Happy holidays

This blog is taking a short break, and will return at the start of the new year.

Thanks to everyone for reading this year. Enjoy the holidays and see you in a few days.

Corruption is evil

For a while now, the Nairobi City Council has outfitted all its parking attendants with bright yellow vests, making them the most visible public employees in the city. In a fit of ambition, naivete or both, the council decided to stamp each vest with the slogan "Corruption is Evil" across the back.

You see this message in government buildings throughout the city, a signal that the government is serious about stamping out "kitu kidogo," the little bribes that people here dole out to their civil servants like nickels to the Salvation Army.

So I had to laugh the other day when I parked my car in front of my bank in a busy shopping district and went to pay an attendant. I handed her the exact change -- 70 shillings, a little more than $1 -- and she asked me how long I'd be parked there.

"Two minutes," I said.

"Then you just leave your car," she smiled, "and when you come back buy me a soda."

I must have seemed like a real square, but I said I'd prefer to pay the right amount and could she please write me the ticket like everyone else.

She shook her pen at me. "Not working," she said.

Well, we tried, didn't we? So I parked my car at a discount, a poorly paid woman bought herself a Coke on a warm day, and Kenya's war on corruption suffered another in an endless series of setbacks.

It takes a village

I'm still recovering from a three-day road trip through the Rift Valley region of Kenya last week. We kicked up enough dust in my hardy LandCruiser to fill all the sand traps at Pebble Beach a few times over.

The Rift region is one of the few in Kenya where polls show the Dec. 27 presidential election to be a toss-up. It's a beautiful landscape of undulating hills and family farms. But as anyone who's traveled in Kenya knows, rural roads can be treacherous. Massive trucks, un-roadworthy buses and passenger cars in various states of disrepair compete for space on cratered strips of asphalt that often dissolve completely into dust and mud. Reading to pass the time is impossible, and the noises of the road are often too loud to listen to an iPod or even hold a conversation.

On the second day, as we went off road up into the hills west of Nakuru in search of Kenyans displaced by recent ethnic clashes, we got completely stuck in mud. This is obligatory on a true Kenyan road trip, even in a 4x4. We were in between two small villages, deep in the hills, and rain was falling steadily. Yet within minutes, a handful of local guys had wandered onto the scene. It was decided that the back axle would have to be dug out of the bog, and soon a hoe appeared, then a pickax.

This is an unwritten law of African road travel: when you get stuck, people will appear to help out, and they will almost always have the proper tools. If you are a foreigner, of course, you will not be allowed to wield the tools.

The foreigner's job in this situation, which I performed more than adequately on this day, consists of the following:

- standing around
- occasionally bending down to inspect the situation
- expressing concern about the time
- becoming very interested in your cell phone, sending unsolicited texts to friends far away
- thanking the guys for unsticking your car
- really thanking them if it takes less than an hour
- paying them for their trouble

Eventually we were unstuck and on our way. There were few other mishaps on our trip, so we were able to spend a lot of time enjoy the amazing landscape of the Rift Valley. This is one of the major tea-growing regions in Kenya, and all around the town of Kericho, where we spent the final day, are impossibly neat rows of bushes. Occasionally you saw a woman with a huge sack on her back, doing the arduous work of picking tea leaves.

The rolling green hills and regularly rainy skies made me think I was somewhere in Scotland, not Africa. It's an unquestionably beautiful part of the country, and barely more than 100 miles west of Nairobi, but relatively few outsiders get there. Especially in the villages, our car, carrying myself and American photographer Evelyn Hockstein, was a spectacle, causing most kids to wave and shout at us endlessly, "Mzungu! Mzungu!" (Literally, "White person! White person!")

But you can't complain when you get to take a few days away from the urban jungle of Nairobi and see vast expanses of this:

Move over, Monster.com

We spotted this establishment today driving through Nakuru, Kenya. Just how much job-hunting do you think goes on here?

Still, points for cleverness. I would have gone in for a Tusker but it was 11 a.m.

Five hours in Somalia

We finally got the all-clear to go to the displacement camps outside Mogadishu, Somalia, on Saturday. At 5:30 in the morning I was at the check-in counter for UN flights, where I met Matthieu, a French field officer for UNICEF. He's normally based in the southern town of Jowhar, but fighting has gotten worse there in the past few weeks. The mayor of Mogadishu, Mohammed Dheere, used to run Jowhar, a few dozen miles away, and his men are still trying to keep control of the place.

Basically, Jowhar isn't safe for international aid workers anymore, so Matthieu was trying to hop on our flight to K50 (so named because it's 50 km from Mogadishu) and "transit" onto a UN flight west to Wajid, a backup base of operations when things get nasty elsewhere in Somalia. I liked the idea of using K50, which is basically a dirt track in the middle of nowhere, as an air hub.

Alas, it was not to be. When he and I got to the gate for our flight, John, the security officer in charge of our trip, told him that he'd canceled all other flights for security reasons. Ours was the only UN plane over Somalia that day. Matthieu would have at least one more day in Nairobi. This was a nuisance for a guy who'd woken up at 4 that morning and was itching to leave the air-conditioned life of Nairobi and get back into the field.

I was with a two-person film crew, two UNICEF staff and John. Our plane was a twin-prop Beechcraft that didn't exactly move like the wind. The 600-mile distance between Nairobi and K50 required 2 1/2 hours. When we landed there was a broken-down sign to greet us and waiting convoy of armored white Toyota SUVs, with flakjackets and helmets for everyone.

I hate wearing the Kevlar because (a) the stuff weighs a ton, (b) it was bound to be 90 degrees or more the closer we got to Mogadishu and (c) you feel especially silly wearing an anti-ballistic vest when you're talking to people who only have the clothes on their back. But you have to do it, if only for insurance purposes, so we all sweated it out. The helmet, however, I refused to wear.

It was 10 a.m. when we landed. We had to be back in the air before 3 p.m. so that the local staff helping to coordinate our visit could make it back to Mogadishu before nightfall. Not ideal working conditions, but in Somalia these days you have to take what you can get. The road from K50 into the city is basically an dirt-and-asphalt obstacle course cratered with potholes the size of bathtubs, so it took an hour to get from the airstrip to the main displacement camps, a distance of about 15 miles.

Our convoy was escorted by two teams of "blue shirts" -- armed Somali guards wearing, naturally, light blue shirts. Somalia has no shortage of armed men, and it struck me as ironic, or at least a sign of the times, that the UN had to hire their own. "So they're like a UN militia," I joked to our driver. "No," he said. He wasn't smiling. I sat back in my seat.

We passed several jam-packed minibuses, nomads and their camels resting along the side of the road, surprisingly green fields, even one or two fairly intact-looking towns. The closer we got to Mogadishu, however, the sandier and more desolate it looked.

Closer to the market town of Afgoye, epicenter of the refugee crisis, the camps started to appear. From the road you could see a few huts, then a few more, and finally huge collections of them, like giant campsites.

We stopped the cars outside one of them. A swarm of people surrounded us. For the next three hours I met people who had escaped the war in Mogadishu with barely anything but their lives. Many had lost relatives and neighbors. Some said they'd been beaten by government forces. Young children were sick and sickly. One 13-year-old girl had suddenly gone mute on the night when mortars rained down on the house next door.

It was rough going. A local aid worker who had agreed to accompany me through the camp and serve as a translator had lost members of his own family in the violence earlier this year. A few times, hearing another victim's story, M. himself began to break down. A woman would give a long monologue about the war in her neighborhood and M. would sit silently for a few seconds. "What did she say?" I asked him once. "Oh, nothing," he said, and proceeded to tell me how his nephew ended up in the hospital a few months ago with a shrapnel wound.

The aid workers in Somalia, even those attached to the UN like M., risk their lives. Local relief workers are routinely harassed by Mogadishu's array of government forces and freelance militias. Some have been arrested, and a few have wound up dead. Somalia's president, Abdullahi Yusuf, increasingly seems to resent the UN presence in his country. Several times, M. asked me not to reveal his name. Even translating for a journalist can be dangerous work.

We were supposed to visit five camps, but time was short so we only made it to two. Everywhere we went, a huge group of children seemed to surround me. Here is where the "blue shirts" swung into action. When I was trying to get someone alone for an interview and kids got in the way, the blue shirts would rip switches off of trees and began to smack the children with them, like little whips. While I don't condone that sort of treatment of children, it was a very effective means of crowd control.

One blue shirt saw the bracelets on my wrist and came up to me excitedly. "Your sister," he said. I was confused. He pointed at my wrist and I understood. I was wearing a couple of rakhis, ceremonial strands that sisters or female cousins, in the Hindu tradition, tie on their brothers once a year. (Yat calls it "a thin, cotton bracelet meant to have the lifespan of the avg carnival goldfish," although mine have lasted since August.) The blue shirt knew what they were from -- what else? -- Bollywood movies.

God and the warlords

The State Department's advice notwithstanding, I booked myself on a trip to Somalia a couple of days ago. Many people are tired of hearing about Somalia, but the humanitarian crisis there has actually gotten much, much worse over the past couple of weeks. I was invited by a relief agency to visit a project site outside Mogadishu -- fly in early in the morning, leave before sundown the same day.

In Somalia, of course, nothing is that simple, something of which I was reminded throughout the day before the trip:

9:00 a.m. -- I arrive for a security briefing at the United Nations, standard procedure if you want to travel on a U.N. flight. It's me and about eight other foreigners. I quickly judge that among them only I have been to Somalia before.

9:15 a.m. -- Briefing begins. We are handed a booklet entitled "Security in Somalia" that covers everything from tribal groupings to instructions for air and sea evacuations. We are also handed a Hostage Incident Card (Point 1: "Your only job is to survive") and a leaflet on stress management.

11:30 a.m. -- Briefing ends. The security adviser has been nothing if not thorough. The back of my notebook is covered with a kudzu-like diagram of Somalia's clan distributions -- 31% Darod, 27% Dir, 25% Hawiye, etc. -- that reminds me yet again why, try as I might, I will never understand that country as well as I want to.

11:45 p.m. -- I arrive at the U.N. air operations office to pay for my ticket. Slight problem: they don't know how much the ticket costs. The U.N. flies regularly into Somalia to deliver emergency food and supplies, but I am on a small charter flight and there is a special charge. I am told to wait while someone tracks this information down.

12:15 p.m. -- Still waiting.

12:30 p.m. -- Still waiting.

12:45 p.m. -- In desperation I offer to leave several hundred dollars and return later. The man chuckles.

1:00 p.m. -- Success. I make the payment and get a receipt, which will get me on the flight. There is no need for a ticket. The risk of someone sneaking on board is minimal.

2:00 p.m. -- I speak with the lovely woman who is organizing the trip. She reminds me that the flight is leaving at 5 a.m.

2:40 p.m. -- I receive an email from her. Departure is changed to 7 a.m. Less time on the ground, but now I don't have to wake up at 3. I judge it a wash.

5:30 p.m. -- I start to throw a few things into a backpack. How does one pack for a 12-hour trip to Somalia? Hat, granola bars, water and a notebook go in first. Then I wise up and add a change of clothes. Things can change quickly.

6:45 p.m. -- I get a call from a number inside Somalia. It's a colleague who's gone in on another U.N. mission. "Have you heard anything about your trip being canceled?" he asks. Then his line goes dead.

6:46 p.m. -- I call the lovely woman. "Have you heard anything about our trip being canceled?" I ask. She says everything is on schedule.

6:55 p.m. -- After a few tries I get back in touch with my friend in Somalia, who says that the Somali government has ordered all humanitarian flights to use the Mogadishu airport. I guess they don't like people thinking Mogadishu isn't safe, but the pilots of the U.N. planes have a pesky fear of being shot down by missiles. They refuse to fly into Mog. Our trip, to an airstrip outside the city known as K-50, appears to be in jeopardy.

7:10 p.m. -- I sit down for a pre-arranged interview with the head of the U.N. relief effort. I ask him about my trip. The Somali government periodically issues decrees like this, but he isn't worried. "I think you'll get to go," he says. Straight from the source. I feel better.

7:12, 7:14, 7:17 p.m. -- The man's phone keeps beeping. Politely, he doesn't answer, but I have there feeling that there's information on the other end that I eventually will want to hear.

7:35 p.m. -- We finish the interview. He wishes me a safe trip. As we walk toward the door, he picks up his phone.

7:35:30 p.m. -- "You're not going tomorrow," he says to me. Apparently the Somalis are serious this time. I contemplate going home and pouring a stiff drink.

7:37 p.m. -- The lovely woman calls. "You're not going tomorrow," she says. But not to worry, they will try to reschedule.

8:20 p.m. -- I send my editor a note. Later he calls. "You have an interesting life," he says. I can't disagree.

The next day, just after noon, a note comes from the woman: the trip is rescheduled, but in the subject line of the e-mail is the all-important "Insha-allah." If God wills it. In Somalia's case, of course, it's more like God and the warlords.

The US Weekly relief effort

Activists and relief workers often talk about raising awareness of the situation in Darfur. If you count the number of green Save Darfur bracelets you see around you -- presidential candidates seem to be required to have them on hand -- people certainly seem aware of Darfur. But all the campaigning hasn't helped educate people about the complexities of the conflict, how much it's changed over the past 4 1/2 years and -- most importantly -- what to do about it.

Now the satirists at The Onion ask whether we've got the thing all wrong. After all, George Clooney, Mia Farrow and Matt Damon care about Darfur, they say. The Onion's fake news panelists now ask: How Can We Raise Awareness In Darfur Of How Much We're Doing For Them?

There are a lot of good suggestions in here, especially the one about holding a gala, star-studded banquet for activists, so that Darfurians can see just how much other people care about them (while not actually feeding them).

My favorite line: "They don't know the significance of the fact that Matt Damon is worried about them. We've gotta educate them on who these celebrities are, and how hard they're working on their behalf!"

Teddygate

This morning came word that Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher at the center of the media-fueled holy war in Sudan over a teddy bear named Muhammad, has been pardoned by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

As much of the world knows by now, Gibbons, 54, was jailed by a court in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, over an incident where she had her class of 6- and 7-year-olds -- at one of Khartoum's most exclusive private schools -- vote on a name for their class mascot, a stuffed teddy bear.

To recap for Americans who've been preoccupied with holiday shopping and the BCS, Gibbons's kids came up with Muhammad, one of the most common names in Islam, but also, of course, the name of the Muslim Prophet. Several parents complained that the name was offensive to Islam. Gibbons was arrested, tried and convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to 15 days in prison. (She was spared 40 lashes, another possible punishment under Khartoum's sharia-influenced criminal code.)

Today, two Muslim lawmakers from the UK managed to secure Gibbons's release after meeting with President Bashir. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was "delighted and relieved." Gibbons was scheduled to be flown back to Britain today, deported but free.

So now that the dust has settled, what are we to make of Teddygate? A tempest in a teapot? Another example of the West's ignorance of Islam? Sudan cleverly appeasing domestic hardliners?

It's hard to say. While British colleagues such as South of West were running around like crazy covering the story for a voracious UK audience, the entire episode barely seemed to merit a blip for American reporters. But having only watched this from the sidelines, I was struck by one thing: the government in Khartoum has proved again that it's one of the more more media-savvy in Africa.

Clearly there was an outcry over the incident from some quarters in Khartoum -- the Arab capital of a country that straddles North and Sub-Saharan Africa and has a lot of battle scars to show for it. But some correspondents pointed out that the mass protests that greeted Gibbons's court appearances -- including calls for her execution -- appeared to have been staged (see end). Members of an angry mob drew their fingers across their throats when Western reporters approached. But a lot of banners appeared to have been professionally printed. So it's hard to know whether the firestorm truly reflected public opinion in Khartoum.

More likely, there was some manipulation involved. This whole debacle happened to coincide with a growing outcry from the U.N. and African Union that Khartoum is blocking the swift deployment of a new peacekeeping force for Darfur. If there's anything that the Arab-led ruling party hates more than the arrogant West, it's being lectured to by the arrogant West.

It was only a month ago, after all, that I saw a top Sudanese diplomat get all in a lather after Prime Minister Brown threatened new sanctions of Khartoum during the launch of new Darfur peace negotiations in Libya. Poor Ms. Gibbons was a convenient pawn. By slamming her with the force of Islamic law, then ever so graciously agreeing to pardon her, you could almost hear Bashir snickering to Brown -- Who's got the moral high ground now?