It's Not Just a South African Problem

Related to the story I wrote about mining pollution is a story detailing the same concerns about toxic water threatening the town of Leadville, Colorado:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28leadville.html

Story

A short article of mine about a rum drink from Madagascar is in the March issue of Saveur. If nothing else, you'll learn a lot about butter.

Trout in South Africa

Story from Afghanistan

This article and these photos, by two extraordinarily brave and talented women, are the most powerful story I've seen about what soldiers face in Afghanistan:

Battle Company Is Out There

Lantana

Our good friend Caroline Herring has a new album, Lantana, coming out on March 4. Caroline's record label hired her sister, a talented filmmaker, to make a short documentary about the new songs (which are excellent - this is her best record yet):

New Story

This story of mine was published on Friday, Feb. 15:

South Africa: Paying the price of mining

The Importance of Colors

M saw this painting from across a huge market in Johannesburg last weekend and she beelined to it as if she were a salmon with magnetite in its snout at spawning time. She deliberated for, oh, 45 seconds and bought it from the artist. It is BIG and so vibrant. I keep watching it because it seems like there is movement from people or wind or ocean. It is blatantly happy, and it is good.

Super Tuesday in South Africa

It's easy to forget the imaginative reach of the United States. The financial, the military, the political manifestations are more obvious. But the imaginitive reach about the U.S.'s potential is more widespread. I went to the South African National Biodiversity Institute, also home to the botanical gardens, today to fetch a copy of a paper that appeared in the institute's journal in 1983. The article is about chiles and I needed it for a reference for a story I'm writing. Someone had misplaced the copy that was made for me so I bought some illustrations and cards in the small bookshop while I waited for my contact to return from lunch. Then Anne-Lise found me and took me up to the library on the second floor and copied the article. On the way back down, we passed a mirthful man with a white beard and shining eyes and a sunburnt nose. Anne-Lise asked him where his American friend was and he said he had just left yesterday and would return on Super Tuesday. "Just in time to get off the plane screaming," he said. She bemoaned that now neither of them would have anyone to discuss Super Tuesday with. I told them they could talk to me. They didn't know I was American until then. The man turned around and walked with us and, in the lobby, we had a rapid-fire round table about the candidates. What was remarkable to me is that they spoke like they had a vote.

"I heard on the radio this morning this American journalist saying that if Hillary was the nominee, McCain might win," Anne-Lise said, her brow angry at the idea.

"I don't think that's going to happen," I said, "but it could still be miserable because so many people despise her."

"I heard that Bill Clinton was relaying that he had waited his whole life to see an African-American or woman as president and now it's come in this form," said unidentified man. "He was in church asking God why he did that to him."

"Well, I'm all for Obama," said Anne-Lise. "I'm sick of everyone else starting these wars and arguing and, if it's not him, it would just be more of the same."

"Me too," I said. "I think Obama represents a political evolution of several steps and we really need that. We need to get beyond the established battle lines."

"So you're for Obama and you're for Obama," said sunburnt man, thrusting a finger at us. "Well, I'm for the woman. I think Obama might be too pure for a politician. I think she's veteran enough to know that politics just sucks."

With that, he had other visitors waiting and waved goodbye. Anne-Lise walked me out and wished me well. I drove back into the rest of South Africa where Super Tuesday is still very far away.

That Old Saw About Kitchen Heat

I recently spent three hours in this kitchen of the restaurant Zambi on the waterfront in Maputo, Mozambique. I was learning how to make peri-peri sauce - a hot sauce made from ground chiles. It was the peak of summer and about 94 outside with high humidity. In the kitchen, there were no fans and no real ventilation and there were open grills, bread ovens and steam ovens filled with crabs. I stood there with the chef tasting painfully good chiles. Hot chiles. I can now say that I do not have to get out of the kitchen - I can stand the heat.

When The Lights Go Out

So I'm a month late with the resolution to blog more but, hey, living gets in the way. January was full of travel to Mozambique, Zambia and Swaziland and then a thousand daily details that don't need to be detailed here.

This doctored image is one of the funnier ones I've seen that combines South Africa's recent power crisis with the ever-present doom and gloom about the country's ability to host the World Cup in 2010. The power crisis is a problem of massive proportions: the country's largest mines - gold, platinum, coal - were shut down for four or five days while Eskom, the power parastatal, scrambled to devise a plan that preserves power to crucial facilities - like hospitals - but the plan has yet to be fully realized. At home, we had blackouts every day for a week last week and, before that, several times every week. Eskom has promised that blackouts will be a part of life here for at least the next five years; they're just hoping to become a bit more reliable about it while cities and businesses try to adapt. Traffic lights are the primary immediate hurdle besides the daily multi-million dollar mines. I returned from Maputo, Mozambique to Pretoria recently by bus and the trip was smooth until we arrived in Johannesburg on a Thursday afternoon. The power was out, the traffic lights were out, a huge rainstorm was underway and rush hour traffic was gridlocked like nothing I had ever seen. The bus did not move for 10 minutes at a time. The trip to Pretoria by bus usually takes 45 minutes if traffic is moving. This time it took three-and-a-half hours. Cities are now planning to install solar panels onto the lights and I even heard that Johannesburg is going to install switches into some 200,000 homes that will allow the city to cut power to hot-water heaters when there is a power shortage. In northern Pretoria, furious and stranded train commuters vandalized several cars. Their anger was legitimate but they just reduced the number of commuter train cars. The fault for this crisis lies with the government which restricted Eskom from building new capacity in the late '90s while the government pondered new energy policy (i.e. - how to attract private investment). Then they changed their mind but the economy and power demand had steadily grown for years by then and Eskom didn't raise the alarm about the looming shortage.

It's going to be quite a year here with big political scandals - the president of the ANC, and thereby the presumptive president of the country in 2009, is facing a corruption trial - and power outages.

Thankfully, the wine is good and grapes grow without electricity.

Poet Laureaute

From an interview with Charles Simic, poet laureate of the U.S.:

What advice would you give to people who are looking to be happy?

For starters, learn how to cook.