Battling the Nile

Africa has been such constant wild adventures.

I battled the Nile this weekend in Uganda - it's is the most thrilling and life threatening experience in life i've ever experienced. We rafted down 30km of Nile in seven hours through four major water falls and 20 rapids. The boat flipped over at least three times and I was under water thought i was dying for a few times but totally worth it.

Everybody has to be able to swim to survive - sometimes your boat is flipped over and caught in the middle between one rapid that charges down headways and another from behind and you are caught underneath the furious water/boat for minutes at a time with no relief. Other times you fall over and flow down the water fall with no control and if you are not careful crashing onto a rock or two. Everybody got half a dozen scars at the end to prove the absolute fury of this powerful monster. Once our boat was caught under a tree and we were all hanging there for our lives screaming...

Anyway It's grade 5 rafting and absolutely a must for all of you to do if you are ever in this area. It's only $125 for a whole day of rafting plus all meals and accomodation for one night.

If you are alive, then you are not poor

Next morning I found my Ugandan twin who happens to be our tour guide. We share the same name and age. He exemplifies what the ambitious youngsters of these villages would like to achieve in life - run a business that opens to the outside world to bring income back to his fellow villagers and for himself to one day descend the mountain and find better employment opportunities. Currently, the best thing for them is to have foreign visitors coming so they could interact with the outside world and most importantly, to practice English.

Our tour guide and some other young adults our age were already one of the better offs in the village. He obviously spent a lot of spare time learning English so he could have this additional source of income compared to other villagers. Given his ability to generate income from the pocket of foreigners, part of his job is to distribute some of the tourguide fee to his fellow villagers. Hiking through the scenic rural Africa is not free - you go through people's huts and farms and they ask you for small amount of money when you go through their backyards. We even saw small kids asking us for money...cute little faces extending their hands out asking for only a penny or less. You can't help but feel emotional/sympathy for them.

The most touching memories of Africa for me were faces of kids. Their innocence is captured by staring at foreign looking faces with such an intense fixture. They would stop whatever they were doing in the field when we walked by and scream out "Mzungu" - white people. Only the older ones can distinguish Asians from Whites. As I was playing around with them, I managed to make an infant one cry as the youngest probably had never seen a "Mzungu" before. Another kid around 12 or 13 years old followed us and the tour guide through at least half of the hike, curiously learning from his elder how to be a tour guide when he grows up, and eagerly practicing English with me.

In the villages you really see how poverty is entrenched as a viscious cycle. The boys may go to school for three years and once they become strong enough, start assuming the family business of selling agricultural goods by carrying them into town. Most girls never even go to school (drafted for working on the farm and taking care of younger siblings). In most villages, you see lots of kids roaming around with very little adult supervision. Even four or five year old girls bear the responsibility of carrying around and looking after their infant siblings. The saddest thing is to see these kids with constant mucus hanging from their nose. They probably have never been checked by a health worker and child vaccination is unheard of. Even though everybody knows this, but seriously - providing basic basic health service and empowering kids through education is perhaps the most effective way for long term poverty alleviation for the entire village.

During a downpour in which we were only protected by "banana leaf umbrellas", our tourguide took us to his "new house" for temporary shelter. It was still mud-built but with tin roof to protect from the rain. While he eagerly wanted to sell us his coffee and yes, "pot", we discussed economics, income and a lot of personal issues. He would be ashamed when answering our questions (sometimes lying to us due to shame) as in how many people in the village had ever gone to college, where he lived as a kid or how much can one acre of coffee bean be sold for. His facial expressions alone indicated the hardships he had gone through, along with the rest of his village folks, during childhood years. The most memorable conversation was when we asked him, "do you consider yourself well-off or rich compared to others in the village?" and his response was "I don't consider myself poor because I'm alive". At first I thought he was just giving a clever joking response...but he was actually very serious and emotional. Yes you realize in this Ugandan village the precious of life - if you are live that means you've had enough to eat to grow up. That was such a simple but profound revelation for me.

We noticed that even though he is well off and respected in the village, there was still intense competition with other guys his age also well versed in English - including the owners of the resort cabins. Each young guy our age wants to be our tourguide, wants to sell his his stuff, and wants to get a piece of our American pie. We lectured him about the importance of avoiding intra-village competition - villagers ought to look out for the economic wellbeing of each other and help each other out with farming or tour guide business. Also in a very academic manner, we told him about microfinance in the form of village group lending which he had never heard of.

In the end, I'm not sure how much of that he took in but when you get once in a lifetime chance to bond with villagers in Uganda, you give it a try. When you work for the World Bank, USAID, UNDP or whatnot, you fly over 99.9% of the country and only see the beautiful trial villages and corrupt government officials.

Journey west to Uganda

Border crossing miracle

The scene of thousands of people with food, produce, animals, clothing crossing the border by foot and bicycles - and the thousands of other people who loiter around looking to cross and for money/food was absolutely shocking. I've never ever witnessed such a chaotic scene in my life. In any case, I took a deep breath and got off the bus trying to pretend I'm just a normal person like everybody else even though in a sea of people as far as I could see, I was the only non-African.

My plan didn't even work for one second. As soon as I started walking, people from all sides swarmed me with stacks of Ugandan and Kenyan money. Farmers with bicycles offered me to ride across the muddy zone. My mind was laughing with the ridiculousness and itchy with the temptation of busting out my camera and take pictures of this amazing scene. I've never been in the middle of this kind of attention before in life. People were alternatively using broken English to offer me help (sell me stuff and services) and uttering "Chinese words" and calling me "M-Cheena".

In any case, the border is nothing more than a dirt road that goes through a ditch/stream with some armed police/militia and a couple of barracks housing the border crossing agents. If you are African you just walk right through. Of course I was so noticeable that walking through wasn't even an option. I only had Kenyan shillings and didn't realize you had to pay 50 USD (in Greenback) as an American to enter Uganda. I was very lucky to encounter an extremely helpful/amicable Kenyan border custom official. I handed him my American passport and he asked me if i was Chinese. I said that I'm an American and he continued: oh so you hold both Chinese and American passports. In the end, I was content with being Chinese and pretended I never owned American money. The custom official was then kind enough to exchange 4000 Kenyan shillings for 50 dollars (better than the market buy exchange rate).

From being totally suspicious of everybody to asking everybody for directions and help to literally survive this chaos, I had learned my first life lesson of living in Africa - people are genuinely nice and are there to help you if you just give them a chance.


Meat and protein-containing food is scarce in this region of the world. Even consuming egg is a luxury and you see kids carrying baskets of eggs and selling them to passengers on long distance buses and taxis. Restaurants may have elaborate menus featuring goat, chicken and every kind of meat but frequently they are just for show - they have none. Whenever our minivan saw a food stall, it would stop and passengers would buy tomatoes, pineapples, eggs, and chili peppers even though the tomatoes are green and small and would hardly be considered edible for American standards.

The diet is simple enough that sorghum is the staple food of Uganda. The people there eat it in the form of Chapati (which is actually Indian in origin). Sorghum is probably the most coarse grain you can get on earth - not much better nutrition-wise than switch grass. Don't get me wrong though, Chapatis are pretty tasty at first - especially when baked to the right extent with vegetable oil. And they are supercheap - only 200USH - .9 US CENTS for a big Chapati pie in Uganda. Ugandans eat Chapatis daily with little else. If lucky, some banana/plantain is mixed in to spice up the flavor.

Not only does the food lack variety and nutrition, there are no electricity, running water, sanitation and a village clinic is unheard of in most places. When I finally arrived in Sipi Falls, a small village situated on the foothills of the majestic Mt.Elgon towering 14,000 feet above sea level and reportedly containing the largest caldera of any volcano on Earth, I was shocked to see that this "crows nest resort" featured in the lonely planet book is located just off this mountain road totally blended in with local village huts. The "resort" was actually built by peace corp volunteers in the late 90s seeking to develop the tourism industry in this impoverished mountainous region of Uganda. The place had no electricity except for the "main office" cabin and the toilet was just a hole in the ground.

All of those amenities didn't matter. This was exactly what I wanted to experience in Africa. Even though people live in huts and if lucky enough, buildings with tin roof so rain doesn't get in and birds don't make nests inside your house, one can appreciate the simple lifestyle away from the modern material world. The lack of electricity makes star gazing an absolutely sensational experience - you could see the milky way clearly.

With a view of a great water fall from the volcano on one side and the vast expanse of the rift valley savana on the other, the place is astoundingly beautiful! The best view is on top of a cliff reminiscent of pride rock in the Lion King movie. It was nauseating to experience the ginormous African sun setting over the majestic kingdom of savana.

Learning from big corporation monopolies - story of Zain

The small African villages may not have cement, brick, running water, clinic, electricity, or even place to defecate, but every single village - no matter how small or remote, has at least one building covered in purple and green - the color of Zain, the Dubai based internet/telecom provider company.

Thinking from the larger scheme of rural development and poverty alleviation, it is strikingly evident how a huge role these large multi-national telecom corporations can play in increase the living standards of even the poorest of the poor - simply by the sheer of their outreach. While the American public and government are myopically focused on NGOs, international organizations like UNDP, UNEP, world food programme etc, I saw no trace presence of any NGO, UN organization,IGOs of any sort in most of the villages. The dillusion of elevating the idealistic mission/vision of these humanitarian organizations on a pedestal is so persistent that we fail to look at what organizations/entities actually consistently get to the local village level.

Zain and Coca Cola for instance are not only visible in a village, but they are visible to every person. There may not be a single Zain worker in the villages, but they be sure to paint every village with a purple house. If the UN came through any of these villages, they certainly didn't do a good job of advertising themselves.

In most cases however, there will also be a Zain distributor or operator in each village. If for anything, they provide cell phone service. Thus the villagers can have nothing, not even adequate food or clothing, but they have cell phones to communicate with the outside world. At the end of the day, what kind of organizations is really helping these people is up to debate. But is it the world food programme, world bank or the UNDP that funnel billions of aid through the government, with 70% of the aid embezzled by govt officials, forcing them to spending another billions on corruption probes? or small NGOs that take years to even manage one or two trial villages with electricity/clinic/school and in 10 years of time can't even cover five villages in the same tribe?

Three day odyssey to Kenya - first images of Nairobi

Nairobi Kenya! Can't believe I'm on the African continent. I finally arrived in Nairobi safely after a three day odyssey through London and Dubai. It has been incredible here...not just the cultural shock but also the pan-African nationalism in the wake of Ghana winning the US in the soccer match. Here are my first observations:

As our plane from Dubai flew over the Eastern African Savana landscape towards Nairobi, I was flushed with joy realizing that my three day trek through four continents has finally brought me to my destination - the kingdom of Lion King. Even though Nairobi is close to the equator, due to its 8000 feet elevation the weather is perfect for human living – fluctuating around 55-75 everyday of the year with relatively comfortable humidity and mild rainfall. I was quite relieved from the NYC heat with no air-conditioning!

After we got out of the airport, we were immediately bombarded with narrow bustling streets filled with European style cars, matatus (small vans that are basically local buses that serve the capital). In some sense the chaos of human activities reminded me of Ecuador when I first got out of the airport. My driver realized that I was of Chinese descent and quickly pointed out all the Chinese investment projects engulfing the city as we drove from the airport to my residence - including the first flyover (expressway) through the middle of the capital. He pointed out what he called a "Chinese engineer" working alongside Kenyans by the side of the road. I really couldn't tell the difference between that Chinese guy and other Kenyan workers in hardhats and construction uniform - I believe he's just an ordinary construction worker. But apparently they are "the Chinese engineers".

Rich and the poor:
To my disappointment, Nairobi is not cheap at all – in fact the consumer price index is close to NYC level. Due to the huge influx of expats, the incredible income difference between the rich Kenyans and the average Kenyans, and the fact that even today a lot of everyday items - from food to electric appliances to garments - are still imported, you can see why it's expensive for a poor nation. This is unlike India, Ecuador or China for instance where although there are still extreme poverty, so much stuff is manufactured locally making everything incredibly cheap for western standards. Hence you can imagine how a typical Kenyan may have a difficult time surviving in this capital.

And indeed, you see the physical ramifications of the dramatic income differences between wealthy, politically well-connected Kenyans (many of South Asian descent and expats) and ordinary Kenyans especially those who flood to the capital from the countryside. The country's economic growth is around 3% per year, but that's how much the population is growing annually!! Moreover, most of the growth is going to the already rich. Even nearby a totally modern western style five story shopping mall there are those "empty fields" filled with bare tents and zero water/sanitation where dozens of Kenyans call home.

Story of a Kenyan gardener:
A call at 10AM from my roommate next morning (who was vacationing at the time) kicked me out of my jet-lagged late morning deep sleep. As I stumbled my way downstairs, I was surprised to see a Kenyan guy standing outside my door. I have no idea how long he has been there waiting for me. He very politely introduced himself, and I could sense an air of guilt on his face as he looked away….he probably thought he woke me up as he saw that I was still in my pajamas. I was the one who was supposed to be embarrassed with my pajamas and sleeping through his knocking on my doors for God knows how long.

Apparently he is the dog trainer and the gardener. He was here to formally introduce me to the two dogs that live in the same compound. So I went with the dog trainer for a walk with the dogs. He explained to me how he is 25 and with a family to support. He didn't have the money to go to a university after high school. He works part time as our dog trainer and gardener, and at other times (late at nights) as a security personnel guarding some house like ours. All this while, images of all these Kenyan guards who spend 24/7 guarding compounds like mine - spending hours in pitch dark with nothing but one chair to sit on flashed through my head. It's incredible how so much of this country's economy and employment is sustained not just via direct Western assistance/aid, but spending by Western diplomats and tourists!! This guy, Daniel, is incredibly well-spoken and his English is excellent. He is also quite well-mannered and I understood from interacting with the guards and guys like Daniel and the expeditor just in the first day that these people are already considered the well-off, well-educated and thus were hired by Westerners. I was just thinking how much untapped human resource potential is there in this big and fast growing Sub-Saharan country - not even thinking about all the unexplored, undiscovered natural resources! But such a nice and smart guy like Daniel doesn't even have one full time job and have to do a few part time jobs for expats to support his family. And they are content with spending day and night just sitting there guarding a house or training dogs.

City is different from our image of a city:
At first I was a bit disoriented as we navigated around the streets of Nairobi. While there are plenty of people on the streets – from people dressed in suits to beggars to people loitering around, as well as plenty of cars, the entire city is ill-defined in the traditional sense of a city in America or Europe – orderly streets with sidewalks and in busy sections of the cities shops lined up along the streets.

Nairobi city is quite different – except for the central business district far from where most people live – the city’s streets are devoid of orderly sidewalks and even smooth pavements and citizens generally all live in gated communities quite a few feet away from the streets. Roads are little more than just raised surfaces above the orange colored soil and it’s for pure transportation purposes with little shops and sidewalks along the roads for people to stroll around. Everybody hustles along and you usually don’t see many women or children walking on the streets- unless they are in the middle of the road selling stuff or begging for money or food. At first I was quite intimidated by the pace of people walking – especially when gangs of men came up behind me. They simply wanted me to yield so they could hustle through the narrow "sidewalks" by the dusty streets...

to be continued...

Three day odyssey to Kenya - Dubai

Dubai:
Forget about the furnace weather, the desert landscape and the fact that I didn’t even get to go to the middle of the city, Dubai is probably one of my favorite cities in terms of its incredibly diverse socio-ethnic composition. Notwithsanding the futuristic skyscrapers (even the airport itself is in the shape of an spaceship), the city is truly at the crossroad of Asia, Africa and Europe and the demographics of its population plus the economic activities of the city truly reflects this old world global melting pot. While New York is considered a global melting pot, I think it’s all the more intriguing to find this Asian melting pot (literally and figuratively) sprouting out of middle of no-man’s desert land in the supposedly culturally repressive middle east. The city has become the center of commerce for the middle eastern region and literally sitting on hot oil, Dubai attracts immigrants from all over the world for investments and physcially constructing its futuristic looking skyline.
Basically all flights from Asia, South Asia, the Middle East to Africa, and a majority of flights from Europe to Africa go through Dubai. The airport is thus gigantic with rows after rows of stores..mostly operated by Thai and Malay immigrants.

Our plane from London to Dubai passed through Turkey and then diverted to the Eastern border of Iraq with Iran (I’m not sure if it’s because passenger planes are not allowed to fly over portions of Iraqi airspace), then due southeast passing through Kuwait and the Persian Gulf. All throughout this journey, all you could see was a vast expanse of hazy/yellow horizon. As our plane started descending, I could see navy ships slowly making their way up the turquoise colored Persian Gulf – presumably in the direction of Iraq/Kuwait. The green colored sea suggests that the Persian Gulf is so full of algae because of the incredibly warm waters – close to 90 degrees. As we landed in Dubai, all you could see was a yellow sandy landscape - even all the houses were colored in yellow/tan. You could clearly see the futuristic skyscrapers lined up against the Persian Gulf shore together with unbelievably wide highways with barely any cars using them. When we arrived it was 8:00AM and it was around 90F. When we departed Dubai at 2:00pm it was 43C or around 112F. – fairly typical of Dubai in June.

How on earth can the public sector attract talent?? Part I: Money is more important than lives

Since the end of my first year of policy school, my life has been characterized by a whirlwind of conversations with bright young students/graduates that culminated in myself questioning society, my destiny and life philosophy. As an ivy league graduate, I can't help but be bombarded by news of this guy or that girl working for Goldman, X hedgefund, Y prop trading firm and making Z hundred dollars an hour. In a nutshell, Ivy league graduates are in some sense all thrive on comparing oneself to another because that's what they have done all their lives and it's in engraved in our genes to be competitive in every sense of the word.

Anyway today as I talked to a Chinese international Princeton friend about this whole phenomenon, when she casually mentioned that every single Chinese international student her year is working for Goldman, I was flabbergasted. I was suddenly struck with the disturbing thought that the future of US-China relationship hinges on knowing as many Goldman bankers as possible. My ambitious goal of networking with Chinese ambassadors/scholars and diplomats just went down the drain.

Our conversation propelled my brain to flash in a split second the idea of going back to the financial sector - yearning for the days when my adrenalin can deliver instant success/fail gratification. Traders live in microseconds. Every second you get updated with new market trend news and you act on it - sometimes like a robot and automatically follow a formula to buy CDS, stock or thoughtfully think about some innovative strategy of hedging or investing.

The idea of constantly thinking and constantly seeing action and results is something I already sorely miss volunteering in the city's poorly funded public advocate office (although I have high hopes for the supposedly fast-paced more performance driven style of the State Dept). Even when we have to deal with thousands of constituents (real human beings here) and we are in charge of 8 million people, which is hard to believe and what's even more - people's livelihoods are directly dependent on our service. We deal with people getting evicted from houses, and of course, assist the elderly, disabled with rent increase exemptions, heat and fuel bills and all sorts of necessary services for survival for some people.

yet we can't get anything done on trader's scale. When we fail in the public sector, we risk people's lives. When traders make a mistake, they lose some money. You ought to think that lives are more important and therefore deserves more attention, time and resources, but that's the irony of our society.

In other words, money is much more easier to deal with, gain, lose, transfer, destroy, create than people.

When people ask me: why are you sacrificing your life to pursue serving people in a sector that's full of dirty politics and cynical, and most importantly, incompetent people.
My answer has always been...why aren't you guys - all you smart, intelligence, innovative, ingenious people not making some minor lifestyle sacrifices and use your talent to help 99% of the world - the entire rest of the humanity who don't have the educational attainment and career opportunities of our circle of friends - the entire rest of humanity who don't have nearly enough assets to even own $1 of stock, let alone invest in your hedge fund - the entire rest of humanity who actually don't make over $30 an hour, which is the minimum wage for ivy league graduates?

What perplexes me is the fact that many of my friends are quite curious about what I do. They are extremely inquisitive especially regarding my stories of helping the poorest of the poor and want to know the hands on dirty details of my diving into different communities. I guess it's an encouraging sign at least so that one day I will be in the position of begging money from these rich retired former bankers and traders and may actually get a penny or two from them.

Thus it seems to me that it's pretty obvious that collective social solidarity and empathy is an important moral value for most people. To borrow a page from Obama....what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart.

At the moment though, the cynics and sometimes the cynical Thomas Che would say that the society is only bound together because the richest are giving away to the society just enough in taxes and aids so that the poorest don't die in front of their eyes - or in the case of NYC - the poorest (with average family income of $10,000 or less!!! imagine that this is Manhattan!!!) are in the housing projects 30 blocks up 5th avenue from the rich bankers' luxury apartments (median income >400K). The richest have just enough common sense of humanity as to give enough to ensure the poorest survive - but anything more - police protection, consistent heat and water, garbage pickup - that's all luxury service for the poorest.

For us in the public advocate's office then, the challenge is to cope with this stark contrast...

To be continued