Back to School
Just spent the last hour or so playing solitaire and listening to a whole selection of Indian and Pakistani film music I didn't really know I had on the laptop. A nice reverie instead of thinking all day about why the Rep's signature on my short extension is so elusive! It's needed to release the next part of my advance and I had hoped to send some of it with a Kenya colleague travelling tomorrow, to pay the rent in Mombasa.
The solitaire was the only thing I could think of doing in a long power cut, the first one (we are on the President's line) when I have only a torch (memo tomorrow, get a lamp). Maybe it is a sign that the president is losing her grip.
Oh and my work. I achieved the signal communication achievement this morning when half my communications team turned up at 10 and the other half at eleven when the first ones had gone already. I had told one person –erroneously – that it was 11 when I bumped into him in the market yesterday; ironical that that person turned out to be the perfect message transmitter** and told loads of other people.
Just the man I need for the Back to School messages, as the great conundrum here is how to do mass communication when most local radio stations have been looted and burned and very few individuals were able to retain their telephones or radios when they fled the massacres. In Kaga-Bandoro last week the schools found out that the Bac had been postponed only because a parent called from Bangui to tell them. There are no radio announcements and only a small polemic press in the city – no news, just denouncing UN, government or anyone else on A4 flyers, probably run off on a UN photocopier.
SMS hardly works. The messages arrive, if they do, hours late.
We are actually going to use town criers.
** Like the perfect AIDS transmitter who is the cause of more than half the infections in any given locality (it was a driver and a secretary who shared that honour in UNICEF Somalia in the nineties). And I guess the super Ebola transmitters.
NB A boy I met trying to get home to see his sick mother had his phone, medicine and return ticket money taken by anti-Balaka rebels at the half way check point. He had to abandon the journey. This is daily life here. Shooting tonight in a quartier not too far away (though generally Centre-Ville is safe enough to walk around).
BTw: Things have improved. It's no longer an ethnic civil war. Now everyone loots everyone. Equal opportunity looting.
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