live from cape verde

liz is in cape verde, africa, for two weeks on a business trip (she works for an NGO). cape verde is an island nation off the west coast. here it is on google maps.

liz had an interesting start to the trip. the feed below is a verbatim from an email she sent.

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Well I arrived in the country last Thursday in one very tired piece. I am very happy to be here, and in general I am having a great time since arriving, but the journey pretty much sucked, but it is a pretty amusing story. Well, to start, on the 7 hour flight from US to Lisbon, I sat in a MIDDLE seat, between two Portuguese guys. One of whom was very fat and took up half my space. Other than a bit of turbulence right at dinner time, the flight was very boring, and they showed an equally boring movie.

So although I arrived around 6 am in Lisbon, I wasn’t too tired at that point. The 8 hour wait in the airport however totally did me in. I tried to keep as busy as possible and moved around getting changes of scenery. The laptop was pretty much dead, so I couldn’t watch anything on the portable DVD player I had or write anything. Since I’ve never really traveled with laptops (more of a desktop girl myself) I learned that airports do not have any power outlets anywhere! Go figure! Fortunately, my Ipod was still working so I listened to some Portuguese lessons. I was reading the book “The Notebook” by Nicholas Sparks, which was getting pretty good … but, since I was practically delirious at this point I left it at the café I had been sitting at. Of course I didn’t realize this until after I had gone through the area where I couldn’t go back through. Nice. While waiting in the airport, I couldn’t really get any sleep b/c the benches were awful. Each café was practically the same with the same bad sandwiches and pastries… good coffee though. When I boarded the plane, the ticket taker said something about the plane stopping in Sal before stopping in Praia (my destination) and that I didn’t have a boarding pass for Sal. I got very worried all of a sudden, and showed him my itinerary. Then he punched some codes in and said never mind and sorry and that everything was ok. I thought this was very curious, especially considering what happened next.

So about 4-5 hours later, we arrived in Sal. That’s right, I was supposed to go to Praia, which is on another island! About 1 hour before landing they announced we’d be landing in Sal because of bad weather. They did not say when we’d be going to Praia. I got a window seat, but unfortunately couldn’t see much of anything during the flight. When we got closer however, I was able to see the landscape of Sal. It was like landing on Mars! Most of the island is red and flat and rocky, basically like footage from the Mars rover. The bad weather the captain had mentioned is what they call bruma seca – or a dust that blows off the Sahara desert, making visibility very bad during the dry season. When I arrived, there were several of us who did not have visas. Since we were supposed to land in Praia, the airport had not been ready to issue visas to us, but they got their act together and did them. They had no idea when the weather was going to clear up, so we just had to wait. We ended up in the airport for 5.5 hours before they decided that no more flights were going out that day and that we’d have to spend the night in a hotel. They put us in a hotel in Santa Maria – the beach section of town. The hotel was pretty nice, but I was too tired to appreciate it. After being up for about 30 hours straight, I crashed.

After breakfast, I was about to head out to the beach (Sal has very nice beaches) when I heard that the bus was there to take us to the airport. So I threw all my things together and headed out. No one seemed to know if there was an actual flight for us, of if we’d be waiting all day at the airport. When we got to the airport, they DID have a flight ready. The flight was only about 30 minutes. When I arrived, I met Helena, the Office Manager and we went straight to the office where we discussed the schedule and got some lunch.

So I haven’t seen much of the country so far, pretty much just the capital. But in general there is a strong European/Caribbean influence to the architecture and the culture. It is much nicer than what most westerners would think of an African city to be like, but it’s still much more run down looking than a European city. I have yet to see any real shanty towns, most buildings are permanent structures, which is a definite sign of prosperity. I’ve been told that the buildings get much more shanty-town like in the rural areas. There are some areas that have cute plazas with outdoor cafes, and then other areas are very dingy. The old section of town is a bit nicer. There is a lot of trash everywhere in the streets and strewn along the ravines and cliffs and mangy stray dogs everywhere.

The landscape is very dry and dessert like, although there are some trees here and there. Although flights are able to get in and out the sky is very hazy this time of year because of the bruma seca, so it’s hard to get any beautiful vistas. The beaches in Praia are small and are not very nice, but they are safe to swim in, and people definitely do swim there. There are much nicer beaches on other parts of the island.

The food so far is decent. The specialty is seafood… all kinds of seafood. Apparently the tuna is considered some of the best in the world. I have to say it is quite delicious. They grill the fish simply, with olive oil and salt over a flame. It’s excellent. They have some amazing papaya too and they are pretty much the only country in Africa that has good locally grown coffee available in country. Most other countries export all their coffee. Coffee is done espresso style a la Italy and it is amazing. Things are cheap here, but not that cheap. A decent meal for lunch or dinner is easily $10 or more. The place I am staying is a hotel for long term guests, it has a kitchenette, so I can make coffee and keep water in the fridge. Unfortunately, it does not have a pool, and no internet, and the TV has about 2 channels, neither of which is CNN International (!) so it’s hard to keep up with the news.

So far, I’ve found the Cape Verdian people to be very friendly and very laid back. Physically, they are a very interesting and diverse group of people. Their looks range from very dark African complexion to European white. The most interesting is to see the folks that have a darker skin color but with bright green or blue eyes. We have just as wide of a range in our office. With the exception of 2 expats, everyone else is Cape Verdian. The other interesting thing is that everyone speaks criollo, a mixture of Guinea Bissau and Portuguese. The more educated people speak Portuguese as well. The even more educated people will then speak French (older generations) or English (younger people). There are a lot of immigrants from other parts of Africa here as well. I’ve met several Senegalese.

Work stuff is not all that exciting yet. The only interesting thing to note is that yesterday, I was at the port observing the offloading of corn. For those of you who don’t know, our program gets donated corn and wheat from the USG and sells it in Cape Verde to finance our development activities. This all works and makes sense because Cape Verde has to import something like 70% of its food from abroad anyway, due to the dessert climate and poor growing conditions. The offloading is like a 4 day process where lots of things can go wrong and we can lose a lot of the commodity, so we need to keep an eye on the port workers so they don’t get sloppy. The corn is dumped into a silo about 500 yards away on the other side of the port. We got to go on the ship and meet the captain, and looked into the hold of the ship, where the corn was stored, that was kind of neat.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the first few days of my trip! I did.