It sort of came out of the blue. The conversations and negotiations started way back in January, I think it was, and now here I am: writing at 2:48 in the morning, Luanda time.
It is SO different this time around. I don't mean the city is different, though it is--lots of construction, noise and dust almost around the clock it seems--but the experience is different.
Last time, four years ago, the time was spent with, and working for, smallholder farmers. I got to go out into the field, into some pretty funky places, and get a sense of what people were going through as they put their lives back together after the long civil war. I stayed in a pension with other people on missions like my own. I got to hunt mosquitoes every night before bedding down in a netted sarcophagus, feeling like I was hiding from a monster just outside the zippered opening. It was a much sportier existence: bad light, a cataract in one eye that screwed up my depth perception and made me so useless as a bug hunter you could almost hear the little bastards laughing through their pointy little needle-noses.
This time round, on the other hand, I'm in a luxury hotel--me and a few hundred business people and oil executives. Every time I get in the elevator it smells of a different kind of cologne. No mosquitoes...well, all right, that part's pretty nice. Room service. Rolls and butter for $8 in the restaurant. Cold lobster salad. Car and driver to pick me up in the morning and drop me off at night.
I work each day, have done for the last four days now, with a group of capable people at the national bank, We're trying to come up with an information campaign that might encourage people to open bank accounts. It's a problem, really, and not just for the tax authorities.
But my point is that the hard realities of life here rarely intrude. I don't go out on my own because the city is, it hardly seems possible, even less safe. I'm insulated, cosseted, overcharged for stuff. There is, though, the occasional reminder. One reason more people don't have bank accounts is they have no identity papers; the government is just getting around, after the long, hard years, of issuing these things. To get papers in the past, you had to have a birth certificate; but if you weren't born in the hospital you weren't registered, and many if not most people are NOT born in hospitals; or if the town center where you lived was blown up during the war, there are no records anyway.
The other problem is, nobody knows who owns the land. Waves of fighting surged over this land time and time again, from all directions, and each wave left the driftwood of displaced people scattered across the landscape. If there was once title vested in someone--which, after the colonists left, was rare enough since they didn't permit much ownership by black Africans--chances are it was a man, and chances are he was killed.
The old soap factory, home to a humming community of the dispossessed and the violent in their thousands, cooking inside the roofless walls and breeding God knows what future problems, has been closed. The president says it's because his mansion isn't secure, so everyone inside a wide perimeter has had to move out. One imagines this was not a compassionate change. And it's curious: the soap factory anchors one end of the great corniche that arches around the bay, just yards from the shining blue water and only a few blocks west from new luxury condo buildings; and there are cranes being assembled over the ruinous site. Security?
wow. I can't wait to hear more about this trip when you come to DC.
Posted by: Alissa | June 11, 2009 at 01:01 PM