Georgian detour

I've been dispatched to Georgia to help my colleague Tom Lasseter cover the ongoing conflict here, so my posts will be less regular than usual. I'm writing now from the sweltering Black Sea port city of Poti, which has a clean hotel that serves a hot breakfast nearly until 11 a.m., two reliable ATMs and a convenience store that's open until 10 p.m. and sells cold Beck's. There are a ton of mosquitoes, but generally there are worse places to be stationed for a few days.

Being an American in Georgia these days has been an interesting experience, not unlike being the long-lost relative at a big family funeral. Strangers have greeted me, when told I'm American, with pats on the back, warm handshakes and professions of gratitude. The friendship between the United States and Georgia is strong and sometimes surreal, symbolized by the sole picture I saw this morning in the offices of a regional governor -- one of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and President Bush shaking hands.

Never mind that, as my colleagues have reported, the U.S. military isn't coming to save this tiny nation. The admiration is mutual. For some Americans, especially those with strong memories of the Soviet empire, Georgia's warmth and openness seem intoxicating. In a piece in Slate, the writer Ilan Greenberg tries to explain why Americans go gaga for Georgia:

Georgia is something like the Italy of the former Soviet Union, where mothers are considered saints and histrionic displays of emotion are roundly approved, where traffic police refuse to write tickets to pregnant women and grown men worship fresh produce. Television viewers getting their first taste of Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili (Misha to everyone in Georgia), this week are not wrong to detect a surprising emotionalism, volatility, and American-style openness from a leader of a country sandwiched between Turkey and Russia.

After just a few days here, I can vouch for Georgians' warmth and the pleasant spice in their food. I haven't seen any men kiss each other, although there is something oddly comforting about a culture that's casual and confident enough to allow its men to cool themselves in the summer heat by rolling  their shirts up to expose their giant bellies (I noticed a similar trait among men in Beijing).

I'll post from here when time allows; otherwise, I'll be back to posting on Africa once I return home.

Nairobi's renewed museum

The Nairobi National Museum had been closed for repairs for three years, from virtually the moment I arrived in Kenya. It finally reopened last month after a $14 million renovation funded by the European Union. I took a walk through the new complex this morning and came away impressed.

Owing to Kenya's (and Africa's) role as a center of paleontological discovery, much of the museum is devoted to tracing the rise of mankind from its apelike ancestors. Several rooms feature important fossils found in Kenya, most notably Turkana Boy, one of the few complete early hominid skeletons in the world.

Just like in the natural history museums I visited as a kid in California, gaggles of children -- here wearing neat school uniforms -- pressed their noses up against the glass to gawk at the various human and animal skeletons on display. (Protests by Kenyan Christians who objected to the evolution exhibit appeared to have faded away, at least for now.)

There are also installations featuring Kenya's traditional cultures -- likely to be popular with tourists -- including a 20-foot sculpture composed of bits of gourds used by tribes throughout the country. Photographer Guillaume Bonn has a thoughtful exhibit of black-and-white pictures from across Kenya. One of the themes running through the clean, airy new compound is Kenya's diversity, something that curators say was planned long before the country's recent election violence.

I'd never seen the old building, but Kenyans seem to like the changes. An article in the Business Daily newspaper summed it up:

The museum is no longer the preserve of academics and foreign tourists with time on their hands. Previously attracting school parties — and many never returned— the museum is now more attractive.

But I'd go a bit further. Comparing museums in the rest of the region -- and the dungeonlike national museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, is the only one of any international repute -- Nairobi's has to jump to the top of the list for quality, design and accessibility. Kenyan officials have already begun to demand the return of thousands of artifacts on display elsewhere in the world -- from the British Museum to Chicago's Field Museum -- arguing that they finally have a world-class facility in which to house them.

In the meantime, there's already plenty of reason to visit the museum. The entrance fee (100 shillings for residents, or about $1.50) is reasonable. It's located on a pleasant hilltop just minutes from the bustling city center. And schoolchildren in Nairobi have a great new addition to their field trip lineup.

Admittedly I did see several glassy-eyed faces among the crowds of schoolchildren trooping through the halls this morning. (In the room featuring African rock art, a teacher lectured to her charges: "This is a fire extinguisher.") Even I rolled my eyes. But being bored on museum field trips is a time-honored elementary school tradition, and there's no reason Nairobi kids shouldn't get to experience that too.

Brand recognition in Addis

Every time I arrive in Addis Ababa, I pass the Denver Cafe, a coffee shop located in a strip mall on the road out of the airport. Incongruously for a country that cares little for American football, the sign features the logo of the Denver Broncos, which happens to be my favorite NFL team. But I'm always on the way to some hotel or appointment, so I've never actually set foot in the place.

As I drove past the cafe for the umpteenth time last weekend -- this time in a hurry to show my brother the National Museum before visiting hours ended, which ended up being for naught as the museum was closed due to power cuts -- I got to thinking that Addis must be the No. 1 city in Africa for, shall we say, appropriating Western brand names and logos on unaffiliated local businesses.

Addis has a Kinko's and a 7-11 -- though not the chains you're thinking of. I'm told there are also places called Burger Queen and Kentucky Chicken, though I haven't seen them. My favorite is the Mariot hotel, whose logo has shamelessly been designed to mimic that of the J.W. Marriott chain, complete with the scripty "M".

By far the most successful knockoff, however, has to be Kaldi's Coffee, a chain that keeps opening new locations throughout the city because of its strong product, locals tell me, and not because its logo and the interior of its stores resemble Starbucks'. I'm far from the only one who's noticed this. (Meskel Square posted some pictures back in 2005, and the New York Times did a story around the same time.)

Starbucks guards its brand zealously, and it wasn't too pleased when they heard about "Kaldi-bucks," although it didn't figure in last year's distribution and licensing agreement with Ethiopian coffee growers.

'Diary of a terrorist'

To mark today's 10th anniversary of the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper this week has been publishing what it claims are excerpts from the diary of the man that the FBI says planned those attacks and others: Fazul Abdullah Mohammed. The newspaper says the diary, written in Arabic, was found on a laptop carried by Fazul's wife in January 2007, when she was arrested on the Kenya-Somalia border.

He's reportedly evaded capture in Kenya several times -- and over the weekend Kenyan authorities said they again narrowly missed capturing him in the coastal town of Malindi, where he was staying with friends. Kenya has since arrested several people believed to be his associates.

U.S. officials (who have a $5 million bounty on his head) accuse Fazul of being many things: al Qaida's main man in East Africa, a master of disguise, a computer whiz, a habitual wearer of baseball caps. But his memoir, if we assume it to be authentic (and I have my doubts), also presents Fazul as a racist, a would-be physician, a bit of a mama's boy, a xenophobe, a writer of run-on sentences, and rather surprisingly weak-stomached for an alleged terrorist mastermind.

On America:
"Have you awakened from your slumber, O Muslims? Have you forgotten that only a few decades ago America called us mujahedeen? Why have they changed their opinions and characterized us as murderous terrorists? It is because we have not abandoned our principles."

On leaving his native Comoros to attend an Islamic school in Lahore, Pakistan:
"The atmosphere was a little cool...when I bade my brothers and sisters farewell and got into the car with my mother. Sadness showed on the face of my mother who didn't know what would happen to me on the way because the trip was long and it was not a direct flight to Lahore....My mother kept on urging me to be courageous, to be wary of thieves and not to mix with foreigners I did not know....I realized that I had become a man and was no longer a child....Ten days later, we had still not arrived in Karachi and I was well aware that my mother was very worried about me. She was always on my mind. I missed her. Who was going to do my laundry and cook for me? I had a thousand questions on my mind. But one must be strong in such situations."

On deciding to undergo jihadi training in Pakistan:
"I said to my mother: 'I have heard that some Comoro young men have graduated from military colleges in Pakistan.'
'Who told you this?' asked my mother....'All I want you to do is enroll in the university and to focus on any specialization that you deem appropriate. After you finish your studies, if you get an opportunity for military studies, there is no objection."...
To be utterly frank, I wished to be a physician. However, I knew that Allah does what he wishes.

On education:
"We must, of course, raise our children with the love of jihad. We have to raise a new generation with an education totally opposed to the Western education that is imposed on us. All young men dream of going to Europe, but Allah knows I hated Europe with all my heart."

On India:
"I didn't like India. Although I know it is the land of my ancestors, I have an instinctive hatred for cow worshipers. The airport was big, but it smelled bad because of the chemicals they use to clean the place, overcrowding and pollution....I had not seen a more deplorable plane....It was like a bus, and I have to go to the lavatory several times to throw up because of that bad smell."

Ethiopia's young Bollywood fans

America's pop-culture hegemony in Africa is pretty much unchallenged. Shania Twain sings on an endless loop at cafes in Addis Ababa, the ubiquitous matatus of Nairobi are plastered with pictures of 50 Cent and Ja Rule, and when I tell anyone I'm from California it's even money that a Schwarzenegger question follows.

But lately I'm seeing signs that Hollywood has serious competition from Bollywood, the prolific Indian film industry based in Bombay. With its angelic female leads, buff male action stars, elaborate musical numbers and fairytale storylines -- forbidden love, brothers separated at birth, scheming relatives, downtrodden servants with hearts of gold, etc. -- the films have a massive following beyond India. Banning Bollywood flicks was one of the earliest, and most unpopular, policies of the Islamic courts regime in Mogadishu.

My Indian heritage notwithstanding, I've never been much for the films -- I can generally find more productive uses for three to four consecutive hours of my life -- but I do like some of the songs. When I was at Lake Chad recently I let a young Chadian guy listen to my iPod. He scrolled right past the American stuff and began singing along -- loudly and perfectly off-key -- to a couple of Bollywood numbers. He then tried to start a debate about the filmography of Amitabh Bachchan -- Bollywood's Clint Eastwood -- for which I was woefully unprepared.

Last weekend I took my brother, who's on a brief visit from the U.S., to northern Ethiopia. We were a big hit in the tourist town of Lalibela, where the young kids, especially boys, kept yelling in our direction, "Namaste, bapuji!" Our guide, Habtamu, explained that they'd picked up the greeting from watching Bollywood flicks at movie houses for a couple of birr apiece (about 25 cents).

And everyone's got a favorite star. One of the kids asked my brother, "Do you know Shah Rukh Khan?" No one mentioned Schwarzenegger.

Beyond borders

News events tend to cross national boundaries in Africa, where lines between states are in the first place arbitrarily drawn and, what's more, very difficult to enforce. Over the past two months I've found myself spending a lot of time on borders.

First I was on the hot and sandy Chad-Sudan frontier, meeting Darfur rebels and chatting about, of all things, Barack Obama's campaign. Then I traveled with the U.N. down to the border between Chad and the vastly under-covered nation of Central African Republic, to report this week's story on ransom kidnappings. The beer billboard-cum-boundary line at right notwithstanding, Chad-CAR is one of the most porous borders in Africa, where people crossed back and forth freely despite the presence of Chadian soldiers a few meters away.

Geographically the landscapes were polar opposites -- a scorching sandscape near Darfur, a lush forest at the edge of CAR -- but the unifying feature was that the same tribes and families live on both sides of the frontiers. The mere existence of a border has done nothing to keep one conflict from spilling into the other -- or, as is the case with Chad-Sudan, making matters measurably worse.

It was a different story in Zimbabwe, where the existence of South Africa just to the south is perhaps the No. 1 thing keeping Robert Mugabe's country afloat. I saw Zimbabweans load up trucks and trailers with every staple good they could get their hands on in the South African border town of Musina. And yet South Africa has avoided being too hospitable. I saw a teenage girl in a tatty school uniform get stuck in a barbed-wire fence as she tried to sneak into Musina. At night I went to a bus station where Zimbabwean migrants were huddled in the cold dark, waiting for a lift to Johannesburg.

Scared, desperate, and suspicious of my accent and questions, no one looked me in the face. Musina had the gritty, over-policed feel of border towns in the American south, and I was happy to get out of there.

Last weekend, taking a short break to visit a friend who lives in the Palestinian territories (yes, this is what I seem to do on vacation), I found myself on another fascinating boundary line -- that between Israel and Syria. The disputed Golan Heights area, seized by Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, is some of the most stunning land in the Middle East. We swam in the Sea of Galilee, sipped locally grown wine at a mountaintop Israeli restaurant with a clear view of Syria and drove through villages that were distinctly Syrian despite the Israeli flags and signs printed in Hebrew. (One of the best meals I had in Israel was was a traditional Syrian flatbread sandwich, made with olive oil and mild yogurt, in a roadside restaurant in one of these villages.)

As my colleague Dion Nissenbaum has reported, Syria has made the return of the Golan its main demand in ongoing peace talks with Israel. For now the UN is monitoring a nervous DMZ between the two countries, and on our long, sweeping drive south from the Golan to Jerusalem we saw reminders of past conflicts: rusted, abandoned Syrian tanks, bombed-out homes and simple roadside memorials to fallen Israeli soldiers. At one spot, inexplicably, a charred hulk of a vehicle was hanging from a metal post, like a head on a stake.

There were also more Israeli military Hummers plying that otherwise quiet road than we could count. Borders in Africa rarely get that much action. Even between Chad and Sudan, two nations that have spent the past couple of years trying to help topple the other's government, you tend to see more camels than soldiers.

Yet for journalists trying to understand conflicts and failing states, borders are endlessly fascinating places to visit. And the other little secret is -- as every correspondent knows -- for a quick dash of intrigue at the top of your story, few datelines can match "AT THE (FILL-IN-THE-BLANK) BORDER."