War and Rebirth: Some thoughts on Africa

Remember Europe in the mid-1990s: a multitude of separate nations and economies, some booming, some struggling and a full-blown genocide occuring in a country that used to be called Yugoslavia. The European Union was in its fledgling state, not yet the economic and political power-block that it is now. The western world jumped to the aid of the Bosnians, I certainly remember nightly broadcasts from a bullet-ridden hive of snipers called Sarajevo. There were great failures (such as the Srebernitza massacre of over 8000 Bosnian muslims) due to a United Nations tying its own hands militarily speaking and prefering negotiation with Milosevic while his para-military chetnicks ran rampant through the safe-zones. Nonetheless, the press of the world was there and we were reminded nightly how very important transpiring events were to ours and Europe's security.

Now try to remember Africa at the same time. Rwanda, the Hutus and the Tutsis. As Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian comander of U.N. forces in the region points out in his film "Shake hand with the Devil", his mission was provided with so little supplies and logisitical support, it was as if he was set up to fail in preventing the ensuing genocide. The world turned its back on Rwanda, and why not - it's Africa after all. It's tribalism and Rwanda has no strategic value. Nearly 1 million Rwandans died. Rwanda was the only conflict that caught any portion of the global media eye. The decades old and brutal civil war in Liberia was ongoing, no to mention the war that was termed "Africa's World War" (1998-2003) fought by rebel forces escaping Rwanda, Angolan Rebels, and Congolese rebels and government forces deep in the jungles of what was formerly known as Zaire (now called the Democractic Republic of the Congo). This war is still ongoing and has claimed 4 million lives over the course of its dreary 8 year run. Amnesty International reports that recent fighting has flared up and that the region is far too dangerous for aid workers to enter.

When I interviewed a UBC anthropologist about the genocide in the Angolan occupied enclave of Cabinda, he spoke of "charity-fatigue in the West." There seems, only so much that we can take of this misery, we just come to a point where we don't want to hear anymore. It seems however, that Rwanda, as grave the cost was in human life and suffering, has taught the world's media a harsh lesson. Though coverage has died down, the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan has not. It bears the grim title of the first genocide of the 21st Century during which atleast 100,000 civilians have lost their lives at the hands of the Sudanese-government-backed Janjaweed Militia. The war has left hundreds of thousands in refugee camps along the border region with Chad. This is a problem that Africa is trying to handle for itself. Soldiers from the African Union (AU) police the camps and help provide water and medicine to the refugees. But the soldiers are undersupplied and rely on local pick-ups for transportation. When it comes to protecting the refugees from the raids of the Janajweed or the Chadian rebels be they looking for child soldiers to abduct, food, women to rape, or men to kill, the AU forces are outgunned and have been reported as standing aside as these crimes are committed. The AU is currently funded by the EU an the US, both of which want to see a UN force into Darfur. The president of Sudan has vowed to make Darfur a graveyard for foreign soldiers, and recent threats from Osama bin Laden seem to suggest that a UN force in the region would serve as a big-target for fighters in the region inspired by his message. A recent attack by Chadian rebels and the Janjaweed militia on the capital of Chad in an attempt oust the president, has resulted in increased tensions between the two countries. The attack was defeated, many of the attacking forces were child soldiers abducted from the refugee camps. The leaders of Chad threatened to expel all refugees from their border regions back into Darfur. The UN quickly stepped into to ease tensions.

The plight of child soldiers in African wars is well known to writer/journalists such as Ryszard Kapuscinski. The children are abducted from their families or refugee camps and kept as prisoners. Somali warlords would use amphetamines to suppress the hunger of their soldiers and work them into a drug-induced state. Cannabis is often used to suppress any feelings of pain. As Kapuscinski points out, children have little concept of self-preservation and would run madly into combat firing wildly while their adult counter-parts were more inclined to take cover in battle. Thus, the surviving children, addled with drugs, are psychologically broken and constructed into killing machines. Aid agencies have reported cases of child soldiers being returned to their long-lost families and then running away to find their soldier compatriots. What lives they may have had are cancelled out by the wars and warlords of their lands. When the wars end, and the soldiers are no longer needed, they return to the cities and seek employment. All too often, the legacy of the wars is a physical one for many.

Recently, there have been some developments in a positive direction that are worth noting. Four Sudanese nationals have been charged with war crimes in relation to Darfur and are having their assets seized. They include rebel leaders and military comanders of the government in Khartoum. The civil war that tore Liberia apart for so many years has ended, and the nation recently celebrated their first democractic election of a woman president (2 firsts). The notorious Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia and instigator of civil war in Sierra Leone as well as in his own nation was captured in Nigeria and is being put on trial by UN forces for crimes against humanity. Angola has enjoyed 2 years of relative peace after the end of their 30-year civil war. It is now enjoying relative prosperity due to its oil reserves (especially in the enclave of Cabinda - see link on sidebar).

It's easy to blame Africans for the problems of Africa. Indeed, endemic corruption is a hallmark trait of so many democratic and autocratic governments in the region. What is not so easy to admit or see is that we in the Western world both benefit from and encourage such corruption to maintain our standard of living in the West. Alberta-based corporation Talisman Incorporated has been exploring and drilling for oil in Sudan with full compliance and complicity of the Khartoum government long before Darfur made the nightly news. There have been reports of the Janjaweed militia being used to run civilians off their land to allow for unimpeded oil exploration. American oil-giant Chevron-Texaco has been doing business in Africa for over 40 years. In 1975, the corporation paid MPLA Angolan soldiers to take over oil fields in Cabinda (during the initial invasion of the Republic by Angolan troops). Countries like Nigeria and Angola are overflowing in oil and mineral wealth and yet, so little of that wealth finds its way back filtering amongst the citizens of those nations. Regions of the D.R. Congo are similarly rich in resources to the point where there have been recent rumblings of war amongst neighbouring nations. Once again, central Africa could sink back into its world war with barely a peep of acknowledgement or care from the World's media. Africa as a whole, through the auspices of the AU is taking major steps to address their regional problems. Any solutions will be impossible without an admission of complicity from the Western world in resource-exploitation of African nations, and steps taken to eliminate this economic relation. It is a relation that beckons back to the dark days of colonialism, the comparison is not difficult to draw. The first step is admitting that we as citizens of the west are part of the problem. After that, what are our options?

Donate, Unicef and Amnesty International do good work on the continent, if you can. Protest the complicity of cororations such as Talisman and Chevron in ongoing genocides. The least we can do is become aware. Africa has the strength and will to improve its own situation. This, however, is impossible when Western corporations ensure that progress is made impossible through support of regional government corruption and infighting for their own financial benefit. Africa is on the precipice: the 21st Century could hold amazing potential and growth for the continent. Already we are seeing this in the area of eco-tourism. Imagine travelling to Mauretania or Libya in the 1980s, now there are several tour agencies operating in those and other nations. While some regions are in recovery and growth mode, others, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, see no end to their suffering.

Generalisations on the continent are always cause for some concern. In the words of Kupscinski, Africa is too large, it is a cosmos, except in the minds of Westerners Africa does not exist.

The Aesthetics of Sorrow in Film - two case studies

Most people I've spoken with about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain have described it in terms that I would paraphrase as a beatifully sad film. I have yet to see the film, but having seen Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, I take what they say at face value. When the majority of hollywood tripe films (i.e. romantic comedy - "Failure to Launch") or even very good heartwarming films (i.e. Napoleon Dynamite - with its truly happy ending) concern themselves with emotional and aesthetic gratification (Sara Jessica Parker and Mathew McConaghey[sp?] are both beautiful people - by hollywood standards - and the sets 'ocean front property with nice light coloring and warm coloring' give a feeling of warmth, and joviality) something must be said for the importance of films that don't pander to this desire from the paying public. The beauty of sorrow in film has a far different pull on the viewer. I'm disregarding films like Sean Penn's "The Assasination of President Nixon" which are about as comfortable to see and hear as all ten fingernails dragging themselves across the chalkboard and leave you somewhat ill to the stomach and mind afterwards. The good sad films leave you with the opposite of gratification, there is an emotional emptiness that seems to fill the stomach when the curtain closes and yet you are convinced that what you've seen was nothing less than truly beautiful.

Take English director Michael Winterbottom's futuristic tragedy "Code 46" with Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins. Winterbottom manages to create a futuristic world solely out of the components and concerns of our own modern one. Instead of relying on expensive sets, filming was taken to various different parts of the world (Dubai, Shanghai, Northern India, amongst others). Most of the world has been reduced to desert ('a fuera') where the poor and displaced eek out a living, while the fortunate live in the cities. The story tells of an insurance investigator who falls in love with the woman he is sent to investigate. The woman, Maria, feels that she has been waiting for Robbins all her life and that fate has intervened to bring the two of them together. There is a palpable attraction between the two in the first seconds of their meeting (an interogation room - where Robbins uses an 'intuition virus' to determine that Maria is the one who has been dealing out false insurance papelles). They meet later on a subway and over the course of the night begin a passionate affair (Robbins is married with a child).

The colors normally associated with warmth and happiness in films are inverted as the bright and hot colors of the desert wastelands of the outcasts where Maria had lived for a number of years. Other uses of warm colors and lighting paint the picture of a grand and solemn sense of urban alienation for those living inside the cities through Winterbottom's superb camera work. For two souls to meet through chance and share each others' embraces and find love in this aesthetic quickly brings a forlorn beauty and the chance of true happiness. In time, Robbins does some investigating of his ownand finds out that a relationship with Maria is a violation of Code 46. Because of mass cloning and in vetro births, much of the world shares genes. The code is in place to protect against sex between individuals who might share similar genes resulting in incestuous reproduction. Even though the two characters are worlds apart both in where they came from, how they were brought up, and who they really are the world they live in or perhaps fate has conspired to make their love forbidden. A pondering Robbins seen above in the airport with hundreds of flourescent Damoclesian swords aiming at him from above and below. It is a beautiful shot, but it offers little comfort. Enter the desert and become a nobody, remain in the stark cities and lose the one true love of his life. He comes back the Shanghai, ordered by his bosses to track down the offender when he failed the first time, and learns that Maria has had a pregnancy terminated and all memories of him and their affair "the sex act" as it is termed by a doctor, wiped from her memory. At this point, the warmth and inkling of happiness we have from the film is solely an effect of the two lovers being together. They are playing a dangerous game and the stark beauty of the opposing environments seems ready to swallow them at any point.

In an embrace at the airport, when Maria has helped Robbins gain passage out of Shanghai, she remembers him from her fatalistic dreams. An embrace is all that is needed, they resolve to throw caution and the demands of their world to the wind and flee to the legendary freeport of Jbel Ali. Once they arrive in the city (a combination of Rajastan and Dubai) the aesthetic changes. Yes, the pleasantries of the city are not present, it is dirty and run down but it has personality and warmth. From the blanket to their bed that the hotel owner's wife made, to the children running and playing in the streets. There is a very real sense that where they are now is far more human than the world they were brought into. Perhaps this is an affect of their feelings: they are together and in love, perhaps there is a chance of a life together. After a night of passion, Robbins watches silently as Maria unwittingly betrays their love to the authorities, in voice-over we hear her speak "you must have known what the virus would make me do, was there nothing you could do to stop me?". She calls in a Code 46 violation and returns to bed with no memory of what she has done. They flee, they are pursued.

The separate environments and world of the two lovers triumphs in the end. We see Robbins back in the sterile white and blue Seattle, his memory wiped of Maria, Jbel Ali, and everything he knew as vital for his soul for that brief time. Maria is cast a fuera, into the wastelands for her crime. She is unimportant now, one of the outcasts. Thus, she is left with her memories. She and her memories compose all that remains of what once was a beautiful thing. She wanders through the barren desert, a picture of perfect loneliness. She sits, tired, her eyes half-closing before uttering to the emptiness of her world in vain "I miss you."

Andrea Dorfman's first feature film "Parlsely Days" is of a similar vein, if more quirky in its development. This east coast indie venture tells the story that so many films never consider: the end of a long-term loving relationship. Kate (Megan Dunlop) and Ollie have what their friends term the perfect relaitonship. She teaches bicycle maintenance and repair and he's a (absurdly meticulous sex-ed teacher at a local school). The film works well to capture the indie feel of north Halifax, as some critics have put it, from the handlebars of a bike. Kate learns that she is pregnant, and on the advice of her herbalist friend, embarks on a diet of parsley to induce menstruation (a herbal abortion).

She's been with Ollie for five years, he is (sometimes irritatingly so) the picture of a perfect, lving, caring boyfriend (he's referred to as a "male lesbian" by her lesbian friends). Kate, however, shared a passionate kiss with one of her bike students that left her convinced that she could no longer be in love with Ollie. As the film progresses, she is isolated from friends and Ollie (in her own mind) as she mulls over her difficulties. She's tormented as to what to do. In between, we have idyllic flashbacks of how their love began in a canoe on vacation at a lake. It is clear, from these times that the two were very much in love for some time and that the decisions she has to make will be difficult and are hers to make alone.

She see-saws (quite literally in one shot) on her decision to break up with Ollie. Ollie learns of the pregnancy on his own, is elated and has visions of a shared future for him and Kate. Ollie never fell out of love with Kate, he remains faithfully devoted through the last scenes. Kate comes clean with Ollie and, as they sit alone in their canoe that lies in the grass of their backyard, she learns that it was Ollie who was really responsible for the pregnancy (everyone had always thought he was the 'King of contraception'). He tells her he doesn't care about the kiss she shared with the student and that they should move on and stay together. When the words come out, it is with no pleasure that Kate declares "I don't love you anymore". The words bring as much sorrow to her as they do to him. They lie in the canoe all night and following day, in the words of Kate "when you think you're holding someone for the last time you don't want to let go" while a melancholic Julie Doiron cover of "In the Early Morning Rain" plays.

The parsley fails, Kate goes for an abortion. Ollie, has a book constructed for Kate "Other things to think about when you are getting and abortion" that is juxtaposed with a beautiful 8mm sequnce of shots. As the film ends, we see Kate and Ollie when it all began, out on the lake in the canoe. Kate makes him promise that ten years from now, no matter who they're with, they have to come back to this exact place. Ollie promises. The canoe and the lovers fade away and we are left with nothing but an empty lake filling the screen. There are points of intensity in a relationship when vows such as that are made and believed for a long time - as Parsely Days beutifully points out even that can fade away into nothingness.

Week 1 - Squamish: I got squished...

The day began early, after a late night shooting the shit with Ryan in the back alley. Up at 6, substitute yogourt for usual liquid breakfast, bring camera, rope, ten quickdraws, helmet and the rest of the gear. At the greyhound station early, my bespectacled climbing partner for the day in nowhere to be seen. He arrives as the bus is preparing to leave, great relief at this point. A slim man, with short hair and a french accent, Gilles from Portugal. I get the sense he's out of my league in terms of climbing ability (I have said I would be comfortable leading 5.8s or 5.9s), he's interested in sport climbing and trad.

We arrive in Squamish and walk over to the smoke bluffs. The VOC party was supposed to be meeting at the town's Tim Horton's. We can't find it so we continue on alone. The weather is beautiful, not a cloud in the sky and the sun's going to be bright and hot. We hike up (I'm relieved to find that I'm not huffing nearly as much as I was when I smoked and climbed stairs at the library for God's sake) to Burger's and Fries and find what we think is a 5.8 slab. It's steep, with nothing but the smallest nubbins for nail-holds, nothing but smearing action with the feet. I volunteer to lead it for the first climb of the day. It's difficult at first, I get to the first clip and I'm in. The bases of my soles are killing me, I make it to the second clip and (struggling) get in the quickdraw. I clamber up a little further, try to get footing off to the left, first lead fall. Not bad, expected it, though I didn't push off the wall so hands and forearms are grated. More scrambling, another fall shortly thereafter. Then I make a hard push for the third bolt, and have a great lead fall, my first big one, it even caused a wierd 3-4 second anxiety/adrenaline attack. It passes and I make it clear to Gilles that I can't get up this one.

I come down and a couple, Luc and Winifred approach and chat, it turns out that Gilles' book is wrong and I was trying to lead a 5.10a called High Boltage. Fuckin' eh! the last thing I lead was a damp 5.7 in Skaha. Gilles leads it quite well and sets up an anchor, and then I climb the bastard. Hardest outdoor climb I've ever done - feeling pretty proud of myself at this point. Luc and Winifred borrow my rope for a while; Gilles and myself scout out other climbs.

We retrieve my sport rope and head down to Fatty Bolger for some sport leads. We both lead a 5.6 called Dave's and a 5.7 called Stepladder with no falls. Good slab with more visible foot ledges and larger hand-holds. We run into a party of French-Canadian climbers (two of wich are in the VOC though we've not met before).

After a rest for water, and a small dose of sugary caffeine for me, we begin the lengthy hike to find the Octopuses' Garden at the top of the Bluffs. The sun's really out and its a sweaty hike for me. We arrive in trad country with a group of climbers laying protection up crags. Bill the Kaleida Cave administrator/builder is there laying protection up Octopuses' Garden. I watch for a while trying to learn. I can't help but staring at a climb called 'edible panties'. Gilles has disappeared around the corner to find Respiration Rock. I track him down and we're staring at a series of crags and crags so wide they deserve the term chimney. He instructs me in the belay style of traditional climbing, the language barrier proves to be a bit of a problem, but we're using two ropes and I eventually get the picture. Gilles starts up the wet and mossy 5.6 called Hernia. The crags prove torture on the feet as he places his cams and uses his friends as he calls them (as they call them in Portugal) to aid in getting up the chimney before moving significantly over to the left and using them again for a bit to get up the second chimney. He makes it, remarks at its difficulty, and sets us an anchor around a big tree at the top. He takes a while to set up the belay at the top and I take a while to get sore feet into climbing shoes before I begin to second the pitch. The first cam comes out without much difficulty but the crags destroy the feet. With much yelling from me and encouragement from Gilles, I muscle with my arms up through the first chimney, smearing to the left and right with feet until I reach the mid-climb bench and rest. I hammer out a nut and manage to jam both thighs and feet into the second chimney and pull desperately with my hands with much yelling and support from above. Make it to the top, hoot and holler, fuckin' rights - first experience in trad and it was grand. I make a terrible rappel down scratching every part of me as I descend, something about rappeling still freaks me out a little. Gilles cleans the anchor and comes down in proper style.

We pack up with just enough time to rush down the hill and into town to catch the Greyhound back to Van. All day no sign of the other VOCers. Nonetheless, a completely kick-ass way to celebrate 1 week without smokes. On the bus ride back we gaze at the Stawamus Chief (pictured above at right, next to typical squish rock). It's a goal, it might be a ways in the future before I can trad my way up it. I'm going to take a 2 day trad instruction course in Squamish before the summer. Harder sport next time, and maybe a little begginer trad.

Now I'm weak, with a sunburn and bashed up knees. Signing off for now...

Did I freeze Sam McGee?

Okay, those are the lions, dead centre top of picture. The two rock peaks are, respectively, the East and West Lions or the Two sisters. Yesterday was day four of the contintual-exercise-to- avoid-smoking-routine and it worked quite well, a bit two well.

The day begins at around ten, when I roll out of bed, consume caffeine in large sugary doses and pack my camera bag with 2/3 of a box of crackers. Mountaineering boots, check, warm fleece, check (thinking I probably won't need it), camera and all accoutrements, check, two water canisters, check, guidebook, check. Next step, wake up Dave. He's up and about. Soon he's at my door and we're off. Of course, the trekking pole (I had to forget something) is left at home. We're downtown consuming Mcdonald's food at around noon. Strange thing about that sort of food, it tastes good going down, but provides you with absolutely no energy, I guess there's nothing really strange about that.

We follow the directions from my guidebook and find ourselves on the sea-to-sky highway a little later. We drive in circles in a neighbourhood off the highway for a while until frenzied navigation leads us to a fenced off logging road. The route has been found. It starts to rain seconds after we get out of the car. I am quite happy that I did being a fleece. I realize the trekking pole was left at home, curse my existence for a while (I have tendenitus [sp?] in my left knee) but suck it up and we begin up the winding road. Time check: approximately 1:15 PM. It's a good start, steep and gradual, gets the blood pumping. Dave and I remark that this is the country where the new Battlestar Galactica is filmed, cylon territory. The rain is light and consistent, Dave (who wears spectacles, is blinded by fogged glasses and wet hair (he has no hood to his jacket). We finally reach the trail proper, the fleece has been taken off along with the Peruvian toque I got for Christmas from my Aunt Carolyn in Australia. We start to see traces of snow alongside the trail.

We pass a rock slide, then a water fall and river blanketed by concrete-esque snow that we trapse across. Nice scenery, but the rain is coming down, not really worth a photograph. Then we notice what are perhaps the markings of a snowmobile. No sounds, it's a miserable day in Vancity and the weather isn't any nicer up here. We realise, shortly, that we are the only two souls on the mountain, memories of a dutch math teacher from my high school "zere we were, up on zee north ridge". Now the trail is uphill and covered with snow (2 to 3 feet of hard pack), somewhere below the snow are rocks and flowing water. The bridges are impossible to find and occaisionally with an anguished bellow, the leader falls into what we later term "mines". Basically placing his foot where he thinks there is footing and, quickly finding none, plunges unceremoniously a few feet down. We stop regularly for water breaks.

After some time, the trail branches down a snowy slope towards another creek. Wooden stairs looking like they were fashioned by disgruntled wood nymphs aid somewhat in our descent. We cross the bridge onto the lions proper and get a slightly fogged view of Howe sound and smoke rising from houses on the other side. A food break is necessary, if only we'd brought cheese. Dave provides some turkey sausage in trade for my crackers. The trail switchbacks through towering firs and the snow becomes increasingly deep. The fleece is back on and strong winds are blowing through the trees. A short but extensive discussion is had about ex-girlfriends in between falling into increasingly deeper and more menacing mines.

The switchbacks stop and the trail skirts along the side of the mountain, at this point I am in the lead and every two or three steps lands one of my legs descending quickly into the unknown. This is followed by curses and difficult extractions from the mines. The trees begin to thin out as we reach the tree line. The marked trail disappears and we continue upwards until we decide to cross over into a tree-less avalanche chute to take our bearings. We have a much higher view of a fogged in Howe sound. Time check: 5:00 PM. There's a storm blowing on top of the East lion. Dave and I are convinced that God Himself may be waiting on top of the peak ready to decapitate us with a bolt of lightning should we challenge Him anymore. I mark our furthest point, perhaps 150 yards from the western ridge. There will be no summit today. We pause, dave smokes a single cigarette, the sun shines through the clouds for the briefest of instances. Endorphins are flowing through my veins, though all my clothing is soaked, I feel rather pleasant. We vow to summit one of the lions come June.

The descent (read: frenzied leaping and sliding down snow) begins. I keep picturing Milestone's white chocolate cheese cake waiting for me in the city. We make good time, though the mines slow us down cutting my bad knee at one point. We keep up the pace and make it to the car by 7:00 PM.

Cold and wet, we proceed to Milestones and eat frugally, though the cheesecake does feature for me. Back home, and a warm shower never felt so good.

Early to bed, early to rise. Sociology final written and finished a few hours ago. Didn't do nearly as bad as I thought I might.

Tonight, a film featuring Noam Chomsky and relaxation before heading to Squamish on the weekend for perhaps two solid days of leading on some good rock. Things are looking up.

The Doves of Mirhleft

The school year has passed quicker than most. It is, in the proverbial language of languishing undergraduates 'crunch time', and I have chosen to make some sort of an inaugural post for this new site. An exam looms in the near distance, but strangley becomes less threatening as the date approaches. What to speak of?

Cigarette smoking, a habit that had gone on for far too long in my life was quit three days ago. It's been on and off this year with the cancer sticks, I'd quit for 5 months last year before a 50 day stretch in a logging camp broke my will. As a tactic to combat the urge, I've embarked on a day to day exercise mania that seems to be working. Day one: climbed Mount Tzhouhalem with a friend of my dad's on Vancouver Island. The mountain is quite small, barely 500 meters off Cowichan Bay, and when we made it to the first summit (marked by a cross) we were met by a native father and three of his kids. The two girls gave us easter eggs and wished us a happy easter, before we continued on. As someone who spends his summers tree-brushing (read: cutting down deciduous trees with buzz-saws so that the coniferous trees grow faster for the logging companies - it pays the bills), and spends his off-time in a nasty port-o'-call by the name of Prince George, the native family was a welcome site. During the schoolyear, the only story getting newsplay concerned the beating death of a young girl by her native uncle and during the summer there's nothing but constant exposure to the racial slurs of brushers on the subject of natives. I was always raised with a high respect for the local natives (growing up in Calgary) as my family had ties with the Blood tribe that went back many years. Unfortunately, Prince George (asleast the downtown core) gives racists the ammunition they need. You kind of understand how a person can form stereotypes, if they have no background understanding to come from. The legacy of betrayal, violence and disease that our culture levied on the native populations is forgotten in the stumbling annoyance of a drunk begging for change.

It's like Africa in that way, the images we see are most usually of starving children in dusty villages. The news we hear about concerns little more than war and starvation. And yet I am hard pressed to find a more beautiful place on this earth than the small coastal town of Mirhleft in southern Morocco near the disputed region of the Spanish Sahara. To stay in a simple auberge run by a French ex-pat tucked away in the dusty lanes of the town and be woken into the deep blue of early morning by the inimitable Muslim call to prayer mixed with the cooing of nearby doves. There were no tourist attractions, the boarding was simple, and the beaches were devoid of locals and yet if money were no option, I'd board a plane for Marrakech and spend atleast a year in that town writing, reading, and drinking mint tea everyday.

Don't get me wrong, there was poverty in Morocco and I imagine a good portion of the populace don't have an easy time of it. However, in the words of a woman who travelled with us for a while and had travelled more extensively in sub-saharan Africa, the stress that we as Westerners put upon ourselves from waking hour until we collapse at night is taken in stride in Africa. When we flew out and landed in the UK, the first thing we noticed was that everyone on the streets of London seemed to be going somewhere else in a major hurry. Gone were the lazy cafes, and groups of locals chatting their way through the days events. After Morocco, London seemed cold, antisocial, sterile, and (though I never really put my finger down on the last one) there was a current of danger.

Bringing this back to the native family, it was just nice to have something stand out and say we're human before we're anything else, and race (as a social term) only matters when individual people insist on it. That, or I just thought it very nice that a couple of kids were willing to share their easter eggs with us (chocolate is a seriously valued commodity when hiking that the smallest child realises).

I had my first piece writing published a few days ago. I always thought I'd be able to twist the arm of some local fictional compilation and get a short story in edgewise. It turned out to be a news article I'd written on the forgotten genocide occuring in the tiny Angolan-occupied enclave of Cabinda for UBC's The Ubyssey. The night before the paper came out, the editor e-mailed me and told me to cut my 1700 word article to 650 at the max. This resulted in me cutting two-thirds (and a lot of the detail) out of it. I brought it to him, and he went to work on it. The result wasn't bad, the editor added a sentence of his own and used the rest of my article to indicate that there has indeed been a genocide occuring here since the Angolan invasion on 1975 that the world has causually forgot. Aside from spelling my name wrong below the title, the thing that struck me as odd was that he took out all mention of the fact (and its a supported fact), the American oil giant Chevron actually paid the Angolan troops to take over the oil fields of Cabinda, not to mention that they continue to pull 8 million dollars a day out of the resource-rich pocket of land. Their complicity in the genocide was excised from my writing. So I'm getting the full article published in an underground paper at the school. Anyone interested in finding out more about Cabinda should go to www.cabinda.net. The enclave is trying its best to get the world to notice what has been going on there for years.

The title of my blog is a reference to a series of mountaineering guides that have been published over the years. It also refers to a real feeling you get once you hoof it through miles of bush and arrive at a beautifully pristine alpine meadow. I got a taste of it this year with the Varsity Outdoors Club. The only trekking I've done at any real altitude came when I was in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. We trekked to the top of Jbel Toubkal (4167 meters), North Africa's highest mountain. It was a good two day slog through arid brushy valleys followed by a scramble through steep boulder fields to get to the summit. Once you're up there though, literally having the breath taken from you, in the words of our Berber guide "you are in a different world". I've rock climbed since high-school, but it was that experience that urged me to continue into the world of mountaineering.

I has planned on going to Nepal for 3 weeks of trekking in the Annapurna ranges before 3 more weeks of wandering around the countryside. Unfortunately, the country's security situation has been on a serious downhill slide since the new year. It's gone from a cancelled cease-fire with the Maoists to the King ordering security forces to shoot protestors in the space of a few months. So that trip was cancelled, and a return to Africa is in the works. Two and a half months of trekking and photography in Namibia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. It's a full brushing season away, but it seems closer every day.

As for the near future: climbing the lions in North Van tommorow, exam the next day, lead climbing in Squamish on friday. An early morning is taking its toll on me now. Enough ramblings for one post.