Bush League: Aug 7, 07 :: 08. 7.07
A few more frames from the tapes.
Bush League: Aug 10, 07 :: 08. 9.07
Today's batch.
Finally, the last frame! Set-ups for translation are done.
Bush League: Aug 17, 07 :: 08.17.07
When I was in Malawi last winter, I read Jeffery Sach's book The End of Poverty. The book presents an economic plan to eliminate extreme poverty and also outlines how the rest of us got on the road to material wealth to begin with. Most interesting to me was the section on England's industrial revolution and the conditions that fostered it. England had multiple gifts: arable land, a temperate climate, navigable river routes throughout the entire island, ports and sea route access, and they figured out how to capture the power of rivers and coal to drive factories. In essence, every individual economy since has needed its own version of the industrial revolution to transcend the economic limits of poverty. The companions to industrialization have been urbanization, women's suffrage (over generations) and eventually a certain level of collective wealth. I doubt there's ever been an example of industrialization that doesn't included horrendous abuses of labor, the environment, and natural resources, but that seems to be the main model for economic development thus far. So how is Malawi going to industrialize?
Malawi is one of many landlocked countries in Africa. Even with cheap labor costs, what manufacturer would move operations to a place that it can't ship from? Likewise, it has poor infrastructure, a rural population and rugged geography. Industrialization seems highly unlikely unless it's based on the removal of some unknown and untapped natural resources. But what is eminent in the Hewe Valley where I shot Bush League is the Communications Revolution. Internet and mobile phones...in the bush!
Imagine a subsistence farmer who lives in a mud brick house with a grass roof, no electricity, no running water, who one day, gets a 3G enabled mobile phone that's charged off a small portable solar panel. How does his life change? A little handset that can connect to websites, send text and make calls. Would he even use it? Could it really happen anyway? Could he afford to use it? If you think I'm nuts for wondering aloud, the picture above is of the nearest mobile phone towers to the Hewe valley where I stayed in North West Malawi. Malawi's network is already well established in the cities and even remote areas like Hewe are bound to get coverage eventually.
The first time I went to Malawi, a lot of the things I'd seen and heard in popular media were confirmed. As we crested the hills above Hewe I saw the vast green plane of the valley floor. Thin blue smoke trails marked tiny huddled villages that were otherwise lost in the grass. It was a vision from Hemingway's Africa; green hills and lions! In the distance was the marsh, full of hippos and lurking poachers. Above us was the plateau, full of zebras and crowned with bursting thunder heads. The valley floor was all National Geographic; smiling women in bright clothes, muscular men bent under tobacco bails and raw meat hanging from tree branches. Then there's CNN's Africa; I saw coffin shops everywhere I went, I met people with HIV and malaria, I saw little kids draped in ragged old T-shirts eating termites off the ground. I met men who were convinced cobras could fly and who believed local witches flew in baskets at night. My first visit was thirty days and I summed it up in my own mind with two words: vivid and tragic.
By the second visit I'd already gotten the low down on HIV, polygamy and malaria. What I didn't know anything about was the economy which is based almost exclusively on maize and tobacco farming. I learned that the best loan a farmer could get in Hewe, a government farm loan, is at 32% annual interest and comes to term after 12 months. That was the PRIME rate for someone with established history and that's way down from years past! These are people living on a dollar a day! I also learned that, at least in the Hewe valley, the farmers had no way to find out what the market price was for their product without a three to five hour ride on a truck. They were at the mercy of the buyers and bankers, with no recourse if they got ripped off. No wonder there was little growth. It was still vivid and tragic, but it was also became understandable and therefore hopeful.
So the farmer gets up in the morning and steps outside where he pulls a mobile device from his pocket. In less than five minutes he can do three things he could never do before. He can check the weather forecast. He can check market prices. He can communicate over a long distance to coordinate with other farmers. In Hewe, and in many other parts of Africa I believe this and much more will happen and relatively soon.
As I write this, the very well publicized $100.00 laptop (One Laptop per Child/Nicholas Negroponte) effort is about to come to fruition. It's a non profit educational effort to design and deliver an inexpensive laptop with open source software custom build for students in the developing world. I hope that someone sees a similar opportunity with mobile telephony. The people who come up with the $20.00 mobile phone, designed for the developing world, will change the world and make a lot of money doing it. Like the $100.00 laptop project, it needn't be strictly contextualized as a tech/comm project, it could also be approached as an agricultural development project, or an educational project, or a health project and so on. The handset needs to be rugged, easily powered by either a small solar panel or a hand crank and have a display that can be viewed in full daylight. So, do I think that mobile phones are going to catalyze enough economic growth and prosperity in Malawi to counter balance poverty, HIV, gender issues and corruption? No.
What it can certainly do is increase quality of life and efficiency. To truly achieve its potential it will take smartly designed support and service, an appropriate regulatory policy and most importantly, all of it has to be shaped very carefully to suit specific social/local needs and that will take R&D for any western participants. Dropping carbon copies of western services won't work. Chatwa the farmer doesn't need stock reports, GPS to track his friends locations or MP3 music downloads yet. Craig's List for Malawi could include funeral announcements, wedding announcements and countless other specifics. Malawians will determine what they need, but the providers need to be listening. Those that do will be among the first to tap an enormous virgin base for future business. In Hewe, the traditional language is Chitumbuka, the second language is English and I don't see why Linux can't be the third.
Drinking the TIgris :: 08.24.07
I started labeling all my posts from Baghdad 'Profiteer' partly out of guilt for coming over here to make money and partly because I liked the edge on the word. Now that I've been here a bit and all the guilt has been polished off by 84 hour work weeks, I've decided I'm not really a profiteer after all. So all the new posts from Baghdad will be labeled 'Drinking the Tigris'. The river has long been one of the main travel routes through the region and since I'm definitely on a journey of sorts...
I finished setting up the translations two weeks ago and next week will start back at the beginning to take notes on the footage for the paper edit. In the meantime I've been reading a couple books to learn more about Iraq. The books were recommended by the instructors at the Foreign Service Institute in D.C. Here are a couple quotes that I found interesting.
From Understanding Iraq by William R. Polk:"The Arabic looking word Iraq (Arabic: al-Iraq) actually comes from the Persian eragh, which means simply 'the lowlands'."
From Understanding Arabs by Margaret Nydell:
"The God Muslims worship is the same God Jews and Christians worship (Allah is simply the Arabic word for God; Arab Christians pray to Allah)."
Who knew. This gives me more ammunition to yell at the TV with. Watch your ass Lou Dobbs.
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