Ivan the Terrible

If you're interested in making a donation to support the response to Cyclone Ivan on Madagascar's east coast, you can do so here through CARE International. Some images of the damage are beginning to emerge on YouTube (for example, here and here).

Earth Album

I could waste some serious time on this website. The only reason I was able to tear myself away after only 30 minutes or so was that I was frustrated with how long it was taking to load all the photos. Enjoy.

Good as New

I recognize that my great weakness as a blogger is that I don't write often enough about day-to-day stuff. A lot of people have asked me what ever happened to my car after the incident last month. Well, after a few delays and a bit of the expected grumbling about how the price we had agreed on wasn't enough for how much work the job turned out to be, I got the car back and was very pleasantly surprised. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you really wouldn't know at all how bad the damage was. Take a look:
The front-left of the car was where the impact was. If you look closely, you might notice that the entire front of the car is now a slighly different shade of red than the rest of the car because they had to paint the entire front section. The paint is the same color, it's just that it hasn't faded like the paint on the rest of the car.

Vendredi at Volume 5

It's been a while since I posted something in the Vendredi at Volume 5 tradition. I've been thinking a lot this past week about my friends in Madagascar who were basically a bull's eye for Cyclone Ivan (latest report of damage and recovery efforts here). Today's installment of VV5 is a song with a particular relevance to this region of Madagascar, and a special sentimental resonance among my group of friends. Hope everybody is OK.

LIEN BOUESSA Gagnony ambaniv'olo
Uploaded by tovolahbawejy

Bush as PCV

It occurred to me for the first time when watching this video of Bush on his visit to Liberia that he probably would have done a great job as a Peace Corps volunteer somewhere in Africa. His personal interest in the development of Africa seems genuine to me and he's been bolder than he probably ever needed to be in pushing some big initiatives related to development and fighting the spread of HIV/AIDS (the verdict is still out, in my opinion, on whether MCC will revolutionize development assitance. PEPFAR, despite the controversial "abstinence only" aspect of it, certainly represents a serious commitment to do something about HIV). Add to this his jocular style, his fondness for riding mountain bikes, and his apparently boundless capacity for optimism in the face of disaster, and you just may have the ideal Peace Corps volunteer.

The Latest on That Cyclone

Sounds pretty grim. Seems like the relief workers haven't been able to get in yet to check out the damage but they're getting reports that at least one hotel collapsed.

Update: here's a more recent report. There's still not a while lot of information, but this detail jumped out at me because the island of Ste. Marie was directly off the coast from where I lived. On a clear day you can stand just outside of town and make out certain landmarks on the island:

On Sainte Marie, a 60km long island off Madagascar's northeast coast, which bore the brunt of the cyclone, "75 percent of the houses have been destroyed," Styvanley Soa said.

Hold the Bacon, Please

If you're interested in the sorts of things that I'm interested in, then seeing another article about assistance for Africa set in a "Jeffrey Sachs versus William Easterly" framework is about as remarkable as flipping through TV stations and finding that some version of Law and Order is on. I actually found this one to be pretty good and I'd say I generally agree with this author. But it also falls prey to a really irritating habit among people who write about this stuff. After a rather lengthy discussion of what's wrong with the paternalism of the Sachs approach, he concludes that aid policies should rather be informed by the ideas of Francis Bacon, Hernando de Soto, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith. In other words, just let capitalism rip and everything else will sort itself out. This kind of market ideology is every bit as simplistic and foolish as the paternalism of Sachs, Bono and Madonna. And it's not like it hasn't been tried, either. A generation of (failed) World Bank and IMF policies were borne of exactly this idea that you just had to get the broad, macroeconomic conditions right and growth and prosperity would follow.

The irritating habit I refer to isn't the right-wing tilt of this guy's perspective, it's the notion that there's an alternative set of "good ideas for development" that we're just not putting into practice. Yes, it's stupid of somebody like Sachs to argue that, essentially, we've figured out how to make development happen and the current challenge is merely mobilizing the resources to carry it out. It's equally stupid to argue that the solution to global poverty is for everybody to read a bit more Bacon and Hayek.

The unfortunate truth is that nobody has really figured out "development" or how to bring it about. The healthy, vibrant, wealth creating, poverty reducing economies of the world are the exceptions, not the rule.

Cyclone Ivan

If you asked me to take a map of Madagascar and point to the place I used to live, I'd have trouble getting any closer than the orange dot on this map representing the latest location of a massive tropical cyclone. In 2004, when I was living there, we had a cyclone that missed us by 100 km or so and it was a pretty frightening experience. Most houses are made of relatively flimsy local materials. The corrugated metal roofs on the nicer buildings are only held in place by a few nails, and when they blow off they basically become giant flying blades. The number of brick buildings is nowhere near enough to accommodate the local population. Flooding is also a serious problem, as the town is located on the coast at the mouth of a big river. What I really remember, though, is the noise. It was just hour after hour of this unrelenting groaning sound that was loud enough to make communication difficult and sleep impossible.

Two Tuaregs Walk Into a Bar...

File this under "things you'd never see in an article about the US":

In April, Niger authorities even plan to organise a "National Week of Ethnic Jokes" with radio programmes, conferences, joke competitions and cultural evenings.

Meanwhile, the article from which this detail was drawn strikes me as exceedingly stupid. The gist of it seems to be that in Niger people make a lot of ethnic jokes, but it's all in good fun and people don't mind. Except sometimes when they do.

I don't really know anything about the "centuries-old custom" of ethnic jokes in Niger, but it seem to me that the author is taking some liberties when s/he jumps to the pat conclusion that this tradition, "far from exacerbating ethnic tensions, actually has a calming effect on them." I think many Westerners, coming from a cultural context in which people are generally sensitive to such things, are struck by the relative bluntness with which people here comment on ethnicity, color, weight, wealth, religion, etc. But this is a fairly banal observation and I wouldn't draw too many specific conclusions from it.