Rescuing the past / pre-Sierra Leone

Africa, Europe, Money, North America No Responses »
Sep 122009

Several months ago, the domain to my Sierra Leone blog ran out. Blame my carelessness. To my disappointment, somebody snapped up the domain name. I didn't notice until a few weeks later and my little African pet project was supplanted by advertisements for herbal sex remedies.

I've now rescued my data (thank you, Internet Archive) and plan a subsection on this site where my old posts, some complete with post-university angst, will be republished.

Some of the classics will find their way to the main page. I'm surprised I misspelled the words "commission" and "because" (the latter twice), even though I was in a rush. I blame Firefox sans spell check. Here is what I wrote post-Kenya, pre-Sierra Leone.

02.06.06 // Destination: Freetown
May 30th, 2006

Welcome to livefromfreetown.com. I’ve had a pretty good time travelling through Europe and into Kenya, and am back home for 2 days until I fly to London, and then on to Freetown. Adventure awaits.

The in-flight magazine from Nairobi to Kisumu had a very interesting article about Sierra Leone. The State Department has declared the entire country safe for travel, including border areas, which were among the most dangerous, and there is a small but growing market for tourism. Despite that it is no longer the poorest country in the world (still among the poorest), I’m not convinced that this country is Club-Med.

Nevertheless, with peace, good governance, and foreign investment (much of which coming from the Chinese), Sierra Leone may have a bright future, although there is still much need.

Friday morning will be rushed because the plan is to get my visa from the High Commission in London. If the quality of a country’s website is any indicator of development, I’d venture that only North Korea is in worse shape. Anyways, these are some thoughts. I will wait to gather impressions once I arrive.

Yet to be determined is the quality of internet access, so I’m not sure how fast I’ll get videos online, but I’ll do my best.

Stay tuned…

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Live from… New Jersey?
June 2nd, 2006

Well, I hope New Jersey enjoyed their thunderstorms, because I sure didn’t enjoy their thunderstorms. An unfortunate combination of bad weather and even worse service from Continental meant I missed my connecting flight at Newark, even though I was at the airport when it left.

This means I’ll be in London tomorrow and Sunday nights, and will be arriving on Monday. If i have some time to kill (likely), I’ll take a picture of my sad face here at in front of McDonalds.

And this is where I spent the night…

Newark Airport

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Live from… Gatwick
June 4th, 2006

It isn’t Sierra Leone, but Gatwick Airport is a lot closer than New Jersey. At least I made it across the Atlantic. After a bit of negotiating, the airline agreed to cover my expenses for the weekend, and thus, I’m spending 2 nights at the Hilton here and eating £18.95 breakfasts. Delicious.

That’s pretty much the only thing of note that’s happened this weekend. The food. The delicious food. Other than that, it has been a lot of sitting around and watching TV, and wandering. After the last month, things really aren’t nearly as fun when you’re alone.

So today is finally go-time. I’ll be going downtown this morning to collect my visa from the High Commission for Sierra Leone, and then rushing back to catch the plane. There are two ways you can get from the airport downtown. Regular train service, or the Gatwick Express. A return on the Gatwick Express is £28, which is about $75. I think I’ll leave early this morning and take the el-cheapo, and then if I’m in a rush, I can take the express back. I’m on a budget…

That is really the last thing I have to do before I go, besides actually getting on the plane. My flight to Freetown leaves today at 3:30 pm, and arrives at about 8:30 pm. Catch you on the flip side.

Posted by Justin at 23:29 Tagged with: , , , , ,

Romania's nurses stick close to home

Europe, Money, Politics No Responses »
Feb 022009

This is the first of two stories from a reportage to Romania the other week. Despite a nearly open labour market across Europe, medical professionals in one of the continant's poorest countries are choosing to stay home.

Romania's nurses stick close to home

Romania's nurses don't earn much and although they can work almost anywhere in Europe, better salaries may not be enough to lure them away from home.

The former Eastern Bloc country of 22 million seems an ideal picking ground for cheap medical professionals for Switzerland.

And it could be, if voters choose to extend a labour agreement with the European Union to new members Romania and Bulgaria on February 8.

"I think they want to stay in the country but they are not very well paid here. And the work is not so easy," says Lamise Bectemir, the head of the paediatric oncology ward at the Marie Curie Children's Hospital in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

There is a great wealth disparity here. The problem for Bectemir and others who consider themselves part of the middle class is that relatively meagre salaries don't translate into low costs of living. Nurses in Romania earn between €500 (SFr750) and €1,000 per month.

At a McDonald's restaurant a few minutes from the hospital, a hamburger meal costs around 18 lei, or roughly SFr6.50 ($5.60).

That's less than half the price of the same sandwich, French fries and soft drink in Switzerland, but for the city's nurses it is a relative luxury. They could earn up to five times more in a Swiss hospital.

Romania's wages are an expression of the country's ongoing growing pains almost two decades after the collapse of Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime.

For all the talk of new money in Eastern Europe, Bucharest's buildings cast a weary shadow and its prodigious boulevards and traffic circles - crumbling edifices to the former dictator's brand of grandiose totalitarianism - teem with a few luxury trucks and many more of the modest Dacias, the national everyman's car.

more...

Posted by Justin at 15:49 Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Foreigner(s)

Africa, Europe, Money, News, Politics, Switzerland No Responses »
Jan 242009

The Swiss would be crazy not to love Foreigner. Seriously, who doesn't? But how do they feel about foreigners?

In the part of the world where I grew up - Canada - we called them immigrants and we for the most part celebrated their stories. Apart from the fact that most of us or our relatives came on some kind of a boat or later, airplane, the integration of new people was an built into public policy at most levels.

Europe, on the other hand, is having a more difficult go at it. France has it's North Africans (and the beggers who hand you sad notes at the Champs-Élysées and Gare du Nord), Italy's been trying to index the gypsies since the end of World War II and Switzerland seems to have some kind of campaign or referendum on sending people home, banning mosques or withholding passports every several years.

In Postwar, Tony Judt details the attitudes taken by many Europeans over the last 60 years, which I paraphrase liberally: take the Italians and Eastern Europeans and have them do the rebuilding, work the bad hours and pick the tomatoes, but expect that in time, they go to their corners.

But what happens if they stay?

Citizenship laws here do not guarantee a Swiss passport for the children of immigrants and a good-sized constituency here - Swiss for all intents and purposes - isn't actually Swiss.

And they're not called immigrants. They're called foreigners. This is interesting and not necessarily an issue of semantics. Suppose we expect these people - the Tamils, Eastern Europeans and others - to integrate, are we holding ourselves back when the first point at which we categorise them - our vocabulary - is exclusionary?

In any case, Switzerland will vote on February 8 on whether to extend free movement rights to new EU members Romania and Bulgaria. Of course, there is a campaign to keep them out (most, as I learned on a reportage to Romania last week, don't actually want to come) but if the Swiss reject the free movement extension, there will be ramifications for our labour agreements with the rest of the European Union.

A colleague at swissinfo, Rodrigo Carrizo Cout, recently wrote from Geneva and Lausanne on the plight of the illegal immigrants, many of whom work long hours for low wages.

The report is here.

Posted by Justin at 21:55 Tagged with: , , , , ,

Dog makes blog

Europe, Money, News, Travel No Responses »
Jan 152009

 

Saint Bernard

I am couch surfing in Romania with a couple named Frank and Tia. Too bad I have to leave them tomorrow. They're quite interesting. And they also have a Saint Bernard who loves me. It must be some kind of a Swiss thing.

I arrived from Bern via Munich late last night and had some trouble holding my eyes open. The hotel was supposed to send a shuttle but it never came, so I got into a lame negotiating session with one of the many cab drivers waiting to take foreigners for a ride. I knew I got hosed when, after we agreed to a fee, he threw his hands in the air like a Pentecostal and felicitously to his buddies exclaimed, "I got one!"

His taxi was "official", he said. It was yellow and appeared to have been hand-painted, which in the case of ubiquitous Dacia - his model was more than a decade old - is not a good thing.

"Don't wear a seat belt. If I rob you, you won't be able to get out quickly."

He laughed and I shoved a microphone in his face and told him that since he was ripping me off he could start talking. 

The man-in-the-cab interview actually went quite well and after he dropped me at the hotel, a couple of kilometres from the airport (he insisted the fare was so high because he would have to drive all the way down the highway and back), we stood in the freezing drizzle for around 15 minutes chatting about European integration and how it related to Switzerland.

He admitted he wasn't so engaged on the debate within Switzerland on whether Bulagrians or Romanians should be allowed free movement but said that for his type of people - uneducated - it didn't seem to be too attractive an option, or at least not like in other places. In Italy, one "can do some fucking construction or wash an old woman".

Couldn't have said it better.

Posted by Justin at 12:23

Joe goes to war, Porsche kills (hedge funds, with investment strategy)

Money, News No Responses »
Jan 132009

Today we learn that Joe the War Correspondent wants to ban the media and got into an argument with an Israeli journalist but the more interesting tidbit comes from  Ivan Krstić, who writes about Porsche earning a load of money by quietly purchasing VW shares and then short squeezing hedge funds.

On paper, Porsche made between €30-40 billion in the affair. Once all is said and done, the actual profit is closer to some €6-12 billion. To put those numbers in perspective, Porsche’s revenue for the whole year of 2006 was a bit over €7 billion.

Posted by Justin at 01:17
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