World Is Round

非洲人对波诺: “看在上帝的份上请打住吧！

My "Africans to Bono" piece, translated into Chinese by a friend of mine.  My inbox is already starting to curse me for writing it.  我想知道中国人对这个话题的看法。请你请你说一下你的意见。

            作者：Jennifer Brea   写于2007年7月3日，星期二

是让非洲想象它自己未来的时候了。

坦桑尼亚阿鲁沙——非洲是一个让人绝望的洲。在这里，八岁大的孩子背负着AK-47s冲锋枪屠杀整个整个的村庄，而他们古怪的独裁者把反对派的器官摆上筵席，相信那会滋壮他们的阳刚之气。采采蝇啃啮着饥饿的孩子们的眼睑，它们运动着张大的腹部，似乎那是它们生来的权利；更不必说当你读完这篇文章的时候，已经又有六个非洲人死于疟疾，五个死于艾滋，十七个死于贫穷和饥饿的事实了。同时，这里野生动植物很美，而且这里的人们喜欢唱歌跳舞。

这就是非洲，它迫切地需要我们的帮助。幸运的是，已经有一些来自美国和欧洲的开明巨星来救助它。

奇怪的是，并不是所有的本地人都对此心存感激。

Racism in France

My sister and I were on a train from Paris to Limonges on the way to the Dordogne when our train was stopped in some random town and we were asked to disembark - something about a motorcycle being thrown off a bridge.

We had been waiting for two hours when a new train arrived and the crowd that had been sitting on the platform in the midday heat started gathering their luggage to board.  There was an African woman who, admittedly, was carrying a great deal more than her allowance.  But so was I, so was my sister, and so was nearly everyone else on the train.

When the woman tried to board, one of the conductors started to yell, "This is not acceptable.  This is simply unacceptable.  Why do you think you have the right to do this here?"  The conductor berated the women for a full five minutes.  She did not say a single word.  She was so still, she looked like she had even stopped breathing.  She kept her gaze firmly set on the ground and didn't even dare to look at the tall white man in the authoritative-looking uniform.  I don't remember exactly what he said, but every sentence was a riff on the same idea: "Who do you think you are you stupid African woman?!"

Email from Accra, en route to Freetown (Summer 2004)

So I'm starting off this travelogue portion of this blog by trying to post what fragments of emails or handwritten diary entries I have from travels taken long ago. And will eventually backdate entries where appropriate. It's the easy way out, but at least it's a start...

Here is a email I wrote back to family and friends after arriving in Accra (June 14th, 2004):

hey everyone. the following is a somewhat hurried email. . .anyway, i left new york on saturday, but i'm still in accra! who knows how long i am here. ghana airways is telling us we "might" leave today...possibly tomorrow. . .i'm just trying to learn how to be patient and enjoy it.

    i've been exploring the neighborhood with some other people here and taking some really good pictures. . .women carrying baskets on their heads, dressed in the most fabrics with the most amazing colors. the women are so beautiful here. and everyone is so open and friendly. i'm staying in a guesthouse waiting for my flight. we still don't know when we are leaving. one woman heading to sierra leone from zambia has been waiting in the hotel since friday. so who knows?

i'm staying with a lot of nice people, including two brothers from memphis (18, 14) traveling to Freetown, a girl and her mother traveling to Liberia, an aunt and her nephew also headed to Freetown. . .and a lot of people we are traveling with are heading to liberia to see family for what may be the first time in many years now that things are a little more stable. some people on are trip haven't seen parents and siblings in ten or fifteen years. some of the women are hoping to return to their villages for the first time in years, though most expect to find only ruins. one woman is trying to find her son who, last she heard, is somewhere in a refugee camp in guinea. everyone is very emotional. mostly i just sit around and listen to people tell stories.

    before leaving for Africa, i had read a lot about the atrocities that happened during the war, and already just reading Human Rights Watch reports was really difficult to handle, but it's so different hearing the stories from people whose lives were actually affected by all that happened, who had loved ones who lived through the torture. one woman's niece was taken by rebels for nine months and subjected sexual and physical torture. another women spoke about rebels taking pregnant women, betting on the sex of the child they are carrying, and then splitting her open to see who was right. sometimes they would take the heads of the fetuses and make necklaces with them. it was not uncommon on raids to eat the hearts and livers of the dead. to burn families alive in their homes. to hack off the limbs of babies. knowing that, it's painful to imagine that most of the footsoldiers were mostly children, some no older than eleven, and that they often returning to their own villages to commit these atrocities. the women here blame it on the drugs they gave the children. other people talk about abuse or threat of death or the rambo movies they used to have the "troops" watch before going out into battle. but i know there has to be some other reason why, some rationalization i have not thought of yet, because any of these factors - taken alone, summed together, whatever - does not make what happened in sierra leone and what is happening in places all over Africa any more comprehensible.

    anyway, for the moment, if you would like to reach me, i am staying at the Ampomaah Tourist Guesthouse in Accra. if the person at the desk does not know who i am, just say the white girl. don't bother asking for my room number since i will most likely be in the lobby or the vicinity, but i think i'm staying in either room 403 or 405. and buy a phonecard! do not call me from your home line. it will cost a fortune.

    so i'm still safe. and so far am enjoying myself. i'm trying to learn how to speak krio. i'm in africa! can you believe it?

    love,

jen

Reading this just a year and a half later, I am amazed how excited and how incredibly naive I sound! I was 21, and it was my first (and only) time in Africa. It's amazing how spending just a few months at that age in a place so radically different from what you are accustomed to can completely change the way you look at the world.

Tags: Sierra Leone, Ghana, Accra, Liberia, Africa, Child Soldiers, Human Rights, Travel, Freetown

boys with monkey

 

Just testing this picture feature. These are four Sierra Leonean boys with what I assume was a pet monkey. Whether or not I ever actually had any intentions of using it at a given moment, just the mere site of a camera lens never failed to provoke extreme reactions from crowds of people. Because of my camera, I would either get chased out of neighborhoods or chased down by throngs of people begging me to snap their pictures, as these boys here did.