Back to normal. Whatever the hell that means...

It is now nearly 5pm on a Sunday afternoon and I'm currently listening to the slow, melodic, rhythmic, and basic "sex on the danceflow" music that is Haitian konpa; and watching an approaching sunset over this gorgeous country. Things have been calm here for over a week - apparently rice prices have decreased by 10% and the country is holding its breath as to whether that and the new in-coming governement will be enough to sort out the crisis. I'm still sceptical about whether any government can actually fulfill its promises, and whether its promises are actually enough - still, encouraging signs.

As per the course when any emergency happens in a development context, donors are throwing money at us. At present, it looks like we could be getting up to an additional €1m in additional funding. On the one hand, it is fantastic news. On the other, my staff are already over-stretched especially with the extra tasks I've given them to do - and huge projects such as these will be would stretch them even further... Oh well, something to worry about once we actually get the funding.

Work is promising to be a complete nightmare until I get to Cuba end of June - especially since my Head Accountant, on whom I rely on heavily, will be in the States for the next 6 weeks due to his wife's pregnancy. Stupid me, I encouraged him to take an extra week so that he would not have to leave so soon after his wife's planned c-section. Don't know what I was thinking - must have been the heat. Bugger consideration and all that crap, need to be more of a bitch in the future. Yep - watch out world for Bitch Boss. Hmmnn - that has a definite ring to it...

However, I'm thinking seriously of just saying to the hell with it and taking a long weekend in New York early May. Absolutely do not have the time for it given everything that needs to be done but seriously thinking that I need it. It's strange how, when you're stressed, a part of you can know it but that still doesn't stop yourself from losing perspective. That happened to me on Friday morning when I lost a document that I'd stayed up ridiculously late the previous night working on. It wasn't a huge deal by itself but added to everything else, I was almost crying in frustration. It was a very good thing that I discovered this very early in the morning and no one else was in the office at the time. Also, that I walked back home to check if it was on my personal laptop (it wasn't) which got me to calm down. I knew objectively that what I feeling was stress-induced and that it was out of all proportion to the event, but I was still fucking pissed off. In the end, it turned out that it wasn't actually strictly necessary. So a lesson for the future.

Oh screw it. Retail therapy, here I come - especially with the Euro being as strong as it is. The work will sort itself out somehow.




Less work related, my dancing lessons are going well. Had my third lesson this morning at our usual place in this dance hall called "Aux Carabasse" in town. Really feel like I can at least grasp the basics of Salsa and cha cha cha, and am really starting to like my tutor, despite initial reservations (he's kind of a bit short...). Thinking though that he's really spoiling me for others as he's such a good leader, which is unlikely to be the case with most other partners. But hey, I just love it when he just throws me into those intricate steps and then I successfully make it back to "base position". Still need to work on wiggling those hips, though. Not to mention dancing the konpa: this looks deceptively easy (just a basic two-step) but then dancers often stop moving altogether and just grind their pelvises together rhymically for a large portion of the set. Yep, it looks like basic screwing on the dance floor. But trust me, a lot more difficult to do than it looks - no matter how I tried, I couldn't get the movement and rhythm right. Maybe that says something about my skills in another area. Ahem.



In other news, a couple of my good friends got married yesterday. To each other. All the best to you Katherine and Steve, and so so sorry I can't be there to blubber nosily in the front row (as I would inevitably do). In honour of this romantic occasion, here's a favourite pic from the wonderful "cute overload" website:

A return to "hunger politics"?

Well, the PM looks like he's on his way out and Preval (the Haitian President) has at last announced some measure to reduce the cost of rice by 15%, so at least things are moving in the right direction. However, there's some question as to if that's enough - just heard that a UN peacekeeper has been shot dead in Port au Prince, circumstances unclear. My colleagues tell me that the test will come over the next couple of days as we see reaction, or hopefully non-reaction, to the news. Anyway, here's a vid from BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7340000/newsid_7344800/7344826.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1

Have had an especialy lazy day of it apart from this morning where we redefined the meaning of "shop until you drop". In terms of food, at any rate. Apart from needing to get more reserves of water and more cooking gas (which we'll do on Monday insha'allah), I feel confident that we can withstand a bloody siege from the amount of food we bought. It's difficult to know how much is too much in a situation like this - by stocking up so much, are we being prudent or ridiculous. Who knows... Apparently, most of the expat community seemed to feel the same way as the supermarket was completely packed to the seems even at 9am. The large laugh was from seeing huge UN guys doing their grocery shopping in bullet proof vests. Those cashiers can be murder when haggling over change.

Just also wanted to share a really interesting article I read in Time magazine about the possible return to government interventions along the socialist model and so-called "hunger politics":
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1730107,00.html

Are we indeed on the brink of such a shift in global politics - a return to hunger sparking "revolutionary violence"? I just want to quote a paragraph from this article:

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That's especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that's precisely what we're seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, "We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

I think it's the last statement that cuts so close - seeing food there but not being able to touch it and then seeing foreigners, such as the UN and us expats living it up. Thinking about the situation in Haiti where a cup of rice costs more than the average daily wage for the minority who are working and where most of the food is imported - the situation is just not sustainable. Something has to give - especially if global food prices are not projected to decrease for the next couple of years. Unless we have another "green revolution" on our hands very soon, this could have the potential of eclipsing or subverting the current "War on Terror".

Here's another article about the crisis from a Christian Aid rep:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7341467.stm

Anyway, off to try out my "Yogalates" DVD ahead of a Kenyan evening...

Cute pic stolen off some stranger's blog

Apologies, whoever you are, but couldn't resist stealing this pic from your blog. God, I just want to pick that gorgeous thing up and give it a cuddle...

Contingency planning and double divorces

Had a short day today - mostly gossiping, rearranging my team's timetable for month end, and attending a THREE HOUR Senior Mgt Meeting focusing mostly on contingency planning and security. We had the fun task of deciding who the essential and non-essential staff were - naturally, we each believed that we were absolutely essential. Benefit of rank (aka abuse of power), you see. Then the slightly less fun of thinking up worse case scenarios and their "trigger points". And the absolutely zero fun of deciding steps to take in event of an evacuation. The last just made me feel sick even thinking about it. Or it might have been the cake we were eating during the meeting...

I now understand why field staff are so resistant to being evacuated - it's that feeling that you're giving up and running away just when the going gets tough. Like what the UN does. Fucking UN... They get paid a hardship allowance and get regular R&R for living in luxurious 5 star compounds, and dining out in high priced restaurants - and they still whine about the situation. I know that they are in fact being targeted during these demostrations but about time they're earnt those criminally HUGE salaries. Besides, their 5 star compounds are gorgeous. Grrrr.

Then we had fun trying to sort out the situation with fuel due to a large proportion of petrol stations having been either set alight or otherwise damaged. (For protestors suffering shortages in fuel due to huge price hikes, destroying what fuel there is is probably not the most logical thing to do, but what do I know). Since we only have electricity a couple of hours a day if that, we're so dependent on fuel to power our generators, not only for moving about.

Anyway, on a lighter note, read the following story in an African newspaper that a visiting consultant supplied us with:

"MAN GIVEN A DOUBLE DOSE OF DIVORCE

When Roslan Ngah took a second wife, he might have wondered if she would get along with his first.

He need not have worried.

The two women got on so well they decided to leave him at the same time.

Faced with their united stand, Roslan, 44, a Muslim, divorced his two wives, aged 46 and 35, in a Shariah Court in Terengganu State yesterday.

According to Islamic law, a woman can submit a request to leave her husband, but the pronoucement of divorce must come from the man or a court. Islam allows a man to have four wives.

Salwa Mansor, the second wife's lawyer, said the wives cited irreconcilable differences and other complaints.

Roslan said he was aware his two wives had become close over the years. "They are like good friends but I never imagined both of them had collectively decided to divorce me," Roslan added."

I loved his statement. Typical male obliviousness...

Back to work...

Things seem relatively back to normal. We're opening the office at 9am with the strict proviso on all our staff to check their local news before venturing out.

I'm sure we'll have an update on the situation when the office opens but my thoughts are that this is a rather deceptive quiet. No substantive measure have been annonced to deal with the crisis in the short term and the leaders of the demostrations have said that they would give the government up to Monday noon to come up with a better package or else... Not very reassuring.

Just thought I'd share an another article on food prices from Al Jazeera:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/731157E1-133D-490D-ACF7-3405744C491D.htm

They also mention the shift to biofuels as well as speculation on the market as causes for the world-wide explosion in food prices. What I found especially interesting was the mention of the percentage of household income spent on food between the poor and rich countries:

"Most people in the world's wealthiest countries take food for granted.
Even the poorest fifth of households in the US spend only 16 per cent of their budget on food.

By contrast, Nigerian families spend 73 per cent of their budgets on eating, Vietnamese 65 per cent, while Indonesians allocate half.

Last year, the food import bill of developing countries rose by 25 per cent as food prices rose to levels not seen in a generation."

It reminds me of what George Alagiah wrote in his book "A passage to Africa" about how you could measure the poverty of a family by how often they go out to buy food. Pretty good measure that - should add that into the HDI...

Anyway, off to work.

9th April - The President speaks...

The President had spoken and said ... well, not much really. Commiserated with the protestors, appealed for stability and calm, announced some subsidies against the cost of living, and refused to lower taxes against imported goods. Basically, nothing that would actually help the immediate situation - and the fact that it took a week (plus an attack on the palace) to come up with this is ridiculous.

It’s now evening and things seem pretty calm – haven’t seen any smoke or heard any gunfire for most of the afternoon so I’m hoping things have stabilised. However, we’re still under curfew until further notice. And even if things are calm, given that there are barricades and debris on the major roads and that most of the staff use public transport (which is not currently running) to get to work – I can’t see that things will return to normal for at least the rest of the week.

Today’s been a complete write-off – have managed to do very little work. The motivation just isn’t there despite the huge amounts to do. In some ways, I hope that I am stuck at home tomorrow again to really get to grips with all the stuff that I don’t actually need the server. Of which there are plenty. But then I’ll probably end up doing nothing then as well.

Anyway, sounds like the international media has finally caught up with the news in Haiti although most of them seem to file it along with the various other food riots that have been happening all over the world recently. This, however, is a vid that I found on the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7330000/newsid_7337900/7337920.stm?bw=nb&mp=rm&asb=1&news=1&bbcws=1

Still waiting...

Have both the radio and the TV on waiting for Preval to speak. Nothing - just retro Bob Marley music with the message that the President will give a special message "En quelques instants...". It's been there for at least the last hour...

Mary made a comment that it's a bit like when there's a coup in a country - all local TV stations just play music while the population waits. The smoke that we can see from our balcony along with sporadic gun shots and helicopters aren't making us feel any less nervous. It's most probably harmless - more tires burning, some idiots waving their guns around, and VIPs travelling around in helos for security reasons - but defnitely not helping.

A couple of articles on the global rise in food prices:
http://www.radio-canada.ca/nouvelles/international/2008/04/08/002-denree-alimentaire-prix.shtml
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1684910,00.html

What both, not to mention other articles all agree on is that this food crisis is not going away anytime soon and that it's very much linked to the energy crisis, not to mention climate change and population growth.

In terms of the price of rice, apparently the catalyst of the current crisis is due to a virtual doubling of the price over the last few weeks.

Waiting for the President to speak

The morning after (courtesy of Al Jazeera here: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2F14DC83-B602-4FC4-9452-3A49886B0AC1.htm)

It's deceptively calm this morning - actually too calm: no sounds of cars, revving of motorbikes, shouting, loud dance music and other assorted ambient street noise. I can actually even hear the birds chirping, and can see the "houseboy" [how colonial] downstairs trimming the flowers.

However, I heard that they're still burning tyres and holding rallies downtown. What's more worrying for us cosseted expats is that there's a huge amount of anger against the UN and, by extension, other international workers. Digicel, the largest mobile phone company here who is raking it in, is Irish and were apparently blockaded yesterday by angry protestors telling them to "go home". I can certainly understand the anger - I'm an NGO expat myself and even I get pissed off by the UN ridiculous pay, their arrogance and their utter ineffectiveness and bureaucracy. However, I'm hoping this doens't turn into another Ivory Coast.

Anyway, we're all on tenterhooks waiting for the President Rene Preval to speak as everything hinges on what he says and how it's received. Unfortunately, the government doesn't have a great deal of credibility and Preval himself is not a charismatic figure so it's unclear which way it will go. As a colleague mentioned though, there are only three options: it will stay the same, worsen or get better. Well, putting it that way...

Meanwhile, might spend today writing new finance procedures. Hmmnn.

8th April - Under curfew...

Today's been rather eventful to say the least. Let's have a compare and contrast (courtesy of the BBC website) to the my Champs de Mars pic in a previous post:

Street scenes of downtown PAP (courtesy of the Guardian):

Haiti is just one in a pretty large list of countries currently experience food demonstrations/riots due to the explosion in prices of basic food commodities such as rice, beans, maize etc. Others on the news include Egypt, El Savaldor, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ivory Coast, Senegal... From the National Commission of Food Security, over the last year in Haiti, prices for:
- imported rice has increased by 50%
- beans by 25%
- flour by a whopping 80%

What makes things even worse over here is that, for a developing nation, there is surprisingly little subsistence farming: depending on seasons and economic/geographic area, Haitians purchase 50 to 80% of their food needs, and more than 50% of that is imported - facts which really shocked me when I first heard them as it seems more in line with post-conflict/natural disaster. Increased prices for fuel, vigorous crackdowns by the government on contraband/informal markets, decline in remittances due to recessions in the US and DR, and poor local harvests due to flooding in 2007 are also blamed for exacerbating the situation.

Anyway, there's obvious widespread hunger: I've heard people here refer to hunger as "Klorox", a local bleach, to describe the feeling of pain in their stomachs - something that just moves you to tears. What's less clear is how much, if at all, opposing political factions are fuelling the crisis for their own ends. From what I gathered, simple food demonstrations are normally not sustainable as protestors simply cannot afford to keep protesting. Also, the violence - the attacks on the Presidential Palace, the burning of buildings and petrol stations, the attacks on MINUSTAH (the UN Protection force) could point to something potentially more destabilising for the government. On the other hand, they could just point to more or less spontaneous outbursts of frustration. It's difficult to really tell - especially for someone who doesn't really have a grip on the politics of this place.

In terms of how it's touched us - it was only really this afternoon that the situation really escalated for us in Petionville. We obviously knew of the rioting in the south (round les Cayes) over the last week and the demonstrations downtown in PAP today but didn't really realise how violent it had become. I spent the morning mostly struggling to go through the huge number of revisions to existing budgets while being plagued by power outages to the extent when I gave and decided to go home over lunch to grab my laptop. Once there, I had calls from a number of people to stay put as there were huge demonstrations going past the office. I later gathered that the demonstrations were close enough that the tear gas used by the police made its way through our office compound. If I'd left it slightly later, it's pretty certain that I would have been caught up in those protests - something to think about...

There's a part of me that is immensely relieved that I was not stuck in the office during what was, to all accounts, a very tense situation. However, it was immensely frustrating not being able to hear what was going on and not being able to support my team. From my flat, I could hear the rioting and see the clouds of smoke but felt very cut off. When the streets grew quieter, we managed to start sending all our staff home - it sounded pretty chaotic with the setting up of shared rides for those who rely on public transport and trying to figure out the best way to get past the worst affected areas - my Head Accountant had to walk home due to the amount of debris on the streets. But I know that all my team made it back so can sleep tonight. Anyway, the office is closed for at least tomorrow and we expats are under curfew until further notice.

With all this going on, not sure if the cashbooks got finalised today...

Slightly drunk after two rum sauers...

I'm such a lightweight...

After two small drinks, I had trouble getting my key into the keyhole [what can I say, it's much more difficult than people think]. Reason being a couple of drinks with an old colleague who used to be Head of Logistics at the first NGO I worked for who just turned up in PAP. He's working for one of the Federation Red Crosses as Country Director over here and has cut his hair, smartened up and settled down. And I remember him as a scruffy long-haired party animal of a loggie... Things change.

Anyway, have FINALLY finished February month end (delay being due to having to rework most of the budgets for the year before inputting them into the system) so very very happy. Trying not to think about the load of work I have yet to do... What the fuck - have Filing Day tomorrow so think I'll have another drink...