http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=&k=1813&t=0&d=0 I would read that. en-en http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site//img/bf-57.png http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=&k=Array&t=0&d=0 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5351 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5351 It's cliche, but every ending *is* a new beginning, and vice versa.
Leaving tonight, for the last time, for Lungi, seeing me having to wait for an uncool five hours, in the middle of the night, to wait for my flight to Casablanca to take off, I'll be moving through half a dozen countries, before settling, with Niamh, in Uganda, just over a month from today.

The last two months, after my return from Tanzania and South Africa, haven't been half bad. Sure, we've had city power perhaps 20% of the time and didn't have water, at all, for a few days, and little water on many others, GOAL, Niamh's organization, finally decided to pony up the cash and get internet at the residence. This meant that, whenever there was power, and we are on a generator in the evenings when city power fails, almost always there has been fairly reliable internet. This, a bit of a godsend, as it allowed me to not have to walk the earth in search for overpriced and very unreliable internet cafes, every day.

The last 19 months or so have been interesting times, good people, a cute kitty, and starting off a weekly pubquiz at O'Casey, last Thursday in its 45th installment. And, on the verge of my departure, a nice project for GOAL, too.
I'm sad for leaving the kitty, Tash, behind, though.

And here's to hoping a return to Asia will happen... at least at some point. For now, it's a one month tour of Europe, which will include a wedding in Brighton and braving the frozen wastelands of... Serbia, as well as visiting a new country on my list, Montenegro.
Then, it's Uganda for a year, with, almost upon arrival, trips to Tanzania and Zambia. And, shortly after, a return to Istanbul and an onwards trip to Azarbaijan with, hopefully, side visits to Georgia and Armenia.

Ah, the bane of aging. If only I still had the same sense of wonder for discovering new places as I once had. And if only discovering new places was as exhilarating as it once was. With the globe being so much more interconnected, and with everyone and their baby brother now having a Facebook timeline where photos, books, games and whatnot get shared, it's just too easy to virtually never leave home and always stay in touch, even in the remotest of places.
The vast majority of the planet has become a completely standardized affair, the wonder and differences being found in every smaller aspects of local life.

Meanwhile, I have to cough up good money to get out of here. The cheapest connection between Freetown and Amsterdam is setting me back 840 USD. For a one way flight. Considering a round trip Amsterdam Johannesburg easily goes for less then 700 USD, it's a total rip off.
And I still have to get to the airport. The cheap option is to take a government ferry, at two euros. But that means either leaving at 2pm, from a fairly easily reachable location, or at 6pm, from the other side of town, a drive there easily taking two hours. As my flight only leaves at 620am in the morning, it would mean having to spend the night close to the airport. There, hotels typically go for over 100 USD per night, as the mining companies bleeding Sierra Leone dry scoop up all the overpriced and low quality beds, though a new place I found that's not great, but manageable, 'only' charges 35.
The alternative, which I in the end decided to go for, is taking a water taxi, at a rip off 40 usd, at 12am. Which means I'll be stuck at the airport, in the middle of the night, for some five hours, before my flight leaves. And, though the airport provided free high speed internet a year ago or so, that has disappeared in the mean time.
Indeed, there's no good alternative here.

It's tempting to want to return to Sierra Leone in, say, 15 years time, to see how the place has developed, but it's also easy to suspect that change will be little. The main road out of town through our area has now been under construction for some 15 months. This is a stretch of road not more than five kilometers long. The road leaving Freetown, going down the peninsula, has been under construction for over five years, nothing ever really changing.
The president recently announced a new international airport will be built on this side of the bay. Sounds nice, until you realize it will be on the other side of the peninsula, where you have to somehow get to the other side of the mountain range that forms the back of Freetown. Meanwhile, see above, trips to the airport are a pain and flying is horribly expensive.
The UN coughed up a loan to allow the high speed internet cable to beach in Freetown, giving land-based international communication access to Sierra Leone for the first time in history, on the condition that the Sierra Leone government would set up an independent telco regulator. The cable beached last October, an independent overseer is yet to be formed. And, hence, access to the cable hasn't yet been rolled out.]]> Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0100 8.47522 -13.27 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5347 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5347 GOAL decided to go ahead, just before christmas, with a complete overhaul of their DCYP, Disadvantaged Children and Youth Program. The paper based workflow is to be completely moved online. And I'm supposed to have this finished when? Before the end of January of course.

Then, the National Auditer's Office of Tanzania also needs a new website. Why not. When do they want to be finished? Well, not later than February, of course.

SACSIS is wrapping up moving to a new server, with a completely overhauled content management system. This week.

And culture, too! The Irish pub O'Casey is now having rather superb open mic and live music nights on Wednesdays. Thursday, they are still home to quiznights. On Friday I had my exhibition Once Salone, and on Saturday there was a photo scavenger hunt organized by a few friends.
With mediocre internet at home, it's almost like being in a real city!

Well, if it weren't for having had electricity for only two days since the start of the new year. But water on most.

The exhibition was a success. Most works were sold before the opening of the show. But I had to also cut the show short. I wasn't able to get the prints framed, as there doesn't seem to be a framer in town, and was too worried about the prints getting damaged.

The scavenger hunt was fun. Tom and I, the only team of two, where everyone else had four-man teams, came in second. It was my first scavenger hunt. Nice, but not as much fun as a photomarathon. For one, in a scavenger hunt, the quality of the photos doesn't matter. Also, the winning team split up to check more items off their list. Of course totally allowed and possible, but it also means that, in effect, they were two teams pooling their scores. Wouldn't it be more fun to keep the whole team together at all times?
One way to resolve this would be to only allow submissions from one camera, I suppose.

The winning team's prize was a case of PBR. The pool party afterwards was a killer. The Star on tap ran out early. The braai was well stocked.]]> Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0100 8.4893 -13.2504 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=10&i=5315 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=10&i=5315 After discovering a host of old postcards from, mostly, colonial Sierra Leone, I realised it would be interesting to compare the old and the new. A few of the places were easily identified, but some took some clever deduction while others were practically impossible to pinpoint.
Interestingly, some of the postcards which seemed easily identifiable turned out to be amongst the hardest to locate. For one, some photos showing what seemed like the exact same road, claimed to be on opposite sides of the inner city. This, while neither location appeared to be just right.

Either way, the result is an interesting mix of old and new, the images creating a portal into Sierra Leone's, specifically Freetown's, past, creating a window into a period when the city was perhaps more organized and, likely, a time in which life, in many ways, was much simpler, or maybe much quieter.

The original postcards came from sierra-leone.org, while valuable insights were gleaned from delcampe.com. A very useful (partial) map of Freetown, dating from 1947, was essential for locating a few more obscure corners of the city.
Many thanks to Ed Ramsey, who was essential in locating several of the spots and who's participation was essential for making sure I'd get out of bed early enough on three consecutive Sunday mornings, the only time of the week in which the inner city is somewhat quiet.

For sale

All the works are up for sale. Select a photo in the grid below and click on the 'Buy Print' link below it. Note that "Premium prints" are shipped from both the UK and the US (allowing for affordable shipping in the US and Europe), but that all other work is shipped from the US.
Printing is handled by Fotomoto.

Exhibition

Most of the prints are on show, and for sale, at Bliss in Freetown (Sierra Leone), from January 13 until January 20. The opening will be on January 13 at 7pm.]]> Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5316 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5316 Sometimes, you have to have faith in people, or, give a sob story the benefit of the doubt.
On Monday, sitting at my favorite internet cafe, I was approached by a French speaking black man, claiming to be from Togo but living in Guinea (Conakry). He claimed all his luggage was stolen (sure!), that he was a diabetic (uhuh!) and that he had a little bit of cash, but wasn't able to buy his, also stolen, insulin (right!). In fact, all he needed was some money to buy insulin, after which he would inject it with me there, just to show he wasn't scamming me (of course!).
He was in touch with his wife (he still had his phone), and she had tried a Moneygram and Western Union money transfer, but, so he claimed, both no longer operate from Guinea. This is plausible, though not easily verifiable. To get money, he had had his wife set up a bank transfer, but that would take a few days for the money come in, supposedly on Thursday.
Also, so he claimed, he had visited two pharmacies in town, from which he knew that the cost of insulin was above his current means. I asked him which pharmacies he had been to and, the luck, one of them is owned by a friend. I called the friend and, surprise, he confirmed that, indeed, a French speaking black man had passed by, asking for the cost of insulin, claiming to not have enough funds.

Sounds legit-ish. So I went on a little adventure.
It was already late in the day and, taking a shared taxi to town, we ended up finding as many open as closed pharmacies, but were able to get the right insulin, from the fifth open pharmacy, just before closing time (and me paying for it). Then, indeed, he injected the insulin right in front of my eyes. Now, it's possible he did an impressive switcheroo, but if not, this showed that Komla (born on a Tuesday), was at least a diabetic, if possibly a scamming one.

He was going to call me Thursday, after receiving his funds, to get me my money back.
Not so. Sadly, Komla was unreachable himself. For days on end. Sadly, another example of misplaced faith.

So, I present to you, the face of an insulin thief. Komla was ok, interestingly enough, with me taking a photo of him, with my crappy phone, which does lend some credibility to his actual story. And though he tried calling me once, on Tuesday, a call which I missed, it's not very hard to call again, whether in or out of country.
Who knows, perhaps he's dead.






Connect!

More adventure happened on the same Monday I went in search of insulin. Delayed by only a year or so, the ACE undersea cable beached in Freetown. Somewhere in the next year, perhaps March, it will be the conduit for all high speed internet trafficked in and out of Sierra Leone. The ministry of information (whose website no longer functions) sent out a press release, inviting all Sierra Leoneans and interested parties to attend the ceremony. Only to not list a time and by sealing off the venue.
I went over, shot some photos, and then was kicked out by an army colonel. "We have state press. We don't want anyone snapping here."
]]> Thu, 13 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0200 8.48528 -13.2679 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=5&i=5247 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=5&i=5247 Reasonably straightforward Wordpress installation. The design was done by Ewa O'Neill, which I converted to a Wordpress template.
]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5201 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=12&i=5201 Perhaps it seemed like a wise decision at the time, but Freetown's airport being on the other side of a huge bay, one of the deepest natural harbors in the world, is primarily horribly inconveniently located.
Whities flying in or out of Lungi international airport typically either take a chopper into town, for which the going rate currently is 120 USD, or one of the water taxis, each of which still charge a painful 40 USD, one way. Alternatively, one could drive around the bay, perhaps an eight hour ride, or take the government-run ferry from the far side of town. Cheap, but known for its prevalence of pickpockets. And, on a regular day, coming from or going to our side of town, from the ferry, typically takes a good 90 minutes, any time of the day.

Going out of our way, the day before our flight to Gambia, we wanted to buy tickets for one of the water taxis, only to find that, on a Saturday, none of them service our Asky flight departing at seven in the evening. Then, the last few months, Saturday mornings have been used to clean up downtown Freetown, in preparation for next week's independence celebrations. During cleanups, it's said that cars spotted downtown on a Saturday morning are stopped by police, their boots filled with sludge being collected from the city's gutters.
Pedestrians, found downtown and not part of the cleanup team, are beaten by police into submission. Or, at least, that's the story.

So, not wanting to risk catching a late, potentially delayed, ferry, we had to get to the far side of town by taking the long way around, crossing the Freetown peninsula, then heading back into town. To catch our seven o'clock flight, we decided to leave at nine thirty in the morning, to get to the airport, perhaps some 25 kilometers away as the crow flies.

Arriving at the ferry, the departure area was actually surprisingly pleasant. Complete with several rather nice cafes, serving both decent coffee and excellent sandwiches. And perhaps because either most people were afraid of the city's cleaning crews or because this was a Saturday morning, the ferry itself was also enjoyably quiet. The crossing was good, the taxi ride to the airport on the other side a breeze, while we saved ourselves some 70 USD in the process.
Clearly, when flying in or out of Lungi and having to cross town on a weekend or holiday, taking the government run ferry is more than good enough.]]> Sat, 23 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0200 8.62 -13.202 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=6&i=5043 http://babakfakhamzadeh.com/site/index.php?c=6&i=5043 Having started a weekly quiznight at O'Casey in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I needed a system to keep track of scores and whatnot. This is it. 

What's more, I set up the system such that it is a socially collaborative pubquiz manager. Start your own quiz and benefit from being able to use existing questions in your future quiznights.

The design was scooped up from styleshout, which has become my favorite source of open source designs. When's the next one coming out?
The logo, the headshot of the awkward dog, is Brain, from the Inspector Gadget television series.



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