Pics from Maputo

All my good pictures were lost when baggage handler thieves in Johannesburg stole my mom's and the project's digital cameras (and my cellphone) out of my checked bag en route to Zambia. So all we have are pics of the meeting, boring! I do have 1.5 seconds of excellent video of our M&E guy doing a Zulu dance and we'll see if I can figure out how to put that up. And EA will provide pics of our ill-fated cruise a bit later....along with the story I still have to write.

The Maputo meeting went really well, I think, and we accomplished most of our goals. The town is quite nice, pretty deserted but with tall office buildings and apartment buildings that are more or less covered in mildew. There are a number of good restaurants, including Micasa, which serves excellent caipirinhas and ostrich medallions. Yum! You can find prawns everywhere, butterflied and grilled with lots of butter, and the South Africans have opened a bunch of chain restaurants and clubs à la TGI Fridays or a mini African House of Blues. The first evening we saw some Portugese jazz at a place that had a faux treehouse quality to it, with vines and leafyness and a real rubber tree growing up out of the courtyard. The band sat in front of a large fake clamshell and there were five big video screens showing two different camera angles.

There was a really really good Indian restaurant not far from the hotel, and the Natural History Museum was AWESOME - stuffed lions and zebras and antelopes and civet cats and a coelacanth (Wikipedia here). Coelacanths are prehistoric fish that everyone thought were extinct until fishermen caught one off the coast of Madagascar, and then Indonesia, in the 20th century. They have little legs and look like Far Side cartoons (they also give birth to live young called pups!).

The museum was great - huge - with fish and mammals and insects, including our beloved anopheles. There were big wood carvings of cellular biology and the prehistoric time periods, with dinosaurs and cavemen. One wall had about 8 elephant fetuses of varying ages (cool!). And - all the animals were eating one another! The lion was perched on the back of the zebra, in the correct position to bite through the spinal cord. Areana said "Wow, that's great - lions are trying to be humane by killing the zebra quickly!" Always the party pooper, I pointed out that it's just more efficient for the lion to not waste a lot of energy mauling the zebra to death.

That's it for now - off to Puerto Rico tomorrow very early! Thank goodness the flight is out of Reagan and not Dulles, like I'd originally thought. In fact, I thought that Reagan and Dulles were the SAME until I checked my flight info last week. It's ok, you can laugh. I don't mind. :)

Shower Bliss

Last weekend at Target I got Edith and myself an early Christmas present - a new showerhead! After two weeks of really awesome water pressure in Africa I came home to our drizzly pathetic shower and said "no mas!". For fifteen bills we got a brand new kickass showerhead whose major advantage over the old one is that it is entirely unclogged with hard water residue.

It is a whole new world right now, and every time we step in that shower it's like a symphony is playing.

Fixies are Everywhere

I come back after two weeks in Mozambique and Zambia and what a difference! There are fixies everywhere in Baltimore. Everywhere! Downtown, Charles Village, Penn Station, Brewer's Art. Ok, so there used to be fixies at these places before, but I just ain't never seen so many. It's nice.

Also the new Chipotle is open up the street from me - won't get to that anytime soon I'm sure, given my past patronage of local eateries. Just can't seem to make it up past the grocery store when there's perfectly good food at home.

Other than that, nothing much is new. I will get to news of the trip a little later.

In Maputo

Made it to mozambique. hotel is nice and purports to have wireless, but i can´t make it work. flights were long but not brutal. it is overcast and warm and breezy and reminds me of libreville but with no people (it is sunday though). i still hate my haircut and want to cry every time i see it but since this is not conducive to getting anything done i am stopping with the pity party and pretending i have my old haircut. i should also stop saying ´thanks, but i hate it´when people say hey you got your hair cut!

i dont have to facilitate many sessions, thank goodness, but areana has already nominated me to go to kenya directly after london to do i don´t know what exactly. i am hoping she was joking but fear she was not. i do have a job to do stateside, after all! didn´t get out in paris at all as the layover was shorter than i thought (7 hours) and i was tired and didn´t want to waste the 195 euro (!!!!!) that the project was spending on the day room.

Hopefully I will have some pics to post during the trip. On verra. There´s a jazz concert tonight we will try to go to, and Matt wants to eat prawns, so who knows what´ll happen.

Packaging

I've ordered a bunch of stuff for work lately that's come in that awful hard plastic with edges you can't cut through without a bandsaw, but honestly, my malaria and traveler's diarrhea packaging takes the cake. I mean, look - they're six inches tall. The Cipro had 4 count 'em 4 tablets in it. I asked the pharmacist if they'd run out of the smaller bottles and she said "No, it's for the instructions." Jeez oh man.

Bike Porn

Check out the hot PX-10! Oooh, chromed seat and chain stays. Diagonal 531 sticker. Not in great shape but what a beauty!

If this guy thinks he needs boobs to sell this frame, he doesn't know what he's got.

Habib!

Habib last night was awesome - Dobet Gnahore from Cote d'Ivoire and Vusi Mahlasela from South Africa were also amazing. It wasn't 3 separate sets, but trading songs and backing each other up. I think they only did one solo number each, actually. Afterwards we marched backstage (ignoring the guy who asked us who we were with - duh! We're with Habib!) and chatted with Habib for a little bit, and then some more after he finished signing CDs. It was really nice to catch up with him - I met him in 2000 on my first trip to Mali (long story) and we've hung out off and on in Bamako and in the states. Mostly Bamako though.

A whole truckload of DC-based Mali PCVs were there too and it was nice seeing everyone, even if only for five minutes. Gotta get down there to hang with the family more often.

Haircut

Got my haircut. I like it. Jenny at Crash was super nice and even called me on Monday to make sure I liked it and was doing ok. Guess I was a little frazzled during the process. Thinking about going even shorter....and Esther at work is egging me on.

Spying

I get on the shuttle this morning and realize the woman sitting in front of me works at my office. Not too many of us commute via the shuttle - it means a 15-20 minute walk through downtown to get to the building.

She's been in the field for a while and is just back as of a month or so. When she met me briefly I had longer hair and I figure she doesn't recognize me. Also, I'm wearing big sunglasses. I know her to be cool (from others) and she also looks the part, youngish, with streaky gray in her hair and sharp cheekbones.

She gets off at my stop and I follow. She walks pretty fast and there's this awesome The Knife song on my iPod, We Share Our Mother's Health (Trentemoller remix) so I feel like I'm in a spy movie, with my black coat and shades and tailing someone. She takes a slightly different route but I keep track of her the whole time and was never spotted. I'm about a 100m back when she gets to the door. Perfect.

Midnight Snack

Imminent Demise

Saturday is the Baltimore Half Marathon.

That's 13.1 miles.

Pretty far, innit?

We'll see if I can do it. Less worried about my aerobic capacity and leg strength than the integrity of my hip flexors and knee parts. There are free massages at the end but I'm pretty sure I will not be walking for the rest of the weekend.

I'll keep you posted!

What's Good

Is having a roommate like Edith, who is the same H&M size as you and roughly the same shoe size, and you can buy and share clothes! Doesn't hurt that she can kill mice that get caught in sticky traps either. I tried to dispatch one with a blow of a broom handle to the nape of the neck and of course did not hit hard enough to kill it outright, though I'm pretty sure I broke its spine. Edith's put-it-in-a-bag-and-whack-it-on-the-ground strategy is more impersonal and effective.

Mozambique!

Work is sending me to Mozambique in December for our Africa Regional meeting. Apparently the beaches are beautiful (not that we will have time to enjoy them!) and the prawns are 8 inches. Oh yeah.

Customer Service

Three cheers for Kryptonite Customer Service.

Not the speediest in the world, but they sent me a new lock and a reimbursement for the locksmith after I wrote them a snippy letter about how it was their fault their keys snap off in their locks, and not the fact that I'd had 6 beers in four hours and was unlocking my bike in an altered state. I guess they've kept me as a customer and here I am giving them free advertising, so it's probably worth the 100 bucks or so to them.

Maybe if I get drunk and break a Colnago I could get a brand new bike too?

A Nobel Prize doesn't make you smart

This morning, eating my Raisin Bran, I noticed that Becker and Posner had blogged about the WHO's recent DDT announcement. Becker is a Nobel Prize-winning economist at U Chicago, which is bursting at the seams with smart economists. You may have heard of a certain Steven Leavitt, for example, who wrote a pretty good book called Freakonomics.

Posner is a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and lectures at the UChicago Law School. He's lately a wackjob, advocating all kinds of torture in the name of national security, and Becker is known to be fairly ruthless in his reasoning (as one of the leaders in economics of population growth and fertility). But I was astounded by the level of ignorance they displayed while writing on this topic. Becker refers to the WTO, not the WHO, for starters, and it gets worse. Thankfully someone's already done my work for me, so you can read the full ass-whuppin' here at Tim Lambert's blog.

I'm all for DDT as part of a balanced approach to malaria control. Combined with long-lasting treated nets (LLINs) and effective treatment, it can reduce malaria to near-undetectable levels. But it's not a magic bullet; it's not effective in all climate zones, it requires an enormous amount of logistical coordination to undertake effectively. The people who think it's the answer to all our malaria woes are underinformed or worse, willfully blind. The WHO knows all this which is why they've been using it for years, and why the ban on DDT never applied to its use in malaria control programs. If you spray it over cotton and tobacco fields, it'll mess up your ecosystem. If you spray it inside houses in small quantities every 6 months, you'll prevent a lot of cases. But when people get sick they still need effective treatment.

Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) with DDT costs about 40 bucks per disability-adjusted life year (DALY) saved. LLINs cost about 20 bucks, and artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), the best medicine we have right now, is around 12 bucks. This is from Morel's 2005 article Cost-Effectiveness of Malaria Interventions. You know, if you want to make an economic argument with some good facts.

Bob Dylan at our Family Reunion

My mom is visiting DC and Baltimore in November for the annual Slavic History meeting (or something). Bob Dylan is playing the same weekend (Friday) in Fairfax. Perfect! I email her this and she writes back:

"It is SO tempting, but I actually have to participate in sessions Friday late and evening. So sorry!"

This is bullshit and I tell her that.

In the meantime I pull Dad in, as he is doing nothing that weekend and might as well fly out to hang out with me and Mom and Bob, and Ede's family. Mom reevaluates her priorities (and her schedule) and discovers she is done with sessions at 6:30. Brilliant! "COUNT ME IN!" she says. Only fitting for a woman who was first in line to buy the new album from the Moscow books and music store, Pages.

So Dad will fly in on Friday and I'll pick him up, go meet up with Mom somehow, see Bob, hang out in DC, then everyone comes back to Baltimore Sunday and we dine chez Edith, two big happy families, and then we do touristy Balto stuff Monday before their flight back. Perfect!

Favorite Papers

This week The Malaria Joural published an article by some researchers at The Wellcome Trust that I found really interesting. It's called Rethinking the economic costs of malaria at the household level: Evidence from applying a new analytical framework in rural Kenya. The team looked at cost data on treatment seeking, burden and coping strategies during the wet and dry seasons over a year, and also followed 15 households to collect qualitative data. Unfortunately no significant different was found between mean direct cost burdens (i.e. the percentage of household income they spent on malaria) in the wet and dry season, although illness and income do vary with the seasons. The main variable was vulnerability - the ability of the household to cope with malaria episodes and other shocks. Unsurprisingly, wealthier households were better able to cope, but poorer ones descended further into poverty, spending up to a third of their income on malaria treatments.

If you would like a brief summary, there's a 10 slide powerpoint presentation available too.

Another Freakonomics-y article I remember from a few months back: correlation of girl's toilets to number of girls enrolled in schools in rural africa. It was in The New York Times but you can read the full article here.