Being that I am neither metrosexual nor gay, I read Men's Journal about as often as I get my nails done; ie never. But, apparently in an attempt to get "edgy", in this month's issue, there between Ask Dr. Bob and an article on T. Boone Pickens on Page 60 is an Emile Hirsch's account of traveling to Congo on the protected wings of Oxfam.       Obviously, this is another case of "Celebrity Goes To Africa to Raise Awareness and/or Save African Babies". I don't like these cases. They're a flash in the pan and then they're gone. People forget about what whomever it was, was talking about when they did that thing that was... you know, somewhere over there.       But to just blindly say that Hirsch is an ass would be arrogant and childish. In his account, he is very honest about what he saw, what he knew going in, and what he got coming out. He was only there for five days, but he saw a lot. Of course, given such a short amount of time and such vast ground that he was covering around the Kivus, one could say that it was all pointless. But, what good does that do? Sure, it doesn't really help anyone and I don't really support celebrities doing this, but on some level he is trying do something, although like Ben Afflecks out there, the energy is largely misdirected. For better or worse, I can say that I've read the whole article and here are a few of the things that stuck out.

And I'm reading these pages and thinking about the $600 in 20s and 50s I was told to carry for "security reasons"...

      Someone really told him wrong on this front. First of all, it's a cash economy and one that runs on external cash (dollars or euros) at that. Your day to day needs are going to have to be met solely with the cash that you bring in. $600 would probably be more than enough to cover his five days there given that his stay was taken care of by Oxfam. But the "security reasons" part was laughable. First, there was no way anything was going to happen to Hirsch and secondly, if it did, $600 was going to do little to make things better.

As we wait on the runway, Lyndsay points to a demolished plane nearby. Two months ago it crashed as it tried to take off, catching fire and killing 21 people. Gulp.

      Why "gulp"? That was a pathetic sub-contractor airline of the slightly less, yet still completely, abysmal Hewa Bora airline. Again, there was no way Oxfam was going to toss Hirsch on anything close to resembling a Hewa Bora flight. Also, that flight crashed in the market nearby (which was the reason for all the ground casualties.) Maybe that was another plane they were referring to as it would seem it wouldn't be where the girl thought it was?

I can't believe it, but he's wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt.

      Apparently no one filled him on on the whole t-shirt thing in Africa. Might have been a nice thing for him to know as he could have brought extra clothes to give someone to sell at the local market.

For a boy such as Prince, the support from NGO's represent a chance to take his destiny into his own hands. And for a rape victim such as Kimanizani, donations to Oxfam go toward her medical costs and food and give her a chance to rejoin the world.

      I was sorta okay with Hirsch's whole account up to this point. This chunk makes me cringe as it feels like it was written by the marketing people at Oxfam. It cheapens the whole account by him as it makes it suddenly one big sales pitch for throwing more money in to the NGO's that in all truth really aren't making much progress. They're just bandaid solutions to the much bigger issue that the government of Congo and all those in MONUC actually need to actively work for change, which they aren't. Throwing money at Oxfam is not the answer, although I'm sure that readers of this article will see it that way.       The real solution is to educate yourself and not listen to some actor who is being used as a pawn. If you actually know what is going on in Africa (and know much more than Hirsch, whose soundbite history lesson left out France's involvement in the start of the Rwandan Genocide as well as other crucial facts) you are going to understand a lot better what needs to be done. Informed people can actually do something. Otherwise you're just a very obedient sheep foolishly giving your wool to an all too eager recipient who just waits for your next wool to grow in.

c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci c'est mon premier article sur ce blog - Merci

As I was traveling a bit last weekend, taking the metro, train, and a bus connection in California, I watched a number of kids riding along with me and using their mobiles in a way that I usually don't in that they were texting heavily. Instead of blathering on the phone like so many people I know usually do (including myself at times), they just kept pinging text messages back and forth during their whole ride. Now, these kids had some of the latest mobiles with touchscreens and ridiculous ringtones that would play a full song when they had an incoming message, but what I was amazed at was how able they were with texting. One was using T9 and the other was using multi-tap to put in their messages. Both were just as fast as each other and were able to do this with one hand, whereas I need both my thumbs in there for any amount of speed.       But what really got me was that despite all the fancy junk that keeps getting slapped on to mobiles, it keeps coming back to the basics that I've seen in Africa in that everyone really wants a two-way text pager. In Western countries, we keep buying new mobiles that are basically worthless gadgets. I know there have been cries by a lot of folks to offer a mobile that is a simple B&W screen, rugged, and has endless battery life. While I think we all regret tossing out older mobiles (I miss my S40), people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are a lot smarter, hanging on to, fixing and continuing to use these older mobiles. Sure, there is the issue that it's done out of a cost issue, but really, when it comes down to it, a Nokia 1200 or a Nokia 3410 have to be some of the best phones suited for these areas, especially Central Africa.       It's not just the Africans using these types of phones I might add. People working for the UN and other NGO's fall back on them as well. They stand up to the environment, perform well, and hang on to battery life for a long time in an area where power can be scarce. Good luck keeping an iPhone running anywhere except in a capital like Kinshasa, Kampala, or Kigali. Of course, this isn't lost on foreign-based companies like CCT (Congo China Telecom) who offer a very simple phone for $20 USD that meets all the criteria of these older mobiles that keep circulation the region. What I regret even more than selling my S40 was not picking up one of these phones. While they are locked in to CCT, they're a very interesting example of the innovation that takes place in Sub-Saharan Africa due to environmental needs rather than by consumerist want. The big GSM Association conferences may take place in Barcelona, but the place where the most useful implementation of mobile technology is happening, is in Sub-Saharan Africa. I'll bet that whatever Web 3.0 application start popping up in the next couple of years will be based on something that happened in there first.

First off, any photographer, writer, musician, artist, or pizza delivery guy that goes by one name like Rankin does, is bound to be an ass and a bit out of touch with the "real" world. By "real" world, I mean the one in which people like you and I watch things called, "Real World" because our lives are so inordinately mundane. Now, these one named people love to do things to show that they do in fact "get it" and obviously Rankin has done such an event or I wouldn't be bothering to write about him.       Twiddling his thumbs in what I'm sure is a sunny, West End breakfast nook one day, Rankin apparently got the idea to go to DR Congo and photograph people living in Mugunga refugee camp. You can take a look at the photos. They're good photos as would be expected from a high end fashion photographer. The thought behind them was to shoot the subjects in a high fashion manner so that people could better relate to them. This is of course where the controversy started because this is asinine. They're human beings. We can relate to them no matter what. But such is the generally inept approach toward Africa. If you feel like reading more commentary, then take a look at: Uganda Scarlett Lion, Wronging Rights, and to a lesser extent Chis Blattman. These are all excellent blogs by the way, which are worth reading on a regular basis unless of course you don't like sarcasm, in which case, what the hell are you doing reading my blog?       In my mind, a better approach would have been for Rankin to "arm" locals in the area with cameras and help them to shoot what they see from their vantage. While the photos wouldn't be artistic at first, they would be honest. Rankin's work is not honest. It's a fabrication and when something is fabricated through a camera, I can't stand it. It's one of the few mediums we have that allows us a window on to another time or place that we don't immediately have access to. This is the point of it; all else is secondary. If we're to "understand the plight" of the people living in the Kivus, then we really need to actually see people living in region and know who they are. As it is, this seems like an anthropological documentation of a foreign species. It fails on all levels except getting Rankin press and making him feel like he did some good by being there for two weeks.

Previous Afrilinks: here.       1. Rwanda just converted in to the first country in the world to have more women than men in their parliament. In the parliamentary elections they had this past Sunday, 44 seats were won by women, this represents 55% of the total. In the exiting parliament, 48.8% of the seats were in women's hands which constituted the highest percentage globally, followed by Sweden with 47%, proving that not everything is bad in Africa.       2. According to this article from Reuters, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country with the potential to feed the world but a misuse of arable land and lack of investment to maintain it leaves many of its own people hungry. And it is a country that has more of less 800 million hectares of cultivable land, the seventh largest amount in the world. What more, the Congo River and its enormous network of tributaries abundant water for irrigation. Their various climates, from tropical rain forests to Savannah, offer ideal conditions for distinct types of cultivations.       3. And speaking of agriculture, a few days ago the newspaper, Público published an interesting interview with Jacques Diouf, the director of FAO (UN Organization for Agriculture and Food) in that he spoke about the actual crisis of food. Very lucid.       4. The television channel TV3 of Catalonia has an outreach program for cultural and gastronomy called Karaki that travels the world through the culinary customs of others' countries. The truth is that I did not know the program, but the indefatigable Aurora recently sent me the episode last year devoted to Central Africa (Tanzania, Rwanda and the two Congos), pipa and I spent time watching the recipes of dishes such as fufu. The video of the program in question can be seen here, and although the recipes are in Catalan, they are very visual and I think it is good to learn recipes that are completely different from ours.       5. And speaking of African food, a few days ago the author of the blog Congogirl posted a photo of a dinner attended by some friends at a Congolese home in Kinshasa, where one can see several typical dishes.       6. And to close, some pictures of the book Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa from the photographer Hans Silvester which are dedicated to the personal ornamentation of the tribes of the Surma and Mursi, in the border area between Ethiopia Kenya, and Sudan. Similar to what is seen in the photo below, in this article you will find a few more. Simply amazing.