Ibn Ibn Battuta

Vieques Vacation

2012-04-29T20:52:00.000-04:00

A view along the malecón boardwalk in "downtown" Esperanza, Vieques.

Last month the lady friend and I needed a break from work, and took a few days off for a long weekend in Puerto Rico. After a night in San Juan (where we discovered the excellent vegetarian spot Verde Mesa—highly recommended) we took a small prop plane from the capital to the island of Vieques.

We found Vieques to be a peculiar sort of paradise. For decades, the US military used the island for target practice, and its eastern half still remains off-limits thanks to the presence of unexploded ordnance. The nine thousand residents mostly live in two main coastal towns, Isabel Segunda and Esperanza, with a scattering of homes and guesthouses located in the interior. The locals are predictably laid back; many own horses, but simply let them roam the island's forests freely, and round them up when they want to take a ride. (The wandering horses—and Vieques' extremely narrow roads—make for nerve-wracking driving.)

Vieques is also known as a place where people don't ask too many questions. The owner of the guesthouse where we stayed—himself by all appearances an upstanding citizen—told us he was channel surfing past America's Most Wanted one night when he recognized a familiar face. "I was like, 'I know that guy,'" he said. "'He owns the home and garden center in town!'" Sitting at the bar at Al's Mar Azul, you can definitely imagine that the colorful faces all around have some stories to tell—and some others they'd probably rather not.

White sand beaches and clear waters ring the entire island, and coral reefs rest just off shore. A highlight of visiting Vieques is spending an evening at Mosquito Bay, where perfect geographic conditions align to make an ideal habitat for bioluminescent micro-organisms. (A very readable explanation of the science is available here.) In a kayak, you can paddle across the bay and watch as glowing streaks extend behind your every stroke. Scoop up a handful of the water and the creatures flash brilliant sparks across your hand. Fish even light up as they cruise below the surface.

The lady friend and I generally spent each day exploring the island's different beaches, snorkeling and snacking and drinking. I lugged a travel fishing kit down from DC with me, but didn't have any luck in the few hours of fishing I managed before my gear was stolen. We had been warned about the thieves on horseback who lurk in the bushes, preying on unsuspecting beachgoers, but hoped that locking the doors and moving a few yards away to the water's edge would be safe. Alas, some local good-for-nothing managed to get in and make off with a bag of fishing tackle and our camera.

He didn't find my phone, sunglasses, or wallet, so life goes on. I just hope the little fucker and his friends are hauling in a lot of fish down there, and taking some great pictures of them too.

Steps Forward, Steps Backward

2012-02-25T03:54:00.000-05:00

At Tenadi, several hours' drive from the Mauritanian capital, two colleagues pause for the view atop a sand dune.

In the Middle East and North Africa, 2011 began with a bang that never let up. A transformational revolution in Tunisia sparked uprisings across the Arab world that, in one way or another, touched every country in the region.

The sudden explosion of the Arab Spring—which saw once dormant populations shock their rulers by gathering in the streets to demand a new political order—is a tremendously positive development for a part of the world that for so long seemed by turns stuck in the mud or actively regressing. Since the initial uprisings, however, the horrific violence, political roadblocks, and other deterrents which various regimes have deployed are a reminder of just how difficult a task the citizens of these countries still face.

The current year—a turbulent one already—is only reinforcing that conclusion. Just two months
into 2012, Syria is witnessing a frightening escalation of violence against innocent civilians. Egypt's military leaders are busy undermining their country's so-called revolution and intimidating independent civil society groups. Battle-scarred Libya and Yemen remain in a precarious state. Leaders from Morocco to Algeria to Jordan to Bahrain and elsewhere have succeeded in beating back or heading off uprisings in their countries while avoiding fundamental change.

Steps forward, steps backward—this is what progress looks like.

* * *

Not long after my last trip to the region back in September, I was again on a plane for North Africa. I spent November in a hotel in Rabat, helping to coordinate international observers for the country's first parliamentary election under its new, post-Arab-Spring constitution. As the elections—or more specifically the population's relative disinterest in them—highlighted, the new constitution hadn't brought real change to Morocco. The kingdom remained a kingdom in every way, and most Moroccans knew they still weren't the ones calling the shots.

I barely left the hotel, and barely slept. Still, walking the streets of Rabat, it still feels surreal to find the place so familiar, and to be reminded of the life I once had there. Steps forward in time, steps backward in time.

Next, back to Mauritania, as gloriously bleak as before. This trip I was lucky enough to get half a day to escape the capital. I convinced a few colleagues—two of whom professed to have never seen the desert, despite having lived their whole lives in the country—to accompany me on a short excursion to Tenadi, a rest stop several hours southeast of Nouakchott along Mauritania's Route d'Espoir, the ironically named "Road of Hope" that leads to Mali through hundreds of miles of desolate dunes and scrub. Every ten kilometers or so, soldiers waved us over to a checkpoint at the road's shoulder to study our papers for a few moments. In a place like Mauritania—plagued by militant activity, trafficking of people and weapons and drugs, and frequent military coups—extra security doesn't make you feel safe, because it's just a reminder that even the thugs in charge don't feel safe.

From the peak of a towering sand dune, Tenadi was beautiful, in the stark way that some deserts are. The horizon was etched with the sharp sand hills, and dotted with scraggly brush. Goats panted under each thorny thicket, and loose herds of camels drifted among the scrub. Even in mid-December, it was a hundred degrees in the shade. Not that I was complaining. After months of nonstop activity, an afternoon adventure outside the office with friends was a welcome break.

Since stumbling across the finish line of 2011, sick and stressed and burnt out, I've been focusing on correcting my work-life balance a bit in the new year, which will hopefully bring as many steps forward as backward.

Back to Berberland

2011-10-30T20:50:00.000-04:00

Bab Rouah, along the walls that ring the royal palace in Rabat.

From Mauritania, my work trip continued to Morocco. It was my first time back in nearly two years, since leaving in December 2009. Before I left home, friends had asked me if I was excited to be heading back. "Morocco and I have a long and troubled history," I would respond with a smile.

In Rabat, returning to my old haunts—the neighborhood of Agdal—was surreal. Every cafe, hardware shop, kitchenware store, grocer's, and flower shop dredged up weighty memories from the depths of my subconscious. The sign on a laundromat, the croissants at a neighborhood bakery, the green plastic bag of local wine shop—my eye seized on even the most innocuous details to recall some lost association. But after living there as half of a couple, I welcomed the opportunity to return alone and rediscover the place on my own terms.

Rabat's new tramway was up and running, but daily life in the city seemed otherwise unchanged.
Moroccan wine—which I found to be an acquired taste when I first moved to the country—was so once again. (I nearly spit out my first mouthful this time around.) Thankfully, an old favorite, Domaine de Sahari Reserve, remains genuinely good, reassuring me at least somewhat me that I was not a complete alcoholic during the 15 months I lived here.

* * *

Morocco has undergone far more noteworthy transformations on the political front since I left nearly two years ago. The "Arab Spring" reached the country back in February, sparking massive street demonstrations that called for the monarchy to share more power and for a crackdown on corruption among the country's political elites. In March, the king appointed a committee—answerable only to the king—to revise the country's constitution based on directions from—you guessed it—the king. The monarchy then mobilized all the state's resources to ensure that the constitution passed overwhelmingly in a popular referendum. While the reform process was, therefore, massively flawed and brought little real change, I'm nonetheless encouraged by the fact that a traditionally loyal population is increasingly thinking for itself, and for perhaps the first time in the country's history forced the monarchy to respond to their priorities, rather than the reverse.

One of the central tensions in Moroccan society, the place of the country's Berber "minority" (which I discussed in a post two years ago) arose in a big way during the constitutional revision process. In the end, Morocco finally came to recognize Tamazight—the Berber language—as an official language of the kingdom.

The other changes were minimal, but a start. I'll be following the country closely in my new position, and will be back in November for the country's parliamentary elections.

Nouakchott, City of Sand

2011-10-17T21:20:00.001-04:00

Traditionally, Mauritanian men and women both cover up from head to toe outside the home. After a minute in the country's blinding midday sun, it's easy to see why.

The night before I left Nouakchott—the desolate capital of the even more desolate northwest African country of Mauritania—a sales email managed to slip through my spam blocker. It began, "Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere in the desert, you MUST have heard of Viagra..."

Funny you should say so. As a matter of fact, I do feel as if I'm living under a rock in the desert.

* * *

Thanks to a long-anticipated transfer at work, my new portfolio includes a series of projects in North Africa. This means the end—for now at least—of my Central African travels, and a chance to further explore this other familiar corner of the continent.

My first destination in the region, however, was one I had never visited and knew little about. I had read about Mauritania's spartan "desert blues" music on a blog I enjoy, Sahel Sounds, and I could vaguely recall waking one morning during my time in Morocco to the news that a military coup had taken place in the neighboring country to the south, but beyond that I knew little. (Well, now that I think about it some more, I can recall that they only outlawed slavery in 2007. It's said that the practice still persists.)

During my week in the capital of this neglected former French colony, I found Nouakchott (نواكشوط, pronounced "new-ock-shot") to be a visually underwhelming place. Apart from a few mosques, modest office towers, and government ministries, nothing in the city seemed built with aesthetics in mind. It seems that most Mauritanians are just trying to make ends meet, and don't have time for frills. Nouakchott's dusty streets, concrete block apartments, and tin-roofed shops are a nod to the hardscrabble lives being lived there.

On our drive around town, my organization's local representative, an ornery old Québecois gentleman, had pointed out sights of interest: his preferred butcher shop, the tent market, the bank with the ATM, the road toward the airport, a few embassy compounds. We visited two beaches outside the city—long, pristine stretches of undisturbed sand and waves. A few French expats spend their days managing a seaside fish-and-chips joint on the beach, but other than that there are no structures in sight.

"Nouakchott, c'est une ville qui n'est pas destinée à survivre," my Québecois colleague opined late on a Saturday afternoon, as we sat in lopsided lawn chairs on the beach, watching the waves. We had just visited the dunes—they start at the city's edge and stretch north toward Morocco, south toward Senegal, and east for thousands of miles, all the way to Sudan. Sometimes those dunes, ever shifting with the wind, overtake the outskirts of town. Other times, sea water wells up from the low-lying ground without warning in a random neighborhood, rendering it unlivable. The people of Nouakchott have found a way to live on the fringe between the sea and the sand, but their city's future is by no means certain.

* * *

I spent much of my week in Nouackhott working, but we dined out most evenings. No more than a handful of restaurants in this conservative Muslim country serve alcohol. Those that do are discreet about it; alcohol is illegal to import, and must be smuggled past pliable customs officers. The Québecois, lacking for entertainment, patronized one of those establishments each night, and each night he chuckled to the waiter as he ordered his "thé canadien" with a wink.

The Mauritanians I had the chance to meet were exceptionally friendly, which bodes well for future visits, even if the place seems less than hospitable in other ways. Beyond Nouakchott, Mauritania's interior is said to hold sparkling oases and small desert towns rich in history. Summoning my optimism and reminding myself that every place holds something worth exploring, I can convince myself that I'm looking forward to another visit in the months to come.

Next up: a return to Morocco that's more apprehensive than triumphal.

9/11 and the Tenth Parallel

2011-09-11T23:30:00.000-04:00

Twin towers of a different kind, Damascus

Among my many emotions on this somber anniversary, the greatest is frustration. Here's why, and what I think we can do to fix it.

In response to a series of events ten years ago today that an arrogant and naive America could not anticipate (much less comprehend), our nation launched two wasteful and devastating wars, dismantled protections of civil liberties, sanctioned torture and illegal detention, built walls—both physical and bureaucratic—around our borders, shamefully failed the selfless volunteers who sacrificed to protect us, and embraced xenophobia and racism in our public discourse. All these rash and careless and downright stupid responses to 9/11 frustrate me, but not nearly as much as our collective failure to respond in one single, all-important way: to seek to understand what led to those events and how can we work to decrease the chances of their ever happening again.

Few ever seriously asked those questions, in large part because they were "answered" for us. President Bush told us the terrorists hated our way of life, media pundits told us the "war on terror" on the battlegrounds of Afghanistan and Iraq was a success—until that illusion became wholly untenable, and all our crazy uncles railed against Islamic rage and Muslim "backwardness" and the desire of every human being from Morocco to Indonesia to see us all dead.

But in truth, most Americans never really made an effort to learn more for themselves about the values, the challenges, the histories, the cultures that exist in the Arab and Islamic worlds. If we had, we may have acted very differently throughout these last ten years, and adopted measures to defuse the tensions that fueled extremism among a shockingly small fraction of these populations. Instead, we spent the last ten years working against our own interest or, at best, spinning in circles.

Today, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, police officers manned every corner of downtown Washington and New York. Why? Because at heart we know that—even with Bin Laden dead and Saddam dead and al-Qaida in disarray and all the other so-called victories in the "war on terror"—we are still no safer than we were on that fateful September morning ten years ago. We just don't understand why.

* * *

I would like to challenge readers of this post to change that, by making a genuine effort to reach out and understand the thing you fear. Here's some ideas:

First, read. I suggest the single best book I have read in this decade on the Islamic world and its interactions with our own: Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone who wants a readable and engaging look at the central questions driving events in our world today.

Second, ask yourself how many Muslims you know? There are billions in the world—now is as good a time as any to meet some. Go out on a limb—ask them about their origins, their faith, their culture, their beliefs. What's the worst that could happen? Too many Americans make too many blanket statements about a religion they hardly know.

Third, take a trip somewhere you'd never imagine going. Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, India, Kenya—why not? The only difference between a trip there and a trip to Europe is that you'll learn more and spend less. Don't have the financial ability to travel so far? There are Muslims in Ann Arbor and Houston and New York and pretty much everywhere else in the US. Visit them and talk with them.

These steps aren't terribly difficult. Yet if more Americans make efforts like these to reach out and understand "The Other", our country can be in a very different place—and have a very different reputation in the world—on the the 20th anniversary of this tragic day.

Hama: Faces from a Forsaken City

2011-08-02T02:38:00.011-04:00


A fruit seller and his tea, July 2005. Hama, Syria.

Since its vibrant, idealistic beginnings eight months ago, the Arab Spring has splintered into many different summers. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia—the Spring's most successful by any measure—have dissolved into banal squabbles over electoral systems and constitutional provisions and party politics, as they should. The aspirations of Bahraini democrats were brutally silenced, but Moroccans, Jordanians, and a few others may still hope to see some small good emerge. Less promising is the civil war in Libya and, perhaps not far behind it, similar disintegration in Yemen and in Syria.

The Syrian case is particularly troubling to me. That's not because, after a summer of Arabic study there, I pretend to know the country, its people, or its politics well. Rather, it's because I have never genuinely loved a place that was not my home the way I loved Syria. Nowhere else have I met
people so eager to know me, to hear my story and to tell me theirs, to explore the novelty of our mutual foreignness and revel in our many similarities.

Today, the Syrian government is hell-bent on crushing the revolution that it created through decades of repression. In the last few days, the regime has redoubled its brutal efforts, hoping to break the collective back of the protesters. Ground zero in that effort is, of course, Hama. (In 1982, the current President Asad's father faced a nascent rebellion in Hama; he responded by barricading all the roads leaving the city and ordering his artillery to bombard it for three weeks straight, killing tens of thousands.) Of all the cities I visited in Syria—and I visited most of those that have been in the news these past weeks—Hama stands out. While the central Syrian town's natural beauty and timeworn sights are spectacular, I remember Hama most for its inhabitants.

In my memory they are uniformly effusive, generous, and warm, but in truth I hardly knew the people of Hama. Today, of the many good-hearted people I met there, I can only remember the names of a few. But when I read the news of the bombings and the shootings and the shellings, I can still recall their faces.

Turqoise to Timberline: Chasing Trout in the Rockies

2011-07-07T23:09:00.004-04:00

Spying on the enemy from above, at Timberline Lake. (photo by C. Graham)

DC is the last place on earth any sane warm-blooded creature would want to be during the summer heat. So a few days before the Fourth of July weekend arrived, when my uncle Chris called to invite me to spend the holiday camping in the Rocky Mountains with him and my aunt and two cousins, I wisely accepted.

From their home in Denver, I drove with my uncle and his chocolate lab, Ollie, to Turquoise Lake, where we met the rest of the family and pitched our tents for the weekend. (Of course, in our minds this was largely a fishing trip, so my uncle and I made sure to stop at several points along the way—fly fishing shops, trout streams, and rivers still bursting with this year's late snowmelt.)

My two cousins, twin 15-year old boys, led the charge with their friends on the next day's hike to Timberline Lake. The two-hour climb to 11,000 feet (3,350 m.) involved fording several snowmelt
streams, which at about 34°F (1°C) left our legs with pins and needles. At the lake, the teenagers ate lunch and then quickly grew bored. While they turned back to the trailhead, Chris and I began our afternoon's trek around the circumference of the lake, in pursuit of the native greenback cutthroat trout.

The fish proved hard to catch, given that the lake's water was entirely clear, allowing our prey to easily spot us as we followed the shore. But after several hours of alternately slogging through icy water and over snow drifts as tall as me, I finally managed to hook one of the brilliant red-gilled speckled trout and yank him ashore. It was a small but satisfying victory.

Greenback cutthroat trout at Timberline Lake, Colorado (photo by C. Graham)

The rest of the weekend passed even better than I could have hoped: campfires and s'mores with my cousins, fireworks and stargazing, more hiking and fly fishing, and a meandering drive home with my uncle across the West's wide and solitary expanses.

Years ago I made a decision to see as much of the world as I can before it all becomes Americanized, and to leave the explorations of my own country until I'm older and, perhaps, less adventurous. But I have to admit: trips like this one make me a little impatient to get started with my journeys closer to home.

In addition, I've posted some of my uncle's pictures from our trip here.

Sylvestre's Stories

2011-06-29T01:30:00.001-04:00

Sylvestre has taught me a lot during my visits to Rwanda.

Of the small group of young Rwandans with whom I work each time I come here, Sylvestre holds a special place. The other Rwandans on our team call him Mzee, a Swahili term reserved for respected elders. He gets that nickname in part because he's the oldest, but at roughly 33 (his exact age is sort of a guess) Sylvestre is barely older than the others, so there is more to it. It's not rank or education either—he's our office's driver and fix-it-man. Rather, they treat Sylvestre with an extra touch of respect in part because he is "a survivor." (In Rwanda, that term has only one meaning: a survivor of the 1994 genocide.) None of the others are; they all returned to Rwanda in the aftermath, having grown up in Burundi, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, or Tanzania. But Sylvestre and his family stuck it out in Rwanda, despite being of mixed ethnic heritage, and thus subject to the anti-Tutsi campaigns that erupted with increasing frequency throughout the '80s and early '90s before fully exploding in 1994.

A few nights before I left Rwanda on my most recent trip, Sylvestre was driving me back to my hotel when he decided to recount one of his stories. He tells them at seemingly random moments when we are together, perhaps whenever he finds the right words. Piecing together phrases from his limited English vocabulary, he revisits in a gentle murmur the horrors that he witnessed as a teenager. On this night, I listened carefully, and when he had finished I asked him as plainly as I could: Would it be ok for me to share some of his stories? His eyes grew wide and he broke into a smile. "Yes... Sure!" A moment later, he explained, "Me, I have very many stories, too much stories. But, very little English."

* * *

In truth, I still know very little about Sylvestre. He was born in southern Rwanda, somewhere west of Butare, and fled his home during the genocide, somehow ending up in Kigali. After my trip to Rwanda last fall, I recounted one of the first stories Sylvestre shared with me from 1994, about hiding in a house in Kigali while génocidaire gangs roved the neighborhood streets, fishing out and executing those they figured for Tutsis.

Everyone who spent the spring of 1994 in Rwanda—survivors and perpetrators alike—remembers these stories, but few speak them aloud as Sylvestre does. Every time he meets foreign visitors, Sylvestre wants to take them to some of Rwanda's many memorial sites, despite the horrific memories that those visits must drag to the forefront of his consciousness. (Or are they always there? The weight of that question overwhelms me each time it enters my mind.) When I asked him why, Sylvestre told me he wants people who didn't live the genocide "to see what really happen, not just in books." Reading about it isn't good enough; Sylvestre wants outsiders to feel a trace of the voracious evil that he and so many others remember.

Driven by this mission, Sylvestre is not content to let visitors just stand in the doorway when they visit a memorial. A few months ago, when he took a colleague to an infamous memorial site near Kigali and she hesitated to enter a subterranean crypt, Sylvestre told her she could not turn back. Then he took her hand and guided her down into the darkness.

* * *

On an earlier trip to Rwanda, I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, which tells a story of the genocide's beginnings, its atrocities, and its ongoing aftermath. Though it is still chilling, the museum's bird's-eye view doesn't quite bring the event to life in intimate terms. When you read a plaque that says, "In 100 days, almost 1 million people were killed by their own countrymen," it's easy for the brain to lump those incomprehensible numbers in with history's long line of man-made tragedies. Even the bones, stacked neatly in glass display cases, have a clinical air. And outside the museum, the visitor sees only a few wide concrete slabs—but not the mass graves beneath them where over 250,000 victims are buried.

But last month—after much urging from Sylvestre—I visited the Nyamata memorial site for the first time, and found it to be an incomparable experience. Back in 1994, in this rural town some 30 km south of Kigali, the guide told us, around 2,500 Tutsis from surrounding villages took shelter in the local church, hoping that the Hutu mobs would respect the sanctuary. They did not, and instead began dragging their victims outside to kill them in small groups. But finding the traditional means of slaughter—machetes, clubs, and farm implements—too inefficient, they called in the national army to help speed up the operation.

Today, bullet holes fill the brick walls. Shrapnel scars pit the floors. The victims' clothes, muddy and slowly decaying to dust, have been carefully stacked on all the pews. With Sylvestre by my side, I walk downstairs, where a single white coffin holds the body of a woman who was tortured and mutilated in ways I wish the guide had never recounted to us.

Outside the church, Sylvestre led me to a set of stairs that disappeared into the ground. I walked down behind him. At the base of the stairs, wide shelves of human skulls and femurs stretched back into the dark corners of the room, leaving only a narrow space to stand. We stood for several moments in chilly silence, then gladly returned to the daylight.

Above ground again, we paused nearby at the top of a second set of stairs leading down into the darkness. "This one, very dangerous," Sylvestre whispered. He uses "dangerous" to cover anything harmful, scary, or just plain evil, so I took this one alone while he stayed above ground. Though it was even larger, this second crypt overflowed with human remains nonetheless. The air was thick with a damp, oppressive silence.

Afterward, Sylvestre and I sat on a low stone wall across the street from the memorial, while children from a nearby primary school shuffled past, kicking puffs of red dust up into the late afternoon light. He was visibly shaken, and I was close enough to breaking down and sobbing that I welcomed our silence.

But after a few minutes, Sylvestre suddenly spoke: "My family, before 1994... we have 50 people."

I didn't hear the laughing schoolkids or chirping birds around us anymore.

"Today, we have five: my mama, my brother, my sister, my cousin... and me."

Every muscle in my neck and face was tensed. I focused all the concentration I could muster on holding back tears. My sinuses filled with snot, my eyes welled, my chest began to tremble. But what right did I have to cry? I wasn't the one who had suffered this.

A minute later, Sylvestre stood up, turned to me, and shrugged his shoulders. "It's ok. Let's go."

He walked toward the car.

* * *

The night before we were to wake at sunrise to visit the gorillas (the other "g word" that Rwanda is known for), Sylvestre and I readied for bed in our hotel room. He took off his shirt, revealing the scar that I had first seen back in October.

I didn't think twice about seeing it again on this night, but for some reason, tonight Sylvestre wanted to show it to me. He turned his back toward me and craned his neck around, pointing at the thick black arc across his otherwise smooth shoulder. "This, from 1994."

Standing across the room in my boxers, I nodded, somber and lacking words. An inadequate "sorry" worked its way past the lump in my throat.

"Yeah, it's ok," Sylvestre replied softly. He offered no more details. We climbed into our beds, and I turned out the light.

Sylvestre fell asleep in seconds, while I stared ahead, sleepless, as the moonlight crept across the wall.

* * *

A few days later as I was preparing to leave, a few of us went out for farewell beers in Kigali. Sylvestre drove me home. When we pulled into the hotel driveway, he turned to me and said, yet again, "Me, I have many stories. But English is, for me, verrrrry small. So... sorry."

"Don't be sorry," I told him. "You're doing great."

And he is. In a place where such stories are charged with either tremendous pain or tremendous shame, where survivors still live next door to the people who killed their families, and where healing is a carefully scripted national exercise, genuine release is hard to come by. Sylvestre seems determined to build an outlet for his stories, charged as they are with dark emotions. I hope the many others like him can find the right words, the right audience, and the right moment to share their stories. Because anyone who has heard those stories knows that from the horrible pain of their retelling, some small goodness can emerge.

Thank you, Sylvestre, for sharing your stories.

Gorilla Country: There Are No Creationists in Virunga

2011-06-13T23:01:00.002-04:00

I had to remind myself that they only look like humans in gorilla suits.

Within a week of returning home from family vacation in Ireland, I was back on the road for another work trip to Rwanda—my third in the last year and fourth overall.

In my previous three trips, I had never managed to visit Rwanda's most famous tourist attraction—the mountain gorillas. The price tag was a big reason. Visiting the gorillas requires getting to Rwanda in the first place (not a cheap proposition), then to Virunga National Park, on the country's northern border. But the expenses don't end there; the permit to join a small group and enter the lush highland forests, under mandatory escort by a team of trackers, guides, and armed scouts, costs US$500. For that price, one is allowed to trek up the volcanoes' steep slopes to find a gorilla family and observe them for a maximum of an hour. Of course, seeing them is not guaranteed, and online travel forums are full of horror stories of visitors paying the hefty fee only to climb through the thick jungle for 12 hours and come up empty-handed. Thankfully, after I finally decided to bite the bullet and visit the gorillas, my luck was much better.

At dawn, I drove with my Rwandan colleague Sylvestre and two new Belgian friends from the city of Musanze to the small village where our trek would begin. (The "road" to this isolated village was so rocky and crater-filled that it jolted our rear view mirror right off the windshield and into my lap.) From the village, we set off on foot with our guide and the few Italian tourists that rounded out our group of eight. Only eight such groups—or 64 total people—are allowed to visit the gorillas each day, so permits are a scarce commodity.

We zigzagged our way through a series of hand-tilled potato and bean fields toward the forest's edge, where the path began ascending rapidly. It was dark under the canopy, and the rich, black soil underfoot was slick with moisture. We pushed our way uphill, fending off bushes and vines and the mountains' most infamous flora: the stinging nettle. A touch of the nettle's hairy leaves causes a painful, fiery rash, and all of us felt it sooner or later.

We had only been struggling uphill for 20 minutes when three machete-wielding trackers materialized before us in the forest. They spoke to our guide in rapid, hushed Kinyarwanda, and motioned for us to drop our bags where we stood and carry only our cameras. I knew what this meant, and jumped to the front of our group, just behind our guide.

A few minutes further uphill, the guide and trackers stopped. I pulled up alongside, panting, and heard a rustle in the bushes in front of us. Suddenly the brush parted and a giant silverback gorilla strolled past us, not two meters from my leg. My heart seemed to slam against my ribs and I sucked in an anxious breath in unison with the others behind me.

I had seen gorillas in the Washington Zoo many times before, but it was an entirely different experience to have a beast of such obviously superior strength walk right past my leg, with no barrier separating him from me. His body language made it clear that he did not feel threatened, and more importantly, that he knew he didn't need to. His once glance in our direction seemed meant to humble, to put us in our place. There are precious few instances in our modern lives when we are remineded of how slow, weak, and frail our species really is, but this was unmistakably one of those moments.

After this giant lumbered back into the brush, our tracker led us in a loop around to a small clearing in the foliage, where the silverback had settled beside a pair of female gorillas and a two-year old infant. We stayed for an hour, watching from a few meters away as the baby played, the silverback snoozed or chomped on ferns and bamboo shoots, and the other adults dozed or picked nits from their fur. Heavy rustles in the brush further downhill indicated that more family members were nearby.

When our tracker took a step too close to the group, the watchful silverback issued a series of low warning grunts, which the tracker later mimicked when the curious baby bounded too close to us. (Gorillas in the Mist this is not. For the gorillas' safety and ours, there is strictly no inter-species physical contact allowed—though the gorillas don't know this, and you can be sure that every one of us would have loved for that baby to come over and jump on us.) The baby was clearly aware of the attention he was attracting, and seemed to enjoy cavorting around, somersaulting over his mother and the other adults, and generally hamming it up for the cameras.

After an hour, as expected, our guide dragged us away to leave the gorillas to their business for the day.

So, for $500, was my visit to the gorillas the best hour of my life? I'm not sure, but it was without doubt a vivid moment of unusually intimate proximity to some very fascinating creatures. Each time they scratched themselves, picked their noses, or wrestled playfully with the baby, the gorillas seemed less wild and more like us. Their every motion is uncannily familiar.

The next time an evangelizing creationist tells me there are no atheists in foxholes, I know how I'll reply.

Leaving Ireland on a High Note: Galway and the Aran Islands

2011-06-05T22:24:00.000-04:00

Family portrait above the cliffs at Dún Aengus fort, on the largest of the Aran Islands

Galway, Ireland's third largest city, is everything its fellow towns along Ireland's western coast aren't—a cosmopolitan, boisterous charmer of a city, alive with the energy of outdoor cafes and street buskers, of art galleries and open-air food and craft markets.

But even Galway can't hide the signs of the times; like everywhere else in Ireland, Galway's residents spent the last decade building. The B&B in which we stayed was just the latest of a long string of recently—and shoddily—constructed places we lodged in, adorned with cheap furnishings and tacky décor. While the various B&B owners were all exceptionally warm and inviting, they also all spoke of Ireland's economic boom and bust in gloomy terms. Ireland's housing bubble was a large part of the cause, but so was America's own economic slump; as our host in Galway explained, the economy in this part of Ireland rises and falls with the tides of American tourists, and this year we
were among the very few.

* * *

Over drinks at an open-air bar our first evening in Galway, we got it into our heads to visit the Aran Islands, several miles off the nearby coast. The next morning we drove to the ferry, which churned its way 45 minutes west to the port of Kilronan, on the largest island, Inis Mór. For €10 each, my mom and sister and I rented a bicycle for the day, and pedaled along the rolling coastal road past horse farms, cow pastures, and abandoned rocky beaches. We ate lunch above one beach where a colony of seals basked in the sun, great lazy, flopping balls of blubber.

The Aran Islands hold some of the oldest archaeological sites in Europe, dating back to the Vikings and their seafaring predecessors. We visited the ancient site of Dún Aengus which, like most of the island, is not much more than a pile of semi-arranged stones. But this spot is the highest on the island, and affords a wide view of the sea in all directions. It also sits atop some perfectly vertical cliffs, which plunge a few dozen meters down to the frothing sea. Perhaps my greatest thrill of the trip came when, laying on my belly and scooting myself the last few feet, I received a blast of air to the face and a rush of crashing waves as I peered over the cliffs' edge. Somewhere behind me, my mother fretted.

* * *

The next day, we drove back to Dublin for one final night out in the Temple Bar district before our flight home.

Having recently returned from the trip, I'm glad to report that my mother seemed wholly satisfied with her Irish experience, and I know I was. Ireland was just as picturesque and relaxing as I had hoped, and the people far warmer than I was accustomed to after years of traveling to some less welcoming corners of the world. Visiting a country so similar to my own definitely lacked some of the surprises that the developing world forces upon the traveler, but the ability to explore a new place without my guard up was an unfamiliar pleasure, and one worth repeating someday soon.

The Cliffs of Moher and the Savage Clan

2011-05-29T05:27:00.028-04:00

Sister Margaret and I posed at the top of the cliffs. (Photo: M. Graham)

En route to Galway, we made a detour past the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland's most famous natural sites. We saw the 200-meter high cliffs, famed for their ruggedly scenic views, but unfortunately did not spot the puffin colonies that are rumored to inhabit their base. By the time we left, a heavy fog was rolling in off the sea, rendering the cliffs' jagged dropoff yet more sinister.

At the gift shop in the cliffs' subterranean visitor center, I happened upon a map showing the traditional homelands associated with various Irish surnames. The Coloes were elusive, but all alone on a spur off the island's far northeast shore were the Savage clan, the other half of my mother's Irish ancestors. If I had been smart and looked that up in advance we might have arranged to pay them a visit!

The Dingle Peninsula: Irish Postcard Country

2011-05-25T07:35:00.002-04:00

A perfect Irish coast at Slea Head, Dingle Peninsula

After our hair-raising run-ins the day before along just one small stretch of the Ring of Kerry (known in online travel forums as "The Ring of Tour Buses"), my mom and sister and I weren't eager to experience a whole day of the same. So at the recommendation of our B&B's owner, we instead opted to drive around the Dingle Peninsula, just up the coast. There we visited the wide, mirrored expanse of Inch Beach, ate fish and chips beside the port in Dingle town, and made the scenic drive to Slea Head, the peninsula's most extreme point.

The Dingle proved to be about as Irish as I could have imagined. Of course, the scenery looked like the postcard images sold in tourist shops back in Dublin, with jagged cliffs plunging down to the sea, greener hills than any we had yet seen, more sheep than people, and very moody weather.

But more telling still was the language. In fact, the prevalence of Gaelic—or "Irish", as the Irish call
it, to distinguish it from the version spoken by their cousins the Scots—had surprised me ever since our arrival in Ireland. Throughout Dublin and every other city we visited, streets were labeled in both English and Gaelic, and the plaques and brochures at tourist sites also showed both languages. For those who aren't familiar, it is fairly indecipherable, though my mother certainly tried. ("Shannon in Gaelic looks like that name my mother wanted to name me.... It's a good thing my father didn't let her.")

But the Dingle Peninsula's residents went even further in maintaining the purity of the local tongue. As soon as we reached the peninsula, English dropped off the road signs completely. When locals spoke to one another on the streets of Dingle township, it was nearly all Gaelic all the time. Estimates of native Irish speakers today number between 40,000 and 80,000, and many of them live in this region, though Irish language courses are mandatory in schools throughout the country.

Gap of Dunloe, Ring of Kerry: Ireland's Fun Though the Driving's Scary

2011-05-23T15:44:00.003-04:00

Maggie made new friends on our hike through the Dunloe Gap.

The town of Killarney is the gateway to one of Ireland's most famous tourist destinations: the Ring of Kerry, a 179km loop around the Kerry Peninsula, which juts off the island's southwestern coast into the Atlantic and is known for its stunning scenery.

My mom, sister, and I spent our first afternoon in the area hiking the Dunloe Gap, a scenic pass in the peninsula's central mountain range. From a small parking lot, visitors either set out on foot or by rented horse carriage along the narrow lane that winds 3.5 miles across the valley floor to the gap's narrowest point. We opted to test our luck with the weather by walking.

Along the route, we passed reed-filled ponds and meandering streams, moss-covered trees, wildflowers and delicate ferns, and plenty of animals. There were ducks and herons, grazing horses, local sheepdogs, and of course quite a few sheep, whose owners apparently spraypaint blue and red
splotches on their sides to differentiate their herds. (At first glance, the red ones look like they've been gnawed on by some sort of carnivore.) We crossed old stone bridges and passed several country homes, but with the exception of animals and the occasional passing horse carriage we were almost entirely alone on our walk.

After successfully walking to the gap's center and back, we drove through Killarney National Park and along 20 kilometers of very serpentine coastal road—the start of the Ring of Kerry—to the scenic overlook known as Ladies' View. Though not far, this distance was enough for us to experience several near-collisions with the tour buses that careened around the tight curves of the Ring's not-quite-two-lane road. Before returning to town we stopped by the Torc Waterfall and Ross Castle, built on the shore of Killarney's Lower Lake in the 15th century.

After the day's driving and hiking, by the time we reached a pub that evening I was so tired that I just about faceplanted in my meat and potatoes.

Kill Village Ahead

2011-05-22T18:20:00.002-04:00

It was undoubtedly Maggie's favorite Irish road sign of our entire trip.

"Kill" or "kil" is an old Gaelic word for "church," we learned on day two of our Irish roadtrip, after Maggie dutifully Googled it on her Blackberry from the back seat. (You can do that on trips in this part of the world, which is a novelty for me.) So this explained how every other Irish village we passed along our drive from Waterford began with some variation of this prefix. But it did not entirely explain why one village along our route was named simply "Kill".

On the day's drive from Waterford to Cork, we made a detour to Bunmahon Beach. Ireland's ever-present rains dampened the sea views a bit, and it was still raining later that afternoon when we passed through Cork and wound our way down to a B&B overlooking the coastal town of Kinsale.

The Irish Roadtrip Begins: Kilkenny Castle

2011-05-21T21:23:00.000-04:00

Kilkenny Castle was in far better shape than any of the castles I have visited in the Middle East.

Within minutes of arriving in Dublin, I had stepped into oncoming traffic and had to leap back to the curb to avoid being squished. Given that I was supposed to drive us around on the left side of the road for the next week, this troubling early sign was on all our minds on our third day in Ireland, when my mom and sister and I picked up our rental car. As my mother gripped her seat, white knuckled, and made gasping sounds of certain impending death, I pulled the car onto the road and began to adjust to the disorienting sensation of lefthand driving. After managing to avoid plowing into any cars in the first few blocks, I made it to the highway and began to feel more comfortable. We were on our way.

At Kilkenny, a few hours south of Dublin, we stopped to visit the town castle and its stables and gardens. Though the castle was clearly of the same origin and similar construction as many of the
Crusader castles I had explored in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, the experience of visiting it could not have been more different. For starters, this castle was wholly intact—restored to some degree of course, but it had also been continuously inhabited and maintained since its construction around 1200 AD. While goats and shepherds had the run of the Levant's long-abandoned Crusader castles, this castle had not only a roof, but also fully intact salons and a grand portrait gallery.

The Dublin Tourist Circuit

2011-05-19T20:13:00.000-04:00

The Temple Bar district makes a fun hangout for bachelor/bachelorette parties, tourists, and locals alike.

For as long as I can remember, in the back of my mind I have been able to hear my mother's voice reciting "Before I die, I have to see Ireland." The land of her great-grandparents loomed large in her mind as much for the ancestral connections as for the cool weather, rolling green hills, and friendly, English-speaking locals.

As my mother's Christmas gift last year, my sister Maggie and I agreed to shoulder the bulk of the costs for a 10-day tour of Ireland. Maggie found a solid travel provider that organized self-driving tours along a variety of routes—we picked the dates and a loop across the country and they made all the arrangements.

* * *

Our plans were interrupted right off the bat at the Dublin Airport, where my mom and sister announced an unscheduled stop to watch "the royal wedding." European and American tourists were
clustered around big-screen TVs set up throughout the airport. Based on the fire hose of news coverage surrounding the nuptials (even in Ireland, a land with a history of friction with the British monarchy, to say the least), someone who didn't know better might have thought the ceremony was the most important global event in decades.

Soon enough, however, we were in downtown Dublin. We grabbed lunch at food stalls beside a canal, walked to the Oscar Wilde statue at Merrion Square Gardens, and watched white-clad cricketeers play on the neatly clipped front lawn of Trinity College. That afternoon we picked up a hop-on/hop-off bus, which featured colorful commentary on the city's attractions. (The famous Molly Maguire sculpture was "the tart with the cart" and the Spire of Dublin was "the stiletto in the ghetto.") We took the obligatory tour of the Guiness brewery and ended the day with live Irish music and dancing at the Irish House Party, where the performers delighted in pulling audience members from the crowd for awkward impromptu dance lessons. (Just my luck, I got picked, and fumbled through a swirling jig with a young Scottish girl.)

* * *

The next morning, while the girls shopped, I spent the morning at Dublin Castle, perusing the gardens and the Islamic manuscript collection at the Chester Beatty Library. Next, I wandered through the Temple Bar area, which reminded me strongly of Lisbon's grungy Bairro Alto district.

As I walked down the sidewalk past a pair of Irish lads in track suits and gold necklaces, one pointed a chubby finger down at my neon yellow sneakers and remarked, "Lovelies, those." He could have been right out of Snatch or Layer Cake. (Note to all people from the British Isles: This is what Americans think of you when you talk and dress like that.)

We spent the night out in Temple Bar, dining, pub hopping, and watching the buskers perform and Dublin's many bachelor and bachelorette parties flit from bar to bar.

A Note to My Readers on the New "Ibn Ibn Battuta"

2011-04-28T22:00:00.002-04:00

The author in Tarifa, Spain, February 2009.

Even when I'm not traveling, I sometimes tinker with improvements to Ibn Ibn Battuta. Last summer, I began the laborious process of transferring the blog to a new service and upgrading the layout. In my free time, I would redesign pages, re-code sidebars, fix old typos, or add new photos.

I was willing to put in the time because Ibn Ibn Battuta is more than just my travel blog. If I kicked the can tomorrow, Ibn Ibn Battuta would be the one thing I've produced so far in life that might endure—my one shot (lousy though it may be) at immortality. It is a chronicle of my most formative experiences, my record of my personal journey with all its ups and downs. I try to make that record honest, even when I would rather not acknowledge some of the downs.

* * *

One day back in September, Jacqueline, then in her second week of law school, announced that we were done. Done?! Done. A week later I was still numb, lost, and tumbling as I left for a work trip to
Rwanda. I spent every spare moment there trying to come to terms with the fact that the girl I had thought might be my partner for life no longer wanted the job.

I paged through my blog, looking back on the travels that Jacqueline and I had experienced together. So many memories from the US, Caribbean, Morocco, Europe, Ethiopia. But now, every image or mention of her on my own public website seemed embarrassing, and a source of shame and hurt. I grew angry and defensive; with her name and picture all over it, my magnum opus was tainted. Why had I let this person in? And how could I get her out? My knee-jerk reaction to the pain was to scrub her from these pages.

But how? Take down every entry where I mentioned her? There goes half my blog. Rewrite all those entries to remove her from my story? Our interactions and our joint reactions to the stimulii of travel were central to several years worth of stories, which would feel forever hollow without one of their main characters.

* * *

Within a few months of our split, Jacqueline and I had returned to cordial terms. Today our breakup seems far in the past, our relationship even further so.

Struggling with the dilemma of how to tell my story took longer, but I ultimately reached a point of acceptance: Jacqueline had been a central figure in my life for four years, and though it hurt to be reminded that she wouldn't be so again, trying to erase her from my blog would do more harm than good. Like it or not, I let someone into my story all the way, got burned, and can't hide that fact without doing myself further injury.

With new peace of mind, I slowly returned to the work of upgrading my blog. Besides making design improvements throughout the site, I even dug up and posted previously unpublished writings from my travels in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Today this work is done. All the characters remain the same, and though seeing one of the names still smarts, this story now feels more mine than ever.

I hope you enjoy the new look, the new stories and images, the "Best Of" page, the map integration on each post, and my favorite feature—the "Random" button in the menu at right.

Expect more travels and more stories to come.

Thank you for reading,
Andrew

A Fast Night and a Slow Day in Kampala

2011-03-20T23:43:00.102-04:00

While Jon was occupied with the ketchup, I chowed down on freshly grilled tilapia and chips, washed down with ginger beer.

After two weeks in pristine Rwanda, where the streets are swept clean each day and traffic flows in orderly single file, I wasn't prepared for the shock of Kampala. Amid the fog of dust and exhaust, an overwhelming disorder reigns on the boisterous streets of the Ugandan capital.

I had managed to stop here for a 24-hour layover on my way back to Washington, in order to visit my friend Jon (of the duo Jon & Jen, main characters in many of my tales from Morocco). While Jen was back home in England, Jon was working and holding down the fort at their new home in Kampala.

Together, Jon and I made the most of my brief visit by sleeping as little as possible. My memories from our night on the town include: zipping through evening traffic on the back of motorcycle taxis, Jon's insistence that I sample every brand of Ugandan beer, gorging ourselves on a goat feast at a
bar called Tickles & Giggles, Jon hopping onstage to dance with the dreadlocked lead singer of a local reggae band, many games of billiards at streetside pool tables, chatting with two Chadian diamond trainers inside a mirror-walled nightclub, fleeing said nightclub to avoid prostitutes who wouldn't take "no" for an answer, and helping several local guys in Jon's neighborhood to break up a domestic disturbance at 3:00 AM. You can't make this stuff up.

Before I left, we spent the next afternoon beside Lake Victoria, gnawing on grilled tilapia and reading while kids splashed in the shallows and their parents picnicked beside us, their car stereos pumping lively beats across the beach.

Big thanks to Jon for an excellent trip. Next time we'll have to see if I can survive a longer one.

Rwanda Redux

2011-03-18T23:15:00.004-04:00

Two colleagues and I crunched into the back seat for a drive to the city of Butare.

Despite spending the first two weeks of March in Rwanda, I managed to return to Washington without even the hint of a suntan (as my friends have happily pointed out since my return). Unfortunately I spent much of this visit working in offices and conference rooms, with less free time than I enjoyed during my last trip in October. But with each visit, I continue to learn more about the country and its many peculiarities, and to strengthen my bonds with several Rwandan colleagues and friends.

Since my last trip here, Rwanda has beaten its own economic growth projections, completed its nationwide fiberoptic network, and won a $25 million grant from the African Development Bank to finance an environmentally friendly power plant that will run on methane gas found in Lake Kivu. Just a few more steps in Rwanda's march toward world domination...

Egypt: The People Victorious

2011-02-11T23:40:00.004-05:00

From earlier today, the headline on Al Jazeera's Arabic broadcast reads, "Egypt: The People Have Won" and below, "Live: Celebrations unite the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Gulf at the fall of the Mubarak regime."

This morning I heard an NPR story on the Egyptian protests' reverberations in Iraq, in which a group of Iraqi activists expressed perfectly what so many ordinary citizens across the Arab world have felt for years: "We are like camels. We carry the gold, but we only get to eat the grass."

Today the people of Egypt have finally thrown off their load, refusing to be beasts of burden any longer. The joy of the crowds in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, and elsewhere is infectious. In just 18 days, they have managed to wrench their nation—and perhaps the Arab world at large—onto a new historical course.

Tomorrow the real work will begin, and Egyptians will have to grapple with the power vacuum left in the revolution's wake. But tonight is a time for jubilation.

The Arab Street's Moment Lives On (To Be Continued...)

2011-02-10T23:12:00.005-05:00

Tune in to Al Jazeera's free streaming coverage of events in Egypt here.

When I last wrote ten days ago of the swelling fervor in Egypt and the Arab world at large, Egypt's streets were filled with protesters.

In the days that followed, President Mubarak responded by unleashing violent thugs on his own people. (Many were security forces out of uniform, while others were ordinary citizens paid a few bucks to attack their compatriots—which says much about the depths of Egyptians' poverty.) The attacks dimmed many Egyptians' hopes for change at just the moment when many began to fear for their economic security. The need to put food on the table began to take a toll and, though the nucleus of the crowds remained in Tahrir Square, many Egyptians returned to work.

Earlier this week (after two weeks of protests now) the release of detained online activist Wael Ghonim—and his emotional interview that followed—breathed new life into the demonstrations.

Today, the army announced that President Mubarak would soon step down. Egyptians filled the streets once again, sensing the long-awaited moment of liberation close at hand. Unfortunately, the rambling address which Mubarak delivered this evening was a slap in the face to the people. Rather than stick to the script the army seemed to have prepared for him, Mubarak announced that he would give some powers to his handpicked vice president (a scumbag even worse than Mubarak himself), while retaining his seat in defiance of the protesters' principal demand.

The insult to the Egyptian people—and to his backers in Washington—which his speech revealed will not be forgiven. Mubarak's reign looks to be in its final hours. Tomorrow, expect protests bigger than any seen so far. Egypt's fate will be in the hands of the military: if the army deposes the president, the demonstrators will dance with joy; if it instead defends the regime, bloodshed in the streets is almost certain.

Already the protesters in Tahrir Square and across Egypt have sent a shockwave through the Arab world. But the future of Egypt itself is unclear, except for one fact: when the dictator finally falls, Egypt will have a very long and dangerous road ahead.

Side note: It would be impossible to overstate the central importance which Al Jazeera has had in these events. Here in the US, its sister station, Al Jazeera English, has also filled in the gap left by the woefully shoddy American news channels, as my friend Jeb has written at Foreign Policy Watch. I encourage everyone to watch the live feed today.

January 2011 Explained: The Arab Street Gets Its Moment

2011-01-31T00:25:00.003-05:00

Market street (Fes, Morocco)

This month's events have turned the Arab world upside down—and have done so with a speed few ever could have imagined. January 2011 will be remembered in the region much like Europe's Summer of '68, if not like the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Because of my interest in the region, I have spent a good part of the month glued to Al Jazeera English, but most Americans have not. Many might now be wondering: After years of stagnation, how did a region so "stuck in the mud" ignite so suddenly? And what does it mean for the future?

Act I: Tunisia

It all began in Tunisia, where a well-educated, globally aware population endured decades of repression under a police state. Thanks in part to satellite television and in part to strong European ties, Tunisians knew what they were missing. Their country's listless economy, chronic high
unemployment, and large youth population made a combustible mix. The many young, jobless college graduates felt a particular humiliation each time President Ben Ali, his wife, and their families publicly flaunted their wealth.

This month it all exploded. Wikileaks published US diplomatic cables confirming Tunisians' suspicions about the corruption and excesses at the heart of the regime. Then on December 17, Mohamed Bouazizi, at the time an unemployed young nobody, set himself on fire after local police forced him to stop selling vegetables on the streets of his home town, Sidi Bouzid. This act of desperation lit the fuse. With Bouazizi's death, demonstrations rapidly gained momentum, spreading across Tunisia. The army emboldened them further by announcing that it would not fire on the protestors. The president offered every form of concession, but the protests only mounted. On January 14, with the mob at his heels, Ben Ali fled for Saudi Arabia.

Act II: Egypt

Egyptians had long endured many of the same injustices as Tunisians—though with even greater levels of poverty. But in an authoritarian state, the risks of speaking out are great. For years, many Egyptians viewed President Mubarak as a despot, but few criticized him openly, for fear that their fellow citizens would not risk joining them—a classic game theory problem. But Tunisia changed the equation, nudging Egyptians' confidence over a critical threshold. (Al Jazeera and other satellite channels actually made this possible, by broadcasting live the Tunisians' easy victory.) Suddenly, the entire nation could enter the streets without fear.

As January draws to a close, the protests continue and the standoff in Egypt remains unresolved. Mubarak has made some minor concessions, but the people have their mind on one thing only: new leadership. Crowds chant "مبارك, مبارك, السعودية في انتظارك" ("Mubarak, Mubarak, Saudi Arabia awaits you"... it rhymes in Arabic) and other unambiguous slogans. A simple "يسقط مبارك" ("Down with Mubarak") is spraypainted on the walls in the background of every Al Jazeera shot from Cairo. Still, the Egyptian army's position remains unclear, as does the opposition's chances of unifying around a single leader. (Mohamed ElBaradei is one possibility.)

Act III?

Ironically, "revolution" has for decades been the buzzword that the Arab world's despots used to guarantee their rule, by reviving the spirit of colonial-era liberation struggles. For example, Libyans live in a "permanent state of revolution", Syrians drive through Damascus along شارع الثورة ("Revolution Street"), and now the Cairo protesters amass each day in Tahrir ("Liberation") Square. The strategy of placing themselves at the head of a never-ending nationalist, post-revolution victory parade has long served Arab dictators well. But now that the real revolution has arrived, they seem surprisingly unwelcoming.

It remains unclear how many of the Arab world's other despots are in imminent danger. (All of them, let's hope.) Egypt is the keystone state in the Arab world, and its fate could determine the direction of political developments across the region for years to come. Just as the Tunisian crowds' triumph inspired their Egyptian cousins to speak out, a popular coup in Egypt could give courage to others in the Arab world. Significant protests have been reported already in Yemen and Jordan. And the Kuwaiti government's sudden announcement of cash transfers to every citizen looks like a desperate effort to stave off a popular revolution.

Labelling the protests an Islamist uprising might be another way dictators will try to cling to power. After all, many have received millions of dollars in American aid for years for their "support in the War on Terror." It's worked before—why not now? For this reason, it is important to note the secular, popular, mainstream, not-at-all-religious nature of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. The moderate masses in the Arab world have been silent for years, allowing extremists to bring a bad reputation upon the entire region. But this month they have finally spoken. Their voice is louder and their grievances more understandable than any terrorist's. This makes it much harder for American policymakers to react—as illustrated by the Obama administration's awkward squirming in response to Mubarak's sudden change of fate.

But if the events of this January tell us anything it is this: the universal desire for democratic freedoms can be subdued for many years, but never for good. All tyrants eventually fall.

* * *

The present revolutionary wave could subside, or it could be one of the most pivotal movements in the Arab world's history. Stay tuned:

watch Al Jazeera English online;
keep up with local opinions through Global Voices;
get timely analysis from Middle East Journal editor Dr. Michael Collins Dunn, or The Atlantic's Max Fisher;
follow the latest news via Twitter at #Egypt or #jan25 (or check out my updates: @andrewfarrand or my friend Ian's: @ianinegypt—he's in Cairo!)

If you have other thoughts, links, or info, feel free to share below.

So, About That Travel Photography Contest

2010-12-14T22:44:00.002-05:00

Bus driver (Dubai, UAE)

Well, I didn’t win. These people did. I'm not impressed with all of the winning shots, but some of them are indeed spectacular.

No big deal. What is important is that I really enjoyed interacting with readers and friends, and getting some new perspective on my own photos.

Also on the plus side, I've whittled down my photo collection to a few great shots, which I can continue to submit to other contests. I've already entered another contest on a friend's website.

Thanks again to everyone who shared their views and helped me pick!

A Glimpse of The New Rwanda

2010-11-29T01:01:00.008-05:00

The Centre Bethanie hotel sits on a peninsula which juts into Lake Kivu, on the Rwanda-Congo border.

Back in 2004, I spent several days in Rwanda on my way to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. At that time—ten years after the genocide that left 800,000 dead and millions displaced—Rwanda was still very much a country on the mend, muddling forward with reconstruction.

Last month, the country I found when I arrived there for a three-week work trip, while recognizable, was clearly much evolved. This was The New Rwanda.

* * *

"Now as we begin our descent into Kigali I'd like to take the time to remind all passengers who will be disembarking here to remove any plastic bags from their luggage, to comply with Rwandan law."

Some tourists chuckled at the flight attendant's warning, disbelieving. But a friend had alerted me before my trip, and I knew it was no joke. In the environmentally conscious New Rwanda, plastic shopping bags are illegal.

Driving from the airport with my Rwandan colleagues, I could see that the level of development may not have jumped drastically, but Kigali nonetheless had a new air of dignity. The streets were paved smooth, swept immaculately free of leaves and litter, well lit, and lined with hibiscus and other flowering shrubs.

With its clean streets, smiling people, and booming economy, Rwanda seems a little African Pleasantville. In Kigali, as one Rwandan professor told me during my stay, "buildings are sprouting like mushrooms." Umuganda, the last Saturday of every month, is an obligatory day of community service for all citizens. Later in my trip, outside Kigali I would see crews of workers digging roadside trenches to lay the country's new nationwide high-speed fiberoptic network.

* * *

Yet reminders of The Old Rwanda are everywhere. In many idyllic Rwandan villages, with their terraced hillsides and quaint farmsteads, a concrete slab marks the site of a mass grave. Kigali's Genocide Memorial Centre holds cases full of human bones, and entire halls papered with victims' photos. The exterior of the parliament building is still pockmarked with bullet holes and the yawning gashes of mortar attacks.

In a bar on a Friday night, conversations can fall silent when they brush the genocide—it's often just better not to ask where someone's family lives, or where someone was during 1994.

Through a colleague's translation, however, our driver Sylvestre did recount one personal story. Sylvestre had spent the spring of 1994 in Kigali—the genocide's epicenter. He described the mobs that roved his neighborhood then, killing anyone who was tall—and therefore Tutsi, according to the popular local stereotype. After no tall people remained in the neighborhood, he said, the mobs swept through again, this time with a new test: They felt the palms of each man and woman, pressing with their fingers. Those whose hands were strong were Hutus. Those whose hands were soft were Tutsis; they were executed.

* * *

Sylvestre's story—like those of so many others in this place—shows a side of humanity that is hardly comprehensible, even for those who have witnessed its horrors. But what place do those memories hold in The New Rwanda?

Every Rwandan has these stories, of course, but today few tell them freely. The government of The New Rwanda would rather its citizens move forward than look back. It generally frowns upon discussion of ethnicity and of the crimes of 1994—the two topics that loom like an elephant in every room. The reasons are complex, and relate to the ruling party's founding narrative, and its birth in the conflicts of the early 1990s. Putting the politics aside though, it is hard to imagine that silence makes healing easy for the Rwandan people.

* * *

Work consumed most of my trip, but left me enough time to attend a soccer match (Rwanda's national team vs. Benin) at Amahoro Stadium, sample several of Kigali's generous lunch buffets, learn to play a little tennis at my hotel's courts, and catch some great performances in the capital's dance halls.

I managed to escape Kigali for 24 hours, during which Sylvestre and I hopped a bus down to the one-horse town of Kibuye, on the western shores of Lake Kivu. In Kibuye, we walked from the bus station to a peninsula on the lake, where we rented rooms with a view at the Centre Bethanie hotel. Over Mutzig beers and sambaza (fried minnows) by the water, Sylvestre and I continued our efforts to communicate. I spoke no Kinyarwanda and Sylvestre no French, so we relied on a mix of his limited English and my limited Swahili, augmented by extensive hand signals. (Ironically, the whole day Sylvestre wore a sassy American hand-me-down t-shirt that read, "This is where I nod and act like I'm listening".)

After lunch we grabbed our suits and headed for the lake, eager for a dip before an afternoon rainstorm rolled in. Thunderheads rumbled above, casting the turquoise waters in shadow. I jumped in. Behind me, Sylvestre peeled off his t-shirt, revealing a foot-long scar that arced across the top of his right shoulder blade. He dove in, and we paddled together away from shore.

I could never bring myself to ask him how he got the scar.

In The New Rwanda, The Old Rwanda has a way of appearing unexpectedly.

Photography Poll Results: The People Have Spoken

2010-08-21T09:00:00.007-04:00

The Anthill Lookout

The polls have closed, and the votes, comments, and emails of nearly 50 readers have been tallied. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to consider the photographs and share your opinions! This process has helped me see these images in new and very different ways.

Now, the envelope please... [cue drumroll]

Photo number 1, "The Anthill Lookout" from northern Uganda is the clear favorite, with "Boy at the medersa pool" not far behind, followed closely by "Hammocks in a blue wood".

Others had a strong following. "Children reflected", "Prayers from above", "Green-robed worshiper", and "Little biker with blast walls" all received quite a few nods. Unfortunately the entries aren't free, so I can't very well submit them all, and have had to make some tough choices.

Later today I'll be sending in three submissions. First, in the hope that my readers' collective opinions have helped to identify the best contender, I'll submit "The anthill lookout." I was also very swayed by the arguments which commenters made in favor of "Boy at the medersa pool" and feel that it has a special, voyeuristic quality which may appeal to the contest's judges. Finally, as the artist, I'm going to submit the one which my gut points to, which is "Prayers from above".

(Given how little I'm likely to travel over the coming 12 months, I may not have any new material to submit for next year's contest, so the runners up from this straw poll could get another shot next year.)

I should find out around October 31 if either of these three entries have won anything. I'll be sure to keep you posted! Many thanks, once again, to everyone who helped me choose.

Update: National Geographic has announced the contest results.