As much as this Swahili speaking region is filled with amazing sights, sounds and smells, it is the people who inhabit this land of human ancestors from whom one can learn so much. My fascination with Africa turned from abstraction and preconceived stereotypes to gradual understanding and appreciation after I traveled solo from Kenya to Uganda.

From suspicion to trust
The immersion experience in the boonies of Africa began with a super scared Thomas Chen in front of the Nairobi bus station at 10pm, waiting for a bus in a shady part of town. With all my money tucked inside socks, shoes and pants, I was about to board an overnight bus en route to Uganda. As the only non-African on the bus, I was so paranoid initially that I thought every stare at me was a threat. While I thought my nervousness would be relieved when I sat next to a girl, I wasn’t prepared for the physical intimacy of Kenyan human-human encounters and felt awfully awkward when she leaned on my shoulder and slept through the whole night.

When the sun rose, wide Kenyan highway across vast empty savannah morphed into small dirt roads winding through village huts hugging lush farms with animals and children roaming everywhere. Once the bus arrived in the small border town of Malaba, which is still on the Kenyan side, all the passengers got off and I was likewise kicked off the bus.  While I was told at departure from Nairobi that the bus would cross the border and I would safely be on the Ugandan side, the bus driver forced me to walk across the border zone comforting me with the fact that the border is “only around 1 kilometer” wide and I can catch a “matatu” minivan on the other side to my destination – still at least two hours away. Without a map nor a single Ugandan shilling, I was about to embark on the most interesting adventure yet. It took incredible courage to just get off the bus. The scene of thousands of people – some refugees  with food, produce, animals, clothing crossing the border by foot and bicycles – and the thousands of other people who loiter around looking to cross and for money or food was absolutely shocking.

The beautiful life away from modernity and materialism
After walking across the border zone, I was as disoriented as a motherless chick. Somehow I managed to squeeze onto a matatu minivan that theoretically holds eight people total, but was occupied by 21 this time around. This first matatu took me to Mbale, a bustling provincial city. The messiness of this place makes Nairobi look like disneyland. Dirt streets and broken sidewalks were filled with mats with vegetables, counterfeit goods and clothes. Since it’s a provincial town with actual buildings and apartments as opposed to mud and straw huts in villages, women, men, children of all ages from neighboring villages trek daily to the city markets with agricultural produce bound to the top of their heads.

There is no electricity, running water, sanitation and a village clinic is unheard of in most places. When I finally arrived in Sipi Falls, a small village situated on the foothills of the majestic Mt. Elgon towering 14,000 feet above sea level and reportedly containing the largest caldera of any volcano on Earth, I was shocked to see that this “crows nest resort” featured in the Lonely Planet guide book is located just off this mountain road totally blended in with local village huts. The “resort” was actually built by Peace Corp volunteers in the late 90s seeking to develop the tourism industry in this impoverished mountainous region of Uganda. The place had no electricity except for the “main office” cabin and the toilet was just a hole in the ground.

All of those amenities didn’t matter. This was exactly what I wanted to experience in Africa. Even though people live in huts and if lucky enough, buildings with tin roof so rain doesn’t get in and birds don’t make nests inside your house, one can appreciate the simple lifestyle away from the modern material world. The lack of electricity makes star gazing an absolutely sensational experience.

With a view of a great water fall from the volcano on one side and the vast expanse of the Rift Valley savannah on the other, the place is astoundingly beautiful. The best view is on top of a cliff reminiscent of pride rock in the Lion King movie. It was nauseating to experience the ginormous African sun setting over the majestic kingdom of savannah.

“If you are alive, you are not poor”
Next morning I found my Ugandan twin who happens to be our tour guide. We share the same name and age. He exemplifies what the ambitious youngsters of these villages would like to achieve in life: run a business that opens to the outside world to bring income back to his fellow villagers and for himself to one day descend the mountain and find better employment opportunities. Currently, the best thing for them is to have foreign visitors coming so they could interact with the outside world and, most importantly, to practice English.

Our tour guide was already one of the better-offs in the village. He obviously spent a lot of spare time learning English so he could have this additional source of income compared to other villagers. Given his ability to generate income from the pocket of foreigners, part of his job is to distribute some of the tourguide fee to his fellow villagers.

The most touching memories of Africa for me were faces of kids. Their innocence is captured by staring at foreign looking faces with such an intense fixture. They would stop whatever they were doing in the field when we walked by and scream out “mzungu”, a common word for “white people”. Only the older ones seemed to distinguish Asians from Whites. As I was playing around with them, I managed to make an infant cry as he had probably never seen a “mzungu” before. Another kid around 12 or 13 years old followed us and the tour guide through at least half of the hike, curiously learning from his elder how to be a tour guide when he grows up, and eagerly practicing English with me.

During a downpour in which we were only protected by “banana leaf umbrellas”, our tourguide took us to his “new house” for temporary shelter. It was still mud-built but with tin roof to protect from the rain. While he eagerly wanted to sell us his coffee and, yes, “pot”, we discussed economics, income and a lot of personal issues. He would be ashamed when answering our questions as in how many people in the village had ever gone to college, where he lived as a kid or how much can one acre of coffee bean be sold for. His facial expressions alone indicated the hardships he had gone through, along with the rest of his village folks, during childhood years. The most memorable conversation was when we asked him if he considered himself well-off or rich compared to others in the village. His response was “I don’t consider myself poor because I’m alive”. At first I thought he was just giving a clever joking response. But he was actually very serious and emotional. Yes, you realize in this Ugandan village the preciousness of life: if you are alive that means you’ve had enough to eat to grow up. That was such a simple but profound revelation for me.

Even though he is well-off and respected in the village, there was still intense competition with other guys his age also well versed in English, including the owners of the resort cabins. Each young man wants to be our tour guide, wants to sell his stuff, and wants to get a piece of our American pie. I lectured him about the importance of avoiding intra-village competition: villagers ought to look out for the economic wellbeing of each other and help each other out with farming or tour guide business. Also in a very academic manner, I told him about microfinance in the form of village group lending which he had never heard of.

In the end, I’m not sure how much of that he took in but when you get once in a lifetime chance to bond with villagers in Uganda, you give it a try. When you work for the World Bank, USAID, UNDP or whatnot, you fly over 99.9% of the country and only see the beautiful trial villages and corrupt government officials.

Learning from big corporate monopolies – the story of Zain
The small African villages may not have cement, brick, running water, clinic, electricity, or even place to defecate, but every single village, no matter how small or remote, has at least one building covered in purple and green. These are the colors of Zain, the Indian based internet and telecom provider.

Thinking from the larger scheme of rural development and poverty alleviation, it is strikingly evident what a huge role these large multi-national telecom corporations can play in increasing the living standards of even the poorest of the poor simply by their sheer outreach. While the American public and government are myopically focused on NGOs, international organizations like UNDP, UNEP, The World Food Programme etc, I saw no trace presence of any NGO, UN organization, IGOs of any sort in most of the villages. The dillusion of elevating the idealistic mission/vision of these humanitarian organizations on a pedestal is so persistent that we fail to look at what entities actually consistently get to the local village level.

Zain, Safaricom and Coca Cola for instance are not only visible in a village, but they are visible to every person. There may not be a single Zain worker in the villages, but they be sure to paint every village with a purple house. If the UN came through any of these villages, they certainly didn’t do a good job of advertising themselves.

In most cases however, there will also be a Zain distributor or operator in each village. If for anything, they provide cell phone service. Thus the villagers can have nothing, not even adequate food or clothing, but they have cell phones to communicate with the outside world. At the end of the day, what kind of organizations are really helping these people is up to debate. Is it the World Food Programme, the World Bank or the UNDP that funnel billions of aid through the government, 70 percent of which is embezzled by government officials, forcing them to spend another billion on corruption probes? Or is it small NGOs that take years to even manage one or two trial villages with electricity or a clinic or school and in 10 years of time can’t even cover five villages in the same tribe?

Flood-hit Jampur, Pakistan (AP Photo/B.K.Bangash)

Ordinary Pakistanis today could be forgiven for thinking that they are living in biblical times. Political instability, economic stagnation, terrorism, earthquakes and now floods. As a nation, this ‘crisis fatigue’ is palpable. I was a junior at college when the devastating earthquake of October 2005 struck the northern areas of the country.  Literally everyone I knew became instantly involved in the relief effort in any possible way. I remember loading north bound trucks with my friends every night for a whole month with supplies and donations that kept pouring into our university. The response from the international community was also swift and quite effective.  This time around though, even with the magnitude of the disaster being much worse, the relief effort is floundering. Why?

The basic reason is the difference in nature between the two natural calamities. Although the 2005 earth

quake caused many thousands of deaths, its impact was immediate and limited to the northern areas and Pakistan administered Kashmir. The floods are still ongoing since they began around July 29. The infrastructure damage assessment has not even begun and the inundated areas stretch along the entire length of the country. The UN estimates that about 20 million people out of a total population of 160 million could be affected, making the crisis worse than the 2005 earthquake, the 2004 tsunami and this year’s Haitian earthquake combined. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon visited Pakistan on Aug 15 and described the experience as “heart wrenching”, adding that he “will never forget the destruction and suffering.” Clearly, our country has never seen any natural disaster like this one.

The scale of the disaster notwithstanding, Pakistan seems to be much less prepared today than it was in 2005 to respond to the challenge. The present government is one of the least popular ever, with glaring governance problems being pointed out even before the tragedy struck. The president of the country, Asif Ali Zardari, is being heavily criticized for going ahead with controversial and ill-timed tours of France and Great Britain just as the seriousness of the floods was becoming apparent. This lack of political leadership in such a trying hour has enraged many Pakistanis, and dampened the zeal of the public in its response to the humanitarian crisis. While the army, the strongest and most resourceful organization of the country has been mobilized to oversee relief efforts, it has neither the training nor the expertise to carry out this task. The country’s National Disaster Management Authority has so far proved to be ineffective in preparing for or adequately responding to the crisis.

On making the trip to Islamabad, the capital of the country, I was confronted with the human aspect of the tragedy. A friend of mine there is organizing a donation drive for a village in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP), the north western province first affected by the flood. The local contact explained to us how his village’s water table had been contaminated, and there was an almost total lack of drinking water. As a result, he added, people had started contracting diarrhea. When we heard this, our focus while gathering supplies was solely fixed on bottled water.  This episode drove home the enormity of the challenge facing us. With all four provinces now affected by the flood in some way, even the immediate relief needs are quite different. Broadly speaking, the provinces of KP and Baluchistan have been mainly hit with infrastructure damage to bridges, roads and buildings, making accessibility to marooned people a big problem. In the provinces of Punjab and Sindh the flood has destroyed agricultural land and food supplies, which are central to the country’s economy. So while the required relief effort seems herculean itself, the subsequent reconstruction and rehabilitation project will have to be something quite unprecedented in Pakistan’s history.

Despite these odds, the unbelievable resilience of the Pakistani people continues to amaze me. A sad, constant stream of images of people wading through flood water or being marooned on roof tops and trees can be seen on the national electronic and print media. Yet in the faces of these people one can see a will to survive and live that is hard to describe in words. They have lost their homes, lands, livestock and in many cases their loved ones, but continue to struggle and cope as best they can. These millions of flood victims need our continued support. The government needs to perform better so that the trust of the people and the international community can be restored in its ability to conduct the massive relief and rehabilitation effort that is required.

With the monsoons predicted to stay around in the coming weeks, the future still looks uncertain. I feel tormented having to leave Pakistan at this time in order to join Columbia for the start of my graduate degree. However, there is consolation in thinking that I might be able to increase awareness about the plight of my countrymen through this blog. I would urge everyone reading this to please contribute to one of the many international aid agencies currently operating in Pakistan. We are extremely grateful for every cent or penny that is donated. But most of all, our gratitude is reserved for the international community’s wishes and prayers, and the hope that we will not be forgotten in this trying time.

After a ten-week stint, I have to say, working in the Middle East policy office of the world’s largest non-skyscraper office building and the organization with the largest operating budget in the world wasn’t too shabby. We had our own bank, DMV, drug store, florist, salon, and several cafeterias, to include a sushi bar within the five-sided structure. Because the vetting process to get inside the building was so involved, once inside, I was treated like any other member of the team.  The time spent sweating in the sun waiting for foreign dignitaries, or the frustration endured while navigating through tourist crowds in the district was all washed away with a handshake from the SecDef or a head nod from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on a walkway. Heck, I even had a cameo on C-SPAN– years earlier than I ever had planned!

This summer was quite the eye opener, though.  It was my first official introduction to Beltway Politics. I was no stranger to bureaucracy; I had served over six years in the US military after all, to include a deployment to Iraq. Though I was a newbie to the world of political appointees, stove piping and the myriad layers of approval needed to change the time of a meeting!

I had originally thought (or hoped) that defense and national security were matters that transcended political parties. The references to “the last administration” really popped out at me in the beginning.  Nevertheless, it was certainly entertaining to hear anecdotes about Rumsfeld’s iron fist leadership style or the behavior of Paul Wolfowitz while heading up the Policy office.

I happened to be at the Pentagon this summer for some pretty big moments. I experienced the inside gossip after General Stanley McChrystal and his fellow COINdinistas’ fall from grace after the publication of the Rolling Stone article. I started work in the Mid East shop the day after Israeli naval commandos stormed the Turkish flotilla bound for Gaza. I was also on the sidelines for one of Ehud Barak’s many trips to Washington this summer.

I left for the summer hoping that I would return to New York in the fall more resembling Elle Macpherson or Claudia Schiffer.  After all, I no longer had mountains of reading to do for Conceptual Foundations or Budgeting group projects to coordinate — I should have all the time in the world to get in tip-top shape.  Though eight hours in a cubicle with forced air and bureaucratic tensions abound tired me to the point that a nap and a beer were my only post-work thoughts some days. It was all too easy just to shut my eyes for a few minutes each afternoon in the basement

SecDef Robert Gates, Adm Mike Mullen at a press conference about this summer's Wikileaks scandal. (Photo: AP / Kevin Wolf)

room I rented. Once I got used to the steamy weather of DC and the constant throng of mosquitoes following me, I was able to enjoy some nice long bike rides along the W&OD trail.

Learning the style of the capital was a lesson for me as well. Where New York women will smash their feet into stilettos or unsupportive flats, the ‘DC look’ for the working woman is a skirt suit, tights, tube socks and white tennis shoes! Throw in some shoulder pads, and its déjà-vu of scenes from Working Girl (I did see some mullets and hairspray-shellacked coifs, as well!). Men have had better luck achieving comfort and panache in DC, on the other hand.  Though I don’t envy a 3-piece suit on the days when the weather was above 100 degrees by 9:30am. In the beginning weeks, I felt self-conscious that my work skirts hit just above the knee. Though I eventually came to the conclusion that I was twenty to thirty years the junior of most of the Pentagon employees — there was no reason for me to dress like the senior citizens in the hallways!

Because of the smaller population (and thus slightly slower pace) of DC, as compared to NYC, I was able to find pleasure in my surroundings. I found it amusing to watch junior embassy officers cruise M Street NW on a Saturday night in their diplomat-platted minivans. Had I went to Ray’s Hell Burger for lunch one afternoon in June, instead of the bad Japanese buffet down the hill, I could have ate with President Obama and President Medvedev. Instead, I watched as husky men with clear earpieces hung out the windows of up-armored black Suburbans as they drove past. Every few days, I watched as Marine One circled over my Arlington condo, wondering if Obama was onboard. You never know what you will stumble upon in DC. Though it would certainly help to have friends with connections for entry to White House galas or diplomatic soirees in Georgetown.

All in all, I’m not sure DC is 100% for me. Then again, there are few people that call themselves native Washingtonians. DC is an international city, a transition city — with Americans from all fifty states, diplomats from over two hundred countries, and immigrants working towards a dream along the Potomac. My goal for now: to carve out a little slice of my New York dream along the Hudson.

For those of you unfamiliar with the international sport of Air Guitar (as I once was), it is a competition to determine which of the participants is the best guitar player – only none of the participants actually play the guitar.  This involves a lot of dancing, running around, confetti, sticking out of tongues, and, if you’re really good, some acrobatics.  An Air Off occurs in those rare occasions when there is a tie after two rounds of competition.  Like the first two rounds, each competitor has one minute to prove his or her “airness” to the panel of judges by rocking out to a song with, well, an imaginary guitar.  However, unlike the first two rounds, in an Air Off, contestants do not choose their song; instead, they must perform after hearing an excerpt of a randomly-selected song.

On this particular July night in New York City, the Air Off was bound to be an incredible show:

The Song: “Welcome to the Jungle.”

The Fierce Competitors:  Romeo Dancecheetah and Dream Catcher

The Stakes:  the honor of competing in the 2011 World Air Guitar Championship in Finland.

Photo courtesy of http://www.flavorsaversmusic.com/

Before I get any further, I know what you are thinking, why am I writing about something as silly as an air guitar championship in this, the SIPA summer blog?* As strange as it may sound, I find that this night perfectly encapsulates my summer of exploring New York City.  While it is missing NYC’s characteristic diversity (Air Guitar is still “A white man’s sport”, as one of the judges put it), Air Guitar makes up for it in its fantabulous mixture of comedy, entertainment, beer, random people, uniqueness, music, cheapness, and general good spirits.  But, most importantly, it was an adventure.

I once heard someone say that an “Adventure” is really just a series of events where you don’t know the ending.  And that is exactly what every day of my New York City summer has been.  I never could have predicted some of the things I’ve tried: improv, dancing with a man on stilts, meeting a guy named “Jurrasic” on the Appalachian Trail, drawing in museums, meeting famous people (like Mike Myers), gorging on chocolate at Max Brenner (ok, maybe that one is predictable), perfecting my chop-stick skills, playing volleyball on Long Beach, exploring Governor’s Island, and arcade games at Coney Island….the list could go on forever.

Even in my city internship, I haven’t been able to fully predict what any given day may hold.  One of my duties is conducting site visits for New York City’s Housing Preservation and Development Department.  This involves going to completed buildings and meeting with the building owners and tenants, who are mostly former homeless people.  The diversity of people living in any of these buildings is remarkable, and always makes for a unique experience.  My favorite was the lady who told me her life story of growing up as an African American in Memphis, and at the age of 60, trying to go back to school to get the education she missed.  You just never know who you’ll meet and learn from next.

So, in the end, the Air Guitar championship, in and of itself, was just one in a series of events where I didn’t know the ending.  Beyond never guessing that I would attend such an event, I was enthralled by the big question – who was going to win the most important sporting event of the year and get a chance to take their talents to Finland?

After two minutes of dueling it out with their imaginary instruments, the judges released the results of the Air Off to the rambunctious crowd:  It will be none other than Romeo Dancecheetah who will represent the US of A in the World Air Guitar Championship next year!  I guess it was something about his cheetah-print spandex pants and dragon-skin collared red shirt that gave him the extra boost.  I am proud to be an American.

In the final months of summer and into the coming year, I’m confident that NYC will surprise me with more unheralded adventures.   And who knows, maybe I’ll even end up in Finland to cheer on my new-found love, Romeo DanceCheetah.  Anyone with me?

*  To those competitors out there, I use silly loosely; I understand Air guitar is a serious and dangerous sport.

I try not to have a lot of sugar, snack on fruit throughout the day, eat a side of steamed vegetables at dinner, that sort of thing.

But after a summer in Moscow, where I’m currently interning, I need to face the cruel truth that in the past I’ve chosen to ignore.

Apparently I also have an addiction to McDonalds. It normally lies dormant, but rears its ugly head whenever I’m abroad.

I’m not talking about the “I’m currently on a 12-hour layover, might as well have another cheeseburger” thought, or even the slightly more acceptable, “I’ve been out all night, give me a Big Mac and find me a taxi back to the hostel now” desire.

No, I’m talking about the much, much worse, “I’ve just left work on a Wednesday evening, and you know, McDonalds sounds great for dinner” craving. The sign of a hopeless addict.

This would never happen back in New York, but in Moscow I’ve found myself eating at McDonalds about once a week.

What is the cause of all this? Why am I able to keep these impulses under control in the US – a place where the right to a bad diet might as well be in the Constitution – but run around uninhibited whenever I’m away?

Is this a symptom of homesickness? Am I reaching out to what I know while I’m alone in a foreign land?

I’m inclined to think not. It’s never crossed my mind to buy a Snickers bar or a Miller Genuine Draft (why they sell MGD in Moscow is something I’ll never figure out) in my two months here.

Have I suddenly become patriotic? Is this a way of demonstrating that America can yet win a culture war in the land of Tolstoy and ballet, and all because of a salty, hamburger made of beef from dubious sources?

Again, no. I spent the group stages of the World Cup rooting for the wily but nevertheless doomed team from North Korea, and following their elimination, promptly jumped on the global Uruguayan bandwagon.

The truth is, to be honest, much sadder.

I kind of like McDonalds.

What’s the big deal, you might ask. So do millions of other people.

But such an admission in some circles might be nothing short of social suicide.

Far worse than being labeled a smoker in Bloomberg’s New York, to be regarded as a lover of McDonalds by the chattering classes is to all but give up on the lofty dreams of power, wealth, and fame that SIPA students hold.

For now, I’m thousands of miles away from the prying eyes of friends and family, and can indulge to my heart’s content (or at least as much as my heart can take).

But as both my internship and time in this beautiful city come to an end, I’ll have to return to a life of green tea and made-to-order salads.

And while the rest of you will be spending September settling into an econ TAship or planning the SIPA boat party, I’ll be at the gym.

What was more surprising is that the incidence of diarrheal disease appears to have made a dramatic decline, despite the fact that access to clean water continues to be a challenge. Shai indicated that many of the reported cases of malaria may actually present with the symptoms of diarrheal disease but since only the final diagnosis is recorded the data appears skewed. Malaria is one of the three diseases (along with HIV/AIDS and TB) that receive the most funding, despite the fact that diarrheal disease kills more children under the age of five. The unintended consequence of the (much needed) attention surrounding malaria is that an equally serious medical situation is being ignored. Drug supplies for malaria are being depleted at an alarming rate due to over-prescription and not surprisingly drug resistance is increasing.

I have also witnessed unintended consequences in the agriculture sector itself. John Francis, the agriculture facilitator who was showing us around, proudly mentioned that due to project interventions (improved farming patterns, the use of fertilizers and improved seeds) beans were now a viable commercial crop for farmers in the area. We also saw the village grain store where farmers can store their harvested beans. Since the store allows for better post-harvest handling and quality control the cooperative that runs the store has been able to sell the beans in bulk to the World Food Programme’s “Purchase for Progress” program at a much higher price than they would get selling individually in the open market. This has allowed for higher incomes for farmers and has encouraged increased bean production.

Unfortunately, as with almost everything, there is an unintended consequence to this success. Some households now opt to sell their beans rather than contribute to the school feeding program, as the project requires them to do. This has of course raised the issue of why parents are not using the additional income they receive from selling to WFP to buy cheaper beans to donate to the school.  When we toured schools a couple of weeks ago we encountered a school in which the feeding program had been completely suspended because parents had stopped contributing their required portion of beans meaning that at the very least these children are going hungry for approximately 9 hours that they are in school per day.

Improved bean production and the grain store, like the malaria control interventions, have had a huge impact on the community but these impacts do not stand in isolation and, like with everything, it is important to remember that there are always unintended consequences. There is always hope that these unintended consequences might be positive ones but it is when they are negative that projects like this one face the greatest challenge.

I left my previous job at City Year Boston at the end of June to travel home to Lebanon and visit Greece for a wedding in July (leaving August for the excitement of apartment hunting in New York City). Unfortunately for me, I left Beirut for Greece on “Black Thursday,” a day of general strike in Athens, and was stuck in the Cyprus airport for over 6 hours (waiting to take a one-hour flight). I was expecting this, I suppose, because of the situation in Greece. What I wasn’t expecting, was just how normal everything else would be throughout my trip.

Once I arrived to Athens, I spent the day with a Greek friend who showed me around the city (not just the acropolis, but areas where Athenians typically hang out). All the cafes were full of young Greeks drinking their beloved freddo cappuccino (a delicious iced cappuccino), at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Now, I in no way want to undermine the deep financial and social crises Greece is facing. And I was there mostly as a tourist to attend my cousin’s wedding. But what stood out to me more than anything was how normal life was on a day-to-day basis.

Yes, my friend does have to put her dreams on hold and stay at her current, safe job at a pharmaceutical company. But she is also, well, happy. She spent the afternoon talking about her new boyfriend- not financial woes. Yes, Greeks are very worried about their pensions, job security and future in general, but they don’t spend their day actively worrying (as most financial news anchors do).

The will to live a good life even in the face of hard times isn’t something that should surprise me. I come from Lebanon, a country we all know has faced- and will continue to face- its fare share of trouble. But even as I write this in Beirut, when “the war, you know, the big one” is coming any day now, if not any second, the Lebanese people will continue to do their best to live their best life. Every pub and nightclub is packed every night, the art and music scene is growing like never before, and don’t even get me started on the booming real estate market.

That is what always disappoints me about the news coverage related to my country, or Greece in these tough economic times its facing: the media tend to forget the humanity behind any problem, and the indomitable will to live, and live well, that is inside all of us.

I know most “Seeps” (my new favorite word) have interesting internships all over the world. Has anyone else found themselves in a country with a bad rep (political, economical, security…) and found a different story at the level of the people and their day-to-day life?

The first remains that I encountered would have been easy to miss. The odd stray tooth. Chalky fragments of bone. And then I stumbled upon what looked like an entire skeleton traversing the path beneath me. It was small, and lay only meters from the place where the children were killed by swinging them head first into a tree.  The apathy I had felt earlier began to fade. It would be impossible for a foreigner to ever really understand what happened here, let alone emphasize, but seeing the scattered remains up close was a penetrating experience. It made the tragedy of recent Cambodian history just a little more real, and after two weeks in the country, several puzzling aspects of their society were beginning to make sense.

Killing Fields just like this one were located all throughout Cambodia at the end of the seventies. This day I was visiting the largest, Choueng Ek, about 30km South of the capitol Phnom Penh. Set amongst cool, lush vegetation, beside a small lake, and with the the sounds of children playing wafting on the breeze, it’s an idyllic scene, so much so that you could be forgiven for doubting that such horrific events unfolded in this place. Roughly 17,000 men, women and children were executed here during the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79. A further 200,000 were executed in other parts of the country, while a further million or so died from starvation and disease. A reliable figure for the total death count during this period has proven difficult to estimate. The Khmer Rouge didn’t keep books.

Human remains collected for the memorial at Cheoung Ek

In the thirty years since the Vietnamese toppled the Khmer Rouge, justice has been slow to arrive. The only member of the former regime to stand trial so far, Kang Kek Iew, or Duch as he is known locally, was charged with crimes against humanity in 2007. From 1975-79 he was director of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. Of the 17,000 said to have passed through it’s gates there are only 12 known survivors. Prisoners were routinely tortured before being loaded onto trucks and bought to Cheoung Ek for execution, mostly with pickaxes to save bullets. Duch is due to be sentenced next week.

The extermination of Cambodia’s educated people was central to the Khmer Rouge’s program of social re-engineering. Their desire was to create a class-less society based entirely on rural agriculture. People that wore glasses were rounded up and killed, because this proved that they were literate, or so the story goes.  Lawyers, doctors, teachers, civil servants, engineers and any qualified professionals in any field were thought to be a threat to the new regime and were summarily executed. Also on the hit list was anyone with ties to the former government, or as the murderous purges of the party from 1976-78 showed, anyone displaying disloyalty or disagreement with the regime’s leadership.

Some lasting effects of the genocide are obvious. By the fall of the Khmer Rouge the country’s economy was in ruins. As the Minister of Commerce mentioned the other day when I met him for work, “100% of the country lived in poverty after the civil war”. Despite decades of aid and strong growth in the last few years in particular, one third of the country still dwell below the poverty line.

Other echoes of the civil war are more subtle. The first time I visited four years ago I was struck by the deference of the people. For foreigners, to be treated like a superior is not uncommon in South East Asia, but to me in Cambodia it feels more like obedience, and is accompanied by a kind of shyness that almost borders on fear.  Four years ago I found it strangely endearing, but now I wonder how much of it has to do with the fact that, for at least four years of their recent history, Cambodians paid a very high price for disobedience. It’s inevitably more complicated than that, but in any case the fear of power is alive and well in this country. Children of the elite, the so-called Khmer Riche, are said to be above the law. “Untouchable,” as the security attache at work described them on one of my first days in-country. One hit and killed a moto driver in broad daylight with his car last year, but was never prosecuted because the police were too afraid to press charges, or so the story goes.

I’ve been working for the United Nations Development Programme for three weeks now, evaluating a range of mechanisms put in place by the government to unlock the poverty-alleviating potential of international trade. One thing keeps coming up again and again. Lack of capacity. Unlike bustling Thailand to the West or the mighty China to the North, Cambodia seems to lack the home-grown human resource capacity to drive its poverty alleviation agenda without significant international assistance. Senior government representatives – primarily educated abroad – are generally pretty capable, but below the top level the ability of civil servants to form policy, manage implementation, monitor progress and coordinate national priorities with the army of donor partners thins out pretty quickly. The internationals I’ve been interviewing recently regularly complain that as much as they might like to promote local ownership, doing so seems to limit the likelihood that much of anything useful will get done.

My friend, also at UNDP, calls it a Potemkin bureaucracy in reference to legend of the fake villages built by the Russians to impress Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. It’s as if the whole state apparatus, bereft of sufficiently educated professionals to do the donkey work of running the country, is a bureaucracy of form rather than substance, a shell of a government with no engine to drive it forward. In a fitting indictment, two critically-needed government agencies in my assessment,  the Ministry of Anti-Corruption and the Government Center for Vocational Training, have been left to rust following their construction because they have no staff to run them.

Again it’s too simplistic to completely attribute this lack of capacity to the elimination of the professional class by the Khmer Rouge some thirty years ago, but you can definitely see it’s impact in the slow level of development progress in Cambodia relative to it’s increasingly affluent neighbors.

A conversation with a mid-thirties Cambodian colleague over drinks the other night personalized how challenging it’s been for them to overcome their history. He described to me how during the Khmer Rouge hiss family used to go and hide in a trench behind his house when the bullets began to fly. Sometimes they couldn’t come out for days, he said, staring at the table as he avoided my gaze. Even if it had been safe to move about education was not an option when he was young, as along with hospitals and other state institutions, all Cambodia’s schools had been routinely destroyed. Thirty years on, this colleague was speaking to me in perfect English (one of three languages he speaks fluently), while working as a senior analyst for an organization that I am currently doing my third unpaid internship to try and get into. Considering what the Cambodians are up against to rebuild their country, it’ continues to amaze me that they’ve come this far.

Courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nasa_blue_marble.jpg

The two-week Bonn climate talks came to an end with some progress but many disappointments. The participating parties discussed topics ranging from climate adaptation to climate finance to clean energy technologies to capacity building to climate mitigation. At the closing part, towards the “Advance Draft of A Revised Chair’s Negotiating Text,” at least 10 countries (both developed and developing ones) expressed their dissatisfaction and frustration. The road to a global climate agreement is still unpredictable.

I. Snapshot

The Bonn Climate Change Talks took place from May 31 to June 11, 2010 in Bonn, Germany. The meeting included the 32^nd sessions of the Subsidiary Bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Approximately 2,900 participants attended the meeting, representing governments, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, academia, the private sector and the media.

Generally speaking, the “Road to Cancun” moves haltingly forward with the conclusion of the United Nations climate talks in Bonn. According to a UN press release, the two-week negotiating session made “important progress towards concluding what was left incomplete at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.”

The Bonn talks were the first official negotiations since the end of the highly charged COP15 climate talks in Denmark last December, from which came the Copenhagen Accord, leaving almost everyone disappointed and dissatisfied.

“A big step forward is now possible at Cancun in the form of a full package of operational measures that will allow countries to take faster, stronger action across all areas of climate change,” said Yvo de Boer in one of his final press conferences before stepping down as Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC.

II. Progress

In order to tackle climate change in the very near future, such as reaching an agreement on adaptation to climate impacts and ways to stop deforestation, the Bonn climate conference made good progress on some of these crucial building blocks that will be essential parts of a future regime to tackle climate change.  There is really no reason for negotiators to go into extra-time instead of concluding them at the Climate Summit in Mexico this December.

According to WWF’s observation, progress in Bonn was mainly a result of improved team spirit among negotiators, with countries from the North and South teaming up in unusual coalitions, creating fresh dynamics and space for solutions and compromise.

For example, the issues below were mentioned and highlighted during the 2-week talks:

♠A shared vision on long-term cooperative action was first considered by the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) on 3 June.

♠Climate adaptation was considered by the AWG-LCA contact group on 5 June. Discussions focused on: scope, institutional arrangements, loss and damage, and how to match action with support.

♠The enhanced provision of financial resources, including linkages between the financial mechanism and proposed bodies for adaptation, technology development and transfer, capacity building, REDD+, and the mechanism to record and facilitate provision of support was first considered by the AWG-LCA contact group on 2 June.

♠Technology was first considered by the AWG-LCA contact group on 7 June. Discussions focused on: how the proposed technology executive committee (TEC) and climate technology center and network (TCN) would interact; the respective roles of the SBI, SBSTA and the TEC; the inter-linkages between the technology mechanism comprising the TEC and TCN; and non-financial aspects of the existing and proposed institutional arrangements for adaptation and mitigation.

(Quick Note on the REDD+ scheme: during the Bonn talks, several nations — including Colombia, India and Norway — called for a special session to be held to discuss how to compensate developing countries for protecting forests as part of a new global climate deal. A majority of nations stated that various approaches ought to be considered for compensating forest nations.  Many said that financing through carbon markets would be needed.)

♠Capacity building was addressed by the AWG-LCA contact group on June 8. Issues discussed included ways to support developing countries’ capacity needs and the adequacy of existing arrangements/institutions/bodies.

♠Climate mitigation was considered by the AWG-LCA contact group on June 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. Issues discussed included mitigation by developed countries, mitigation by developing countries; REDD+, cooperative sectoral approaches and sector-specific actions; various approaches to enhance the cost-effectiveness of mitigation action, including markets; and consequences of response measures.

III. Barriers to Further Success

Bonn did not see any major victories on challenging issues like funding and policies to wean economies off fossil fuels and make them fit for the low carbon future, mainly due to a lack of progressive champions and blocking tactics by oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Emissions reduction targets by industrialized countries and the matter of financing mitigation and adaptation measures in developing countries appeared to be stymied.

Dissatisfaction and Disputes on the Advanced Draft of a Revised Chair’s Negotiating Text: During the AWG-LCA closing plenary on June 11, AWG-LCA Chair Mukahanana-Sangarwe presented the advanced draft of a revised Chair’s text (http:unfccc.int/files/meetings/ad_hoc_working_groups/lca/application/pdf/awg-lca_advance_draft_of_a_revised_text.pdf). This draft triggered tremendous dissatisfaction and disputes amongst parties.

♠Yemen expressed dismay with the text, saying that it is “unbalanced.”

♠Lesotho expressed concern that the new text does not adequately reflect parties’ views on finance.

♠The Democratic Republic of the Congo lamented that the Chair’s new text does not reflect views expressed by the parties.

♠Colombia described the section on finance as “unacceptable” because the vulnerability criteria apply only to the LDCs and SIDS.

♠Iran stressed the need to respect the two-track negotiating process and address the building blocks of the BAP in an equitable manner.

♠China stated that the revised text “deviated from the BAP by 50%.”  It is noteworthy that China has softened its discourse somewhat: In Bonn, during a debate on finance, instead of sharply stating, as it has done in the past, that industrialized countries must pay for their impact on world climate, China quietly observed that the use of the carbon market is just one of several options available for funding actions in developing countries, and should not take the place of other responsibilities.

♠Thailand and Qatar noted that the text was unbalanced.

♠Gambia expressed concern that long-term finance and references to LDCs and SIDS were not reflected in the text.

♠Russia stated that the text was not balanced and highlighted “serious problems regarding sources of finance” and lack of consideration of countries with economies in transition.

♠USA noted “unacceptable” elements in the draft text, such as elements from the Kyoto Protocol, as well as key omissions, noting that the text moves away from the agreement in Copenhagen. It called for stronger text on MRV and ICA, noting that there is no presumption that the text can be used as a draft going forward.

IV. Taking the Long View

A final climate deal will likely take another 20 years – maybe even 40. Christiana Figueres, the incoming Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, told reporters last week in Bonn that if a “final, conclusive, all answering” climate agreement is ever reached, it will happen “certainly not in my lifetime,” she said.

“If we ever have a final, conclusive, all-answering agreement, then we will have solved this problem. I don’t think that’s on the cards,” Figueres said, adding such a process will “require the sustained effort of those who will be here for the next 20, 30, 40 years.”

Given such an outlook, the urgency of each step in the process is apparent, even if maddeningly, frustratingly small and inadequate to its task.  A journey of a thousand miles is only accomplished with a succession of small steps.