KEITH SCHAEFER S TRIP TO AFRICA

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1 KEITH SCHAEFER S TRIP TO AFRICA The only words left to explain the hurt in the Canadian oil patch are ones like utter destruction and where is the bottom, or is there one? While we had expected a sell off in tax-loss selling, but the other tidbits like production halts and the like, not so much. Still do wonder where the price of oil will be in six months as the Saudis cut a million barrels a day, the Russians 200 thousand, Venezuela continues to fall apart rapidly, now Libya is hit in a big way...and then how about those Albertans!!! Might yet get hopeful, but enough of this trying to be wishful, as we publish a piece by Keith Schaefer, as he and his wife Rose did a trip through Africa... (he s) had enough of trying to predict oil for a while as well. His piece is definitely a relaxing read on the state of some of the continent. It s more fun than reading yet another analysts all wrong oil report. He took all those pictures himself it s amazing how close you get to the animals. He should be doing this for National Geographic Don t you think? dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 1

2 African Trip Blog--Oct 2018 Amsterdam--Kigali--Virunga--Amboseli--Lewa--Masai Mara-- Nairobi--Zanzibar/Pemba We flew out October 9 to Amsterdam, and stayed there for 3 days to get over the 9 hour time lag before flying down to Africa. We were blessed with sunny warm weather, but not a great sense of directions. After gathering our bags at Schipol airport, we found our way down to the trains to take us into the city.but we went to the wrong city. What should have been a 9 minute train downtown ended up being a 35 minute train south to The Hague. Woops. We chose to make the best of it and spent the afternoon there, getting a couple UBERs and going out to the beach and back, and around the main downtown area. Before heading back we had a beer and sandwich in a civic square in the fading 4 pm sunlight--and it was still 20 degrees! dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 2

3 We walked around Amsterdam, looking into the windows of all the pot shops. Even though our hotel was in the Red Light District, we didn t go down any alleys to check it out. We are so boring. The 8 hour flight to Kigali, Rwanda, was from 10 am - 7 pm, so we flew over the Sahara Desert in mid-late afternoon. It s like 3 hours of nothing-ness, interrupted by the odd bit of water and irrigation, as you can see in these pictures. This would be towards the southern end of the Sahara. RWANDA It was an amazing first day in Rwanda. We were done with jet lag; 3 days in Amsterdam had us sleeping on local time. Here in Kigali we were up with the light at 6 am. We changed some money for local Rwanda francs (Rwanda was French but now teaches their students English), and then our driver Sam started us on 2.5 hour circle of Rwanda s capital, Kigali. This 1.5 million person city is called The City of A Thousand Hills, but I think they missed some. If you re a cyclist, you better be one fit person. And this city sprawls forever. It was Sunday, and as we left the hotel around 930 am, the streets around the hotel--but all over town really--were full of colourful clothes as people were either going to church (Rwanda is mostly Christian) or visiting shut-ins in nursing home-style residences (mostly the Muslims, says Sam our driver). We stopped in at a women s co-operative as Rosemary wanted a colourful Rwandan dress, but it was mostly baby-wear. I got bored real fast (and it was dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 3

4 a very tight shop) so I went wandering down a couple of side streets. I went down two blocks one way then turned left & down one block. All of commercial Kigali is paved, and most of the offshoot residential streets have stones or bricks--this street had them laid in concentric circles that went right across the 15 ft wide street. Then after the second block they were just regular rectangles. But it was artistry. click and I offer some money as well. I c a m e u p o n Mahuda and Majuma, two fifty-something ladies, doing some embroidery work on a ledge on the side of a building. I went over to them and asked if they would teach me how to sew. They only spoke the local dialect, which was some kind of Bantu or Swahili. We had to wait for a young girl to come by to help out with the translation. (Most of the younger generation speak English, or French, or both). The word for white person is muzungu. I had asked Sam for the word crazy in the local language; it s pronounced mesozo. Whenever I go up to a local looking for a picture I say - hey, Muzungu mesozo want click These two ladies were happy to sit me down between them, give me the needle and show me where to put it through the cloth and then back up again. Through the young girl, they asked me where I was from, and laughed at my clumsy fingers. dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 4

5 After just a couple minutes I got up and said mwarakozay chani, which is thank you very much. (Learning hello, please and thank you in the local language goes so far everywhere in the world.) Their faces lit up and they laughed and waved goodbye. Then a young man in his early 20s came over and introduced himself as Allen, speaking French, and I responded in my limited French and we had the regularone minute chat what your name, where you from, what your job.and as soon as I left him, there was Sam looking at me. I had been gone a bit too long. We continued on around the city. I loved Kigali. It s SO clean. Plastic bags are outlawed. Everyone comes out on the 4 th Saturday to clean--in the entire country--and cleans up around their area. This is what happens when you have a small, homogeneous population and a slightly repressive government. (President Paul Kagame has been in power non-stop since the 1994 genocide-- he was leader of the winning side.) If you haven t been to other major African or Asian cities, you can t really understand how clean it is. Freakishly clean. The backbone of the city is the motorbike taxis the little red vests with black helmets are everywhere. We drove around a couple of the poorer areas; Sam called them slums but they still had adobe walls; just tin roofs. In South Africa we saw much, much worse--everything was tin held up by sticks no bigger than 2-3 inches round, and nowhere near as clean. I had a hard time thinking of them as slums. He said many of the homes didn t have running water, but each community organizes their own waste process and dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 5

6 everybody follows the local rules. Well, that s what he said. And it looked clean. Kigali is attracting investment. Western hotel chains are starting to be there, as are at least a couple of the major African ones. Judging by the retaining walls, the pavement, the waterways beside all the roads a lot of the money they generate from tourism seems to be getting well spent in local infrastructure. I doubt Rwanda has much access to international debt/bond markets yet so it s likely not borrowed money that paid for that, but I m not sure. Sam says he pays US$200/month rent in Kigali, and US$150 for food, and gasoline is US$4/gallon roughly I can t remember all his numbers but we figured out he got by on US$800 a month. He pays US$1000 every 3 months for one of his kids in university in neighboring Uganda. Rwandan children used to be taught in French and English was a subject they took, but now it has reversed--they are taught in English and French is a course. (Having said that, the Rwandan foreign minister was just elected head of La Francophonie, the French equivalent of The Commonwealth.) dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 6

7 We stopped in at a local market just to walk around and see some local culture. We told Sam we would not be buying anything, so he took my cell phone and took all the pictures (so I didn t have to pay $1 for each picture). There were several cell phone repair stalls all in a row, and several butchers in stalls no wider than 6 feet with lots of meat hanging from their ceilings. Inside was a massive vegetable market. Sam said many people in Kigali don t have refrigerators because a) they re expensive b) so is electricity and c) everything you could ever need you just go buy it that day. And down in the valleys of the city--in the rare bit of flat land--there was often community gardens, worked with no-till methods. There was also a big cloth market, and some of the stalls had s e w i n g m a c h i n e s where they would make you a garment right there on the spot. There were a couple other white people in the market; other guides had brought their clients here. But it was still a bit intimidating walking through that place as a white person. My travels really haven t made me a visible minority very often. And there were almost NO white people around Kigali. We saw one family and one group of young women in three hours; white people stick out like a sore thumb. At every stoplight, even driving by other cars--people look over, see us and can t look away. dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 7

8 When we went for lunch at Hôtel des Mille Collines--the hotel that was the basis for the movie Hotel Rwanda I realized where all the white people were. All 15 of them were having lunch on the back patio, listening to a black jazz band play. Lunch was delicious. We then headed out for the 3 hour drive up to Sabyinyo Lodge, on the edge of the Volcanos National Park where the mountain gorillas live. This was one of the most beautiful drives of my life. It started off with a bit of fun--two young cyclists had grabbed on to the back of the transport right in front of us as we started up the hill out of Kigali proper. I took a couple pictures of them and gave them the thumbs up sign, and maybe that s why Sam didn t honk up to the driver to let him know he had a couple stowaways. Despite driving very slowly up the big hill, this could have been a disaster at any moment. In fact, we were so focused on them we didn t realize we had our own stowaways that had hitched on to OUR truck. We only figure it out about ¾ the way up when another passing car honked at us and pointed back to our rear bumper. Sam just stopped the car and the cyclist let go. Kigali is just over 5000 feet in elevation, and we drove up another 3200 feet up to Sabyinyo Lodge over that 3.5 hour drive. But along the way we had amazing, expansive views across these lush green valleys, and the other side of these valleys were very organized, terraced agriculture. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in Africa, with 11.5 million people in 26,000 square kilometers, or for Americans, the state of Maryland. Those people have to feed themselves. And this country is not afraid of hard work all through the countryside you see people on the road walking to or from work. All the country roads are dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 8

9 FULL of people, all day long. We walked out up into the fields on the way to see the mountain gorillas, and they are full of people with adzes and harrows, digging holes or digging up potatoes or whatever produce is ready. The farmers have used slash and burn agriculture to increase the amount of land they can till--at the expense of the gorillas; up the side of the mountains where the gorillas live. But that is now stopping. The government has built a massive stone wall to keep the gorillas and water buffalo in the park and prevent the farmers from taking back any more of the rainforest jungle. Drivers have to navigate lots of pedestrians--who are often carrying sticks or planks that may turn out into the lane if the people turn their heads. They also have to get around the cyclists who are passing the people, and other cars who want to pass you and them and everyone else. I m used to lots of people in the cities, but it was really unusual for me to see so many people in the countryside, all the time even on the roughest backroads. dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 9

10 One of the points that our guide Sam kept on mentioning was how Rwanda made a big effort to move women forward in life. They represent half the government and they are educated and have a lot more opportunity in life-- even for the poorest than other women in Africa. And I think that s probably true, but Sam spoke The Party Line a lot as well. To read the full blog: Click here: Deb s Ditty: Don t expect any New Year s Resolutions from me. I intend on staying the same awkward, sarcastic, foul-mouthed delight you ve all come to know and love dave.pescod@plant4seeds.com debbie.lewis@plant4seeds.com 10