Fishing along the Malecón

Sunday, May 2009

Crocs in the Sewers

On my last full day in Kingston I went with one of our partners to visit the community resource center my organization funded a project for. It is located in Riverton Meadows, a very rough and poor neighborhood in Kingston. As we were touring the health clinic we funded, we heard a huge ruckus outside- lots of excitement and shouting. The head nurse ambles over and says, “They caught a crocodile.”

Something was going on...

There is a large open sewer that runs through the community, and the community is located right next to a trash dump. Apparently the croc came up through a river connected to the sewer. What was truly amazing is that some of the men in the community hopped right in a wrestled the croc out of the sewer. They thought it was too dangerous to have it loose in the community and the police or animal control certainly doesn’t go into Riverton, so they had to take matters into their own hands. It looks small in the pictures, but this thing was huge!! Huge and angry!

The sewer that runs through the community, from where the croc came...
I was as curious as anyone else, and ran over to take pictures. Some people were like, “Who’s the whitey mon” (even though I'm a woman I'm still a whitey mon, apparently) but most people were too excited by the croc. I asked the center manager what they were going to do with the croc. “Are they going to eat it?” Boy, did I ever get ribbed for asking that! Apparently crocodile meat is not the delicacy in Jamaica it is in Southern Africa! In my defense, the croc was being strung up right in front of Jerky’s Jerk Center! Would have been convenient...

When it rains, it pours

Last Wednesday heavy rains fell in Lobito. The main street, recently paved, was fine, but the side streets were an absolute mess. This is the street in front of my colleague Elizabeth's house. She lives one block from the office. She had to get her son to carry her piggy-back style, to work on Thursday morning. It hasn't rained heavily since, and most of the water has dried up. However, there are still standing pools and lots and lots of mud.

Cunene Floods

One house flooded. Note the proximity of the water to the side of the road. Normally this road is raised by at least 5 feet.

In addition to slipping across the border to renew my 90-day visa, I went to Cunene to gather information about the devastating flooding going on in the southern province that borders with Namibia.

It has rained much more than usual- in fact Cunene was suffering from a drought before the rains came. Estimates are that 40,000 families have been affected in some way.

The director of our local partner agency and I tried to meet with some government officials to get numbers but it was short notice and I’m not important enough, so no one would meet with us. On the radio they said 23,000 people in Ondjiva (the capital city of Cunene province) had been displaced (read- homeless).

An IDP tent in one of the camps

The situation in Ondjiva alone was shocking. We visited two IDP (internally displaced persons) camps that had been set up by the government. The tents are crammed with people- we heard of one tent that was housing 4 families- and all the belongings they could grab before their houses were flooded. I saw no more than 3 makeshift latrines for each camp which, by the looks of it, house approximately 2,000 families (which would be around 10,000 to 15,000 people). Not a pleasant or sanitary set-up, to say the least.

What’s interesting about the Ondjiva flooding is that it doesn’t come from a river- it is simply accumulated water and all over the city. This poses an intense public health risk- I witnessed countless children playing in the water as if it was a giant swimming pool, adults with giant nets fishing inside the sewage gates which were gushing with water and dozens of people living right next to the stagnant water.

Note how close this house is to the water.

It’s harder to gauge what is happening in the interior of the province. It can only be worse. Unlike communities in Benguela province which are relatively close to one another, communities in Cunene are very spread out. Your closest neighbor may be a few miles away, so it’s difficult to know who has been displaced or killed. There weren’t any roads to speak of in the first place, so whatever was there has been washed out, making rescue and relief efforts difficult.

We will be bringing in an internal consultant to do a proper assessment and response proposal. Our partner plans to focus on the rural areas where response has been minimal. Sadly, it will only get worse as March is the peak of the rainy season.

Sailing in Lobito Bay

I'd been bothering my friend Rui to take me sailing for quite some time, and on Sunday he finally obliged. Being surrounded by water, I'm surprised that it took over a year to get me on some sort of watercraft.

Rui has a small catamaran, a Hobie Cat. It was so nice to be on the water and see Lobito from another side. Honestly, it was one of the best days I've had here. Here are some of the highlights.

The Captain

We got up close and personal to some of the big container ships.

You'd never know that across the bay was a large city. Sadly, they are going to build an oil refinery on this side. Surely it will change the character and environment of the bay.

A rough life, I know...

Crazy Neighbor Lady Stikes Again!

(Scene of the craziness!)

A few months ago I wrote about the water situation in our building. To sum, my next door neighbors, two nice Portuguese professors, have an empregada (maid) that is crazy and rude. She blamed their apartment’s lack of water on me and would yell at our guards when they wouldn’t turn on our generator for their apartment.

Well, things calmed down a bit. Jesús, our handyman, did something to the pipes and the problem was solved. At least, they were hooked back up to the public water works, meaning that they would not get any water when the city water was out. (Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, lady!) After all the yelling and insults, the university the professors work for had to nerve to call our office and ask if they could hook into out pump. The empregada was so rude to us that we said no. I felt a little bad because the actual residents of the apartment, the two Portuguese women, are quite nice. But if they want to take advantage of our resources, then they should talk to their empregada about her actions.

Anyway, today is Saturday. I woke up a little cranky because the people in the house next to the building decided that 6:45 am was an appropriate time to start blasting music- cheesy Brazilian romantic music at that! About an hour later, I heard the shouting, the familiar raspy voice of my neighbor’s empregada. From my bedroom I could see the empregada at our pump and our guard at our water pump telling her to step away. She starts yelling about the water situation, calling our guard names. Once again she’s blaming the lack of water on my neighbor/colleagues and I- instead of, say, THE MUNICIPALITY, the entity responsible for supplying the water to residents. But we are easier targets, I suppose.

She basically wanted the guard to turn on the pump so that the professoras could take showers. Her argument was, basically, “Do you think it’s proper that the professoras have to take baths out of buckets?!” Oh, how my heart bleeds for them! This was one of the weakest arguments I have ever heard. Everyone takes baths out of buckets when there’s no water, including me! Our guard had little sympathy- a given, considering that he is poor and probably lives in a place with no running water and bathes out of a bucket too, like ¾ of the people in this city.

Our guard explained that the pump belongs to us and that without our authorization he could not turn it on. He spoke calmly and politely, ignoring her shouts. She then got personal, telling him he was ignorant. This was the final straw for him, and he started yelling at her, telling her that she was out line and that if she had a problem she should talk to me or Sergey, not him. She yelled again and said that she had knocked on my door and I didn’t answer (a lie) so he should go ahead and turn it on.

She finally went inside and things calmed down for a bit. About an hour later, I heard her shouting again, this time saying that there was too much noise coming from the house next door and that the guard needed to go next door to tell them to turn the volume down. He said in a loud voice, “I work for Dona Elizabeth (me, I think) and Dona Stella! I don’t work for you! You have no right to tell me what to do!” Good answer! She didn’t like it, however.

Another hour later, I heard her shouting from the stairwell, this time “talking” with our downstairs neighbor. ("Talking" = shouting and not letting the other person speak.) She was complaining about the water situation trying to get the neighbor to come up and talk to me. Now, the downstairs neighbor is hooked into our generator because she is friends with Jesús, and she doesn’t want to press her luck. So she just said, “There’s no city water, so we don’t have water. There’s nothing was can do about it.” At least one of our neighbors is smart!