On The Road - South Africa

D.I.Y. Africa

BY SETH KUGEL

MARCH 28, 2014

It was a daunting challenge for a lone traveler in the African bush: Using only a tiny $23-a-day Fiat and my wits, I had to sneak around the six sleeping lions blocking the gravelly road ahead.

Much as I wished I could watch them for an hour and then double back, I was late for curfew at Crocodile Bridge Rest Camp, 15 miles ahead, and at South Africa’s Kruger National Park in February, vehicles must be off the roads by 6:30 p.m.

The prudent approach seemed to be to inch forward, slowly. If a Fiat could tiptoe, this is what it would look like.

The two closest lions kept on snoozing, ribs heaving so rapidly they must have been racing after a delicious impala in their dreams. Then, at 10 feet, the female jumped up and stared straight at me. Juggling my camera, the steering wheel and the (left-side) stick shift, I hastily backed up and was edging forward again when, heart pounding, I realized my window was open.

When most people imagine their bucket-list African safari, they’re in the back of an open 4x4, nothing to worry about but their cameras, as their expert guide keeps an eye out for cheetah tracks and rhino dung. Then it’s back to the luxury lodge to doff their pith hats, enjoy a sundowner and relive the day’s sightings.

Such comfort is far beyond the scope of many travelers, and certainly of the Frugal Traveler. But as South Africans already know, there’s a cheaper alternative. By driving yourself, cooking for yourself and camping, you can do Kruger for around $100 per couple per day, including everything but airfare. Prefer a bed? Reserve a “safari tent” instead and make that $120.

The self-drive safari wasn’t the only cheaper — and to me, equally appealing — alternative during my 16-day trip to southern Africa in February. I chose the simple charms of a $14-a-night mountain camp in Swaziland over the usual draws of that tiny monarchy — the touristy attractions in the Ezulwini Valley, home to its polygamous King Mswati III. I stayed in feisty Durban instead of its famously dazzling cousin down the coast, Cape Town.

(As recounted in previous columns, which you can find on the Frugal Traveler topic page, I also traded overwhelming Johannesburg for the compelling history of Soweto and visited Mozambique, a less touristy alternative to South Africa itself.)

The result was perhaps rougher than a traditional itinerary — traveling in Africa can often be a challenge — but also more rewarding, and rarely lacking excitement.

Where was I? Ah yes, facing a ferocious lion with my window wide open. I rolled it up and temporarily backed away. Now that everyone was awake, I drove through, hugging the opposite side of the road as the lions trotted into the bush. My heart continued to pound as I replayed the scene again and again. That lasted about two minutes, until three giraffes ambled onto the road in front of me.

It was the closest encounter I had with wildlife, but not by much. With no guide and using only maps, tactical advice from a whiskey-drinking Afrikaner in the tent next to mine and (when cell coverage allowed) the occasional tweeted tip, I saw thousands of impala, hundreds of zebras, dozens of elephants and giraffes and blue wildebeests, six white rhinos and plenty of half-submerged hippos (including one doing a 360-degree roll in the water, exposing an immense pink belly). Then there was a troop of baboons, some with babies hanging from their underbellies or riding piggyback, that took over the road like a swarm of locusts.

Punctuating all this were some sublime solo moments. Alone at an isolated waterhole, I watched an elegant saddle-billed stork snapping what I assumed were fish with its magnificent red and black and yellow bill. Another time, I saw a rhino padding up the dirt road ahead. Keeping my distance, I watched his huge body stop to munch grass. He soon had company, as birds alighted on his back to munch on ticks. I stared down a green snake at eye level in a roadside bush — was it a rare spotting of the aggressive eastern green mamba or the more common (but still venomous) boomslang? (In retrospect, I should have rolled up my window then, too.)

Friends who heard I’d be camping in a game reserve had alternatively romanticized it (“Sleeping under the African sky, epic,” one wrote me) or imagined me trampled by elephants. But really, the two spots I camped in were not unlike those I’ve stayed in in Sweden or New Zealand. I set up my two-man tent among friendly Afrikaners who invariably had far more luxurious setups. On a third night, I opted for a safari tent, a rustic but quite comfortable permanent structure with comfortable twin beds, a porch and refrigerator.

Some exhausting driving aside, there wasn’t much of a difference between my trip and a guided safari, at least in terms of spotting big game. For those looking for anecdotes and tips and a break from driving, though, 220.20 rand (about $11 at 10.5 rand to the dollar) will net you a guide. I opted for one such trip out of Lower Sabie camp at sunset — and within minutes the group was slack-jawed, transfixed by a leopard perched high up in a leafless deadwood tree. We also got a lesson on details like telling white rhino dung versus black rhino dung.

I’ve wanted to visit Swaziland, a short drive south from Kruger, since childhood, though for reasons specific to a geography-obsessed kid: I thought its name was cool, its spears-and-shield flag awesome, and its existence as a small, pea-shaped country landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique, and still ruled by what most consider to be an absolute monarchy, an odd quirk of history.

I eschewed the standard Swaziland itinerary — game parks, casinos and the Ezulwini Valley, home base of the monarchy, where you can do such things as visit a “cultural village” and see art shows and music performances at a place called House of Fire — in favor of Shewula Mountain Camp, in the country’s far northeast; it had been highly recommended by someone I met in Kruger as a rustic resort run by villagers with a very light touch. The price was light, too — 150 rand for a dorm bed in a rondavel, a modernized thatched roof structure. (The Swazi lilangeni is pegged to the rand and both are accepted all over the country.) Avoiding the trappings of monarchy had another advantage — avoiding controversy. A pro-democracy movement has urged foreign performers and fans to boycott the country, affecting tourism.

It took just minutes to like Swaziland. First, there were the infinite shades of green, sometimes layered one upon another in the same panorama, from the yellow-green of withering sugar-cane leaves all the way to the deep, shadowy green of distant mountains. And then, turning up the 10-mile rutted, burnt-orange dirt road that led through Shewula village to the camp, things took on a surreal look of another time: Children waved as I passed a mix of traditional thatched houses and more modern concrete structures.

Of course, what you see is rarely the full story. I was not surprised to hear from Kayise, the woman who greeted me at the camp, that the village was very poor and ravaged (like much of the country) by AIDS. One sign the Mountain Camp was a homegrown operation: I couldn’t get a clear explanation of how revenue from the camp (founded by the local chief) helped local residents. A more polished operation would have surely had a sound bite ready.

The mountaintop camp itself was tidy and modest — until I got to its edge, where I found a sweeping view of mountains and valleys stretching out below. Saving two of the camp’s few activities (a 100-rand traditional dinner of chicken and peanut sauce and a 40-rand village tour) for the next day, I decided to simply wander into the village.

Just a couple of minutes down the road, I came across a field of kids in a full-scale pickup soccer game. They practically pulled me into the game; I handed my camera to a 14-year-old named Myeni, showed her how to shoot video and made my first appearance as a goalkeeper in 18 years.

The next day, I suggested to the camp’s only other guest, a young South African named Maria, who was carless, that we take a road trip. She agreed, and we chose what looked like the closest city of any significance, Siteki. What had been described in a tourism guide as a “charming” regional capital was actually a rather dusty town, but it was Sunday, and so congregants were returning from church in either their natty best or brightly colored robes. The doors to the High Praise Assembly church were wide open, and we poked our heads in. “We’re just wandering around,” I explained to a group of women who seemed perplexed by my curiosity.

“You should have been wandering around at 10 this morning,” one girl said. “You would have seen us dance.” Note to self: Next time you head to Siteki on a Sunday, get there by 10.

We went into the only spot we could find for lunch, the Lamatikweni Pub and Restaurant, a simple operation with a few shelves of sodas and snacks in the front and a steam table farther back. We ordered what the server called “beans with bones,” an irresistible and pretty accurate name of a tasty dish (the beef bones still had a little meat hanging off them). With another plate of stewed chicken and vegetables, and entree and drinks, our total was 67 rand.

From dusty town to metropolis: I had chosen coastal Durban as an alternative to Cape Town because it was supposed to be less beautiful but more diverse and friendlier. I am always wary of entire populations being described as friendly, but in the day and a half I spent there, a stranger bought me a beer during lunch, a taxi driver abandoned the cab line to lead me to his favorite local restaurant, and even a convenience-store clerk — often the surliest of professions — perkily asked where I was from and wished me a good stay. And I had just bought a water.

In a roll of the dice, I had decided to book a room through the website Hostelworld at Neil’s Backpacker’s and Guest House, which had few online reviews but seemed quirky. Indeed. The house, on a leafy block not convenient to public transportation, was huge and inhabited solely by Neil Snyman (a South African, age: “of the Woodstock music generation”); his dog, Zuma, named for the South African president, Jacob Zuma, though before he was elected; and the occasional guest.

Neil is an incredibly nice guy, an accomplished music producer and a conspiracy theorist, though he would object to being called the latter, arguing that conspiracies are not theories but reality.

I arrived at night, and we went out for an evening of Indian food and Namibian beer (Neil considers South African beer impure), and he gave me several excellent Durban pointers, the intriguing story of how he got into African music, and how the National Security Agency regularly shuts down his computer. My creatively painted, decently appointed room was a bargain at 240 rand a night, though window shades would have been nice.

On Neil’s recommendation, I went to lunch on my second day at Gounden’s, which is one of the more legendary purveyors of the dish Durban is famous for: bunny chow — curry stuffed into a hollowed-out half- or quarter-loaf of white bread. I ordered the mutton version — full of meat, a spicy kick, very filling, and just 40 rand.

Durban’s main attraction is the Golden Mile, a strip of beaches and piers linked by a palm-lined, runner- and biker-friendly promenade that was overhauled for the World Cup in 2010 and is still looking mighty good. Though it lacked the sheer beauty of the Cape Town coast, it was a world to itself. Nowhere is the city’s diversity — blacks and whites and Indians and Muslims and tourists — more evident. Joggers in tank tops and running shorts breezed through, a woman in a hijab trotted after her daughter in a summery red dress, Indians crowded the boardwalk restaurants, a leather-skinned middle-age white surfer emerged from the water, a black soccer team trained on the sand.

Durban wasn’t all wonderful. I left without much sense of its racial history — perhaps because I found the place dedicated to that topic, the (free) KwaMuhle Museum, hard to navigate and confusing for anyone without a working knowledge of, say, the 1959 beer hall riots.

And the city is a bit rough-and-tumble. In the bustling downtown area known as Grey Street I witnessed a disturbing scene: a pickpocket chased down by a security guard and beaten bloody rather than turned over to the police.

“Rough justice,” explained a taxi driver named Krish Moodley, who turned out to be the experience’s silver lining for me: He promptly abandoned his front spot in a taxi line and took me to a nearby Pakistani restaurant, Al-Khair. As I ordered prawns karahi and garlic nan, he gave a more coherent version of Durban history, through his own experiences, growing up nearby when the area was almost entirely Indian.

There were other downsides to taking the alternative route. I found out later I had missed Swaziland’s Marula Festival, which celebrates its namesake fruit and the “beer” made from it, at the very royal residence I had purposefully avoided. (Instead, I tasted marula beer in a traditional home during a very unscripted 40-rand village tour in Shewula.)

But as for finding yourself utterly alone on a winding dirt road, eating your lunch as the rhinoceros 10 yards ahead eats his, I’m not sure there’s an alternative to that at all.

 

Correction: April 1, 2014
An earlier version of this article described incorrectly Cape Town’s location along South Africa’s coast. It is situated down the coast from Durban, not up.

IF YOU GO
Whether you’re willing to camp or need somewhat cushier accommodations, a trip to Kruger or other African parks like it will be far cheaper than moderately priced package safaris. Here’s a guide to planning and pricing.
Make sure your dates in Kruger do not coincide with school holidays in South Africa (schoolterms.co.za), when you’ll be competing for space both at campsites and on the roads. Avoid weekends as much as possible.
Book a flight. I was shocked to pay only $1,175 for a round-trip nonstop from New York to Johannesburg on South Africa Airways; as of this writing, a $1,198 fare is available online for many spring dates.
Rent a car. I did at the huge Avis operation at the Johannesburg airport for $23 a day. If you take a quick flight to Nelspruit, you’ll avoid the four- to six-hour drive to Kruger — but it can be a pleasant one, especially if you listen to SAfm, which is like NPR except with awesome accents.
Budget for gas. I used about 120 rand ($11.50 at 10.5 rand to the dollar) of gas per day in Kruger, about a quarter of a tank; you’ll also need gas to get there and back.
Stop at a supermarket on your way to Kruger, but only for basics. I spent $30 for three days and didn’t eat half of what I bought. Stores within Kruger have most of what you’ll need anyway, at reasonable prices. For a couple, $15 per day is more than enough.
Calculate park admission, called conservation fees. For short stays, adults pay 248 rand per day in the park, children under 12 pay half. But anyone staying six days or more should get a yearly pass called the Wild Card. It’s 1,610 rand for an individual, 2,610 per couple and 3,120 per family. A couple staying a week ends up paying 373 rand a day.
Book lodging. There are about three dozen camps throughout the park, which is about the size (and shape) of Israel. Accommodations can get luxurious, but budget travelers should opt to camp (about 215 rand per couple per night) or take one of the lower end options, like “safari tents” with comfortable beds, a fridge and a porch (but communal facilities) for about 470 rand. Book at sanparks.org/parks/kruger.
Other tips. Buy a map of the park and a basic bird-spotting guide at any camp store; they’re cheap. Follow the advice of Danie, an Afrikaner and a Kruger veteran who camped next to me one night, and drive in the park with windows down, radio and air-conditioning off and ears open. Ask people what they’ve seen and where. Don’t be in a rush — sit still and watch; allow scenes to unfold. And a final tip from me: Don’t forget to look in the trees for birds — and leopards.
Seth Kugel writes the Frugal Traveler column. Read more of his southern Africa reports at nytimes.com/frugaltraveler.
Follow Seth on his frugal adventures via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2014, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: D.I.Y. Africa
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/travel/diy-africa.html?_r=0

No Grid Means Everyone Is Off The Grid

   When there is no grid everyone is off the grid............

   Much of Africa also went to 4G cell phone without ever having 3G........   When there is no grid, possibilities for solar are massive. Kerosene or solar?

Can Kenya Light The Way Toward A Clean-Energy Economy?

11/12/2013 @ 10:32AM

By Smithsonian, an Energy Realities Partner
The absence of a robust fossil fuel infrastructure makes the African nation ripe for energy innovation.
In the United States, we tend to think of electricity as something that is either on or off. You either have power, or you don’t. But in Nairobi, Kenya, electricity is experienced more like the hot water in an old building: sputtering, low-voltage brownouts contrast with sudden voltage spikes and power surges. Inconsistent electrical power does more harm than a suddenly ice-cold shower; refrigerators, computers and manufacturing equipment are frequently damaged, and routines are disrupted. Power outages cost the country an estimated 2 percent of gross domestic product annually.
That’s because the country’s power plants can provide just 1.2 gigawatts of electricity. The United States has more than 960 gigawatts of capacity, and one of its largest utilities, American Electric Power, serves about 5 million customers with its 38 gigawatts of generating capacity. In Kenya, that 1.2 gigawatt capacity serves more than 10 million customers, including homes, businesses and industry—less than 30 percent of the entire country’s population. The remaining 70 percent have no electricity at all.
Kenya’s “Vision 2030” plan, widely praised when it was announced in 2008, calls for 10 percent annual economic growth, and estimates that at least 20 gigawatts of new energy capacity will need to come online in the next decade to support it. To achieve that goal, dozens of efforts are underway to aggressively expand Kenya’s electric power infrastructure and, in doing so, to “leapfrog” over fossil fuels toward a clean-energy economy.
The idea of leapfrogging first emerged when cellphones swept the continent, bypassing traditional landline technology. The number of cellphones in use in Africa ballooned to more than 615 million in 2011, from 16.5 million a decade earlier—a surge that ever since has spurred optimism among everyone from local politicians and NGOs to international businesses and media that other cutting edge technologies could carve a similar trajectory. Because of the opportunities opened up by Vision 2030 and other factors, nowhere does this excitement run higher than in Kenya’s energy sector.
Taking the leap
The lack of an incumbent telecommunications industry or existing telephony infrastructure played a critical role in the cellphone’s success in Africa, and for many, the absence of existing energy infrastructure suggests that the country has a similar opportunity to adopt and scale the use of new technologies quickly, avoiding the mistakes of the past. In this case, that means avoiding the fossil-fuel-lined path to development.
“In many ways, the beauty of Africa is that you’re almost starting with a blank canvas,” says Bob Chestnutt, a London-based project director for Aldwych International, which is developing a 300-megawatt wind farm near Kenya’s Lake Turkana. “You really do have the opportunity to be innovative. You’re not dealing with the legacy of 40, 50 years of fossil generation.”
Renewables to the rescue?
Kenya is particularly well positioned for an end-run around fossil fuels. Its location along the equator bestows the country with plentiful sunlight (on average, each square meter collects an estimated 4.5 kilowatt-hours per day of solar radiation, which can be converted to electricity; a more northern climate like Boston would be expected to get about 3.6 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day). In the Lake Turkana region, Kenya also has some of the world’s greatest wind potential. And the Great Rift Valley, which carves a jagged arc through the heart of Kenya, sits atop a hot spot in the earth’s crust that creates ideal conditions for geothermal wells. At a policy level, it doesn’t hurt that Kenya has dropped its import duties on renewable energy technologies.
Much of the nation’s energy today comes from large hydropower projects, many of them part of a series of linked dams and reservoirs known as the Seven Forks scheme. Located primarily along the Tana and Turkwel rivers, hydropower provides about 800 megawatts of electricity to Kenya’s grid. However, there’s little room for hydropower to grow; many rivers run dry for a good portion of the year, limiting their ability to provide consistent electricity.
Developers have already begun to tap into new energy opportunities, with geothermal leading the way. By next year, a series of geothermal wells will provide 280 megawatts of power to the grid, up from 157 megawatts today. By 2030, geothermal power is expected to meet more than a quarter of the country’s energy needs. “Geothermal is a very stable, sustainable source,” says Gregory Ngahu, a spokesman for Kenya Power, the nation’s only electric utility. “It’s quite robust.”
Wind and hydropower projects account for more than 95 percent of the rest of the new capacity planned through 2030. Yet renewables are not a shoo-in for Kenya’s electrification push. Over the last few years, Kenya has discovered oil, natural gas and coal deposits within its borders, tempting some to consider expansion of traditional fossil-fuel capacity. Hydropower has stumbled as climate change-linked droughts reduce water flow through critical rivers. And solar isn’t part of the Vision 2030 plan.
Another challenge for renewables is the need for new infrastructure to connect large projects to the grid. Led by state-backed organizations, Kenya’s power industry is building out several transmission lines to import power from neighboring Ethiopia, and also to bring electricity from new renewable projects to population centers where it’s needed. Developers of the Lake Turkana wind farm, for example, are building a 428-kilometer (266-mile) high-voltage transmission line from Lake Turkana to the existing grid. Crossing the geothermal-rich Rift Valley, the line will pave the way for future energy projects, Aldwych’s Chestnutt says. “Now, developers will take the initiative.”

Cutting the cord
Despite these efforts, the majority of Kenya’s population won’t gain access to electricity from these sources. Even though urban areas are growing dramatically, most Kenyans live far from the grid in rural towns and villages. And those who do live close to the grid can’t always tap into its benefits. Kenya Power charges approximately $400 USD per household for a grid connection.
“That is so far away, if you’re a poor Kenyan family,” says Jon Bøhmer, founder of Nairobi-based Kyoto Energy. “There are many places where the power lines cross over people’s huts and they have no way to connect to the grid.”
As a result, there’s a growing recognition that serving these areas will require a different approach. Locating a variety of smaller-scale resources in a single location, close to demand, could help expand energy access more quickly. Startups, nonprofits and even Kenya Power are all beginning to look to solar-based microgrids—small, self-contained power grids—as one possible solution.
While individual solar lighting systems, like the d.Light, have received much positive press in the U.S. and Europe, microgrids have the potential to power local industries. Bøhmer, a Norwegian software engineer who in 2006 moved with his Kenyan wife to Thika, near Nairobi, has introduced a solar microgrid system specifically for this market.
“Silicon Valley entrepreneurs come in saying, ‘We raised $3 million from a venture capitalist in San Francisco,’ with their 3-watt solar panel and LED light,” says Bøhmer. “They think they’ve sorted it out. Sure, now someone has lights and can charge their mobile. Great. But in the West, when you got power, you could run a machine, and build a business. That business could grow and build an entire industry. That kind of story is not possible, if you’re going to do it with these dead-end, stop-gap solutions.”
Bøhmer’s solution, dubbed the Butterfly Solar Farm, uses concentrating solar photovoltaics (PV) to generate electricity and captures solar thermal energy to heat water. His first customer is a commercial tea producer whose operations include both agricultural and drying facilities.
The first pilot project, planned for later this year, will place the concentrating system’s solar-tracking mirrors, or heliostats, among the bushes in the existing tea fields—a kind of triple-cropping arrangement that produces tea along with 1 megawatt of electricity and 2.5 megawatts of heat. The heat is used in the drying facility, reducing dependence on wood-fired heat, and the electricity provides power to 7,000 on-site homes. Bøhmer estimates that the project will have a four-year payback period.
In the northern part of the country, Kenya Power has 10 microgrids with capacities ranging from 5 to 10 megawatts in pilot phase. Most of them were built in off-grid areas using diesel generators over the past several years; today, the utility is beginning to add a solar resource to the mix. During the day, solar power feeds directly into the regional distribution network, and at night, diesel generation fills the gap.
“Operating diesel plants becomes very expensive and unsustainable,” says Kenya Power’s Ngahu. “We are eventually going solar throughout.”
Terry Mohn, CEO of General Microgrids, which has offices in Nairobi and San Diego, California, advocates for “opportunistic” microgrids that leverage a wider range of local energy resources, such as solar, biogas or small-scale hydro. No matter what the energy source, microgrids can provide reliable shared energy infrastructure while slashing the need for large-scale transmission infrastructure.
Efficiency first
If these efforts seem small, that’s because they are.
Kenya’s per-capita consumption of electric power in 2010 was less than one-tenth the global average for nations considered middle income, such as Argentina, India and South Africa. Even with expanded generating capacity, the available supply for households isn’t likely to grow quickly. Because much of the planned growth in Kenya’s power is intended to support industrialization and tourism, limiting the growth of residential use will be critical to the success of the plan.
For that reason, one of the key “leapfrog” opportunities that may exist in Kenya is an opportunity to develop an energy policy where efficiency comes first. Implemented at the outset, efficiency efforts can give Kenya more bang for every buck it invests in new capacity.
One way to improve efficiency of the overall system is to meet some energy demands with heat instead of electricity. The central government has introduced programs aimed at spreading the use of solar thermal water heaters to harness the sun’s warmth for household water heating. Some innovators are looking for new ways to satisfy thermal needs on the industrial side, too. “Many industrial operations are still using wood fuel to power their boilers,” says Ernest Chitechi, Outreach and Partnership Manager for the nonprofit Kenya Climate Innovation Center, or CIC. As a substitute, the organization is working with entrepreneurs to develop a biomass briquette based on pineapple waste.

But the real challenge will be in controlling electricity usage where there is no substitute.
Pre-payment brings power to the people
Pre-paid electrical meters mirror the ubiquitous pre-paid cellphone. Users can purchase energy “tokens” from a handful of providers (including mobile payment providers). Each token has a 20-digit number that can be entered into an electric meter to unlock the purchased amount of electricity. Users pay higher prices per kilowatt-hour as they consume more electricity.
These increases are quickly recognizable by the user, encouraging conservation. At least, that’s the idea. In practice, some complain that rate information isn’t transparent enough, and that different token providers charge wildly variable service fees, confusing pricing signals to customers. Further consumer education is likely needed to ensure that they achieve these goals.
But pre-paid meters have another advantage. Like the rest of Kenya’s electrification initiative, they feed into the country’s broader economic development plan: The program is supporting new job growth, as vendors are needed to sell the energy tokens. In the mobile market, a similar marketing model created 100,000 new direct jobs.
Pre-payment has also helped the utility shore up cash reserves, because customers can’t miss payments. In September 2012, Business Daily Africa reported that by June of 2011, Kenya Power had already accumulated Sh7.4 billion ($84 million) in unpaid electricity bills for the year. With pre-payment, those funds can be used to further invest in its electrification program.
Renewable energy entrepreneurs are looking to the success of the model as a way to introduce their products to rural Kenyans, as well. “In most cases, people may not have adequate resources to invest in the upfront costs,” says Chitechi. “It’s one of the biggest barriers to adoption.”
Stima, Angaza and Azuri are among the startups offering pay-as-you-go solar, which allow users to install a few, small solar panels at a time, with no up-front cost. To access power from their panels, customers buy energy credits using a mobile payment system. Unlike the utility-installed pre-paid meters, however, solar customers can eventually pay off their solar panels and permanently “unlock” access to the electricity. Two entrepreneurs at the CIC are also looking at ways to leverage pre-payment to finance the up-front cost of renewable energy systems.
If innovations like these can support cleaner, more efficient energy use for urban and rural customers alike, Kenya just may have a chance to make the hop toward a strong, low-carbon economy.

Smithsonian magazine informs and inspires readers with knowledge they can trust through a balanced editorial blend of topical, relevant issues and historical perspective. Always respecting the intelligence of the Smithsonian reader, our writers deliver the highest quality editorial, sharing knowledge and educating our readers. Every month Smithsonian leads the conversation with coverage of culture in all its forms, including travel, the arts, history, biography, science and the natural world, through narrative, photography and first-hand reporting.
This article is also published on the Energy Realities website.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/statoil/2013/11/12/can-kenya-light-the-way-toward-a-clean-energy-economy/

“the terrifying exactitude of memory”

The things people in glass houses do......... maybe Mr. Ryan can eat rotten potatoes for a few days.....

An Irish girl guarding her family’s last few possessions after eviction for nonpayment of rent, during the potato famine. A wood engraving from The Illustrated London News, April 1886. Credit Print Collector/Getty Images

Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia

IN advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

What was a tired and untrue trope back then is a tired and untrue trope now. What was a distortion of human nature back then is a distortion now. And what was a misread of history then is a misread now.

Ryan boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he said last year during a forum on immigration.

BUT with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish died — one in eight people.

“The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine,” wrote the fiery essayist John Mitchel, whose words bought him a ticket to the penal colony of Tasmania.

What infuriated Mitchel was that the Irish were starving to death at the very time that rich stores of grain and fat livestock owned by absentee landlords were being shipped out of the country. The food was produced by Irish hands on Irish lands but would not go into Irish mouths, for fear that such “charity” would upset the free market, and make people lazy.

Ryan’s running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney, made the Tory case with his infamous remark that 47 percent of Americans are moochers, “dependent upon government.” Part of that dependence, he said, extended to people “who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Food — the gall!

You can’t make these kinds of heartless remarks unless you think the poor deserve their fate — that they have a character flaw, born of public assistance. And there hovers another awful haunt of Irish history. In 2012, Ryan said that the network of programs for the American poor made people not want to work.

On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.

“The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect,” said Christine Kinealy, a professor of Irish studies and director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. “It’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.”

And it wasn’t true. The typical desperation scene of the famine was the furthest thing from a day in the hammock. Here’s what one Quaker relief agent, William Bennett, found in a visit to County Mayo in 1847:

“We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly ... perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.”

For his role in the famine, Trevelyan was knighted. The Irish remember him differently. At Quinnipiac’s Great Hunger Museum hangs a picture of this English gentleman with a dedication: “For crimes against humanity, never brought to justice.”

Irish Alzheimer’s, goes the joke, is to forget everything but the grudges — in the case of the great famine, for good reason. What Alexis de Tocqueville called “the terrifying exactitude of memory” is burned into Ireland’s soil. But more than forgetting, Paul Ryan never learned.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 16, 2014, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/paul-ryans-irish-amnesia.html

Classical Music and Spoken Word; In Yiddish

Kissin offers Jewish composers, Yiddish poets in striking concert departure

By Anne Midgette, Published: February 21 | Updated: Saturday, February 22, 12:42 PM

Evgeny Kissin is widely known as one of the greatest living pianists, a superstar, and, like many big-league musicians, a citizen of the world. He is also known as a pianist of Russian Jewish extraction. He is hardly known at all as an Israeli, and for good reason. He took Israeli citizenship only last December.
And he is emphatically not known, outside a small circle, as someone who recites Yiddish poetry from memory, much less as someone who does it during his concerts. Yet that’s exactly what he’s going to do Monday night at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.
Kissin’s concert is jointly presented by the Kennedy Center and Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit group devoted to presenting works by Jewish composers. Getting a star of Kissin’s caliber to play little-known or obscure works — pieces by Ernest Bloch, Alexander Veprik, Alexander Krein and Moses Milner — is something of a feat. Getting him to recite Yiddish poems by Hayim Nahman Bialik, Israel’s unofficial poet laureate, and Isaac Leib Peretz, who helped gain recognition for Yiddish as an autonomous language, was not something anyone would have thought of asking; it was Kissin’s own idea. Kissin has already done this on a few occasions; he has even recorded two spoken CDs of Yiddish poetry.
“It’s unusual,” said James Loeffler, Pro Musica Hebraica’s resident scholar, of the Kennedy Center concert. “But it also affords a very dramatic window into Kissin’s intense mind at its most revealing. He’s a cipher, you know. But his deep love for these eloquent chestnuts of Yiddish verse is actually a fascinating phenomenon.”
Kissin, 42, is not a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy. Sporting a mop of curly hair over wide-set dark eyes, his scrolled lips often locked in a wondering half-smile, he tends to take the stage with brusque efficiency, plunge into his music, seal-bark the names of his encores, and resist telephone interviews with reporters in favor of e-mails, when possible. He’s direct, he’s no-nonsense, and he projects an air of detachment. Yet when it comes to Judaism and Israel, he can be surprisingly effusive.
“If I, as a human being and artist represent anything in the world, it is my Jewish people,” he said in a statement last fall when he was sworn in as an Israeli citizen, “and therefore Israel is the only state on our planet which I want to represent with my art and all my public activities, no matter where I live. When Israel’s enemies try to disrupt concerts of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra or the Jerusalem Quartet” — as they did in 2011 and 2010 in London — “I want them to come and make troubles at my concerts, too: because Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared of the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”
This from a man who was raised in the Soviet Union, has never been religiously observant, and came to some aspects of Judaism — for instance, a mastery of the Yiddish language — only in adulthood. “As a child, I used to hear my grandparents speak it a lot,” he said by e-mail, “so a nostalgic feeling for that language remained in me and I felt a desire to learn it.”
“He learned Yiddish to such perfection,” said Neil Levin, the artistic director of the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, “that you cannot believe this is not 150 years ago and he is in secular Yiddish poetry circles in Poland.”
When you look at Kissin’s performance calendar, flexibility is not the first word that comes to mind. Since last fall, he has played a single recital program — music by Schubert and Scriabin — and he will continue playing it in venues around the world until June. He will then perform Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with several different orchestras before moving on to another recital program in November.
But he seems to have no particular resistance to learning new music, as long as it meets his standards of quality. The current concert came about when Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who founded Pro Musica Hebraica with his wife, Robyn, in 2008, met Kissin at a reception after a concert a couple of years ago.
“He wanted to be shown that there was very good music of the kind we believe ought to be played,” Krauthammer said, “classical Jewish music. But he was very open-minded about it. . . . We sent him stuff and he either approvingly responded or disapprovingly, until we found what he wanted.”
Reading poetry was not part of the original conception. The presenters planned to put Kissin on stage with Maxim Vengerov, the violinist, but plans for that venture broke down. Yet it seemed impractical to ask a star pianist to learn an entire evening’s worth of new music. “That’s when we came up with the idea of the poetry,” Krauthammer said.
Outside observers aren’t quite sure what to make of this. But there’s no questioning the sincerity of Kissin’s gesture. “He’s going to recite Yiddish poetry, which is a level of identification with Jewish culture that is very deep and very rare,” said Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the New Republic. “There aren’t a lot of people who can do that anymore. For someone of his generation to get up and proudly recite Yiddish,” he continued, is unusual — not least because Yiddish, long the vernacular of international Judaism, was severely proscribed in the early days of the state of Israel, seen as a language of oppression and the diaspora.
Taking Israeli citizenship was an idealistic, striking, and brave thing to do. “It is a countercultural act of dissent, nothing less,” said Wieseltier, pointing to what he sees as a current fashion for putting down Israel in academia — witness the boycott of Israeli educational institutions by the American Studies Association — and culture. “It’s obviously a gesture of pure integrity and principle,” Wieseltier added, “because nobody gets handsomely rewarded for Jewish patriotism.”
It remains to be seen how well Monday’s unorthodox presentation goes over on an artistic level. Kissin is not the first concert pianist to give poetry readings — Alfred Brendel has published several volumes of his own work — but mingling music and poetry is often seen as being slightly minor-league. Tzimon Barto was castigated by critics for offering one of his own poems before his encore at a Philadelphia Orchestra concert in 2004, and when Van Cliburn recited a poem from the stage in 1989, a reviewer likened it to “some ladies’ musicale in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was born.”
Kissin, of course, will be reading great poetry by other poets rather than his own work, in a language unknown to most of his audience. “I think it is very much like performing music,” he said of his recitations. But he can’t pretend to bring the same expertise to poetry recitation that he brings to playing the piano, as he’s the first to admit. “I want to make it clear that playing music is my profession,” he wrote, “whereas reciting poetry is my hobby.”
As for the music, Kissin said he is solidly behind the works on this program, which focuses on Russian composers of the early 20th century who pioneered the exploration of Jewish folk themes in concert music. There are clear parallels, Loeffler points out: Like Kissin, these composers grew up non-observant and became more deeply involved with their own Judaism the more they learned about it.
“I’ll keep playing all of them for as long as I’m alive,” Kissin wrote.
Levin, of the Milken Archive, has higher hopes. The Milken Archive shares a general goal with Pro Musica Hebraica: to spread the word about Jewish composers. “If somebody like Kissin champions it, that really is the ultimate hope,” he said, citing Artur Rubinstein’s support of Albéniz and de Falla, which helped bring them into the musical mainstream. “If there’s anybody in the world who can do it,” Levin said, “it is Kissin.”
But as this pianist prepares to show another, more personal side of himself, not even the presenters are sure what to expect.
“Well, the people are warned,” Krauthammer said. “We’re not springing this on anybody.”

Evgeny Kissin will play at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. Monday.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/kissin-offers-jewish-composers-yiddish-poets-in-striking-concert-departure/2014/02/20/02320e30-988d-11e3-8461-8a24c7bf0653_story.html

Family History In The Spanish Inquisition

In Spain, a Family Reunion, Centuries Later

By DOREEN CARVAJALAPRIL 4, 2014

At twilight, I roamed a honey-colored labyrinth of brick houses in Segovia’s medieval Jewish quarter, walking a cobblestone path in the footsteps of my distant ancestor from 16 generations ago.

In the shadows, I reminded myself that every element in his story is true: a Vatican power struggle; an Inquisition trial that confused our family’s religious identity for generations; and a neighborhood infested with spies, from the queen’s minions to the leather maker and butcher.

I was hunting for documents, landmarks and even medieval recipes that could bring to life the family history of Diego Arias Dávila, a wealthy 15th-century royal treasurer to King Enrique IV who was loved and loathed for the taxes he extracted. Call it ancestral tourism, a quest for roots, branches and a family reunion across centuries. 

My quest was inspired, in part, by the ancient Spanish custom of Holy Week religious processions: brotherhoods of penitents in robes and peaked hoods that for centuries marched through the narrow lanes in different regions in cities like Seville, Málaga and  Segovia. The first time I saw them was in the south of Spain, passing an old Jewish quarter of whitewashed houses where the images plunged me into a medieval era when inquisitors in anonymous hoods confronted suspected heretics, including my own ancestors.

During Easter week, the brotherhoods in Segovia, in central northern Spain, parade with lifelike wooden sculptures of Jesus and Mary past the Gothic cathedral in the center of town and the illuminated Alcázar, the towering castle of the kings of Castile and León.

I feel shivers of the past each time I walk the path along the limestone ramparts — facing the dusky blue Guadarrama mountain range. Perhaps in some ways I know the Arias Dávila family better than my own generation. When I learned their fate, I felt my own identity shatter and shift, changing who I am. 

Their dramas are preserved in Inquisition folder 1,413, No. 7, in handwritten script and housed in the Madrid national archives. Almost 200 pages are devoted to their daily habits, gleaned from neighbors turned spies — wedding rituals, burial clothes, prayers and frequently the adafina lamb stew of chick peas and cinnamon they savored, slow cooked on hot embers overnight and served on the Sabbath.

For these rituals, Diego Arias Dávila — and other Jewish ancestors who were Christian converts — were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition in 1486 for heresy. Their religious crime: maintaining a double Jewish life in secret.

On this journey to Segovia, perhaps I could find their missing tomb — their remains whisked away to evade the reach of inquisitors looking for telltale signs of Jewish burial rituals. Or maybe I could reclaim the shards of the identity of my family who converted to Christianity centuries ago to survive but guarded a Jewish legacy in secret for generations from Spain to Costa Rica to California.

Not many people come to explore the roots of a family tree in this rocky crag of about 55,000 people, nestled between two river valleys 55 miles north of Madrid. But there are plenty of tourists who arrive in Segovia by bus and train, bound for the granite Roman aqueducts that loom over the entrance to the historic quarter and the taverns serving the Segovian specialty of baby suckling pig. Most vanish before sunset.

Then the rhythm of the city shifts to a meditative, unhurried one. For me, it’s a contemplative time to savor Segovia’s historical charm by its Gothic 16th-century cathedral and a leafy plaza of outdoor cafes where Queen Isabella was crowned — power used in 1492 to expel thousands of Jews who faced the choice of fleeing, converting to Christianity or preserving their religion in secret.

Ana Sundri Herrero, of the city’s tourism center, told me during one of my visits last spring and summer that there isn’t much demand for genealogy information although Spain has a vast diaspora of emigrants that dates back centuries.

Other countries with a more recent history of mass migration, such as Ireland and Scotland, are aggressively promoting genealogical records on government-sponsored websites to increase tourism. And Irish and Scottish businesses have seized it as an attraction. The Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin offers a special genealogy butler to guide guests. The Four Seasons hotel in Prague also offers a genealogy service to fashion tours to track the neighborhoods of grandparents.

For my own quest, I cobbled together a strategy with a right and left-brain approach that started with an emotional immersion in Andalusia and then a methodical genealogical search to track family lines that led north to Segovia.

For one summer, my husband, Omer, and daughter, Claire, and I moved to the south of Spain, to Arcos de la Frontera. We settled in one of the white houses, an ex-bordello clinging on the side of a limestone cliff and a short walk from the remains of a Jewish quarter and a synagogue transformed into an orphanage during the Inquisition.

I moved there to learn the history and geography of the country and to understand why ancestors left or stayed and submerged their identity. I traveled to Arcos frequently, fascinated that food, art, music and culture could help me travel back in time — especially the brotherhoods that in some cases played historic roles as enforcers during the Inquisition.

I felt chills at the sharp notes of saeta music — distinctive to the region and sung a cappella in the streets during Holy Week. The music echoes the rising and falling chant of the Jewish Kol Nidre, a Yom Kippur prayer. And some flamenco experts believe that converts sang the saetas to passing Holy Week images of Jesus and Mary to demonstrate loyalty, but with a double meaning for insiders.

For the left brain side of my hunt, I started researching all the family branches. My search dated back to 2001, after a move from New York to Europe, a moment in middle age that strikes most of us when we think about roots and what we can pass on to our children.

In my work as a journalist, people had long inquired about my byline, Carvajal, a Sephardic Jewish name that in some spelling variations means lost place, rejected. But I knew nothing about the past. My father, Arnoldo Carvajal, had grown up in Costa Rica and emigrated to San Francisco with his mother and sister while a teenager. He married, and with my mother raised six children. We were Catholic, attended weekly Sunday Mass, ate fish on Fridays and wore it all: Catholic school uniforms of green plaid skirts and medieval-style scapulars tucked around our necks.

After I started my search, I found many clues to our submerged Jewish identity from relatives, but I hit brick walls on the Carvajal line. A 19th-century Costa Rican ancestor had not registered a husband, giving her Carvajal name to a newborn, registered as a "natural son," the polite Spanish term for illegitimate.

I had made a critical error by not looking at other family lines, ignoring an ancestral habit of intermarriage among Costa Rican cousins. I realized later it was a sign that they were marrying one another to protect secrets and preserve rituals like the menorah that my cousin said he found in my great-aunt’s bedroom after she died in 1998.

My grandmother’s line on the Chacón side led to Spaniards who abandoned prosperous lives in Andalusia in the 16th century. One was a judge who died of a heart attack on the way to the Spanish colony of Costa Rica, and another, his young son, who drowned on the same journey in the Río Negro in Honduras. Each new generation fit together in a crossword puzzle of wives and husbands — a search for birth and death certificates that emerged in fits and starts, aided by sites like familysearch.org or ancestry.com.

Segovia startled me when it surfaced in my puzzle. I knew of no family tie to the city. But my grandmother’s line leapt a new generation in the 16th century, to Isabel Arias Dávila, the wife of the first governor of Costa Rica, who emigrated from Segovia during the Inquisition.

With that name, I rapidly learned about the Inquisition trial that tangled the family’s identity for generations and forced others to lead new lives as conquistadores in Spanish colonies. The patriarch was Diego Arias Dávila, whose family converted when he was a boy and whose son Juan was the bishop of Segovia for 30 years.

The bishop’s internal political struggle with the inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada turned into an epic legal clash that reached all the way to the Vatican. The Grand Inquisitor battled the bishop by probing his family for evidence of their double life. His parents and grandmother were investigated posthumously, among them Diego Arias Dávila.

I knew the contours of their story the first time I arrived last spring in Segovia’s Jewish quarter, which dates back to the 13th century. Today it still gives the eerie sense at some moments that little has changed among the three-story houses where inhabitants once worshiped at one of five synagogues, some still intact.

The mansion of Abraham Seneor — a contemporary of Diego Arias Dávila and a royal financial adviser who converted in 1492 — has been meticulously restored by the city and was transformed into a museum for the Jewish quarter in 2004. There conversos like the Arias Dávila family worshiped in secret in a private synagogue, according to accounts of the time.

Up until the early 1990s, Segovia did not promote this quarter, which is set off from the rest of the walled city by brick arches that were gated in the 15th century to separate Jews from Christians. But since then the local government and state invested heavily to restore the quarter. Now its streets have an air of calm: clean brick and stone facades, rhythmic detailing of balconies and hanging plants at the windows.

To restore my own family history, I knew I needed a very special kind of guide. On my own, I had failed to find the missing tomb of Diego Arias Dávila, though I had located the family coat of arms in the cathedral of Segovia.

Typically most cities in Spain have a cronista, a historian with a passion for the place and its quirks. I had found one earlier in Arcos de la Frontera, Manuel Pérez Regordán, a retired accountant who was so obsessive that he self-published four volumes of history told through each one of its little streets.

In Segovia, the tourist office led me to a high school teacher named María Eugenia Contreras, who is researching the Arias Dávila family for a doctorate.

It was María Eugenia who guided me through Segovia’s tranquil neighborhoods, passing a park with nesting storks where the Mercedes convent once stood. It was the site of the last official tomb of Diego Arias Dávila, and his wife, Elvira, also a Christian convert. But even Maria Eugenia did not know what happened to their remains. They had been moved too many times. She gave me a huge gift, though, when she told me about a Salamanca professor who had painstakingly transcribed the handwritten Inquisition testimonies of 200 witnesses against the family.

I found the title — in pristine condition — through an online used-book store in Spain. It was a window into their lives — the lettuce and unleavened bread they ate at Passover, their donations of oil to the local synagogues and the telling anecdote that as he lay on his deathbed at 86, Diego Arias Dávila thundered at the Franciscan friars who had come to administer last rites to go to the devil.

He lived in an enormous palace on the southern side of the city that is dominated by its fortress tower and plastered in Segovia’s unique limestone patterns. Today, a neighboring street is named for the family. A sign also marks the landmark tower, but with no reference to the Inquisition.

The first time I tried to enter the palace, I was turned away because it was closing time. The next morning, the first floor was bustling with people waiting to pay bills. Fittingly, the Arias Dávila palace has been transformed into government tax offices — a perfect legacy for a royal treasurer.

In theory, I should have felt something, but I didn’t. I studied the palace’s coffered ceilings and the stone carvings of the coat of arms of the Arias Dávila family, but the government office could be anywhere with its counters, red chairs and bureaucrats.

Instead I felt the pangs of yearning for home — añoranza in Spanish — when I sat in a windswept little plaza at sunset near the city’s stone walls. It was loud with birdsong. A few neighbors occupied plastic chairs, and tables were cluttered with iced tinto de verano wine cocktails.

The square lies near Calle Martínez Campos, where a vanished synagogue stood that was funded by Diego’s wife, Elvira, and her presence, after reading the Inquisition transcripts, was inescapable. I wondered, as I sat in the square, if Segovia had absorbed some of her burdens and if places, like people, can be scarred by history.

Elvira converted as a young girl with her family in the 15th century in the midst of spreading anti-Semitism.

Yet it was clear from the Inquisition testimony that she yearned to maintain family bonds: taking pleasure in Jewish weddings and holidays, leaving explicit instructions before her death about who should be at her bedside. Those family ties remained so strong that she managed to share something precious with us 16 generations later. Perhaps some things are meant to be.

I was startled when I discovered her real name was actually Clara, changed after her conversion. It means clear and bright. By coincidence — or maybe not — we named our daughter the French version, Claire.

As I sat in the little plaza in Segovia, watching the pale stone walls and the blue night deepen, I knew that I could not change what is past. But I can change the story we tell about ourselves, and by doing that I can change our future.

Doreen Carvajal is a correspondent at the International New York Times in Paris and author of a memoir, “The Forgetting River.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2014, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Family Reunion, Centuries Later.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/travel/in-spain-a-family-reunion-centuries-later.html?ref=doreencarvajal&_r=0

Peter Tosh Reasoning On Stage - November 27, 1982

   Peter Tosh usually gave a small talk during his performances, a reasoning. On US tours where I saw him perform, the talk was often about 7 or 8 minutes. At his November 27, 1982, performance in Montego Bay at the Jamaican World Music Festival, Tosh reasoned for almost 15 minutes. Much of his reasoning was about herb but he spoke about much more including the repression Rasta has faced because of herb and the lack of promotion of reggae music in Jamaica. He directly addresses the Jamaican  media in attendence with a blistering rebuke.
The second video is a television news report about Tosh's 1983 appearance in Swaziland. Working on a translation.





In this next video

Slavery History In Brazil

Time catches up.... history is revealed........

Rio’s Race to Future Intersects Slave Past

By SIMON ROMEROMARCH 8, 2014

RIO DE JANEIRO — Sailing from the Angolan coast across the Atlantic, the slave ships docked here in the 19th century at the huge stone wharf, delivering their human cargo to the “fattening houses” on Valongo Street. Foreign chroniclers described the depravity in the teeming slave market, including so-called boutiques selling emaciated and diseased African children.

The newly arrived slaves who died before they even started toiling in Brazil’s mines were hauled to a mass grave nearby, their corpses left to decay amid piles of garbage. As imperial plantations flourished, diggers at the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos — Cemetery of New Blacks — crushed the bones of the dead, making way for thousands of new cadavers.

Now, with construction crews tearing apart areas of Rio de Janeiro in the building spree ahead of this year’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, stunning archaeological discoveries around the work sites are providing new insight into the city’s brutal distinction as a nerve center for the Atlantic slave trade.

But as developers press ahead in the surroundings of the unearthed slave port — with futuristic projects like the Museum of Tomorrow, costing about $100 million and designed in the shape of a fish by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava — the frenzied overhaul is setting off a debate over whether Rio is neglecting its past in the all-consuming rush to build its future.

“We’re finding archaeological sites of global importance, and probably far more extensive than what’s been excavated so far, but instead of prioritizing these discoveries our leaders are proceeding with their grotesque remaking of Rio,” said Sonia Rabello, a prominent legal scholar and former city councilwoman.

The city has installed plaques at the ruins of the slave port and a map of an African heritage circuit, which visitors can walk to see where the slave market once functioned. Still, scholars, activists and residents of the port argue that such moves are far too timid in comparison with the multibillion-dollar development projects taking hold.

Beyond the Museum of Tomorrow, which has been disparaged by critics as a costly venture drawing attention away from Rio’s complex history, developers are working on an array of other flashy projects, like a complex of skyscrapers branded in homage to Donald Trump and a gated community of villas for Olympic judges.

At the same time, descendants of African slaves who live as squatters in crumbling buildings around the old slave port are organizing in an effort to obtain titles for their homes, pitting them against a Franciscan order of the Roman Catholic Church that claims ownership of the properties.

“We know our rights,” said Luiz Torres, 50, a history teacher and leader in the property rights movement. With the slave market’s ruins near his home as testament, he added, “Everything that happened in Rio was shaped by the hand of blacks.”

Scholars say the scale of the slave trade here was staggering. Brazil received about 4.9 million slaves through the Atlantic trade, while mainland North America imported about 389,000 during the same period, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a project at Emory University.

Rio is believed to have imported more slaves than any other city in the Americas, outranking places like Charleston, S.C.; Kingston, Jamaica; and Salvador in northeast Brazil. Altogether, Rio received more than 1.8 million African slaves, or 21.5 percent of all slaves who landed in the Americas, said Mariana P. Candido, a historian at the University of Kansas.

Activists say the archaeological discoveries merit at least a museum and far more extensive excavations, pointing to projects elsewhere like the International Slavery Museum in the British port city Liverpool, where slave ships were prepared for voyages; the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston and Elmina Castle, a slave trading site on Ghana’s coast.

“The horrors committed here are a stain on our history,” said Tânia Andrade Lima, the chief archaeologist at the dig that exposed Valongo, built soon after Portugal’s prince regent, João VI, fled from Napoleon’s armies in 1808, transferring the seat of his empire to Rio from Lisbon.

The squalid wharf functioned until the 1840s, when officials buried it under more elegant docks designed to receive Brazil’s new empress from Europe. Both wharves were eventually buried under landfill and a residential port district, called Little Africa.

Many descendants of slaves settled where the slave market once functioned, with African languages spoken in the area into the 20th century. While the district is gaining recognition as a cradle of samba, one of Brazil’s most treasured musical traditions, it was long neglected by the authorities.

Black Consciousness Day is observed annually in Brazil on Nov. 20 to reflect on the injustices of slavery. In 2013 Ms. Rabello, the legal scholar, pointed out, Rio’s hard-charging mayor, Eduardo Paes, who is overseeing the biggest overhaul of the city in decades, did not attend the ceremony at Valongo, where residents began a campaign to have it recognized as a Unesco World Heritage site. Complicating the debate over how Rio’s past should be balanced alongside the city’s frenetic reconstruction, some families still live on top of the archaeological sites, occasionally excavating Brazil’s patrimony on their own.

“When I first saw the bones, I thought they were the result of a gruesome murder involving previous tenants,” said Ana de la Merced Guimarães, 56, the owner of a small pest control company who lives in an old house where workers doing a renovation first discovered remains from the mass grave in 1996.

It turned out Ms. Guimarães was living above a dumping ground for dead slaves that was used for decades, until around 1830. Estimates vary, but scholars say that as many as 20,000 people were buried in the grave, including many children.

Ms. Guimarães and her husband opted to stay in their property, opening a modest nonprofit organization on the premises, where visitors can view portions of the archaeological dig. The authorities have plans to build a light-rail project on their street, which may lead to more discoveries.

“This was a place of unspeakable crimes against humanity, but it’s also where we live,” Ms. Guimarães said in her home, complaining that public agencies had provided her organization with little support.

Washington Fajardo, a senior adviser to Rio’s mayor on urban planning issues, said that some important steps had been taken at the archaeological sites, including the designation of the slave port as an environmental protection area. And he said that a plan under consideration would create an urban archaeology laboratory where visitors could view archaeologists studying material from the sites.

Mr. Fajardo also emphasized that at another new venture in the port, the Rio Art Museum, residents of the area make up more than half the staff.

“They are handled by the purchaser in different parts, exactly as I have seen butchers feeling a calf,” he said. “I sometimes saw groups of well-dressed females here, shopping for slaves, exactly as I have seen English ladies amusing themselves at our bazaars.”

Slavery’s legacy is clear across Brazil, where more than half of its 200 million people define themselves as black or mixed race, giving the nation more people of African descent than any other country outside Africa. In Rio, the large majority of slaves came from what is now Angola, said Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University.

“Rio was a culturally vibrant African city,” Dr. Hawthorne said. “The foods people ate, the way they worshiped, how they dressed and more were to a large extent influenced by Angolan cultural norms.”

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, making it the last country in the Americas to do so. Now the relatively relaxed approach to the archaeological discoveries is raising doubts about how willing the authorities are to revisit such aspects of Brazilian history.

“Archaeologists are exposing the foundations of our unequal society while we are witnessing a perverse attempt to remake the city into something resembling Miami or Dubai,” said Cláudio Lima Carlos, an architect and scholar of urban planning. “We’re losing an opportunity to focus in detail on our past, and maybe even learn from it.”

 

Correction: March 16, 2014
An article last Sunday about a huge construction project in Rio de Janeiro that has uncovered vestiges of Brazil’s prodigious slave trade misstated the surname of a professor of architecture and urban planning. He is Cláudio Lima Carlos, not Lima Castro.

Taylor Barnes contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 9, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Rio’s Race to Future Intersects Slave Past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/americas/rios-race-to-future-intersects-slave-past.html

The Best System Money Can Buy

Law Doesn’t End Revolving Door on Capitol Hill

By ERIC LIPTON and BEN PROTESS

February 1, 2014, 12:50 pm

A top aide to a Republican congressman from Arizona helped promote a legislative plan to overhaul the nation’s home mortgage finance system. Weeks after leaving his government job, he reappeared on Capitol Hill, now as a lobbyist for a company poised to capitalize on the plan.

A former counsel to Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee left Capitol Hill a year ago. He, too, returned to the Hill just months later, lobbying committee aides on behalf of Wall Street giants like JPMorgan Chase and Bloomberg L.P.

And the chief of staff for the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee left his government salary behind in January 2012. Yet for months afterward, he continued to manage his boss’s re-election campaign, even while serving as a lobbyist for financial industry clients.

The experiences of the three Capitol Hill aides-turned-lobbyists — traced through interviews with political operatives and a review of public records — illustrate in new detail the gaping holes in rules governing Washington’s revolving door.

Federal ethics rules are intended to limit lobbying by former senior officials within one year after they leave the government. Yet even after the ethics rules were revised in 2007 following a lobbying scandal, more than 1,650 congressional aides have registered to lobby within a year of leaving Capitol Hill, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data from LegiStorm, an online database that tracks congressional staff members and lobbying. At least half of those departing aides, the analysis shows, faced no restrictions at all.

The rules are particularly loose in the House of Representatives, where aides and lawmakers enjoy significant leeway in hopping from job to job — and from government pay to six- and seven-figure private sector salaries.

In the three cases identified by The Times, the interviews and records suggest, the former House staff members did not violate the rules but rather seized on loopholes to lobby within one year.

Those examples, and the data analyzed by The Times, offer a playbook of the many ways that former officials can legally circumvent the purpose of the law. While the law’s limitations were known, the data highlight for the first time the extent to which lobbyists routinely capitalize on an array of loopholes.

Some aides resist pay raises, to keep their salaries just below the cutoff that would prompt lobbying restrictions. More highly paid House aides, simply because their paycheck came from an individual lawmaker or leadership office rather than a committee they worked closely with, are immediately allowed to lobby former committee colleagues. This maneuver would be prohibited in the Senate, where senior aides cannot contact anyone in the Senate for a year.

In other cases, former House aides can continue socializing with lawmakers, working on campaigns and attending committee hearings while representing private clients as a lobbyist. That loophole exists even though a lobbyist’s presence on campaigns and at committee hearings could serve as a reminder of pending requests by clients.

The effortless way former staff members avoid the one-year ban raises new concerns about the revolving door. Some critics say it fosters a clubby culture in Washington, where lawmakers and their aides might seek to protect Wall Street and other industries like health care from new rules and legislation.

When Congress updated the ethics rules in 2007 in the wake of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, which included illegal influence peddling between a lawmaker and a former aide, it initially drafted tighter restrictions on the revolving door, arguing that a broader ban lasting two years might curb conflicts of interest in Washington. But with protests from some lawmakers — including Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, and Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, then the top two members of the House Judiciary Committee — the proposal was watered down to remove the two-year “cooling off” period for the House and other restrictions.

The resulting widespread use of loopholes is disheartening to former lawmakers who tried, but failed, to enact more radical changes.

“Is it any wonder that the public holds such a low esteem for Congress?” said Joel M. Hefley, a Republican who served as chairman of the House Ethics Committee before he retired in 2007. “You can dance around these rules in so many ways it really does not accomplish much of anything.”

The continued surge of former congressional staffers to K Street helps explain the fundamental change that is taking place in the lobbying profession in Washington, as former government employees accounted for 44 percent of all registered, active firm lobbyists in 2012, up from 18 percent in 1998, according to a recent study by the Sunlight Foundation.

On some occasions, former congressional aides crossed a legal line and paid a price. Doug Hampton — a onetime aide to the former senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada — pleaded guilty in 2012 to violating the one-year ban.

But such prosecutions are rare. The Justice Department, which is responsible for enforcing the ban, does not actively police compliance with the rules, ethics lawyers who handle such cases said.

“Unless the violation is brought to our attention, it is hard to enforce,” said Michael P. Kortan, the chief spokesman for the F.B.I.

And in interviews, aides-turned-lobbyists emphasized that there was no need to run afoul of the law, given the broad number of exemptions.

The salary loophole is perhaps the most popular. House aides can avoid the one-year “cooling-off” period as long as their salaries are below a certain cap, totaling $130,500 last year.

Erik Olson’s salary fell below that cap when he stepped down in September from his job as chief of staff to Representative Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin. Soon after, he started to lobby Congress on behalf of corporate clients like Leprino Foods of Denver, which wanted to shape the so-called Farm Bill, a topic that Mr. Kind was involved in.

Mr. Olson, when asked if he had contacted his former boss in the months since he left, said his firm’s policy was “to not publicize who we are meeting with on the Hill or administration,” and a spokesman for Mr. Kind simply said, “No comment.”

Matthew Tully, the Congressional aide who helped pitch a plan to revamp the nation’s home mortgage finance system, earned an annual salary of $128,000 while serving as chief of staff to Representative David Schweikert, Republican of Arizona. Mr. Tully’s job title, like Mr. Olson’s, would seem to have qualified him as a senior staff member, a role the ethics law is supposed to cover. But again, the paycheck amount exempted him from the one-year ban.

During Mr. Tully’s tenure in the House, Mr. Schweikert was one of the leading House advocates for legislation that would change the way most Americans obtain home mortgages, limiting the federal government’s role as the primary insurer of these loans. While on Capitol Hill, Mr. Tully became a sought-after expert on the debate, speaking in 2012 at a major mortgage industry conference in Miami to highlight legislation his boss was preparing.

But in 2013, Mr. Tully spun that expertise into a job as the only internal lobbyist for a Pennsylvania-based private mortgage insurer, a job he started one day after leaving the House. The company, Essent Guaranty, stands to benefit from Mr. Schweikert’s positions.

And yet Mr. Tully, in his new role as a lobbyist, was free to communicate with the staff in his former boss’s office. At one point, while attending a House hearing on housing legislation, he emailed one of Mr. Schweikert’s staff members, according to a Congressional aide with direct knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Tully and Essent declined requests for comment, so it is unclear whether he intentionally kept his salary below the $130,500 threshold.

But a former Senate staff member-turned-lobbyist, whose salary was just a few thousand dollars below the cap, acknowledged that she had knowingly kept down her pay. That way, she was free to immediately lobby at least some members of the Senate upon her departure for a mortgage company.

“I was very lucky I was underneath the cap,” she said, asking that she not be named because her new employer would not allow her to speak on the subject. “The rules are very arbitrary. Honestly, they don’t make sense to me.”

Dee Buchanan, a Republican who earned more than $170,000 during his last year as a senior aide to Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, benefited from a different exemption.

After departing Capitol Hill in fall 2012, Mr. Buchanan started a job with Ogilvy Government Relations. The firm’s website boasts that Mr. Buchanan — who quickly registered to lobby for the American Bankers Association and the CME Group, one of the world’s largest futures exchanges — was “the ‘go-to guy’ for the new House Financial Services Committee chairman,” Mr. Hensarling.

Despite the close ties, Mr. Buchanan was free to immediately lobby most members of Mr. Hensarling’s committee. Mr. Buchanan’s one-year ban did not apply to the committee at large because his government paycheck had come from the House Republican Conference, a leadership arm of the party that Mr. Hensarling led in 2011 and 2012. As such, Mr. Buchanan was restricted from lobbying only Mr. Hensarling and a few other committee members who also belonged to leadership.

Democratic aides have made similar moves.

John Hughes, the lobbyist now representing JPMorgan Chase and Bloomberg L.P., last held a job on Capitol Hill as a senior adviser to Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House. As an aide to Mr. Hoyer, Mr. Hughes’s job in part was to be the contact person with the House Financial Services Committee, where he worked as the top lawyer during the 2008 financial crisis.

Because his most recent government paycheck came from House Democratic leadership, Mr. Hughes was prohibited only from lobbying top House leaders. Mr. Hughes, who declined to comment for this article, was soon able to begin contacting his former associates on the House committee.

“It is almost a meaningless ban,” said Craig Holman, who helped write the 2007 ethics law as a government ethics expert at the nonprofit group Public Citizen.

The one-year ban also allows former aides to “interact socially“ with former bosses or Capitol Hill colleagues. Although there can be no “intent to influence” a lawmaker’s “official actions or decisions” at dinner parties and golf games, the lobbyists can work behind the scenes, using their expertise to advise clients about the inner workings of Congress. And when it comes to working on a political campaign, there are few restrictions, since such activity is considered a form of free speech.

The result is a blurring of lines that allows former aides like Larry Lavender to legally spin through the revolving door. Mr. Lavender spent five years as chief of staff to the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee at the time, Representative Spencer Bachus, a longtime friend from Alabama.

When a law firm representing JPMorgan recruited Mr. Lavender for a job in early 2012, he left the committee behind. But he stayed close to Mr. Bachus, becoming an unpaid campaign manager for the congressman’s re-election bid.

Mr. Lavender, who earned $172,500 in his final full year on the Hill, fit squarely into the one-year ban’s allowances for campaigning and socializing. While Mr. Lavender occasionally lunched with former colleagues, and even made an appearance at the committee’s holiday party, he said he did not seek out any official favors or actions. And although he represented JPMorgan, he said he had never contacted the committee on the bank’s behalf.

“I took great care to confer with the House ethics committee to make sure I understood the rules, and then I was scrupulous in complying,” Mr. Lavender said in an interview.

The rules allowed Mr. Lavender to join a behind-the-scenes effort to help JPMorgan avoid having to testify at a House hearing in 2012. The hearing focused on the collapse of MF Global, a major New York brokerage firm that was one of JPMorgan’s clients.

On a conference call with fellow lobbyists, one person briefed on the call recalled, Mr. Lavender took aim at the former colleagues who wanted to force JPMorgan executives to testify. The person briefed on the call, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Lavender remarked about his former colleagues: “I should have fired them when I had the chance.”

A version of this article appears in print on 02/02/2014, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Law Doesn’t End Revolving Door on Capitol Hill.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/law-doesnt-end-revolving-door-on-capitol-hill/