My Fight With the Giraffe

The Internet connection speeds are way too slow for me to upload any videos of me feeding giraffes or crocodiles snapping at us (but I will be back in Chicago next week and able to upload then). 

In the meantime, I thought I'd post a few photo previews.  The first is from when I ran out of food for the baby giraffe (again, baby is a relative term) and he got pissed at me.

In this one I'm hanging out with his dad.

And finally, me holding the crocodile I wrestled into submission.

Ask Not What X Can Do For Your Country

I heard a great story about a meeting with a former member of parliament (MP) in an African country that I have to share.

There was this person ("X") who was meeting with the MP in order to learn more about the MP's country and the organizations the MP was running.  Due to a minor miscommunication, the MP thought X was from a company looking to do business in the MP's country. 

Accordingly, the MP started the conversation by informing X of all the power, influence, and friends in high places the MP had.  X was very confused, not really understanding what the MP was talking about, nor why.

As the conversation progressed, X realized the misconception.  X gingerly tried clarifying the situation.  As X explained that the intent wasn't to make a profit, the MP's demeanor immediately betrayed irritation and a complete loss of interest.

Once it became clear that X was indeed considering an investment, only a charitable one, in the MP's country, the MP's level of interest started simmering once more.

The situation fully straightened out, the MP proceded to directly ask X not what X could do for the MP's country, but what X could do for the MP.

True story.

Why Don't They Care?

I think part of it is indeed corruption, though in this case on a personal level (the workers are being paid, they just aren't doing their jobs unless they get an additional stipend for each individual task).

I think part is indeed desperation and raw human nature - you understand that when you see how little some people have, the kind of conditions they live in, and what they do to try to get food and water that won't poison them.  Everybody lives in the center of their own series of concentric circles of loyalty (I assume unless you have children, then you probably live in ring two).

I think part is the culture the industrialized world has created by handing out hundreds of billions of dollars over the last 50 years without any accountability for results or incentives for performance (to Chris Sang's point).

I also think part is what the director of UNICEF's nutrition programs told us today - "We (as a development community) spend all our resources addressing the immediate causes of death.  We're pulling kids back from the brink, but there's nobody there to catch them."

They Just Don't Care?

We've seen and heard some bad stuff over the past few weeks, but nothing really got to me until today.

We were meeting with another NGO here who is execution partner for UNICEF, who is one of the organizations getting fortificants and therapeutic foods to moderately and severely malnourished children.

The way it is supposed to work is UNICEF brings in the food, then the government health system is supposed to distribute it to the provinces > districts > health facilities > then communities.

The way it actually works is this organization has to provide a lot of the logistical support, even though it's outside of their charter. Their other key role is regularly checking up on the health clinics to make sure people coming to work, actually helping people, etc.  There simply is no one else to provide that oversight. 

Due to the logistical challenges and lack of funding, the group is pulling out of some of the worst slums.

We asked, "What happens to the food programs?" She replied, "They will collapse. We've already started pulling out of one, and the program is collapsing."

It turns out the workers don't do their jobs because their salaries aren't "topped-up". It was a new phrase to me and means that they need to be paid extra on top of their salaries in order to actually do anything.

The government's official policy is that top-ups are not allowed, but there is one big organization here that dictates the terms of the game given the size of their checkbook, and they skirt the rule and contract directly with health workers who are technically still employed by the government. (The health workers also claim they can't do their jobs because they don't have computers or vehicles, so this NGO buys those as well. Apparently the vehicles are rarely used for official business, but lots of personal transportation needs.) This organization is also focused almost exclusively on HIV / AIDS patients, so all of their nutritional focus is on them.

So, there will be wards of moderate to severely malnourished children, but this organization that has the money and logistics doesn't treat them unless they have HIV / AIDS. So the other kids are completely dependent upon a ridiculous patchwork of other agencies that simply aren't getting enough fortified food to the facilities to feed them.

The capacity and resources are so lacking that in a lot of instances, there are moderately malnourished children who have to wait until they become severely malnourished before they qualify for a therapeutic feeding program.  Not surprisingly, it's a vicious circle where the kids often end up back in the clinic or hospital.  The other option for dealing with the malnourished children is to just send them home.

Back to the top-up conversation - the NGO was explaining how the health workers only do exactly what they're being paid to do (e.g. if they're going door to door checking that people are taking their medicines, unless they're paid an additional fee, they won't also ask them if they are feeding their children fortified food), and even then only when there is a third party checking in on them, when I asked, "So if they can't get the fortified food to the facilities and are just sending the kids home because they don't have the space or resources, what happens to them?"

She responded, "They die."

I asked, "How is that possible? How could that happen when there are clinics and health workers obviously in their community?"

Her answer, "They just don't care."

A Survey of Kenyan Construction Methods

Today we had a meeting with a development venture capital fund, a business alliance, and the nutrition department at Kenyatta University, so there was nothing too interesting or shocking about the day.  The most dramatic moment was when I learned to first check the sinks for running water before pumping any handsoap.  I had to spend about two hours with papers and pens sticking to my hands like Clark Griswold with his Christmas tree.

Kenyatta University is located about 30 minutes outside Nairobi, so we got to drive through the slums and rural areas again.  I was taking pictures through the dirty, tinted windows of a van careening down a road / strip of rugged terrain deprived of vegetation, so they aren't my proudest photojournalistic achievements, but I think they're interesting nonetheless.  The thing that impressed me the most was the lack of modern building methods.

You will note that the scaffolding and cement forms are made from whatever branches and sticks could be rounded up.  If you look closely, you will see the unevenness and inconsistentcy of every aspect of the construction.  Windows aren't rectilinear because the blocks used to frame it are of all different sizes and shapes.  In the buildings that do have rebar, it's a tangled mess of protruding metal rods of different gages and lengths, even when the construction is "finished".  It's a miracle there aren't building collapses every day (though there was a major one the other day... I suppose most probably go unreported, as well).

The markets in rural areas and slums remind me of Wall St. - these people somehow manage to make a living by selling each other worthless crap.

With officially unemployment around 40%, you see a lot of people just sitting around because they literally have nothing else to do.

Flying the Petro Skies

I've had to rearrange my itinerary because I received some bad consular advice from Accenture.  Turns out I need to apply for and pick up my Swiss work permit (one is necessary if working in the country more than eight days) and India visa in Chicago.  So after heading back to Geneva on the 31st, I'll be flying to Chicago on November 3, doing the visa stuff on Wednesday, then leaving for New Delhi on Thursday via Abu Dhabi, arriving Saturday morning at 3am local time.

I was going to take a direct American flight, but A) American's international service sucks (the Nintendo Power Glove was easier to control than their in-flight entertainment system), and B) economy on Etihad Airways (the UAE's national airline) is better than business class on any US airline, and C) Etihad's price was half that of American's (I figure our oil dollars bought all those aircraft and transportation and oil infrastructure, so maybe US citizens get special subsidized fares).

We Didn't Find Simba, But We Smelled Him

I think that along with the printing press, steam engine, and transistor, future anthropologists are going to have to add washing machines to the list of innovations that enabled modern productivity.  To avoid paying $5 per t-shirt to Conrad and Paris, I decided to do my laundry in my bathtub. 

Washing eight shirts is literally an hour-plus job.  Complicating matters is the lack of ventilation that doesn't involve diesel smog or clothing donation to the neighbors, coupled with the recent rainy weather that is great for Kenyan people, animals, and crops, but bad for people washing their clothes in the bathtub who aren't into accessorizing with mold.

I did finally find a hair dryer though - of course it was bolted into a drawer in the desk - so that helped speed the drying process a bit.

Today we went to a Nairobi district hospital that specializes in treating patients with HIV to understand how they reach and treat their patients.  The government has a fairly widespread HIV treatment network, which we may be able to utilize for nutrient distribution.

Hospital is actually a generous term, as would the terms "road leading to it", "offices", and "examination rooms".  I wasn't taking pictures, but there were some taken that I will be able to upload tomorrow.  The experience was shocking - walking into the "board room" where we had our meeting, the odor instantly made me feel like I was walking into the lion house at Brookfield Zoo.  From our conversations, there were two things that stood out:

1. There's been a recent trend of women in the slums getting jobs and dropping their kids off at informal "day care" which is really just the shanty of another woman.  Apparently this is rapidly becoming a crisis because the so-called caretakers do not feed or provide decent hygeine for the kids.  Compounding that is the fact that they will pack something like 50 kids into a 15 x 15 foot shack.  I have a feeling that number is a bit exaggerated, but I'm sure it's just as horrific.


2. Denial is still a major part of the problem with HIV management.  Beyond the stigma attached to having HIV (and even being tested), most of the really poor Kenyan's still very much hold to old traditions and beliefs like witchcraft, herbal cures, and other nostrums.  We heard the story about one child who was afflicted with AIDS and brought to the clinic by his mother.  They wanted to test him for HIV and treat his worsening malnutrition, but the father refused to give permission for the test or treatment.  Given that Kenya is still very much a patriarcal society (some of the more shocking statistics I've come across in our research so far are those on domestic violence, e.g. something like 70%+ women think their husbands are justified in beating them if they burn dinner), the test and treatment were never carried out and the boy died last week.

There are so many problems that are so deep and structural, but as we meet with more and more officials and experts, it becomes clearer and clearer that the foundation for a sustainable solution has to be education and advocacy.

Even that is daunting though - Kenya is remarkable in that nationwide, about 90% - 95% of children (ages 6 - 15) are attending school, and adult literacy rates are in the 80% ballpark.

Kenyatta Day

Today was Kenyatta Day - Kenya's independence day.  So that meant no meetings for us, just working out of the hotel lounge (with yet another Member of Parliament who was being interviewed).

The holiday is named after Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta.

You may think Kenya was named after him, but the country was actually named after it's highest mountain, Mount Kenya.  In turn, the mountain was named (Kenia) in 1849 by a German missionary who was the first European to see it.  The etymology isn't clear, but he derived the name from the local tribes' names, which included Kirinyaga (white mountain), Kirenia (mountain of whiteness), and Kiinyaa (the mountain of the ostrich). 

This was the first European to climb the mountain, and I'm only including the picture because if I was in the US for Halloween this year, I would be dressing up as him.

Kenyatta himself actually had a bunch of names throughout his life (including "Kamau wa Muigai", "John Peter", "Johnstone Kamau", and "Diddy") and the conventional wisdom is that he changed it to Kenyatta for political reasons while he was attending graduate school in London.

Everybody still considers him a great president who is largely responsible for Kenya becoming a relatively stable country.  Unfortunately, the goons who came after him took to rolling back his progress and effectively turned the country into a dictatorship.

Tonight the city was more bustling and hectic than ever.  Not far from our hotel is an area where a lot of locals shop and work, and the primary mode of transportation here is a massive fleet of private taxi vans and busses (matatus) that are covered with photos of American celebrities, are just as likely to be packed with chickens as humans (who are often hanging out of the windows and doors for lack of space / ease of harassing us), and seem to be exempt from Kenyan law (if there is traffic, they just pull into the oncoming lanes, shutting them down by fiat).

While the matatus are exempt from Kenyan laws, it appears their waiver doesn't apply to the laws of physics.

The chaotic scene we walked into was like the worst you could imagine in somewhere like Vietnam, only everybody was driving on the wrong side of the rode (once again I stepped out into the street after thinking the coast was clear, only to have a beat-up Toyota approach at warp speed, horn blaring, trying to get the bonus points for hitting a white person) and there was lots of music blaring from the matatus, whose drivers were advertising by trying to yell through the fog of diesel fumes (in violation of another new law against noise pollution... I think that's how they sold the bill since it was really aimed at the matatu drivers).

It would have been a priceless video, but I've learned the trick is to walk around acting like you live there, and nobody harasses / kidnaps you.

AIDS for Food

I forgot two really important things yesterday:

The first forgetting to give my sister the credit for going to Carnivore - the restaurant that used to serve game - over the weekend.  Apparently they no longer serve game at all due to government regulations.  We were also encouraged to go there by some of the locals here, further adding to my suspicion that everybody is on a nationwide, Westerner-referral commission scheme.

The second is forgetting to include the pictures below, which are the whole reason we are here.  We took these photos during our site visit to the nutrition clinic in a Nairobi slum.  The boy is about nine months old (apparently he's small for nine months... I have no point of reference, so I didn't know until someone pointed it out).

His arm is being measured for both body fat and length, malnutrition metrics, which at this point put him right on the border of being malnourished.  He was born a healthy weight, but his mom weaned him after four months, succumbing to Kenyan conventional wisdom that breastmilk doesn't provide enough nutrition for growing toddlers, despite years of government and NGO campaigns to educate the population that babies should only be breastfed for the first six months of life.  Within a couple of months he was underweight and stunted, which is when he was first brought to the clinic.

He was only moderately malnourished, so the clinic provided him with monthly supplies of USAID-supplied UNIMIX  - a highly fortified flour / porridge mix used for interventions - and after 2-3 months, he was on his way back to normal development (though he may never grow to the same size he would have had his mom fed him correctly).

Severely malnourished children are given PlumpyNut, which you may have seen on 60 Minutes.

Our job is figuring out how to permanently get nutrient fortifications into his food everyday so he never has to go back to the clinic. 

Four learnings from today that further highlight the challenge we face:

1. The nutritionists at the clinic told us that his family shouldn't have any trouble feeding him correctly since the husband had what qualifies as a high-paying job in the slums - he works six days a week (he's one of the lucky ones who gets a day off) and makes 300 shillings per day, which is about $4.


2. A lot of times the UNIMIX and Plumpy Nut interventions don't work because the families end up sharing the fortified foods (which are precisely calibrated for different levels of child malnutrition) since they don't have anything to eat.


3. In meeting with the UN's World Food Program today, we were discussing the reasons why a food sprinkle fortification (a packet of nutrients that can be added to any meal) program didn't work in the Somali refugee camps in Kenya.  Apparently the packaging the UN designed looked like a condom, and the muslim Somalis wouldn't even touch them.


4. In some parts of Kenya there are food / nutrition programs for HIV / AIDS patients, but not ordinary people.  In some of the most desparate areas, people have started going out and contracting HIV on purpose in order to qualify for the food programs.

Into Africa

I only had time to get some selected pictures from the safari uploaded, and only one of the videos, which are the best content. I will have more time later this week, but I am also constrained by the bandwidth available here, so the full library of videos may not be up until I get back to Geneva in a couple of weeks.

Until I can provide a more comprehensive accounting of the safari and our day on Friday, a few of the photo highlights follow.

A downside of all the rain is all the mud (or whatever you call a bunch of city grime mixed with water).

At first I thought my expectations for Africa were distorted by all the prejudiced connotations we associate with a huge, diverse content spanning two hemispheres (e.g. poverty, AIDS, lack of infrastructure).  I started to think Africa wasn't that different from Central America... then we ventured outside the confines of Nairobi's business district and headed into one of the urban slums for some field research.

Us white folks are a big hit with kids here.

Friday night we went to Carnivore, a restaurant where they normally serve wild game, e.g. lion, giraffe.  Thankfully, they aren't serving any game right now.  I'm assuming because the draught has wiped out so many animals in the wild.  The following video is pretty dark, but it's the audio that's key.  It's a Kenyan version of Happy Birthday.

Kenya is unbelievably beautiful.  Here you can see where the valley part of the Rift Valley.

I wanted to try riding a zebra, but our safari guide wasn't very keen on the idea.

This picture of a zebra family under a tree was like something straight out of The Lion King (fun fact: "Simba" is Swahili for "lion").

We chased these rhinos for a while... they are unbelievably fast for animals that weigh two metric tons!  I jokingly asked the guide if we could provoke them into ramming our van, but again he didn't see the humor.  I guess my humor doesn't translate into Swahili.
 

This monkey later jumped into one of the vans and stole a carton of orange juice.  Luckily I captured the whole thing on video!

This baby monkey was adorable... lots of video of him, as well.

After we left the national park, we went to a lake that was home to a bunch of hippos.  They stay in the water all day and only come out at night to eat the 40kg of grass that they consume every day, but even mostly submerged these guys are massive and scary (of all the animals in Africa, they are responsible for the most human deaths every year... apparently they just hate us).  I got an incredibly awesome video of a giant bull yawning and raising his head up out of the water... that will be the first video I put up.

The lake was situated in the private sanctuary where they filmed the movie "Out of Africa".  Apparently they brought a bunch of animals into the sanctuary just for the movie, then left them all there.  So it's a little paradise for them where they have lots of human contact and no predators to worry about. 

I chased this baby giraffe (he was still a good 25 feet tall) around a bit, and while he let me get a lot closer than I ever would've guessed, he was still pretty scared of me.  He was surprisingly curious though and was watching us the whole time we were there (all of the other animals ignored us, so I assumed he was curious and not just making sure we weren't trying to have him for dinner).

No Simba, But Safaricom

We're just leaving the national park and while we got some incredible video and photos of rhinos, monkeys, giraffes, etc., we weren't able to find the lions. We also found out the park is too small for elephants, so I missed out on the two animals I most wanted to see. I think I'm going to try a different park next weekend, and if not, I'm sure I will have the opportunity in South Africa.

Once we get back to Nairobi tonight, I will start posting the photos and videos. You may be wondering, "Well how are you writing this post if you're not connected to the Internet?" The answer is almost as cool as the safari.

We figured out it is way less expensive to buy a cellular USB modem than to pay for the hotel's Internet access. So, I'm driving through a rural part of the Rift Valley (think monkeys, impalas, etc. on the sides of the roads) with my laptop connected to the Internet at 3G speeds for a fraction of the price that it would cost in the US.

It's counterintuitive that mobile technology can be more widespread and less expensive than the US, but the cellular networks are often developing countries' first and only nationwide communications system. The economics of developing nationwide land-line just didn't work, so they were never built.

So today there aren't a bunch of companies and investors with massive amounts of capital invested in copper wires / fiber optics criss-crossing the country; the price of the underlying technology has been subsidized by the consumers, investors, and governments of the industrialized world who scaled the industry; and there is a lot of pent-up demand among people who are suddenly able to leapfrog from having virtually no access to any form of modern communication to being a button's push away from anyone, anywhere.

No Country For Old Men

When I first read that Kenya's median age was 19 and life expectancy was 58 (vs 37 and 78 for the US, respectively), I didn't really believe it or fully appreciate it. As I was walking around today in both the slums and business district of Nairobi, it occurred to me that I hadn't seen a single "old" person since I got here.

If I needed a reminder why, it came on our way to dinner tonight. For a good five minutes, we were tailing a bus by about 10 feet. It wasn't the driving skills that provided the reminder (or else Italy would clock in at ages considerably less than their respective 43 and 80), it was the fact the bus was spewing a thick cloud of exhaust and partially-burned diesel fuel, making it hard to see even within the car, which had all of its windows open (they were locked and we'd already gone through an extensive exercise of getting each open to just the right height).

I made a comment from beneath the undershirt I'd pulled over my nose and mouth to the effect of, "Wow, that's a lot of smoke!" To which our Kenyan driver responded, "Oh yes, it's very bad." Yet we continued our low-speed pursuit until the bus turned a few minutes later.

There are so many health challenges and things trying to kill people here that ingesting carcinogens doesn't even register on the radar (literally... see the chart below). Cancer is so far down the list of causes of death that people rarely live long enough for it to ever be of concern.

On that uplifting note, I need to finish preparing for the safari we're going on tomorrow! I should have lots of good photos and videos of Simba and family.

Kenyatta and Obama Did It

Apparently we are staying at Nairobi's analog of Jack Abramoff's Signatures. Camped out across from us this afternoon in our office / lounge was a group of boisterous guys, loudly counseling each other on the best strategy for acquiring money (apparently $10M is decent start) and then what to do with it (the consensus was to invest it in land). It would've seemed a normal conversation among a group of young, ambitious businessmen sitting in the lounge of a flagship hotel in any major city in the world, except there were references to "constituents" peppered throughout the debate.

After they left I asked the Kenya-based consultant working with us who they were. Turns out the ringleader of the group was Raphael Wanjala, a former Member of Parliament who was arrested in India with a suitcase full of US dollars and the 24 year-old Kenyan wife of a wealthy Nigerian businessman.

Turns out it was all a big misunderstanding. He was simply on a business trip, and there was no scandal because his affair was being carried out within the bounds of customary law. As he summed it up: "Kenyatta had five wives. The father of US president Barack Obama had several wives. I can marry as many wives as I want. No man can claim he does not have a girlfriend outside marriage."

We Make It Rain

It poured late last night here and again during the day - not an insignificant happening given the worst drought the country's ever seen. Unfortunately, Nairobi isn't the area that desperately needs it.

Still, we are taking credit for bringing the rain with us.

Shanghaied

A few quick thoughts.

1) Nairobi very much reminds me of Shanghai. It's a teeming mass of people, has a very "developing country" look to it, has a permahaze (though nowhere nearly as bad), and most of all, the smells are similar - occasional wafts of both good and bad food, wood fires, plastic fires, and exhaust / pollution. It's also a similar sociological experience - we are walking billboards that shout "We are not from here!" in blinking, Vegas-style lights.

B) As someone who is paid in USD and currently buying things around the globe, I would like to go on the record and thank all of our assorted political "leaders" from the past several decades for their brilliant, prescient fiscal, trade, and monetary policies.

The Number of Euros Purchased With $1

III) If you're not familiar with the term "Shanghaied", it was fairly common practice in the port cities of the mid-19th century Western US for men to go into a bar and wake up on a merchant ship in the Pacific Ocean, on their way to the Orient.

Due to a confluence of factors (laws that required a man to finish a voyage once it began, a shortage of labor, incentives for third parties to find crew members), shady saloon owners would frequently drug their patrons, drop them through a trap door that led to an elaborate series of underground tunnels, forge the hiring papers, and dump them on a merchant ship.

That's sort of like recent US history - we got drunk on free money, fell through the trap door of a rigged financial system, and next thing we know, the Chinese own our asses.

Hanging With the Prime Minister

The red carpet was rolled out in the lobby today - Prime Minister Odinga was in the hotel to give a speech.  We were shown in to the lounge where we were holding our meetings today, and as we walked in we asked, "Wait, isn't the Prime Minister using this lounge?"

The reply, "Oh yes, but he is sitting over in that corner.  You guys can sit over there."  Over there was 30 feet away from him and his entourage.

No questions asked, no frisking, inspection of our bags, etc.  Pretty crazy.

Jambo!

Successfully made it to the Hilton in Nairobi - the place reeks of British colonialism, which is pretty cool.  A quick recap on the day:

I flew through Heathrow and you know something is wrong with a city (Geneva) when you can get a meal in London that actually fills you up (it was actually a great turkey and cranberry sauce sandwich... my homage to Canadian Thanksgiving... a nice change from European sandwiches that consist of a baguette and 1.2 slices of deli meat) for 30% of the cost.

Ok, a slight detour - in addition to the theory on Geneva's exorbitant inflation posited by Chris Sang (fiat money stashed away there), part of the cause is attributable to the fact that Geneva is very much a corporate town.  Most of the business in the city revolves around the government (UN agencies, all of the diplomatic representation that accompanies them), non-government, and private organization headquarters that draw temporary residents from literally every corner of the world.  All those people live in corporate / government-funded apartments or hotels, have significant expense accounts, etc.  

Though my involvement in the world government / NGO sphere is limited, I've already learned just how much money sloshes around within and between them.  UN / NGO type organizations pay ridiculous salaries that are multiples of similar private sector positions, and the overhead for any world program seems to consume most of the budget.  I think one of the primary reasons that the billions in aid over the past 50 years hasn't made much progress is due to the waste.  It seems like a lot of these organizations have a Wall St. mentality - only instead of taking people's money via morally and legally-dubious means, they just ask for it from governments and Bill Gates.

Anyway, back to Nairobi.  The first thing I noticed was how cool it was - it's about 66F right now, not what I was expecting a few miles from the equator.  I remembered reading that Nairobi's name comes from the Maasai phrase "Enkare Nyirobi" - "the place of cool waters".  Apparently it cools down like this every night, but the days are hot and humid.  Luckily for me, I got upgraded to a poolside cabana room.  We are going to be working out of the hotel when we're not meeting with local officials and experts, so I may have to hold a lot of poolside meetings.

For all of the major commercial and government buildings in town, they check every car for bombs and have metal detectors in the lobbies. They've had that level of security since the US embassy bombings in 1998.  Not that surprising given that some of Kenya's neighbors are the least stable countries in the world.

As we were careening down the highway leading from the airport, I saw what I thought was a statue, but turned out to be two live zebras feeding on grass in the highway median.  I thought that was really cool until I realized they were probably feeding there because they had no other choice - the drought is starving both the people and animals here.

Which made my dinner awkward - I ordered spaghetti bolognese, which turned out to be a giant bowl of ground beef with some spaghetti in it.  Probably a good 1500 calories or so.  It still doesn't make sense that I could eat a meal like that for $15 in a country where people are literally starving.  I had a similar thought on the flight when I had to throw out the sandwich I received with my afternoon tea (British Airways) because it had cheese sauce all over it.  It just seems so simple.

It really does come down to the sustainability of the food distribution model - the long-term solution can't be handouts, it has to be a self-sustaining economy that gets food to the people who need it.  Again, that's one of the great things about the organization we're working for - our job is to find ways to change the legislation, build the infrastructure, and design the business and distribution models that form the basis of a profitable private food / nutrition sector.

That's not to say we have delusions about the challenges we face or that we're going to solve world hunger this year or decade, but I think we're at least heading in the right direction.

Nairobi Bound

Early tomorrow morning we head out for Kenya via London.  Like most places in the world, it's much further away than you'd initially think - just under 5,000 miles, or about 8.5 hours via 777.

We will be based out of the Hilton in the center of Nairobi, taking field trips to meet with government, civic, NGO, and private sector officials (including the Minister of Health, which is pretty cool).  We will also be traveling to the different regions of Kenya to see first-hand the variations in local diets, supply chains, businesses, lifestyles, etc.  Two particularly interesting areas of focus are going to be the school feeding programs (and how the autonomous, extremely high-quality schools of the northern nomadic tribes work) and the emergency aid programs that are trying to feed the rural populations being decimated by an extreme drought.

Some interesting facts about Kenya (we're quickly learning that when it comes to developing countries, there really are no such things as facts, just a wide range of educated guesses):

• Kenya gained independence from the Britain in 1963 (led by Jomo Kenyatta) and upon his death in 1969, effectively became a dictatorship in 1969 under the rule of President Moi
• Moi abdicated after a fair election in 2002.  The election of 2007 was widely believed to have been rigged and triggered months of widespread, machete-wielding mob violence until a UN-brokered power sharing agreement in early 2008.  Our research on Kenya has suggests the country is stocking-up on weaponry in anticipation of the next election
• Kenya's population is about 39M, with the capital Nairobi accounting for about 3M, about the same as Chicago
• The median age is just under 19 years old, with a life expectancy at birth of about 58
• The most predominant religion in Kenya is Protestant (45%), followed by Catholicism (33%)
• English is the official language
• Literacy is an impressive 85%, rebounding from a dip to about 70%... a few years back the government made education free, trigging the bounce
• Per capita GDP is about $1,600, but that doesn't reflect the reality that there is a huge gulf between rich and poor - the poorest 10% account for 1.8% of national income while the richest 10% account for 38%; about 40% of the population is unemployed; 50% live in poverty
• The government's annual budget is $8B, about what we spend in Iraq every month
• Total number of airports = 181
• Total number of airports with paved runways = 16

And for those of you bored by my dry, textbook recitations:

World Cup Commercial - Soccer Dancing

I saw this World Cup commercial on the BBC and thought it was great.  Maybe it will inspire a new style of dancing - soccer moves.

Genève Photos - Jet d'eau, Mont Blanc, Horloge Fleurie

Some of other people from dinner last night were headed up the Alps today, but I opted to do some wandering and take some photos instead, which you can see by clicking on the photo slideshow in the right-hand navigation bar.  Some of the more interesting ones are below.

The first is a picture of both Geneva's famous water fountain (Jet d'eau) with Mont Blanc (Western Europe's highest mountain, not the pen) in the background.  Back in the 19th century, water was pumped throughout town to run hydro-powered machines in workshops.  The fountain was originally a pressure release valve for the distribution network when power demand dipped, e.g. at night.

Today it's powered by a pumping system that consumes an incredible 1 megawatt of electricity, shooting 132 gallons of water per second up over 450 feet at an initial speed of over 120 mph.  At any given time, there are almost 2,000 gallons of fountain water in the air.

Some tourists getting soaked.

The Horloge Fleurie (flower clock) is another famous Geneva landmark, a reflection of Geneva's heritage as the watch-making capital of the world.  The flowers and arrangements change seasonally, so it's never the same clock twice, making it living art in more than one sense.  Fun fact: The second hand is the biggest in the world, measuring 2.5 meters.

I also think I found the entrance to purgatory.

And what I thought was just a cool photo.

Ethiopian "Hats" and Portuguese Karaoke

We ate at a very good, very authentic Ethiopian restaurant last night - the decor was straight out of an Ethiopian village.  You can see some of it in the photos below.

Walking in the door, I was smacked with a delicious thick smell that made me think of rich, slowly barbecued beef.  We were ushered into our own little thatched hut where there was more than enough seating for the 14 of us - our team along with the Accenture team from the Global Fund and some of their non-Accenture colleagues from Africa, including Tanzania and Uganda.  It originally was supposed to be 13 people, but one couldn't make it.  After the restaurant informed us that we'd have to pay $30 for the no-show, one of the Global Fund guys called some friends who were happy to help us meet our quota.

The chairs / benches had cow skins draped over them and were arranged around a series of wicker tables that looked like giant weaved baskets turned upside down.  On the tables where giant weaved hats that look like they came out of southeast Asia, so of course we put them on.

Turns out they were the lids to the platters on which the food was served.  Our waiter was not amused and promptly moved the hats to outside our hut where we couldn't play with them.  You can see some of the decor in the following picture of Harinder - one of the consultants on my team - standing there doing something of unidentified nature.

The food was awesome - if you've never had Ethiopian, it's basically a bunch of heavily-spiced, stewed meats and vegetables served on a giant communal platter lined with pieces of this really spongy, flat bread that is like a giant crepe and serves as the only eating utensil  - but we had some drink issues.  The first drink was a Heineken that reeked of sulfur (I didn't even want to figure out the contaminant / source) and the second was a glass of wine from a bottle that had clearly been open for a couple of days.  Wishing to avoid saliva being added to the ingredients in our dinner, we decided to just order bottles of wine, which turned out to be really good.

Afterwards we stumbled into a Portuguese karaoke bar and proceeded to interrupt the Portuguese programming with selected American staples, e.g. Oops I Did it Again, Country Road, etc.  The crowd seemed to enjoy it much more than I would've thought, but I think it was mainly a laughing at us vs. with us situation.

Ironically, the bar had a version of Photo Hunt, but all of the images were cartoons, unlike the Naked Photo Hunt found in every sports bar in the US.  I figured Europe would for sure have something more scandalous, but nobody had even heard of it.

Al Qa'ida in Geneva

Some real cloak and dagger business going on in Geneva today:

French agents have arrested a researcher from Europe's top atomic lab on suspicion of links to al-Qaeda, fuelling fears that terrorists could be targeting the nuclear industry.

The 32-year-old man, who was detained along with his brother, works for the prestigious European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva, Switzerland, according to French police sources.

Full story at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6868246.ece 

The Pope's Personal Tomatoes

Taking the exchange rate into account, Geneva has got to be the most expensive city in the world, beating out London, Moscow, and Tokyo.  It's impossible to find even a small sandwich that is not more than 12-15 Swiss Francs (about 1-1 with the Dollar).

Today we had lunch at a small Italian restaurant, a mom-and-pop type of place... nothing special.  Below is a picture I took of the menu showing appetizers - take note of the $20 bowl of minestrone soup (first item on the list).  I'm also a fan of the $22 caprese salad.  I asked the waiter if the tomatoes were flown-in this morning from the Pope's personal garden, but he wasn't sure.

The food may be outrageous, but I think I will just have to forgo that Patek Philippe I've been eyeing on my way to work each morning (well food prices plus the 50% pay cut I took as part of the project).  Given the work we're doing, I realized I shouldn't complain when I looked at how much my malaria medicine cost - $600 for a three month supply (before insurance).

So for the 4 billion people who live on less than $4/day, they would have to save a minimum of 1.5 years of earnings (and not buy or eat anything) for every year of malaria protection.  So now I have an answer to my question on why 500 million people are stricken with a disease that's so easy to prevent and treat.

Lost, Sauced, and Sobered

Three things from today:

1. They (those wise strawmen) say the best way to learn a new city is to get lost in it.  I've been here five days now and must know half of Geneva's landmarks. Apparently lost is the new found for me - I must have looked so authoritative and confident in my wanderings today that I had no less than four groups of British tourists try to hire me as a tour guide.  I came up with a great solution though - I am practicing my route to the office and back on Google Maps Street View.


2. Judging by the English put on my kebab sandwich as it was being tossed by the angry one-eyed Lebanese restaurant owner, apparently "no sauce" translated into French means just "no chili sauce" and not "no lactose sauce".


3. One of the fun facts I learned over the weekend was that we should buy a personal supply of syringes to bring with us to Kenya and Nigeria should we need any medical care.  Another sobering reminder of just how dire daily life is for so many people on a day-to-day basis.  When I was getting pumped full of vaccines I only half-jokingly asked the doctor how anybody manages to survive in these countries, and not-jokingly he astutely responded, "Most don't."

What exactly are we doing?

We are working for an aid organization created out of a UN conference, dedicated to eliminating malnutrition in the world.  Some facts on global malnutrition and hunger:

• It is responsible for more than half of the 10 million children under the age of five who die every year in developing countries
• It accounts for over 11% of the world's disease burden
• Nearly 150 million children under age five in the developing world are underweight for their age
• About 178 million children under five are stunted (low height for age) as a result of insufficient food, poor diet and diseases according to WHO
• An estimated 55 million children, or 10 percent of the world’s children, are wasted. Wasting is a severe form of malnutrition and demands emergency nutritional interventions. According to WHO, about 1.5 million children die each year due to wasting
• Countries may lose two to three percent of their GDP as a result of iron, iodine and zinc deficiencies
• 25,000 people die every day from hunger and related causes
• Nearly one billion people in developing countries do not have enough to eat - more than the populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined
• The number of undernourished people in the world increased by 75 million in 2007, largely due to higher food prices

The organization's approach is to work with governments, NGOs, and the private sector to create sustainable solutions to malnutrition by fortifying local food supplies.

One of the keys to their approach is the sustainability piece - they are not interested in simply donating food or money for a short-term solution, they instead seek to put in place the right political, infrastructure, and private sector foundations for a region to acquire the capability for producing their own food supply with sufficient nutrient content.

Our job is helping them develop the process for going in to target countries and conducting the assessments that will guide their efforts and investments, which could range from advocating for new legislation, conducting publicity campaigns, making investments in infrastructure, establishing access to capital for local food manufacturers and distributors, directly investing in local businesses, etc.

We will be piloting the process by conducting assessments in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Rajasthan (a very poor state in India that borders Pakistan... there is a new state government in place that may not be receptive to our efforts, so we may have to shift our focus to a different Indian state), and Bangladesh.

The nutrients we are working with are: 

• Folic acid - prevents neural tube defects in infants
• Iodine - prevents goiter and mental retardation
• Vitamin B - a deficiency can cause a slew of serious problems, including retardation, weakened immune systems, neurological diseases
• Iron - to prevent anemia
• Zinc - another mineral critical for immune function, neural development, heart function

Our work will focus on finding ways to get these fortifications into local food staples and condiments, such as rice, wheat and corn flour, vegetable oils, salt, sugar, milk, soy sauce, and fish sauce.

First day in Genève

Well it wouldn't be a trip if my luggage wasn't lost. Trying to buy pants in a foreign language and an even more foreign pants-measurement system  - who knew 54 was smaller than 26? - was a fun experience that I'm sure will be repeated on numerous occasions over the next couple of months.

The itinerary is firming up and should have all flights booked by early next week. Kenya will be first on October 13.

Also, went to an Iranian restaurant tonight, hoping to bump into the Iranian delegation that was in town for the inaugural direct US-Iran nuclear talks today. No luck.