Month: June 2013

A Journey, Part 9. Small Is Beautiful

The sea was like glass when dawn broke the following morning, with not even a ripple save those made by the ship. It was sweltering already and in the sticky heat we were surrounded by a dense mist or steam which when combined with the eerie silence of the sea, lent an atmosphere of ghostliness to our position. As the bow of the ship broke the perfection of the surface, the sea scrambled in our wake to repair the disturbance and it was almost as though nature was conspiring to ensure that we left no trace in the water or the air. A little after sunrise we reached the outer waters of the port and the engines stopped. For two hours we drifted silently on the oily sea, waiting for a pilot boat to lead us in. By mid-morning we had African soil under our feet once again.

And Eritrea is Africa. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but to me there’s something uniquely light-hearted about African people. No matter where you are and despite hardship, smiles and laughter are never far away and easily bubble to the surface. From the stifling heat and humidity of Massawa, we took a bus to Asmara, 110km by road but less than half that distance as the crow flies. It’s a steep climb almost all the way, starting off barren and dry at the coast and becoming progressively more lush as you ascend the 2400m to the capital city. As if by order, the bus was as typically African as could be; filled to the brim with all manner of luggage and possessions, breastfeeding mothers and their doe-eyed babies, and live hens roaming the floor.  On route we passed familiar acacias, flame trees, jacarandas, and bougainvilleas – further welcome reminders of where we were.

Asmara is a small and charming city. Wonderfully temperate as a result of its altitude, it has a distinctly Italian feel with many pizzerias and coffee bars. As halfway houses go, we couldn’t have picked a better city to wait for our possessions to arrive from Jeddah and with not much to see nearby, we made the most of the time relaxing and fraternizing with other travelers. But of all the memories I have of Eritrea as a country, the one that has endured is that of the near complete absence of litter and waste. I’m not sure whether this was a result of a wartime mentality from the recently ended thirty year war with Ethiopia, or whether it’s something particular to Eritrean people, but I was struck by how value was assigned to seemingly every item that would have been discarded elsewhere. In Asmara, I vividly recall visiting the Medeber – a kind of open air recycling market and a hive of activity where hundreds of workers turn all manner of would be waste, from tins to tires, into something useful. I did quick search on YouTube and it appears that it’s still going strong after all these years.

This year is the 40th anniversary of first printing of Small is Beautiful, E F Schumacher’s seminal study on economics as though people mattered, and I find myself asking what progress has been made since 1973 on dealing with the issues that he raised. The way I see it, the prognosis is not good. Even at a superficial level, if I compare the way we, as middle class South Africans lived in the 70s to today, consumption and waste has increased astronomically. We’ve moved from an era of paper bags, loose veggies and glass milk bottles to one in which we’re downing in a sea of packaging and it’s little wonder for instance that the Rausing family, founders of Tetrapak, count themselves near the top of the Forbes rich list. Some of us recycle, but others of us couldn’t be bothered or see it as something we’d like to do but simply can’t fit into our busy schedules. But even recycling is no panacea and we have to be careful not to lull ourselves into a false sense of greenness through relatively minor eco-friendly actions and without striving for more holistic and sustainable lifestyles.

It seems in general that the more affluent we become, the more we consume and the more we waste, if only as a result of us assigning less value to the waste we generate. I stumbled across the art of Chris Jordan a year or two ago and the impact it had on me was immense. He paints pictures not with paint, but with replicated images of the waste we generate and the things we consume, for example a painting of a forest using 139,000 cigarette butts, which is equal to the number discarded in the USA every 15 seconds, or 20,500 tuna, the amount fished from our oceans every 15 minutes. I find his works mind-numbing and for me they really bring home the complete unsustainability of the Western way. In the so-called developed world, we love to lay the blame for the world’s problems on overpopulation and the rampant breeding of the masses, but an honest appraisal shows the truth that our problems are actually rooted in the conspicuous consumption of the few. Well over half the world’s resources are consumed by a little over a tenth of the global population and these are not people living in Asia or in Africa. Despite the starkness of this statistic, we continue to believe in the gospel of Westernization and industrialization, with complete blindness to the fact that were the ninety percent to rise to parity with today’s privileged few, then our consumption and waste as a species would be more than quadrupled from what it is today. To think that we can persist in this is nothing but delusion, denial, and madness.

The problem is that it’s just too easy for us to turn a blind eye to the consequences of our consumption, and almost all business marketing and spin is aimed at making us do just that. But somehow, if we are to overcome the problems we’re facing, we all have to begin to be responsible and to consider our lives and actions, bit by bit, and start to count the cost of everything that we do; To think about the fuel burned when flying in those avos from Spain or the mushrooms from China. About the true cost of jetting around the country or the world. To remember that plastics are derived from fossil fuels and to make an effort to buy local and loose, rather than freighted and packaged. To make a point of squeezing our own OJ, cooking food for our pets, and planting and tending our veggie gardens, even if it seems at first that we can’t afford the time. We may all feel to a lesser or greater extent that we’re living in glass houses and are afraid to speak out, but if we are to shatter our illusions then we all need to start throwing stones…

It took just over two weeks for our car and possessions to reach Massawa from Jeddah and by the time they arrived and had cleared customs we were itching to get moving again.  From Massawa, we climbed the mountain pass to Asmara one last time and set out the following morning for the border, travelling with a Swiss couple that we had met on the Red Sea ferry. We crossed into Ethiopia in mid-afternoon, hoping to get to Axum, but dusk soon approached and we were forced to find an isolated spot to free camp. On the morning of this day in 1997, we woke on our first morning in Ethiopia.  A dozen or so onlookers must have surrounded us noiselessly in the dawn and they stood quietly, some ten or twenty yards off, surveying us as one might survey an alien spacecraft that happened to land in a field near one’s home. Although we tried to engage with them, they were shy and intimidated by our presence and preferred to keep their distance. Shortly after breakfast we were back on the road to Axum.

A Journey, Part 8. Facing the Fear

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best idea to slip into Saudi Arabia on an invalid visa, but sometimes one needs to be bold to move forward. From the outset, I found the general feel of the country to be quite repressive. We were stopped twice by police on the way to Jeddah, each time because they assumed that Hayley, seated in the passenger seat on the left, was driving. It’s against the law for women to drive in Saudi Arabia.

Reaching Jeddah, we set about making arrangements to get ourselves and our car shipped across the Red Sea to Eritrea, and the mood persisted and intensified. Ever present, the Mattawa cruised about in their cars, keeping a watchful eye on the public to ensure adherence during the five-daily prayer times and suppression of all spontaneous and human outpourings of joy and affection in between. To me, it felt almost as though someone had put burkas over not only all the people, but over society itself, leaving us feeling inhibited and obscured while peering out at our other similarly suppressed fellow beings in the swelter of a smothered city.

To start with, Hayley wore a headscarf outdoors, but soon decided to defy the law, tucking her plait into the collar of her loose fitting shirt in order to pass for a boy and avoid the covert lewd behaviour and the stifling heat.  Our Sudanese travel agents told us that we were referred to by locals as the khawagga (tourist) and his brother. But our troubles started when we decided to challenge Mr. Baboud, the owner of the only ferry to Massawa, who had trebled the price for ferrying the car on hearing that we were Westerners. Face to face in his office, his loathing and indifference was barely concealed and we left after a pointless and increasingly heated exchange, determined to ship the car on a freighter and to warn all the travelers we could of his shenanigans. 

The fear started to rise in earnest a few days later when our Sudanese friends, having arranged alternative shipping for the car, weren’t allowed to take it into the port.  The port officials told them that we were a security risk, that we had overstayed our welcome, and that the only way that we could leave was on Mr. Baboud’s ship. Now convinced that there might be something sinister going on, we returned reluctantly to the shipper’s office only to be told by him that the cargo space on his ship was full for the next three months.

On the Friday before the Sunday that we had arrived in Jeddah, they had beheaded four people outside the mosque, a block away from our hotel. All were foreigners and all executed on drug related charges. A long way from home, I couldn’t help wondering what would prevent somebody well connected from having something planted in our car or trailer. It would be so easy. If it happened, could we rely on a fair trial? As the days were passing, the tension was increasing and I was becoming more and more aware of the growing knot in my stomach.  I knew we had to get out soon by whatever means we could.

Even though we aren’t always exposed to it and don’t always feel it, I think that fear and its avoidance plays a huge part in our everyday lives. While established protocol and behavioural norms may be vital for retaining a semblance of order in our lives and in society, they can also provide a means by which we avoid challenging ourselves and awakening the fear that naturally results when we do. Even when there is a clear moral imperative, countering the flow can sometimes take tremendous courage; Consider the soldier who witnesses an atrocity that is morally reprehensible. On the face of it, his decision to become a whistle-blower is a betrayal of the military code of unity and may even be seen as treason, but he realises that his silence makes him complicit and is a betrayal of a deeper morality. He knows that he will be called a pussy and be vilified by his fellow soldiers and citizens, but he also knows that as a human being his inaction will forever damn him. So he chooses to commit to a moral course that moves him in the direction of his own vulnerability. This for me is the essence of courage. It cannot exist in the absence of fear and is always a choice to act despite fear.

Although this may be a dramatic example, I think that life offers each of us times at which we must choose to overcome our fears in order to honour the truth that’s written inside us. It could be a career that has become a dead end, or a relationship that’s no longer able to fulfill the way it once did. But there is comfort in the known and fear in the unknown and in disruption. Fear of rejection or failing at a new endeavour. Fear of disappointing or hurting others. Fear of being seen as a failure, or as insensitive or selfish. In reality though, we only have this one life and somehow we have to be true to ourselves, take it in both hands and live it for all it’s worth. To make it count. Life is just too short to force it or to fake it. It can be hard to let go of dreams that we might have invested our hearts and lives into, but if they no longer align with our internal compass, what choice do we really have? After all, if we are not true to ourselves, how can we possibly be true to others? Somehow, at times like this, we have to call on the strength within to help us overcome our fears and to change course, doing so with all due care while investing faith in the unknown and the uncertain, daunting and terrifying as it may be.

On this evening of this day, 16 years ago, we were on Al Rasheed, on route to Massawa. We had left Jeddah the previous day, leaving the car and trailer behind and trusting our Sudanese friends with the task of getting them to follow us to Eritrea. Although feeling torn and anxious in dispossession,  I also felt happy that our time in the Middle East was finally over. As I stood by the railing of the ship and watched the phosphorescence dancing off the dolphins as they surfed the bow wave, I felt the rising of the African blood in my veins and the mounting excitement and anticipation of the journey ahead. I was going home at last.