Despite my traveling to far-off lands, I’ve rarely had a case of food poisoning on the road. Actually, I’ve only had one that comes to mind after eating at the Alliance Française in Abengourou, Ivory Coast. I was the unlucky victim to having eaten what were otherwise delicious meatballs the day after a power cut from which their freezer hadn’t restarted. So it goes. I was much happier having that very fast heave-fest that the day or two my more steel-stomached ally experienced in eating the Swedish meatballs at the Ikea in Sacramento, California.

And that’s really the thing of it. All of my episodes with a meal hell-bent on making me one with the “thunder bucket” were in the “civilized” world. I think I’ve been taken down at least four times in San Francisco alone. I attribute some of this to having what is probably a stomach made of tissue paper from having drank horrid irrigation water as child–nobody mentioned to my city folk parents that what came out of the tap was not potable when they bought the farm. But, it’s also the fact that people are dirty (like dudes with a half meter beard making my food in San Francisco) and the more advanced a society is, the more it stores its foods, and the less fresh items are eaten. Food storage, while in days of yore had its merits, is now rancid.

Take for example, eggs. It takes some time to get used to them not being refrigerated in Europe. But, in the end you think, “Fuck it, it’s getting cooked/boiled/poached, so who cares?” The problem arises though when you mistakenly buy hardboiled eggs in the supermarket. Why on earth would anyone buy hardboiled eggs? To put it succinctly, I don’t fucking know unless there is a huge degree of foreigners who don’t understand that they’re hardboiled and buy them. That and people could just be lazy as all hell.

My foray in to Spanish hardboiled eggs promptly ended with a worship of the porcelain Buddha, throughout the night, without my stomach needing any call to prayer to show bare my neck to the almighty lord of gastroenteritis. Needless to say, I won’t be making that mistake again and I’m still, as of now, mystified as to why these are even being sold. Sure, I’ve bought them as a snack before, like in Ghana where street vendors have them, but they’re fresh there. Actually, all over Africa they have hardboiled eggs to buy and many a loved one and friend have basically lived off them without issue. They haven’t been sitting on a shelf all day and I’ve never had a problem buying those hardboiled eggs, just those in the fine establishment of Mercadona.

On that note, I think it’s time to go cook up the wild asparagus I just picked for lunch and make an omelet with some fresh, farm eggs.

The photo above is one in a series about the Kinshasa Symphony by Vincent Boist

It infuriates me to the point of exhaustion and pure frustration when campaigns such the one that Invisible Children is running develop legs and become popular. In this instance, they’ve put up a 27 minute video about the evils of Joseph Kony. If the name isn’t familiar, he’s a piece of crap from Uganda who has been using child soldiers to fight wars and has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on a slew of serious war crimes.

Of course none of that matters really because a group of whiteys from the US decided to make a little film to raise awareness about Joseph Kony. I’ve watched said film and it’s painful. It’s like a “Have you seen this warlord?” campaign on a milk carton in case you happen to spot him in the parking lot while picking up that weeks groceries. “Oh, but they’re just trying to do good in the world.” Not really. They feel guilt for being white, privileged to some degree, and being from the US and thus needing to create a non-profit that pretty much just “raises awareness” and does little else. There is no state building mechanism in what they do and if there were at some point, the citizens of whatever state they were working to fix should move to a neighboring one as these guys are typical of Whites in Shining Armor. I can’t even get in to all the details of this lest I write through the night. But, it’s simple: white people in the US donate to make themselves feel better. They don’t give a damn about the recipients as long as they get a newsletter with smiling dark-skinned children that shows their money “at work”.

Why would I say this about Invisible Children? Watch the video. Pay attention to how the narrator has made himself and family the real focus of the video from the beginning. Pay attention to how the narrator interacts with the Africans. He always talks down to them as if they were children, no matter their age. Pay attention to key phrases such as “something in my heart told me”. All of this comes up time and again when you’re dealing with white people from the US and their approach to Africa. There is no sense of equality, only of being a savior.

What gives me the right to criticize them, after all, they’re “doing something”, right? My right to criticize is the same as their right to make this in the first place. But, people need to understand that just “doing something” is the worst thing you can possibly do. Would you “just build a skyscraper”? Would you “just perform open heart surgery”? Obviously not, so why on earth are Americans “just doing something” when it comes to Africa? We have no business doing this. Our business should be first in foremost to fix both our local and national problems. For instance, the narrator is shocked to see all these homeless children in Uganda. Um, they’re in the US too. We’ve some really serious problems.

All of this, to use the skyscraper analogy is like deciding to build a 50 story building. One day, you run down to a random building site you know nothing about. You dump money there. You work on it over a three day weekend, or even a summer, then run off. A year later, you’re shocked that it never got finished. It’s a horrible approach to everything charity-related and the fact that the vast majority of people can’t see this makes me numb.

Absolutely no problem that faces the world today has an immediate fix. The work is long term, hard, and a hell of a lot more invested than retweeting a YouTube link.

While living in Ivory Coast, there came a point where I needed a break from the constant humidity and power cuts to go somewhere that didn’t have the same amount of hours for day and night; ie non-equatorial. As it turned out, cashing in a small wad of airline miles was going to get me from Abidjan to Cape Town via Nairobi & Johannesburg in a lot cheaper manner than if I had to pay to fly there from the US or Europe and so I took advantage of it. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend the multiple red eye flights it took to get there.

I also took advantage of that time spent there and went around to the wineries in the Stellenbosch area. Today, the resulting guide for Stellenbosch is now out. It took awhile to get it done, but I’m generally working on four guides at a time, so one can understand why it took so long to get everything balanced out.

I think it turned out well. It gives a good, general overview of the area that someone can pick up on their e-reader tablet or Apple device to take with them when they travel there. Handy in that you don’t have to lug yet another book with you. And, everyone should try and make the trek down to Cape Town. It’s an absolutely glorious place to visit. Just mind the baboons.

I’m not a terribly huge fan of organized religion. It doesn’t matter who it is or which branch of whatever it may be, it generally tends to result in violence or oppression or something else bad instead of people just following The Golden Rule and getting on with things. The general crapiness of organized religion can’t be better shown that in modern day missionaries working/traveling in Africa.

I was shown this article via a friend living in Ivory Coast. It starts out with a good point which is that there is a ton of garbage in Africa and people just litter everywhere. It’s a problem. I don’t deny that and it’s painful to watch people do it all the time and see the ground hardpacked with the damnable black plastic bags. Is burying trash in landfills like we do in Europe or North America any better? Not really, but slowly we are setting up systems to deal with that waste and these simply do not exist anywhere in Africa except parts of South Africa.

The author, this American named Felix Carroll, then falls prey to the age-old blathering and half-truths that are so typical of those who are completely arrogant and self-righteous in what they’re doing. In this case, Felix makes a number of errors as it is often the case in for those who spend little time on the ground in a country so foreign that they’re tripping over themselves to understand it.

Under sickly yellow streetlights, the city had an aura of violence — like a clenched fist ready to go through broken glass

Okay, there are problems in Ivory Coast right now due to the aftermath of the presidential elections, but this “sickly” phrase is moronic as the mercury lamps you see coming from the airport are literally everywhere in the world. I have them outside my apartment in San Francisco lighting up the night.

On my way to meet up with a Virginia-based Catholic charity to document their efforts to build orphanages here, I traveled by taxi through lagoons of people living amid the stench of human waste.

Ugh. I’m assuming that this “savior of humanity” must be originally from some small town somewhere. I don’t know, but I do know that people who have never been anywhere crowded in the world don’t seem to understand that we humans are really filthy. Sections of the Abidjan lagoon do indeed stink, but so do: Venice, the Thames, the Seine, San Francisco Bay, and the Hudson River.

They are the face of Africa for many of us in wealthy nations. But when I first set eyes upon them — many orphaned, many injured, scavenging in piles of trash — I felt my consciousness crack into two (one half goes to you, the other should be locked in the zoo).

I’m not even sure what the second sentence means other than to say that African children are animals that should be in a zoo? That’s wonderfully eloquent.

I’m traveling now on a 32-seat bus filled with American missionaries. We snap photos of the trash as we pass through squalor-filled streets. We take photos of it, because none of us have seen anything like it.

Again, really? Have you never been to your landfills in your respective small towns? That’s the difference in that the dumps in Ivory Coast are hardly external of the town. I completely admit that this is not a healthy manner in which to live, but I guarantee that it probably takes 20 Ivorians to produce the same amount of trash as any single one of these American missionaries.

You can’t even drink the water here.

You can actually. Abidjan has potable water that’s perfectly safe to drink. Outside of the main town, sure, it gets shaky, but there are vast tracts of America where there is no potable water either, for instance, where my mother lives.

In 2006, more than 100,000 Ivorians had to seek medical treatment after being poisoned as a result of toxic waste dumped in Abidjan.

Yup, that was done by a European company who were later found guilty of it. It didn’t come from Ivory Coast. Felix, you might have thought to mention that (I’m tempted to add, “you ass” at the end of this sentence, but it would probably seem uncouth).

…you cannot help but to see all this garbage through their eyes — as a symptom of something else, of the seven deadly sins committed without fear of consequences.

I can’t even use the acronym for this and I have to say, What The Fuck is that supposed to mean?

The side roads here in Yamoussoukro are paved, too, but tracked with mud from the bush.

Genius, have you been to New Orleans or other places in the US that have tropical climates and red dirt? It’s impossible to keep the sidewalks clean because you have one season of torrential rain and then another of powdery dust.

It’s difficult to fathom the origin of a business plan in which countless children in nearly every large town sell small packets of tissues for the equivalent of three cents. Maybe like the missionaries I’m traveling with, these children see only one choice in life, and that is to bring comfort to a country on the verge of tears.

I know a numbers of Ivorians. They’re actually pretty happy, easy going people and the ones who have things tough aren’t always choking back tears. They go about their lives and work. Many Americans could learn something from this instead of demanding that we allow in more Mexicans to fill service industry jobs.

Felix Carroll is a former staff writer for the Times Union. His column runs every other Sunday.

And there we have the reason as to why print is dying. Felix, you should really meet Nicholas Kristof when you get a chance. You’ll get on fabulously.

One of the more interesting things to watch in social media is how it gets used in guerrilla ways to fit a momentary need. Such was the case with the hashtag that came about of #civsocial for Ivory Coast. For quite awhile, the tag of #civ2010 had been used to spread news. Once things quite really bad in Abidjan (the de facto capital no matter what Yamoussoukro says) they switched over to this hashtag to address immediate needs. Now that things are slowly returning to normal, the need has definitely lessened and this tool will probably die out quite soon, only to be hit with the occasional spam tweet.

Naturally, this hasn’t stopped some people from trying to turn it in to a revenue generator. It’s natural for folks to think this will work and cash in on “scaling” the idea. That’s what happened with Ushahidi, but that field has already been dominated by them and there isn’t much room for others. So, I wish the Ivorian folks behind this attempt to monetize the best of luck, but really, these things should be taken for what they are: short term solutions to an immediate problem that, once that instance of the problem goes away, cease to have direct use.