When Woodland Kingfishers Attack

This morning I saw one of these on the rail of our terrace:

At the time I didn't know what it was. I was only a few feet away from it and I didn't want to move or call out to Mike. I just watched him and tried to imprint his image on my brain so I could look him up later. 

He flew up under the terrace roof, right in front of me, and smacked into a column on the other end of the terrace. Then he took off for a nearby tree. Mike came out as he was flying off. He had something in his mouth and with the binoculars Mike identified it as a gecko. The geckos hide out in the seam along the edge of the roof, so he must have intentionally flown in to get the gecko; he wasn't just a stupid bird smacking in to something. He thrashed the gecko around a bit, then assumedly at it. He flew away before I could see him with the binoculars.

This was our first sighting of this bird in our yard. The blue is striking. We hope he sticks around! We have more than enough geckos for him to snack on.

Image from wikipedia.org.

He was a phenomenal cat

After a few days of what seemed like recovery, Grendel started losing weight again. Quickly. We had long days marked by visits to the vet and long nights where I was sure he wasn't going to be with us in the morning. But he kept pulling through, which kept my hope up. 

He passed last Saturday night. We had a sunrise burial on Sunday. 

We are overwhelmed by the love that has been pouring in from around the world. He was an international superstar. Thanks everyone.

Songs

I've had two songs stuck in my head the past few days.

Brand New Colony, by the Postal Service:

I want to take you far from the cynics int his town
And kiss you on the mouth
We'll cut out bodies free from the tethers of this scene,
Start a brand new colony
Where everything will change,
We'll give ourselves new names (identities erased)
The sun will heat the ground
Under our bare feet in this brand new colony
Everything will change

And The Kinks' Phenomenal Cat:

A long, long time ago,
In the land of idiot boys,
There live a cat, a phenomenal cat,
Who loved to wallow all day.

No one bothered him
As he sat, content in his tree.
He just lived to eat cause it kept him fat,
And thats how he wanted to stay.

Though he was big and fat,
All the world was good to him,
And he pointed out on the map
All the places he had been.

Regular blogging will resume here in a few days. I've done a bit of posting at What I Eat.

Ellie et le petit serpent maison

We get baby snakes in our house. The first time we saw one, one of our first nights here, we were horrified that we had some sort of worm moving in to infest our food.

But we soon learned that they are snakes. They are babies. And they are harmless, even as adults. They are called house snakes, or serpent maison, and they apparently come in both black and green.

The cats love playing with them and they seem to be in endless supply so we let the cats have them. As long as the snakes stay babies and stay on the floor. I'm dreading the day I find an adult curled up in my t-shirt drawer, as nonvenomous as they are.

Harry Potter and the Land of No Movies

There's one thing I'm really jonsin' about this year. I'm going to miss the new Harry Potter movie this summer. I've seriously been thinking about a July vacation in the United States or Europe just so I can see the movie (we have no other reason to take a vacation in July; in fact, Mike can't take a vacation at all until September). I've loved all the Harry Potter movies and there have been no other films in recent years that I've really wanted to see right away.

But Burundi has one movie theater, and the movies are almost exclusively shown in French. Maybe two or three times a year they'll show an English-language film (and so far they haven't been ones I've wanted to see). Since I really can't afford a vacation just to fly home and watch a movie here's my plan B: Befriend the guy at the theater who orders the films and lobby for an English-language showing of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 

It's starting to work already! Mike works with the brother of the theater manager. The manager and I have exchanged emails. I just have to convince him that there are enough English-speaking Harry Potter fans here to warrant this being one of his few selections this year.

I have no hips

For want of entertainment around here, when a friend said she’d teach a belly-dancing class, I said I’d attend. I don’t know what I was thinking. On one hand, I like exercising and I’ll try just about any workout. On the other hand, I hate people and organized class-type situations. Plus I have no grace or rhythm and I’m not flexible.

Why not give it a shot?

It was fun. The music was catchy. I got to wear a scarf tied around my hips with little jingly coins on it. And while I found the whole thing enjoyable, I wasn’t overcome with the feminine sensuality that women are supposedly overcome by when they do something like try belly-dancing. (It’s like when I shot a gun. I was like, okay, I shot a gun. I didn’t feel strong or empowered.)

I don’t have hips. I’ve always enjoyed my slim figure and never once wished for a waist or hips or an otherwise hourglass figure. I know that technically I was doing all the moves correctly, but my little coins weren’t jingling as loudly as they should have. I probably looked like a robot. A quiet robot.

But I'm going to go back next week. Now that I've started, I want to finish the whole dance. 

Besides, what else am I going to do with my Tuesday nights?

Hardly Worth Reading

I had a decent post all worked out, done during some slow moments at work, but of course, since this is Burundi, the network went down and I couldn't email my post notes to myself to work on at home. Plus, now, I've been at Book Club and have had a bit of wine, so I can't recraft the post.

I like reading, and I enjoy the people at Book Club, and in theory I enjoy Book Club, but why does it always seem like such a chore? Once I come home I realize I've had a good time, but there's something about the label "book club" that's off-putting.

More on this later. It's time for bed.

Thousands of Burundians turn out for anti-gay demo

BUJUMBURA (AFP) — Thousands of Burundians took part in a government-organised demonstration Friday to demand that homosexuality be criminalised.

Between 10,000 and 20,000 people turned out, according to varying estimates, to protest the senate's decision not to criminalise homosexuality, in the largest demonstration since President Pierre Nkurunziza came to power in 2005.

Read the full AFP article. We were at home having lunch that afternoon while this was going on so we didn't get to see it when it passed by Mike's office. Apparently it was a peaceful demonstration, so despite what they were demonstrating for, it may have been the most peaceful large demonstration in the country's history.

There's been discussion about whether homosexuality should be a crime in Burundi. It's a religious conservative country and many people believe that it's not just a sin, but should be punishable by law. Incidentally, at the same time the homosexuality bill was brought up, the government passed a law abolishing the death penalty. Yay! Look, no death penalty! We'll just try to sneak this anti-human-rights bill through while everyone's distracted by the death penalty abolishment.

One of my worst nightmares

When we returned from vacation, two weeks away, we found that Grendel (a 20-pound Norwegian forest cat) had lost weight. A lot of it. Nearly half of his body weight. We know our housekeeper had been coming to feed the cats while we were gone and the other one was perfectly healthy.

Coming home to a sick pet is traumatic enough, but in Burundi its worse than if our house had been robbed. I felt empty and helpless and incredibly guilty. There's a veterinary clinic here, but it's for livestock. Vet care here consists of knowing when it's time to put down a sick cow or goat so it doesn't infect the rest of the herd. But we know someone who'd taken their dog to the clinic and the dog recovered. What other choice did we have? 

The vet was very nice and everyone in the office told us how "joli" (beautiful) he is. Even with his diminished weight, he's a large, good-looking cat. No one in the office spoke English but Mike managed in French to say how big he'd been before we left for vacation. They couldn't do much for him, but they tried. They took his temperature and tested him for worms. They gave him a deworming pill and an antibiotic shot. They really didn't know what was wrong with him, but that was pretty much all they could do. He had a slight fever, which indicated infection. They asked us to come back the next day for another antibiotic shot.

On that day we came home, our flight was early in the morning and we had that whole day off from work. Mike got called in, but I spent a long afternoon at home worrying over Grendel and observing him. To my relief, around dinner time he got up and ate a little bit and drank some water. His personality was returning, too, and he jumped up onto the couch with me. The next morning, he was eating more food.

We took him back to the vet at lunch time. His temperature had returned to normal. She gave him another antibiotic shot. We didn't have time to bring him back to the house so he hung out in my office for the afternoon. He continued to eat and drink water in near-average quantities.

By that night it seemed like his old self was all the way back. He was even begging for food. We are incredibly lucky that whatever it was appears to have been a simple infection. He's a middle-aged cat and he was slightly overweight. If he has kidney problems or diabetes complications, there's nothing that could be done for him here. 

Now, two weeks later, he's gained some weight back. It will take awhile for him to beef up completely, and it would be better for his health if he stays closer to 17 or 18 pounds rather than 20. He's still so handsome.

(A collection of Grendel pics.)

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

Yes, that's a cliche title to a post about visiting the Livingstone Monument. Stanley and Livinstone's first meeting wasn't even in Burundi, it was in Tanzania (although many people who don't know that assume it was here when they see there's a monument). 

They traveled through Burundi and spent several hospitable days in Mugure, a village just south of Bujumbura. When we arrived yesterday I could see why they wanted to spend several days there. The view is gorgeous. You've got mountains behind you, a river immediately in front of you and Lake Tanganyika in the distance. Beyond the lake, more mountains from the Congo.

Livingstone carved their names on a large rock overlooking the river. And that's the monument. It's quite simple and I think some people are disappointed by it.

But when I was planning an excursion for some folks at work I needed a way to make it less disappointing. The spot is wonderful for a picnic. There used to be a bar there but it closed down during the war. The buildings were abandoned but still standing. And "buildings" is a generous term. They are huts with short walls and thatched roofs, so you can enjoy the view and be out of the sun. I told people to pack a lunch and I'd provide a cooler of beverages. Primus anyone? We had beers and Cokes and hung out for over an hour just enjoying the view and the breeze. 

There are some children there who will hang around. There's a police post there, and the police will chase the kids away after awhile hoping to get a tip from you for that task. We didn't give anything to the police officers, but when we left we gave lollipops and pencils to the kids.

It was nice to be outside the city for a couple hours.

I've also blogged at bit at What I Eat this week.

A jungle alliance that may just endure

Mar 5th 2009 | GOMA AND KIGALI
From The Economist print edition

Two rival countries have joined forces to hammer the militias that have devastated eastern Congo for so long

SCRUFFY but happy, Timothy is keen to talk about his new life in Rwanda. A former captain in a guerrilla army across the nearby border in the dense jungles of eastern Congo, he has spent most of his life fighting against the present government of Rwanda. Now, however, he has turned himself in and gone back to the land of his birth, where he is on a two-month course run by his former adversaries to reintegrate him into Rwandan society.

He starts early every morning, packing in six hours of “discussion” on such topics as patriotism, the history of Rwanda, and “the role of youth in national development”, before breaking for football. Timothy realises that he must “forget everything about guns” and “learn to co-operate with civilians”. He is learning a lot of other useful stuff too. “Men used to beat women,” he says, but apparently you cannot do that any more. “When she is wrong, you have to talk to her, not treat her like a goat.”

Timothy’s re-education at the Mutobo demobilisation centre near Ruhengeri in north-west Rwanda is the best hope in years that the long, devastating conflict between Rwanda and Congo may be abating. He and hundreds like him are being persuaded to give up their arms by the force of a new alliance between the two old foes. If this new alignment of military and political power eventually leads to peace in the region, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 may at last cease to cast its long shadow over the Great Lakes region (see map).

Read the full article at The Economist. This is the kind of news we keep an eye on, since it's all happening so close to us and it involves the same ethnic groups as the war in the 1990s here.

One More Day

Are you tired of hearing about Tanzania yet? I have one more day to blog about.

The food that Zara Tours provided us was not terrific. Most nights it wasn’t bad and one night it was even pretty good. Some dishes were utterly inedible though, and some of those dishes were served to us at nice hotels, not dinners at high altitude when everything made us feel nauseous. What was annoying was that most of the dishes were local interpretations of Western-style food. Most of the tourists were American or German and they seemed to be okay with pizza topped with sardines and the same vegetable soup every single night. What’s wrong with you people? We had been hoping for some African food. We like it! And we also had our hearts set on amazing coffee, but the coffee served by Zara, even in the hotels, was dishwater.

So on our very last day in Tanzania we went back into Moshi in search of coffee and African food. Our safari guide pointed out a restaurant and we had seen and heard of a couple others we wanted to check out. First, coffee. We had been in search of coffee the last time we were in Moshi but every coffee shop we passed was closed. The same was true on this day. What’s up with that? Finally we were driven inside by thirst, heat, and visions of ice cream at an Indian restaurant called Deli Chez. (Yeah, and remember the Salzburger Café was full of Volkswagen iconography.) First we each ordered a milkshake. Milkshakes! It had been ages since we’d had milkshakes. Mine tasted like strawberry Quick rather than strawberry ice cream, but I didn’t care. I loved it. Then I ordered a hot coffee and Mike ordered an iced coffee. It wasn’t the best Tanzanian coffee I’d ever had, but it was a million times better than what I’d been drinking for the previous two weeks.

Milkshakes at Deli Chez

We still wanted African food, but we were full of beverages so we decided to walk for a bit. We found some relatively quiet and shady roads leading away from the crowded downtown area and just wandered around. When we finally got hungry, we walked back into town to the restaurant our driver had pointed out for local food: Central Garden.


Central Garden

We got the African menu, but the muzungu prices. (It was still pretty cheap, but no matter how much long we live in Burundi, we will never get the local prices.) Mike ordered ugali with beef and I ordered ugali with chicken. (Actually I ordered bananas, but they were out of bananas!) The food was okay. It wasn’t the greatest but it was a nice change from the hotel food we’d been eating. And the mango-passionfruit juice for dessert was yuuuummmmmeeeeee.

Eventually we went back to the hotel for the night. We had to leave at 4 am the next day to make a 6 am flight. We skipped the hotel’s dinner, preferring to snack on Lara bars rather than face that food one last time.

We had an uneventful trip home. And that about brings us up to speed.

The Invisible War

By BOB HERBERT
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Published: February 21, 2009

Perhaps we’ve heard so little about them because the crimes are so unspeakable, the evil so profound.

For years now, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, marauding bands of soldiers and militias have been waging a war of rape and destruction against women. This sustained campaign of mind-bending atrocities, mostly in the eastern part of the country, has been one of the strategic tools in a wider war that has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since the 1990s. Millions have been killed.

Women and girls of all ages, from old women to very young children, have been gang-raped, and in many cases their sexual organs have been mutilated. The victims number in the hundreds of thousands. But the world, for the most part, has remained indifferent to their suffering.

“These women are raped in front of their husbands, in front of their children, in front of their parents, in front of their neighbors,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynecologist who runs a hospital in Bukavu that treats only the women who have sustained the most severe injuries....

Despite the presence in the region of the largest U.N. peacekeeping mission in the world, no one has been able to stop the systematic rape of the Congolese women.

If these are not war crimes, crimes against humanity, then nothing is.

Read the full column at the New York Times.

I know it's a hard read, but it's a good one.

Tanzanians to name albino killers

Tanzania is launching a nationwide exercise urging the public to identify those behind dozens of murders of people with albinism.

In the secret "referendum", citizens will be invited to write down on slips of paper the names of those they suspect of involvement.

Legal officials will gather the names and pass them to the police.

President Jakaya Kikwete said the public should not fear retribution for naming the culprits.

The killers reportedly sell albino body parts - including limbs, hair, skin and genitals - to witchdoctors who make potions promising to make people wealthy....

The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon last week decried the albino killings during his official visit to the country.

Last week, in neighbouring Burundi, assailants reportedly dismembered a six-year-old albino boy in his home in front of his parents, the eighth albino killing in that country.

The government issued a ban on all traditional healers in January in an effort to stop the killings and several have been arrested since then on suspicion of flouting the order.

Last month, a pastor was charged in Tanzania with being found in possession of the body parts of an albino.

Read the full article at BBC News.

I get sick every time I read a headline about these albino killings. We have had several here in Burundi since we arrived and it's rumored that they have to do with the Tanzania trade. What century is this? Sorcery?

Mto Wa Mbu walking tour

21 Feb
Last day of safari, but not last day in Tanzania
Morning on patio at Highview Hotel

Leaving Highview and heading back to Moshi today. Supposed to tour a village for traditional food and drink.


And that’s where my journal ends.

On our last day of safari we actually didn’t go to any of the safari parks. We were a tad animal-ed out and tired of bouncing around in the truck. We had struck a deal with our guide to cut short a Serengeti day in order to spend more time in Ngorongoro Crater but that left us with nothing but a five-hour drive back to the hotel on that last day.

We had been complaining about the lack of Africa culture in our hotels so our guide set us up on one of the Cultural Tourisme Program village walking tours. We stopped at Mto Wa Mbu village just outside the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and were treated to a two-hour walk through this unique village. This is an area where the socialism experiment is working.

Over 100 tribes from Tanzania and other African countries are represented in this farmer and artisan co-op. The land around Ngorongoro is so fertile, due to the volcanic nature of the soil. There’s also plenty of water from the lakes and rainfall.

We learned about the cultivation of the different banana varieties. The bananas can’t be left to ripen on the trees because monkeys will come down and eat them, so they harvest the bananas green and put them in a ripening room with avocados, and the avocados encourage the bananas to ripen. Also, the guide said they can’t tell what kind of banana a plant will yield until it starts to flower. All this time spent in Burundi surrounded by bananas, and we hadn’t yet had the opportunity to see how they grow. Funny that we had to spend two weeks in Tanzania before we found out! We also went to a house that brews and serves banana beer. I like the Burundi banana beer better, but it was cool to see how it’s made. It’s fermented with millet, so it’s a beer I can drink!

Sampling the banana beer

We visited artist communes and were convinced to buy some wood carvings produced by a tribe that fled Mozambique. (We can get the same stuff here in Burundi, but we felt better about paying the carvers directly rather than the myriad middlemen involved with the trading.)

We also learned that the elephants from nearby Lake Manyara have developed a taste for corn, and elephants in your corn patch will obviously destroy your livelihood that season. And apparently the Masai people who raise cattle in Ngorongoro believe that all the cattle on Earth belongs to them and they’ll steal any cows that they see. So the few people in this village that have cows keep them in a spare room off of the house, to keep them hidden.

It was a fascinating tour and just what we needed after all those days of being in the car. Of course, we didn’t do nearly as much shopping and photo-taking as muzungus (white people) should. We already live in Africa and see this stuff all the time so we were bad tourists.

Coffee! Quick!

This escaped me while I was on vacation, but for one last day (today!) you can buy Burundian coffee from Peets:

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE - BURUNDI
Discover Peet's Burundi—a berry perfumed and caramel textured East African coffee. This wonderful new treasure is a coffee redolent of Kenya's berry perfume, but with the bold, caramel texture we enjoy in Burundi.

Tucked in between Rwanda and Tanzania, Burundi sits in the heart of that grouping of East African jewels which consistently provides us with interesting African flavors: berries and body, clarity and heft. Given the country's remote location, it is difficult to get coffee out on time to be savored at the peak of the season. Fortunately we did—because Burundi coffees are at their finest this time of year.

This coffee is so good that we are making it the heart of our upcoming Anniversary Blend—but it's a treat to taste alone, so we're offering the top pick of the lot for one last roast.

Order online by Tuesday, March 3rd for the last roast.
Also available in Burundi African sampler.

Today I posted at What I Eat. What did I eat? Impala!

Africa: Getting the Continent on the Obama Agenda

26 February 2009
Reed Kramer

George Clooney's meeting to discuss Darfur with Vice President Joe Biden and with President Barack Obama Monday night at the White House provided one of the first glimmers of Africa involvement from the top echelon of the new administration.

According to Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander, Clooney was told that Sudan policy is under "ongoing review." The Academy Award-winning actor, who skipped the Oscar's ceremony Sunday night to fly to Washington, said he welcomed what he heard "because there was some concern this could fall off the radar."

That concern has been spreading among Africa watchers as days go by without any significant Africa-related pronouncements - particularly, no announced selection of a person to head the Africa Bureau at the State Department. Similar misgivings are being expressed about the administration's slow movement to fill top foreign assistance-related posts, which also affect U.S. relations with Africa.

Not only are the conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and Congo requiring urgent attention and perhaps changed approaches, but also there is equally pressing need to spotlight and support places trying to get development right, especially with the added strain of the global economic crisis. One stark example is Liberia, which has been making "steady progress" toward eradicating poverty, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon reported this month, but where "limited national institutional capacity" and persistent security threats make continuing international support vital for the country's and region's growth and stability, his report said.

Read the full article at AllAfrica.com.

I think I'm going to start posting some Africa news. What are you hearing about back in the U.S., financial crisis stuff?

Day 4 of Safari

20 Feb
Day 4 of Safari

Pair of Kirk’s dik-dik on route to SNP, just outside of gate.

On route from SNP to NCA:
cape hare
topi
kori bustard

Ngorongoro Crater
Around water hole
lions – male and female at water hole, then they crossed the street to join another male with females and two more females arrived around the water hole
spotted hyenas
elephant
egrets
yellow-billed stork
hippo ibis
crane


Ngorongoro Crater

Rest of crater
zebras
wildebeest warthog
lesser flamingo
black rhinos – 3, one solitary, then later a mamma and baby
cheetahs – 2 or 3
black kite
small black bird w/ orange shoulders
dark storks
lesser masked weaver
superb starling

Outside of crater just before exiting NCA
waterbuck
cerval

See photos on flickr

I'm typing up my notes from the trip and posting them with just some light editing. Each day will be a new post. (Some of these may not be much more than lists of animals we saw each day.)

Day 3 of Safari

19 Feb
Day 3 of Safari – Ikoma Wildcamp

Drove through Ngorongoro Cons. Area yesterday. Stopped at Olduvai Gorge.

Arrived at Serengeti Nat’l Park after lunch.

Arrived at Ikoma Camp by sunset. Two options—camping and lodging. Lodges are mud huts with thatched roofs. Very cute!

Heard crunching sounds all night long though. Mike thinks it may have been the giant mantis we saw just before bedtime.

Ikoma Wildcamp

At camp, saw a pair of go-away birds. On route to SNP, storks in a tree.

Serengeti National Park
francolin
hartebeest
elephants – the first one of the day trumpeted and false charged for several steps
giraffe
Kirk’s dik-dik
lions – 3 females, one with tracking collar; two cubs
bird – lilac-breasted roller
crocodile
Egyptian geese

buffalo
ox-peckers
warthogs
hooded vulture
2 leopards, mamma with kill and baby
long-crested eagle
white-headed buffalo weaver
waterbuck
topi
hyraxes – rock and tree
tawny eaglewhite crown shrike
lovebirds
red-neck falcon
lanner falcon
common stilt
olive baboon
vervet monkey

Serengeti National Park

See photos on flickr

I'm typing up my notes from the trip and posting them with just some light editing. Each day will be a new post. (Some of these may not be much more than lists of animals we saw each day.)