Spending lazy Friday afternoons in Djibouti (A MUST READ )

[Fyr]

By Riaan Manser

 

I've missed my second Easter egg hiding session. I guess my routine of hiding Easter eggs in the garden for my dogs to uncover will have to wait until next year.

 

Because Djibouti is a predominantly Muslim country Easter is not even mentioned. Not that these guys need any more holidays - they have probably the laziest existence I've yet encountered.

 

For 80 percent of the male population, this is what an average day would look like.

 

Slowly start work at about 8.30 or 9.00am, until 12.30. Then scramble to find your supply of the narcotic leaf "qat". Qat (pronounced "cat") is chewed for hours while reclining in a chair or sprawled on the ground.

 

One cheek will be crammed with these chewed leaves, making the user look like a hamster with sunflower seeds stored in its mouth.

The fine pulp of the chewed leaves makes its way on to the front teeth and is sprayed out in greeting. It's an undignified sight.

 

The qat chewing takes up to four hours and people return to work at 4.30pm for three more hours. That adds up to a gruelling day of six and a half hours.

 

Many people return to the "qat dens" after work to continue chewing this addictive drug.

 

Adding insult to the productive, capitalist mindset that many of you may have is that Thursday afternoons and Fridays are write-offs for getting anything done.

 

Hardly a soul moves on Friday morning, although more people seem to rise the closer it gets to the afternoon prayer time.

 

Qat consumption is a serious problem that has received national and international attention. Studies have found that people living below the bread line in countries where qat is available spend about 10 percent of their income on this leaf.

 

A supply of good quality qat for an afternoon session will cost around R30.

 

Qat is flown in daily from Ethiopia and receives priority clearance before many other important consignments.

 

I have seen people chase after the trucks that bring qat into town for distribution.

 

A story doing the rounds here is that when then-United States secretary of state Colin Powell visited Djibouti before the Iraqi war in 2003, he was mobbed by angry locals.

 

Many believed that they were demonstrating against the US and its policies, but this is untrue.

 

Powell's flight had taken precedence over all air traffic coming into Djibouti International.

 

And, you guessed it, the Ethiopian flight carrying the qat was circling above while the Djiboutians were going into withdrawal and Powell was handing out "God bless America" T-shirts.

 

But what sort of person would I be if I merely criticised?

 

I carried out some first-hand research and found women were the main distributors of qat. It didn't take me long to find a "dealer" who could supply me with a bag of the Ethiopian leaves.

 

I found some locals I knew and ordered the customary cup of tea and a sheet of cardboard to sit on.

 

The leaves taste very unpleasant and I had to laugh thinking about the goats that were walking around us - they were eating plastic and here was I eating their food - leaves.

 

There were no fireworks for me, although I did have some cold shivers, even as the mercury was hitting the high 30s. I also found it very difficult to sleep. And, to top it all, I had a souvenir headache to start the following day. Some locals told me to use qat while cycling home to South Africa.

 

One old (wise?) man asked me how many kilometres I cycled a day. Before I could answer, he said. "Don't worry, just add a zero to that. That's how much you can cycle with qat."

 

Tempting! But quite honestly I don't understand it. Why would people, in such large numbers, be so fascinated by this drug? The greatest ally a dictatorial regime needs is a big distraction like war, religion or qat!

 

But other people's lives, so different from our own, are guaranteed to be interesting.

 

I wish I could write more, because Djibouti was an eye-opener. For more information about qat and how it has affected peoples' lives, look up: http:/ag.arizona.edu/~lmilich/yemen.html

[Suldaanka]

... I had to laugh thinking about the goats that were walking around us - they were eating plastic and here was I eating their food - leaves

[Sky]

Many believed that they were demonstrating against the US and its policies, but this is untrue.

this honestly almost made me fall off my kursi

[macalimuu]

What is ironic is that you all missing the magnitude and moral implications of this blinkered yet candid reporting.

 

We, Somalis, are perhaps the most impoverished racial group in this world. we are ferocious savages, lethargic vagabonds, and unproductive, unyielding and incompetent punch of drug addict junkies. we don't have any propensity and impulse to work hard and earn a decent living. we still live in very primitive way of life and are incapable to progress and join the industrious, civilized modern world.

 

We spend more than a Quarter million US dollars on chewing these useless leaves. Imagine what that amount of money could do if it is invested on some sustainable development projects like building water wells, farm irrigation canals, maternity and child hospitals, vocational schools and so on. the money we send back home on wire transfers go directly to the pokets and saving accounts of criminal Qat drug-lords in Ethiopia and Kenya. there is no encouraging basic structures for people to work and produce and their only vocation is consume and chew QAT leaves all day long to escape from the cruel, inhospitable environment they live in. that is a sign of desperation of defeat.

 

One of the early bigoted and racist European explorers, Richard Burton who went to Somalia in eighteenth century wrote in his celebrated travel book,- First footsteps in East Africa - , that we were savage nomads and called our country " Bilaad Wax I sii" - land of baggers- who are good for nothing else but butchery, theft and asking hand-outs.

That was in early 1800 hundreds. Look at us now? Have we made any progress and made any tangible development at all? Can we boast on anything innovative? Did we contribute anything to civilization? We are still unproductive, Qat-addicts, ferocious, primitive and uncivilized. Our privileged 'creams of the crop" elite, those who had the luck to go to school, are dispersed all over the world as refugees who live on welfare and social assistance. and sadly, all of these " A$$ -holes & Mother-Fckers" PH.D holders who call themselves, Intellectuals and scholars, are happy to be the mouth-piece of some ruthless warlords and thugs of their immediate clan.

 

Our self-styled leaders are squabbling and exchange blows in neighboring African capitals along clan lines. They are trekking around the globe for handouts, instructive of that unbefitting epithet of "Bilaad Wax I Sii" or the “graveyard of Aidâ€.

 

we like to blame others for our backwardness, failure and lack of developmentas society.so many nations were colonized, exploited, underdeveloped but their people, leaders as whole refused to accept degradation, corruption, nepotism and being labelled as primitive and under-developed.

 

Instead of rejecting this shame and abasement, we rather keep fighting and killing each other for the few resource on our poverty stricken barren land. we rather all be loyal to the clan warlords and continue this cataclysmic road of bloodshed, poverty and beggary.

Or better be as morally bankrupt as our forefathers and pesent day elders and perpetuate this ignorance. keep on chewing QAT, keep on guessing my clan alliegance, keep on destroying our nation, people and land.

 

Question? is there a QAT bazaar in Hell?

Do poor mothers and malnutritioned children who starve to death go to Heaven? what about the warlords? Do the warlords get punished after death for the crimes they committed against the living poor and wretched in Somalia?

Here on earth, we do reward them with position of authority and leadership while alive.

 

If you want to be a president, minister or government official in Somalia, you have to be a ruthless murderer - " Eey eey dhalay oo nixin oo ina Hoog iyo belaayo qaba ah " right right!!

[Fyr]

Qat vs Sustainable Development

 

Unsustainability as interpreted by Jodha (1992) refers to intergenerational inequity, an adaptation of the original Brundtland Report that starkly stated: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (WCED, 1987). The problems associated with qat, primarily the reduction in the quality of the land resource and the rapid overpumping of stored water, preclude sustainable development. As for economic development, one subset of sustainable development, unquestionably qat has brought great benefits to the villagers engaged in growing it. But as Kennedy (1986) points out, the economic growth that has occurred "must be viewed as shallow and temporary." There is an illusion of economic prosperity in Yemen, which the profusion of Toyotas on the streets and electronic goods in the stores amply demonstrates. However, the essential societal changes that are a prerequisite for economic development are not present. Yemeni social critic Saad Saleh Khalis (1993b) writes that:

 

 

"No development can be achieved in Yemen as long as this plant called qat takes up 90 percent of the spare time of the Yemeni people.... Some may argue that this is an old tradition of Yemen just like the arms and jambiyas. But even if that were so, harmful traditions must be thrown away.... The people and the government are satisfied with cursing qat and its effects."

 

 

 

Indeed, the people and the government are satisfied with merely - and rarely - cursing qat; the government has no adequate policies to apply to the problem. In the interim, the population of Yemen is expected to double every 19 years. As in other developing nations, urbanization is rapid: by 1991, 30 percent of the population was urbanized, compared with just 13 percent in 1970 (World Bank, 1993; Anonymous, 1994). High infant (131 per 1,000) and child (190 per 1,000 for children under 5 years) mortalities are indicators of malnutrition, as is a maternal mortality of 10 percent per birth (Kolaise, 1994). The expulsion of 1.2 million Yemeni workers from Gulf Cooperation Council states following the 1991 Gulf War as a result of Yemen's support of Iraq has exacerbated unemployment (Fandy, 1995). Food prices are rising, and poverty is increasing.

 

While on the one hand many households are becoming increasingly dependent on income from qat (Dr. Abd Al-Rahman Dubaie, pers. comm. with authors, Nov. 1994); on the other hand low- and mid-income qat chewers most certainly contribute to their own impoverishment. For example, Mahdi, an English-language teacher at a rural school 40 km west of San'a, in 1994 earned 9,000 Riyals a month, and spent 250 Riyals each time he chewed qat. He chewed three or four times a week, thus spending 33 to 44 percent of his salary on qat. We witnessed Mahdi asking for a cash advance from the local school administrator - not to buy food but to purchase qat. This codependency between producer and consumer is perhaps fragile. Since qat is not a physiologically addictive drug, one hypothesis suggests that most households will ultimately choose to eat rather than to chew qat. An opposing hypothesis contends that since some qat chewers are already willing to subject themselves to malnutrition, a possible scenario is that more will choose to do so, particularly because qat effectively reduces appetite. If the first hypothesis dominates, the demand for qat will diminish, pushing prices down. The question then is, how will producers react? Will they plant more qat in an attempt to maintain their income, or will they allow the reduction in price to stimulate demand as suggested by classical economics?

 

While the latter response of producers is bad, because it does not address the issue of how Yemen can break out of the grip of qat, the former is worse. Since the enhanced supply would contribute to keeping market prices low, ever-increasing areas of land would be locked up in qat, and the tapping of water resources intensified. National food security would diminish, since it is always the best, most-productive lands that are converted to qat. The government will have to spend ever-larger sums of hard currency on food imports just to maintain the status quo, contributing to the inflationary spiral and increasing poverty levels. In the face of predicted population growth, malnutrition levels may greatly increase. And as we indicated above, malnutrition enhances the adverse effects of qat. In such a weakened physiological state, we speculate that many Yemenis would be unlikely to survive sustained, drought-induced food shortages that could occur at any time. Qat, then, is unquestionably beneficial to the households that grow it, but we believe it is severely damaging the national weal.

 

http://ag.arizona.edu/~lmilich/yemen.html