News From Behind the Front Lines

Stories from behind the scenes in parts of Africa and elsewhere compared to America

Sawubona.

I do adventure travel all over the world, and I have clients in several countries. This past February and March I was in Tanzania and Kenya just as the current Conditions were beginning to spread worldwide. I got home just under the wire. Since then, some of the destinations where I had just been, and places which count desperately on tourist income, governments have in some situations behaved very badly. Not all, but some. That of course includes our own.

In fairness to you, while I don’t feel at ease writing about our Conditions directly as I have no medical expertise, I do feel comfortable informing you about what’s happening in my world and those who inhabit it within the realm of adventure travel, and in a few places where tourism is a desperately-needed lifeline for so many. Comparisons to America are inevitable and revealing.

What I share with you here comes in part directly from people who live and work there, and who are my friends and clients. First, let’s set the stage.

When I left Africa, the virus was a distant idea. As with America, when the word came out of Wuhan, it was happening “over there” as opposed to “our world.” Since then the awful reality of just how small the world is, how vulnerable we all are when a butterfly flaps its wings in Asia, and how we all suffer from or are affected by some of the same problems have all become terribly evident.

This piece from NPR gives a version of what might and could have happened in some of those countries as well as a description of some of those conditions:

I have been to South Africa four times. There are two very distinct worlds there: the white moneyed classes and those African families who have prospered, and Everybody Else. Just like in America. In the Capetown area, once one of South Africa’s crown jewels, the problem with available water has been a topic of international journalism for some time.

While Cape Town averted the crisis, it’s not over. Not only that, their water crisis pointed to the same issues of class and color that we experience: those with money could shower or water their lawns. Or, more directly, they took longer showers and watered their lawns despite government edicts to the opposite, while Black slums not only had to adhere (they had no running water anyway) but were also punished if caught breaking the rules. Just like here.

Of course, it bears pointing out that not too many Black South Africans in Cape Town have lawns to begin with.

This behavior is no different from the Covid parties and Mardi Gras and all those who now crowd the streets with signs that claim with mindless selfishness and reckless disregard:

I WANT A HAIR CUT

Today with the new threats to health, the same kinds of class stratifications apply and are even more exacerbated in places like Cape Town. Add to that the imperative for constant hand-washing driven by our Conditions, people who already live largely without water and soap supplies, and you can see where this is going. These are just some reasons why South Africa’s infections have skyrocketed, a nation which only a few years ago was Africa’s finest example of an economic success story.

While Kenya’s government has responded fairly swiftly, fear and ignorance have driven both people and police into terrible conflicts. Their response has been labeled “colonial,” with good reason.

There have been reports of police brutality in Kenya, using beating and tear gas to control crowds after March 25th. Efforts at detention forced (Black) people into crowded spaces in direct conflict with social distancing guidelines.

Before you tut-tut that, please consider this:

This isn’t much different than how returning passengers to the US were forced into endless, tightly-packed crowds “for health reasons” when they arrived at huge US hubs, potentially spreading the disease among them because of the lack of social distancing.

Or border detention centers, for that matter. Nursing homes. Or in our prisons. I struggle to see the difference in practice. The end product is pretty much the same.

Where I travel, I have made friends who live five to ten to a small house or single room. There is no clinic and often no running water or soap. Water has to be brought in from a nearby river. To get medical care in those distant places you get onto a crowded bus with thirty other people and ride the pockmarked roads for many hours to the closest city. If you’re infected, or someone else is, that virtually guarantees that everyone gets sick. So by the time the entire bus gets to the city, it’s not just one infected person, it’s thirty, and infection rates are exponential.

When you drive through Nairobi, a city afflicted with heartbreaking poverty and massive shanty towns, the smell of the Nairobi River is nauseating. It’s horribly polluted, and cannot be used for drinking or washing. At least, by people with options. Most poor Kenyans don’t have those options, and live in crowded, squalid conditions cheek-by-jowl alongside that very river.

An email landed at three am today which addressed the stark reality of those living in Tanzania as the Conditions make their way through the vulnerable populations of Africa.

A friend was in touch with a bed and breakfast where I was staying just this past October. Moshi, Tanzania, is not far from Kilimanjaro, where I was also staying in order to write some stories about an organization doing good work on that mountain. In Moshi, on February 2, there was a terrible incident involving a church stampede:

The people of Africa, as we all do, have powerful feelings about faith, and can be very superstitious. Lest you mock them, I might point to the swift disappearance of bleach, tonic, and other products touted by scammers to capitalize on ignorance, fear and the very real problems of supply chain issues around masks and PPE:

In a time of great fear, graft and abuse proliferate. In America, where gullible people have been led far astray by science doubters, evil religious leaders like Jim Bakker and others have peddled dangerous “cures” to terrified customers:

So imagine, then, where people have even more faith in religious leaders with questionable morals and are even less educated (although that’s increasingly debatable). Christianity in places like Kenya and Tanzania is in too many cases little more than a way to convince poor people to pay for a “miracle,” which provides a very good living for pastors. I met people there who went into the church solely to become a pastor because it was a better living, having nothing whatsoever to do with faith and everything to do with bilking folks out of their meagre shillings.

As with many developing countries, the African version of Christianity is deeply swayed by local shamanic customs and beliefs as well as traditional superstitions. White people are mistrusted for good reasons, so if medical advice is handed over from whites, it’s often seen as little more than an attempt at genocide or a way to trick Africans. That is just one reason why HIV-AIDs efforts have been met with such powerful resistance.

That these beliefs are held among college-educated Africans with good jobs simply underscores how powerfully certain beliefs, especially when it comes to racial discrimination, can completely over shadow facts.

Just like in America.

In Tanzania, as with many African countries, suspicion and abuses have abounded in part due to those very reasons. One email I received this morning spoke to a problem that had already been infecting Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam. Criminal gangs have been expanding for some years. This email report speaks to what happens in countries where the Perfect Storm of ignorance, superstition, government idiocy and lack of basic needs come together:

Three days ago I spoke with (an employee at their B and B) on the phone to update him with accurate info as they get very little. He told me there was a situation in Dar. Apparently when someone tests positive, they round up the entire family of that person and anyone they had contact with in the last week. All of those people are then locked into a designated “hospital” but apparently they are not given food or water or anything. Locked up like some strange prison to be held for 14 days of quarantine. Apparently after three days of no food the 250+ people decided to break out. They rushed the door, breaking it down, and then attacked the police with rocks and all escaped. Now sick people are not going to the hospital but hiding in their homes. The government is so much more concerned about keeping the reality quiet that they probably also prefer someone dies at home than being tested.

Gangs have now been going around extorting money from perfectly healthy not sick people. They tell them if you don’t pay we will report you as sick and they will come and take you and your family and everyone you know and lock them up with no food. (author bolded)

Tanzania was one of the last countries to stop commercial flights coming in. It was only done after the last airline decided to no longer fly, so it was a useless government decision as there were no international flights coming in at this point anyway. Around the 24th of March they had instituted a 14-day quarantine for anyone arriving on flights. (One person) was on a flight back to Tanzania the same day. It was announced in the morning already to be in effect by noon, so if you were already on a flight you were in for a surprise when you got there. Anyway, the quarantine was that the person had to pay for it themselves. When they arrived they were transported to a hotel (owned by politicians) where they had to stay for 14 days with the other people on the flight. It was a huge joke he said. There was a govt conference going on at the same time in the hotel. There was no separation of rooms for those quarantined and the normal guests. They all ate in the hotel restaurant together with the other guests of the hotel. Staff had no safety equipment aside from hand sanitizer. Needless to say the entire quarantine thing was a scam to make some money. A few people under quarantine bribed their way out after a few days….

The entire country has four ventilators, according to a friend at the embassy. I guess that on a positive side the people are afraid to get sick so maybe they will be careful, because it would be way worse if they were like many Americans and Europeans who are not afraid to get sick because they are young and healthy.

We in America have a President who goes on national television and effectively sanctions injecting one’s self with household cleaners as a way to stave off illness. Poison centers have already seen an uptick in cases. After Trump said that hydroxychloroquine was a cure, Nigeria saw a series of deadly overdoses. There are still overdoses, and the run on the supplies have directly affected lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients.

In this sense, America is no different than countries that this Administration referred to as “shitholes.”

Desperate people anywhere will believe anything. Desperate people combined with desperate conditions then hit with with a desperately awful invisible disease all create a ripe recipe for evil people to profit. In America we are being deluged with that very thing right now. In so many ways we here in the USA are not much different from those determined to walk on “holy ground” and getting trampled to death in Moshi.

Don’t agree? Please visit any supermarket toilet paper aisle. Any disinfectant aisle. Bleach shelves. I could go on. If one of these dimwits went public and claimed cow urine would work…wait, they already have.

At the highest levels we have a dangerously ignorant person, a world leader no less, giving lethal advice to ignorant followers, which results in those followers doing themselves harm and using up critical medical resources. Just as in these African countries, we have criminal “gangs” dressed up as religious leaders calling us to gather by the thousands to be “saved by the Blood of the Lamb.” The only saving that’s likely to be done is reducing the cost of providing long term health care for those who sicken and die. Somehow, the Blood of the Lamb doesn’t exactly work as well as the simple science of social distancing and hand washing.

For those of us who travel a great deal, the insults that our leader hurled at developing countries as “shitholes”….

…instead invites me to point to our own. We are subjected to so many scams from so-called religious leaders and people hawking fake cures that are in fact endorsed by this shithole president that more than a few of us are wondering how to emigrate to New Zealand.

To their credit I don’t think the Kiwis much want us. We’ve been infected by this Administration. But that’s just my opinion.

I also received an email from my Kiwi adventure travel consultant who has been under quarantine far longer than we. In a country where their leadership took early, decisive action, which flattened the curve and crushed it before it even had a chance to spike. Mongolia shut their borders in January. To date they’ve had 30 cases. The have smaller populations, but in a city like Ulaan Bataar, where close to 67% of the population (2,203,469 people in 2020 is urban) lives, that’s an incredibly low per-capita infection rate.

One of my responsibilities in this pandemic has been to write about and highlight the very good work being done by people who are doing all they can to support others who are even more vulnerable. In one case, some 20,000 people who work in one African nation’s tourist industry.

When a Covid-19 safety procedures handout was translated into Swahili, and sent out by cell phone to a great many of those people, that particular organization was publicly criticized by some leaders in that African nation for not waiting until the government had decided what to do. What that government did decide to do was not much. Deny, delay, and put millions at risk.

The same way the governor of Florida did because he was far more concerned with tourist dollars than human lives in my home state, where a vast proportion falls squarely into the categories of the most vulnerable by age, race, health and virtually all other co-morbidity categories.

Deny, delay, and endanger.

Which is precisely what our Administration did.

And even more strikingly, other governors like DeSantis, who were even worse, putting local mayors and strapped regional officials in a terrible bind by loosening restrictions where the curve had only just begun to arc skyward.

I don’t know about you but these examples and the comparisons- just a few of many-are to my mind, highly instructive.

Americans used to be able to pride ourselves on our educational levels, our savvy, our sophistication. We like to think of ourselves, as a nation, more capable of handling the tough stuff. How prepared we are. How…..Sixties. How Kennedy-esque. How old-fashioned.

We aren’t. Not nearly as prepared as New Zealand, for example. Germany’s for example. Both run by smart, compassionate women.

What strikes me as I compare what my clients and friends all over the world send in and what we discuss is how much so much of where we are today is just like in those Developing countries. Superstitious, gullible people, greedy gangs and underhanded operations strip scared folks of their funds for “cures” that can kill them, leaving the most vulnerable to fend for themselves (the poor, elderly in nursing homes, etc.).

That’s while the uber-rich get tested and before they get the results, they rush off to beautiful, small communities ill-equipped to handle their own community needs, much less that of the spoiled rich parasites who show up feeling entitled to the best that community has to offer.

While proffering the one thing those very communities didn’t need: an invisible killer. The rich might just have to learn how to clean their own toilets for a change.

While Covideniers march the streets demanding a haircut, who cares about the lives of the weak, the vulnerable, the elderly, the poor, the medical people killing themselves to keep us from dying? People who forfeit their health because our nation couldn’t be bothered to heed the warnings of the Obama Administration that what was coming was not only inevitable, but imminent. As in NOW, assholes.

Make America Great Again.

Uh-huh.

What we did and continue as a nation stands as a model for what not to do. I find it hard to consider much of that “great.” Plenty that we are doing as individuals is great. But we have failed not only the world but also our own people as a nation.

But that’s just me. What do I know? Hell, I’m just a decorated military vet who worked on multiple Presidential campaigns, met two sitting Presidents, worked at the highest levels of Federal government and lobbied for (failed) future-thinking programs. Like solar energy.

What the hell do I know.

Not much, I guess.