Scribbles

In many posts on The Road, you will see I am an addicted traveller. I love travelling, even for the sake of travelling. But there are things I hate about travelling. Last night’s flight (leaving 01:00 AM) from Rome to Addis on Ethiopian Airlines reminded me of them.

Ten things I hate about travelling:

1. Have to check in two hours before departure, only to have to wait and wait.

2. Red-eye flights: leave tired, arrive tired.

3. Flight attendants who wake you up each time they pass by with (make your choice) a hot tower (which stinks anyway), the menu, drinks, food, newspapers, a hot towel (again), immigration leaflet, a headset.

4. Non-reclining seats. (Where the hell was the time where Ethiopian Airlines were the best in Africa? This plane sucked. Dirty floor cover, dirty seats, most of the seat covers half dismantled…)

5. Seats which have little or no legspace.

6. “I am sorry, we have run out of headsets”

7. Having to sit around an airport after midnight with all shops, restaurants and pubs closed. And to top it off, with the wireless Internet connection failing after you only used 10 minutes of your 120 minutes subscription you just paid online.

8. Stepping onto a plane, stopping over, with passengers picked up from the previous airport. Getting in the air smelling of 300 people stuck in a confined area for three hours.

9. Sitting by the plane’s emergency exit, which is that cold and draft-y, you think your hair is going to freeze against the wall as your head leans over while falling asleep.

10. Being happy you get through customs and immigration in a whizz (only handluggage, yuuuhuuu!), but then having to wait for 90 minutes for your airport pick-up. Only to find out that a. your hotel courtesy van claims to have been there all the time, b. the office driver thought it was tomorrow, c. another office driver had left one minute before you arrived.

11. Ok, here is an 11th: Checking into the hotel to freshen up after an overnight flight. Just as you are getting undress, the office calls and the reception guy knocks on your door stating “we will move you to another room, as we realized the toilet in this one is not flushing”.
They move you from a 15 m2 room with huge windows and a wonderful view, into a 5 m2 room with a 0.2m2 window, with mold on the walls. And while moving you, the porter did not notice your bag was already unzipped (no matter how many times you say: “don’t worry, I will take care of that”), and spreads your underwear, electronic gadgets, toiletry all over the corridor.

Dah. I guess it all starts with a 01:00 AM flight. It just puts me in a bad mood.

I was home, in Belgium, this weekend. Taking the train back to Brussels airport, I was surprised how green everything still was. And how beautiful it looked.

The fields were much smaller and looked more cramped next to the other, compared to what I am used to in my second home, in Italy. But its beauty still amazed me. And it took me by surprise that I was amazed. After all, I have seen this scenery since 47 (soon!) years. I have taken this train to Brussels Airport for 15 years. And still…

It made me think about travelling… Travelling is a state of mind. In finding joy in little details. Even if you see them every day. Travelling is being amazed by these small joys. Travelling is standing still to look at a detail, no matter how common, and to look at it as if it was the first time.

I took some random pictures as the train was passing through scenery. (Surely wished my Nokia mobile phone featured a better camera!)

(click on the collage to view the slideshow)

Take the case of Haiti:

Rice is the staple food of Haiti and up until the 1980s Haiti was self-sufficient in its production. In the mid-1980s Haiti’s domestic rice production decreased rapidly. By the 1990s rice imports outpaced domestic rice production. This displaced many Haitian farmers, traders, and millers whose employment opportunities are extremely limited.

Import tariff reduction is a critical piece of the trade liberalization policies that are strongly advocated and many times mandated by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the loan packages they negotiate with developing countries. In 1995 Haiti agreed to the pressure of the IMF to cut on rice import tax from 35% to the current level of 3%.

Though it earned Haiti a score of 1 on the IMF’s 1999 Index of Trade Restrictiveness, making Haiti the least trade restrictive country in the Caribbean, Haiti has also remained the least developed country in the Caribbean. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Three-fourths of Haitians live on less than $2 a day and 70 percent of the workforce is jobless or underemployed. More than half the country’s children don’t get enough to eat. The connection?

Following the adoption of the import policies local production of rice in Haiti dropped dramatically. Rice import tariff reductions in Haiti has made it more difficult for local rice producers to compete with imports.

Some argue that the resulting flood of relatively cheap rice imports originating mostly from the United States has had a negative impact on Haiti. The decline in the demand for Haitian rice has been devastating to an already desperate rural population. Rice farmers are some of the most vulnerable members of the population; the alternative employment options for farmers in Haiti are extremely limited.

Furthermore, competition between Haitian and American rice growers is not exactly fair. While US rice production is “subsidized through a variety of mechanisms”, the small, struggling domestic rice industry in Haiti receives no support from the government. Several Haitian and international NGOs have claimed that the US is guilty of dumping rice in Haiti. The US now dominates the rice market in Haiti. Most American rice exports are handled “by a single US corporation — American Rice Inc. — which has enjoyed an almost monopolistic position in Haiti.” (Full)

Picture courtesy Newsday/Moises Saman. Graph courtesy american.edu