Chapter Five

I got robbed last night.

Calm down mom, dad, I’m alright, everyone is alright, I lost my Blackberry, some cash and the cheap local phone I bought for staying in contact with people here. Wallet is safe, they didn’t get my cards or even the $50 U.S. that was in it. They were incredibly amateur, which made them that much more dangerous, in some ways, but which also made it possible to resist here and there in little ways, hold this or that back and get away with it.

Again, I’m fine, perfectly safe, they never even pointed a gun directly at me, it’s OK. I lost a few pictures, some of which I can take again, and other than that I think I got away clean except for about $60 worth of the phone and currency. My Blackberry is insured and the face was so scratched it was gonna need to be replaced when I got back to the states anyways.

You want the story? OK, here it goes:

I’m in the tiny little bar section of this Thai restaurant, hanging out for the last time with this one friend I’ve met here before I head north in a few days. We’re talking, laughing, planning to go out to a real bar in a few minutes when two black guys come in, no big deal, one is carrying an AK-47 and the other has a handgun, but I don’t see it at first, so I figure the one guy is just the restaurant’s security guard. Around here you see automatic weapons many times a day, so the simple fact of a guy carrying one is no cause for alarm.

It’s not until they start shouting, pushing people around and reaching in peoples’ pockets that you realize what’s going on. Soon people are on the ground or sitting in chairs against the walls with their hands up.

They don’t speak English well at all, but they tell us to put our phones on the floor and they keep shouting at each other to hurry, hurry, and something about a taxi. I pull out my cheap phone and make sure they see me put it down, then they demand cash, I pull out my wallet, thumb the Meticais out of it and fling them at him. For a moment he gestures at me like he’s gonna demand that I open the wallet and show him that it’s empty, but he gets distracted by something else in the room and I tuck the wallet behind me between the two chairs I’m sitting on and the wall. When he looks back at me he notices the square shape in my pocket and reaches for it. Disappointed—I’d almost saved the Blackberry from them—I pull it out and chuck it at him.

After that, I’m basically a spectator. The one with the handgun, at some point before this, had pointed it over peoples’ heads at the wall and fired it. I was looking right at him, I saw where the gun was pointed. There was no impact, no ricochet, the sound was too quiet. It was clearly a replica. Still, the other guy has a real enough looking AK-47, although he holds it very inexpertly. For a moment I tell myself how easy it would be to get ahold of the barrel and keep him from leveling it at anyone. But I tell myself not to be a hero and I just sit there with my heart pounding. I don’t feel helpless: like I said, it would be easy to disarm these guys, seeing as they’ve only got one gun. I’m not helpless, I’m just restraining myself. They’re not worth resisting over a few hundred Meticais.

Good thing, too, because the unintended consequences are impossible to predict. Soon a third guy comes in, with another hand gun that looks just like the first, but I can’t know for sure. And later, it turns out there was a fourth one on the patio which, from the description of the Chinese men out there, sounds like he was carrying a shotgun.

Now the owner, who’s quite drunk, is shouting at them, advancing on them, “So what!” he says in his thick South African accent, “I’m old! Kill me! Go ahead, just kill me!”

They level the AK at his chest and I think to myself, I’m gonna see someone killed tonight. In my mind’s eye I can literally see the blood blossoming on his chest and I can’t look away.

Finally, after an interminable instant, the owner’s friends pull him away and soon the guys have left and we’re all standing around trying to figure out if that really just happened. The bar around us is in chaos, the owner is pissed at everyone and everything, he runs outside, comes back in demanding his keys, saying that the guys’ taxi has “fucked them.” Someone reaches into the fuse box and turns out the lights, which seems like a bad idea, but apparently it prevents the owner from finding the keys. He fumes around, yelling at everyone, talking about how his dignity has been taken from him, which I understand, but he also points at two or three of us younger American guys, calling us ‘Marines’ and saying we’re cowards. Whatever, he was drunk, and he had a right to be pissed. I don’t take it personally.

Meanwhile there’s an older Swedish lady FREAKING. Screaming, crying, slapping her husband. Turns out they took her wedding ring, a tennis bracelet and her purse, which she was sitting on and seems to feel they would not have noticed if her husband hadn’t volunteered it. I feel for both of them. I did the same thing she did with my wallet, didn’t I? But I know he was just trying to keep his wife safe, and there’s not really time to think in that situation. Sucks.

All is said and done and we leave. Our local numbers are put on a list at the bar, but none of us really expect to get anything back. It all still seems surreal, and the only difference I feel is I’m a little bit more nervous walking on the street at night, but otherwise, it really almost feels like nothing’s changed. Some of the people who were there don’t want to post this stuff on their blog. Think it reinforces a prejudiced view of Africa. But this is where it happened. You can’t ignore it and think it will go away once people stop being racist. The only way to make it stop is to take it on, and the best way to do that is to make people talk about it and about how to stop it from happening in the first place. It’s all a very weird and mixed-up set of feelings that I doubt will ever get sorted out.

18/7/10

Chapter Four

I’m doin’ it! I’m feelin’ it an’ I’m doin’ it. Here’s the opening trip story, at least as far as Dubai, for now, we’ll see how much I feel like writing.

Those who received my very first e-mail are aware already that I missed my scheduled flight. I arrived at Tom Bradley International Terminal as the flight was leaving, walked up to the front desk of Emirates STRESSING; on the edge of tears really. But the guy was great to me, gave me a coupon for a discounted night’s stay which, despite being in El Segundo, was kindof ok, and confirmed me on the next day’s flight instead of leaving me on standby, which was incredibly kind of him.

So I went wandering up Sepulveda to find a RadioShack, the last act of my trusty Blackberry before relegation to the position of fallback camera after I packed the charger chord for my parents’ camera but forgot the camera itself, and ran across a great little ghetto fabulous sports bar with low light and red crushed velvet wallpaper (the ribs were amazing, by the way, kind of a honey sesame seasoning) and watched game 3 of the NBA finals. It would be weeks until I got word that it had gone seven games and the Lakers had won. I got none of the details.

But I took good advantage of the hotel’s free WiFi (another ‘last’) to download four solid articles of East African history, which I printed up in the management office in the morning, great thanks to the staff of La Hacienda for that. Then I took a soak in the hot tub and my last morning newspaper in English and some Mexican food, which I rightly expected I’d not find much of here. I got to the airport before the desk even opened and was through security with about three hours to kill, which I believe I spent on a final proofreading of my term paper (which I’ve gotten an ‘A’ on, by the way, simplifying my life considerably).

It’s difficult to condense a sixteen hour plane ride into an appropriately engaging half page, but that is somewhat simplified by the fact that I spent the whole thing reading and annotating the first two articles, sleeping for a few hours, and then writing up the first of two ‘historiographical summaries’ still due before my quarter was truly over. This was aided considerably by the fact that Emirates furnishes their long-haul planes with two power outlets for every three-seat row, but hindered by the fact that they also provide individual screens for every seat, a couple-hundred-video library and video games to boot. Those amenities, added to the leggy blonde Australian flight attendant, who flirted quite pleasantly throughout most of the flight (being the first passenger checked in, by about twenty hours, I got a bulkhead seat, so her fold-up was right across from me) and the really sexy uniforms they wear, including a red hat with a scarf pinned at the temple which hangs down and then wraps around the collar (the only time they have to wear it over their nose and mouth is if they get off the plane in Saudi Arabia: I asked) makes Emirates, hands down, the best airline in the world. I’m not a terribly experienced international traveler, but first hand I can say its better than British Airways, KLM or Lufthansa, and I have agreement for others who’ve flown with more.

Ok, enough with the Emirates ad. We landed in Dubai in the most opulent airport EVER, went through customs pretty quickly, although I ran into some trouble at the declarations post after two guards carrying M4s (I can’t tell you how strange it is to walk by police and even private security toting serious firepower: Beretta, Kalashnikov, serious shotguns held so frankly you’d almost…almost…think they were toys. But you get used to it) noticed me taking pictures of the fuckin’ marble-columned, literally acres-wide baggage claim area. They waved me on when I was a little too willing to open my bag for them (“No, no, no, tell me if you’re carrying anything to declare.” Tourist.).

So, you walk out of the air conditioned arrivals terminal and the heat hits you like a sledge. Luckily its early evening and the desert gets steadily cooler but never so far as cold, or even really cool. They take you to in a bus to the Millennium Airport Hotel, which is as opulent as everything in Dubai, even though the rooms in the ‘Emirates Wing,’ which are compped, including dinner, anytime snack and breakfast for passengers with overnight layovers, like me, are quite modest.

I had a bit of an embarrassing episode when I first got into the room. None of the lights would turn on. The TV turned on, and I even went so far as to check the circuit board before calling the front desk in confusion.

*Sigh* “Sir, you must put you key card in the slot by the door.”

It had looked like a light switch, but it had no moving parts.

Tourist.

So I grab a cab downtown with the doctor and lawyer twins who’d sat next to me on the plane, but we got dropped off in the wrong place and by the time we’ve walked almost the whole ‘round it looking for the entrance, the gates are closed and we miss our chance to go to the top of whatever-it’s-called tower, currently the tallest in the world or something, I think. Shit, saved me some money, though. Turns out its quite expensive for some vertigo and a few photographs.

So we took a few pictures from the base, wandered around Dubai Mall, which is like Mall of America type of huge, then headed off to this bar the Sheila had told us about. I will say about the tower that it’s a pretty impressive building that won’t fit in the camera frame, or even the field of human vision, whole. You look at the base and start looking up and up from about fifty yards away and by the time you get about halfway up, the lights at the bottom have already disappeared from even your peripheral vision.

The bar was also impressive. Four patios on two levels, two rooms indoors, live music, covers of John Mayer unfortunately, three bars and beach access with some impressive yachts at anchor in the bay. The Sheraton Hotel was next door. The place had taken advantage of the transit crowd, like us, by building a big white dome, air-conditioned and with its own bar and a big screen TV feed. It was the night of the opening ceremony and it was kind of crowded when we first got there, but it soon emptied out and we hung out on one of the patios, near a fountain with a broad pool that must have been quite expensive to feed with clear blue water in the desert air during the day.

We met up with a couple of guys we’d eaten dinner with at the hotel who had made it to the top of the tower, saw their photos and had some weak, overpriced drinks. Whatever, I figured I was lucky to find a wet bar at all in a Muslim country. The one guy was a kind-of douchie if gregarious thirty-something bartender from San Diego (“Don’t say I’m from L.A.!” Wah.) and the other his lapdog friend, so I went home with the twins. I had another summary to write, after all, and I surprised myself by mustering the motivation to read a page or two before going to bed.

Last word on Dubai is to repeat what I told the twins, slightly buzzed at a price that should have gotten me plastered, in the cab on the ultra-modern ten-lane main freeway on the way back to the hotel. It’s a place that feels so foreign to me that I can’t really be sure, but I think, with a few more weeks in town that it’s a place I’d really enjoy.

The trip to Nairobi was a six hour version of the same flight from L.A. but a less luxurious plane and a flight attendant team made up of the most incredible variety of gorgeous women you can imagine from the senior attendant, a gorgeous Nilotic black woman, maybe Sudanese, but with an unfortunate angry demeanor, to a buxom blonde Dutch, a dark haired beauty and the new girl they were training, a perfect-featured Spanish girl who I swear would have been putty for me if she hadn’t been training and I hadn’t had to write.

I still had a page or two to write when I got off the plane. Had to find an ATM, then bought a Nigerian team jersey to get change for the bills it gave me, The jersey cost five times as much as the visa it facilitated and I still haven’t worn it since I didn’t make the game. Now it’s basically useless since the damn team’s banned from playing internationally for two years. Fuck. Oh well, at least it saved me thirty or more dollars on the Zimbabwean visa.

I found a café on the airport campus that let me plug in, but I didn’t finish the paper (so vague and distracted because of the noise that I’m frankly surprised I did well enough on it to pull the full ‘A’ in the class) until the seventieth minute, so I missed the South Africa goal and only barely caught Mexico’s equalizer after dashing off an e-mail and attachments at a badly virus infected internet café next door that’s almost sunk my last flashdrive and I barely kept off my mom’s computer. I did keep it clean, Ma, I swear, but we really should get a Norton subscription on this thing. I’m finally sold on the two hundred dollars a year for it.

Took a couple of pics of the café where I caught the end of the game to commemorate the end of my term and the belated beginning of my summer trip. (But it looks like I've lost these pictures, at least until I get a new Blackberry and can upload the backup of the main memory drive onto it from the old one)

2/7/10-3/7/10

Chapter Three

Breakthrough! I’ve finally found something that I can use!

I’ve been trying to motivate myself to tell some stories about my trip from Nairobi to Johannesburg and my night in Dubai, but I just haven’t found it. There are some very interesting parts to the whole thing, but I guess there’s not really any single unified story, despite the long road along which it all happened.

I’ve been in Maputo, Moçambique (yeah, I went there. It’s called a cedilha and I think I love it) for a couple of weeks now and, first of all, the thing you need to realize about Africa is that you can only ever get one or two things done in a day because, well, people only really work a couple of hours a day and you never really know which ones they’re gonna be. So maybe you get to the University at ten A.M. and maybe the archive building doesn’t open until noon. If it turns out that what you’re looking for is downtown in the Bexia (or Lowland) district, you’ve not only got to make your way down there, for all you know, the guy you need to talk to went home at one. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that by four when the games start, no one is in their office.

So I’ve been trying to get into this one building for two weeks. There are four buildings associated with the historical archives directorate. One is on the campus of Edward Moudlane University, the national school, one is on 24 de Julho the upper street of the two major roads in town. In Beixa (sometimes written and said Beira) there’s an admin building where I had to write a letter to the Director General (a pedido, I’m told it’s an essential to getting anything official done, so I’ve kept the file) for permission to use the archives.

The last building is sort of an annex to the National Library which is on 25 de Setembro, the lower main street that runs through Beixa. It’s where the microfilms are kept and it’s been pretty clear for a while that that’s the format in which anything as old as I want would be kept. Still, around here, as with many places, you’ve got to do things their way or they’ll inevitably turn obstinate and it’ll just be like pulling teeth. The appropriate metaphor, I think, is more like waiting for a loose tooth to come out. So finally—yesterday now, because I got distracted from finishing this last night—I not only received permission to go to the annex and an introduction to the woman in charge of the microfilm, I also got the chance to borrow a friend of mine’s research assistant as an interpreter. Sure enough, not an hour in the microfilm office with this girl and I find myself with a catalogue book of documents pertaining to Moçambique from the national archives in Lisbon, organized by author, date and subject. I flip to the chronological section, copy down the call numbers of the first dozen and a half documents and voila! I’m off to make sure they found them all this morning and that I’m one step away from great success!

Of course, characteristically, the one step is inevitably turning into six already. Apparently, the machine that could copy the microfilms for me, something they would be happy to do, is broken. So now I have to find an old school film developer or another library or something that can do it for me. Africa.

1/7/10 – 2/7/10