EPA Proudly Stops Egyptian Monitor Reuse? Err...

I was aware of the company.  I was aware of the market.  I think the EPA press release, below, is referring to the sentencing of the same St. Louis company "profiled" in the Basel Action Network blog. which I covered in Environmental Malpractice 5.1   The Michigan owned Missouri company was trying to stay in the reuse business... selling used CRT monitors to a hungry bunch of Egyptians.

Michigan Computer Company Owner Sentenced for International Environmental, Counterfeiting Crimes

In the year before the first "Arab Spring" revolt, in Iran, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was already beginning to feel the heat.   Iran's regime would survive, but Mubarak would be the second to face internet impeachment, after Tunisia and before Libya.  In the years running up to that revolt, Mubarak called used CRT monitors "e-waste" and made it illegal to import them if they were more than 5 years after the date of original manufacture.

Keep in mind that CRTs last 20-25 years, and keep in mind that the "original manufacture date" is typically a year before it's even sold at retail.   That means an American would have to buy the 25-year CRT, use it for three years, and then leave time for a collector to inspect it and send it to Egypt.

Discount Computers (and I know of one other doing this in the USA, and two in other countries), was taking the good CRTs which might be 6, 7, or 8 years old, and putting a new label, in Arabic, which said something like "remade on".   This would allow the Egyptian buyer, sometimes with the help of a bribe, to get the working and repairable CRTs into Alexandria and Cairo, where they were sold in shops like the ones I photographed in the blog about innocent "Hurricane Hamdy" (Environmental Malpractice).

Price of the mislabelled monitors?  The Egyptian importer in this story, according to EPA, paid $21 apiece.  That's Twenty-one US dollars... enough to make the mislabelling worth the trouble.

So why does EPA declare this? "By exporting older CRTs with fraudulent manufacture dates, Mark Jeffrey Glover sent a large quantity of older e-waste overseas which was subjected to improper recycling, increasing the potential for environmental and human exposure to hazardous materials. "


Profiling  Anyone?  Is this what we call  "environmental justice?"

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.