30/1/2012: Links

these are some links i've liked over the past month (sorry if they're a little outdated, i don't get a lot of internet leisure time):

on liberia:

•  "liberia's security will not be at risk": as she leaves, the UNMIL SRSG, Ellen Loj, says that the international community will continue to stand by liberia, and cites the improvement of security sector as major remaining priority. while not groundbreaking news, certainly, it is vaguely reassuring, i guess?
• ellen promises GDP growth and, more importantly for national reconciliation in the wake of electoral unrest, youth employment programs targeting the main constituency of the opposition.
• an op-ed in the nyt opposing the strategy of economic growth that relies on granting concessions of land and resources for foreign countries. i think that one of the most interesting things to watch going forward in liberia will be if and how the government manages to ensure that the benefits of extracting liberia's abundant natural resources (rubber, palm oil, lumber, gold, iron, and, possibly, oil) devolve to the population. this has historically reeeallllly not been the case in liberia. more on this at some point....

on development and the region:

• discussions (including important critiques of methodology, or lack thereof) from a view from the cave and find what works in the global journal's ranking of 100 best NGOs
• a criticism (and response) on the world bank's excellent impact evaluations blog of the use of conditional cash transfer for school enrollment (giving cash directly to mothers on the condition that their children, mostly daughters, attend school)
• johnson and johnson declines to put three ART patents into the medicine patent pool to reduce cost to poor consumers. this is a bummer.
• the argument for technological change, and thus economic growth, being driven, not by markets, but by government investment.
• paul simon's graceland reconsidered, on the anniversary of its relase.
• vote in bill easterly's exploiting africa academy awards for the movie that uses "the most insulting and exploitative images of Africans, usually being heroically saved by some white people" (h/t blattman)
• highlights and conclusions from the sixth annual poppov conference on population, reproductive health, and economic development

and, unrelated to africa or development

• an typically awesome infographic from information is beautiful on the way we talk about ideas.
• if you're doing research on illegal activity as an academic, the government can, apparently, demand your notes and even the names of your informants. this kind of suppression of academic freedom is completely horrifying to me. more than it should be maybe.
• without engaging on the ethics of the activities of this memoirist, i just want to say that the concept of "tit whisker" is pretty much my new rallying cry. it's emblematic of something that's not inherently scatologically gross, but is discomfiting and taboo because it runs counter to the very specific ways that the acceptability of women's bodies is policed. and we're complicit in it! it's bull. TIT WHISKER, I SAY.
• speaking of empowering: check out this article on "how to be a woman in any boys' club". it is so intimately familiar, but so much better ariculated than i ever could have done.

liberian english: enjoy yourself!

so, liberian english is an experience. as you can hear in this clip, it's a pidgin of "standard" english; spoken raplidly, the ends of words are swallowed, and there are some pretty significant colloquial vocabulary differences. i think it's fun to just listen to as i learn to understand it better. some of my blog posts will highlight things i've noticed and liked in liberian english. i can't promise 100% accuracy, so i hope you'll cut me some slack if i get things wrong; it's just what i've observed, understood, or talked about with my liberian friends.

enjoy (v): to have a good time; to party
“wha’ you will do this weekend?” 
“we jus’ enjoy ourself, shake small-oh” (“we’ll have some fun, do a little dancing”) 
in liberia, if people do anything as sedate as “enjoy” their lunch, i rarely hear about it. the word is, as far as i can tell, used primarily to describe what one does during a party, a holiday, or any other opportunity to celebrate or kick back and (possibly) tie one on. often used with a knowing smile, and always with great relish.


...and if you're going to enjoy yourself liberian style this weekend, you should do it to what is probably the most commonly played song in clubs and bars here: "chop my money" by p-square, a nigerian identical twin duo. i should totally be sick of this song after five months, but it's, like, MIND-BENDINGLY catchy, and everyone just pours on to the dance floor when it comes on (including me! apparently i have something resembling "moves" here. i know, i'm as surprised as you...unless i was actually being made fun of, in which case that makes so much more sense).

happy friday, enjoy your weekend!

food safety in glass houses.

one of the things that my job involves has been ensuring the inclusion of food fortification in liberia's food safety and quality control systems. this is, believe it or not, fascinating. as with many things in liberia, systems that were in place before the war need to be revived, or, in some cases, created from scratch. in the case of food safety, there are efforts underway to do the latter. there are currently four or five government agencies charged with various (and sometimes overlapping) areas of responsibility within the umbrella of "food safety," and one of the major current challenges is coordination and responsibility mapping among those agencies. it's an incredibly impressive undertaking to watch and, in a small way, be a part of.

since i'm in the middle of all of this here, a quick blurb in the scienceinsider blog caught my eye. it's mostly about the weirdness of NOAA being under commerce, rather than interior, but the quote pulled from a speech given by barack obama also points out that there are over a dozen agencies involved in food safety in the US.  this is pretty demonstrably not an ideal system we've got going. it's just sort of one of those moments that serve as reminders to stay humble as an outsider trying to tool around with another country's system. sometimes it's easy to get frustrated or, worse, condescending, when dealing with those developing systems, until you remember that, to some degree, you're holding your host government to higher standards than you're holding your own.

alright. enough of the sanctimonious crap. back to our regularly scheduled diarrhea jokes and youtube clips.

photos from the guinea border

so i checked off 1/3 of an adventure list item when i popped over into guinea while i was in nimba county for a planning meeting last week. the border gaurds were like, really enthusiastic about chatting in rudimentary french and getting in photos with us, so i guess all's generally quiet on the north-western front. 

this is what i look like after two days of meetings in the world's hottest high school gymnasium

a response to "world's worst places"

west point from the ducor roof

when i first saw morovia at #5 in recently published gadling blog post, “world’s worst places: top ten places you do not want to visit in 2012”, i indulged a moment of gloating… take THAT, friends in kinshasa. I am SO MUCH TOUGHER than I was six months ago in kathmandu. I even posted it to facebook along with my stock “expat in liberia” pictures of a jaunt to the roof of the ducor. i positively glowed with EAW-y self-congratulation. but when you think about it, the flawed and kinda neo-colonialist assumption underlying this whole post is that, from nepal to nicaragua, angola to afghanistan, the world is just a buffet of rugged travel adventures for those intrepid (and privileged) enough to taste of them; that the highest goal a nation could have in terms of development would be to make it appealing for tourists, instead of making it better for the people who actually, y’know, LIVE THERE. in one paragraph, it managed to conflate all of monrovia with west point, and everyone in west point with the idea of (“ew! gross!”) open defecation. it’s an almost elegant dehumanization of an entire country, if such a thing exists. and yes, it’s true that, except for the well off and those (like me) living in a rarified expat bubble, life can be pretty tough, and is definitely lacking in amenities like electricity and plumbing. but that doesn’t mean anyone gets to take 3.4 million people, and reduce their joys and sadnesses, cruelties and kindnesses, and all the complexity of human experience in between to an oversimplified narrative of anarchy and squalor that would make robert kaplan blush. and christ on a cracker…the vice guide to liberia is “great”?? no. no it’s not. i don’t mean to imply that the author is a somehow a bad guy. the introduction even seems to hint that the author wanted to make folks conscious of #firstworldproblems bias…but a “list” post? on the huff po travel blog? he should have known that was doomed to backfire.

the ducor hotel

 

soooo, this is my practically obligatory-as-expat-new-to-liberia-OMFG I WENT TO THE DUCOR post. nonetheless! friends and I have been so slow at chipping away at the adventure list, that i thought it deserved commemoration. (plus, since i just turned 26, i feel like the window of time where it’s acceptable to post moody photos of abandoned buildings on my livejournal myspace blog, is quickly closing.)

so the deal with the ducor:
built in 1967, it was recognized as one of the finest hotels in west africa (you can check out some glory days photos in this slide show). when samuel doe's government fell in 1989, the ducor closed. as with the rest of the country's infrastructure, over the course of the following fourteen years of civil conflict the building was stripped impressively bare. the shell of the hotel looms over rock hill (my neighborhood) and the dwellings that have crept up the slope to the base of building. it sits at the terminus of broad street, which winds up the other side of the hill to the corrugated metal barricade. although there's a guard to prevent squatters, the people living in the area hang out there during the day; the darkened concrete slabs serve as both clothes line and playground. the guards will very conveniently look the other way, permitting a seven-flight walk up to the roof of the hotel, where you get a full 360 view of the city. it's pretty amazing. a libyan firm bought the place and was going to begin sprucing it up, until ghaddafi's government fell, which, understandably, stopped the project.

more of my photos after the jump and here (along with the national health fair).

aaaaaand we're back (with a list!)

so i've been pretty terrible about this, huh? i'd like to blame the lack of internet here (seriously, i can skype from, like, three places in the whole country), but, yeah....mostly lazy. however, on my full page, single-spaced list of new year's resolutions, "blog more" is on there. it's right between "wash feet before getting into bed" and "remember that waxing belligerent about the use of human terrain teams for an hour while swilling whiskey is not charming cocktail party conversation." i guess i thought "be less gross and socially stunted, as a human individual" lacked a certain concreteness as a resolution.

anyway! so a sub-list of new year's resolutions is my ADVENTURE LIST. i don't like the term bucket list. it's overdone and is inevitably, if irrationally, linked in my mind with a narrow-minded, middle america ethos that the elitist, nomad snob in me disdains, so i'm going with the far more grandiose ADVENTURE LIST. i came up with it, because i think it's really easy to just float in your bubble of comfort in a place like monrovia, and get in a rut. some of the stuff may not be all that interesting or even possible; a lot of these went on the list because i had heard someone mention them once and i sort of thought "yeah, sure, that seems like it's...a thing." nevertheless, hopefully the (attempted) completion of this list will spawn many blog posts that don't have to do with me making snarky criticisms of other development work or getting all existential and live journal-y. behold, the ADVENTURE LIST:

• go up to the roof of the ducor hotel
• go to all three borders (going to all 15 counties seems excessive) 
• find the best beach 
• climb mt. nimba 
• go to the national park 
• go to freetown by bus (12 fun-filled hours) 
• ride a UN chopper 
• learn to cook liberian food 
• immerse myself in nollywood (second most prolific film industry in the world, baby!) 
• master the liberian handshake 
• go fishing and eat what we catch at marlin’s corner 
• go on a tour of the club beer brewery
• Extractive Industries Mega-Tour (see a diamond mine, an iron mine, visit Firestone, pan for gold, etc) 
• finish (er, start) schwab's tribes of liberia (an old school, 600-page treatise on liberia's "tribes")
• learn to curse in at least three indigenous languages 
• learn to wrap a lapa headdress 
• go to a soccer game (i will NOT write "football match")
• CHIMP ISLAND (no joke, there is an island full of former lab chimps. you take a boat out and feed them? i don't even know. frankly, i find this terrifying.)
• as always, floss.