Video: 2 Weeks In Rwanda

“Rwanda, our beautiful and dear country / Adorned of hills, lakes and volcanoes / Motherland, would be always filled of happiness…”

These first three lines of the Rwandan national anthem are epitomized in this video created by Missouri based video production company Mammoth Media. This past summer, they were invited by the Rwandan tourist department to spend two weeks capturing video that would encapsulate the breathtaking nature of the country. Ultimately, the group aimed to collect footage to be shown in the country’s airports and welcome centers.

According to the video’s description on Vimeo, the tourist department ultimately decided, “to omit most of the footage showing people, poverty and real life.” The video you see above is a re-edited version to include that footage and it is beyond breathtaking. I had personally never thought about traveling to Rwanda before watching this video, if only from a lack of knowledge. But now I have an appetite to see those hills, the green savannah, the rare birds and those gorillas in the mist.

Travel writing: how not to do it

We’ve had some interesting posts on travel writing lately, including Don George’s secret formula for writing a successful travel narrative and Pam Mandel’s report on Book Passage. While studying good writing is vital to learning how to write, it’s also important to study bad writing so you know what not to do.

Talented writer Steve Almond tackles this for us with his hilarious skewering of Toto’s 1982 pop hit Africa. I never liked this song, although it was the background theme to far too many high school memories. While this is a song and not a travel article, it includes many of the mistakes sloppy writers make when covering travel in general and Africa in particular. Watch, laugh, and learn.

Thanks to my friend Hannah for showing me this vid!

First impressions of Ethiopia

They say first impressions are lasting impressions, and while that’s a cliché, strong first impressions of a country can tell you a lot.

I’ve been in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, for four days now. My wife has just joined me and I’m treating her to a two-week road trip around the historic northern part of the country to celebrate our tenth anniversary. Memories make the best presents, after all.

This is our first time in sub-Saharan Africa and we’ve both been taken by surprise, summed up by my wife’s assessment of the Ethiopians: “They’re like us.”

(She’s Spanish, so when she says “us” she means Mediterranean people.)

To a great extent they are–in attitudes, priorities, even many mannerisms. With 1500 years of Christianity and an even longer period of nationhood, along with several centuries of Islamic learning and contact with the Mediterranean, Middle East, and South Asia, they’ve developed a culture similar enough to Southern Europe to be recognizable while different enough to be intriguing.

Take social life, for instance. Ethiopians have a great cafe culture and love to while away the hours sipping coffee, chatting with friends, and reading the paper at their favorite cafe. Addis Ababa has a wealth of cafes, both traditional and modern, to suit every mood. The Ethiopians discovered coffee, and it’s equally excellent everywhere, so you pick your place by location and decor.

Their attitude to education is similar to ours too. Private schools abound, the capital has plenty of good bookshops, and every city of any size has at least one university. I’ll be taking a closer look at the schools in a later post in the series.

There’s a relaxed relationship between the sexes here that’s much like our own. While many people frown on premarital sex, that doesn’t stop them from having dating. This has a beneficial effect for female Western travelers in that they won’t be constantly harassed by chronically lonely men like often happens in northern India and parts of the Middle East. Both male and female travelers will receive a fair amount of innocent flirting, though. Considering how good looking the Ethiopians are, this isn’t a bad thing.

%Gallery-85449%I’m ashamed to admit that I thought Addis Ababa was going to be dirty. While it’s a poor city, a small army of street sweepers keeps it pretty tidy. They can’t stop the dust that blows everywhere, though, and the pollution is as bad as a Western city during rush hour. One stark difference is the poverty. There are countless beggars. Many of them are farmers whose crops have failed and they’ve been forced to come to the city to find food. Others are handicapped or have suffered injuries that keep them from working. More prosperous Ethiopians readily give to beggars and don’t judge them simply because they’re poor. This is a pleasant difference from our own culture.

So in the first four days we haven’t had any real culture shock. Expats living in Addis Ababa say it’s easy to slip into daily life here. The Ethiopians we know in Madrid say the same thing about Spain!

Of course we’ve only seen the capital city so far and talked to members of only three of Ethiopia’s many ethnic groups, so as we travel around Ethiopia for the next two months I suspect we’ll discover many differences.

But I bet we’ll find some more similarities too.

UN: Urban Growth Set to Explode in Africa

In 1950, there were only two cities in Africa with more than one million inhabitants. They were both in Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria). In the 2008 version of continent, there are more than 40 urban centers with populations over 1 million. A report by the UN Human Settlements Programme projects that the number of Africans living in cities will double by 2030 to more than 700 million.

The image of an urban Africa is not one that usually comes to mind. Much of the continent’s tourism is still based on wildlife and the natural beauty of rural areas. It’s too early to tell if the landscape will totally change in the coming years.

Large cities are not growing rapidly, but mid-sized cities of between 500,000 and 1 million people are the ones that the UN report focuses on. These upstarts are growing at a rate that will see them soon rival or even eclipse the populations of current African mega-cities like Johannesburg and Nairobi.

[More on the UN Human Settlements Programme report]

Why give Africans IQ tests?

Call me crazy but I just don’t believe that Africans are less intelligent than Europeans or Americans. Yes, it seems like every once in a while a scientist tries to prove that Africans are somehow inferior to the rest of us. You would think there are more pressing issues out there that they could be focusing their studies on…but I guess this one gets a lot of press.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize-winner for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, is facing backlash in Britain after making this controversial statement: “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says, not really,” Watson told The Sunday Times. He recognized that the prevailing belief was that all human groups are equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.” As a result of his comments, the British Science Museum has canceled the scientist’s scheduled speech, saying he has gone too far. He’s since retracted his statement and apologized, but he had to scrap his book tour.

That’s the funny thing about scientists, so brilliant in their fields and so narrow-minded in other areas. Has anyone ever told this poor fellow that giving Western-style IQ tests to people worldwide is not really a fair way to assess people’s true intelligence?