Forests for the Trees

(A tree deep in Sapo National Park, Liberia's only protected forests)

Liberia turned down an interesting offer last week. Basically, a consortium of Western 'partners' offered to pay Liberia millions of dollars to not ratify several forestry contracts, themselves worth millions. The Liberian speaker of the house was reported to have called the offer a joke, saying, ultimately, that Liberians need jobs, not money.

This may be a fair assessment, but it did not seem like the full purpose of the offer was really considered.

For those asking the valid question of why someone would pay to not log, a brief synopsis of REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation). Basically, its a controversial means of carbon offsetting and carbon credits, both of which are occasionally controversial methods of essentially putting value on the amount of GHG's (greenhouse gases) emitted by companies, governments and individuals. REDD has not been officially recognized, but its general purpose is to protect large tracts of virgin rainforest that would be otherwise logged, thus reducing the associated GHG emissions (deforestation accounts for roughly 20% of worlwide GHG emissions, vs roughly 2% for the airline industry).

Despite being a country known for its 'blood timber' during the war, Liberia holds a massive share of the largely untouched Upper Guinean Rainforest, a precious, and increasingly rare commodity around the world.

This is valuable in a way that is difficult to sometimes rationalize in a country with an unemployment rate of 85%, and a desperate need for jobs: telling rural workers that they cannot have a job because of a global crisis involving the a substance in the air does not translate.

Of course, as UK-based environmental watchdog Global Witness raised in a report last week, these jobs offer a lot shorter term benefits than virgin forests, and almost always, provide significantly less (in jobs, pay, and local benefits such as schools, clinics and infrastructure) than promised in their contracts.

Looking at other international companies involved in natural resources within Liberia, its not hard to see the dangers. Firestone, the largest employee, had to be dragged kicking and screaming last August in order to raise wages to $ 3.78 / day, plus a modest bonus for production, and to reduce their hours and quotas that were encouraging child labour until 2008. Mittal Steel - when they do pay their local employees - pays them pittance, evicts workers from housing, and jacks the prices at the hospitals they 'provide' (see "Steel Town Blues For Yekepa", by Rebecca Murray).

International forestry companies will offer similarly meager salaries for the dangerous, grueling work of equatorial forestry, and, many fear, will avoid responsibilities to the impoverished local communities.

Along with concerns raised by Global Witness and others about the track records of the companies involved in the proposed operations, and the legitimacy of some of the contracts, ample questions remain.

Does providing $ 5 / day jobs to hundreds of Liberians actually outweigh the benefits of preserving a virgin rainforest? Will the Liberian government be able to hold the international companies to task on their promises? How much of the proposed millions of dollars per year will actually remain in Liberia?

USAID has been working hard with the FDA (Forest Developmental Authority) to create truly revolutionary regulations for forestry here, including barcoded trees and logging strategies that look towards long term forest health. Making sure this happens will be another story of navigating bribes, failed promises and assessments (that may or may not have taken place).

Weighing environmental benefits against the need for economic growth is never easy. And this problem gets magnified in a country routinely exploited by the international companies they depends on for the capital and overhead needed to even start these operations in the first place.

With virgin forests becoming an increasingly rare resource around the world, greater debate should occur regarding the importance of both the forest and the trees, and how they can offer the maximal, long-term benefits to Liberia.

Two Amazing Finds

Although in Monrovia it can be impossibly hard to find things that you need - or things that work properly - sometimes the most amazing items just turn up.

In the above photo, please note that Liberia now has the morning after pill, with special emphasis on the sentiments behind taking it.

Below, transcribed from arguably the best 'greeting' card on record.

Front (floral border, cursive script):

IT'S ALL OVER
A message to let
you know that
I am not satisfied
with your
performance nor
encouraged by
your actions.
You can now
forget about me
and try someone
else elsewhere and
you may be luckier

Inside: (cursive script at bottom)

Truth sometimes hurts but it must be told.
And to keep patching things when I'm
displeased it's unlike me.
Our relationship was over a longtime ago.
Let's call a spade a spade.
WISHING YOU ALL THE VERY BEST
FOR THE FUTURE

(props to M-Safely for contributing both items)

Health[Don’t?]Care in Liberia: A Bit of a Story, A Bit of a Rant

photo courtesy of Katelyn Hendricks

Leaving behind an epic weekend of catching waves in Robertsport, the back seat of the car offered the perfect location for my blessed-out exhaustion; enjoying the music and late afternoon sun, three of us rolling out on the dirt road.

Things often go wrong at times like this.

Seeing people flagging frantically from the side of the road, it seemed just the usual problems of (very) limited transportation on the deserted road, and people eager to get home. Spotting the mangled car, upside down, 20 meters back from the road, and the blood on the people waving, we pulled over.

In all honesty, the scene was half as bad as I expected after the first glance of people lying all around the ditch. Mainly cuts, concussions, shock, possibly some broken bones or internal injuries, and one broken neck. (remarkable, considering the car flipped going VERY fast, according to some friends who left a few minutes ahead of us). W e bandaged the people up best we could, rearranged the car. John transported the people we could move to the hospital. Katelyn and I stayed with the broken neck.

This is where the insanity of health care here starts to reveal itself.

First of all, the hospital is located up a hill in town that requires navigating a severely potholed road. All the injured packed into the car moan with each jolt; which is understandable. John alerts the nurse at the door that he has four injured people, and they need to get back to the ambulance to collect the fifth, who is more serious. The nurse nonchalantly ambles around with no sense of immediacy and limited interest. She tells John to ‘slow down’, exhibits little interest in the only patients at the hospital, and essentially does nothing productive at all.

Since we need a collar to stabilize the man’s broken neck, this request is made. This is subsequently met with blank stares, despite pointing, gesturing and explaining. A collar is found (by John) in a supply room, much to the amazement of the nurse (later, back at the scene, the nurse will hand it to me upside down and backwards, simply stating with a shrug that she ‘doesn’t understand it’).

Now, the search for the ambulance driver begins, and only ends after some driving around town to find him, and pick him up. He drives like a madman back to the scene (obviously), screeching to a halt on the dirt road in an ambulance that we soon learn has NOT A SINGLE SUPPLY in it. No IV, no bandages, no pain meds, no rubber gloves, nothing. Just a stretcher on 2 foot elevated wheels (which, for anyone who has worked in first aid, you know this is relatively useless for a spinal).

In the meantime, broken neck man has been slipping in and out of conscious. When awake, he claims death is upon him, cries out in pain, and makes irrational demands to be moved into different positions. Typical fare of an injured person.

However, the nurse shows overt fear of touching him and demonstrates her complete incompetence in understanding a spinal injury (Seriously! That is one of the very first things you ever learn in even the most basic first aid courses!). The ambulance driver stands frozen on the side. We are, de facto, in charge of the scene, despite the presence of now two medical professionals.

We get the neck brace on, and devise a plan to move the patient onto the completely impractical stretcher using a surfboard. The nurse - still terrified and unable to anything useful - manages to make a controversial contribution: she removes his shoes, which she claims will make it easier to lift him.

The lifting process is a zoo, where the only semi-helpful person was some dude with a machete and a duffel bag that just happened to walk by. Nonethelss, I am glad I was a part of this move for the sole reason that the man would perhaps never have walked again without external advice.

In total Liberian fashion, out of nowhere, a doctor appears on the scene in a jam-packed Ministry of Health pickup. This is ironic (or serendipitous, or whatever) for two reasons: 1) only three cars have passed us in the two hours we have been there and 2) there are only around 50 doctors in the whole country.

His appearance is a mixed blessing. While he writes a script to get the man taken to Monrovia for cervical spine x-rays, which is great. Yet, he maintains a demeanor of ‘bossman’ disinterest in providing any help AT ALL on the scene, and largely ignores our questions about how to handle the patient. In fact, despite being two feet away, he has to be literally yelled at in order to stabilize the shoulder of the patient as we adjust him to fit into the ambulance.

He then loudly orders someone to NOT move the shoes the nurse removed, that are now sitting right behind the ambulance door. (?!?)

At this point, I have largely shut myself off from others at the scene (J and K excepted), partially due to disbelief, partly due to anger. John - who will later articulate his angers more eloquently - is sweating and livid at the level of incompetence surrounding us. Surreal is a bit of an understatement

- -

Not to spell out the obvious, but ultimately, getting hurt in Liberia is a scary prospect, and this was my sobering reminder. People often talk about health care in developing nations through the prism of hospitals, clinics and health stats such as infant mortality. Primary care, however, is rarely discussed.

I highly doubt that stats exist here about how many people die or experience significantly worse injuries as a result of mishandling patients at accident scenes, but I am positive this number would cause me to swear. Before this, I have seen two accidents where critically injured people were literally grabbed from all angles and heaved onto the back of trucks. Some other friends watched in horror as ambulance drivers arrived at an accident, and promptly picked up a motorcyclist with a split-open head by the hands and feet and literally chucked him into a pick up. He died in hospital later that day.

Having myself suffered a broken neck in a car accident, and a herniated disk from surfing, I shudder and cringe every time I picture the spinal patient from our accident being moved in such a fashion, and the consequences of that kind of carelessness.

Effective primary care is critical to saving lives. When the attending nurse doesn’t know shit about how to treat a spinal issue, a doctor is ordering shoes to be left on the scene and ambulances roll up without a single supply, this can never be achieved, and regular people die unnecessarily.

For me, this accident was a serious reminder about the importance of maintaining personal safety in country with limited health care. Being proactive about getting your own first aid training, and asking coworkers to do the same is not lame, pedantic or overly worrisome, which for some reason, many people seem to believe; it should be essential. It takes a weekend to get your basic first aid and costs less than $ 100 (in Canada, at least), and a bit more time/money for more advanced courses.

Carry rubber gloves, sterile pads, tape, and, if possible, a mask. You will never be sorry that you did.

Props to John and Katelyn for being more the most effective aspects of this accident, despite the presence of three ‘professional’ health care workers, and the truck full of Ministry of Health workers who rolled up.

New School Luddites: Carrier Pigeons vs The Internet

For anyone who has worked in Africa, parts of of Asia, has a parent with dial-up (muh-umm, seriously!) or had a hotmail account in the nineties, you have threatened a computer and/or the internet with its life. (Admit it).

But what to do?

Well, if you are clever, endeavouring technologist who moonlights in ornithology, this could be your answer: carrier pigeons.

Fed up with the inability of their 'ADSL' provider to deliver files in an interconnected manner, a company decided to strap 4-gigs of memory to a winged rat, send it to the same location as their desired recipient and see who wins. For all the luddites out there, you will be happy to see that the BBC article on this topic confirms that old school still rules, and Winston the Pigeon won easily.


"Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data," the article reports.

Coming off my first week back in Liberia, where download speeds reached as low as 258 bytes/sec (yeah, I said bytes, not kb) which took a year off my life as I struggled to download a 'massive' 48 kb Word document, this struck a chord with me big time.

You could send a 3 legged sloth hopped up on Quaaludes across Monrovia faster than you could send 4G's. And at the risk of promoting more vermin in this city, I say bring on the pigeons.

Hilariously, the article comes with a video that I can't download.

(Props to John for informing me of this article, Google Reader for reminding me of it this morning and to Winston for representing)

And speaking of Canada...

This is pretty amazing stuff. A white South African not only claiming, but receiving refugee status in Canada based on the high crime rate, and the purported anti-white sentiment that inhibits his safety. Not that South Africa is free of race issues, but seriously, check this article out out and ask yourself where this falls on the priority list of refugees - paging Congo!

(props to my South African homey for making fun of me for this story, and thus bringing it to The Esteyonage. He's escaping the 'crime crisis' in S.A. by flying planes in Peshwar and Kabul. Stay safe, bru!)


On a similar tilt, courtesy of Glenna Gordon (who runs a great blog and photo site, if you didn't already know it), give a read of Alex Halperin's insightfully sardonic piece that traverses the complicated issue of race relations in East Africa. Full text here, but a little excerpt that I think sums up some of the hypocrisy that his article wrestles with.

"A few years ago, a Chinese tourist was standing on the rim of Mount Nyiragongo, a live volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo, snapping photographs as the lake of lava smoked and bubbled hundreds of yards below her. Straining for an angle, out on a ledge, something happened and she fell like a cartoon character down the inside of the crater. Apparently still alive, she lay a distance from the lava but a first rescue attempt, using a United Nations helicopter, had to be aborted. When a rescue team of climbers finally reached her, she had died. A rebar cross juts out of the volcano's lip where she fell. Within 50 miles of Mount Nyiragongo, tens of thousands of people live in refugee camps. The UN provides them with calories and tarps to sleep under. I don't think it would fish a refugee out of the volcano.

Every day Africans are reminded just how little the world thinks their lives are worth. Many spend their days being counted, patronized, and poked by well-meaning foreigners. Many more are completely ignored."

Escape from/to Paradise

Trapped in the eerie pre-post-apocalyptic haze of an especially violent meteor, the wild (and vicious) dingoes were already upon us, calling dibs on the carcasses of myself and some of my closest companions as we ducked, gripped by fear. I can't get into all the details, just picture 'The Road', or 'The Stand' and you'll understand that we barely made it out with our lives.

Point being, I escaped the dangerous assignment of 'chill time back in Canada', and have returned to the safety and sanity of Liberia.

Goodbye serene lakes, (actual) 'good-good friends', healthy and delicious food: hello power outages, insanely slow internet, and constant yelling.

For serious though, spending some time in 'somewhat northern' Canada, away from internetting, phoneage and responsibilities - including blogging - was toooo sweet. Heavenly almost. But its also nice to be back here for another stint.

Back for two days, I have mainly slept, surfed and tried to find solutions to the classic, 'surprise! no housing ready yet!' that met me at the airport. And the complete lack of power at my current abode, where I can't possibly stay another night. (Among other challenges that don't really warrant expansion.)

I see things taking a real turn upwards real soon-like, in particular in the productivity department.

And to my most recent anonymous commenter: I copied the spelling of 'nagh' under this blog's title from dictionary phonetics for 'espionage', my obvious source of mimicry. Nonetheless, I am contemplating your highly sensible idea.

Until soon,

werd