All in a day's work in Sao Tome and Principe

It’s a wonder we get any work done at all in this country. When it’s not an internet connectivity problem (there’s only one provider in the country, so there’s no competitive incentive to give good service) it’s an electricity problem (again, only one provider – do you see a pattern here?). Last week we had the great misfortune of our generator breaking down at precisely the same moment as the worst city-provided power outage in history (well, at least the history since we’ve been here). Normally, we get power from the city electric grid for 12 to 16 hours a day, and when that fails us, our own ADRA generator serves as a backup, providing us with our own mini power plant.

Of course, this coincidental misfortune occurred right when we had two important deadlines to meet: the uploading of a proposal for a competition, and the drafting and printing of a letter for a visa application for an upcoming international trip. Without electricity from either of our usual two sources, laptop batteries died within hours, backup power supplies ran out of residual charge, and machines with no backup power (printers, internet routers) fell dead. Work in the office ground to a complete standstill. Upstairs in our house (within the same compound), food in the refrigerator slowly decayed, and with no air conditioning, household temperatures climbed to match the heat outside (thankfully it isn’t extremely hot at this time of year).

For over 24 hours, we had no electricity whatsoever, and counting over a 48-hour period, we had only about 5 hours of power. Our calls to our generator supplier (it is still under warranty) were to no avail, as they said that all of their technicians were occupied at other addresses, dealing with other generators on the fritz. What to do? Deadlines must be met, but options were limited. This is where ingenuity really shines in overseas living. Thankfully I had brought a power inverter from the United States, which plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter and converts 12-volt car battery power into 120-volt AC power to run whatever appliances you plug into them. I temporarily moved my office out to the car, plugged in my laptop (to charge it, but also work on it), and hooked up one of our office printers on the passenger seat. With this setup, I was able to type and print the visa application letter on beautiful letterhead that did not betray whatsoever the herculean efforts required to produce it.

Uploading the proposal proved slightly more tricky. I cannot park our car close enough to the building to connect the internet router to it, so there is no way to power the router and gain access to the outside world. After charging my laptop in the car, I drove to a nearby hotel with wireless internet signal leaking out to the parking lot and lobby. This hotel runs their own satellite internet access which bypasses the notoriously unreliable national internet service provider, and I have used their free wireless access in the past to circumvent our own internet difficulties. Alas, the hotel has since secured their wireless signal and only provides the access code to clients who are spending the night. At this point, it was 10:00 p.m., and I was exhausted from having already tried to jury-rig my way through one day without power. I drove home in defeat, knowing that there were probably other methods at my disposal, but having neither the energy nor the heart to chase them down, since none of them would be easy at all. I just figured that we’d have to accede defeat in this case, and hope for more opportunities in the future when conditions were better.

I flopped into bed with a sigh, said a prayer for this country, and let my mind relax and decompress from the stressful day. Then, in the silence of entering dreamworld, a brilliant solution popped into my mind. I remembered that although we had run down our office backup power supplies during the day, hoping that power would come back before they completely ran out (didn’t happen), we had turned off our only household backup power supply as soon as the power had gone out. The battery probably still had some charge left! I quickly leaped out of bed and silently grabbed the backup power supply unit and took it downstairs to my office. Turning it on (running on internal batter power, of course), I hooked the internet router up to it and connected my laptop to the router. There was a signal! Working quickly (since I had no idea how much time was left on the backup power supply’s battery), I navigated to the correct webpage, filled in the necessary information, then clicked on “Upload Your Documents.” Waiting with bated breath to see if the upload would succeed before the backup power supply’s battery died, I prayed and prayed that it would work. Success! I had met the midnight deadline, and wouldn’t have to write off this opportunity!

All in a day’s work in Sao Tome and Principe.

Bushwhacking!

ADRA owns a plot of land in the jungle of Caué District.  It was bought many years ago to be a sort of experimental research farm, but has lain dormant for several years now.  We're still holding onto it because we know that one of these days, we'll figure out what to do with it.  But for the moment, it just sits there, slowly getting overgrown and maturing into a full rainforest.  We have a guard who lives there and keeps an eye out on the property, but we were starting to get reports of illegal logging and harvesting on our land.  So one day in February, I went there with some of our staff (who already know the lay of the land), and we hiked the perimeter of the plot, hacking our way with machetes part of the time, walking on dirt roads some of the time, and sweating buckets the whole time!  It is absolutely beautiful territory, complete with a scenic cliff overlook, waterfalls, and black cobras all around.  Thankfully on our hike, we didn't come across any cobras, but we did come across evidence of illegal logging and fruit harvesting.  Either our guard is not on duty much of the time, he's too old to hear the chainsaws, or he's complicit with the activities.  Not sure what we're going to do about it, as guards willing to live out there in the lonely woods are hard to come by.  Perhaps we'll turn our land into an ecotourism trekking ground and make some money off of it that way -- without having to introduce any kind of labor-intensive industry!

Our Container Arrives!

Our long-awaited shipping container arrived in port in mid-January!  We are, of course, elated.  Up to this moment, we still have not finished unpacking and assembling everything, but our house is looking a lot better already.  As Kristi said, "I forgot what comfort looked like.  I was starting to think that we were being extravagant getting a shipping container, but now that we have some comfort items from home, I'm realizing what a mood lifter it is!"

As we did not have enough items to fill an entire shipping container (the director's house is partially furnished), our goods were loaded into giant wooden crates so that they wouldn't bang around inside the container in transit.  The port officials were kind enough to be convinced to come to our house for the opening and inspection of the crates, which eliminated the cringing spectre of half-open cardboard boxes strewn all over a truck bed being paraded through town.

So now, our house is covered in an ever-diminishing stack of boxes.  The kids are getting tired of every weekend being filled with daddy assembling furniture, but they're a very patient lot!  As soon as it's all done being set up, I'll post some more pictures.

Angola

The São Tomé e Príncipe Mission of Seventh-day Adventists is paired administratively with the four regional missions of the country of Angola; collectively, the five missions make up the Angola Union Mission of Seventh-day Adventists (AUM), which is just one of several unions that make up the Southern Africa Indian Ocean Division of Seventh-day Adventists (SID), which is just one of several divisions that make up the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists (GC) – the world governing body of the church that is headquartered near Washington, D.C.  STP is paired with Angola not for geographical reasons (it is the farthest north country in SID and is the only one north of the equator) and not for proximity reasons (Gabon is the closest mainland country; south of Gabon is Congo, then DRC, then Angola).  Instead, STP is paired with Angola for linguistic reasons – it is the nearest Portuguese-speaking country, and STP is too small to be on its own, administratively speaking.  ADRA Angola is currently dormant while awaiting the arrival of the next appointed country director, so at the moment, ADRA-STP is the only active ADRA office within the AUM.  As such, I was privileged to attend the year-end meetings of the AUM in Huambo, Angola at the beginning of December.  I presented a report of ADRA-STP’s activities during 2008, as well as participated in some important committee votes affecting the future of the AUM.  I also had the chance to meet with many of our leaders and representatives in the church and put faces to the names I’ve seen passing through my inbox month after month.

There is a twice weekly direct flight from São Tomé to Luanda, the capital of Angola (population estimated at 7 million).  From there, there are daily flights to Huambo, the second city of Angola, which is about 1.5 hour’s flight by jet plane into the interior of the country (population estimated at 2 million).  Huambo is situated on a high plateau at 1,703 meters elevation (about 5,000 feet, or one mile).  The climate is GORGEOUS!  It was the beginning of their summer (remember, they’re south of the equator), yet I didn’t once break a sweat despite wearing a full suit the whole time I was there!  I even had to wear a BLANKET at night!  Huambo is a beautiful city.  It was the center of the main resistance group during the lengthy Angolan civil war (UNITA planted plenty of landmines throughout the area, many of which are still unexploded today).  Yet the city is clean, well-ordered, and in repair (some buildings still bear the scars of bullet holes, but those are fast disappearing).  Angola in general blew me away with how developed it seemed in comparison with São Tomé.  Construction is booming everywhere, and now that the war is over (since the killing of the UNITA leader in 2002), people’s energies are be turned toward capitalizing on Angola’s considerable oil reserves.  I was told that Angola is the single largest oil provider for China today, which if true would represent a considerable amount of business and revenue!  I did see many Chinese in Luanda, so even if it’s not the largest oil provider, it is certainly a significant one that China takes seriously.

In any case, it is amazing to see what has been accomplished in six years since the end of the fighting.  Streets are paved (I did not see ONE POTHOLE the entire time I was in Angola!), construction cranes pepper the skyline throughout urban areas, and garbage collection seems to be catching up to the pollution problem slowly but surely (Luanda is still struggling with this, but Huambo was impeccable!).  Because of the incredibly rapid growth, traffic is HORRENDOUS is Luanda; it seems that the middle class which can afford a car is rising so rapidly that road construction simply cannot keep up, despite work crews laying new pavement both day and night.  As Angola rockets skyward in its quest for development (an aspiring politician boasted to me that Angola will surpass South Africa as the most developed country in Africa within 10 years), infrastructure is also severely strained.  Gas lines are horrendously long, despite fuel being so cheap (remember, Angola is an oil producer; it was just admitted to OPEC in 2006).  Hotels are disastrously insufficient to meet the demand.  The Africa Cup (soccer) will be hosted in Luanda in 2010, and despite construction workers throwing up hotels just as fast as they can, rooms are still booked far in advance.  One hotel proprietor hadn’t even finished construction on his new edifice when SONANGOL (the national petroleum company) bought out every single room for the next two years!  And while staying in Luanda (the night before flying back to STP) as the guest of Benjamim Paiva, the former vice president of the national parliament (remember, there are few hotel rooms, and Dr. Paiva just retired in October after 14 years in parliament to work full time in public relations for the church), I visited a shopping mall that made me think I had been plucked out of Africa and dropped into America!  From the parking lot to the sweeping archway entry to the Christmas lights to the tiled food court to the department stores, this mall (Bela Shopping) could just as well have been in Los Angeles as in Luanda!  I was completely blown away!

In any case, despite its growing pains, it’s so refreshing to see a country where the riches are shared with all!  Too many countries throughout Africa have reserved the plunders of mineral wealth for the elites, pushing the poor into deeper and deeper poverty and fomenting strife and conflict in the process.  Angola’s president, despite raising questions internationally over the transparency of his election and continuing mandate, at least seems to be reinvesting his country’s wealth back into public services for all to enjoy.  When the roads are paved, garbage service is gaining upon the problem, and electricity service is virtually interruption-free, revolutionary tendencies are dissipated and public confidence in the market encourages investment and growth.  This is not to say that Angola is out of the woods yet.  There are still some poor that have not yet gotten on board with the development train that is sweeping the nation.  I didn’t visit any rural areas, so it’s hard for me to say if what I saw was in urban centers only or nationwide.  And at least in the area of immigration reform, it’s still easier to get a visa to STP than to Angola!  But it is encouraging to see a positive story coming out of the region, when all we hear about in the news otherwise is how Robert Mugabe is trashing his nation which once was a contender for overtaking South Africa in development.

Meeting the President

It’s not required, but it is considered a courtesy for directors of international organizations playing a major role in the country’s development to meet with representatives of the government upon undertaking their duties.  Though I was here last year as a project director and had already met the Ministers of Health, Agriculture, and Foreign Affairs, the previous ADRA director and the current board chair both strongly recommended I present myself to the president of the country as a diplomatic gesture.  This way my first time meeting a sitting head of state – I have previously met Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia, and attended a speech by former president Bill Clinton at the University of Florida, though I did not personally meet him, but I had never met a president while he was still serving in office.

The local ADRA board chair took me to the president’s house to introduce me, having attended school with the president when they were both boys.  The presidential mansion is a stately pink edifice in the center of town, surrounded by a tall, black, wrought-iron fence and armed guards posted at every gate.  Hardly anyone checked our credentials upon entering.  Either the board chair is well-known, security is lax, or they don’t dare question anyone entering while wearing full suits for fear of embarrassing themselves with foreign dignitaries!  In any case, getting in was easy.  Getting an actual audience with the president was a much slower process.  We sat in the waiting room, the president’s benign visage gazing down charitably upon us from an oversized portrait on the opposite wall.  The furnishings seemed well appointed – beautiful Persian rugs, ornate wood and glass coffee tables, fresh cut tropical flowers adorning vases throughout the room.  Forgive me if I’m a stickler, but I did see chipped paint on one corner of the wall!  It just jumped out at me, given that this was the president’s mansion!

Suddenly, the doors burst open and we were escorted upstairs past an enormous tapestry depicting traditional Saotomean dances, past fancy marble colonnades, and into a spacious room fitted with the finest and fanciest furniture to be seen anywhere on the island – furniture befitting a president.  After a brief wait in this (which turned out to be the receiving room), a side door burst open and in strode the president confidently, extending his hand to each of us present in the room.  After greetings and small chit-chat, I was presented as the new ADRA director by our board chair, and the president followed up with a few appropriate questions which I answered with ease in Portuguese.  Then, his attention turned to our board chair, his old childhood buddy, and they dominated the rest of the half hour conversation with reminiscences of old times and catching up on what’s been happening recently in each others’ lives.  Our board chair is also the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in this country, and the president of the republic had LOTS of questions about our beliefs and our evangelistic intentions here.  “Do Adventists permit a man to marry more than one woman?”  “Do Adventists believe in the end of the world?”  “Why are Adventists and Pentecostals growing so rapidly in numbers in this country, while Catholic numbers are languishing?”  His questions fired rapidly upon one another, and our board chair did his best to keep up the pace with his answers.  Finally, the president said, “I could never be an Adventist myself!  I cannot keep myself to one woman!  That’s the life of a president!  But I really appreciate what the churches are doing in our country.  The government cannot do it all.  We do not have enough money.  It’s hard being the president of a poor country.  Yet the churches have the ear of the majority of the population, and you can reach people in ways that we cannot.”

The rest of our visit was uneventful except for the power outage that occurred in the middle of our conversation!  Apparently, even the president’s house is not immune from the fickle power supply of EMAE (the national electricity company)!  I would have thought they’d have an immediate backup, but we sat in at least 10 seconds of absolute darkness (it was after sunset) before the generators kicked in.  Nobody seemed the least bit concerned and kept chatting away as if nothing had happened.  Again, either a serious security breach or implicit trust in our delegation not to engage in any 10-second shenanigans while the power was out!

(Photo authored by Ricardo Stuckert/ABr and produced by Agência Brasil).

Shipwreck!

Shortly after arriving back in São Tomé in August, I made a supervisory trip to Príncipe to check on the status of ADRA activities on that sister island.  While there, we received the unfortunate news that a boat carrying passengers and supplies from São Tomé bound for Príncipe had sunk in the ocean.  I awoke that morning hearing moaning and wails wafting in my hotel window.  By the time I reached the hotel restaurant for continental breakfast, more details about the tragedy had come to light.  Several small ships typically ply the waters between São Tomé and Príncipe.  Whenever they leave Príncipe bound for São Tomé, they carry primarily passengers, as there is very little produce and manufacturing in Príncipe that would ever find a market in São Tomé.  On the other hand, ships heading from São Tomé to Príncipe are primarily loaded with goods and supplies either produced in São Tomé or imported from abroad to help restock Príncipe’s store shelves and gas stations.  Consequently, passengers from Príncipe who had an easy time finding passage to São Tomé end up having a difficult time finding a way back home.  Unscrupulous or sympathizing ship captains relent when canvassed by desperate Principeans, overloading their vessels beyond their weight limits and praying to their saints for protection.  If it works, the ship captains make more money per trip than they would by staying within their limits.  If it doesn’t work, well…

So in this particular case, a boat rated to carry 40 tons and 21 passengers was carrying over 50 tons and 38 passengers (if I’ve got the numbers correctly – reports varied depending on who you asked), and left São Tomé at about 4:00 p.m. for an overnight journey to Príncipe.  If all had gone well, it should have taken about 12 hours to get to Príncipe.  Instead, the ship had sunk by 8:00 p.m.  The sun had gone down about 5:30 p.m., as it always does here on the equator.  Apparently, the boat had taken a medium wave to the flank, and everybody on board had panicked at the slight pitching that this had caused.  En masse, they all rushed to the opposite side of the boat and pressed against the railing.  This seriously unbalanced the vessel, and it rolled over, dumping everybody and cargo into the sea.  The boat itself sunk quickly, and thankfully, many people were able to grab onto cargo and hold on until being rescued – a task made all the more difficult by the darkness of night.  Unfortunately, however, 14 people died, and several more required hospitalization.  The captain himself probably wishes he had died, too, as he must now live the rest of his life with the weight of a poor decision on his shoulders.

Throughout the following day in Príncipe, the mood was subdued and mournful.  The greeting of everybody in the streets that day was, “Did you have any family members on the boat?”  Only 6,000 of STP’s 150,000 or so residents live on Príncipe, so it’s an even more tight-knit community than São Tomé.  EVERYBODY is either related or a close friend to everybody else.  So every family was affected in one way or another by the tragedy.  One particularly hard hit family lost a mother, three children, and two nephews in the accident.  In the immediate aftermath, the government majorly ramped up port security, stationing armed soldiers at regular intervals all along the waterfront and heavily fining violators of load regulations.  But this is the 5^th boat to go down in the past 10-15 years, and local residents tell me this always happens after a tragedy.  What is really needed is for such regulation BEFORE accidents occur – in other words, all the time, since one can never know when “before” will occur until it’s too late.  Now there is only one boat remaining that plies the route between São Tomé and Príncipe, so unless a new ship is added to the route, a golden business opportunity exists for anyone willing to open up a reliable service between the islands.  Thankfully, air service still exists, though it is out of the price range of most residents.  For the sake of those residents, better boat service is desperately needed.

ADRA Trains the Government

To jumpstart our business ventures, ADRA has been blessed with an opportunity to help the government achieve financial transparency up to international standards.  Worldwide, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is making a push to transfer its activities from the UN to local governments, and in STP’s case, the Global Fund (GF) will soon switch from being managed by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) to CNE (Centro Nacional de Endemias, the Saotomean counterpart to the CDC in the United States).  ADRA was specifically approached by a team of evaluators from UNDP to bring CNE’s financial standards up to the level required to manage the GF because of ADRA-STP’s reputation for financial transparency, rigor, and quality.  Our dream is to expand this one-time training course into a full suite of training programs in various other areas, as well (survey research implementation, multimedia communication strategies, and other areas where our current staff hold expertise), so as to offer these trainings to other organizations and the public at large as a source of revenue for our ADRA office.  Even while conducting the current financial training course for the government, we are developing further courses to open our training center as soon as possible.