I’ve travelled a bit and seen many inspiring things but those that I fancy the most are places of natural beauty – mountains, the jungle, countryside fields, waterfalls, and the beach, to name a few. After this trip, the mountains of Nepal and the backwaters of Kerala, India were the highlights.  .

Anyway I’ve been travelling for 15 days now nd a few days ago Olivia rejoined me for a tour of Kerala, one of India’s southernmost states and one of the most beautiful part of India I’ve seen during my travels here (even nicer than Goa). Thanks honey for joining me for your first trip to this country. 

One of our main objectives was an overnight trip on a houseboat through the tranquil and meandering backwater network of canals, rivers, and lakes. This is a very popular activity for travelers to Kerala (both Indian and foreigners) and a lot of our friends in Abu Dhabi have told us about how beautiful it is. And they weren’t wrong! But beware of the booking process. Houseboat operators will charge the price they think you can afford to pay, not what it is ‘worth’.  We paid 5500 rupees (US$122) for a private room with air-conditioning and bathroom on a 5-BR houseboat, including three meals (lunch, dinner and breakfast the following morning, eating such things as fresh prawns, coconut rice and fresh pineapple and bananas). We brought our own supply of Kingfishers on board too.  We also had the boat to ourselves – the group that had booked it cancelled at the last minute and so the owner was desperate to take any money in that he could.

Starting from the small town of Alleppey, which is one the main starting/ending points for backwater cruises, our houseboat travelled down a narrow canal, the sides of which were lined with other houseboats and the homes of local people. We would occasionally get a glimpse into their daily lives, as they bathed or washed their laundry in the calm waters at the doorstep of their homes. Palm trees fringe the shores of the many lakes and rivers, the sounds of worship or song from the various temples, mosques and churches waft over the water and birds alight on clumps of floating moss and lilies. Aside from tourism and fishing, farming seems to be the other major economic activity of the backwater community.

By way of background, the backwaters were formed when water from the Arabian Sea overflowed rivers flowing into the sea down from the Western Ghats mountain range. Various barrier island chains were formed. Manmade dykes were created to form an irrigation system for low-lying fields in order to allow the farming of rice, cassava and yam. It is on these dykes, only a few metres wide, that local farmers live. I find myself wondering for how long such an irrigation and transportation system has existed, and how much of it is man-made and when it was constructed.

Hanging out on a boat like this for 24 hours provides a perfect place to feel like you are getting away from the rat race and enjoying what the world has to offer. Be it taking in the beautiful scenery, intense conversation with another, reading a good book or immersing yourself in deep thought and contemplating the meaning of life, this is a good place to do it. The best way for me to wind down a trip through a though-provoking place such as India.

Tomorrow, the beach, at Varkala. 

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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So I’m in Varanasi – one of the holiest cities in the Hindu religion – and I’m sick.  I’d only been here a couple of hours when I started feeling the rumblings in my tummy. The prime suspect is a vegetarian meal I had at a local restaurant – I ordered bruschetta and I guess the chopped tomato is what done it for me! The restaurant is highly rated so I guess I let my guard down.

Before the shit hit the fan (so to speak) I managed to get in an hour watching part of a cool concert series happening at Assi Ghat. the group on stage had a great drummer/tambores player, an accordian-like instrument and some kind of strings instrument and finally a lead whose singing style sounded like he was speaking very rapidly . Eric I bet you’re curious  I got photos and will post soon.

Since then I’ve spent the last 24 hours in my room in bed or on the toilet. 

Except for a 20min walk I took tonight while trying to find an ATM. You know if I had to describe India in one word it would be ’shocking’. The filth, the noise, the poverty, the smell and the chaos. At night these are all magnified. The long creepy shadows in the streets, the incessant beeping of the motorcyclists and auto-rickshaws and the glare of their headlights cutting through the haze that hangs in the city air, the thick acrid smell of something burning (not bodies but more like wood – like a stove fire – and it burns the nose and the throat), stray cows EVERYWHERE yes stray cows, and of course the street-dwellers – the poor and homeless who beg, the street workers who sell – and the touts, those super-friendly random guys who walk up to say “Helloooooo, how are you? Where are you from?” as if a totally innocent question when they are really just trying to make a quick buck whatever way they can.

Varanasi had it all in that 20 min walk. I just hope that I get to see some more of the cool, cultural side of Varanasi in the one day I have left before I go to Kolkata (the side you keep telling me about Mick!). If I feel better tomorrow morning I plan to take a stroll along the ghats and maybe even a boat ride up the Ganges. We’ll see!

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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On Thursday morning I left the Pokhara Valley on a tourist bus (so-called only because most of the passengers were tourists but which was in fact a ‘local’ bus – see below!) and headed south to Lumbini – the birthplace of the Buddha. The bus took the Siddhartha Highway (note: Gautam Siddhartha was Buddha’s name prior to achieving his enlightenment at Bodhgaya in India) which is a 160km stretch of narrow road through the mountains located south of the city of Pokhara. The scenery was breaktaking – at 7am the sun was just rising and the valley below was covered in fog with the lush green mountainscape rising up out of it like cliffs out of the ocean. I have a beautiful picture which I will upload when I’m back. If you read about bus crashes in the mountains of Nepal in the newspapers, I would imagine this is the place! Places I’ll add to an itinerary for a future visit are Tansen and Sirubari (two mountain villages) and Tashiling (a Tibetan refugee camp).

After seven hours of winding roads on an uncomfortable seat, I arrived in the dusty town of Bhairawa, where I looked for transport to Lumbini. An excited local approached me and urged me to go with him for the trip.

“How much?” I asked.
“30 rupees sir”, he said, spitting a long stream of sweet-smelling tobacco juice into the ground beside him.
“How long until you leave?”
“5 minutes sir!”
“Really? 5 minutes?” I said with a wry smile.
“Yes sir!”

Thinking it would be more like 20 (in fact it turned out to be 40) I climbed on board. The resulting trip turned out to be even more uncomfortable than the preceding ride through the mountains. Picking up new passengers every five minutes, idling in heavy traffic with fumes filling the bus through the open windows, dodging the myraid of obstacles on the single-lane road (cows, pigs, chickens, goats, donkeys, and dogs). Not to mention bicycles with 2 or 3 people on them, cycle-rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, tractors, trucks, cars and buses. Of course the sensible driver will use his horn liberally to indicate he is approaching from behind and is also willing to drive on the wrong side of the road (which is the right side, not the left side) in order to avoid oncoming traffic and consequently lift his foot from the accelerator. Bring your ear plugs! Oh, and if you ever wondered how many people you can fit on a bus in Nepal, the answer is as many as you want!

Anyway it isn’t anything I didn’t sign up for. Bring it on! 

Lumbini, as I mentioned, is known as the birthplace of the Buddha. Almost immediately upon arriving, I met a Buddhist monk named Choki from Karnataka, India. He had travelled by bus for over three days to Nepal to visit Kathmandu and then come to Lumbini for the Golden Jubilee Ceremony of the 41st Throne Holder of Sakya Order His Holiness The Sakya Trizin. Lol… I wasn’t able to communicate clearly enough with Choki to understand the significance of the event so further research needed.  He did tell me that the festival would last for six more days.

Choke told me he had been born in India and his parents were originally from Tibet. He had taken a vow of celibacy. He had no desire to get married and seemed a very pious man. Curious, I asked how old he was.

“37″, he said, and to me, “what is your age?”

“31″, I answered, and he said with a twinkle in his eye, “So I am your elder!” 

It turned out that there were several thousand monks attending while I was there so the timing of my arrival to Lumbini was very serendipitous!

The whole area is very peaceful and there are people everywhere, praying and chanting. These include monks and tourists, many from China, India and Japan. Did you know that there are an estimated 350 million Buddhists worldwide? It is the world’s fourth-largest religion after Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

Anyway, Choki took me around Lumbini, introducing me to various Buddhist holy sites in the area. The ones that interested me most were the following:

1) Maya Devi Mandir: an archaeological site with brickwork from 300 BC and which is thought to be Nepal’s oldest known man-made structure. The site is enclosed by a building, and to enter it you must take off your shoes. Inside you get to see the excavated site (not impressively detailed/explained) but the centrepiece is the spot where the Buddha is thought to have been born. It is presumed so based on a stome that the Indian Buddhist emperor Ashoka placed there. At the spot there is a sculpture where you can see pilgrims placing prayers on a slip of paper and tucking it with money into little cracks (you are allowed to touch it).

Lana – where did you come up with the name Devi for your charity? (Lana is a friend from my days at Concordia University in Montreal – she started a group in Canada called Devi to collect beauty products, toiletries, and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and donate them to people in need, since so much goes to waste (think of airlines and hotels for example). Great initiative! Please check out her project here:

Devi – Conscious Giving

Devi on Facebook

2) Eternal Peace Lamp: a flame that burns brightly 24 hours a day and has the following inscription oin a plaque next to it: “This Eternal Lamp was set aflame on November 1st, 1986 by then His Royal Highness Prince Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev to commemorate the International Year of Peace. The flame was brought from United Nations (New York, U.S.A.) to integrate peace and harmony among the global community.”

I don’t know what is meant by the flame was ‘brought’ and I don’t know if it has really been burning non-stop for the last 23 years – am curious to know. But one interesting fact – the prince mentioned is suspected by conspiracy theorists to have arranged the massacre of his family including the presiding king, leading to his ascension to the throne in 2001. Some of you may be familiar with Nepal’s political troubles over the last decade or so. Gyanendra was deposed as king in 2008 and stripped of his royal privileges for reasons unrelated to the death of his family (in which he has never been implicated).

3) the beautiful garden and temple prior to entering the area known as the Sacred Garden: a very tranquil place that was donated to Lumbini by a Tibetan monk who was a teacher of the Dalai Lama (according to Choki) – he died two years ago. Not sure of his name but I am keen to look it up.

Interesting factbite which I didn’t know – the Dalai Lama was presented with honourary Canadian citizenship in 2006. Only four other individuals have ever been granted such an award: Raoul Wallenberg (Holocaust hero), Nelson Mandela, Aun San Suu Kyi, HH Aga Khan. The honourary citizenship does not entitle them to rights of a normal Canadian so it is merely symbolic. The Dalai Lama also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989.

4) Morning Puja with the monks: This was a meditation session attended by over a thousand monks at least, of ages from 7 or 8 years old to 80 at least. All had their heads closely shaved and some carried books with writing in Sanskrit in them (I think). They all wore robes that wrapped around one shoulder, some were red and others were orange. What I found interesting was that you could not tell who was rich or poor from the clothes they wore. I took a peek inside the temple where a ceremony was underway. Choki was obliged to participate so he couldn’t provide me with much background information.

Yesterday morning I left Lumbini and headed to Sunauli, where I crossed the Nepal-India border on foot and caught a three-hour local bus to the town of Gorakhpur. This time I bought myself two seats so that I could have a bit of leg room! At 55 rupees each I decided to splurge for the comfort! Gorakhpur is where I intended to arrange my onward journey to Varanasi and then Kolkata, hopefully via the Indian train system. I had been trying for days to arrange this online / through tourist agents (marking everything up for fee of course) in Nepal but had had no luck. As a last resort I decided I would be willing to cough up USD 200 for a flight to Kolkata if I had to. After my experience on the buses I was not going to go through it again especially on a 20hr journey to Kolkata! But then something told me I should leave my fate with the gods and maybe I would have more luck going directly to the train station in Gorakhpur, in India itself. And I did! I got lucky and managed to get Second Class A/C tickets for both destinations. 

So that’s it! I’m on the train now to Varanasi and getting tired of typing on my blackberry… More stories later! 

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Been a busy trip so far! Olivia joined me on my last of three days in Kathmandu and then yesterday morning, we flew to Pokhara with Buddha Air on a twin-prop airplane! Pokhara is a Nepali town nestled at the foothills of the Annapurna Range of the Himalayas. Unfortuately her trip was a short one – Olivia left this afternoon and will rejoin me in Kerala (India) a week from now.

Meanwhile I am still in Pokara and will head south on my way to India tomorrow. The itinerary described in mylast post has changed a bit. Due to limited time I’ve had to cancel my planned visits to Chennai and Hyderabad. Instead I’m going to spend more time in southern Nepal and northeastern India with the objective of educating myself a bit about Buddhism and Hindusim.

A trip yesterday to the World Peace Pagoda with Olivia (it is an enormous Buddhist shrine at the top of a mountain outside the town of Pokhara) has inspired me to visit as many of the four major sites on the Buddhist pilgrim route as I can (namely Lumbini, Kushinagar, Sarnath and Bodgaya). By way of background – Lumbini was the Buddha’s birthplace, Bodhgaya was where the Buddha achieved enlightenment, Sarnath was where the Buddha delivered his first sermon and Kushinagar was where the Buddha died. While I have always been curious to learn more about Buddhism (Matt Petchsy – this is your fault!) my encounters with Buddhist lore and religious sites here in Nepal have now brought that desire to the fore.

I should be able to visit these places with relative ease over the next 4-5 days as I travel from here to Varanasi and then on to Kolkata.

As you may know by now, my first visit to Nepal did not include plans for a trekking trip to the Himalayas. But after five days here, I have decided that this is something I’d love to come back for in the near future. Olivia has a preference for Everest Base Camp (EBC) so this is on the to-do list! She has shown me new appreciation for mountain scenery.  The trekking season is best in October/November but there may be alternate times we can go, as I know the father of a friend of mine trekked to EBC at a different time of the year (Mike do you know the details?). Small fact bite – Nepal has eight of the world’s ten highest mountains! It also extremely small and is sandwiched between giants India and China, landlocked with no access to the sea. The precipitous terrain precludes agriculture from being a major economic activity and also makes it difficult to develop efficient and effective telecommunications and transport infrastructure. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world – average income per person is US$470 (it’s artifically high due to the large number of Nepali migrant workers working in Middle Eastern countries).

As the country develops economically, people have migrated to the cities in search of work of course. Kathmandu has not escaped the environmental effects of this growth – pollution here is atrocious. Many local people (and some tourists) walk the streets wearing face masks to block out particulate matter in the air. You will be sneezing black by midday if you know what I mean and your eyes will water during taxi rides through streets choked with traffic! The city is known to have one of the worst levels of air pollution in Asia. Am trying to think of why this city would have higher than normal levels of industrial / automobile pollution – any ideas? Part of it is probably the thousands of diesel-burning motorcycles zipping around the city (public menaces)! Another thought I had was that perhaps the problem is exacerbated by the mountainous terrain surrounding the city (it traps the air – this is the case in Mexico City for example) but I’m not sure. Interested to look this up…

If there is one thing I will never forget about Nepal – it is the prevalence of middlemen in every commercial transaction! This is most likely to occur when booking tickets for tourist excursions but applies to almost anything else you can think of. Your hotelier will offer to arrange anything and everything you want to do in the city, from taxis, to meals, to entertainment, to laundry service. No one does anything for free in this country – there is always a commission to be made – so go straight to the source if you can!

One of the notable excursions from Katmandu was a day trip to Bhaktapur, about 16km away, but what a world of difference. The tranquil town is well-known for its traditional style of architecture and way of life. The city’s inhabitants are largely Newari – the dominant ethnicity in Nepal. It is a city meant for walking, with its narrow streets and lanes, cobbled with stone. I spent about 45 minutes hanging out at the corner of one such intersection watching mostly townsfolk go about their activities. This ranged from two old men playing chess, to local women gathering buckets of water at the public tap. 

The town’s buildings tend to be no more than three or four stories high and most are made of wood or brick of a burnt peach colour. Imagine a city where every building is permanently cast in the setting sunlight! Of each building, the lowest level is usually a storefront or a workshop which opens directly on to the street (no sidewalk) and you are free to walk in and inspect their wares.

I poked my head into one such workshop and was invited in by a young fellow who looked to be in his early 20s and was kneeling forward over a pot filled with hot coals. He explained that he and his brothers were busy preparing molds that would be used to cast brass artefacts for export to Germany. His family has been doing so for least three generations and they were the only such tradespeople in town. I did not ask whether he or his brothers had finished their school before joining the profession) (the youngest brother – about 10 – was there at the time). He taught me a bit about his work, and the various steps in the process from raw material to finished goods. Funnily enough, having spent time observing their work and noting that they were the first step in the supply chain – I figured I did not (or should not for fear of offending them) need to negotiate/bargain. In hindsight i almost cetain that I paid nearly double what the ‘fair price’ was. But then that brings to mind, what is a ‘fair price’ for something it took them 15 days to manufacture with their bare hands.  This was the highlight of my trip to Bhaktapur.

I also befriended a local fellow named Arjun, who holds two jobs – as a bartender and a waiter – in the tourist area of the city. He offered to show me around one afternoon and take me to a local Buddhist temple. On the way to our destination, we stopped at his home. He invited me and as per local custom, I took my shoes and socks off. He lived in a single room with a mattress on the floor. He shares a bathroom with a couple of other people who live in what could be called a converted apartment. His prize possessions range from a DVD player to a poster of a gorgeus young Bollywood actress in a skimpy bikini. He has a library of books on cocktail-making, and his ’savings’ are in the form of assorted banknotes inserted between the pages. There was a large 20L plastic bottle of water sitting in the corner. Before we left the house he put tonic in his hair and put on some deodorant. And he offered me some too. :p

So – he has a steady income, access to fresh water, a working toilet and electricity, and he has clothes on his back. He even bought me lunch that day (for 90 rupees – about US$1.50). Would you call him poor? What is poverty, really? Is it someone who cannot afford to buy what we in the Western World deem to be important or is it someone who cannot afford to buy what they consider necessary to live comfortably? This whole idea of the ‘poor’ being defined by one dollar a day seems flawed to me… There are millions who live off of subsistence farming, they may own a small plot of land and have food on the table but if they don’t earn an income, would we call them poor? Any thoughts?

The internet cafe is closing now but I suppose a good way to end this post would be to explain its title. Namaste is a Hindu greeting and means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’. What you are actually saying is ‘I salute the god within you’. As I leave Pokhara and head down to India it seems like a good way to sign off… more stories on Nepal when I can

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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I started my 15-day backpacking trip through Nepal and India yesterday, by flying into Kathmandu.

I’ll be staying here for a few days – but have not yet made a real plan of things to see or do. At the moment I’m just wandering the streets talking to some of the locals. Today I’m planning to visit a local temple where monkeys run free.  And I discovered the local brew during my adventures last night in Kathmandu’s nightlife (more on that later). It’s called Gorkha and it’s quite tasty!

On the 23rd my girlfriend Olivia will join me from Abu Dhabi and we’ll head over to Pokhara – perhaps engage in some adventure sports, check out Devi’s Fall and perhaps an Everest flight? Keeping the schedule open for surprises. 

On the 25th Olivia will head back to AD  and my plan is to then head south by bus in the direction of India. I’d like to visit a national park if possible – Chitwan National Park is in mind – and get some photos of elephants and tigers – Masood thanks for helping out with the camera, this wouldn’t be possible without you!

Then, onward to the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in India. The city is situated on the Ganges and is where Hindus cremate their dead and dispose of the ashes in the river water.

Next stop Kolkata (perhaps better known by its English name Calcutta) where my plan is to visit the Parivaar orphanage which is run by a friend of a friend. They adopt destitute children and school them under a rigorous curriculum. From what I understand – all of their staff live at the orphanage and work for free!

After that I might visit Hyderabad to see a friend – Raj Koona – but this is still not sure. Depends on how cheap the flights are dude! Then on to Chennai (formerly known as Madras) which is the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, and the origin of many of the migrant workers I wrote about in an earlier post on labour camps.

Final destination is Thiruvaranthaparum (formerly known as Trivandrum) in the state of Kerala, where I am crossing my fingers that Olivia will be able to rejoin me for a few more days, for some beach-play and a tour of the backwaters.

Despite four previous visits to India, I have never visited any of the above cities… in particular Thiruvaranthaparum and Chennai are the hometowns of many of the Indian migrant workers (construction labourers, security guards and office boys) that I have interacted with back in Abu Dhabi. I am really excited about this trip since it will be give an insight into their origins. Should be a blast…

Ok, that’s it for now, will come back to you later with some more detail about my time in Kathmandu!

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Last Friday night, a private fundraiser was held here in Abu Dhabi to support the Tabasamu Education Fund, a Kenya-based charity I have been working closely with for over a year (my role is primarily marketing / strategic partnerships and fundraising efforts here in the UAE).  See end of this post for more info on what the charity does.

The concept behind the fundraiser is to provide a venue, music, and beverages in return for a contribution at the door of 100dhs (US$30).  Importantly, we do not deduct any amount to cover the expenses of hosting such parties – these are all borne out-of-pocket so that 100% of proceeds goes to the charity.  My flatmates kindly agreed to co-host the party and co-sponsor the costs with me.  Thanks so much to Cat and Dilip!

Photos on facebook – Let’s Party for Africa

Two previous such fundraisers have been held during 2009, raising nearly US$5,000.  But this most recent one was much more successful – being attended by over 200 people, running from 8pm until 5am and raising nearly US$14,000 (we received a matching corporate contribution from a locally-based company)!  This amount is enough to fund the education of at least 14 Kenyan children for a year each.

Such a large amount would obviously never have been possible without the individual contributions and support of everyone who attended the party. So, a huge THANK YOU.

Special thanks also go to:

DJ Hassan and DJ Shadi – for agreeing to play pro-bono for the entire night and arranging sound equipment. Music was fantastic! thanks! (if you want to catch them again head to Boogie Box at Left Bank on 27 November)
Elias – for the ice, for the signage, helping out with the collection of contributions
Khalid – for helping out with the ice runs
Andy and Ali – for lighting and helping out at the bar, and elsewhere as needed!
Marah – for the donation box and making the run to Ikea for various odds and ends
Ema – for the sangria, the raffle tickets and greeting people and collecting donations.
Suparna – for the jello shots!
Aaron and Brinston – where do I start? Couldn’t have done it without you.
Jasmeen for creating the posters that we used to increase awareness of the cause
Olivia – for photography and moral support 

I’d also like to thank our corporate supporters for the raffle:

Il Porto Italian Restaurant and Sushi Bar – for their donation of three lunch vouchers each for four people (won by Payal, Suparna and Jason)
Royal Meridien Hotels – for their donation of champagne brunch for two on the Shuja Yacht (won by Khalid)
Sheraton Hotels – for their donation of lunch for two at Flavours (won by Sven)

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About Tabasamu Education Fund (TEF)
TEF is a fully volunteer-based charitable organisation helping to educate Kenyan students at primary, secondary and university levels.  Launched in Nairobi, Kenya in November 2006, the organisation identifies individual children and young adults from marginalised, under-privileged, or otherwise needy backgrounds, and supports them financially, logistically and emotionally to stay in school and maintain good standing.

Cost of Education in Kenya
Approximately US$8,400 is required in order for a child to obtain a full primary and secondary education in Kenya. A university degree can cost up to an additional US$8,000 if the student makes it into what is known as the regular programme, meaning that they scored in the top 30% of their graduating year and the government in turn subsidises the cost of their higher education. The other 70% of high school graduates in Kenya who do not qualify can only attend university if they can afford to pay the fees charged by private institutions, which can be far out of their financial reach given Kenya’s official monthly minimum wage is approximately US$37.  Some sources estimate that about 85% of children in Kenya attend primary school, 24% attend secondary school, and only 2% attend higher educational institutions.

Achievements
To date, TEF has funded 42 students to complete all levels of education as follows:

• 22 primary students; 17 secondary students; 4 university students;
• 22 males; 21 females; aged 8 to 24 years; and
• 66 education-years funded with US$70,000 raised from donors in 9 countries.

The group currently comprises 8 boys and 20 girls. Kenyan provinces covered include Rift Valley, Northern, Central, Western and Nairobi.

TEF provides funding for school fees, boarding fees, extra tuition, transportation, uniforms, books, medical coverage and any other school-related needs. The annual funding cost for these students can be between US$600 and US$2,000.

For more information on the charity, please visit their website here or join the facebook group here.

We are also looking for reliable and energetic volunteers if you are interested in getting involved in one way or another. Feel free to contact me…

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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The below article and video from CNN shocked me at first - to see that people could live like this.

Then, toward the end of the video, commentary from the government is provided and made me think again.  If what they say is true, and people can live in better conditions somewhere else but choose not to (for whatever reason) then do they really have a right to complain?

This article is reposted from the CNN website.

Link to the original article: Living in a cage in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, China (CNN) — If you have ever complained that your apartment is the size of a shoebox, consider the living space of Hong Kong resident Chung For Lau.

Chung lives in a 625 square foot (58.06 square meter) flat here with 18 strangers.

The place is sectioned into tiny cubicles made of wooden planks and wire mesh. Everything he has acquired over the years — clothes, dishes, figurines, a tired TV set — is squeezed into this tiny cube, a modernized version of what is known here as a cage home.

With all the buzz over Hong Kong’s exorbitant luxury property (like the recent record-breaking sale of a $57 million duplex), it may be hard to believe that people have been living in cage homes in this city for years.

But with Hong Kong home to some of the most densley-populated urban districts in the world, real estate has always come at a premium, no matter how small.

Chung’s cage is a newer yet less-desirable model, we are told. The wire mesh one, which resembles an over-sized rabbit hutch, is apparently more comfortable.

Occupants have less privacy, but the temperatures don’t get as high as in the wooden-mesh variety. A thermometer in Chung’s home reached 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). Sometimes it gets so hot, Chung said, that he wants to die.

Chung used to be a security guard. In the good old days he earned about $500 (HK$3,875) per month. But as the economic crisis set in, his full time job went to part time work until he was laid off this past summer.

As he stared into his bank passbook, Chung lamented that he wouldn’t be able to make the $150 rent (HK$1,160) this month — these cubes aren’t cheap.

They are stacked on two levels — $100 (HK$775) for a cube on the upper deck and $150 for the lower bunk.

The lower cubes are more expensive because you can just barely stand upright in them. Do the math and the apartment owner is collecting roughly $2,500 a month (HK$19,375) from these people.

The 19 occupants share two toilets. A small rubber hose attached to a leaky faucet is what they use to wash themselves. Social workers who monitor the apartments said the electricity is donated, so a few of them have TVs. One person on the upper deck has an aquarium.

One social workers said that because of the recession these homes are being occupied more frequently by those made jobless — people in their 30s and 40s. The social worker said none of the younger people wanted to speak on camera for fear their chances of finding work would be hurt.

Chung, 67, is now waiting for welfare to kick in and is on a long list for public housing. The government says it is doing its best to meet its citizens’ needs, but Chung says he has lost all hope. Economic recovery or not, he feels forgotten.

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Whenever I watch this video it moves me to tears. The number of times Ive been rude or impatient (or even mean) with my parents for the silliest reasons…. Even today, I still occasionally make dumb and hurtful remarks which belie the behaviour expected of a 31-year old man.

When I was young, I often forgot how much my parents had done for me. The good values they tried to instil in me, the education they worked so hard to provide for me, and the warm bed and roof I had over my head as I grew up. I think of how they continued to believe in me when I did not know what to study in school, or when I failed in sports most other kids my age were good at, or provided encouragement and financial support when I decided to travel instead of work for a living (quite spoiled I am…).

As my parents and siblings get older along with me, I find myself becoming sensitive to the fact that I have less and less time to spend with them. This video drives home the message that life is short and we should be kind and patient with the ones we love, because when they are gone, we will miss them more than we can ever imagine. If you havent seized a day lately, a great way to do so might be by reaching out to someone you’ve lost touch with or have had a disagreement with!

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This post was inspired by Olivia Giangiulio.

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Hi,

Further to my earlier posts/articles/photos from my trip to Kenya, I just watched a a recent video from CNN highlighting the effects of drought on the Samburu tribes in that country. The area focused on by the video is not far from where I visited in September 2009 (Isiolo, in Eastern Province). I thought I would share it with you as it made my experience even more real and gave me further insight into the devastating effects of the drought on the local people, their crops and their livestock and how it is causing people and animals to starve, face malnutrition or thirst due to the lack of water.

Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>

Many images in the video are similar to those I posted in my articles during September 2009.

What I did not know before visiting Kenya but learned about after meeting a German woman who works with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was that there are hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees on Kenyas western border with Somali.  This woman has been involved in working with Dadaab, the worlds largest refugee camp with over 300,000 people living there.  Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) is also working on the ground in Dadaab.  Here are two articles from UNHCR and MSF which provide background on the situation:

UNHCR – Angelina Jolie visits “dire” refugee settlement on Kenyan border with Somalia
MSF – Briefing Paper Dadaab: the Unacceptable Price of Asylum

The resources of the organisations are already stretched but now additional assistance is needed to assist the victims of the drought, which is not just a nation-wide phenomenon but affecting other East African countries. Read more here:

World Food Programme – Kenya
Red Cross Red Crescent – Field Operations in Kenya

Those of us not in the field can help by supporting their efforts with financial donations, without which they would not be able to do their work! If you would like to make a contribution, please contact me so I can help you make a greater impact through various matching donation programs! Such programs would allow you to match up to double the amount of your donation…

©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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This is an extremely compelling and impactful video. I urge you to watch this. There are children all over Africa who have been orphaned by civil war or tribal conflict or AIDS or famine and become the ‘head’ of their households, …taking care of their brothers and sisters, when they themselves are barely old enough to work. This means that they cannot attend school and break the cycle of poverty.

If you are interested in making a contribution to an excellent, well-run charity on the ground in Africa, with little overhead, which funds the academic dreams of children who would otherwise not be able to afford to go to school, then visit the Tabasamu Education Fund at their website or on Facebook.

I personally vouch for it. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

We can all make a difference, with an active voice, our time, our money. It’s just a matter of doing it. Let’s seize the day.

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©2010 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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This article is reposted from the website of the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent.

Kenya diary: Drought continues through rainy season
15 September 2009
Text and photos by Andreï Engstrand-Neacsu, IFRC in Kenya

Noor Guhad stands in the middle of the dry Oda earth dam, where water would have reached over his head three years ago. Now he has to dig deep to find water. (p-KEN0327, IFRC)

The breeze is so hot that I choke on the air that I inhale. I can hear the crackle of my footsteps on the gravel. Drops of sweat are running down my face and my spine. I advance with calculated effort.

I summon my energy to walk the couple of dozen metres to the car where the air conditioning system will dry my sweat until the next stop. I notice that the only green around is the pale pistachio-like of the acacias.

This should be the rainy season even here in arid and drought stricken northern Kenya. I have no doubts about how the 300,000 inhabitants of the Mandera triangle must feel: betrayed, let down, abandoned by a nature they fail to understand. But resilient they are. In spite the odds they find ways to cope.

From the compound of the Red Cross branch in Mandera I can see the rooftops of the houses in Bulahawa, the first town across the border into the Gedo province of Somalia. Few streets away we reach the shores of the Daua Riverthe natural border with Ethiopia.

From the neighbouring town of Suftu, people cross the knee-high waters with bundles on their heads. Rafts made of wooden planks attached to empty petrol drums are lined up in hope of more heavy duty traffic. But this will have to wait. One raft stranded on a sand bank in the middle of the river, bears witness to how low the waterlevel is.

Khalil Mohammed, who coordinates the work of the Red Cross in the region, tells me that there will only be more water in the river if it rains in the Ethiopian highlands.

In this environment the Mandera branch works to assist up to 40,000 people affected by the drought.

Drastic fall of water levels

After a three-hour journey on the potholed roads of Mandera we reach the Oda earth dam. Here the Kenya Red Cross has helped to dig a deep water collection point.

Noor Guhad, a cattle herder in his sixties, still remembers the days when the water reached the edges of the pond, at least four metres above our heads. Now, he was forced to dig a four metres deep hole in order to reach the water.

Noor Guhad explains that “many people have left the Oda earth dam because of the lack of water.” The dam was built by the Kenya Red Cross Society as part of their drought recovery response. (p-KEN0335, IFRC)

A bunch of yellow jerry cans is sheltered under the only tree I can see on the horizon. We learn that fewer cattle are coming to this water point. Many have started to move towards places where water is less difficult to reach.

Noor wonders if the Red Cross could help to dig a canal that would direct the waters of a seasonal river to his catchment area. Khalil promises to look into the matter. He tells me that this and many other simple but vital interventions would be possible, if the Horn of Africa drought emergency appeal would receive more support.

A drizzle accompanies us to Elwak where we will spend the night. Children and women are collecting water from the pools formed on the road in the trails dug by the tires. Here and there patches of grass are visible. Khalil thinks it is a ”good sign” as long as the rains intensify. “Otherwise the goats will eat this in less than a week”, he says.

This story was originally posted at http://www.ifrc.org/Docs/News/09/09091501/index.asp.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Hey everyone,

I just got back from my trip to the Northern Hemisphere! I hadn’t realised when we left Nairobi four days ago that we would be crossing the Equator on our journey to northern Kenya! I should really brush up on my geography…

At the Equator in Nanyuki

As we left Nairobi early on Sunday morning, our journey began on a single-lane (in each direction) highway. Even at that early hour, there were plenty of matatus (private minivans providing bus services) and pesky mosquito-like motorcycles competing with us for lane space. I was a bit worried that we would end up on a highway similar to the one I travelled on by bus between Rwanda and Uganda in August 2008. Thankfully though, Kenya has a very well-developed road infrastructure, perhaps the best in all of East Africa (a geographic region which consists of Rwanda, Burundia, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya). In fact, a long stretch of this particular highway is being upgraded and expanded under a contract with the Chinese (who are quite active in Africa – see my December 2008 post - Ethiopia inspires so many feelings).

Construction workers working on upgrading the Nanyuki – Isiolo highway

The cows love the new Isiolo – Marsabit highway

Our destination – the capital of Isiolo District – is considered the last major town on the way north to Ethiopia and the Lonely Planet’s ‘East Africa’ book considers it a vital pit stop for supplies such as fuel and food for the long trip north. The upgraded highway is now expected to open up this part of the country to further economic development and tourism (a number of national parks and reserves with game animals are located in this area, as well as Mount Kenya, Africa’s second tallest peak which can be seen in the distance from the highway). This should be especially helpful in diversifying sources of income for local communities who typically depend on their livestock (cattle, goats, chickens and camels) to make a living. Such communities have been very hard hit by the drought which has been affecting Kenya now for years.

Street in Isiolo Town

It is in one such community that we spent most of our time – a little Turkana village named Ngaremara (pronounced ‘ingaray marah’), which is located about 30km north of Isiolo. The Turkana originated in Sudan and Uganda but as a nomadic people have roamed far and wide in this part of Africa. For some reason, the Turkana people of Ngaremara settled on this location generations ago and they have been here ever since. The roughly 3,000 inhabitants of Ngaremara live mainly in mud huts they’ve constructed themselves. Their homes are mainly clustered around the highway I mentioned above, which runs right through the harsh desert (don’t think Sahara think African savannahs with lions and elephants). They also build their own toilet systems – essentially a latrine or a hole dug deep into the ground.

Building a mud hut in Ngaremara

A typical mud hut used by the people of Ngaremara

Work-in-progress photo of a latrine

Kenya has a very diverse rural landscape and it was eye-opening to see the varying effects of the drought as we drove through the countryside. At first glance, the lush, green highlands outside Nairobi seem unaffected. They are lined with farms, fields and / or greenhouses growing fruit, flowers and vegetables. Major international brands such as Del Monte have dozens of plantations here, growing bananas and pineapple for instance. There are fields of barley and wheat which seem to have been harvested recently. Local markets in small towns along the highway have plenty of fresh produce for sale and there are numerous stands of fir trees and eucalyptus along the roadside. But look a little closer and you would start to see the effects. Agricultural production is down and electricity outages are occurring in Nairobi due to water shortages at the country’s various hydroelectric power plants. In fact the government has even implemented power rationing on weekdays (power off between 6pm and 12am every night).

While the drought has caused hardships for the Kenyan people, the effects are perhaps worse felt in these arid lands north of Isiolo where various pastoralist tribes have dwelled for generations. As you cross the Equator at Nanyuki the altitude begins to decrease. Nairobi sits at an altitude of 1680m (5500ft) and has a cool night-time climate but Isiolo and surrounding areas are at an altitude of roughly 1100m which seems to make a huge difference.

Here vegetation has dried up and there is a severe drinking water shortage. As a result, livestock are dying of hunger and thirst. Carcasses of cattle lie on the side of the road. Even wild elephants emerge at night to hunt for food in the villages (an example of things they might eat are the nests of weaverbirds which offer a large clump of grass in one gulp). One local man had his water pump broken a few weeks ago by an elephant looking for a drink and another was gored through the stomach (he was drunk and encroached on the territory of a bull elephant). In the morning you’ll find their tracks and piles of elephant dung around the place. It’s really quite a sight.

Victim of the drought

Carcass of a cow found in the desert

Nest of a weaver bird

Elephant tracks and damaged water pump

Since the main economic activity of the Turkana is cattle / goat-herding this has worsened an already fragile economic situation. While other (less substantial) sources of income include the sale of cow dung as fertiliser or arts & crafts (jewellery and basket-weaving) perhaps the largest inflow of funds comes from remittances from family members who have migrated to Nairobi in search of opportunity. Education is also affected, with many children going to school on an empty stomach and community-run schools running on limited budgets. There’s no bus service of course and you will often see groups of uniformed children walking along the shoulder of the highway on their way to and from school. Government or community-owned schools are required to provide food to their students but in practice the funding is often not there. Some schools which are linked to Catholic missions seem to be relatively well-provided for. We visited one Catholic-run primary school and one community-run secondary school. In a future post I will try to share more on what I saw and learned during these visits.

Ngaremara Secondary School – Community-run

To read more on the effects of drought on Kenya, here is a recent article from the New York Times:

Lush Land Dries Up, Withering Kenya’s Hopes
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, New York Times
September 8, 2009
A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, imperiling agriculture and tourism as well as spawning ethnic conflict.

Ironically, the drought in Kenya has worsened the effect of the already harsh climate in this part of the country. The environment and landscape captures much of how I imagined Africa to look like as I grew up – hot and dry and extremely isolated from urban / more densely populated areas. The equatorial sun will burn if you’re not careful so bring your sunscreen. Underfoot the soil is loose and sandy and you need to watch out for snakes and scorpions. What topsoil isn’t held down by the roots of brush or acacia trees can easily be blown into the air by spontaneous and blindingly fierce dust twisters. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed a twister and it blew me away (no pun intended!) Some are so big they reach right up into the clouds and you can see them from miles away. Much of the vegetative cover is brown and thirsting for water. Now try to imagine it stretching for kilometres in every direction. Acacia trees provide stark relief with their extreme heights and long arching branches. Their broad reach creates great shade cover and as you hurtle down the freshly paved highway at over 100km/h (an uncommon feeling for most African motorists I suspect), you’ll see goats and cattle grazing in these shaded areas on the bits of green shrubbery or foliage they can find. Watch out for the occasional stray donkey or cow though (see above photo of finished highway)! And you’ll usually spot a lone man or boy who herds the livestock in search of water and food and women and children will sit underneath the trees as well minding tall white burlap bags filled with home-made charcoal for sale to passers-by. The smell of burning cow dung or smouldering charcoal fills the air. Mixed in to a cocktail of cleaner countryside air and the altitude I often felt sleepy by mid-day!

Dust twister

Donkey in the middle of the highway

Can you imagine all of this? Maybe it will help if you have a look at a selection of the photos I’ve taken so far…

Sunset over the desert, with acacia trees on the horizon

FULL PHOTO ALBUM: Sights, sounds and smells of Kenya

Africa is such a fascinating assault on the senses! Love it!

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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In a recent post I described my visit to a migrant worker camp located outside the city of Abu Dhabi.

Just to clarify, there are many names used for a place like this, ‘labour camp’, ‘labourer camp’, ‘ migrant worker accommodation’, etc, etc. The camp I visited is not really a ‘labourer’ camp (i.e. construction labourers) as the fellows who live here are actually office workers but for now I will use the terms interchangeably. (Btw, thanks to Eric Adler who pointed out after my last post that the term ‘labour camp‘ had been, until recently, reserved for referring to penal camps where labour is forced upon its inmates as a form of penalty. So this seems to be a bit of a misnomer (or not?). Anyway, leave it to the Abu Dhabi Government to label highway signs with the phrase.

In any case, I enjoyed my experience last time so much that I asked my host if I could visit him and his friends / brothers / roommates again. Although I found it a very humbling experience it was also fun and insightful and visiting the camp is kind of like entering a microcosm of India itself (or at least a certain part of that country). The building that I am visiting houses 320 workers (number verified since my last visit), many of whom are from from the state of Tamil Nadu in India, and about half of which follow the Muslim religion.

To provide some context, the capital of Tamil Nadu state is Chennai (formerly known by its English name Madras which you may have heard of) which is located in the south of India close to the states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The per capita income of the residents of Tamil Nadu is approximately US$480 a year. The residents of this building are mainly employed as office assistants and they can make anywhere between 1200 and 2000 dirhams a month (between US$324 and US$540 a month!). So a definite improvement.

But the cost of living is high in Abu Dhabi and it is clear that social issues are not being considered in the development of these places. Meals are not provided for. Health insurance is not provided for. Desalinated water is provided (but no one in the UAE really drinks it because of the high sodium content / poor taste, so these fellows buy their own bottled water like the rest of us). In addition to their basic salary, only their living quarters and transportation to / from their workplace is provided. There are no perks, not even an allowance for a trip home to see their families once in a while. What money do they have left over after providing for their expenses is sent home in the form of remittances to their families. Not to mention inflation in the prices of basic goods and currency fluctuations which have had a big impact on savings…

Tonight I will share an iftar meal with twelve of the residents in the confines of their 4.5m. x 3.5m. room. I will describe this in a future update, the focus of this post is to describe a bit of what the living / sleeping conditions of the camp are like.

By way of background, Iftar is the name for the evening meal Muslims use to break the daily fast they observe during the month of Ramadan. From dawn until dusk, Muslims are not permitted (under Islamic custom) to eat or drink. Traditionally, the first thing that a Muslim will consume at the start of Iftar will be a date. As a contribution to the meal, I have decided to bring apple juice and date-filled chocolate-covered cookies. Can’t wait to bite into those.  [Check back soon in this space for an update on my iftar experience]

In my last post I left off as my host was about to show me around his building and his room (his ‘accommodation’). The decor of the building is very simple. The hallways are long and mostly unadorned, painted in an off-white colour. Here and there hangs a poster or a flyer, advertising goods for sale. There are a number of rooms, outside of which lie mats with shoes and sandals. The few men who happen to be in the hall look at me with funny smiles, obviously wondering why I might be there.

We stop at a door on the right side, on which there is a large sign announcing ‘Ramadan Kareem!‘, which translates loosely as ‘Happy Ramadan!’. My host opens the door and invites me in, so I slip off my flip-flops and peer inside. There are a few guys who look at me warily and feeling like an intruder I gingerly make my way in. They smile and greet me and immediately invite me to sit down, while offering me tea and biscuits.

To say the room is small is an understatement. It’s about 4.5m x 3.5m in area. Metal-framed bunk beds ring the room, providing sleeping space for up to 12 people (some rooms have up to 16). Those who are lucky enough to have a bottom bunk have extra storage space underneath but it wouldn’t surprise me to know that they share it with their roommates. On top of each of the bunks is a sheet of plywood, wrapped in duct tape on the ends to prevent splinters I assume. There are no mattresses. Each of the beds has a pillow and a blanket, and on most of them personal effects are piled high, competing for space with the person who sleeps there. Frankly, I find the atmosphere cozy, and it reminds me of the dorms I stayed in at summer camp as a child.

As I absorb the contents of the room, it dawns on me that probably all of the personal possessions of these men are actually located in the small area that is their personal sleeping / bed space (you can see photos by clicking the links below to Picasa).

Here is an ad posted by someone looking for a bed space in downtown Abu Dhabi (this would be for a space in a typical 2 or 3 bedroom apartment which is being shared by 10 or more people).

Looking for a place to live 

Comment on this photo on facebook

There is a window in the room but it is covered with a plastic tarp out of which juts one of the air-conditioning units I mentioned previously. I also see lots of power bars connecting to various electrical appliances in the room. For starters, the a/c unit, a small refrigerator (in which the guys keep bottles of water, juices, milk and other things) and a kettle (for making tea/coffee). On some of the beds there are computers or televisions, each of which is hooked up to Internet or satellite tv (pirated connections) for a small fee which they split among each other. It helps them stay connected to their families, and they use skype regularly, even as I sit there in the room. There are wires everywhere. There is no fire extinguisher.

During the evening I take a bathroom break, and one of the fellows shows me to their lavatories. Bathrooms are nothing to boast about – a hole in the ground over which you squat and do your business. The floor is filthy. The men acknowledge that it is not very pleasant. They say that someone cleans the bathrooms once a day – I decide not to ask if they need to pay for the cleaning service or if the building management takes care of that.

Have a look at some of my first photos of the camp and leave your comments (you need a userid) on PICASA:

Migrant Worker Camps in Abu Dhabi 

Despite all of this, I am getting the feeling that there are camps out there where the workers are much worse off than the fellows who live in this one. Here’s an anecdote worth sharing: a camp for construction labourers is currently being developed in a nearby area. The size of the lot for the development is 700 metres by 700 metres. Low-rise buildings to accommodate over 75,000 workers are contemplated in the plans, which also call for an electrified fence to encircle the lot…. This comes from a reliable source.

Keep checking back on this space… I will continue to write more about my experiences visiting these camps. There is so much still for me to learn about this topic, so much to write, and I want to share as much of it as I can.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Hi everyone,

As some of you know, I finally made a decision on where to spend my Eid holidays (Eid being Eid-al-Fitr, the three-day public holiday which occurs at the end of the annual observance of one month of fasting in the Muslim world).   Taking two days of leave from work, I was able to get nine days off with the weekends on either side and I decided to head to Kenya to visit my friend Anne-Marie Di Lullo.  Initially, I had had some trouble deciding between Kenya and UK/Switzerland to visit family and friends.  What tipped the scales was Anne-Marie’s invitation to join her on a trip to northern Kenya to follow up on a development project she has been working on.

The project, known as ‘Lights for Life‘, is a non-profit initiative which aims to deliver a lighting system powered by renewable energy to Kenyan communities which are not connected to the power grid.  According to one NGO, only 2% of Western Kenya is connected to the grid.  Most of the people who live in such communities tend to use kerosene lamps as a source of light.  The problem with this is that the by-products of burning kerosene inside the home can have serious health consequences. The lighting system being promoted by Lights for Life consists of pod-like lights powered by rechargeable batteries.  The lights are connected to a pedal-powered generator which is operated by humans (somewhat like a bicycle).  20 minutes of cycling will power the lights for up to 37 hours.

This week Anne-Marie and I (and others involved in the project) will be traveling to northern Kenya to survey 90 children in two local schools on how the lack of light in their homes affects them in school and in their daily life.  The plan is to then provide the students with free lights and the school will be provided with the generator (all funded by the World Bank) so that the students can recharge from time to time.  Its important to collect data prior to the launch of the program so that a before and after picture of the impact can be formed.

Separately we are also planning to meet with a local entrepreneur who is aiming to sell the technology to people in his village who have no access to electricity.  The business model is simple.  Using micro-credit, the entrepreneur is loaned the money to purchase the generator and dozens of the lights.  The lights are sold to the villagers who pay a small fee to the entrepreneur to recharge them as and when needed.  Using these proceeds he will repay the loan made to him.  This is the for-profit part of the venture being spearheaded by the company which owns the patent to the technology.

I’m really excited about this project and I think it’s going to be an amazing learning experience in so many different ways.  I will try to post photos in the days to come so you can see what the technology looks like!  We leave tomorrow morning at 7am for Isiolo, in the Eastern Province of Kenya.  It’s a four and a half hour drive.  Funnily enough, Isiolo is a largely Muslim town, and will be celebrating the Eid holiday while we’re there.  So it might actually feel a bit like home (Abu Dhabi). 

I have already been in Nairobi for about a day and a half.  I had an eventful flight here with Ethiopian Airlines from Dubai via Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).  There was a two-hour delay in the flight and they left my suitcase behind in Dubai!  Although they did bump me to Business Class to compensate for the delay it was nothing special.  The cabin crew were less than helpful in informing me about whether I would miss my next connection or not and there was no apology for the flight being delayed.  Although I’ve flown with Ethiopian twice before and hadn’t had any problems I’ll think twice about using them again.  Total cost for the flight – AED 2265 (approximately US$675).

Despite the issues with the flight and suitcase (which had my jeans and contact solution in it) and the resulting sleepless night,  I’ve had a great time in Nairobi so far.   Had a great tour of Nairobi nightlife by Anne-Marie – we bar-hopped last night until 8:00am visiting places such as Black Diamond, Gipsy Bar, Bacchus and Crooked Q.   I haven’t had a late night like that in a while!  I have no doubt that Anne-Marie won’t let anyone soon forget that I wore her jeans out to the clubs last night (they were a bit tight but did the job). 

Here are some photos from last night’s fun 

Exploring Nairobi Nightlife

I’m scheduled to fly out of here next Saturday evening.  After returning from Isiolo, I may go on a 2-night/3-day safari in the Masai Mara or take a two day trip to Kampala (the capital of Uganda) to visit friends Bhavya and Aman Kalsi and Yasir Alam.  Still undecided…

Take care for now, and wishing Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

Ryan Rowe

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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In a recent post I described my visit to a migrant worker camp located outside the city of Abu Dhabi.

Just to clarify, there are many names used for a place like this, ‘labour camp’, ‘labourer camp’, ‘ migrant worker accommodation’, etc, etc.  The camp I visited is not really a ‘labourer’ camp (i.e. construction labourers) as the fellows who live here are actually office workers but for now I will use the terms interchangeably.  (Btw, thanks to Eric Adler who pointed out after my last post that the term ’labour camp‘ had been, until recently, reserved for referring to penal camps where labour is forced upon its inmates as a form of penalty.  So this seems to be a bit of a misnomer (or not?).  Anyway, leave it to the Abu Dhabi Government to label highway signs with the phrase.

In any case, I enjoyed my experience last time so much that I asked my host if I could visit him and his friends / brothers / roommates again.  Although I found it a very humbling experience it was also fun and insightful and visiting the camp is kind of like entering a microcosm of India itself (or at least a certain part of that country).  The building that I am visiting houses 320 workers (number verified since my last visit), many of whom are from from the state of Tamil Nadu in India, and about half of which follow the Muslim religion.

To provide some context, the capital of Tamil Nadu state is Chennai (formerly known by its English name Madras which you may have heard of) which is located in the south of India close to the states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh.  The per capita income of the residents of Tamil Nadu is approximately US$480 a year. The residents of this building are mainly employed as office assistants and they can make anywhere between 1200 and 2000 dirhams a month (between US$324 and US$540 a month!).  So a definite improvement.

But the cost of living is high in Abu Dhabi and it is clear that social issues are not being considered in the development of these places.  Meals are not provided for. Health insurance is not provided for. Desalinated water is provided (but no one in the UAE really drinks it because of the high sodium content / poor taste, so these fellows buy their own bottled water like the rest of us). In addition to their basic salary, only their living quarters and transportation to / from their workplace is provided. There are no perks, not even an allowance for a trip home to see their families once in a while.  What money do they have left over after providing for their expenses is sent home in the form of remittances to their families.  Not to mention  inflation in the prices of basic goods and currency fluctuations which have had a big impact on savings…

Tonight I will share an iftar meal with twelve of the residents in the confines of their 4.5m. x 3.5m. room.  I will describe this in a future update, the focus of this post is to describe a bit of what the living / sleeping conditions of the camp are like.

By way of background, Iftar is the name for the evening meal Muslims use to break the daily fast they observe during the month of Ramadan. From dawn until dusk, Muslims are not permitted (under Islamic custom) to eat or drink. Traditionally, the first thing that a Muslim will consume at the start of Iftar will be a date. As a contribution to the meal, I have decided to bring apple juice and date-filled chocolate-covered cookies. Can’t wait to bite into those.  [Check back soon in this space for an update on my iftar experience]

In my last post I left off as my host was about to show me around his building and his room (his ‘accommodation’).  The decor of the building is very simple. The hallways are long and mostly unadorned, painted in an off-white colour. Here and there hangs a poster or a flyer, advertising goods for sale. There are a number of rooms, outside of which lie mats with shoes and sandals.  The few men who happen to be in the hall look at me with funny smiles, obviously wondering why I might be there.

We stop at a door on the right side, on which there is a large sign announcing ‘Ramadan Kareem!‘, which translates loosely as ‘Happy Ramadan!’. My host opens the door and invites me in, so I slip off my flip-flops and peer inside.  There are a few guys who look at me warily and feeling like an intruder I gingerly make my way in.  They smile and greet me and immediately invite me to sit down, while offering me tea and biscuits.

To say the room is small is an understatement. It’s about 4.5m x 3.5m in area. Metal-framed bunk beds ring the room, providing sleeping space for up to 12 people (some rooms have up to 16). Those who are lucky enough to have a bottom bunk have extra storage space underneath but it wouldn’t surprise me to know that they share it with their roommates.  On top of each of the bunks is a sheet of plywood, wrapped in duct tape on the ends to prevent splinters I assume.  There are no mattresses.  Each of the beds has a pillow and a blanket, and on most of them personal effects are piled high, competing for space with the person who sleeps there. Frankly, I find the atmosphere cozy, and it reminds me of the dorms I stayed in at summer camp as a child.

As I absorb the contents of the room, it dawns on me that probably all of the personal possessions of these men are actually located in the small area that is their personal sleeping / bed space (you can see photos by clicking the links below to Picasa).

Here is an ad posted by someone looking for a bed space in downtown Abu Dhabi (this would be for a space in a typical 2 or 3 bedroom apartment which is being shared by 10 or more people).

Looking for a place to live 

Comment on this photo on facebook

There is a window in the room but it is covered with a plastic tarp out of which juts one of the air-conditioning units I mentioned previously.  I also see lots of power bars connecting to various electrical appliances in the room.  For starters, the a/c unit, a small refrigerator (in which the guys keep bottles of water, juices, milk and other things) and a kettle (for making tea/coffee).  On some of the beds there are computers or televisions, each of which is hooked up to Internet or satellite tv (pirated connections) for a small fee which they split among each other. It helps them stay connected to their families, and they use skype regularly, even as I sit there in the room.  There are wires everywhere.  There is no fire extinguisher.

During the evening I take a bathroom break, and one of the fellows shows me to their lavatories.  Bathrooms are nothing to boast about – a hole in the ground over which you squat and do your business.  The floor is filthy.  The men acknowledge that it is not very pleasant.  They say that someone cleans the bathrooms once a day - I decide not to ask if they need to pay for the cleaning service or if the building management takes care of that.

Have a look at some of my first photos of the camp and leave your comments (you need a userid) on PICASA:

Migrant Worker Camps in Abu Dhabi 

Despite all of this, I am getting the feeling that there are camps out there where the workers are much worse off than the fellows who live in this one. Here’s an anecdote worth sharing: a camp for construction labourers is currently being developed in a nearby area.  The size of the lot for the development is 700 metres by 700 metres.  Low-rise buildings to accommodate over 75,000 workers are contemplated in the plans, which also call for an electrified fence to encircle the lot….   This comes from a reliable source.

Keep checking back on this space… I will continue to write more about my experiences visiting these camps. There is so much still for me to learn about this topic, so much to write, and I want to share as much of it as I can.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Here are the photos from my recent trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in early September 2009:

Visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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An Arts & Crafts Bazaar is taking place in Abu Dhabi this week down at Le Meridien Abu Dhabi.  I went and visited this evening and I just had to write and tell you about it since I’ve lived in Abu Dhabi for three years and I’ve never seen a little gem quite like this.

It’s set in an old restaurant which is decorated with brightly coloured paintings on the walls and arched supports extending up to the ceilings.  It’s well-lit and the venue is small and cozy. As you walk in, you’ll see 15-20 exhibitors set up on various tables selling their arts & crafts ware.  This includes an assortment of items such as hand-made jewelery jewelry (beads, silver and stone based), crochet works, old coins, souvenirs and magnets with UAE themes, women’s clothing, paintings and photographs. Although their prices seemed more than reasonable to me, they still seem willing to bargain.

The exhibitors are a collection of artists from near and far (some of them belong to a local group named ARTE) and if you’re looking for a quaint gift for someone dear or something for the home, this is a nice little place to stop.  The bazaar will continue on every night this week until Saturday, beginning from 6pm until midnight.

On your way out, don’t forget to buy a raffle ticket or two from the table staffed by members of a local volunteer group. Prizes include air travel, hotel stays, meals, and massages, to name a few. Proceeds from the sale of tickets (a campaign known as ‘Road to Awareness) go to fund a UNICEF project in support of street youth in Cairo. The objective of the project is to provide social and medical support to up to 2,000 street children in the Greater Cairo area. These kids are at high risk of violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse and health problems. This is a fantastic project which will help re-integrate them into society.

Please do these kids a favour and forward this message around to your friends or the colleagues in your office to spread the word of the great little community event happening this week.

Thanks!
Ryan

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Yesterday I visited a migrant worker “camp” for the first time. Yes – the type of camp that has made the United Arab Emirates (and other Gulf countries) so infamous in recent years for the alleged rights violations of the men who live there.  I won’t comment on these as I am not in a position to do so – not being an expert on human orlabour rights.  In this post I will try to describe my initial thoughts just prior to entering the camp.  In posts to come over the coming days I will try to follow up to describe their living conditions, the services they have access to and the general atmosphere among the residents.

I leave my home in the early evening hours – the camp I am going to visit is located 30 minutes from downtown Abu Dhabi, in the dusty industrial city of Musaffah. After driving for 30 minutes along the the six-lane (in each direction) Abu Dhabi – Dubai highway, my taxi turns off onto the two lane (in each direction) Musaffah road. Within a few minutes we begin to pass row after row of dilapidated low-rise rectangular buildings with triangular roofs and strange square blocks protruding from the sides.  At first, from the blur of a passing car, they look like industrial warehouses. But as the taxi slows down for an approaching roundabout I look closer and I can see school buses parked outside and recognize the protruding blocks as air-conditioning units. Now that we have slowed to a brief stop, I can see groups of men sitting around smoking cigarettes or strolling around shirtless with lungis wrapped around their waists.  Heading around the roundabout, we drive onto a dirt road and pull up next to one of these buildings.  In the common area where the men are lounging, there are satellite dishes mounted in the ground and clotheslines are strung up, flapping in the hot summer wind.  The taxi driver announces that we have arrived.  Before I’ve even realized it, I am among the labourer camps where thousands of men are housed for years whilst they support the multi-billion dollar developments that are giving the UAE its global claim to fame.

Welcome to Abu Dhabi, the richest city in the world.  This is the closest thing it has to a slum.

The building I am visiting houses five hundred Indian men mostly from the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. As I get out of the shiny silver taxi, the men stare at me; my impression is they are wondering what a gora (Hindi for white man) is doing this part of town. I am not afraid though. I feel that it is not an indignant look, just a curious one. Later on I find out that I am the first gora ever to have visited this particular camp or accommodation complex. Indians are among the friendliest people I have ever met, which is part of why I wanted to visit this place so badly. It is a chance to be among the people who are building this place, people who may also be among the loneliest in the country.

As diverse as the UAE is, sadly, it is also an isolated place, where people seem to fall into social groups often based on their economic position and / or ethnicity. The transient nature of the community (over 80% of the population is expatriate) makes it difficult to connect with people living here.  Much of the expatriate population hails from labour-exporting countries such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Arab World as well, for instance Syria, Egypt or Jordan. I like to compare it to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel except that in the UAE they are somehow able to get things built despite the cultural and linguistic differences.

My host is one of the residents of this building and he excitedly greets me with a smile and a warm handshake. “Hello sir, how are you sir?” he begins, and then goes on to admonish me for taking an ‘expensive’ silver taxi instead of a cheaper ‘gold and white’.  Doing so means I may have paid up to 3-4 US$ more for my journey (approximately 25% higher than it would have been).

And so began my four-hour visit to this camp on a warm (~40 degrees Celsius) Saturday evening, during which I learned a bit about their lifestyle, their spending habits, their gripes, their culture, their needs, etc.  That’s it for tonight – I’ll come back with more to write about in the coming days.  Keep an eye on this space.

For the moment I don’t have any photos to share of the area outside of the buildings – I was a bit cautious in this respect as I didn’t want to offend my hosts.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Some may say that reading is the best way to improve vocabulary and reading-comprehension skills in a given language. As a lover of languages and a proponent of self-help, I tend to agree with this statement. The problem is that I haven’t spent much time reading the last several years and as a result I think that my English-language skills are way behind where they should be.  For example: some subject matter is challenging for me; I have difficulty articulating my thoughts on paper and aloud; I feel my vocabulary is not as broad or as deep as it should / could be, and perhaps most importantly, I feel unable to retain most of the information I read.  Having completed graduate-level studies, I feel my skills are not at all up to scratch and frankly, it’s embarrassing.

Looking back, it seems things went wrong after finishing high school.  From the age of about five or six until about 16 or 17, I would devour almost every book I could get my hands on.  Actually I spent more time in the library than in social settings interacting with people (for reasons I won’t go into here!).  Anyway, more often than not, these books tended to be action/adventure fiction for young adults and therefore relatively light reading material such as the Hardy Boys, Fear Street, or Stephen King.  I never fully embraced more ‘refined’ literature such as biographies, poetry, or history works, although the topics certainly interested me.  For example, I used to read the encyclopedia for fun. 

Moving on through university , I quickly discovered that I had some distance to go to improve my reading and writing skills to the level of many of my peers.  I often wondered why this might be the case!  I could finish a 500-page novel in a matter of hours, my spelling and grammatical skills were very strong and improper punctuation was one of my major pet peeves.  But still, I had to scrape through various papers assigned to me in business school and avoided classes such as philosophy or English literature, because I wanted to avoid the pain of having to write a twenty or thirty page essay (although I did enjoy writing on my website, in a more creative/freestyle.  In the business world, I quickly found out that I had a tendency to be verbose.  During my twenties I also became very involved with numerous social /extracurricular activities that left me little time to nurture my love for reading.

During graduate school, I could not avoid writing long papers on complicated topics such as international trade, development and economics.  I spent huge amounts of time digesting the assigned reading material, frustrated by my doubts that I would even be capable of retaining the information.  This bothered me greatly.  Unfortunately, my busy social life continued to be busy, and I neglected to spend the time needed to correct the situation.  I fooled myself into thinking of it as a personal flaw that I would be unable to change and would need to adapt accordingly.  I now believe that this is a poor excuse and I just need to crack the whip on my own behind a little more forcefully.

Eighteen months ago I read the book ‘Shantaram’, (my notes on it are here) and it reminded me of how fulfilling I had always found reading.  Food for the mind!  I realised that I had become so caught up in my career and education that I had left behind one of the great loves of my life – it had even begun affecting my overall level of happiness - and I realised how much I missed it.  I began to see clearly that I could tie reading in with my career and continuing education to generate synergies that would help me personally and professionally!  Worth spending time on, for sure!  Since then I have dedicated myself to spending more time reading both entertaining and more complicated titles, with the goal of increasing my skill level by subjecting myself to less familiar subject matter.  But to do so implied I would have to become an active reader, and thereby address all of the weaknesses I mentioned above.  So… how can one become an active reader?

During a self-diagnosis of my reading habits (which is still ongoing), I discovered that one of my fatal flaws is reading too quickly by skipping over descriptive paragraphs and background information. This can lead to missing vital information that contributes to the development of the storyline or central argument of the book.  It sounds so obvious but this can occur easily if you are, like me, eager to skip ahead to the ‘good parts’.  Having read plenty of action/adventure fiction as a child, I had become accustomed to this style of reading and had foolishly applied it all types of reading material.  For example, ‘The Contest’ by Matthew O’Reilly is an example of pure entertainment.  I recently breezed through it in six hours, mainly by skipping entire paragraphs that I scanned easily and could see were of little interest to me.  A book is a compilation of words, and every single word contributes to the overall message – how can you hope to understand it or remember it if there are gaps everwhere?  I see this as analogous to a house made of brick – if a single brick were left out here and there, it might not make the house fall down, but you’ll have to deal with the leaks later on!!   My super-short attention span doesn’t help.  But whatever doesn’t kill me, will only make me stronger, right?

As I mentioned it is also important to choose books that are of a higher degree of difficulty, so as to challenge yourself.  Choose books that are out of your comfort zone and outside your field expertise.  This will expose you to new vocabulary and enhance your reading-comphrension skills.  But try to pick subject matter that is of personal interest.  This will keep you awake, while building on your existing knowledge of a particular topic.  Keep a dictionary at hand, to look up words that are unfamiliar or whose meaning you are unsure of.  The advantage to this as well is that you can read the words in context, allowing you to gain immediately greater insight into the storyline and keep your attention focused.  One of the books I have been reading is ‘The State of Africa’ by Martin Meredith, which I began in August 2008 and am only just finishing.  It is a 700-page historical account of 50 years of the independence movement in Africa.  Not an easy read – for me.

All of this just to say that being an active reader is a critical part of improving your skills at reading and becoming a more skilled user of a given language. Like anything else, you must continually ratchet up the level of difficulty and try new things so that your skills improve and become more adaptable.

Happy reading. 

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Today I am traveling to Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, for a short 36-hour trip related to work but with a bit of tourism thrown in of course.

Most of Saudi Arabia is only an hour’s flight from where I live in Abu Dhabi yet this is my first visit to the country.  Since moving to the region a few years ago, my ‘Middle Eastern’ experiences have so far consisted mostly of day travel to a few of the Gulf nations (Kuwait, Oman and Qatar) and relatively little of the UAE itself, sad to say. A weekend trip to Istanbul and a week in Isra*l, Jordan and Palestine round out my regional travels.  Frankly, I have tended to favour more far-flung or ‘exotic’ destinations in Asia, Africa or Europe.

But I can say this – few destinations in the Middle East hold as much allure or mystery for me as Saudi Arabia, which, being the birthplace of Islam, is a must-see for anyone wanting to learn more about the religion and the ‘Arab’ culture. There are also the stories in the international media of human rights issues and restrictions on freedoms that I am lucky enough to enjoy. Hopefully this will help provide me with a different perspective on life in the Middle East.

Riyadh, with its religious police (Mutawa) patrolling the streets, ensuring that the local population follows strict Islamic law, is considered to be much more conservative than Jeddah. Alcohol of course is totally prohibited here. So is interaction between single men and women who are not of the same family. Appropriate dress and prayer at prescribed times (five times daily) are other things that seem to be within the mandate of theMutawwa’in. From what I have heard photography can also be sensitive, and I have been told to avoid meeting the eyes of local women.  I find myself wondering if the t-shirt I am currently wearing is a bit too risque (on it are written the words ‘Concordia University’)!

From what I understand, single women may not travel here (even for business) and any visit visa (business or tourism) is only provided through a locally-based sponsoring organisation. So this place is not really a destination for wandering travelers or a last-minute weekend destination, and in my opinion, is way off the beaten path. 

As I will only be here 36 hours, I have set myself a brief itinerary to try and give myself a taste of Riyadh. I have the late afternoon and evening to explore so I will begin with a trip to the Batha area of town, which is the downtown / city centre and site of the National Museum, a public library and the King Abdul Aziz Memorial Hall.  I would also like to see Hara, which apparently is the epicentre of the local expatriate Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi community, which is the largest segment of the country’s foreign population.

Poverty in Saudi Arabia is a real problem and consequently, slums do exist here. Some examples are poorer communities in the southern and eastern part of the city, such as Al Aoud, Sebala, Shamissi, and Al Suwaidi.  The last one is most well-known for the attack on a BBC correspondent several years ago.  Al Suwaidi is apparently a breeding ground for Al Qaida activity in Saudi Arabia. So I’ll try to avoid that one! Apparently these poor communities are mainly populated by expatriate workers but there are many Saudi nationals who live in relative poverty, considering the huge oil wealth of the country. Iit may be a bit naive and unrealistic to attempt to visit these places during a 36-hour trip (and my first visit) and I think I’ll have to satisfy myself with learning the lay of the land before I venture into unknown and possibly unsafe locales.

However, this article sheds some light on the problem of poverty in Saudi Arabia:

Saudis’ Quicksand of Poverty

At the end of the day, what I am looking for from my Saudi Arabian experience is a brief glimpse beneath the layer of extreme wealth in this part of the world… Appreciate that this is ambitious but if I can began to chip away at the mystery in my short 36 hours I will be pleased.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Hey there,

Well, it’s been another spell since I last wrote on here.  Sorry for the long absence.

I’ve been busy lately getting involved with providing relief aid/funding to assist with the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) of Pakistan.  Currently in its fourth week, some 3 million people have been displaced by the military campaign against the Taliban.

Many of the Pakistani people in the UAE come from the NWFP and are thus directly affected by the fighting.  Many are among the poorest people living in this country – i.e. the taxi drivers and construction labourers who are a very very large section of the population.  One such taxi driver I met about 10 days ago hasn’t spoken to his family in weeks.  He works 14-16 hour days making perhaps 1000 dirhams a month (US$275).  Although he barely spoke English, the sadness on his face was clear, but his situation was bleak. As mobile phone communication is cut off and due to the mass displacement of people, people such as this man may not even be able to get money to their families, or even speak to them, much less travel home to find them and see if they’re ok.

Here are a couple of photos of cool Pakistani taxi drivers I’ve met around Abu Dhabi (photos were taken in November 2006):

As the fighting intensifies, this has the situation to escalate into a humanitarian disaster.  People are being forced to flee their homes with just the clothes on their back – injured, homeless, and destitute – the most vulnerable being the elderly, women and children. Many people have no access to clean drinking water / adequate sanitary facilities, so conditions are ripe for the outbreak of disease. Polio, which was on the path to being eradicated, is now on the rise again.

Pakistan/IDPs/ Newly arrived displaced people at Jalala camp. Mardan district North West Frontier Province. © UNHCR/A.Rummery/7 May 2009.

If you’re reading this, I urge you to take the time to visit the website of any number of humanitarian organisations working on relief efforts in Pakistan and donate.  We all need to do our part, please – here are a few organisations I recommend where you can make an online donation:

Pakistan Red Crescent Society
United Nations Refugee Agency
Medecins Sans Frontieres

The United Nations estimates that perhaps as much as US$600 million is needed to cope with the current crisis. The money raised will help establish refugee camps and provide food, drinking water, clothing, medicine, shelter, and other basic supplies, for example:

- US$100 can provide a survival kit, with essentials such as blankets, cooking utensils and a stove
- US$200 can provide shelter to a family in the form of an all-season tent
- US$500 can fund the construction of two fresh water wells to provide clean water for refugees
- US$1000 provides a therapeutic feeding kit to feed up to 100 children

If you are interested in informing yourself in more detail about the crisis, I recommend ReliefWeb (http://www.reliefweb.int), which is a portal for information on humanitarian efforts ongoing around the world.

If you have any comments on the above, please feel free to comment directly below or email me by using the contact information provided on this site.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Hi there guys,

Am off to Mumbai (Bombay), India for the weekend.  Flying out of AUH (Abu Dhabi International Airport) in about three hours and get in very early tomorrow morning, around 5am local time.  Time difference is about 90 minutes ahead of us here.

This is kind of a last-minute trip, another one of those holiday getaways planned around a Muslim holiday that has been announced by the UAE Central Bank at the last minute.  The UAE CB governs banking holidays – I work for a financial institution.  The holiday is the Prophet’s Birthday.

Agenda for the weekend - meet up with my old friend Marino Francispillai, with whom I go way way back, around the days of IBM (c. 1999) although I knew him for a few years before that through his brother Steve, also a very good friend, and with whom I studied in high school / CEGEP. Marino will be in town on business – am looking forward to catching up over the very familiar dark rum and Coke. 

Will also hang out with my friend Freya, who is a local but now transplanted to Abu Dhabi.  She’s got a great crew of pals in the city and I have gone out with them before – should be good fun.  Am also planning to meet up with a few NGOs in the city that are working in the famed “Asia’s largest slum” Dharavi (now made even more famous after featuring so prominently in the movie Slumdog Millionaire – a great film – if you haven’t seen it, go, now!).  I want to become more familiar with the poverty and development problems affecting this city of approximately 20 million people.

No other plans beside that – except maybe get a tattoo.  Probably not – but you never know – my last trip to Mumbai in May 2008 was for the specific purpose of finding myself a tattoo parlour.  That adventure didn’t quite work out.

This will be my fourth trip to India and my third trip to Mumbai.  Am looking forward to it – I love this country!

By the way – great book I recommend – Shantaram.  It’s a novel about an Australian convict who escapes from prison and flees to India.  He spends eight years on the lam, becoming involved with the criminal element of the city, working as a doctor in the slums, and even going on to fight in Afghanistan.  An amazing story – if slightly embellished.

My review – from Facebook:

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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I received the news a few days ago that a popular professor at Schulich passed away.  Unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to study under him, or even meet him.  But upon reading his bio, I was surprised to discover that he was the professor that orchestrated the development of the MBA school’s MGMT 5150 Management Skills course.  It was my first class ever at Schulich and in the weeks that followed, the course set in motion some of the defining learning experiences and themes of my B-school experience, i.e. ‘reframing’ and the ‘15% approach to change’.  Lessons that have stayed with me to this day.

A copy of the course outline is available here:

Thank you Professor Lucas.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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Tonight is the beginning of the Chinese New Year, which began with today’s New Moon.

Here in Abu Dhabi, my only Chinese friend in this country invited me and about 20 other people to a Chinese New Year’s celebration at what she says is one of the few good and authentic Chinese restaurants in the city – the Beijing Restaurant.  Here is a map that Shu prepared for the benefit of anyone in the city who wants to try it out.  Her description of how to direct a taxi there is “Behind the Madinat Zayed shopping centre or Gold Souq, next to Shoe Mart.”

When I showed up the restaurant was packed and most of the diners were watching the television in the corner which was showing a live feed from the annual Chinese New Year celebration television show (a marathon four hours!).  Shu insisted that it is THE thing to be doing on Chinese New Year.  By the way, did you know that some 500 million people travel around the country at this time of year in order to return home to celebrate the occasion with their families? Yikes – think about the traffic jam!!!

Being the culturally aware person I am, I decided to wear red (a sign of good luck in Chinese culture).  When I proudly mentioned this to Shu, she promptly informed me I was meant to be wearing red underwear… I, of course, double-checked (I couldn’t remember ).  Out of luck…. oh well, next time.

The food was delicious but unfortunately I didn’t have much of an appetite tonight given that I’m just coming off a brutal cold and am super fatigued.  But folks were raving about the frog legs and the pork.  What was the BORK by the way Shu?  My fave was the fried prawn (fried anything, really).  It was basically a family-style set-up with a range of dishes served on lazy susans (a circular flat glassware dish that spins around so everyone can access the food easily).  No alcohol served – a sure digression from the usual table-top fare found at a Chinese New Year party but sacrifices must be made when you live in the Emirates.

We made a very excited Chinese fellow even more excited and very happy when the entire table of 20 agreed to pose with him for a photo that he could send to his friends back home.  I insisted of course on getting a photo with him myself so I could show MY friends back home. 

Photos on facebook so that I can tag those who attended   Here’s the link

and THANK YOU Shu for the lovely gift you gave us all with the candies and the fortune.  What a sweetie. 

Ah – I need to plug her blog – you can visit Shu’s website here. 

And in the words of my friend Kun - Gong xi fa cai, wan shi ru yi!

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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I never would have thought….

Ras Al Khaimah is one of the “Northern Emirates” of the UAE – about as far north as Qatar and about a 1 hour drive from Dubai. :p

See photos below.

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[BEGIN] Heavy snowfall on Ras Al Khaimah’s Jebel Jais mountain cluster

GULF NEWS
By Nasouh Nazzal, Staff Reporter
Published: January 24, 2009, 19:47

Ras Al Khaimah: Snow fell heavily on the mountains of Ras Al Khaimah on Friday night, leaving the Jebel Jais range covered in a thick white blanket of snow.

The extreme cold spell brought the temperature on top of the Jebel Jais mountain cluster, situated at a height of 5,700  feet, to as low as -3 degree Celsius on Friday night, as the snow blanketed an area extending over 5kms.

Major Saeed Rashid Al Yamahi, Manager of the Air Wing of RAK Police, who flew a helicopter to the top of the Jebel Jais mountain, said that the entire area was covered with 10 cm of snow.

“The sight up there this morning was totally unbelievable with the snow-capped mountain and the entire area covered with fresh, dazzling white snow. The snowfall started at 3pm on Friday afternoon and heavy snowfall began at 8 pm and continued till midnight, covering the entire area in a thick blanket of snow,” he said.

The temperature on top of the mountain cluster remained extremely cold during the daytime on Saturday with the temperature rising to just 1 degree Celsius in the afternoon. “Much of the snow was still there even when we flew back from the mountain this afternoon. It is still freezing cold up there and there are chances that it might snow again on Saturday night,” Major Al Yamahi added.

M. V. Varghese, Observer at the RAK Airport Meteorological Office, said that there were scattered rains in Ras Al Khaimah on Friday night which brought the temperature down. “The rain along with the cold easterly winds and low-lying clouds could have bought the temperatures further down on the mountains,” he said. [END]

N.B. Photos obtained in the public domain.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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The other day I stepped outside the front door of my building and immediately noticed a strange smell in the air… It smelled fragrant, humid, and very familiar, but i still couldn’t place it… as I turned the corner to catch a taxi I spotted pools of water in the streets and realised it had rained overnight.

here in the UAE it really only rains during the winter season (October – March) and even then it only rains a handful of times, maybe 5 or 6. So we’re really not all that used to it. But when it does rain, it often comes down in cats and dogs and the below photos show the effect on a large city like Dubai.

This is a brand new development in Dubai known as Springs. But they obviously neglected to build in proper drainage system infrastructure.

Also, from the same storm, here are some amazing photos of lightning over the Dubai skyline.

I have other shocking photos of rain-induced flooding in Sharjah, and a video of a rainstorm here in Abu Dhabi… I will try to post those this weekend to satisfy the curiosity of those who wonder what havoc rain might cause here in the sandpit… 

Photos provided by my friend Hani “the Hunk Mani” Zogheib.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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I went jogging on the Abu Dhabi Corniche today during my lunch hour and I saw something strange. Not that that’s unusual, since it’s Abu Dhabi after all. 

I saw a couple sitting on one of the benches on the waterfront. There was an Indian guy and stretched across his lap and almost kissing him was a woman. She was either Indian or Filipina I couldn’t tell. But I thought it was odd that they were being so “close” in public. You see, public displays of affection are only barely tolerated here and sometimes people even get thrown in jail or spit upon (the latter also sometimes happens to women who bare too much skin). So I wondered to myself if they would still be doing that when i came back on the return. Surely they wouldn’t risk doing it for a long period of time as someone (maybe a local) might draw attention to them or rebuke them. But in fact, on the way back she was still on his lap and I realised what had struck me as strange the first time around was that he looked like he was crying. And it was in that moment, I felt myself step outside of a box and look at the human situation in front of me. I saw sadness, grief in his face as if he was totally inconsolable and I wondered to myself, i wondered if maybe she was sick or something terrible had happened to her like maybe she was dying of some terminal illness. It occurred to me that maybe he was taking care of her in her last days or that maybe they just couldnt be together due to religious or cultural reasons. Or maybe he or she would be leaving for an arranged marriage for example and they were being prevented from being together. I wondered if they were beyond caring what people thought of them being so close in public like that, and and beyond caring that someone might report them yet. I thought of different views in different societies and wondered had they both been born in a different country, would their problem even exist for them? It just made me realise that there are so many different perspectives to a situation and so many different world views. How to understand them all? How to reconcile them all, if even possible? These reflections and ponderings seem to be happening more and more frequently to me and especially since I moved to the UAE two and a half years ago. Something about this place has caused so much change in me, I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel more aware of what is happening in people, processes and places around me, more reflective, more pensive.

You may wish to read a post on a related topic - sounds of abu dhabi, posted on 10 June, 2008.

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.

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1. Eat more fruits & vegetables and less red meat
2. Drink more water and drink alcohol more moderately
3. Read more and learn more about the world we live in and the problems we face
4. Strengthen my foreign language skills
5. Exercise more
6. Give more back to the community and take better care of the environment
7. Travel less to exotic places and more to spend quality time with family and close friends
8. Save more and be willing to take on more risk with my investments
9. Love more deeply and without fear of pain
10. Take myself less seriously 

Happy New Year!!  Comments welcome or if you’d like to share your resolutions, feel free

©2009 ryanrowe.com – have you seized a day lately?. All Rights Reserved.