I was child laborer. Throughout my youth I worked in the creation of different ceramics pieces that were produced in my hometown of the rural Northern California foothills. While not child slave labor, I was paid very little if at all. It may shock you to hear this, after all this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in such a civilized country as the United States, but it does and it has.
Of course, in making that statement, it needs to be qualified with the fact that I was helping my parents' business out and it was largely by grumbling choice. My situation was different than that of children who are forced in to garment or agrarian work against their will and exploited. But, it needs to be noted that in the narrow scope of how journalists are defining "child labor" that they are accusing my parents (as well as countless others) of human rights abuses when it couldn't be further from the truth.
Remember my old chair in Abengourou, Cote d'Ivoire? It was horrible and needed replacement. Through a friend of a friend, I found Babacar. He was a nice 19 year-old fellow that was a carpenter. That's all he did for a living was make furniture and he'd been doing it since he was 12, having started as an apprentice which was yes, child labor. He had little choice though as both his parents had died and he had no relatives to take him in. Sure, he should have been going to school, but he was left supporting himself and so he learned a trade that allow him to do just that.
Now, you can view Babacar's story from two angles. The first is that of any article you find when searching "ivory coast child slave labor". The other is the angle of context wherein you see the choices that he had and how he had to survive in his environment. Don't get me wrong, there are indeed child laborers and even those who are slaves in Africa... as well as Asia, the Americas, and Europe. They're an easy group to exploit and so the truly evil of the world do so.
It's just that when it comes to Africa, journalists drop in, search far and wide to come up with their example of child labor in say, cocoa production, then they take off and write their sensationalist article. In reality, they should be looking at the surroundings and understand how and why children end up working at an early age which is often to help out their entire family to make a living and eat. Context is crucial in this understanding and it's oft ignored all in the name of a headline.
As for Babacar, he's not getting rich working as a carpenter, but he supports himself. He isn't a victim, although a North American or European journalist might choose to show those in the same situation he was in seven years ago to be that of an exploited child. A lot of it depends on how lucky one is to tell their own story, such as in my case where you can see that I was just a kid helping out my parents and not some child trafficked to produce artwork. Keep this in mind and look to the periphery when reading about "child labor" and especially "child slave labor" in Africa.
The vast majority of anyone reading this has either tried out or downright downloaded torrent files to get music or movies. Hell, it's one of the only ways to get your hands on a lot of things in Africa as actually buying CDs or going to movie theaters can be pretty difficult in many parts of the continent. Then of course there is the free factor which is appealing to pretty much every cross-section of society.
Naturally, there comes a time when you realize though that when it comes to music, you'll listen to a good chunk of an album and think, "Man, this isn't some O-zone, Dragostea tin dei one-hit wonder garbage, this is a real album!" Such was the case with Just-a-Band.
This Kenyan trio has done what few are doing these days in that they've produced an entire album of worthy songs. They're also known for having started the Makmende meme that ran the internetz for awhile.
But seriously, I'm of the opinion that some of the only good music (and consequently albums) are coming out of Africa these days. While the Zouglou style of pop causes me convulsions due to everyone in a group playing the melody and the beat the exact freakin' same for every song, there are the groups and artists like Just-a-Band, Nneka, and K'naan making some very, very nice recordings that I'm happy to pay for. I recognize that there was some craft that went in to them and I feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
So, here's to Just-a-Band and what I've started deeming, "purchase worthy". A new dawn has arrived for me in the realm of digital music.
"Combien à l'Hôtel Ibis?" (How much to the Ibis Hotel?) "Où?" (Where?) the taxi driver at Abidjan airport answered back. "L'Hôtel Ibis en Plateau." (The Ibis Hotel in the Plateau district.) Despite clarification of the neighborhood, there was still a dull, thudding look on this taxi driver's face. He said 5,000CFA ($10 USD), which was a ripoff, but how it goes when coming from the airport in Abidjan.
As we got on the road, it became extremely obvious that he had no idea where this hotel was despite it existing in the rather large Plateau district and it was incredibly annoying that once we got across the lagoon, to have him asking every third person where the hotel was despite my giving him directions. Of course, no one else knew where it was, even when a mere three blocks from it. And let me emphasize that this is well-known hotel in Abidjan in addition to the fact that this taxi driver was picking up a foreigner at the airport and should already know every damned hotel in Abidjan.
One week prior to returning to Côte d'Ivoire and the joys of Ivorian taxis, I was chatting with the gang at the iHub. We got to talking about how impossible it is to find places in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people are hell-bent to propagate the myth that despite the vacuous absence of proper street numbers or street name signs, people in Africa just "know" where they're going (it's a "spoken map" I suppose). Every African I've ever met from East, West, Central, and South Africa decries this as bullshit. It really is impossible for anyone to find anything and is a painful process of lengthy explanations that usually involve making multiple turns at pharmacies and ever-changing landmarks (like a guy selling mobile credit.)
I said to this group that what someone should do is to start up a GPS web-based system so that people could spit out their GPS coordinates and use those as an address instead of actual street addresses. I laughingly said that it could be called "mapfrica", but that that name was probably already taken. I was surprised to find that it wasn't and so I registered the .com and .org.
Time has progressed as it does and I've realized that I'm never going to get around to creating the initial version of this site. Basically, what I wanted to do was to embed a Google or OpenStreet Map mashup. Someone could then zoom in, plop down a pin on what was their house, or business, or general piece of knowledge (like if they wanted to list a park or landmark) and then take those coordinates to give out to people. Additionally, they could have the option of submitting the address information in to an open database that anyone could query to get the locations of everything in a town.
Whatever the case, as you can see, there are a lot of details in this, but given the fact there are more and more phones with GPS ability and location-based services are really the way of the future, I can't see how this isn't one big win for everyone as long as the same standards are being used. To that end, anyone who feels like taking this on, I'm more than happy to point either of the domains I've got in your direction if you come up with a solid proof of concept, help out with hosting if the idea really takes off. All I know is that I don't want to fumble my way around African cities anymore, guided by the lights of pharmacies and mobile phone stores when a vastly superior system is floating above all our heads in a geosynchronous orbit.
Best wishes from 37.788370,-122.415200
By now, the news that Steve Jobs has vehemently renounced Flash is not any kind of news. While I find it annoying that people will take the word of one person as gospel, it's really the case that it wasn't Jobs alone speaking at Flash's funeral. In web development circles, we've hated the technology for years.
As an accent, widget or some other non-critical piece of a website, Flash is fine. For video, it's even better. But, for a site to be completely built in Flash is inane. First there is the issue with Google in theory not being able to index it. Then there is also the issue that unless designed incredibly well, Flash site take a long time to load. In low bandwidth situations, they often never load.
Above and beyond serving information to the world, there is also the business side of things. I just finished launching a redesign of a site for a client who had had a previous site that was not even completely Flash, but just Flash heavy. Once that previous site had launched, online sales dropped by a whopping 50%. That's scary and it's the reason that the new site has not single lick of Flash in it, except for a flickr embed widget, which for some reason isn't compatible with IE8 or Opera and that's seriously weird.
So, like I said, while Jobs wasn't saying anything that any of us hadn't said before, he said it and acted in such a way that it woke up a great many people we geeks hadn't reached. Now for myself and everyone else I know in web development people tell us that they have no interest in supporting IE6 and are happy having no Flash. Ah the difference a keynote can make.
When driving down from Abengourou, there is this one spire that sticks up and basically serves as my indicator of where to turn in Abidjan to go down to Plateau. For those who haven't had the thrill of driving in the Art Nouveau highway offramp designs of Côte d'Ivoire, let me tell you that when you see something like this spire, you remember it. If you don't, you're going to end up in Ghana before you can turn around and come back.
Anyways, for all my time in the country, I never actually managed to get up to this spire which is the top of a Catholic church. So, on my last day in the country, I set out to go visit it. This was definitely an interesting trek to set out on because while I'm sure there are easier ways to get to this church, I don't think that any of them don't involve driving the opposite directions at various point before you finally get there. Suffice to say, I'm glad that I went. While the exterior is a bit funked up from the climate, it's actually an extremely nice church with a design like no other I've seen and that I appreciated a great deal. If you're there, I'd recommend checking it out to show that yes, places of Christian worship don't have to look like the European church layout.
But, in the shot below that shows the spire, I realized that it sums up Abidjan quite well with the church looming above, lush greenery, laundry drying on said greenery (common in this district), the twisty roads, an old Mercedes on said roads, mobile network advertisements, skin lightening cream advertisements, and some guy in the middle of the shot because there's always some guy sitting in some random place. About the only thing missing would be the lagoon, which was actually a bit off the the right. Funny how one shot can show so much. A tip of my hat to Elia for getting it.
I've unfortunately had to leave a Côte d'Ivoire a bit earlier than I had planned. After nearly six months in the country (which went by insanely fast despite délestage) you would have thought that most everything that needing doing and seeing was covered to some degree. But, it's amazing how when once back to your home country, you realized how much was missed.
For obvious starters, BarCamp Africa did not come about. This was due to many factors which will someday be part of a larger treatise to put on that site, but suffice to say, it was an ambitious project that fell prey to many limitations. The list is large, but the biggest one deals with the cost and time of travel in Africa. Highway Africa is one of the few pan-African, multilingual events that happens each year and knowing what goes in to making an event like that happen, I have to say that I am in awe. I hope that someday, the BarCamp Africa will actually happen somewhere in Africa and be a smashing success though.
I am happy to have paid one last visit to Maison de la Lagune although it's disheartening to see how it is spiraling out of control with these large, obnoxious groups including the ever idiotic French Licorne troops. I'm sure the owner is tired of the constant seven day a week schedule as well. But on the issue of travel, it's unfortunate that I never got the chance to take one of the water taxis across the lagoon. Even the most hardened and acerbic of staff at ONUCI will attest to how nice that boat ride is... if done outside of commute hours. It was a lot of fun to have visited Treichville one day though as that is a fantastic neighborhood. Although on the same token, I will never set foot in Koumassi again, even if at the wrong end of a gun. Lord I hate that neighborhood.
But probably the most frustrating thing I missed was not getting out to San Pedro. While visiting a town named the same as one near Los Angeles had mere entertainment value, it was more the fact that I've been to the North, South, East, and center of Côte d'Ivoire, but I never made it to the West. I suppose there is always a next time someday.
But more than anything, despite the malaria, heat rash, lack of power, lack of water, and any number of other troublesome problems, I've finally understood why it is that people miss Africa so much after having lived there for some time. I can't tell you why this is and it's not that I won't tell you because I want to be an ass, but there is an appeal to it that goes above and beyond simple comparisons. Taken singularly, there are a great many things to hate on their own, but taken as a whole and once away from it, there is something that seems to always beckon from the continent where we humans all came from in the beginning. I suppose that no matter what our beliefs, we know this and we work so hard to act as if we don't.
But best of luck in the World Cup, Côte d'Ivoire. And best of luck with Gbagbo and Soro. You will need it and then some...
On the 9th day of July, 2006, the final game of the World Cup was being played. In France vs. Italy, it was Italy that was ultimately victorious mainly due to Zidane's idiotic headbutt in the 110th minute.
In that same month, a small little website that had been previously been used internally by the staff at odeo.com was made public and thus, Twitter was born--after the World Cup. Quite a bit has changed in these last four years with Twitter having grown from a couple of people trading quick notes back and forth to a massive ecosystem of applications that claims 190 millions users. But, how will this massive user base effect the World Cup outside of maybe a couple of Trending topics?
I have no idea as to Twitter's user base in South Africa. While there is the new short URL service, mzan.si (which really is the kind of thing for Twitter), there is no mobile shortcode for South African mobile users and thus no mobile access. Under the Geo Trending settings, there also isn't South Africa as an option. Naturally, it's true that both of these items could change before Friday's kickoff, but you'd think they'd already be there to grow interest. So it seems that currently those on Twitter from SA are either using the web version or are visitors texting back home while roaming.
Twitter is based in San Francisco. In the past this has caused a number of problems when a large burst of users outside of UTC-8 got fired up on the service. South Africa is currently in UTC+1 and most games will be happening in what is the middle of the night for the American West Coast. While FailWhales are only sporadic creatures these days, how will monitoring of the system work during the time when most anyone at the World Cup (or watching the games live) would tweet it? I know I'd hate to be a sysadmin for the next month and a half.
While users in the US have taken to tweeting every sniffle, sports are a slightly different beast. Television has its obvious appeal and listening to games on the radio can be fun because there's personality, but ironically I doubt that 140 characters can actually produce any real character. I'm already prepared for GOOOOOOAL! spelled out to the entire length of the text field, but really, will anyone care?
I know I won't give a damn about viewing Twitter to see what's happening at the matches. I want to actually watch them. This is important and it's probably a huge part of the reason why the power cuts have suddenly dried up in Côte d'Ivoire because if you take away the ability to watch soccer, there will be blood. But, if you take away Twitter in the middle of the World Cup will there be a sound? Yeah, the sound of "GOOOOOOOAL!"
So here it is, possibly the largest test of Twitter on an international level to date. It will go a long way to showing how stable the platform is and if someday it could be used by first responders in an emergency. Then again, maybe no one at the World Cup will give a damn about tweeting and be much happier drinking and enjoying the country.
I have yet to work out the math on it just yet, but I've found that there is some kind of correlation between the amount of coding in a location and the amount of pizza present. I mean, say what you want about fine French (or any other) cuisine, when it comes down to it, pizza has become our base food of choice in the world, especially for coders and especially especially for expats... It's probably one of the reasons that so much code is generated in San Francisco, although it would fail to explain why there isn't as much in New York or Chicago. Like I said, the math isn't quite there on this yet, but it is a fact that Debonairs does exist across the street from the iHub. Coincidence? Possibly, but definitely a delicious coincidence nonetheless even though Debonairs is the African equivalent of the US's Pizza Hut.
This brings us to the question of pizza in Abidjan. It's lacking; a lot. In turn, I think it's part of the reason why the technology scene hasn't developed so much (yeah, okay a recent civil war doesn't help either.) Most people I know swear by a place called Sorrento's which is down in Zone Quatre, although I find that they enjoy the atmosphere a great deal more than the actual quality of the pizza as I was not terribly impressed on my one visit there.
For my money, this place which is essentially a slightly enclosed maquis owned by a Lebanese fellow named Elio called Copa d'Elio has the best pizza in Abidjan. The best pizza in Côte d'Ivoire was actually in Yamoussoukro at a place called Brennus, but that's a bit far to run for a good pie. Needless to say, anyone looking to establish some kind of innovation/coding/incubation hub in Abidjan should look around this spot here, just off Rue du Canal and next door to the cool-looking, yet abysmal Ché Café in Zone Quatre. I would be curious to see if my pizza = code theory plays out.
A page dedicated to pulling together all the World Cup links on Maneno as well as elsewhere. A handy reference for those looking in to what's happening with the Cup once it's starts up next week.
At some point, I really need start using a tag whenever the Balkans and Africa have some kind of crossover. It happens rarely, but in the case of this add-it-to-the-pile URL shortener mzan.si (a popular word to call South Africa) it just so happens that they made use of the Slovenian country code domain for the .si portion. I guess Balkrica is about as decent a name as I can think of for these odd instances because really, they're always odd.
Finally, an article saying a lot of the same things that I try to keep driving home about all the praise constantly heaped on to the African mobile market. It's a good read and it brings up points that I hadn't even thought about yet.
You don't hear too much about it due to Northern neighbor, Kenya grabbing gobbling up all the press for their connectivity. But, rest assured, Tanzania, like Uganda and other countries in the east is rapidly getting connected and changing the face of broadband in Africa.
Africa is entirely peopled by wild animals, or so the travel guides would have you believe seeing as how any guide to Africa always has a lion or cheetah or something else with four legs on the cover. Of course, if one were to follow this rational, then in Paris only exists the Eiffel Tower. I guess books are just meant to be marketed and judged by their covers.
But getting around that whole "book thing", Offbeat Guides is doing something interesting in that they custom make guides for you on order. It's an interesting concept given how electronic all the information for travelers is these days. Curious as to how it worked, I shelled out $10 USD to get the guide for Nairobi in PDF format, although you can also order a printed version if you really want to, but it takes longer and costs a lot more.
Once compiled, I downloaded the guide and after perusing it, I have to say that it's a lump of rancid ugali. Essentially it consists of all the information from the Wikipedia article as well as the Wikitravel article. Tossed in are a couple of references to Wikipedia articles on two of the large parks as well as some culled data from weather websites and a screenshot of Google Maps.
For $10, I have to say that this is pretty weak, especially considering that Nairobi is a major tourist destination and you can buy Lonely Planet's electronic guide for $4.62. Of course you can also just open up the various wiki pages and save them to your computer locally to avoid spending anything.
I suppose that Offbeat's attitude towards Africa is to be expected to some extent given that they're based in San Francisco and well... I was going to say that it's not Paris, but again, it's a major destination and for $26 you can get a whole, proper paper guide from Rough Guides just to name one of many who publish on Kenya. I'm actually curious as to the whole legality of this since their citation page at the back looks like this:
Wikipedia, Nairobi — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NairobiWikitravel, Nairobi — http://wikitravel.org/en/Nairobi
Wikipedia, Nairobi National Park — http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Nairobi_National_Park
Wikipedia, Lake naivasha — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Lake_naivasha
Eventful — http://eventful.com
Zvents — http://zvents.com
Upcoming — http://upcoming.yahoo.com
Accuweather — http://www.accuweather.com/
Yahoo Finance — http://fnance.yahoo.com
Google Maps — http://maps.google.com
Yelp — http://yelp.com
They're not specifically citing what text and photos come from where as is mandated by Creative Commons. Also, they are trying to put out the guide under a 1.0 agreement when the source material came from a 3.0 page. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm assuming you can't just change the agreement on something that's been released under one specific agreement.
Also, in terms of Google Maps, can you sell off their map images like that? I would venture a guess as to no since this is a commercial venture. Just my two cents on all this as I feel like I've had my $10 ripped off for stuff that not only I can get for free, but also shouldn't have been bought in the first place. And given that they feel like they can so freely use the CC license with abandon, if anyone wants this crappy guide PDF, I'll happily email it to you, although prepare to be let down.
