MY WILDLIFE ADVENTURES (OR GOOD NIGHT RAMAR OF THE JUNGLE WHEREVER YOU ARE)

Tags

African Widlife, Birding, Cameroon, Chad, Gameparks, Humor, Kenya, Peace Corps

“So geographers in Afric-maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er uninhabitable downs,
Place elephants for want of towns.”
(Jonathan Swift)

The gameparks in Kenya are grand. I enjoyed several of them while visiting dear friends stationed in Nairobi. It was wonderful to have use of a vehicle and driver thanks to them. However I wasn’t there long enough to develop many stories. There was one that is worthy of note. Nairobi National Park is just seven kilometers from the city. You can see skyscrapers. They had to put up a fence on the city side. Surprisingly it has a wide variety of animals, some like chetahs I had not seen in West Africa. It is a beautiful thing to watch a chetah run. I happened to be in Nairobi at the time of the annual animal census in which my friend Paul and a friend of his, both Foreign Service Officers, regularly participated. They invited me to go along, but the lady who ran the thing was a class conscious Brit. There were still colonial remnants in Kenya and apparently the gamepark census was one of the them. The participants had to be vetted by her. Paul solved this problem by introducing me as Doctor Branson. “Yes, yes, delighted to have you aboard Dr. Branson.” It was a fun day. No doubt the gameparks of East Africa were where to go for a tourist in those days. They had more animals and were far better organized. However the rough and tumble gameparks of West Africa, where I had the great fortune to spend significant time, had their own charms. I mean who gets the chance to live in a gamepark for months on end, an obscure little park to be sure, but quite beautiful in its way. There was an unpolished beauty in those less traveled environs.

My first visit to a gamepark occurred before I was officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. Peace Corps has a trick. They don’t count training or vacations as time served. They put me on a plane to Africa in July, 1975 and officially mustered me out in December of 1978. They credited me with three years of service. Not that I’m complaining, it was a great experience. Just before my fellow wells project recruits and I finished our on-the-job training, we took a trip to southern Chad, the city of Sarh, to a small project spin off where one or two of us would be posted. Manda gamepark is just north of Sarh and on the main road. We decided to camp out there and go into Sarh the next day. In the park they had a raised platform for such purposes. Fortunately the park didn’t have any big cats. We arrived just before dusk and barely had time to set up camp before dark. Extremely excited, when the night animal sounds started up a strange feyness overcame us. We grabbed flashlights and ran out into the elephant grass looking for animals. The park had elephants, hippos, buffalo, and poisonous snakes, among others, stumbling upon any of which could be fatal. Hippos come out of the river at night to graze and are particularly dangerous. Perhaps God does look after fools or the noise we made drove everything away, anyway we didn’t find anything. The next day herds of antelope leaped the road in front of us as we drove around the park, and a buffalo even gave the door of one of our two Land Rovers a head thump. Very satisfying that.

As a PCV my gamepark experience was limited to a visit or two to Manda when I was stationed in Sarh for some months. However while drilling wells in the north, on rare occasions we would run across gazelles, warthogs, jackals, and majestic roan antelopes (antelope cheval in French), among others. A few wild animals like monkeys and lizards were ubiquitous. Interestingly our Chadian counterparts used one word “laham” (Chadian Arabic for meat) to describe any edible animal we encountered. Even though our counterparts save one were not Muslim, a few of the Muslim dietary restrictions had become more or less generalized in Chad, with the notable exception of pork which they ate with gusto. They refused to eat carrion eaters like shellfish, not that dry Chad had a lot of shellfish, and animals that had hands like monkeys or even appendages that vaguely resembled hands. One of the night guards at the Peace Corps Office did a favor for an Air France pilot. The pilot repaid him with a bucket of shrimp, a rare and expensive treat in Chad. The guard approached me with bucket in hand and explained that he hadn’t wanted to hurt the pilot’s feelings, but he couldn’t possibly eat those creepy little things. He asked me rather doubtfully if nasaras (white people) really ate them. I recalled the old line about it being a brave man who first ate an oyster. In my best Lewis Carroll Walrus voice, I replied: “Yes, yes, indeed we do, as disgusting as that may seem. My good man, I will gladly take them off your hands. I mean what are friends for?”

In the spring of 1979 everything changed for me. While working on contract for USAID Chad civil disturbances broke out. My experiences in Chad are covered elsewhere. After a few weeks, with the airport closed and bridges blocked, I was assigned to northern Cameroon to provide logistical support to the US Embassy in N’Djamena, chiefly transportation of personnel. My expenses were covered generously. I could have stayed anywhere I wanted between Maroua and the Cameroonian border directly across the Chari River from N’Djamena. There were three nice hotels in Maroua and one at Waza, the big gamepark between Maroua and N’Djamena. Over a period of roughly five months I tried them all out from time to time. I enjoyed the amenities they had to offer, hot showers, AC, excellent meals. However after years of simple food as a PCV, I appeciated rich French restaurant cuisine more as a sometime thing, not everyday fare. From my visits to France, probably the average Frenchman feels the same way. They don’t eat like that everyday either.

For the most part I chose to stay in Kalamaloue National Park, located just ten or so kilometers from N’Djamena. As a consequence I ate a lot of sardines and crackers, but I could always buy baguettes and basic supplies in nearby Kousseri. The park had one round hut with no electricity and only cold water that the park guards would pump up to barrels on a tower. Actually when the sun had been shining on the barrels all day late afternoon showers weren’t that bad, but morning ones were best avoided. Because I paid my modest fees in cash and stayed so long, I was their cash cow and they treated me like royalty, useful since they weren’t about to question my iffy credentials. The park was so strapped for funds that the guards were issued only three bullets each annually and had to strictly account for them. Kalamaloue was a tiny park as these things go. I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but having walked it I would estimate the size at thirteen thousand acres give or take, which is extremely small by African standards.

My hut had windows without screens or glass, just wooden shutters that you could prop open. The beds had mosquito nets. The hut sat on the only hill in the park and looked out over a plain. I suspected that the hill’s origin was not natural, most probably the result of successive habitation. Not far to one side was a steep decline to a water hole where a large crocodile lived. He would often crawl out on a sandbar to sun with his mouth gaping open. I nicknamed him Walter. We were friends. We played games. I would walk around the top of his hole, and he would sink down with just his eyes showing and stalk me, hoping I would come down for a drink. Toward sunset with the heat retreating somewhat, I would pull out the metal table and chair and sit there looking out over that plain at gazelles, kob antelope, waterbuck, jackals, warthogs, and whatever unusual treat that would choose to show itself that day. As a kid I was a big fan of the TV show Ramar of The Jungle, a show way too politically incorrect to ever be shown again except on youtube. OK I didn’t get to live in a neat treehouse like they did, but this was about as close to a childhood fantasy as it gets. An hour or so before dusk the park’s three guards would go home, leaving just me and the animals. Usually I could manage a glass of wine or perhaps Ricard as the sun drifted downward. Those were moments of profound contentment.

Sometimes for a few days here and there I would share my hut with Joel, a PCV assigned to the gameparks in northern Cameroon. He worked alone, but when I was available I would help out with various projects. This was before Caddy Shack, but anyone who’d met him after seeing that movie would have compared him to the Bill Murray character, the main difference being that Joel wasn’t mentally slow. He had been a grunt in Vietnam and bore the scars. He was awkward socially and half deaf. He was taciturn at times and talked incessantly at others with the loud voice of the hearing impaired. He was best taken in small doses, but he was a really good guy. I liked him.

Joel asked me to walk the park with him while he did an animal inventory. We were unarmed, but Kalamaloue wasn’t supposed to have any of the more dangerous mammals except for the hippos from the river, and they stayed in or near the water during the day. Nevertheless there were dangers on foot, snakes, feral dogs, and such, and it was safer with two people. We walked systematically the grid Joel had developed. At one point we heard frenzied yapping and approached a jackal raising hell at a big bush. We walked around the other side and came face to face with a lion. That was a come to Jesus moment. He was an old male and from his belly it looked like he had just eaten. Lucky us. We backed away slowly. Another time Joel was in the park when a troop of elephants migrated through, a ragtag troop, a mere remnant of the vast numbers of bygone times. Somehow Joel talked me into climbing trees along the likely trails and dropping paint on elephant butts as they passed below. He wanted to document their migration. That lasted until a female became annoyed and made a mock charge toward my tree. At my insistence we called it a day.

I was blessed to be in Kalamaloue during the summer rainy season and able to help Joel with bird counts. Fortunately that could be done from my vehicle. I was pretty good at identifying birds, but Joel was way above my class. We would come across temporary ponds that were chock full of all kinds of birds, some resident but most migratory — spoonbills, crowned cranes, sacred ibis, four or five different duck species, kingfishers, and marabou storks standing like a row of undertakers. Maybe en route we would watch an Abyssinian roller with its electric colors, in tumbling flight one of the most beautiful birds in the world, or possibly spy a majestic African fish eagle. The rainy season in off the beaten path Kalamaloue was one of nature’s great secrets, a once in a lifetime birder’s paradise.

One night by myself at Kalamaloue, sleeping with the shutters propped open, I heard some noise. I picked up my powerful flashlight and illuminated a civet in my hut. Now a civet is about the size of a very large domestic cat or a small raccoon, which it kind of resembles although it is not related. The poor thing panicked and began running around the perimeter of the round hut, which included jumping on my bed and stomach and bringing down my mosquito net. I was afraid to make a sudden move for risk of getting bitten. Rabies shots were no fun in those days. The civet made three round trips total, landing on my belly on every lap. Eventually I gathered my wits about me and turned off the flashlight. Then the critter lost no time figuring out where the exit was and departing out the open window.

WHAT LIES BEYOND BEING BORED TO DEATH

Tags

Africa, African Bees, Chad, Humor, Non-Fiction, Patas Monkey, Peace Corps, Swiss, Termites

My first year in Chad I spent a good bit of time living in Sarh, the most significant city in southern Chad. Apparently Sarh was built with delusions of grandeur. Maybe the French were planning to make it a capital of something in the early days of colonization. In the words of another Peace Corps Volunteer, it’s largely unpaved but nevertheless extremely wide streets seemed to be waiting for a parade that never came. The French liked to call that region “Le Tchad Utile,” because the comparatively wetter climate permitted the cultivation of cotton, peanuts, and some rice along the rivers, with cotton and beef being Chad’s only important export commodities. Cattle could walk across many miles of borders in a country more than twice the size of France, but the harvest and sale of cotton lent itself to central control, and thus it was the most significant cash crop and a major source of tax revenue. Sarh was a medium sized city, maybe 40,000 give or take, with a largish expat community that disappeared during the rainy season, although the rainy season was really no worse than a summer in Florida, albeit one without paved roads. Just before he went home, Francois, the former wells PCV in Sarh, had advised us: “In Sarh you’ll discover what lies beyond being bored to death.”

The wells project in Sarh was the poor stepchild of the well financed project up north, and my fellow wells vol Scotty was often up in N’Djamena trying to secure some funding. My Chadian workers were all blue collar guys, friendly enough, but not much for in depth conversation. I did take them out for beers on occasion, but they felt they had to return the favor by having me over for billy billy, the local home-fermented millet beer. The next week I’d spend a good part of it in the bathroom. I went to work at our warehouse workshop on time every work day, but Scotty had the only functioning vehicle, and the workshop like much of the town only received intermittent electricity. I’d sit there in that dark warehouse until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then hop on my mobylette (French moped) and ride around town some before heading back, hoping that the lights had come back on in my absence. I always felt guilty about doing that. My Chadian workers could sit for hours in a hot dark warehouse doing absolutely nothing, didn’t seem to bother them at all, but I had my limits.

Scotty and I shared a house in a three house compound. One house was occupied by two Swiss vols, Hans and Giscard, and the other by a male French Canadian vol. There was a great looking female French Canadian vol living elsewhere in town who would visit her compatriot. She was cordial, but clearly she hadn’t come all the way to a French speaking country in Africa to date an American with still rudimentary French. The Swiss vols said Americans all smelled like milk and put ketchup on everything. Not wanting to disappoint, if I saw them coming I would put ketchup on anything I was eating. The compound was heavily shaded by dense-leaved mango trees. Occasionally, perhaps it only seemed like always in the middle of the night, a mango would drop on my tin roof, sounding like a bomb going off.

I find the cultural myths we all have amusing. The noble fight at the Alamo is one of ours. I eventually learned that war was really all about slavery which was illegal in Mexico. The well-to-do southerners there wanted to cultivate cotton on plantations, and for that they needed slaves. One day in discussion with Giscard, he revealed a Swiss myth. He honestly believed that the Germans hadn’t invaded Switzerland because they were afraid of all the old Swiss men on bicycles in the mountains with their long rifles. Every able bodied male in Switzerland received some military training, and apparently that terrified the Nazi panzer divisions. That is what he’d been taught since childhood. I laughed and suggested that perhaps the Germans had had other reasons. I couldn’t convince him. It reminded me of a lady I knew who was jogging along the beach one day just registering things she passed, crab, gulls, dog, driftwood, peanut butter foam. Suddenly she realized that that tan foam everywhere couldn’t be peanut butter foam. When she was a little girl she had asked her grandmother about it. No doubt with a smile, her grandmother had explained that it came from ships at sea washing out their peanut butter jars. Maybe one day Giscard would recognize his peanut butter foam. Some of us never do. The Arabs have a proverb: That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.

Inside the compound Hans had some duck and turkey pens, and Scotty and I had a patas monkey that we had inherited from the former vol. Patas monkeys are fairly good-sized reddish brown savannah monkeys. The female monkey was tied to a mango tree off to the side of our house. I hated that, but I couldn’t keep her in the house. She would chew through her rope from time to time. My house wasn’t all that far from open land, but she never left the compound. Instead, since she never bit anybody, I would let her terrorize the compound for a couple days. If someone left a door open, she would steal food. When she was loose, mine was often open with a convenient bowl of fruit on the table. A bit riskier, from time to time when the lady fruit sellers came into the compound with their platters on their heads, she would leap out of a tree on a back scattering fruit everywhere. Of course I would pay for the fruit. After the initial shock, the Chadian ladies would laugh good naturedly about it. When I decided it was time to put her back in her tree, I’d buy some chocolate bonbons. She loved chocolate. She was female. So I would stand by her tree and noisily eat bonbons, until she gave up and came over for some.

As the rainy season moved in, with Scotty in N’Djamena, the expats all leaving, and the electricity becoming more problematic, boredom settled down over everything. The house did have quite a few books, but I’m a fast reader, and soon the only book left was The Book of Mormon. The three page introduction, I believe called The Testimony of Joseph Smith, is actually a nice piece of creative science fiction. However Twain aptly described the main text as “chloroform in print.” I won’t critique it further. It is easy to mock someone else’s peanut butter foam. It was a mark of my desperation that I read it all the way through anyway.  Around that time the last of my expat acquaintances, Hans, left for vacation. Before he left he asked his cook to do something about the bee’s nest under the overhang of his tin roof. To paraphrase what Eldredge Cleaver said about Rosa Parks: That day somewhere in the universe a gear shifted.

The next morning I awoke to ungodly screeching. I ran to my front door and looked out. It was snowing, at least that was the first thing it looked like. Then I realized that bees filled the air. Most of the noise came from Hans’ duck pen, but some came from the monkey. I saw Hans’ cat running across his roof, swatting at bees. It backed up to the edge and fell off. Landing of course on its feet, it saw me and made a beeline (pun intended) straight for me. I opened the door. The cat ran in and cowered under the coffee table. I decided I had to try to save the monkey, so I donned layers of clothes, sunglasses, work gloves, and a motorcycle helmet and headed out. I’d made it about five steps when I was stung at least ten times. Worse, the bees kept going for my eyes. It was only a matter of time before they got around the side and under the glasses. Plus it was obvious that I would be stung several hundred times before I could free the monkey. Be they African or American, honey bees don’t pack much venom punch, but several hundred stings can kill you. I turned and ran back in. I was swatting the bees that came in with me, when someone pounded on the door. The monkey had chewed through the rope and wanted in. She ran under the coffee table too, grabbing and hugging the cat. I surmised that the thick leaves of the mango tree must have provided some protection. Still I half expected her to go into shock, but she survived, none of the blinded ducks did. And there we sat all that day and late into the next before the bees disappeared. Later I learned that that entire section of town had been shut down.

When the air cleared shortly before sunset on the second day, I decided to get out of stir and find a cold beer. There was a Chadian bar on the far side of town that I liked. I’d gone there once with my Chadian co-workers. So I headed out across town on my mobylette. I stopped on top of a rise to view an accident scene below. There was an ambulance and policemen and a victim. The victim was one of the ubiquitous thin old white-bearded men of Chad. He lay on the pavement beside his smashed bicycle. He was smashed too. Even from a distance I could see the odd angle of his leg, and jagged bones, and blood. The policemen were busy drawing a chalk outline around him. No one seemed concerned by his serious injuries. The old man had propped his elbow on the pavement to hold his head up. While he watched as the policemen chalked away, he had a look of utter disgust on his face. To me he seemed some Old Testament prophet prophesying doom. And I knew, as he knew, whose doom it was he prophesied.

I detoured around. As I drove, a full moon peeked above the horizon. Fitting. Although the phrase was not original to him, one of the older volunteers was fond of saying that one day in Chad they would discover immense deposits of time. On occasion I’d felt like I’d slipped into some alternate universe where the rules of time and space were slightly different. I called these “Fellini moments.” This seemed like one of them.

I walked through the enclosed bar to the brightly lit courtyard behind and ordered a beer. The tinny repetitive electric guitar music of West Africa played through bad speakers. I sat at an empty metal table and looked to the east. A huge yellow-orange moon rose behind a picket of kapok trees. The tall stark trees were eerie enough, with their broad fluked trunks near the ground. The full moon completed the scene. As I drank my beer, it started to snow again. I had a moment of panic before I realized that the air was filling with termites, not bees. Whenever the termites struck a wall, a chair, me, they dropped their wings and began to crawl. I looked around the courtyard. The Chadians were picking up termites and eating them. I was adventurous in those days. I tried a couple. Not much flavor, but they crunched nicely.

“Tonight is the night of the termites,” said a deep voice in booming French. At my side stood a big broad Chadian. From one of the southern tribes, he bore three large raised scars on his face, three arcs, one on each cheek and one on his forehead, suggesting a circle. “Tonight the young queen flies toward the full moon. She is bigger and stronger than any of the males. Only the strongest most determined male can fly as high as she can fly. When they collide they lose their wings and tumble leaflike back to earth, making love the whole way down. Where they land they form a new nest.” Then he waved his arms dismissively and gazed out with disdain over the termite filled courtyard. “These termites have mistaken bar lights for the moon.”

A FEW AMUSING GUINEA VIGNETTES (INCLUDING MY DR. STRANGELOVE STORY)

Tags

Africa, Dr. Strangelove, Earthquake, Guinea, Humor, Nonfiction, USAID

This is a collection of short amusing and/or interesting stories from my years in Guinea (1982-1985). It is a complement to my previous blog Sekou Toure’s Funeral.

One of the projects I oversaw in Guinea was a NGO Small Enterprise Project. In the absence of a banking system that would loan to small businesses, they would loan small amounts to worthwhile applicants. The project worked well because they were diligent in the approval process. The vast majority of people paid back their loans. A former PCV, Steve Connolly was the NGO on-site manager. From time to time I would ride with him as he looked over the applicant enterprises, any excuse to get out and about. One day we drove out to assess a poultry farm. We had no trouble finding the place. There was a huge professionally done sign proudly proclaiming the applicant’s poultry farm. It was a really beautiful sign. Unfortunately it sat in a barren field, not a coop or chicken to be seen anywhere. Instead of spending his money on infrastructure or livestock, it all went to impress us with a sign. We laughed and drove off.

I worked for USAID in offices inside the US Embassy in Conakry, and the US Ambassador had a tendency to call on me for odd jobs from time to time. It wasn’t like I could refuse. Once he asked me to escort a visiting Israeli military attaché upcountry for no particular purpose. The attaché didn’t seem to care where he went. He just wanted to see some of the country. So I drove him up to our big agricultural project where we had a contract team and a decent place to stay. That guy was impressive and friendly enough in a taciturn macho way. He looked like a commando. While up there he had an attack of kidney stones. They had to medevac him by helicopter. I can still hear him screaming. I guess if something hurts badly enough, we all scream.

There was an earthquake in a hilly/mountainous area of Guinea. We felt it in Conakry. I don’t remember what it registered, but it did a good bit of damage to the stone and concrete buildings near the epicenter. USAID had a technical office in Abidjan, Ivory Coast that served the region, providing engineers, agronomists, economists, and disaster relief specialists as needed. So they sent a lady named Sam over to assess the damage. I was the Conakry AID Affairs Office’s handy all purpose tool for that sort of thing, so they gave me a brand new Jeep Cherokee and told me to take her up to the site. My years of experience had taught me to plan for the worst, so I packed well.

It was a tricky trip because we had to travel on narrow mountain roads that now had loose boulders on them. We made it to the site and she did her thing. While there we experienced several aftershocks, which made the drive back more dangerous, the aftershocks having enhanced the obstacle course. A large boulder required that I drive near the edge of a cliff to get around it. For safety reasons I told Sam to get out and walk. I hadn’t anticipated the weakened shoulder collapsing. The front half of the vehicle hung out over the precipice at an angle. I crawled through the vehicle and out the back. I had a solid rope which I tied to rear chassis and then across the road to a tree, drawing it tight. Once that was secure, very carefully I worked my way out as far as I could go beside and partially underneath the jeep, until I managed to release the winch cable mounted on the front. I clung to bushes to keep from falling and half expected the jeep to crash down on me any minute. Sam was telling me not to do it the whole time. It was one of the scarier things I have ever done. I mean it was a brand new vehicle. I pulled the cable across and secured it to another tree at an angle from the first rope. At that point absent the road crumbling further the jeep was reasonably secure.

A local guy appeared. In Africa you can always count on somebody showing up no matter in what God forsaken place you find yourself. It’s reassuring. I asked him to go to the nearest village a few miles away and bring all hands. Then I removed blankets and provisions from the vehicle. Sam and I had lunch. For emergency purposes I had brought some camembert, pate, French crackers, and a nice Beaujolais. I even had a couple of wine glasses. Our straits aside, Sam seemed amused. A few hours later the whole village showed up. In order to get the front tires high enough to clear the edge, we had to bounce the jeep up and down and have everybody on the winch cable pull inward on the high bounce. The folks on the rope just had to keep up a steady pull. While waiting I had unloaded everything I could without significant risk to lighten the vehicle, not that that made much difference in the overall weight. My major concern was keeping people far enough back so that nobody would be hurt. It was touch and go, but somehow we managed to bounce the vehicle back on the road. I thanked them profusely and gave them all the money I had. We made it back without further incident. With a wry smile Sam thanked me for the adventure and the lunch. There were times in Africa when I felt that I had too much luck, that somebody had tilted the pinball machine in my favor. That was one of them.

One of my favorite movies is Dr. Strangelove, and whenever I watch it I flash back to Guinea. One morning the ambassador called me up to his office. He asked me to go down to the docks and go out with the Guinean Harbor Master to meet a navy cruiser that was bringing the fleet admiral in on a standard Show-The-Flag visit. It sounded like fun, but I did wonder why this task fell to me. I found out. In moderately rough seas we went out on a little tug boat to meet a very big ship. Cruisers are huge. When we got to it they threw a rope ladder over the side. It was a long way up in choppy waters. My oh-so-careful ascent garnered a few smiles. For the next few days I became the embassy liaison to the navy for a variety of logistical tasks. What the hey, they served great ice cream on board.

On the admiral’s last night the ambassador held a dinner for him, to which I was invited. Everyone else there was either a career diplomat or a naval officer. I’ve known many ambassadors, and honestly I rarely met one I didn’t like. They were bastions of sanity compared to some of the USAID Directors I have encountered. I guess I had mentally placed admirals in the same category. So I was caught off guard when after thanking me for my assistance and getting a little chuckle in about the rope ladder, the admiral began to wax philosophic about the Vietnam War. Sterling Hayden could have played him. He went on and on about how the war could have been won if we’d taken the next logical step and defoliated the rice fields in southern China. My God! Funny thing was all the diplomats and subordinate officers nodded their heads in agreement, like everything he said was perfecly reasonable. I guess that is what they are trained to do. Kudos to their training. I was the only loose cannon on deck. Several of the diplomats glanced nervously at me. I wanted to ask the admiral if he had considered that that might have made the Chinese very very angry, but I was a good boy and kept my mouth shut. Still it was a chilling thought that in the mid-eighties we still had very high level people who thought that way. Then again he was commanding the fleet off the coast of West Africa. Kind of hard to start World War III from there. Hard but Sterling Hayden might have managed it.

Listening to pundits give their opinions about the economy brought a story to mind. I was visiting a forestry project upcountry. David Laframboise was the NGO on-site manager. I liked David and his African wife and always enjoyed getting out of the capital. He and I headed out in his small jeep to visit a village woodlot. It had been raining, and since we were on a very rough little road, the jeep got stuck. We took turns, one pushing and the other driving, with no success. Soon we were both covered in mud and still very stuck. Rummaging in the back of a jeep, I found a board. We wedged it under one rear tire and tried again, but the other tire just sank deeper. Then we tried the other rear tire, with the same result reversed. Wiping mud from my face, I looked at David: “You know David, if we just had another board, we could get out of this mess.” He looked back at me: “What are you, an economist?”