Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  I visited a cave big enough to hold my apartment building, snorkeled over four species of distinctive brown coral on the Diahann reef, and fed the world’s cutest vultures—bright orange and yellow and almost cuddly—when they invaded my picnic at the bottom of Daerah Canyon. They turned up their beaks at my offerings of tomatoes, cucumbers, and oranges, and only grudgingly ate an apple, but they loved my leftover pita bread.

  Far as I could tell, the big daily event in the island’s biggest town was the feeding of the goats. The five or six produce stores on the main drag closed around 4:00 p.m., and the grocers discarded the cardboard boxes they no longer needed. They tossed them into the middle of the street, where several dozen goats quickly descended on them, tore them apart with practiced skill, and chewed them up and chowed them down in a grand feast. Their clear favorites were the boxes labeled WASHINGTON STATE APPLES.

  I may have established a new culinary trend on the island. When walking past the village fish shop—several big boards on the ground—I noticed the fishmonger hacking some prime albacore and bonito into chunks with a machete. I prevailed upon my hotel to buy a few pounds of that dark red tuna, then skin and bone it, wash it with bottled water, and then serve it to me raw with rice. It was delicious, some of the freshest sashimi I have ever had. The locals were terrified to eat any—“Raw fish? Are you crazy?”—but I persuaded a few of them to try a small piece, and soon they were all asking for more and marveling how they could really taste the fish flavor, while simultaneously economizing on cooking fuel, leaving more funds for qat consumption.

  The problem was the condiments. As every sushi lover knows, the fish is merely a vehicle for ingesting the soy sauce and wasabi. I tried the hotel’s “Sweet Soy Sauce,” but it tasted like a melted Hershey bar. After sampling all that was in the hotel’s cupboard, I found one sauce that was sufficiently salty. To get the vital wasabi bite I experimented with whatever I had on hand. I essayed some pulverized CIPRO from my medical kit, but it was too bitter, and also likely to raise a race of superbugs. I considered adding a schmear of SPF 50 sunscreen or some athlete’s foot balm, but felt that neither of these would provide quite the piquant punch of the Asian radish. I settled for the Heinz mustard.

  On my last night, ten Taiwanese tourists checked into the hotel, saw what I was eating, started shouting “Sushi, sushi,” and demanded that they be served the same on the following evening. It might be the start of a food fad, but I’m sure it will not displace the qat.

  I returned to Sana’a the same day that a German national was kidnapped by tribesmen from Yemen’s Maghreb region, who hoped to exchange him for several of their brethren who were in prison for various antigovernment activities. As this was the ninth kidnapping of a foreign tourist from Sana’a in the year, I figured it was time for me to get out of Dodge.

  I flew to Beirut the following day and drove through one of its suburbs about 30 minutes before a suicide bomber blew himself up on the same spot.

  I was down to the Savage Seven.

  CHAPTER 28

  Guerrillas and Gorillas

  Some days a guy just can’t catch a break.

  Gulf Air goofed on my flight to Ethiopia, stranding me for 33 hours in Bahrain, not normally a bad place to be stuck for a day—unless it happens to be a major Shia holiday and the Shia are angry because the ruling Sunnis had called in Saudi troops to crush a Shia-led rebellion.

  When I strolled through the diplomatic quarter in the capital of Manama a minivan exploded behind me. When I retreated to my hotel, the pool was frigid and none of the gym equipment worked. When I turned on the telly, I learned warfare had resumed on the border between Sudan and South Sudan, which I was scheduled to visit in ten days. When I went to a beachside bowling alley, no ball fit, and I rolled a 53. And Gulf Air refused to honor its obligation to pay for my hotel and meals.

  Some days it truly does not pay to get out of bed. Even if you are in it alone.

  The next day I arrived in Ethiopia, where Andrew Doran rendezvoused with me at the airport, in Addis Ababa. He was not the eager, macho, tough guy I’d known; he appeared tired and confused. He attributed it to jet lag, but it later proved to be something more serious.

  My main objective in Ethiopia was to visit Dinkneh Tamire, a seven-year-old boy I supported through ChildFund International, in his small village 200 km east of Addis. I had arranged, during the preceding ten months, by many international snail mails, to visit him during this trip, and for at least four months ChildFund knew I wanted to buy his family a female goat to get them on the road to self-sufficiency. I chose goat, the “soccer of meats,” because it’s popular everywhere in the world except North America and because it’s the easiest to raise and will eat almost anything. It’s the least demanding on the environment requiring only 127 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, while a pound of chicken takes 468 gallons, and a pound of beef sucks up 1,800.

  But had anyone there located a suitable goat or begun to look for one? Of course not.

  I met Dinkneh and his mother at his village, which sits astride the discontinued railway to Djibouti. We had a pleasant lunch, joined by our driver, our guide/translator from ChildFund in Addis, and ChildFund’s local manager. Andrew had remained in Addis, where we were guests at the Danish Embassy residence. He said he needed to catch up on sleep.

  After lunch I announced I was ready to buy Dinkneh the goat.

  “But we cannot do that today,” apologized the local rep, who was aware that it was the only day I could do it. “The livestock market is closed today.”

  And that, for him, was the end of the matter. No initiative. No creativity. No can-do attitude.

  “Look,” I said, “about ten minutes before we reached town we passed a flock of sheep and tribes of goats between the road and hills to the north. So let’s drive there and buy one. When you want a goat, you go to where the goats are.”

  “But those goats may not be for sale.”

  “All goats are for sale,” I shot back. “They are not children you keep forever. It’s just a matter of the price.”

  Hence, much against the wishes of the driver and the bureaucrats, we piled into the 4 × 4, drove ten minutes back down the road, turned off onto the dirt track I’d spotted, and within five more minutes were on the tail of a herd of more than a hundred goats.

  “Go buy the boy a goat,” I told the Addis manager.

  “But this man may not own these goats,” the city dweller replied.

  “Nonsense. You can tell by the way he’s treating them that he is the owner.”

  “But he may not want to sell them,” added the local rep.

  “You will never know unless you ask.”

  They came back: “He said he was not yet ready to sell any goats.”

  “He’s just bargaining. Tell him I want a healthy female and will pay 600 birr,” I said, quoting a price I knew to be about ten dollars higher than the going rate.

  After another conference with the shepherd, they reported back: “He says he will only sell you a male.”

  No way.

  After more dickering, I bought Dinkneh a male and a female for $65, but I was concerned because the male Dinkneh’s mother had selected was the year-old son of the female we bought.

  I told the translator to tell her she must not breed the female with its son.

  All the Ethiopians thought this was a splendid dirty joke and roared with laughter.

  This was not funny, I explained. “If you want a goat to give birth to healthy kids who produce a good supply of milk and meat, you never mate mother and son.”

  Sadly, after more than a thousand years of raising goats, sheep, and cows, and at least a score of years during which the USAID, CARE, and Heifer International had labored to teach Ethiopian herdsmen the basic principles of animal husbandry, they remain ignorant, with inbreeding common and highly detrimental.

  When the translator firmly told Dinkneh’s mother she must never mate the female with the son, and that whe
n the dam came into heat, she must mate it with a male from a neighbor, she was puzzled. When I told him to explain that it was necessary to expand the gene pool, it got translated that I wanted her to build a large pool where people could swim wearing jeans.

  When ChildFund gave me a tour of its schools, I began to understand the cause of the problem: The kids are not taught to think; memorization and recitation fill most of the day. They learn factoids and definitions, math formulas and the periodic table of the elements, but they are not taught to solve problems, to be creative, to look ahead, to think things through.

  This disadvantage afflicts many Africans, from the lowliest cart drivers to top government officials. The drivers, for example, fail to realize that when they’re driving a dull-colored old vehicle without reflectors and it breaks down at night, other cars are likely to smash into it on the narrow roads unless they provide adequate warning. Yet they uniformly put only two dark rocks on the road about ten feet behind the broken vehicle. The governments also fail to think ahead, as, for example, in their contracts with the Chinese, who are on a rampage across the continent, buying up all the oil, mineral resources, and farmland they can. In exchange, the Africans usually ask for infrastructure projects, but overlook their need to be properly run and maintained. As a result, they are ending up, across the continent, with Chinese-built roads that crumble in three years, railroads whose rolling stock is often sidetracked with mechanical failures, and factories that the locals have not been adequately trained to operate or maintain. This shortsightedness is endemic and easy to understand in a vicissitude-plagued continent whose people have learned, the hard way, that it seldom pays to plan ahead because one long drought, locust invasion, dictator, revolution, tribal feud, or other aleatory event can wipe out a lifetime of savings and planning.

  Before I left Dinkneh, I took him to the nearest town and bought him new clothes, although he was intrigued by my heavily taped jungle pants. For several years they’d been threadbare from the knees to the cargo pockets, where I’d mended them repeatedly with massive patches of duct tape, applied inside and out, in the hope of coaxing this one last journey out of them. I was flashing so much shiny metallic tape I looked like RoboCop.

  One unanticipated benefit of this decor had been that when we were driving back to Addis and I stopped to purchase some produce at a roadside market, the vendors quoted me a price far lower than the typical tourist price. As one woman explained after she sold me eight pounds of tomatoes for less than two dollars at a makeshift market beside a small lake in the Great Rift Valley: “We think that if some faranji wears clothes like you, he must be even poorer than we are.” The strawberry sellers at the same market were surprised, but impressed, when I insisted—politely but firmly—on getting the one birr (six cents) in change I was owed after a purchase. “We assume,” one vendor told me, “all white people are rich and do not care about small change.” I don’t believe that’s a favorable image to impart to poor Africans, so I did my best to dispel it.

  At the market I saw in watermelons the results of the same ignorance of basic genetics as with the goats. The melons had so many seeds they were almost inedible. The evolutionary battle of natural selection had been won by those melons that produced the most seeds, and consequently produced the most offspring, not because farmers had consciously chosen their seeds from melons that were tasty and pulpy.

  We didn’t get to read much about politics in Ethiopia because the country was run by a stern autocrat (who died while this book was being written) and his Marxist-Maoist clique, who are not fans of democracy or freedom of the press. The government had just ousted the reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post, with the result that my pal, Peter Heinlein of the Voice of America, with whom I stayed in Addis, was the only fearless and unfettered journalist left in the country, which made him a marked man, and one who would have been booted out or imprisoned years ago were he not married to the powerful Danish ambassador.

  After I returned to Addis, I picked up Andrew, who had not left his bedroom during the two days I was gone. We flew to N’Djamena to complete my twice-thwarted attempt to visit Chad.

  Andrew and I had not been in Chad for a full minute before the shakedown began, as was to be expected in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. An immigration official stamped us in and directed us to one of his colleagues at the far side of the entry hall, where the uniformed officer rubbed his thumb and fingers together and said, “Money, money, money.” He asked Andrew for a bribe of “fifty dolla,” pay or you stay at the airport. Andrew meekly gave it to the officer without a word of protest, which was way out of character for him.

  When the officer demanded $50 from me, I told him, in my most forceful French, I had already paid for my visa.

  He looked unimpressed: “Money, money, money.”

  I told him the Chadian ambassador in the U.S. had assured me I did not have to pay more money to enter Chad.

  He looked at me as if I were a simpleton; “Money. Money.”

  I asked him to show me the regulation that required me to pay.

  He looked at me as if I was a troublemaker.

  I told him I would pay him only if he gave me a signed receipt.

  He choked with laughter and shared the joke with two of his colleagues who were waiting for their cut of the loot.

  I flipped over my passport and pointed to the business card that I had, for this very purpose, inserted under the clear plastic protective cover. It bore an engraving of the White House and stated that Albert Podell was Barack Obama’s “Presidential Partner.” I emphasized that the building—my home base?—was “La Maison Blanche dans Washington.” (The president had sent me ten of these impressive cards in 2009 to thank me for having been a large and early donor to his campaign, and this was the first time I’d used it for anything other than picking up women.)

  The price of the bribe dropped to $15.

  I had only a 20, which I gave him, and asked for change. For this I got the biggest laugh of the day and a wave to get-the-hell-out, now.

  Corruption like this is endemic in Africa. It is unfair, wearying, invasive, disheartening, and destructive. But it can be turned to good advantage, as we later did.

  To secure a visa for Chad, I’d booked our first night at the overpriced Novotel La Tchadienne, one of the few establishments that could provide the letter of invitation required for the application process. The hotel was a mere shade of its glory days, when French tourists thronged to Chad for some fun in the sun and sand. It was French to its core—the room contained a full dozen complimentary condoms of the Prudence brand, with its straightforward slogan, emphatically applicable to this AIDS-ravaged area: “Abstinence, Fidelity, or Prudence.”

  After we had hobnobbed with the rich and powerful by the Tchadienne’s large but freezing pool for a day, we moved into Spartan quarters at a local missionary guesthouse, where my Cornell cohorts Carl and Karen had worked for the past 13 years.

  I had chartered a plane from a local flight service to fly Andrew, Carl, Karen, and me down to the edge of Lake Chad, but it turned out to be such a windy, dusty day in N’Djamena that our plane was not allowed to take off. The airport lacked the instrument needed for this kind of weather, and it was not expected to be delivered for three months.

  So as not to waste the day, Carl and Karen took us to visit one of their many Chadian friends, Colonel Aran of the Presidential Guard. He graciously received us in a heavily carpeted large tent in his family compound, where his three wives served us glasses of delicious, scalding, sweet mint tea, while several of the younger of his “about 20” children snuggled in his lap and sneaked peeks at the foreigners as the colonel regaled us with his quintessential African story.

  Twenty years before, when Aran had been a wild young kid, he joined Idriss Déby’s 2,000-man Patriotic Salvation Army (MPS in French), helped him overthrow the government of Hissène Habré, and became a member of Déby’s inner circle. He later grew dissatisfie
d with Déby’s administration, defected from it, and joined the United Front for Democratic Change (whose unfortunate French acronym is FUC), an anti-Déby rebel movement operating from Sudan. After two years of rebelling, followed by some delicate negotiations, Aran rejoined Déby’s government as a highly placed colonel in his Presidential Guard and actively fought against his former FUC buddies during their attack in early February 2008 (when my plane could not land in N’Djamena). It is not possible to find a U.S. analogy. The closest might be if a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army or Weather Underground joined the president’s Cabinet, then defected to the Branch Davidians or the skinheads, then rejoined the government and was appointed deputy director of the Secret Service. But, again, TIA.

  The colonel and I managed some quality face time, aided by fluent translations from Carl and Karen, and we bonded as kindred spirits, after which he ardently advised me to “take a wife or two, so you have someone to massage your rheumatism in old age.”

  He then invited us, and two of his brothers, and two of his children, to travel—all in Carl’s 4 × 4—two hours east of the capital to watch the horse races scheduled for that afternoon in his brother’s village.

  It was a turn-of-the-century scene, a thousand Arab men—only men—lining the race route, dressed in spotless white cloaks, with white scarves pulled across their noses and mouths to keep out the desert dust and keep alive an ancient tradition. I saw some superb horsemanship during the four races, each about 800 yards along a large oval track of hard-packed dirt outside the village. One rider fell off his horse, one horse fell on his rider, one loser protested the result until the announced winner was disqualified, after which a few fists flew among those who felt wrongly deprived, and a good time was had by all.