On the road with the U.S. military

Last week we went to Djibouti, a country that, until recently, some people didn't know existed. Besides being the punchline for grade-school geography jokes, Djibouti has a lot to offer, if what you're looking for is humidity and flies the size of toasters.

Djibouti is also the home of the only U.S. military base in the region, at Camp Lemonier on the Red Sea, which is where we were headed for a story on the war on terror in East Africa. The troops were going to escort us to the remote town of Gode, in Ethiopia's Ogaden desert, to see one of their projects -- installing a water pump in a poor village. Photog Evelyn and I slept on base last Monday night because we had to report early for our 6 a.m. flight -- at 3 a.m. Our public affairs liaison, Shannon, apologized, but it was the only way we could get to Gode and back in one day. "And trust me," she said, "you don't want to spend the night in Gode."

We whiled away the early morning hours watching a DVD of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," currently the most popular film on base. (The troops like to go around quoting, "You know how I know you're gay?") The flight on a C-130 cargo plane was pretty smooth, and the Army officers waiting for us in Gode took us around the area quite efficiently. Sitting in the back of their vans, bouncing over rough terrain and munching on military MREs, we felt very welcomed. (And the Mexican-style chicken and rice tasted surprisingly, well, Mexican.)

By 2 p.m., however, our tour was over and Evelyn and I had hit the wall. The heat and swirling dust were hard to bear, despite the steady supply of cold bottled water (from Saudi Arabia). We headed back to the airstrip, where we watched another cargo plane, a C-17, load up to return to the base in Djibouti. When it took off, we expected our C-130 to land. It was supposedly circling the runway, waiting for the go-ahead to descend. But it didn't. Minutes passed. Finally we got the bad news: the plane had run low on fuel and the pilot had turned around and gone back to base.

Shannon, an Air Force lieutenant, got a lot of crap from the Army guys in Gode about her branch of the military screwing this one up. (It was a bit more complicated than that: planes only leave with enough fuel for their mission, and the C-130 had been circling for a lot longer than expected.) Chuckling, the Army guys drove us back to their base in Gode, relishing the chance to torment two journalists on their bad fortune.

To call Gode a one-horse town would be overstating it; it's more like a one-donkey town. The troops had set up shop in an old hotel, a U-shaped block of rooms with a dusty courtyard in the middle that until recently served as a parking lot. Now it has benches and a smattering of workout equipment. There's a kitched staffed by Ethiopian cooks, who do a lot of capable variations on goat meat.

We slept outside on cots, like many of the troops. They're not the most comfortable things in the world, especially without sheets, but having been up since before 3 a.m. we'd have slept anywhere. There were mosquito nets tied in knots over the beds, but as I untied mine a thick cloud of dust fell from the net onto my bed. You just can't get away from this stuff in Ethiopia. So I was left with a very African dilemma -- would I rather sleep on a bed coated in dust or risk getting eaten alive by mosquitoes? Figuring I'd get a shower back at the base and malaria is lethal, I chose the dust.

The next day we were back at Camp Lemonier, which felt like the Bellagio by comparison. The base has expanded in the past two years -- it now boasts a large gym and a Burger King truck, and there are plans for an indoor basketball court and coffee shop. It's certainly not the most glamorous place to be posted; on off nights troops have few other options in town than a tiny bowling alley or the dingy casino at the Sheraton. But Lemonier is big, comfortable, and on Wednesday nights you can play bingo with the troops for ridiculously high stakes -- $20 buy-in, $200 per game for the winner, and up to $1500 if you win the last game of the night. It's not exactly Vegas, but in Djibouti it's close enough.

The C-130 cargo plane we flew to and from Gode. I have to tell you, this thing is pretty awesome to see. That's a Hummer coming out the back. 

The main marketplace in Gode. Most people didn't want their pictures taken, and would wave us off or even throw things when we'd pull out our cameras. Hence the rather uninteresting shot of this woman's back, although it does show off her cool outfit. 

Shopkeepers in Gode, loving life. This little stall had everything -- shampoo, canned food, candy canes, even luggage. 

We came across this photo shop in the marketplace and Evelyn decided she had to have the kitschy sign. Aidan, the military translator at left, bargained the shopowner down from $100 to about $12. (By the way, that sweet man-skirt Aidan and the other guy are wearing is called the macawis, and I wish I'd bought one. They look really comfortable.) 

Evelyn shows off her souvenir. Aidan told us the faint writing at the bottom says, "Stand up straight and be ready." That's good advice for life. The sign had seen better days, and I think Evelyn will be picking out termites for months to come.

Hut in Gode. This is how a lot of people in the Ogaden live, in shacks made of twigs and branches, covered in whatever fabric they can find. What's always astonishing is how clean the huts are on the inside. 

Southern Ethiopia is perpetually in drought and famine. We came across this goat carcass on a drive outside Gode. 

In much of Africa, women do a lot of the important domestic work, like herding goats. 

As you can see, we were a hit with the kids. I think the one in the black is trying to stare me down. 

Building collapse

Thanks to those of you who wrote/called about the building collapse in downtown Nairobi yesterday. Our office is about a kilometer from the site, but yesterday I was writing at home and didn't know about the collapse until my assistant, Eric, called about 2:30 p.m. -- not long after the building went down. So I and my regular photographer, Evelyn, were among the first foreign journalists to arrive.

 

Despite the limited scale of the accident, the scene was chaos. People were digging into the rubble with their bare hands. Emergency workers were yelling for the most basic supplies -- a hammer, a flashlight. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people had crammed the street to see what was going on, forcing police officers to switch to crowd control. Red Cross workers busied themselves forming human chains to keep people at bay so ambulances could get to the scene. It wasn't until Kenya's feared special police showed up, wearing their trademark red berets, that the crowd started to behave.

 

We'll probably hear stories of dramatic rescues over the next couple of days as people slowly are pulled out. But the initial disorganization of the rescue effort might have cost lives. Today, that's all anyone is talking about -- how unprepared the city seemed, for a relatively small-scale accident in central Nairobi.

 

The greater, though less surprising, tragedy is that the collapse is in all likelihood due to sloppy construction. The building -- a commercial complex in a busy business district -- had gone up in less than three months, with construction crews working day and night. One worker told us from his hospital bed, "We were constructing floor after floor even when the cement of the one beneath us had not dried to the required standard. That's why the building caved in."

 

Buildings go up so damn fast in this city, who knows how many construction codes are being violated, or whether there are any. In my neighborhood, cookie-cutter apartment blocks are sprouting like mushrooms, so quickly that the electricity grid can't handle it -- we had a dozen brief power cuts this weekend alone. Last month, when the earthquake hit in Congo, the only buildings where cracks appeared were those built in the past few years (the old, Soviet-style government buildings were sturdy). A few weeks ago, I noticed small cracks along the wall in my bedroom and living room -- and my apartment is barely more than a year old.

I met this man in Mekele, Ethiopia. He's director of a school that was bombed during the last war with Eritrea, in 1998. The yellow markers are for each of the 12 students who were killed.

It was hell getting the schoolkids to pose for portraits. Here a third-grader can't help but crack a smile when I ask him to put his hands in a small crater left by one of the bombs. 

Mekele is the salt capital of Ethiopia. They bring the stuff in via camel from the Afar desert, and men like these carve it into neat rectangular blocks -- a lot of them. 

The school keeps the shells from the cluster bombs in a wooden box in a storage room. 

Nightly water fountain show at Sheraton Addis...a little bit of Vegas in Africa 

The emperor and I

The rest of the Ethiopia trip turned out fine. Spent the weekend in
Mekele, about 100 km from the disputed border with Eritrea. I had some
free time on Saturday and thought about visiting some of the historic,
century-old churches in the region -- carved completely out of rock,
accessible only by scaling some decently steep terrain -- but I was
pretty tired from the long week. Also, my tour guide and the taxi he
had selected for the trip were pushing 60 years old, and I doubted any
of us could make it up a sheer rock face. Instead I stayed in my hotel
room, napped and made it through nearly the entire second season of
Family Guy on DVD.

Culturally insensitive? Perhaps. But the episode where Peter takes
over the community theater production of The King and I is classic.

Don't worry -- I was feeling guilty about not seeing any of the
sights, so on Sunday afternoon, with a few hours to kill back in
Addis, I went to two museums. The ethnological museum is set in
Emperor Haile Selassie's former palace, and the highlight is seeing
the emperor's bedroom -- still in its original condition, down to a
bullet hole in his dressing-room window, a remnant of the coup that
forced him from power in the early 1960s. They also have the emperor's
bed and a few outfits on display -- turns out he was about 5 feet
tall, immediately vaulting him into the ranks of my favorite emperors.

Pictures coming later this week.

Three days in the Sheraton

After three days in Addis Ababa, my attempts to convince the Ethiopian government to escort me to its disputed, heavily militarized border with Eritrea have been rebuffed. This happened so gently, however, that I almost didn't notice. Last week, when I spoke on the phone with the government press officer, he seemed so eager to see me that I thought he wanted to sell me something. When I met him here on Wednesday and repeated my requests -- an escort to the border and an interview with a government spokesman -- he said, "It is no problem" about a dozen times. Which, of course, meant Not a chance in hell.

 

This morning, he called and said, "You will get everything you need from us." Thanks anyway, I said, but after two days here I had everything I needed. All that remained was the trip to the border, which only he could provide. "Yes," he said, "but it is unnecessary. Everything you need is here." I could see where this was going. So no border trip? I asked. "It will be better for you," he said. "All the information you need is available here." That sounded like a no. Fine, I said, how about the interview then? "Ah, that will not be possible."

 

At last, a direct answer. But it was too late -- I'd already gambled and bought a plane ticket to the northern province of Tigray in the faint hope of getting a military escort. So tomorrow I'm going there anyway, with no agenda. At least I'll get out of Addis, by which I mean the Sheraton. I'd like to say that I've seen more of this city in three days than just my hotel and the insides of office buildings. But you should see this hotel. As I write this there is a Bellagio-style fountain show happening outside my window, set to classical music. This morning a guy came to my door with a water tank and spent 10 minutes watering and dusting the floor plant. There's no gym here, but if you call the front desk they'll wheel an exercise bike up to your room.

 

Meanwhile, goats graze on the lawn just outside the hotel's wrought-iron gates, and dozens of families cluster in tin-roofed shacks. Should I feel guilty that I've basically camped out in the expat hotel, ignoring the rest of this city? Probably. But I got out to do a bit of souvenir shopping today, and had coffee at an old Addis establishment called Tomoca. (Ethiopian coffee is strong, and with one sip I felt my heart jump.) Still, I'm vowing to do more sightseeing in Tigray. There are some amazing rock-hewn churches up there, some dating to the 8th century, and no fountain shows.

Sunset in Addis 

Sunset in Addis

I'm in Ethiopia for the next few days. I got to Addis Ababa this morning and will be trying to get to the border with Eritrea this week, where tensions are high. I had the foresight to arrive on a national holiday, so I had little to do today but sit in the hotel (the Sheraton...possibly the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in) and enjoy views like this one, from my balcony.

Sunday at the mall

Two British journalist friends, a husband and wife, are leaving Nairobi after two years and heading back to London. They both really seemed to like it here and they've done pretty great work, so I was curious that neither of them feels at all conflicted about leaving. They can't wait. "It will be nice to be somewhere where you can walk to the corner store again," the guy told me yesterday. "I guess that's something you don't miss, being from California."

 

Ah yes, the West Coast digs don't stop, even when you're in East Africa. But I thought for a second. It was Sunday, we were sitting on a patio having brunch, the weather was somewhere in the high-20s (80s in Fahrenheit), a multicolored, multilingual crowd was all around us, and the view spread out before us was a mini-mall parking lot. It was true -- I'd never left L.A.

 

The parallels between Nairobi and my hometown are starting to become clear. You have to drive everywhere. All the shopping, eating, drinking and entertainment are centered in malls. The city's climate and natural beauty are stunning, yet most days all you see are concrete and car bumpers. The pollution is noxious. The segregation is stark -- the slums of Kibera on one side of downtown, the well-manicured estates of the expatriates and Kenyan middle class on the other, and never the two shall meet.

 

The mall culture is especially similar. On weekends places like the Junction -- a gleaming South African-built mall north of town -- are teeming with families who come less to shop than just to walk around. (Which is good, because virtually all the shops and restaurants are replicas of ones you can find at any other mall in town.) You can have lunch, take a quick stroll around (there's only about a dozen shops), lose yourself in the bookstore, have a cup of coffee, catch a movie. It's the Beverly Center, minus the Armani store. Having a clean, safe place like this is something new for a lot of Kenyans, but if you're from L.A., it feels completely like home.

We're not going to talk about it

Well, that sucked.

 

Listen, I could talk all day about the turnovers, the missed tackles, the questionable timeouts, the fourth-and-fingers that came up short. I could, but I won't.

 

If I were at home today, I'd no doubt be, as Bhargavi put it, "crying into my cornflakes." I'd be reading the LA Times sports section cover-to-cover, plus every article on every website I could find, plus the blogs. Then I'd have to hear it about it all day in conversation. It's the sort of torture a sports fan understands.

 

But here, 10,000 miles away, no one is going to ask me what Bush was thinking on that lateral, why they didn't review the TD when Young's knee was clearly down or why we couldn't stop the no-huddle. Today I got my tires changed, wrote a story and made plans for a trip to Ethiopia next week. It was Thursday, not The End of a Dynasty.

 

Plus, here's the thing -- seconds before Texas scored the winning TD, with everything on the line, the TV cut to Coach Carroll on the sideline. And he was smiling. He was loving every minute of a fantastic game. He's going to be back in the fall, and so are our boys -- well, minus a couple of Heismans. (And I think they'll win the Pac-10 next year, too.)

 

Until then, let's not talk about it.

Turkish delights

Happy New Year, everyone. I'm back from Istanbul after a week of history, hookah and holiday good times. It may have been a nontraditional New Year's destination, but our merry gang of five (me, Bhargavi, Yatin, Terence and Sujit) managed a pretty great trip, hitting all the tourist must-sees, underspending on food, overspending on alcohol, haggling with bazaar vendors, eating our weight in kebabs, staring slack-jawed at the mosques, grooving to bad Europop, getting sick, playing long-forgotten drinking games, partying at a swank club on New Year's Eve and even deflecting the half-baked advances of Istanbul's police. It was, in short, perfect.

 

We rented an apartment in Beyoglu, also known as the "new city" -- a relative term considering that much of "old city" dates to the sixth century. We were right off the main drag of Istiklal Caddesi, which could be Turkish for "consumerist revolution." One look at Istiklal and you'd think the Turks will have no problem shopping their way into EU membership, but the beauty of Istanbul is that, if you turn off onto a narrow side street, you could find yourself looking at a centuries-old mosque or byzantine set of alleyways, suddenly transported back in time. We were confronted with this old-meets-new paradox several times, most notably on New Year's Day, when the entire neighborhood went without water for nearly 24 hours due to a city shortage.

 

As a highlight, it's hard to argue with the Aya Sofya from a historical and architectural perspective, and there's something amazing about seeing depictions of the Virgin Mary share ceiling space with ornate etchings in Arabic. But I was most struck by the views from farther away -- like from the roof of our apartment, which gave a panorama of the city that encompassed the old mosques and their minarets alongside new apartment buildings built seemingly one on top of the other. Istanbul's might be the most beautiful skyline I've ever seen, especially at dusk when the mosques are bathed in light.

 

I've never been much of a New Year's Eve person; the pressure to have The Best Night Ever is usually too exhausting to contemplate. But this year we were in a partying mood, and bought our way into what must have been one of the nicer parties in town, at a club called Reina. For $100 a person, we had unlimited drinks and the privilege of being outdressed by Istanbul's beautiful people. But it was a good deal considering alcohol is so heavily taxed in the city that a simple cocktail can run $20. We staked out a spot outside, under a heatlamp, with a view of the Bosphorous on one side and some new acquaintances -- a group of similarly outdressed Sri Lankan tourists -- on the other.

 

On Monday, with everyone else gone, I had a few hours to kill and decided to try a Turkish bath. This went against a long personal history of bathing myself -- one of which I am very proud -- but it was one of those "When in Rome" moments. I selected a bath with a good reputation from the guidebooks and went in not knowing what to expect. I was led to a small personal changing room with a narrow bed and tiny chest of drawers, given a striped piece of cloth the size of a beach towel, and told to change. I was then taken to the steam room -- a huge marble room beneath a skylit dome -- and lay down on a hot, slippery slab of rock. For what felt like 20 minutes, I lay there on my back and entertained myself by watching drops of condensation fall from the domed ceiling to the marble next to me. It was so hot even the walls were sweating.

 

In walks a big, hairy Turkish guy who took me to the bathing area. For the next ten minutes he rubbed soap all over me and conducted the harshest massage I've ever had. In the most painful maneuver, he pressed his forearm into my back, leaned into me with all of his weight, and rubbed up and down my back for what felt like an eternity. I didn't exactly feel relaxed. After a long rinse with hot water from a small metal bowl, though, I felt better. The Turk stood me up and gave me the marching orders: "Good massage. Good tip. You. Give good tip. Five, ten Turkish lira. Is good." Yes, sir.

 

In all, I would say the bath itself was highly overrated -- not very relaxing, not particularly enjoyable, and in the end I could have done all that in the shower in about five minutes, plus a shampoo and a shave. The steam surrounded by marble was OK, but still felt somewhat seedy. So, future visitors to Istanbul, my suggestion is to save your money and bathe yourselves. Is good.