Blog

I’ve woken up each day this week to work on my world food film with my co-creator Jim.  I’m at a fancy hotel in Johannesburg, South Africa, anId he’s some 9,000 miles away in Oakland raising a near one year old, so we connect before work, my time, and before bed, his.

 

 

I eat waffles, fresh fruit, and strong tea as we write through drought in Ethiopia, embattled corn harvest in Mexico, grain trading in the USA.  These characters, whom I know better than most of my friends, and Jim’s voice threaded through the computer surround me alone, perched in my Johannesburg hotel room.

I’ve spent the last couple weeks traveling around Liberia visiting rubber plantations and mine sites, talking with people about how these businesses can better benefit local citizens.  I like the technical discussions the best: the cost of replanting a plantation slaughter tapped during the war, the tonnage of various trucks to transport, the process for cleaning and packing rubber.   This plant is run by a lovely Congolese woman who when I break into speaking french with her, invites me to her party.  Sometimes I marvel at home blessed I am to drop into all of these various worlds.

 

maybe they sense the coming rain.

Another amazing evening, with readers of the World Food Movie calling in from three continents. Filled today with thoughts and inspiration on how to keep in developing. Here was the London contingent.

On my way back from the mine in Obuasi, Ghana to Accra and then to Johannesburg. Flights cancelled and so I hole up in a hotel to work, rest, and sleep. One of the benefits is that they serve Banku, my favorite Ghanaian dish made with pounded fermented corn and cassava. Banku with Tilapia, Banku with light soup . . . I could stay here for awhile.

Been working on a film about the global struggle for food. The film takes us from the corn fields of Iowa, to Presidential palaces in Ethiopia, to rancheros hiding out in Mexico city. The opening credits roll over shots of Solon Beef Days, an annual festival in a small Iowa town where my aunt and uncle and their family still live. The parade is actually happening today while I am 6,000 miles away at a gold mine in Ghana eating mashed cassava and running projections for millions of dollars of new community projects. Sometime I wonder at the strangeness of how a boy from Massachusetts ended of advising African governments and companies, but today its the Solon main street parade that seems oddest of all.

Back in South Africa after two years.  Back with old friends in old haunts.  Like I never left and like I’ve never been here before.

 

From the electrical shop at the mine I’m working at in Ghana.

I’m off to Ghana for a few weeks working on a gold mining project.  Before I leave I sit in my cafe in London and read reports.

 

One is about the Galamsey, the men who pay off guards, descend down into shafts for days, chip away at bits of rock, and then turn around hauling bags of ore on their backs.  They are often injured, sometimes die, are always trapped in a web of bribes, debt, desperation, hope that one day they’ll hit a good gold vein.  My job is to help figure out how to improve the situation..

 

I drink sweet Turkish coffee and eat tabouleh bitter with lemon.  I still don’t understand much about the world.

 

Just back from three weeks in Liberia.  Amazing to work in a country, that six years after a devastating civil war, is putting itself back together.  I was advising the government on how to make sure Liberians benefit from over $20 billion of concession agreements with foreigners in mining, oil, and agriculture.  Piece by piece.

I was taken by the people, by the language, by the possibility.  I learned a new kind of english and glimpsed another way of seeing the world: perhaps God is real, not so sure in this land.  It was shocking to be in a country where not the French, not the English, but people from the US were the colonizers: I couldn’t hide as easily.  I was taken with the place, the warmth people showed me, the opportunity to make a difference.   I’m hopefully going back again soon.