Baino, Lebanon - The Middle East may be famous for its black gold but on its western boundary not far from the Mediterranean Sea, the oil is flavourful and goes well with crispy bread.

Just beyond the Chuoar Valley waves of stone and scrub meander all the way to the horizon and the afternoon sun glistens through the olive groves of Youssef Fares and his family.

Lebanon, a small strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and Syria, was once known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. Since it signed a free trade agreement with Lebanon several years ago, Switzerland is now helping farmers like Fares put the organic label on their bottles.

Back in November I took a spur of the moment trip to Lebanon. I arrived on a Saturday and it was cold and rainy: an inauspicious start to what would become one of my most memorable trips.

I ended up travelling solo up the coast and into the Bekaa Valley, visiting ruins and castles before jumping for a day to Damascus.

One of the highlights was a trip north with Youssef, flatmate of Charbel, my Couch Surfing host. Youssef is a fifth-generation olive grower and produces the most delicious organic olive oil.

I ended up with three litres but better yet, a story. It's here.

Cyclones are nothing new to southern Bangladesh but villagers say that storms are coming more frequently and with increasing intensity. Switzerland's development agency has pioneered a program that provides villagers with cash grants to invest in business opportunities.

Lives have changed over the past couple decades here, along with the weather. Cyclones are breaking the embankments meant to protect villages and protect the rice paddies from salt water. Aila washed away shrimp and fish farms, and the increase in the water's saline content means that rice has become more difficult to grow.

In June 2006, I visited a school in Lunsar, Sierra Leone. It was my first trip upcountry having arrived at the beginning of the month and we were there to do some inspections of schools where children had received grants for uniforms. I would later find out more about the importance of school uniforms within Sierra Leone culture (more on that another day).

One of the stops was a Catholic school and since we were guests, it of course meant we would be treated to a song. One of the teachers, Sister Frances, asked her class of third-graders who wanted to start with the song. No hands went up. She surveyed the room, picked out the least shy student, pointed at her and exclaimed: "This one is ready to sing!"

I returned with a few photos and video, material for what turned out to be my first music project in the country. I was able to rip the audio from the video after I returned to Freetown. Using a small laptop, a copy of Cakewalk's Sonar DAW, the Atmosphere soft synth, some drum loops and an evening hunched over a pretty basic M-Audio MIDI controller, I remixed it. It's here.

01 This One is Ready to Sing

Fast forward. CelTel, the mobile phone company that sponsored everything, has been bought by Zain, a Middle Eastern company that sponsors everything.

But speaking of beauty, have a look at Aschobi Designs. It's a company started a couple of years ago by a young Sierra Leonean designer, who after having studied at Parsons Paris, set up shop in the heart of Freetown. There's also a Facebook page.

Put your arms together for Miss University
August 1st, 2006

Embrace. Beauty.

CelTel seems to sponsor everything around here. Beach bars are painted in the red and yellow colours and small booths selling phone cards dot the roadsides. So it was no surprise that Miss University 2006, ostensibly one of the most happening events in Freetown, would be sponsored by Africa’s leading mobile service provider.

Embrace. Beauty. CelTel’s entire marketing campaign is based around grammatically incorrect sentences and phraseology; and while I do not understand the rationale, I’m sure it is intentional. Miss Universe 2006 was the event we had been looking forward to since we saw the banners over a month ago. We even skipped an overnight trip to River No. 2 to make sure we could be in attendance.

The show was advertised to start at 9:00 in the evening, and we arrived at 9:30. Although Sierra Leone is four hours ahead of Eastern time, they were running on Standard African Time, which is anywhere from one to two hours behind schedule. Nobody seemed to care, and members of the large crowd appeared to be having a good time waiting in their seats, some munching on small pieces of meat on a stick.

Entrance cost 20,000 Leones, meaning many of those in attendance had probably saved up for quite a long time to attend. Twenty thousand Leones is around eight dollars.

It wasn’t exactly a classy affair.

This writer is playing a difficult game balancing accurate reporting with not being patently offensive to his host country. The dress for many consisted of relatively short bottoms accompanied by tops that reciprocated in coverage and lack of taste. One young lady donned a top with strategically-placed rips meant to tempt, tease, and entice but not give away the secret; except it shifted. Surprise! Everybody can see your nipple.

There were two fights.

Things got underway at 10:45 with several “artists” performing musical acts. And by artists, I mean what appeared to be regular people. And by musical acts, I mean lip-syncing and really bad dancing. Crowd response was lukewarm and my brow was furrowed.

Music was followed by the hosts, and the hosts carried scripts in their hands. I was reminded of something we did back in primary school called reader’s theatre. It was when we hastily put together a script of a quality which reflected our grade level and traveled to different classrooms reading and making up actions. I can’t say this was much better. Coordination between backstage and talent was lacking.

The show got underway. Each young woman was introduced to the crowd. More than one was named Fatmata, several were 5’6”, and a few enjoyed playing basketball. All were dressed in identical jean miniskirts and red CelTel t-shirts tied at the bottom to reveal as much midsection as possible. Each strutted out, posed, and shook her way down the catwalk, then back towards the stage to take her place among the others.

The host then asked us to “put our arms together for Miss University”. We decided to clap instead. Then we left to sit over some Sierra Leonean beer in a beach bar, which by that point, seemed to be the more sophisticated option.

Before asking us to put our arms together (which I still haven’t figured out yet), the host had asked us to wait patiently for things to get underway and the excitement to materialize. And before that, we heard that tonight, we would be witnessing real Sierra Leonean beauty.

Right… I saw many things that evening, but I’m not sure I saw beauty. I saw vanity, exhibitionism, and overall trashiness, but I did not see beauty. I saw women and girls who conducted themselves as though the road to a man’s heart runs directly through his pants (and men who would believe it), but I did not see beauty.

I saw eight young women making their first impressions to the world dressed in identical out-of-date denim miniskirts, emblazoned with a logo.

Embrace. Beauty.

I saw over a thousand people, many of whom probably paid more than a day’s wage to witness the Western phenomenon of chauvinism and vanity mixed together in a cheap soup.

Embrace. Beauty.

I thought about some of the people in a polio community I visited the other day. I thought about their sheet metal walls and their tarp roofs, and of their ragged clothing, their gnarled hands, and of the simple tools they use to construct the five dollar stoves they make from scrap metal.

Embrace. Beauty.

There is no shortage of beauty in this country, but not here, not this night. Rather, it is nestled in the vernacular, buried in the everyday, and typically obscured by a flaking veneer of poverty and drudgery. It lives in the candid moments when nobody pays attention; on the streets and in the fields, and in the daily struggle to survive. But like light through a pinhole, it is a beacon- visible to those who seek it, it summons us to compassion and illuminates our humanity.

Damascus nevertheless has a beautiful old souk and some of the friendliest people I've come across. More pictures here.

Then two days in Dhaka, a short flight to Sunmanganj, in northern Bangladesh, three nights there and back to Dhaka. Waiting for a flight to Jessore, which will be my gateway to the magnificent Sundarbans, an enormous mangrove forest by the sea.

On Tuesday, it's back to Dhaka and the next day, back to Zurich via Bahrain and London.

It's the cool season here and the fields in northern Bangladesh are no longer flooded. In a couple of months, the monsoon's waters will have given way to endless stretches of brilliant green and much of the country's vast rural population will be harvesting their crops - then waiting for monsoon.

Bangladesh is one of the  countries most often mentioned as being vulnerable to shifts in climate. A one-metre rise in sea level threatens to wash away one-third of the population in the Sundarbans. But according to just about everybody, the people here have little leverage at the global climate negotiating table.

They're still flying about 80 people to Copenhagen and many senior climate bureaucrats have Copenhagen on their minds. But apart from making a moral case for rich countries and the dirty developing countries to cut their emissions, there's not much leverage.

Bangladesh is responsible for a very small percentage of the pollution that is affecting its climate.

And for some people I spoke with in the north of the country, changing weather patterns may not be so bad at all.

In Sunamganj, many are quite happy that there's a little less rain during monsoon and that the dry season lasts a little longer: more time to grow crops.

But for the most part, any evidence of climate change is more anecdotal than scientific. A senior UNDP official told me a few days ago that they're relying on the UN models. Let's hope (or perhaps not) they're right.

My first impression (and an opinion shared my everybody I've spoken with) is that climate change is not the most significant development challenge the people here are facing. At least in certain parts hugging the Indian border, they're more concerned about fortifying their raised villages and ensuring waves don't enter their houses and wash away their children.

They're building floating vegetable gardens, diversifying their crops and they spend roughly one-third their annual income raising the dirt their villages are built upon.

I'll probably have some more thoughts in the next week or so as I work on the three stories I have planned. Pictures to be uploaded too.

Thank you Switzerland for your vacation time policies.

It's been a little while since I updated the website. The plan, as assuredly mentioned somewhere was to provide some regular updates on life in Switzerland interspersed with vintage Sierra Leone posts. I have unfortunately not gotten to far on that front.

The good news is that I'm in an interesting place again. Not that Switzerland's not interesting but perhaps a little less novel than two years ago.

Several weeks ago, I thought I'd be somewhere near Dubai at this time on a stopover en route to Bangladesh for a reportage on climate change and development. I had the week booked off and plans to spend a week and a bit after that in Canada.

Then we found out it takes three weeks to get a journalist visa for Bangladesh, so Dhaka and some of the outlaying areas got the kibosh, at least a couple of weeks. That left me with a week off and some ideas for adventure.

In Switzerland, they actually pay overtime or compensate for it, so at the beginning of October I found myself in the rather fortunate situation of having roughly seven weeks of holidays.

I booked my flight to Beirut on Friday evening and was on a train for Geneva airport 12 hours later.

I overpaid for my cab from the airport, meaning I've overpaid for cab rides in Geneva, New York, Freetown, Monrovia, Kisumu Bern, Bucharest and now Beirut.

The plan is to spend a few days in the city and perhaps get on to Damascus if possible. Maybe some hiking but nothing is certain. It's scheduled to rain for the next couple of days, at least in the evenings.

I realise I remember little from university Arabic. I can say "American coffee" but of course I don't want that. Lebanese coffee's better.

Viewed in light of safety and reliability standards in the developed world (especially Switzerland), riding this whirlybird was unadulterated stupidity. But a necessity. One year later, the day before I would leave Sierra Leone, one of the helicopters caught fire on its approach to Lungi airport. Two of its three pilots bailed. They hit tarmac and died. The third pilot survived. The sport delegation from neighbouring Togo, in town for a football match, was consumed by flames.

I've decided that I will want to re-upload all my movies to YouTube in HD. I had fortunately brought along one of the first pro-sumer HD cams that existed at the time. Even if it were possible at the time, uploading HD would have been impossible given the reliability of internet in Sierra Leone.

Day 1
June 7th, 2006

We arrived last night in Freetown ninety minutes late. Typical. The international airport here is quite undeveloped, and there are a few small planes kicking around, and various helicopters in disrepair. There are few lights from the air, and almost none on the ground.

Getting off the plane, I felt the warm, air cling to my skin like some kind of blanket I would have been happier without. This is the cold season. The wait to get through customs was thirty minutes or so, and there was a group of Canadian teenagers there on a 3-week trip with an international organization.

Our flight was the only one that arrived that evening, and the 200-or-so people there waited for one of 6 customs officers to allow us into the country. Some people had a long and difficult time, but I passed through in less than a minute, without any problems. Our baggage came in on one of two carousels. I hadn’t locked my bags and was afraid it might have been torn open, but it arrived unharmed. Even my piano was in decent shape.

I was spared the normal customs routine of having everything ripped open and eyed by the inspectors.

Apparently they ask you if they can have some of your stuff. I’m not sure what the right answer would be. We waited in a terminal that really looked like an oversized barn for our helicopter. Our ticket was a wooden tag. The helicopter looked equally primitive. It was a Ukrainian beast. There were three crew members and some of the windows were open. It was loud, but at least there was a breeze.

The trip to the city was surprisingly long and as dark as expected. We flew low enough so that if the engines quit there would be no autorotation, but high enough that we’d die if the bad boy decided to stop flying. Luckily turbine engines are reliable and the Soviets built better helicopters than cars.

Freetown is dark at night. A few people have electricity and some people make fires. We arrived at the gate of the house. Our security guards come from Group 4. Talk about globalization. The house is relatively nice and spacious. There is a “secure” room in case of armed robbery, but I am told the risk is significantly lower than a few years ago. A couple years ago, they had to evacuate… the country.

This is an interesting place.

Cosmos the reindeer had had enough of dragging tourists around ski slopes in Melchsee Frutt, central Switzerland, and made a run for it just before Christmas. Cosmos is one of a herd of nine reindeers kept for breeding and trekking. The owner has had to resort to ingenious tactics to try to woo the escapee back into the fold.

Listen here