The Next Trip

. . . and there always seems to be a next trip. I'm in the middle of this trip and I'm already focused on the next one. I get back very late on the night of Tuesday 4 November (I'll be travelling the entire day of the elections, which will be a little odd - luckily I was able to vote early) and after being home for around thirty-six hours, I'm off on a two and a half week trip to Jordan (visits to the University of Jordan and Princess Sumaya University), the United Arab Emirates (visits to the Dubai and Abu Dhabi campuses of Zayed University), Oman (an initial visit to Sultan Qaboos University), and Hungary (visits to Corvinus University and Pazmany Peter University). I already have places to stay in Jordan and Oman, so I'm ahead of the game . . .

Al Akhawayn University

I'm currently at Ifrane, Morocco, visiting Al Akhawayn University. I've said a lot about the university in the past, so I won't go on and on about it this time. It's been a very lovely and productive stay so far. The folks here are very supportive of Champlain and our Global Modules project, and also remarkably friendly folks. It's bitterly cold - rainy and blustery - and one of the professors, my good friend Bouziane, even dropped off a sweater for me yesterday with the instructions that I should keep it and then just drop it off at the front gate to the university with the guards when I leave at 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday morning (on my way to my 6:00 a.m. flight out of Fez). I'm staying at an apartment in one of the faculty housing units, which is very nice - and has cable TV - so I can keep up with the U.S. election through the BBC. I don't get CNN, which is OK because the British coverage is so far superior that it is a laughable comparison anyway. The students are having a big Halloween party this weekend, which may seem a little odd, but the Moroccans have a very tangible European sensibility about things, especially here in Ifrane, and the school also has a fair number of European students here on exchange (I'd love for some Champlain students to come here as well).

Like I said, the university is very supportive of our attempts to create international educational links. We are looking at embedding GMs in the first year courses in Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology and Geography, and in the second year courses in History, Literature and Philosophy - in addition to other selective courses across the curriculum. This is exactly the type of foundation that we need to take the GMs to the next level - I couldn't be happier. We've also begun discussions about grant opportunities, similar to the one we just submitted with Kenyatta University, the University of Pretoria and North Carolina A&T University.

Culture of Fear

Even though my latest passport adventure in Kenya ended up eliminating the Cape Town part of the my trip to South Africa I still had a great time. Everyone I met was wonderful - very friendly and out-going, and they reminded me, I suppose naturally enough, of Australians (although the South Africans would cringe at that comparison). I ended up spending my time in Pretoria, presenting at a conference on African curricular development and visiting the Universitity of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. I'll have more to say about this all later on, but what really struck me was how fear has taken hold in so much of the white community of Pretoria. When I first arrived in Pretoria I spent a few days at a bed & breakfast out in a very nice suburb of Pretoria, but you'd think it was an outright war zone for all the barb wire and electric fences that surrounded every single house. Home security has been an absolute boom industry in South Africa for some time now. The nice folks who ran the bed & breakfast were really intent on me never walking anyplace by myself - and, again, this was essentially a series of gated communities with not a poor person in sight. On a Sunday I didn't have anything to do and didn't want to sit around in my room so I asked the owners over breakfast if there was public transportation that I could take to downtown Pretoria for a walk and the woman who ran things had an absolutely stricken look on her face at the thought that I would do something so reckless. A nice young couple who were visiting from Cape Town volunteered to drop me off downtown at the zoo as they left for the day. The owner said that was OK, but that I had to call, from the zoo, as soon as I was finished and that they would come pick me up - and to not leave the zoo under any circumstances. Well, of course, I paid no attention to that directive. After a lovely couple hours in the zoo I went for a walk around downtown Pretoria and had a perfectly safe time. I ended up in the main square and just sat there, had some ice cream, and watched the world go by. I called her when I was finished and her husband drove out to get me. On another night I went for a walk to a local Chinese restaurant to grab dinner and suddenly a car pulled over - it was the owner who was out for a drive with her son. She insisted that I get in the car and she took me to the restaurant and volunteered to sit there while I picked up my food to go - and seemed a little startled that I intended to eat at the restaurant and then walk home. It reminded me of my first visit to Kenya when the woman who ran the conference center picked me up on the side of the road when I went for a walk, but I could at least process that event because I was walking towards a sort of ramshackle area - but this was a very posh area of Pretoria. I talked to several folks, including my driver (who I'll have more to say later) and the young couple from Cape Town, who felt that the folks in the suburbs of Pretoria were completely overreacting and that while there was a fair amount of crime in Johannesburg (or Joburg - pronounced jawburg - as everyone in South Africa called it) there wasn't enough in a nice area of Pretoria to justify that level of hysteria. It has inspired me to try and do some research on crime levels in South Africa. It reminded me of that book, Culture of Fear, that is discussed in Bowling for Columbine. In that spotless neighborhood in Pretoria there were even eight-foot high fences, topped with razor wire, around the local funeral home.

The U.S. Election

It's always amazing, and a bit humbling, how focused the rest of the world is on the U.S. elections - and also more than a bit embarrassing how little attention we pay to theirs. When I was in Kenya in September the Kenyans, naturally enough, were absolutely fascinated by the election. Everyone I met asked me if Obama would win or even could win. There was also great interest in South Africa, and here in Morocco. Most of the folks are hoping Obama wins, mainly because they view it as the opportunity for a much-needed change in American foreign policy. They are hoping that an Obama presidency would bring about a more balanced foreign policy - or at the very least a presidency that will actually look out to the rest of the world with a sense of leadership and optimism, as compared to fear and protectionism. For the Africans, especially, the hope is that an Obama presidency might signal an interest in a part of the world that routinely feels completely marginalized if not outright ignored. Here at Al Akhawayn University, up in Ifrane, Morocco in the Middle Atlas mountains, the students are actually having a mock election on Tuesday, that includes presentations by professors, as well as a celebration around both the mock election held here at the real one being held in the U.S. (or at least we hope it's not a mock one in the U.S. as well). I always tell my students that as American voters they have the most important and serious job in the world in that they are truly voting for the planet. Or, as my good friend Bouziane Zaid says, everyone on the planet should be able to vote in the U.S. election because the results impact them directly.

Trapped in Kenya, temporarily

As always seem to be the case anymore, I'm going to have to try and get caught up on the travel blog. I've left Africa and have returned, albeit to far northwestern Africa in Morocco (more on that later). My time in sub-Saharan Africa was very positive, although with it's usual Scudder-related disasters. I ended up being trapped in Kenya for a few days. I popped in to the Nairobi airport for my flight to Cape Town on South African Airways and was denied entrance to the flight because my temporary passport (the one left over from the Great Unpleasantness in Cairo) didn't have enough blank pages so the airline wouldn't let me on. Maybe the most amazing thing about the encounter was that I didn't end up in a Kenyan prison - essentially, I could have handled it much better than I did. I think I was mainly angry because it brought back the whole passport theft in Cairo - it's like the gift that just kept on giving. Anyway, I had to leave the airport, make it back to Kenyatta University, and arrange to make it to the US Embassy the next day to get another temporary passport. The lady who denied me access to the South African flight told me that it really wasn't that big of a deal and that the embassy would just put extra pages in my passport - I tried to explain to her that while I'm unfamiliar with diplomatic statecraft I was pretty certain that they wouldn't, in fact, add extra pages to a temporary passpost - that sort of defeats the point of a temporary passport.

Now, getting a new passport caused a bit of a planning problem. I could have made arrangements to just get on the next flight for the same time the next afternoon, but that presupposed that I'd be able to get my new passport at the embassy in around two hours and still make it to the airport on time. It would have been impossible to leave the embassy, make it all the way back to Kenyatta to pick up my suitcases, and then make it to the airport. So, the only option would have been to leave all my worldly possessions with a driver that I had met the day before and depend upon him to wait for several hours outside the embassy for me. It all seemed a bit iffy so I just postponed my flight until the weekend, which caused me to miss my time in Cape Town (which really annoyed me because that was the part I was looking forward to most of all). Now, typically, after having done that, the whole thing worked perfectly. Traffic in Nairobi is incredibly bad so I had arranged for the driver to come out to Kenyatta around 6:00 in the morning (this is the same driver that I had just met the day before at the airport) so I could get to the airport hopefully by 8:00 (they have reduced hours if you're an American citizen, although many hours if you want to become an American citizen, which is interesting in and of itself - anyway, there were only a couple hours in the morning and then a couple hours later in the afternoon, so if the passport wasn't done in the morning the afternoon time slot would have made catching the afternoon flight a moot point anyway). Well, the driver actually arrived early and then took off on this insane drive through every shortcut known or unknown to man, and we actually made it to the embassy early, which gave me time to go next door to have my passport photo taken before preceeding into the embassy.

As it turned out I was the first American citizen in the embassy and they took care of me very quickly. Well, not very quickly, of course. The big snafu was that I had to fit out the form to get a new passport and the woman gave me a red pen, which I thought was odd, but figured that maybe it was a new policy. So, I filled out the entire form and gave it back to her, only to be met by this quizzical look and the obvious question - why did I fill it out in red? I explained that she had actually given me the red pen, which then made her feel pretty foolish. I didn't say much, although I did suggest that maybe it would be a good plan to throw all the red pens away. So, I had to fill out the form again, and then left it with her. She told me to come back around 11:00, which was actually after the official citizen time slot had ended at 10:00. She said not to worry and to just tell the guards at the gate to call her and tell her I was there and that they would let me back at the unofficial hour. It seemed unlikely, but I didn't have much of a choice. As I was filling out the form it occured to me that the US Embassy in Nairobi was actually very nice, and then it dawned on me why it looked so new - it is new, the old one was blown up a couple years ago. Oh, and it was September 11th, which made the whole thing just a bit more odd.

Anyway, I went next door to a very nice coffee shop and had a couple very good cafe lattes and some cheese cake and just sent emails back and forth on my Blackberry. It was one of those experiences that you can't quite convince yourself is actually happening because it was just a little too surreal. At 11:00 I walked back to the embassy, told the gates to call the woman, and, sure enough, they let me in and my new temporary passport was waiting for me. Utterly painless and quick. So, then I had to go find my driver. Sure enough, he had waited for me outside the entire time. So, theoretically anyway, I could have actually done all of that, made my second afternoon flight time, and included my trip to Cape Town. Of course, the skeptic would say that if I had actually left all my worldly possessions with the taxi driver that there would have been a smaller chance that he would have still been waiting for me outside. However, I think he would have because he was a great guy.

One last weird thing about an utterly weird day. When I walked out of the embassy to find my driver I couldn't track him down right away. So, I checked my Blackberry to see if he had called me - we had swapped phone numbers before I entered the diplomatic maze and entered his phone number into my phone. Sure enough, the phone showed that I had missed a call from him. I called back the number and some woman answered who had never heard of my driver - nor had she the second time I called. Anyway, I found my driver and told him the story. He said that I had entered the wrong number into my Blackberry in the first place. He failed to grasp my point that it completely defied logic that I would get a phone call out of the blue from a person I didn't know who had the same number that I had allegedly entered incorrectly.

Anyway, I made it back to Kenyatta and was able to use the extra days to build on the momentum of several good meetings so it turned out OK in the end.

A Kenyan Ghost Story

As is often the case in Kenya, internet connectivity was a bit of an issue so I'll try and get caught up. My time in Kenya has been very successful on the Global Module front, with the requisite number of Scudder-related travel adventures. I spent the time at Kenyatta University, one of our main international partners, and I feel we're making great strides there. I've managed to pick out several departments (sociology, literature and history) to act as "homes" or "incubators" for the Global Modules as we continue to grow. I'm working on a grant with some folks at North Carolina A&T University that would bring some much needed computers to Kenyatta.

I spent the time at the Conference Centre at Kenyatta, which is a pretty nice place - and there were actually some folks there this time (unlike last time when the only other person was a professor from England who was a vegan, which the meat-loving Kenyans couldn't begin to understand). Unfortunately, the internet usually seemed to be down at the business center and a couple different nights the electricity was down in the Conference Centre itself (which was made even more annoying by the fact that it was on in the rest of the campus). What made it even stranger was that sometimes the electricity would work in one outlet and not anyplace else, which led to me almost scaring myself to death one night. I had come back from a day full of visits and was greeted with the information that the electricity was out - and that the backup generator was acting up - and that the repair folks had decided this was a wonderful time to go on strike. So, I had dinner by myself in the dining hall - the crowd that had been there earlier had now cleared out. However, the crew that worked the dining hall could not have been kinder and took great care of me - whipping me up my own meal - which I downed with a bottle of Fanta, which apparently is the national drink of Kenya. I always asked for a Coke and they would always stare at me sadly and encourage me to get a Fanta instead. Armed with candles and matches I went back to my room - and setting up the mosquito netting in the darkenss was another adventure and I almost suffered the total humiliation of hanging myself in the mosquito netting (and thus providing proof positive of the total idiocy of all Americans). I sat down at my desk, with the television behind me, to write in my travel journal in the total darkness of my room - and, for that matter, the entire Conference Centre. At a certain point I suddenly heard a woman's voice behind me - and just about jumped out of my skin when I turned around and saw nothing behind me. And then the television blinked on. Apparently the only outlet in the entire Conference Centre which had decided to work was the one attached to my television. The next morning I told the story to the morning crew and they thought it was very funny and joked that I must have been visited by a jin (obviously drawn from the Arabic jinn) - but then they more seriously stated that jin were more common on the coast in Mombasa.

I had a Global Module in Africa . . .

OK, I'm running around like a lunatic trying to get ready for my next trip. I'm heading back to Africa this weekend to present at a conference on curricular design in African universities and to visit four universities. First off, I'm heading to Kenya to revisit our partner Kenyatta University for several days of meetings as we fine-tune our agreement. Then it's on to South Africa for stops at the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa - as well as the conference. I'm getting tired just thinking about it. I'm especially looking forward to the return trip, which runs from Johannesburg to London (isn't it possible to fly northwest from South Africa to the U.S. instead of over the entire length of Africa and Europe?), and then London to JFK, and then JFK to home - that will be a relaxing day. It's central to our vision to create a strong foundation in Africa - and with partners in Kenya and Ghana and Morocco - and new potential partners in Egypt and South Africa - we're well on our way.