Chasing Brangelina

And now, for something completely different...

 

Who says covering Africa is all about war, famine and pestilence? Occasionally, it's also about sex. Or, in this case, the Sexiest People Alive.

 

Unless you live on Mars - or, let's face it, parts of Africa - you know that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are vacationing in Namibia. She's very pregnant with their first child, and she loves the country, having filmed a mediocre movie there in 2002. Not many people have heard of Namibia, which is in southwestern Africa, and I thought it would be interesting to see what the attraction was for Brangelina, aka the Sexies.

 

Let me just say at this point that I've never done the paparazzi thing, lacking both the long camera lenses and (I like to think) general sliminess required of a full-time celebrity-chaser. This wasn't a pap mission though - I was hoping for an ironic piece about the world's sexiest couple on a relatively unsexy holiday.

 

They had holed up in western Namibia, a massive desert that basically tumbles into the Atlantic Ocean, with a long, flat highway and some decent beaches in between. Last Tuesday, I flew to the coastal town of Walvis Bay and met up with a Namibia-based freelancer named John, and together we drove out to the Sexies' oceanfront resort, called Burning Shore (below, behind the green fence, erected especially for them):

 

 

A few Africa-based photogs had spent much of the past month hanging around the resort and got no love whatsoever. We weren't any luckier; the staff at the hotel basically told us to get lost.

 

Undaunted, we went back late the next afternoon, this time with John's 3-year-old daughter, a beautiful blonde named Eva. This time we avoided the main entrance and went around back, to the beach. Eva brought along her new Beach Barbie, John his pocket-sized digital camera, and with John playing the role of Dutiful Dad, they sat in the sand a few yards from the hotel's back lawn and hoped for the best. I made myself scarce (John had suggested we pose as a gay couple, but we quickly dismissed that idea). Because it was a public beach, the stocky Namibian dude in the dark sunglasses who had camped out on the lawn - obviously a member of the Sexies' security detail - couldn't tell John and Eva to scram.

 

They sat out there for about an hour while I sat behind a restaurant a few hundred yards away, pondering the state of my young career. There was little action around the hotel so I figured the Sexies were out for the day, but as it got closer to dusk I thought we might get lucky. A few times, small planes flew overhead and I wondered each time whether it was the Cessna Grand Caravan they were using to hop around the country, which has few roads.

 

Finally I saw the stocky security guard get up and take a long look at John, so I got up and went toward them. I arrived just in time to get strict instructions: "Get the (expletive) off this beach. I know you're journalists and I'm (expletive) tired of your (expletive). (Sometimes, "expletive" looks harsher in print than the real thing, doesn't it?) Having heard from one of the other photogs in town that the security team's preferred method of dealing with journalists was to grab them by the neck, John, a veteran journalist who raised some hell here while covering the bloody independence struggle, opted against the verbal confrontation he so badly wanted. Eva, oblivious, grabbed her Barbie and made off for the car.

 

So we were denied our exclusive access, and our chance at a big payday. With Jolie due next month and the security around them so tight, magazines are reportedly offering $5 million for a photo of the baby. That could feed a lot of Namibians for a lot of days, but generally the locals - many of them descendants of German settlers - are happy to give the couple their space. Every person in town that I interviewed about their visit rolled their eyes at me. All my leading, irony-laden questions were deftly parried by the their practical, Germanic sensibility. To them, I was just another celebrity-obsessed American. In the end, we silently agreed to disagree.

OK, Chad isn't rad

One week ago, I was in N'Djamena, Chad, on the last leg of my two-week trip. Today, rebels and government forces are battling for control of the city, and residents have been describing the sounds of artillery fire and gunshots to news services. It's the perverse nature of my job that I feel a twinge of pain not being there, or rather having been there too early.

 

Instead I'm on my way to Cape Town for some holiday R&R, followed by a reporting trip in southern Africa. I'll be watching the developments in Chad on the news like everyone else - OK, not everyone else - and thinking about the people I met on my trip there.

 

After two days on the border, I spent three days traveling with UNHCR in Sudanese refugee camps scattered around the town of Farchana. Two years ago, friends told me, these were wretched, unimaginable places where even the UN staff on-site lacked basic things like clean water. In the intervening months the state of the camps improved, and today upon visiting them you feel like you're in a poor but functioning town. NGOs have built schools and helped establish markets where people can earn a bit of money selling basic goods like meat, vegetables and clothes. Families living together cordon off private spaces with simple fences made of thin wooden sticks, inside which are a series of UN-issue canvas tents. It's not home, but the people who have lived there for a year or longer have created a sense of permanance.

 

The ranks of the camps have been swelling in recent months as violence in the area worsens, and it was easy to tell the new arrivals apart. On their tents you could still vaguely make out the letters "UNHCR" - they were only partially obscured by the sand and dust that blows everywhere in eastern Chad. In the newest camp, Gaga, I was looking to interview some of these recent arrivals, so we pointed ourselves in the direction of the whitest (i.e., least sandy) tents we could see.

 

I spent the morning talking with a handful of families about what brought them to Gaga. These were people who had fled janjaweed attacks in Darfur but settled just over the border in Chad, in the hope of remaining close to their native villages. Moving farther from Darfur reflected a loss of hope, a sense that this war wasn't going to end soon and they had no choice if they wanted to protect themselves. In many cases, they'd recently been the victims of violence. I met one man in his 40s who wore a white bandage on his bald forehead - covering a wound he said he suffered at the hands of the janjaweed two weeks earlier, when one of the militiamen struck him with the butt of his rifle.

 

The interviews weren't easy - I had to conduct them in French because my Chadian translator didn't speak English (I met few Chadians who did). But it was easy to glean a common theme: despite the steady increase in janjaweed attacks, most people told me they left the border reluctantly. They clung to the belief that they might, one day soon, be able to return to Darfur. Those of us out in the rest of the world who are following this story know that that faith is probably misplaced, that diplomatic efforts to resolve the war are failing and that no one predicts it will end anytime soon.

 

But these people, of course, know nothing of the high-level discussions. So they have hope. One of them said he was sure the people in rich countries - he pointed at me - were seeing what was going on and were working to stop it. That's why he was even talking to me, he said - he thought I was there to help.

This is the crowd outside the registration center at Gaga refugee camp as Sudanese from Darfur wait to register for a space 

Harna Azin Adam, 33, waiting to register at Gaga camp with her two children - one of hundreds of Sudanese arriving at these camps each week 

This was the man who'd had his head bashed in a janjaweed attack

A man selling skewers of all kinds of meat in the market in Gaga refugee camp 

Refugees wave ration cards to get food allowances 

A boy in Gaga Refugee Camp 

Chad is rad

Arriving in the border town of Adre, it was not what I expected. It looked to be a fairly large settlement, with a bustling market and even a couple of schoolhouses, and there were a lot of people walking around. Not the picture of a region under siege, but soon I understood why. Besides janjaweed incursions, the border has also been the theater recently of clashes between rebels and the Chadian military. The biggest so far happened in Adre in December, so the government sent in thousands of troops to fortify the town. So Adre is about as safe as can be, while a few miles away some bad things are happening.

This became clear when we went to the hospital in Adre, which has been run for the last two years by Medecins Sans Frontieres of France. They're pretty much the only relief agency working on the border these days, and the handful of doctors and medical staff we met - expatriates and Chadians alike - are doing amazing work in difficult conditions. Besides treating expectant mothers, sick children, the old and the infirm, they are dealing almost daily with victims of the violence on the border.

The afternoon we were there, last Wednesday, a military truck rolled into the hospital about 4 p.m. and a commotion ensued. Slowly four men, all of them bloodied and seemingly in shock, were carried into the dark concrete box used as the makeshift emergency room. The driver of the truck, a camo-wearing officer who couldn't have been more than 20, told me there had been an attack on a village about 10 miles away. "Janjaweed?" I asked. "Of course," he said.

All four had been struck by bullets, but three of them had been hit in the legs or arms. Only one looked to be life-threatening - a young kid, in his late teens or early 20s, had a bullet go through his right shoulder and come out the middle of his back, traveling some pretty serious territory along the way. An American MSF doctor, a great guy named Peter Reynaud of New Orleans, told me the kid's lung was collapsing, and they called for the surgeon. A few hours before, when I met Christophe at the MSF house, he was saying he hadn't done a single surgery in the month he'd been in Adre. He was about to go to work.

I'm not going to pretend I understood what Dr. Christophe did, or Dr. Peter's explanation, but it involved jamming a rod in the guy's chest and other indelicate maneuvers. I stifled a couple of yelps, but my pain was visible. The young man on the operating table, however, was stoic. He'd been given a couple of painkillers, but nothing like what I'd need if I was in his place. At one point, Dr. Peter asked him if he was in pain, and the guy responded simply, "Yes, it's painful." His strength, and that of the doctors and hospital staff, was remarkable under the circumstances.

That night Abdul Hamid and I slept in a guesthouse run by a local Muslim leader. The beds were not what you would call clean, and there was the distinct smell of donkey in the air, but hey - he had two rooms, two lanterns and water for bathing, so you couldn't really complain. (There were mosquito nets, but they had golf ball-sized holes in them, so I slathered myself in insect repellent.) The next day, after a few more interviews in town and at the hospital - checking on the previous day's patients, all of whom were reportedly doing better - we were back on the road in the other direction, away from the border, heading for the refugee camps.

Two victims of janjaweed attacks last week lie in the makeshift emergency room of the MSF hospital in Adre, Chad 

A 20-year-old is treated for a massive bullet wound in his right shoulder. Peter, the American doctor in the center, is assisted by Major, the Chadian nurse on the right. 

Nurses treating a janjaweed victim 

Yacoub, who's been injured twice in separate janjaweed attacks - once in Darfur and again last month in Chad 

Gamar, a Chadian who lost his right leg in a janjaweed attack in March 

Women carrying firewood outside a refugee camp in eastern Chad 

Two brothers in Adre 

Fantastic voyage

I've just finished a week on the Chad-Sudan border - an eventful week, so I'll post in parts. As background, over the last few months, the Darfur war has gotten worse, with violence spreading into eastern Chad and forcing thousands of people out of their homes. The janjaweed - you remember them - are using in Chad the murderous techniques they honed in Darfur. I went to the border to ask Chadians - I think that's the adjective - what the janjaweed have been up to recently.

First, though, "went to the border" doesn't quite do justice to this voyage. Between my leaving Nairobi and actually reaching the Chad-Sudan border, it was a week. It began in Addis Ababa, where I had to go to get a visa to be allowed to actually enter Chad. (There's no Chadian embassy in Kenya.) I took an early morning flight from Nairobi to Addis, and after landing headed straight for the visa office. The francophone consular officer realized that I would stop speaking to her in my California-French accent if she just told me I could have the visa that afternoon, which she did, and I figured I was in business.

But I couldn't get on a flight to Chad until Monday. So I was stuck for the weekend in Addis, which turned out not to be a bad thing, because I had some work to catch up on there, plus my digestive system decided to go on strike. This was a huge stroke of luck - I got whatever it was out of my system, and after seeing the facilities in the border areas, it was far better to be sick in a hotel room in Addis.

On Monday I flew to N'Djamena, the virtually unpronounceable capital of Chad. I made arrangements with the local office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to fly with them to eastern Chad the next day, and Monday evening I set up an interview with a leader of one of the major Darfur rebel groups. It's one sign of the bad blood between Chad and Sudan that you almost can't walk down a street in N'Djamena (assuming you'd want to do such a thing) without running into a Darfur rebel.

My rebel - balding chain-smoker, slow gravelly speech, what you'd expect from a man who spent many nights in the bush - was a fountain of information. He was also a little too eager to have me meet his colleagues who are holed up somewhere in a rebel-controlled area of Darfur. I told him I didn't want to think what the Sudanese government might do if they found me on their soil with a camera and notebook but no visa, he said something like, "Don't worry, we have guns." I laughed, until I realized he wasn't.

The next day I flew to Abeche, the largest town in eastern Chad and base of humanitarian operations in the area, which is home to more than 200,000 Darfur refugees in about a dozen camps. The folks at UNHCR gave me a space in a guesthouse, but they don't work on the border anymore for security reasons, so I had to rent a car and driver and get there on my own.

The car-rental sector in Abeche is basically one tall dude in a caftan, and in this case when supply meets demand, the result is pretty brutal. I won't say how much I paid for a car to the border for two days, in case my editor is reading this, but because there's pretty much nothing else on the border to spend one's money on (like food or accommodation), I figured my expense report would look all right in the end.

Given the security concerns that the car-rental guy said justified his rates, I was a little concerned when the driver showed up the next morning. The kid looked about 14. Together, we looked like two high school buddies out for a joyride in Dad's SUV. But Abdul Hamid turned out to be a pretty competent driver. It's not the easiest drive - this part of Chad is basically a total desert, so in parts of it it feels like driving on a beach. Occasionally you slow down to let camels cross the road. And you either keep the windows down or die of heatstroke, and with the windows down everything gets coated in sand and dust. I think I'll be scraping bits of Chad out of my stuff for the next several weeks.

Next: "ER" comes to Chad