Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like
There exists a subject that would not constitute polite dinner table conversation at home, but that becomes a favourite mealtime topic over which to bond as soon as one enters the magical realm of Expat Aid Workerness. This topic never gets old because it affects each and every EAW at some point. It’s known as gut rot, running stomach, the shits, two bob bits, Montezuma’s revenge, Delhi belly and other fine euphemisms. And EAWs find it to be one of the most interesting topics on earth.
When home, EAWs greet their coworkers with a friendly, “Good morning.” They engage in congenial neighborhood competition over the tidiness of their lawn. But out in the field, everything is different: asking “How is your pooping going?” is a common way to start the day, and bragging rights are earned by descriptions of bowel movements so graphic they would be considered TMI for even an appointment with a gastroenterologist. When the EAW is jetting around the world, communing with local, impoverished people, a spice that doesn’t sit right or a parasite that wreaks havoc is bound to make its way into the EAW’s intestinal tract on an almost daily basis. And that spice or parasite must be discussed—in detail. Because if there is one thing EAWs love more than sharing hints on the best kebab stand in town, it’s talking about their legendary experiences with the after-effects of a meal there.
Nothing says I am a hard core, badass EAW than a good, hard core case of gut rot. Now we are not talking about the kind of ‘upset stomach’ that M & E missions from HQ get when coming for 5 days, after eating salad that wasn’t washed in filtered water. We are talking about the kind that has you bent over double with cramps and limping politely out of coordination meetings hoping to find a WC nearby that 1) has water 2) has a loo roll 3) flushes. EAW scales on which to measure the bad-ass-ness of your latest bout have been created for such situations; ten being liquid and one being bloody impossible to do anything. A number 5 is a cause for celebration.
Trying to pin point the cause of the problem can provide endless fun, particularly if it was local food. Maybe it was that plastic bag full of batunda, or the chicken kebab from the lady outside the bus station or a dodgy bit of crab in that matapa last night. Discussing the finer points of Cipro (used so often its name gets shortened, like an old friend) verses Amoxicillin and the miraculous properties of Buscopan as an excellent anti spasmodic become the norm. Self medication is particularly welcomed, however even better is being sent to a “regional center of excellence” like Nairobi or Johannesburg for treatment. Ordinary food poisoning is enough to garner some attention if the symptoms were severe enough and the situation extreme enough, but to contract an actual named disease on which to blame the diarrhea is much more of a point of pride. If it can be diagnosed professionally as giardia (bronze) or amoebic dysentery (silver) then this is good, but if it’s so bad that the cause mystifies even the doctors in JBG, and it’s put down to “Africa crud” (gold) then this is even better.
Stories that in normal company would be seen as humiliating are worn as a badge of honor among the EAW community. “Once I almost didn’t make it through customs in Tunis because I kept running out of line to go to the toilet and customs officials thought I was up to suspicious activity” and “Once an entire compound in an African village watched me shit on their pit latrine and then wipe my ass with my hand” are both totally acceptable dinnertime stories at EAW gatherings.
In no other workplace in the world is it more common to hear about someone’s toilet exploits than it is in an EAW field office. There’s no shame in discussing the hours spent cramped in the bathroom, in fact, the longer an EAW has suffered, the more impressive they become to their colleagues. Levels of field cred can be increased by the way you handle various types of lavatories. There’s your sit down, your squat and aim and then your balance and pray that the square of wood you’re hovering over doesn’t collapse. There are the make shift long drops which seem to attract every fly or buzzing insect in the area, with your only protection from the other members of your team being a UNCHR plastic blue sheet. And then there are the moments on the road from somewhere to somewhere, where you know that the verges could be riddled with AP landmines, and so bang goes the option of privacy behind a bush; you just have to suck it up and deal with going alongside the road, behind the back wheel of your trusty Toyota 13-seater hardtop and hope that a pickup full of locals does not zoom past before you’ve got your trousers up again. (Now you realize why local women prefer skirts!)
Setting aside the pain, discomfort and downright shittines of the situation, a good case of gut rot does have its benefits. Not only does an EAW already have one advantage over their friends at home or HQ colleagues — they are a damn sight more tanned — but a good case of gut rot now and again makes them svelte and even more attractive. Need to drop 7kg? Don’t go to the gym!! Become an EAW and the weight just drops off.
The only bummer about these amazing and exotic stories (aside from the dire intestinal pain and the ruined pairs of underwear) is that EAWs know they can’t use them to impress all their Facebook friends back home. As a status update, “Just shat my pants,” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Just stepped off a helicopter.”
http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/05/18/57-talking-about-poop-2/
Combined posts, by Carly who blogs at Chasing Carly; and tweets @chasingcarly, Katie Seward who blogs at Eating Stuff Everywhere, and UXO.
Friday, November 4, 2011
Visit From the Parents... or Knee Deep in Awesome
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| Pool at the hotel |
So, as a precursor, I feel like my blog posts have been a bit negative of late, and I am going to try to get back on a positive track with this edition. Last weekend my parents flew down to El Salvador and we spent five days hanging out there in the picturesque town of Suchitoto. It was an amazing weekend for a number of reasons, first and foremost being that I had not seen my mother for the last 16 months (since june of 2010). This is by far the longest time I have ever gone without seeing her and it was definitely starting to wear on me (though apparently not as much as it was wearing on her, seeing as she dropped her bags and sprinted across the airport to hug me when I showed up to pick her and my father up).
Overall the weekend was amazing and full awesome side adventures (like our trip visit to a local illegal chaparo still [chaparo is a kind of local moonshine made from corn], and our visit to the village I worked in with an aid trip 4 years ago]). The highlights however (besides seeing my parents of course), were the sweet hotel we stayed at and the amazing food we ate. While this may make me see shallow (just concentrating on creature comforts), try to imagine how amazing a high priced hotel and good international food would be after 16 months of living on $8 a day in a tiny mud brick house that smells like mold and rats (for those of you without imagination, it is really, really amazing). I ate like a pirate king for 5 days, nothing but delicious food (I had 2 american style steaks, sushi, and even jamon serrano imported from Spain… that’s right expensive imported ham) and top shelf booze (well except for the moonshine, that was some pretty bottom shelf booze [like hobo booze]). Overall it was an spectacular weekend with my parents and my good friends from the states who live in Suchitoto.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Featured Content: Honduras Becomes Cocaine Hub
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — On Honduras' swampy Mosquitia coast, entire villages have made a way of life off the country's massive cocaine transshipment trade. In broad daylight, men, women and children descend on passing go-fast boats to offload bales of cocaine destined for the United States.
Along the Atlantic coast, the wealthy elite have accumulated dozens of ranches, yachts and mansions from the drug trade. And in San Pedro Sula, local gangs moving drugs north have spawned armies of street-level dealers whose violence has given the rougher neighborhoods of the northern industrial city a homicide rate that is only comparable to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Long an impoverished backwater in Central America, Honduras has become a main transit route for South American cocaine.
"Honduras is the number one offload point for traffickers to take cocaine through Mexico to the U.S.," said a U.S. law enforcement official who could not be quoted by name for security reasons. A U.S. State Department report released in March called Honduras "one of the primary landing points for South American cocaine."
Almost half of the cocaine that reaches the United States is now offloaded somewhere along the country's coast and heavily forested interior — a total of 20 to 25 tons each month, according to U.S. and Honduran estimates. Authorities intercept perhaps 5 percent of that, according to calculations by The Associated Press based on official estimates of flow and seizures.
The flow is hard to stem, said Alfredo Landaverde, a former adviser to the Honduran security ministry, because there are few other sources of cash income here.
"We have to recognize that this society is very vulnerable," Landaverde said. "This is a country permeated by corruption, among police commanders, businessmen, politicians."
The country's isolated, impoverished Atlantic coast, remote ranches and largely unguarded border with Guatemala — where much of the cocaine is taken — also make it a haven for traffickers.
"When the traffickers are unloading a go-fast boat in (the Atlantic coast province of) Gracias a Dios, you can sometimes see 70 to 100 people of all ages out there helping unload it," said the U.S. law enforcement official. "The traffickers look for support among local populations."
In the past year, authorities seized 12 tons of cocaine, according to the Honduran government — a vast improvement from previous years, but still a small portion of the estimated 250 to 300 tons that come through annually. Most of the cocaine arrives in Honduras via the sea, in speedboats, fishing vessels and even submersibles. In July, the U.S. Coast Guard, with Honduras' help, detained one such craft that had been plying the waters with about 5 tons of cocaine per trip.
Fishermen who once worked catching lobster now look instead for a much more prized catch, the so-called "white lobster" — bales of cocaine jettisoned by drug traffickers to either escape detection or to be picked up by another boat.
Honduras is also by far the region's biggest center for airborne smuggling. Of the hundreds of illicit flights northward out of South America, 79 percent land in Honduras, said the U.S. official. Ninety-five percent of those flights hail from Venezuela, which also has become a link for cocaine produced elsewhere.
Landing aircraft in Honduras was once so profitable and planes so easy to get that traffickers would sometimes simply offload the drugs and burn the aircraft, rather than take off again from dangerously rudimentary clandestine landing strips. Last year, however, they started reusing the planes to ferry loads of bulk cash back to Colombia, the U.S. State Department report said. Authorities found one load of $9 million in U.S. cash stuffed in plastic bags in the trunk of a car, and millions at a time in suitcases at local airports.
Earlier this year, as aircraft became more difficult to obtain, traffickers stole a military plane from the San Pedro Sula army base on the Atlantic coast, said Landaverde, adding that soldiers were accomplices to the theft.
"The plane is left outside," he said. "Some guys turn it on and take off. Nobody leaves a plane like that, ready to fly." In fact, one of the soldiers involved in that incident was later arrested in September with other ex-soldiers as they allegedly waited to meet a drug flight on the country's Atlantic coast.
It is not just poverty-stricken fishermen and corrupt soldiers who are the beneficiaries of the emergent cocaine republic. Last week, authorities seized 13 luxurious homes and ranches and 17 boats in the first such mass raid since the country enacted a drug-properties seizure law in 2010. All were owned by local people.
Key members of the region's business community who have hotel, real estate and retail holdings have been named as associates of the cartels, often for money laundering. Nor are the drug trade's ripple effects restricted to the coast.
Copan, a Guatemalan border province popular with tourists because of its Mayan ruins, is a lawless area dominated by business interests tied to the drug trade, said a radio station owner who asked not to be quoted by name for security reasons.
"These people move without shame in politics and the business world," the station owner said. "They are involved in large-scale businesses in tourism. This region has been separated from the nation's territory. It is their lair."
At the other end of the economic spectrum are local street gangs, who are often paid in drugs as well as cash to move drugs north. Their ranks are growing and competition among them has pushed up the country's escalating homicide rate to one of the highest in the world. The country of 7.7 million people saw 6,200 killings in 2010. That's the equivalent of 82.1 homicides per 100,000 people — well above the 66 per 100,000 in neighboring El Salvador.
Others are becoming players in the bulk trade, the U.S. official said, remarking that, "Lately, we've seen some gangs that will purchase the cocaine and resell it."
The high volume of drugs coupled with the alarming homicide rate is tough to address in a nation where many police and army officers are working with drug gangs. Corrupt law enforcement officials had a fierce foe in the person of former Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, who was fired by President Porfirio Lobo in September after proposing a law to purge the police force of corrupt cops.
Alvarez had said publicly that some corrupt police essentially act as air traffic controllers for the drug flights. When a suspected drug flight was detected in August, Alvarez was quoted by a local newspaper as saying that two police officials not assigned to the district were in the area — their cellphone signals were traced to the control tower where the plane landed.
Alvarez claimed he was fired because of his campaign to clean up the police force, saying, "It was easier to get rid of a minister than to get rid of a corrupt cop."
But his replacement, Pompeyo Bonilla, said that given Honduras' highly protective labor laws, a mass firing of police officers probably would have been quickly followed by the reinstatement of many. He also claimed that Alvarez overstepped his authority by sending his proposed police cleanup law to congress without even telling Lobo.
"The president heard about it on television," Bonilla said.
Alvarez, who left for the United States soon after his dismissal, was not available for an interview, according to an unidentified woman who answered his U.S. cellphone number.
U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubiske said she expects to work well with Bonilla. "President Lobo's administration is totally serious about fighting the cartels," Kubiske said. "When you talk to them, counternarcotics is almost the first word out of their mouths."
Alvarez was accustomed to dropping bombshells, including the claim that fugitive Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman had visited Honduras' border region next to Guatemala.
In March, police under Alvarez's command raided a remote mountain lab in northeastern Honduras. Alvarez said the lab processed cocaine from the paste of partly processed coca leaves, the first time that would have been done outside South America and an ominous development for Honduras. The lab, however, had apparently not yet been put to use. Bonilla said the lab was a small one, quickly dismantled, and no other such lab has been discovered in Honduras. "We are rather more a transit route" than a producer or processor, Bonilla said.
Some doubt the lab was intended to process coca paste; it may have been simply dedicated to cutting and repackaging imported cocaine, which is usually cut many times before it reaches the street.
"We haven't seen any evidence of cocaine processing taking place in Honduras so far," the U.S. official said, adding, "Twelve thousand kilos of cocaine were seized in Honduras this year, and we haven't seen a single ounce of cocaine paste."
Associated Press writer Luis Alonso in Washington contributed to this report.
Along the Atlantic coast, the wealthy elite have accumulated dozens of ranches, yachts and mansions from the drug trade. And in San Pedro Sula, local gangs moving drugs north have spawned armies of street-level dealers whose violence has given the rougher neighborhoods of the northern industrial city a homicide rate that is only comparable to Kabul, Afghanistan.
Long an impoverished backwater in Central America, Honduras has become a main transit route for South American cocaine.
"Honduras is the number one offload point for traffickers to take cocaine through Mexico to the U.S.," said a U.S. law enforcement official who could not be quoted by name for security reasons. A U.S. State Department report released in March called Honduras "one of the primary landing points for South American cocaine."
Almost half of the cocaine that reaches the United States is now offloaded somewhere along the country's coast and heavily forested interior — a total of 20 to 25 tons each month, according to U.S. and Honduran estimates. Authorities intercept perhaps 5 percent of that, according to calculations by The Associated Press based on official estimates of flow and seizures.
The flow is hard to stem, said Alfredo Landaverde, a former adviser to the Honduran security ministry, because there are few other sources of cash income here.
"We have to recognize that this society is very vulnerable," Landaverde said. "This is a country permeated by corruption, among police commanders, businessmen, politicians."
The country's isolated, impoverished Atlantic coast, remote ranches and largely unguarded border with Guatemala — where much of the cocaine is taken — also make it a haven for traffickers.
"When the traffickers are unloading a go-fast boat in (the Atlantic coast province of) Gracias a Dios, you can sometimes see 70 to 100 people of all ages out there helping unload it," said the U.S. law enforcement official. "The traffickers look for support among local populations."
In the past year, authorities seized 12 tons of cocaine, according to the Honduran government — a vast improvement from previous years, but still a small portion of the estimated 250 to 300 tons that come through annually. Most of the cocaine arrives in Honduras via the sea, in speedboats, fishing vessels and even submersibles. In July, the U.S. Coast Guard, with Honduras' help, detained one such craft that had been plying the waters with about 5 tons of cocaine per trip.
Fishermen who once worked catching lobster now look instead for a much more prized catch, the so-called "white lobster" — bales of cocaine jettisoned by drug traffickers to either escape detection or to be picked up by another boat.
Honduras is also by far the region's biggest center for airborne smuggling. Of the hundreds of illicit flights northward out of South America, 79 percent land in Honduras, said the U.S. official. Ninety-five percent of those flights hail from Venezuela, which also has become a link for cocaine produced elsewhere.
Landing aircraft in Honduras was once so profitable and planes so easy to get that traffickers would sometimes simply offload the drugs and burn the aircraft, rather than take off again from dangerously rudimentary clandestine landing strips. Last year, however, they started reusing the planes to ferry loads of bulk cash back to Colombia, the U.S. State Department report said. Authorities found one load of $9 million in U.S. cash stuffed in plastic bags in the trunk of a car, and millions at a time in suitcases at local airports.
Earlier this year, as aircraft became more difficult to obtain, traffickers stole a military plane from the San Pedro Sula army base on the Atlantic coast, said Landaverde, adding that soldiers were accomplices to the theft.
"The plane is left outside," he said. "Some guys turn it on and take off. Nobody leaves a plane like that, ready to fly." In fact, one of the soldiers involved in that incident was later arrested in September with other ex-soldiers as they allegedly waited to meet a drug flight on the country's Atlantic coast.
It is not just poverty-stricken fishermen and corrupt soldiers who are the beneficiaries of the emergent cocaine republic. Last week, authorities seized 13 luxurious homes and ranches and 17 boats in the first such mass raid since the country enacted a drug-properties seizure law in 2010. All were owned by local people.
Key members of the region's business community who have hotel, real estate and retail holdings have been named as associates of the cartels, often for money laundering. Nor are the drug trade's ripple effects restricted to the coast.
Copan, a Guatemalan border province popular with tourists because of its Mayan ruins, is a lawless area dominated by business interests tied to the drug trade, said a radio station owner who asked not to be quoted by name for security reasons.
"These people move without shame in politics and the business world," the station owner said. "They are involved in large-scale businesses in tourism. This region has been separated from the nation's territory. It is their lair."
At the other end of the economic spectrum are local street gangs, who are often paid in drugs as well as cash to move drugs north. Their ranks are growing and competition among them has pushed up the country's escalating homicide rate to one of the highest in the world. The country of 7.7 million people saw 6,200 killings in 2010. That's the equivalent of 82.1 homicides per 100,000 people — well above the 66 per 100,000 in neighboring El Salvador.
Others are becoming players in the bulk trade, the U.S. official said, remarking that, "Lately, we've seen some gangs that will purchase the cocaine and resell it."
The high volume of drugs coupled with the alarming homicide rate is tough to address in a nation where many police and army officers are working with drug gangs. Corrupt law enforcement officials had a fierce foe in the person of former Honduran Security Minister Oscar Alvarez, who was fired by President Porfirio Lobo in September after proposing a law to purge the police force of corrupt cops.
Alvarez had said publicly that some corrupt police essentially act as air traffic controllers for the drug flights. When a suspected drug flight was detected in August, Alvarez was quoted by a local newspaper as saying that two police officials not assigned to the district were in the area — their cellphone signals were traced to the control tower where the plane landed.
Alvarez claimed he was fired because of his campaign to clean up the police force, saying, "It was easier to get rid of a minister than to get rid of a corrupt cop."
But his replacement, Pompeyo Bonilla, said that given Honduras' highly protective labor laws, a mass firing of police officers probably would have been quickly followed by the reinstatement of many. He also claimed that Alvarez overstepped his authority by sending his proposed police cleanup law to congress without even telling Lobo.
"The president heard about it on television," Bonilla said.
Alvarez, who left for the United States soon after his dismissal, was not available for an interview, according to an unidentified woman who answered his U.S. cellphone number.
U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubiske said she expects to work well with Bonilla. "President Lobo's administration is totally serious about fighting the cartels," Kubiske said. "When you talk to them, counternarcotics is almost the first word out of their mouths."
Alvarez was accustomed to dropping bombshells, including the claim that fugitive Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman had visited Honduras' border region next to Guatemala.
In March, police under Alvarez's command raided a remote mountain lab in northeastern Honduras. Alvarez said the lab processed cocaine from the paste of partly processed coca leaves, the first time that would have been done outside South America and an ominous development for Honduras. The lab, however, had apparently not yet been put to use. Bonilla said the lab was a small one, quickly dismantled, and no other such lab has been discovered in Honduras. "We are rather more a transit route" than a producer or processor, Bonilla said.
Some doubt the lab was intended to process coca paste; it may have been simply dedicated to cutting and repackaging imported cocaine, which is usually cut many times before it reaches the street.
"We haven't seen any evidence of cocaine processing taking place in Honduras so far," the U.S. official said, adding, "Twelve thousand kilos of cocaine were seized in Honduras this year, and we haven't seen a single ounce of cocaine paste."
Associated Press writer Luis Alonso in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Up in the Air
I just got back from a whirlwind weekend in Atlanta, GA for a good friend's wedding, which was a welcome 3 day break from Honduras. Anyway, before the flight I got into a conversation with another volunteer in the airport at San Pedro Sula about flight rituals, which got me thinking that it would probably make a pretty decent blog post. I realized, when talking to her, that I do have a lot of "rituals," which really surprised me. I'm not a superstitious person, but I feel almost required to do a cacophonous list of things before and during the flight.
It also reminded me of the first time I flew into Honduras, and howabsolutely terrifying tense of an experience it was. I remember that when we landed, barely missing the rooftops of mountain clung houses, that everyone in the plane broke out into applause. Not a bad way to start two years of your life.
Window seat. Always. No questions asked. To me it's the smarter move for comfort and a more enjoyable flight. I think part of the reason for me doing this was because as a kid I would sit on the roof of our house and watch the planes line up for their approach into O'Hare. Roof sitting, always classic.
If I'm not drinking, by the way cheers to the Delta flight attendant who hooked me up with about 7 free drink tickets for my flight back to Honduras. Anyway, if I'm not drinking, I'm ordering a milk with ice. I blame that one on a roommate from college. Also, nowadays it is great to get a cold glass of milk, because a lot of times milk in Honduras is served warm or heated up. I still don't get that one.
I'll always sneak my headphones on during takeoff to play the same song, and I have no idea why. If you start playing Jack's Mannequin, "The Mixed Tape" as the pilot throttles the engines up for take off, I've found that the music matches the actions of the plane taking off perfectly. Try it.
The kid in me loves turbulance. If I'm paying $400 for a ticket, you better make the flight as memorable and as fun as possible.
Don't drink for at least 12 hours before and international flight. Standing in lines con una goma is terrrible. Read a book instead.
Finally, there is not a better thing in the world than flying back into Chicago. Whether it be MDW or O'Hare, day or night. Seeing the city skyline back-dropped against Lake Michigan is an unbeatable experience. It's made even better by the fact that it usually means your coming home, back to green colored street signs and "fireworks over Lake Michigan."
It also reminded me of the first time I flew into Honduras, and how
Landing at Toncontin is still considered one of the most technically difficult and dangerous landings for commercial airliners.
"Air "Rituals"
Window seat. Always. No questions asked. To me it's the smarter move for comfort and a more enjoyable flight. I think part of the reason for me doing this was because as a kid I would sit on the roof of our house and watch the planes line up for their approach into O'Hare. Roof sitting, always classic.
If I'm not drinking, by the way cheers to the Delta flight attendant who hooked me up with about 7 free drink tickets for my flight back to Honduras. Anyway, if I'm not drinking, I'm ordering a milk with ice. I blame that one on a roommate from college. Also, nowadays it is great to get a cold glass of milk, because a lot of times milk in Honduras is served warm or heated up. I still don't get that one.
I'll always sneak my headphones on during takeoff to play the same song, and I have no idea why. If you start playing Jack's Mannequin, "The Mixed Tape" as the pilot throttles the engines up for take off, I've found that the music matches the actions of the plane taking off perfectly. Try it.
The kid in me loves turbulance. If I'm paying $400 for a ticket, you better make the flight as memorable and as fun as possible.
Don't drink for at least 12 hours before and international flight. Standing in lines con una goma is terrrible. Read a book instead.
Finally, there is not a better thing in the world than flying back into Chicago. Whether it be MDW or O'Hare, day or night. Seeing the city skyline back-dropped against Lake Michigan is an unbeatable experience. It's made even better by the fact that it usually means your coming home, back to green colored street signs and "fireworks over Lake Michigan."
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