Back to Berberland

Bab Rouah, along the walls that ring the royal palace in Rabat.

From Mauritania, my work trip continued to Morocco. It was my first time back in nearly two years, since leaving in December 2009. Before I left home, friends had asked me if I was excited to be heading back. "Morocco and I have a long and troubled history," I would respond with a smile.

In Rabat, returning to my old haunts—the neighborhood of Agdal—was surreal. Every cafe, hardware shop, kitchenware store, grocer's, and flower shop dredged up weighty memories from the depths of my subconscious. The sign on a laundromat, the croissants at a neighborhood bakery, the green plastic bag of local wine shop—my eye seized on even the most innocuous details to recall some lost association. But after living there as half of a couple, I welcomed the opportunity to return alone and rediscover the place on my own terms.

Rabat's new tramway was up and running, but daily life in the city seemed otherwise unchanged.

Nouakchott, City of Sand

Traditionally, Mauritanian men and women both cover up from head to toe outside the home. After a minute in the country's blinding midday sun, it's easy to see why.

The night before I left Nouakchott—the desolate capital of the even more desolate northwest African country of Mauritania—a sales email managed to slip through my spam blocker. It began, "Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere in the desert, you MUST have heard of Viagra..."

Funny you should say so. As a matter of fact, I do feel as if I'm living under a rock in the desert.

* * *

Thanks to a long-anticipated transfer at work, my new portfolio includes a series of projects in North Africa. This means the end—for now at least—of my Central African travels, and a chance to further explore this other familiar corner of the continent.

My first destination in the region, however, was one I had never visited and knew little about. I had read about Mauritania's spartan "desert blues" music on a blog I enjoy, Sahel Sounds, and I could

9/11 and the Tenth Parallel

Twin towers of a different kind, Damascus

Among my many emotions on this somber anniversary, the greatest is frustration. Here's why, and what I think we can do to fix it.

In response to a series of events ten years ago today that an arrogant and naive America could not anticipate (much less comprehend), our nation launched two wasteful and devastating wars, dismantled protections of civil liberties, sanctioned torture and illegal detention, built walls—both physical and bureaucratic—around our borders, shamefully failed the selfless volunteers who sacrificed to protect us, and embraced xenophobia and racism in our public discourse. All these rash and careless and downright stupid responses to 9/11 frustrate me, but not nearly as much as our collective failure to respond in one single, all-important way: to seek to understand what led to those events and how can we work to decrease the chances of their ever happening again.

Hama: Faces from a Forsaken City

A fruit seller and his tea, July 2005. Hama, Syria.

Since its vibrant, idealistic beginnings eight months ago, the Arab Spring has splintered into many different summers. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia—the Spring's most successful by any measure—have dissolved into banal squabbles over electoral systems and constitutional provisions and party politics, as they should. The aspirations of Bahraini democrats were brutally silenced, but Moroccans, Jordanians, and a few others may still hope to see some small good emerge. Less promising is the civil war in Libya and, perhaps not far behind it, similar disintegration in Yemen and in Syria.

The Syrian case is particularly troubling to me. That's not because, after a summer of Arabic study there, I pretend to know the country, its people, or its politics well. Rather, it's because I have never genuinely loved a place that was not my home the way I loved Syria. Nowhere else have I met

Turqoise to Timberline: Chasing Trout in the Rockies

Spying on the enemy from above, at Timberline Lake. (photo by C. Graham)

DC is the last place on earth any sane warm-blooded creature would want to be during the summer heat. So a few days before the Fourth of July weekend arrived, when my uncle Chris called to invite me to spend the holiday camping in the Rocky Mountains with him and my aunt and two cousins, I wisely accepted.

From their home in Denver, I drove with my uncle and his chocolate lab, Ollie, to Turquoise Lake, where we met the rest of the family and pitched our tents for the weekend. (Of course, in our minds this was largely a fishing trip, so my uncle and I made sure to stop at several points along the way—fly fishing shops, trout streams, and rivers still bursting with this year's late snowmelt.)

My two cousins, twin 15-year old boys, led the charge with their friends on the next day's hike to Timberline Lake. The two-hour climb to 11,000 feet (3,350 m.) involved fording several snowmelt

Sylvestre's Stories

Sylvestre has taught me a lot during my visits to Rwanda.

Of the small group of young Rwandans with whom I work each time I come here, Sylvestre holds a special place. The other Rwandans on our team call him Mzee, a Swahili term reserved for respected elders. He gets that nickname in part because he's the oldest, but at roughly 33 (his exact age is sort of a guess) Sylvestre is barely older than the others, so there is more to it. It's not rank or education either—he's our office's driver and fix-it-man. Rather, they treat Sylvestre with an extra touch of respect in part because he is "a survivor." (In Rwanda, that term has only one meaning: a survivor of the 1994 genocide.) None of the others are; they all returned to Rwanda in the aftermath, having grown up in Burundi, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, or Tanzania. But Sylvestre and his family stuck it out in Rwanda, despite being of mixed ethnic heritage, and thus subject to the anti-Tutsi campaigns that erupted with increasing frequency throughout the '80s and early '90s before fully exploding in 1994.

Gorilla Country: There Are No Creationists in Virunga

I had to remind myself that they only look like humans in gorilla suits.

Within a week of returning home from family vacation in Ireland, I was back on the road for another work trip to Rwanda—my third in the last year and fourth overall.

In my previous three trips, I had never managed to visit Rwanda's most famous tourist attraction—the mountain gorillas. The price tag was a big reason. Visiting the gorillas requires getting to Rwanda in the first place (not a cheap proposition), then to Virunga National Park, on the country's northern border. But the expenses don't end there; the permit to join a small group and enter the lush highland forests, under mandatory escort by a team of trackers, guides, and armed scouts, costs US$500. For that price, one is allowed to trek up the volcanoes' steep slopes to find a gorilla family and observe them for a maximum of an hour. Of course, seeing them is not guaranteed, and online travel forums are full of horror stories of visitors paying the hefty fee only to climb through

Leaving Ireland on a High Note: Galway and the Aran Islands

Family portrait above the cliffs at Dún Aengus fort, on the largest of the Aran Islands

Galway, Ireland's third largest city, is everything its fellow towns along Ireland's western coast aren't—a cosmopolitan, boisterous charmer of a city, alive with the energy of outdoor cafes and street buskers, of art galleries and open-air food and craft markets.

But even Galway can't hide the signs of the times; like everywhere else in Ireland, Galway's residents spent the last decade building. The B&B in which we stayed was just the latest of a long string of recently—and shoddily—constructed places we lodged in, adorned with cheap furnishings and tacky décor. While the various B&B owners were all exceptionally warm and inviting, they also all spoke of Ireland's economic boom and bust in gloomy terms. Ireland's housing bubble was a large part of the cause, but so was America's own economic slump; as our host in Galway explained, the economy in this part of Ireland rises and falls with the tides of American tourists, and this year we