angloswisskiwi weblog 

Pouring a bucket of cold water over yourself inside a concrete outhouse so dark you can hardly see the incredibly large bugs and insects stuck all over the wall is enough to wake anyone up, despite the lack of sleep caused by a stuffy room with a broken fan, a foam mattress worn thin in all the wrong places, a cloying mosquito net and a rattling generator just on the other side of the wall. It's early, and the sun is just going up over the UN compound in Paoua, north-western CAR. After nearly two years of political bickering in the capital, Bangui, the rebel groups who signed a peace agreement with the government in late 2008 are finally being disarmed.

Our team, responsible for the implementation of the disarmament process, is here to accompany the military observers from the regional peacekeeping force who handle the more dangerous aspects of removing crude hand-made and volatile weapons and munitions from rebel soldiers. We're doing the data collection right next to them. This time round, we're verifying whether the rebel soldiers submitted on lists by their commanders actually exist, and qualify for disarmament (and the relevant benefits associated with it) according to criteria agreed upon by everyone. The next time, we'll be taking their weapons, asking more questions, giving them lectures on health and hygiene and a reinstallation kit, and sending them home.

We were supposed to start this verification yesterday, but as has happened so often over the past years, something came up. The local commanders of the rebel group in the Paoua area, who have to accompany us, had no petrol for their motorbikes and refused to move until we provided it. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. In an environment where everyone – from the groups' political leaders to their lowest foot-soldiers – is looking to maximise their own personal gain, arguments about trivial amounts of money, and especially who gets the power over spending it, are commonplace. And there's no petrol station here.

So, after my bucket shower and a cup of tea, the chauffeur and I head out in our car across town towards the airfield. We're flying the most enormous UN flag, inching gently around enormous gashes in the road left behind by rainwater runoff, dodging undernourished children and domestic animals (mostly chickens and goats here in the north; pigs are less common because many people are Muslims). At the airfield, a dirt strip slightly wider than the road, the peacekeeping contingent are already lined up for inspection, as the head of the Central African army is expected on a whirlwind tour of their three bases in the north. I go over to greet the commander of the military observers. He's from Gabon, and is equally frustrated by the delays and problems that have kept derailing our activities. We chat as we look out for the plane, which is already late.

Paoua airfield (August 2010)

Soldiers from the peace-keeping force lie in the shade of the wings awaiting the return of their officers. I prefer the car's air conditioning.

The soldiers have secured the strip and are preventing a herd of cattle from crossing. The herders – nomadic Peulh tribes who traverse the region with their animals and who had often been preyed upon by the same rebel soldiers we want to disarm – are getting impatient, but one of the soldiers points at a distant speck in the sky and shouts to them to keep clear. The twin-prop plane flies a wide circle around the airstrip to make sure it's safe to land before touching down on the red earth a few metres away from us and braking sharply with a roar from the thrust reversers. The kids hiding in the bushes behind us scream with delight. The cows are unmoved.

As the South African pilots – the only other white people here – shut off the engines and open the door, all the soldiers shuffle to ill-formed attention, looking around to make sure their weapons point in the same direction and using their outstretched arms to measure their distance from their neighbour. The officers descend from the plane amidst a lot of salutes and indecipherable African hand-shake codes. I'm constantly surprised by what makes it across borders and what doesn't. This is not our show, so we remain to one side, waiting.

Eventually one of the officers breaks free from the backslapping and strides over to us. He has an envelope for me, agreed upon after discussion late last night between the rebel's political and military leaders and UNDP. It contains about $170 dollars in local currency. I sign the confirmation of receipt to give back to him, and we head off to the centre of town.

Paoua town centre boasts a little roundabout where its three main roads meet. One goes back south to Bangui, the other two go to the Chadian and Cameroonian borders not too far from here. Little signs hand-painted on the concrete pedestal point the way. A few steps away, four terraced rows of mud huts with no front wall form the market, and Muslim traders in long white robes crouch in front of their wares chatting. Someone has rigged up a table by the side of the road and on it are perched a line of dirty plastic drinks bottles filled with a purplish liquid. It's the petrol merchant. He's brought his wares over the border from Chad or Nigeria, and is actually selling at a lower price than the few legitimate petrol stations the country possesses in its larger towns. No doubt this is down to a combination of tax evasion (a small bribe to the border guards will have sufficed), probable product dilution and a need to price to the impoverished market which offsets his monopolistic advantage.

'It's a white man in his big land cruiser who's splashing money around again!' I can almost hear the whisper go around. I am inevitably quickly surrounded by curious kids, some aggressive-looking guys and women in bright headscarves who stare from a distance when they think I'm not looking. In the burning sun of mid-morning, the petrol seller and his assistant measure out 120 litres into six dirty plastic canisters with the help of a funnel and a battered bottle which, I am assured, holds exactly 5 litres. Petrol goes everywhere, mixing with the sweat pouring off their faces. I watch carefully to make sure the measuring bottle is filled to the top every time, while debating with the driver how we will best transport it. The team will be in the field for 3 weeks, and petrol, unlike diesel, is flammable at normal temperatures. Care will have to taken. Giving the whole lot to the rebel group before leaving is not an option if we want them to have anything left after the third day.

Once he's finished, he carefully writes out and stamps the necessary receipts, I give him my envelope of money and we head back to the base. Our disarmament field office is a small concrete hut with two rooms and yet another broken fan in the corner of the UN compound, but we do boast a multi-function printer that I installed on a previous mission a few weeks ago and – to my surprise – is still functional. I've learnt to be grateful for small things like that. I scan the receipts and email them off via the satellite internet connection and go to get some lunch.

The UN presence here is just over two years young; I was already in the country, though not invited to the celebration, when the compound was unveiled. Built by the Swedes, it was to be a model example of the 'One UN' era of inter-agency collaboration. All it has managed to demonstrate amply is that the five agencies who occupy the compound are utterly and completely unable, unwilling, and uninterested in doing so. Cost sharing is interpreted as 'why should we pay? Let the others' and as a result the communications, electricity and water systems are all barely (or in the latter case, no longer) functioning. But the food isn't half bad. The cook, a large lady with a sour expression that breaks into a refreshingly large smile, does a mean schnitzel. While I'm eating, Walter, a permanent base resident who runs the UNHCR sub-office, unveils a food mixer and promptly serves up guava juice. He's even teaching the cook how to make crepes. To be fair, the staff who are based here are quickly fed up with the monotonous fare – there are no restaurants or other eateries worthy of the name in town. The lack of decent bread especially gets to everyone, even the Central Africans, who are more used to the French baguettes of the Grand Café in Bangui. But I'm well fed, so I'm happy.

After lunch, we've arranged an appointment with the local commanders of the rebel group to explain to them the arrangement with the petrol and ensure we can leave tomorrow. We head down to the peace-keepers' base near the centre and wait with the Gabonese military observers for them to arrive. When they do, I'm introduced to three men. Two are older, well-built and with quiet authority. The third is much younger and has a mean look in his eye. As we sit down, it becomes apparent that despite appearances he is in charge, and the menacing authority his facial expressions affect are in sharp contrast to his otherwise boyish looks. Silence reigns, and everyone looks to me.

I explain in French the agreement reached for the fuel and force myself to talk predominantly to the young rebel, in spite of my natural tendencies to focus on the older members. We then discuss the first handover (we will give them the petrol in six lots, one every few days), the hour of departure, and tomorrow's itinerary. His concept of the route differs from ours, and there ensues heated debate during which it rapidly becomes clear that none of them really speak French, and it is left up to my Central African colleague to interpret into Sango. How much of my speech had they understood? At least they probably didn't realise how bad my French was. Now I am, for once, not the only stupid foreigner who can't communicate – the Gabonese rely on French as much as I do to talk to the locals. Both us and them make satellite calls to our respective decision-makers - the rebels to their field commander and their political leader in Bangui, and me to the UN project's Head of Operations, and we settle on a unified plan. After so many months of waiting, no one will notice two more days' delay; and the rebel soldiers should still be waiting patiently to be verified when we finally arrive. Task accomplished, we head back to base to load the car for tomorrow.

Sunset, UN base in Paoua (August 2010)

The line of huts are the offices of different agencies. OCHA, WFP, UNHCR, UNDP, FAO and UNDSS are represented here.

When I was young, I wanted to be a train driver. Sitting in a cab watching the rails roll by underneath me seemed a good life to me. When it became too uncool to admit such aspirations, I revised it to becoming an engineer (designing trains, of course). I even steered that course at university. Secretly, though, that was just a cover-up, and I ended up in my early twenties knowing only what I didn't want to be. I spent that entire decade hunting high and low for stuff to do, certain only of one thing: it was an interesting life that I wanted to look back on when I was older; one replete with stories that would make me think, when I told them to my bored grandkids, 'Wow, was that really me?' My friends are bankers, lawyers, academics, teachers, doctors. Interesting work, no doubt, but somehow these had never really been options for me. I'm in my early thirties, and – right now – this is what I do. Tomorrow, after another cold bucket of water, I go count African rebels.

Chile and Argentina share what is undoubtedly one of the world's longest borders – certainly in relation to country size. And yet, despite its permanent proximity wherever you are in Chile (the country is on average only 175 km wide) as well as in many parts of Argentina, I often end up feeling when I mention one country to the people of the other as if I'm talking about somewhere on the other side of the world, not on the other side of a few mountains.

Confluencia, Aconcagua National Park (November 2009)

The Confluencia camp at 3,400m is the first base camp for climbers attempting Aconcagua - they spend many days here acclimatising to the altitude. Given the deteriorating weather (sleet turning to snow, no sign of Aconcagua through the clouds) it marked the high point of our day-trek. And this with 32 degrees in Mendoza, which we left just 3 hours previously.

In those mountains lies the beginning of the problem, of course. The Andes are the backbone of South America, stretching from Venezuela's Caribbean coast all the way down to Antarctica in one unbroken chain of peaks. The two countries were founded as Spanish colonies from the coast, with Chile initially a province of Peru, and Argentina a colony on the Atlantic seaboard far from the mountains. So they both face the sea, as it were, with their backs up against the mountains and little historical need to peek over them. The problem is made worse because although the Andes vary greatly in height and width, right between Santiago and Buenos Aires (the two hubs around which the colonies grew) stands Aconcagua, at just under 7,000 metres the highest peak anywhere in the world outside the Himalayas. Here the mountains are a formidable geographical obstacle, a natural border preventing easy interchange. You could imagine that it simply wasn't feasible to depend much on each other for anything, and so today's relationship between these two countries occupying the southern cone is a product of this historical non-dependence, a blind spot for both societies whose international links always lay elsewhere.

This geographical explanation is deceptive, however. Even just a few 100km south of Santiago, the Andes are much lower, and not a significant obstacle. Many of the indigenous tribes of this area were found in lands on both sides of the cordillera. And even if the Spanish coming from the north saw it as a greater hurdle, it didn't stop the Chilean colonists from founding Mendoza, now the capital of the Argentinian wine region and very definitely to the east of the mountains. In fact, trading links were much more significant because of another, even greater geographical obstacle which the 18th and 19th century pioneers faced: Cape Horn. Before the opening of the Panama canal in the early 20th century, the only sea route to the Western United States, the Spanish colonies in Peru and Bolivia and across the Pacific to the Far East required the long and arduous journey to the extreme south and either around the stormy cape or through the Straits of Magellan. Sea journeys between the ports of Buenos Aires and Valparaiso (the port city on the coast west of Santiago) took two weeks in good weather, and so the direct land route via the Uspallata pass offered an important alternative for the transportation of goods and passengers, reducing the journey time between the two capitals to a mere 36 hours once the Trans-Andean railway was completed.

So Chile and Argentina's difficult relationship cannot easily be blamed only on the mountains. They are merely a physical manifestation of what exists rooted deeply in the culture of both countries – as can often happen with close neighbours, especially those which at first glance surely have so much more in common than they have dividing them. Entire books could be (and probably have been) written on its complexities. In essence, however, similarity awakens the desire to differentiate: to look down on others and find reasons to praise ourselves, to stand alone and, where possible, ignore the ever-present others with nose in the air and chip on the shoulder. It persists even where it makes no sense at all.

In Patagonia, the border is in many ways less significant than the divide between north and south. The mountains are not only easy traversed, in many cases the Atlantic-Pacific watershed lies well to the east of the border in Argentina, and the western Patagonian steppe drains westwards in valleys cutting right through the Andes. The border between Trevelin (in Argentina) and Futaleufu (in Chile) is one such example – and yet despite the fact that you drive down the river valley from one to the other with no geographical obstacle whatsoever, the border point is called ‘Paso Futaleufu' – the countries resolutely ignoring geographical reality. It's just 30 kilometres between the two towns as well, and yet Buses Jacobsen, the local Argentinean bus company, running hourly services throughout the rest of the region, only run an unbelievable two buses a week to the border. You can go on Monday and Friday, and that's it. It's as if the other side simply didn't exist.

Trevelin (December 2009)

A small isolated village maybe, but nothing compared with Futaleufu, 30km further east across the Chilean border.

This is bad news for the Chileans – for down here, there really isn't much to Chile at all. For the most part, Chile essentially consists of a coastal range, a central valley and the Andes, and it's the fertile central valley where all the people live and crops are grown. But in the south, this valley disappears beneath the sea, and all that's left is mountains, a few narrow valleys of rushing rivers, fjords and off-shore islands. Until the 70s there was no north-south road at all here, with access only by boat or across the ‘passes' from the Argentinean side. With great difficulty and expense, Pinochet had his army build a road, the Carretera Austral, a small unsealed track interrupted by several ferry crossings (which don't even operate all year), winding its way tortuously south until it is finally brought to an end permanently by the impassable Patagonian ice field. He built it because until then a trip by boat up the coast to Puerto Montt was so long and difficult (and rarely undertaken) that it was known by the local inhabitants as 'going to Chile'. But even today, the connection is still largely an illusion, and Argentina really the only alternative. The inhabitants of Futaleufu simply don't have the luxury to ignore their eastern neighbours as they are ignored themselves. Everything is much cheaper there merely because it can get there with ease from Buenos Aires: food, consumer products, and most importantly fuel. And it's half an hour, even with the border checks, compared with 12 hours of car and ferry to get to Puerto Montt.

It reminds me of the curious case of Zongo, the small Congolese town on the other side of the Oubangui river from Bangui, the Central African capital. A historically significant and unfriendly border between French and Belgian colonies meant that Zongo is in effect a horribly provincial and isolated backwater many days by road and river from Kinshasa, its capital 1000km further south. And yet it is merely a few hundred metres away from what is, in comparison at least, a bustling metropole. The Banguissois largely ignore the presence of border or other town, which without doubt remains an undeveloped and backward place, yet the overlooked reality is that the Zongolese get most things from across the river out of necessity despite the politics.

Banco del Estado, Futaleufu (December 2009)

Even more useless than its sister branch on Easter Island, it recently had an ATM installed. It can't take VISA, rejects most MasterCards, and the nearest bank is 12 hours away - or 30 mins across the border.

Futa is the same. There is one little bank, someone's front room, which does now boast an ATM (a new arrival) – but as yet only manages MasterCard and rejects even most of those. It's harder to get money here than it was on Easter Island. The few tiny shops dotted around get restocked once every few weeks – the owner of the only place with vegetables pointed wistfully at a sorry little pile of rotting tomatoes and told us we should come back tomorrow evening when a truck would hopefully be arriving. I ask, where from? From Puerto Montt of course, she says: they can't bring any fresh products across the border because of Chilean rules preventing the spread of agricultural diseases. I see, I say, so the truck depends on the infrequent ferries to be able to get here, that's why it's so rare. No no, she says – the truck goes from Puerto Montt over to Argentina, down the much faster road on the east side of the mountains and then back across the border to Futa – but it's sealed by the border authorities to make sure it remains unopened while in transit. It comes rarely only because of lack of demand, as most people are self-sufficient here and have been so for centuries.

I think back to the gleaming 'La Anonima' supermarket in Trevelin, its many aisles overflowing with the abundance of modern convenience. Can that really be just a few kilometres away? The little wooden shacks with their ill-fitting windows and small wood-burning stoves that sum up the pinnacle of Futaleufuan architecture could come straight out of the wild west or some centuries-old pioneer's tale.

I'm camping in the back yard of Hernan's house – he's a rafting guide together with his wife Vanessa, and I'm staying there for free for a few days while we go rafting and kayaking on the local rivers, boasting some of the best white water in the world. He helps me solve my money problem by whisking me across the border and back to Trevelin to find some Argentine pesos that a friend of his will then exchange for Chilean ones. He's going for the petrol, of course. That's three border crossings in one day, there, back and over again: six stamps and a lot of paperwork, more for him because of the car. But it's a routine he does every week at least. In winter they sometimes even get some fresh produce through, when the Patagonians band together and maybe forget about the border a bit more than usual.

Futaleufu high street (December 2009)

A storm brewing over the tiny village of Futaleufu hidden in a back valley of the Chilean Andes. There is a small but growing tourist scene due to the world-class whitewater on the Futaleufu river.

So does the border really exist? It is so significant and yet so irrelevant and meaningless at the same time – the Chilean Patagonians live their primeval hardy existence in desperate 19th century isolation but travel forward two centuries in time to refuel their cars. Its presence allows such development and lifestyle differences to exist whereas in practice all trade and commerce, even with the ‘motherland' further north, comes via Argentina. The ferry is impractical because it's so infrequent – but then it too is largely symbolic, politically and socially necessary because it gives the people here their first genuine feeling of an end to their primitive isolation, even though they themselves rarely take it and have for years just driven up to Puerto Montt on the eastern side of the mountains.

It's election day here in Chile, and everyone must vote. What candidate do they want to be the next president here in Futa? Socialist or big business? I get different answers from people, which surprises me because I thought a place like this would have a relatively homogenous political allegiance. But when people explain themselves, I realise that it all comes down to the measly bits of local development that have dribbled down from Santiago over the past years, and which party or previous leader was attributed the credit for it. They desperately want it, someone up north who cares for them and builds things. Pinochet is a hero here – he built the Carretera Austral, doesn't matter what else he did to other people in a far away place. Which candidate will extend the road, or have it paved? That's what really matters.

But, I ask, would you really use it? I gesture vaguely eastwards with my hand. The Argentinean road will always be faster, the products cheaper and more abundant, the distance vastly less. Of course they would use it, they say. The border they so continuously cross in practice is, and will undoubtedly remain, sky high.

It’s remarkable how the same things can be perceived so differently by different people. Argentine Patagonia’s huge expanse of wilderness stretches seamlessly from the endless windswept plains in the east to the Andean cordillera in the west, where snow-capped volcanoes loom above sparkling lakes and forests of beech and alerce trees many centuries old. With a generous square kilometre for every two inhabitants, its population is on the sparse side – indisputably so, or so one would have thought.

Volcán Lanín (December 2009) The Patagonian steppe seen from the bus to Bariloche on RN40. After many hours, the Andes are finally visible in the distance, with the immense 3,700m cone of Lanin dominating the horizon.

Lago Puelo (December 2009) Nestling up against the Chilean border, the small Lago Puelo National Park just south of El Bolson hides two beautiful lakes surrounded by forests and snowy peaks. With all the snow-melt of early summer, our dip was decidedly cold!

Of course, a low overall population density can, and nearly always does, hide significant variations – and Patagonia is no exception, with one or two larger towns containing most of the people and the rest left largely to the sheep and the condors. Arriving in Bariloche, the tourism capital of the Argentinian South on the shores of the magnificent Lago Nahuel Huapi, after hours of monotonous driving across expanses of scrub desert with little sign of human presence, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d arrived in a bustling Alpine ski resort. And this is off-season: in a few weeks when Christmas kickstarts the summer holidays of most of South America, the relentless 20km of lakefront west of the town centre given over in its entirety to hotels, cabanas, hosterias, hospedajes and rental apartments comes into its own.

But even this surplus is not enough for some. Israeli travellers, notorious all over Asia and South America for all the wrong reasons, seem to band together even more than usual in the face of this huge emptiness – even when it only really starts well beyond the city limits. They clump together in large impenetrable groups, take over entire hostels (whose owners rapidly end up fluent in Hebrew), colonise restaurants to the extent that they start giving Israeli discounts – apparently anything to avoid having to look around and acknowledge the humbling vastness of what surrounds them. Returning to Argentina from the Chilean border we stopped to offer a group of such Israeli backpackers a lift to the next town – there were five of them and we could only take two. They refused, for how could they ever find each other again if they split up? Waiting another two hours for the next bus was the only option they were willing to contemplate.

Bariloche (December 2009) Stretching along the south shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi, Bariloche is a uncharacteristically crowded part of Patagonia. Its status as a tourist mecca is understandable given its stunning location and the surrounding countryside is perfect for trekkers, kayakers, skiers, campers, day-trippers and holiday-makers of all inclinations.

Valerie works in a youth hostel in Trevelin – she has lived in Patagonia for a long time; her husband is a ‘horse-whisperer’ (though she hates the term) – he trains horses following ancient Mapuche traditions which establish a strong bond of friendship between man and beast. They moved here a few years ago from El Chalten, an even smaller town further south which has recently started attracting ‘hordes’ of trekkers every summer. Trevelin, while not nearly as isolated as Patagonia can get, is still worlds away from Bariloche. 30 km south of Esquel, a rather modest town perched on the edge of the steppe with its back to the mountains, Trevelin is a small village founded by the Welsh in the nineteenth century. Welsh is still spoken, and is indeed undergoing something of a revival, with regular exchange programmes with the homeland. It is largely off the tourist map – the only Israelis you’ll meet here are those few adventurous ones who actually talk to locals and other travellers and whose opening line is normally an apology for their fellow-countrymen. Other travellers are relatively rare too: the hostel, Casa Verde, while regularly getting rave reviews from those who make it, has only a few rooms and is closed over the winter. And yet it’s all getting too much for Valerie, who feels acutely the oppression of crowds and longs for a quieter existence. The village recently got a supermarket, and there are plans afoot to pave the road to the Chilean border.

Trevelin (December 2009) The small community of Trevelin was founded in 1889 by Welsh settlers who had already settled on the barren plains of the eastern Atlantic coast but moved west looking for some scenery that's slightly more Welsh.

More isolated than this? I sound incredulous when I ask her despite my best attempts to hide it. Valerie has not been to Esquel in months and has no intention of going if she can avoid it, despite the hourly buses. Most people I know – even myself, thinking seriously about settling down in New Zealand – could not even begin to contemplate such exile. The Welsh teacher, from some inhospitable Welsh mountain valley, is looking decidedly frazzled after just a few months here. I was here once, three years ago, struggling to get here with local buses and no tourist guide only to find the hostel closed and having to return up the road to Esquel. Back then I felt so alone, I was glad to have left so soon.

It’s a question of perspective, and even here on the southern edge of the world with apparently limitless space, there are those who want to escape the crowd – even if that crowd is merely being able to see another house on the horizon. And why compromise? If you are Patagonian, such luxurious aloneness is one of the country’s biggest perks – Bariloche as distant as London to a Highland Scot, and every group of Israelis as alien to you as you appear to the Israelis. Thankfully, for now Patagonia still has more than enough space to escape the crowds, whatever your personal definition of them – and I hope that will never change.

I have recently started publishing articles on the website of the Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team in the Central African Republic (HDPT CAR). This is an advocacy website bringing together all the different actors working within CAR, with the aim of improving knowledge and awareness in the anglophone world of the country and its precarious situation.

The first article was written based on a recent mapping trip I undertook to North-East CAR by road - a 1,000km journey from Bangui to Birao that took four long, gruelling days.

North-east CAR: Reaching the forgotten