Share the Scare from Plastic Collection from Urban Wastewater: Hygiene is Paramount

A caution about our plastic litter "offset" project in Cameroon...

While we remain proud of the success documented by University of Cameroun researchers, as profiled in Recycling Today, I found out yesterday that we owe several words of caution. For decades, African city canals have suffered pollution and diseases associated with raw sewage.

For published peer reviewed articles on the subject, google our lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud et. al.

• Abundance Dynamic of Oocysts in the Groundwater of Mbankomo, a Sub-urban Area Yaounde: Physico-chemical Factors and Health Risk
• Distribution of Cryptosporidium and Cyclospora in the Soil Around the Wells and Springs in Yaounde and Environs: Role of Some Abiotic Factors of the Medium
• Biomonitoring of drinking water (springs) in the sub-urban areas of Centre Region (Cameroon): Microsporidies and quality of water

So glad we partnered with experts rather than diving in, so to speak, with informal sector workers.

While the "bang for the buck" cost of diverting ocean-bound plastic in early rainy season was strongly demonstrated, four of the workers suffered bacterial illness afterwards. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126130/

https://www.in.gov/health/eph/onsite-sewage-systems-program/diseases-involving-sewage/

The disease risks involving city sewage in emerging markets are one of the reasons we are working with the University of Cameroun, Yaounde, rather than with the so-called "informal sector" in this second stage.

Had I followed my first impulses and thrown funding at informal sector workers, we might not have any means to study the correlation with bacterial illness suffered by four of our nine Enprosa Action workers who cleaned up the plastic litter in Yaounde, Limbe, and Douala.

As with #GeeksofColor accused of dumping electronics, we have to recognize that these are Africans taking risks to their personal health to provide a better future for their society. It's another case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, but also a call to constantly improve and leave no environmental soldiers behind.

I was frightened by the news of the hospitalization of Dr. Asi. He is in many ways the splitting image of his father, my landlord from 1984-86 in Ngaoundal, Cameroon. His dad tragically died when Dr. Asi was still a boy.  Now I have to #ShareTheScare and document the need for PPE and santization after every exposure to the city water.

Cross Culture 3: Domestic Disputes in African Forestry

The Politics of Deforestation in Africa: Madagascar, Tanzania, and Uganda [Foreign Affairs]... Nadia talks about important environmental issue with permanent consequences, and whether third-party international assistance will be effective.

Middlebury professor Dr. Nadia Horning (one of the hosts of the kickoff session at Fair Trade Recycling Summit in 2013) is on of the few people talking about something important in African resource policy.

Extraction is more crucial than discard, and the most important aspect of waste is whether it influences extraction. This paper discusses the intentions and effects of external solution making.

It's a Domestic Dispute with International and Inter-generational consequences.  Plastic litter will kill a lot of individual creatures that we can see close up, but destroying and cutting road-threads through an entire habitat exposes, degrades, and destroys the entire forest system.

We feel guilt about waste like we feel guilt about negligence.

We feel guilt about consumption in a scarier way.

We feel guilt about domestic violence against a woman in a neighbor's apartment in another way.

How we need to take action, as agents of conscience, demands a little more study than we like to put in. But we at least need to agree to purge the airwaves of uncredible and false accusations.

FALSE CLAIMS

Spiral Economy Trumps Circular Economy: Part 3 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man"

In northwest Arkansas, forensics, speech and debate was a way to get out of town, visit other cities and states, and compete with really smart people (often) in dialectic, rhetoric, and drama.

One of my favorite one-act plays then was Mark Medoff's 1969 "Doing a Good One for the Red Man: A Red Farce". I watched it performed with success by Fayetteville High School '78 Seniors Bill Owens and Michael Rudko... two intellectual giants of FHS.

The one-act play shows the interaction of a dirt poor native American selling stuff to white American tourists, who stop and seek to feel good about themselves for offering to buy things.  Medoff captured the conceit... the liberal do-gooder, a white guy who feels very confident in his role as "savior", is confronted with "white privilege".

After rereading it, the play didn't really age that well.  The tourist is more Archie Bunker, less liberal than I recalled.  But lines like "we've been wearing African and Indian shirts to parties for almost a month now" was fresh stuff.

Criticism isn't attack.  In order to win, we must improve our game, including the one called "circular economy".  We must demand our fellow do-gooders work as hard as if they were making O-rings for the space shuttle.  And just as NASA studies the psychology of astronauts in the isolation of space, we must constantly check the self interests of any constituency our causes attract.

Hastily constructed "cures" for the environment, like Product Stewardship laws, and prescriptions for circular economics, are designed by good-hearted people.  No offense that social engineering can create a viper pit of unintended consequences.

Many African High Schools today still struggle under the leaky roofs I taught lessons under (Cameroon, 1984-86).  But the Arkansas high school I practiced drama for is not as far away from a school in Africa.   Yesterday, via Facebook, two photo posts from two schools (screenshots below), LITERALLY back to back, update me on a school from home, and one from West Africa.

So Western Schools still have drama classes, and African schools still struggle to provide enough desks.  But the latter problem is in part driven by rapid urbanization and increasing access to schools, even as the population of schoolkids increases.

Before a satellite circles the globe, there's homework.   It's necessary to know the weather forecast for a satellite launch.  And if we are to engineer a circular economy, it's necessary to get recycling, mining, and waste cycles straight.  We need to know how pollution got where it is.  

Those who drink the "80% of used goods exports are pollution exported as a ruse of reuse" kool-aid, and design a system around that, wind up responsible for Joe Benson and the destruction of the dream of Africans with mutual funds.  They followed a guy who does not know what he is talking about, and was making it up as he went along.  Sorry if they don't want to throw away all this hard work to save the world and start over... but one's ego isn't the end product.

- - -

Agbogbloshie's number one import isn't waste.  It's photojournalists.   And photojournalists who fly in and exploit the hard working, sometimes destitute, scrappers, can't be allowed to fly home and claim they saved someone.   Their reckless reporting put TV repairman Joe Benson in prison, they led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars of working second-hand computers of Hamdy in Egypt, they led to the closure of Net Peripheral (the Peace Corps volunteer's 'wet dream' of sustainability, income, and internet), and loss of contracts by Good Point Recycling.

In theory, I'm pro circular-economy.  But this "circular economy" is being promoted by the same WEEE Policy job-hoarding bureaucrats, the same donation-photo-gimmick NGOs, and the same "strategic metals" and "big shred" and "planned obsolescence" capitalist interests as brought us the great #ewastehoax of 2002-2012 (the year the studies all started coming in, backing what my export pals taught me a decade earlier... that there is no money in "waste" migration, only in added value.

Sworn testimony by big metal shredding companies to US Congress...

Sworn testimony to UK House of Commons

No one ever gets testimony from the Geeks of Color.
No one interviews the Agbogbloshie scrapper.
No one finds the parent of the child posed on McElvaney's cruddy monitor.
No one asks anything, no one checks the facts.

I took a call from Awal an hour ago.  I can't always take his calls, we really don't understand each other much.  He was trying to find out when Wahab, the Chendiba Technician buyer, was coming back to Agbogbloshie.  I wasn't sure, think Wahab's in Accra now, but he may have skipped a trip to the scrapyard and gone straight to Tamale.   Wahab and the Techs in Tamale don't really have much to do with scrappers, but Wahab understands the scheme of Fair Trade Recycling, where if the Techs take the scrappers under their wing, more white people may be willing to sell to them instead of boycotting them.

Awal laughed when I told him about the "America Lion" which came to my office a day before... a very large bobcat came to inspect our office in Middlebury, confronting its own reflection in our building's office window.  It's all the buzz on Facebook today (30k+ views).  Employees at Good Point, students at CES de Ngaoundal, we are all connected.  Without the trade - and images are currency - we are engaged in, we would not be.

Doing a Good One for the Red Man was written in 1969, when Medoff was on faculty at University of New Mexico.  It was a product of 1960s liberalism, which showed a self awareness of the cultural gulf between do good trophy hunters, gatherers of mementos, and "spiritual materialism".

At times, there's a competition of vantage points and depth perspectives.  And that's my blog... I'm trying to defend people who are being treated like pawns, but I'm also aware that from another vantage point, I could be exploiting people in another way.  The photo with my student Nana was posed, after all... I wasn't as self-aware of the "currency" of cultural exoticism, though I was clearly aware of the value of photographing my class.  We don't want so much self doubt and growling at the mirror that the next generation gives up, parties hearty, and casts the whole thing aside with trollish conservatism.


Boy.

Africa's Tech Sector Becoming Africa's Banking Sector

WSJ Reports

"Sub-Saharan Africa accounted for more than half of the 255 live mobile money services across the globe in 2014, with monthly mobile money transactions in the region topping $10 billion in late 2014, according to GSMA."

Startup Fuels Africa’s Mobile-Payment Boom

MFS Africa’s mobile-payment platform is used by 55 million people in 17 African countries

Full article here (may be paywalled).  But check out the numbers.  This network is built on the refurbished cell phones and phone towers set up by Geeks of Color a decade ago.  This is incredible, and helps explain why it makes me furious that Basel Action Network, Greenpeace and PureEarth are making money by hustling and over-producing films depicting Africans as "primitive".





The Geeks of Color are going to inherit the continent, and people are fools to boycott America's access to the ground floor.  More Africans are going to college in China today than are going to college in the USA.

#freejoebenson

#thanksobama

African Women Have Knuckles

There are many ways by which Northern stereotypes of "the south" and Western stereotypes of "the east" get mixed and shuffled - like hearts and diamonds called a flush.  It's not the color of the cards that proves the claim.  Clarissa Shields proteges from the USA will have a lot of competition in future olympic boxing matches.  As they get more integrated into African city economies, African women may be million dollar babies.

From LATimes:  Op-Ed:  The Heroic women of Africa are Standing Up to Boko Haram"

Yadji Moussa's niece in Yenwa

"As a woman and a mother, I pray for the safe return of all the abducted girls. I also applaud the strength of the women who continue to fight for them. They are African women — women who can function under the harshest conditions, who in the face of murder and rape continually stand up to fight. Strong. Resilient. Powerful. It is time for the world to put away the image of African women as victims and see them as the everyday heroes they are."

Leymah Gbowee writes this in conclusion to her op-ed in the Los Angeles Times this morning.  The headline is a breath of fresh air.   As awful as the images of disempowered African women are, as horrible as the statistics of rape and sex crime and modern slavery are, they do not mean African chicas are "weak".

Game Theory 1: What Would [Massively Intelligent Persona] Do?

WWJD, or "What Would Jesus Do?" was a welcome Christian riff about 15 years ago.  I looked it up in part because of the upsetting crisis of Boko Haram near the eastern Nigerian border, very close to the part of Cameroon I taught school in the 1980s.

The phrase "What would Jesus do?" (often abbreviated to WWJD) became popular in the United States in the 1990s and as a personal motto for adherents of Evangelical Christianity who used the phrase as a reminder of their belief in a moral imperative to act in a manner that would demonstrate the love of Jesus through the actions of the adherents.

What would Jesus do, or Muhammed do, about lunatic fringes in religions established in their names?

"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy" - Aristotle

Boko is a Hausa word, and Hausa is a society which was massively splintered by Western lines-drawn-on-maps in Africa.  England and France drew Vertical lines (Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon west-east borders), whereas the African societies tended to follow latitudes associated with climates.   The band of Sahel and Sahara stretches longitudinally north of the forests and mountains to the south, and it's a big "Bantu-v-Islam" historical and geographical context ignored by historical cartographers. Of course, with no lines at all, the ports and trade would still have drawn economic maps and boundaries, and either way, north is the loser.

Full Lunar Eclipse, Seen in Cameroon, Africa at Ramadan May 1985

Below is {recorded livestream?} of tonight's Rare Hybrid Lunar Eclipse, which in 2014 we can watch live online.  No need to worry about clouds, or to go outside.  Social Media has it covered.

It would be my second.  I will always remember my first.  It was in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, Africa, sitting on a bench at night in a small unlit bar run by Suzanne Ateh, my "African mother".  I ate at her place every lunch, and spent many evenings drinking mimbo (beer), around a short table with backs to the wall, or sitting outside and looking out at the street.  It was a paved highway with no traffic.  Virtually none at all.

That night was the full moon of Ramadan, which started that year on May 4.  The eclipse was May 21.  Ngaoundal was probably 60-70 percent Muslim, and about 1/3 Baya, 1/3 Fulani, and 1/3 mix of other areas of Cameroon, brought there by a military training camp.  I lived near the military camp, which is where the bars and prostitutes were.

(Original Livestream video link ended without recording, but here's a good link from Mexico.  Fast forward to the first hour, hour ten minutes or so.)

Heroicizing and Exoticizing the Trade in Small Household Appliances

I was having a little Facebook chat with an old chum from Peace Corps (Cameroon 1984-86) early this morning, and she shared with me a Washington Post article about John Beale, who reported to Gina McCarthy (now head of EPA, and a former upstairs-dweller at EOEA when I worked at Massachusetts DEP's Recycling program in the 1990s).  I'm told that Beale's original development work was legit, but the slippery slope of junkets turned into a kind of riptide.  (If you don't have time for pontification, enjoy this amusing Vimeo parody "License to Chill")

It's about Fufu

Beale often went to Africa.  At the beginning he claimed it was for an international-EPA-outreach on "stoves" for more efficient cooking of fu-fu.   Within the EPA, the story goes, it became widely accepted that  he was actually working for the CIA, and his EPA post was "cover" for cloak and dagger work.

No.  According to his deposition, he was just playing hooky.   His cover story about "cook stoves" (which were nothing we hadn't seen in the 1980s, not much of a cover story for people who lived in Africa) was all he had come up with, and when the internal EPA gossip gave him "CIA" cover, it just made his travel appear more exotic.  We like to be exotic.

I had shared a link with Judi about a "fu-fu pounding machine" covered by an African blogger this week. It reminded me of how many hours of work teenage African girls and their mothers spend pounding nyams and gari into this delicious cookie-dough-like staple.  Fufu is dipped into all kinds of green, brown and orange colored spice gravies.   I wondered to Judi whether appliances like these might play something of the role washing machines and dishwashers are said to have played in the saga of American women's liberation.

Freedom from labor is freedom to read.  In the Mary Poppins movie, the mother is freed to promote "vote for women suffrage" by the housekeepers and hired help.  Democratic participation has always been for people with time on their hands.   Laundromats (which I've sung the praises of before) freed people - mostly women - to have more time after school to study, and to participate in other earning activity.

When Amartya Sen wrote of "100 Million Missing Women" it turned "environmental justice" on its side.  When women's hours are missing from the economy, land values stagnate, wars ensue, social development is stymied, and cultures tend to be, in a word, "more primitive".  With eventual acceptance of the washing machine, we release women to do more productive things.  Like write books, in the case of Rachel Carlson, author or Silent Spring.  (The tangential irony is that women were freed by technology, the downsides of which she aptly described.  Manufacturing of devices created waste and toxics, which tend to wind up in places where land values are lower... This isn't a rant, as I'm a fan of Carson, it's more of a yin yang thing.)

Here's film of the "fufu pounding machine" with traditional (women labor) pounding to the right.  In Africa, hand laundry is pounded in similar way, and as the video demonstrates, automated fufu pounding is a lot like a washer-dryer.  The first ones were probably made with spare WEEE parts (see bottom).

More professional videos (including consumer on the streets interviews) raise fears of change among African men, fear of the unnatural, association with disease, and other modern "modernization juju").  African Men demand  "certification" and call for the machines being "certified".   An opening for fufu Stewards?  What I can hear in the back of my mind is echos of similar "fear of tech", like the effects of train motion on womens uteruses, the hyperbole over direct current electricity, and "ghoulish" practices of computer monitor refurbishing (as described by Puckett and co.).

Three Interviews with Yadji Moussa about Cameroon, Africa, and "e-waste"

These are pretty unprofessional, unedited, videos interviewing our departed friend from Cameroon, Yadji Moussa.   I'm working today on getting some photos together for the service on Friday.  Yadji's kids, Innah and Adam, will be coming from Michigan.

The service will be held at the Memorial Baptist Church, between Pleasant St. and Court St (Rt 7) near the Middlebury green.    Friday, July 6, 6:45PM

A Rich Story Ends: Services for Yadji Moussa 1955-2012

Services for Yadji Moussa will be held at Memorial Baptist Church in Middlebury Vermont, Friday July 6, 6:45-8:00 PM. Another ceremony will be held in Howell Michigan, at a date TBD. Thanks to Roy Buzzell, Amanda Sheppard, Colin Davis, Rachael Gosselin, Renee Babcock and Thomas Barr for your help.

Yadji Moussa was a man.  When I met him in Cameroon, he told me he had problems in the past, that he had been at "rock bottom", and described those tough times in detail, with humor, making me laugh.  During the 30 months I lived there, he only seemed to do better and better.  I could write, and have written, about some times that he was a hero in the town of Ngaoundal in Adamawa Province.

Yadji has worked with me for 12 years in Middlebury.  He continued to do better and better after I left Cameroon, and Renee, my peace corps volunteer replacement, agreed he was something special.   They married and had two kids, Innah and Adamou, and returned to the USA to live in Michigan, around 1989 or 1990 I think.

He revisited rock bottom a few times, and the marriage broke up in 2000.   I owed him a lot from my time in Cameroon, and brought him to Vermont to start a business with me.

Yadji drowned last week, while I was celebrating my twins birthdays in Arkansas.  We returned to Vermont and assist with the arrangements for Yadji, who for many years I described as my best friend, and for many times I was furious with, as only a brother can be.

This isn't really the time to write and rewrite whole chapters about him.  But this one tells how brave he was, and how he used our underestimation of him to get away from things (for better or worse).   When I met him, he had a debt to a cab driver because he'd tried to save the life of a man stabbed in Ngaoundal... there was no hospital there, the closest one was Meiganga or Tibati, in different directions.  He put the man on his lap and paid the cabbie to go to Tibati, where they found the doctor was gone on vacation.  They turned and drove three hours back, at top speed, to Meiganga, where Yadji was covered with blood and the man was dead.   Yadji came back and found the stabber had paid off the town cops.  So he wrote a simple letter to the Governor of Adamawa, and told me how he had written in a persona, polite and childlike, asking "but why isn't this man being arrested," sounding like Cindy Loo Who asking the Grinch about the Christmas tree.  Three days later, provincial troops were sent to the town, the town cops were barricaded in their police station, and the knife weilder was arrested.   Yadji said that the police chief knew he had taken the victim to the hospital, and confronted him angrily, saying he KNEW Yadji was behind the letter to the Governor.

Yadji told me he opened his eyes wide, shook his head, and said "Patron, but I don't know how to read or write..." And the cop believed him, stomped his foot and left.

Here is an interview with Yadji from 2008.  He speaks about his home village, Yenwa, one of the most "ancient" or primitive mountain areas of Cameroon, with no electricity or running water.  Yadji describes how people move from rural areas like Yenwa, to the cities.  And this is really a glimpse of the man, who speaks in a simple and disarming way... so you might forget that he knows 5 languages and could wrap you around a tree if you underestimate him.

He would have been in the African Spring.

Criminalizing Hard Work Done "By Hand"

Society recoils from hard work when toil is presented in a racially charged manner.

reported from the road in Ozark Mountain country.

My kids Posed "Toiling" Cameroon 1985

Hard work was good.  Working with your hands was nothing to be ashamed of in Arkansas and Missouri, where I spent every summer.
But the Western Press increasingly presents anything done "by hand" in the developing world as being an unsafe and sad "state of affairs".  See again the coverage of "fair trade" by Victoria's Secret, headlined "Children Toil With Bare Hands in Burkina Fields."
In the Ozark Mountains, toil was something to enjoy, something to be proud of.   But during the attack on fair trade cotton, "Toil + Manure + 13 years old labor" was a damning equation for Victoria's Secret.  Manure to a farmer is non-toxic fertilizer, but to an American reporter, seems simply odorous.

In Burkina Faso, girls marry at 13.  Most girls that age are lucky to be in school, even part time.   If they are not lucky enough to be in school, there is a short list of careers for them.  If a girl is an orphan or foster child, the choice of careers is shorter and the choices more perilous.  One of two girl students of mine at 9th Grade of CES Ngaoundal in Cameroon, the privileged daughter of the Sous-Prefet, died in childbirth the night before I was to hand out her grading card (she failed my English class).