White Thoughts.

Everything is an ecosystem; everything we do has an impact somewhere, and affects the lives and well-being of other living creatures. At the other end of our action lies Africa, where climate change and unsustainable living habits directly change the world of thousand of people. Plastic, metal and paper wastes cover the streets and the fires made out of these piles fill the air with dense smoke that make you out of breath.
Since we got here and introduced our way of living, our innovations, Africa bears a scar of underdevelopment and underachievement of what we believe so strongly in, like our medicine, our democracy, our sanitation. We therefore all travel with a sense of responsibility towards these people, who we know suffer indirectly and directly from our everyday action here and at home; we need to fix what we fucked up.
But our way is not always the best way, and sometimes the involvement of keen and motivated and oh so generous NGOs bring deception and a feeling of treason towards the whole east to those people that have been promised many good things.
There are two major slums in Nairobi, each housing around a million informal settlers living in conditions of extreme poverty. The most famous of all, Kibera, has been visited by stars and holds many UN-Habitat pilot projects, like road and infrastructure construction, sanitation block implementation...These project were put in place after the examination of the needs of a neighborhood in the informal settlement (Soweto-East) by UN, when they decided than a road would allow better access for external help. For the construction of that road, some hundred of house/walls were demolished. It's been three years, and the UN workers are nowhere to be seen. A deep feeling of treason and anger towards everything Western is shared by the settlers, who were promise so much. Meanwhile Mathare "suffers" from low recognition of the international community. The projects build there are bottom-up, and not top-down. The community sets up projects they know are needed, and build a strong sense of giving back. We don't know best. These people do, and when walking through these two neighborhoods, Mathare breathes hope, cooperation and unity. Kibera felt hopeless. And even though the two have the same living conditions, and neither succeed better in bringing the community basic needs, love, joy, friendship, collaboration and emotional help of these people is best served by initiatives from their neighbors.
In Kisumu, the selected first and original city of the Millenium Cities Project (M.C.P.), the community has come with similar intiatives. The Jua Kali (meaning hot sun and damn, it is a burning sun) group bears a 1000 steel workers. It is a giant open air garage, made of informal settlers that changed their living conditions and escaped a little bit poverty by uniting and setting rules. It is not even close to be rich, or secure, but the little bit they achieved in ameliorating their living conditions by themselves is uplifting for anyone visiting them. They've been promised some security infrastructure from M.C.P., that they await with great excitement. It might not have been a promise, but even just the discussion of a possibility that is not followed-up can be detrimental for their faith in external aid. I really hope they will receive what they deserve and what has been told. Because making impossible promises to people that were hopeless is a major cheat. And apparently it is a major Western habit.

Recits Ougandais 2 - Que le ciel nous tombe sur la tete

On peut seulement dire qu'on connait la pluie quand on a vu une pluie tropicale. Des litres d'eau pas seconde qui se deversent sur les terres de l'Ouganda et qui viennent a la rescousse de plus d'un...L'ouganda, ainsi que le Rwanda, a herite d'un des sols les plus fertiles du monde lors des derniers changements geologiques majeurs. Les collines sont couvertes de toutes les teintes de vert: les champs de the, mais...remplacent la foret tropicale qui jadis couvrait tout le territoire. Malgre ce vert et cette fertilite (la foret peut se regenerer d'elle meme en moins de 10 ans), le pays souffre d'une secheresse extreme depuis quelques mois; les pluies tant attendues de decembre ne sont jamais arrivees. Le puit duquel s'alimente en eau potable, traitee et controlee une soixantaine de personne est desesperement sec, forcant les familles a puiser leur eau du Lac Nabugabo. Il nous est interdit a nous canadiens de meme toucher a cette eau, par crainte de Schistosomiasis. C'est pourquoi lorsque notre groupe de wazungus est debarque au Lac avec un deluge de quelques heures pendant quelques jours, on etait des dieux. Mais pour nous, le ciel nous tombait carrement sur la tete. Je ne suis pa sune grande fan de la pluie montrealaise, mais God Bless the Rains Down in Africa (merci Toto).

Ugandan Travels 1 - My First Taste of God

Most of the early development missions were carried by religious groups. Western religions are therefore well implanted throughout East African communities. Our field assistant Peter Atoki is greatly involved in the management of the local catholic church around Kibale National Park. It was thus a pleasure to accept his invitation to the Sunday service. As the church filled out to what seemed the maximum capacity every minute, the singing became more and more powerful. Joined by more traditional percussions, catholic songs have never seemed so uplifting. Even though I don't have a clue of what the sermon was about (my Rutooro isn't there yet) I was filled with hope when it ended. the sense of unity between all these human beings was bigger than any of us. What these isolated communities achieve by uniting their strengths against AIDS, malaria, yellow fever, droughts... and by cooperating to fight these challenges was palpable in this church, under this roof. We are so much stronger in a group, and that feeling is what I will call my God from now on, this is the higher instance I believe in. And I deeply hope the primary goal or churches was just that: to create a central place for community building.

To end the morning with an even more positive note, we bought a chicken from the auction and offered it to our kind friend Atoki, as seen in the picture.

Joni and home

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone"
And oh shit was Joni ever right.

Not so long ago, let's say at the bio wine & cheese fall 2010 edition, I had an interesting conversation about homes, and what it means to possess a home. It all started by the simple sentence: "I don't have a home". It is true that in its purest form and as defined by Oxford Dictionnary, a home is simpy the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household. According to this, having a home is probably something fairly unknown to most of us, or far and confused in childhood memories.
This description deceives my own feelings about homes. I believe we all have a home, a place where we are all loved and cared about, where we can only and purely be true. A unphysical place where indeed not one but one's heart and soul can live permanently, as a member of a living unit. And I hope this represents so much more than the simple physical location of «home». 

I found that place, and to realise it makes it even harder to leave. And did I require a departure to actually know how important that home of mine is? I might have. But now that I know what it takes for me to truly have a home, there's no way I'm letting go of it, and I shall work as hard as I can to preserve it. I will be back.


Amour à ma maman et alliés, mon amour, et mes amis si précieux! Je vous adore.