Travel Reflections - 7/7 - i should log off

Good Beer, Bad Beer & Ugly Beer

February 16, 2011 By Danny

Some beer is great, actually a lot of it is. So good in fact that we dedicated a Foodie Friday to all the different beers we tried while we were in Europe. Beer helped us to become friends with a few Iranians and we became enthralled in Tanzania where our beer options were Safari, Kilimanjaro, Uhuru and Serengeti. We tried a huge variety of beer on our trip, mostly because we wanted to collect a variety of labels, and here’s our good, bad and ugly.

The Good

This one is really difficult to put our finger on. While we were in Cologne, Germany our friends there introduced us to Kölsch and explained to us that by law it has to come from that very region. We were there during the world cup, while Germany was making a run for the championship, and on game day we went to buy some and found the warehouse of a beer aisle at the local supermarket completely cleaned out. The beer is refreshing but really, is every bit as good as those wonderful pilsners we tried while we were in Prague….namely the original Budweiser. We didn’t have any trouble finding that in a local Prague bar and the local version of the familiar ‘black and tan’ was quite frankly amazing. Given that we have friends in both cities, I think we’re going to have to call it a tie. (I’m willing to take my chances that our friend in Munich isn’t reading….she might have a slightly different opinion.)

The Bad

This one goes to Egypt. Many of us have been toasting the changes occurring there recently but the unfortunate truth is that Islamic countries, even secular ones, just don’t understand the concept very well. The local brew was actually OK but it was only memorable in that it was almost impossible to find outside of a tourist restaurant. Wanting to celebrate our completion of the overland Cape Town to Cairo route we struck out again and again. Finally we found a liquor store (we’d been told that the handful in existence were all run by Christians rather than Muslims….I’m not so sure of that) and, giving up on beer, made the switch to liquor. Have you ever heard of Jani Walker Red Lion? I imagine it is pretty similar to motor oil. Runner Up: Every time I go home and visit my parents I’m confronted with a refrigerator filled with Michelob Ultra. How Lance Armstrong, the world’s premier endurance athlete, became associated with a low-carbohydrate beverage is one mystery….how they get away with calling that yellow water beer is another.

The Ugly

The recent purchase of Anheuser Busch by InBev has had many Americans upset that our American beer is being stolen by Europeans. Company number two, behind InBev is South African Brewing Co, based in Johannesburg. (In case your curious, familiar names like Miller and Peroni are SAB labels.) While in Jo’Burg we toured the International Beer Museum (which is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon) and were surprised to learn that our tour entitled us to a taste of traditional African beer. Thankfully it was just a taste and we were later given two pints of real beer, plus a small souvenir glass filled with some more.

This column of ishouldlogoff.com aims to answer those questions that we always get asked. What was your favorite this, or your worst that. Every week we aim to highlight a new topic and will do so until we run out of ideas. If you have an idea for a Good-Bad-Ugly post, feel free to tell us in the comment section below or send us an email. To read all of them, click here.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Day

February 9, 2011 By Danny

In this first column of ishouldlogoff’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, we aim to answer what our best and worst days of the trip were….We’ve made plenty of memories and these are just some of the ones that standout the most in our heads. We will do our best to “The Good, The Bad & The Ugly” a weekly column. but our creative juices are bound to stop flowing sometime.

The Good – Bolivia’s D eath Road. This day was just plan fun, nothing else to describe it. We started the morning in La Paz, one of the world’s highest capital cities. Next up we we strapped ourselves into some pretty impressive gear, hopped on some nice bikes and rode down that mountain all the way to the Amazon just as fast as we wanted. At first we shared the paved road with traffic and then we turned off and onto the older, unpaved, dirt road for the rest of the trip to sea level. We were fed good food, taken care of by a support vehicle, and literally not allowed to worry about a thing…which is probably what made it so fun Runner Up: Taking the boogie board down the class V rapids of Uganda’s Nile River.

The Bad – We had just come down from Kilimanjaro. Our bodies were sore and achy. Our bowel movements weren’t quite right…and we went online. We quickly learned two things we would have rather not known about. The first was that the rather hefty amount of money we had to send to Uganda in order to visit with the Gorillas was being held in limbo by the money transfer people (aka banks) and that our visitation permits had not yet been purchased. The second was that our box that we’d sent home of all the beautiful Zimbabwean statues had arrived home in a very damaged state. The Zimbabwe box was the straw that broke the camel’s back and we felt completely beaten by travel, and by Africa. Of all bad things to happen, in hindsight these weren’t so awful….but we just couldn’t handle it anymore.

The Ugly – That would be the day I almost died in Ethiopia. Nobody ever said e.coli was a nice illness, did they? We didn’t realize it was that bad at the time, hence it wasn’t quite as scary as the 7.2 earthquake from Belize, but it was pretty darn awful. If you didn’t read the original post, you probably want to….and if you did already read it, well then you know why I’m not repeating any of that here!

Stop Hunger Porn #2: Engage and Help

May 27, 2010 By Danny

Yesterday I vented my frustration at the state of the aid business. It is easy for me to point fingers and note that many of the places in Africa that have been receiving aid dollars have been doing so for over 40 years; with little to nothing to show for it in the form of positive change. Western nations (and now Eastern, China is quite active in the undeveloped and developing worlds) have their own agenda’s to support…and who can blame them…democratic governments stay in power by keeping their voting citizens rich and happy.

So how do we fix the problem? There are a few ways that I really believe a person can make a difference from far away.

The most obvious, with Haiti in the nightly news is disaster assistance. When things go terribly wrong it IS important to offer aid, with an end in sight, so as to help a country or a people through a tough time. I don’t know what the situation is like in Haiti but the fact is that it is far more helpful to Haiti to have Haitians do the helping, where and when they can, than to have the US Army doing it all. This is one realm that the US will not be accused of lacking an ‘exit strategy.’

The second is education. Many of these poor countries suffer from a combination of poor education systems and brain drain, where those who are smart and well off enough to get an education leave the country for better jobs abroad. Supporting ‘in-country’ education is the only way to stop these problems and help a people grow internally, with their own—native—lawyers and lawmakers to lead the country to prosperity, making things right for business instead of right for corruption. This can only come from education and if the first teachers are Western, this should only be temporary until local teachers can take up the charge.

The third is business. If you have $100 you want to throw at Africa to help, do it as a business rather than a donor. People don’t work for donations but they do work for $$ and we’ve seen the pride people have when they work for themselves to lift themselves up and out of poverty…nothing beats it. Tourism is great, I’m clearly biased naturally, but it pumps money directly into a community and allows people to work for that income. The man with whom we booked our Tanzanian safari, Peter, started as a porter on Mt. Kilimanjaro, working his way up through cooking and assisting to eventually guiding and running his own business. He was proud, he was working hard, and it was a pleasure to do business with him. His is the kind of story that changes these poor countries for the better, not the presence of UNICEF camps and USAID food.

So if you don’t have your own business to run, we have a solution for you….help a local get themselves started in business. We’ve recently set up the ISHOULDLOGOFF.com group on Kiva.org. If you don’t know what Kiva is, you’re welcome to read up on it but it basically connects people in the West with a few dollars to spare with people in the undeveloped world who need those dollars, and you make a loan directly to them…. Yes, I said a loan. This is called micro-finance and, in my opinion will do more to help the undeveloped world than any amount of hunger porn on CNN will ever do…..

Stop Hunger Porn #1: Stop Donating

May 26, 2010 By Danny

Recently, somewhere in America, a politician was forced to backtrack from comments he made comparing people on welfare to wild animals. The problem, he said, was that if you feed them, they would breed. Although his comments were crass, there was an underlying message that he failed to pass on when uttered that awful metaphor…handouts create dependence, dependence is bad.

We have been to some of the poorest countries in the entire world on this trip: Guatemala, Bolivia, and of course the ‘South Park’ favorite of Ethiopia. Throughout these countries we’ve seen, in living color, the people who sometimes grace your televisions in “hunger porn” commercials where some international aid agency is trying to get you to send money to support a child or a community.

When food and money enter a community from a foreign source, it can take away the people’s need to work and support themselves and places that ability in the hands of The West. We have seen people so dependent (not everyone, but many nonetheless) on this aid that they no longer work, find food themselves, or otherwise put ‘effort’ into life.

There are countless stories of how “sponsor a child” programs have destroyed communities because one child is chosen for new books and not another. We’ve seen many children kept out of school so that they can beg, as this is more profitable in the short term. Giving out sweets is a problem because if it is done by many people, eventually the child recipient might have no teeth since we’re not giving out toothpaste as well. School supplies are probably the best option, so long as they are given to a school or community to be distributed equitably to all rather than used to stock an individual’s hoard. In one town we visited the known scam for children was to ask foreigners to buy them a book directly from the shop, once the tourist left the child simply returns the book for cash.

If I sound like I’m standing on a soapbox, it’s because I feel a need to vent. Throughout Africa we’ve been witness to UNICEF camps, OXFAM caravans, and USAID food vats. We’ve watched as aid workers come to Africa, drive around in 4×4’s, and leave the place no better than they found it…staying only at the fanciest hotels in town or in a specialized camp with more security than Baghdad’s Green Zone. And if you think at least USAID food aid serves to help feed people, you’d be surprised that the people it helps most is the American farmer. The US Government buys this food, from our farmers to support them, pays to ship it over seas, gives it away for free, all for it to be bought and sold on the local market at market prices. Generally we see USAID food in shops and stores available for sale.

The next time you see hunger porn on the television remember that the business of aid is just that, a business. The goal is certainly altruistic, don’t get me wrong, but the practice can be anything but. There is a right way to help and a wrong way to help. One friend of ours shared a story of how she was told by one of these officials that, with luck, this organization would have enough funding to be involved in Africa indefinitely. This official was then surprised at the response of shock and dismay she received when the group she was addressing pointed out that if the goal is to supply handouts indefinitely then clearly the organization wasn’t helping anyone but themselves….

This is part one of a two part post. I don’t believe that these problems are without solutions and that we, as “rich” people cannot help in someway; but I do believe there is a right way and a wrong way. Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for life.