Radio Free Benin

When you are a radio pro on a tour of a radio station and the director of a live show asks you, “Want to go on the air?” The answer can only be, “Absolutely!” 

Ocean FM is owned by the same Cotonou, Benin, media group that publishes a major newspaper here, Le Matinal. The offer of a tour sprang from a talk I gave earlier in the week; I had hoped I might be able to visit a local radio station, and a few days later I was standing with the managing editor of Ocean FM in their control room, on the guest end of a spontaneous booking process.

A public affairs officer from the US Embassy here had arranged my visit to Ocean FM and she balanced my "yes, obviously" with a hesitant, "ok but...." The co-hosts would ask me questions in English, and presumably interpret some of the conversation into French. The PAO didn't want to be on the air and she sat away from a mic went we got into the studio. But the free-wheeling nature of the show didn't conform to those subtleties and sooner than later the host was lobbing her questions, too.

I don't speak French or any of the several local languages in Benin, but I do speak control room, and it felt great to hang out here.

Ocean FM isn't exactly a morning zoo format but it was loose enough that the host riffs unscripted on the news of the day, takes listener calls and is clearly comfortable spending a few minutes with impromptu guests who weren't pre-interviewed. Three topics emerged from their  questions to me: What do you think of our radio station? How can our journalists get training in the U.S.? Why is radio important?

The second question is a variation on a theme that I encounter frequently, and it stabs me in the heart a little every time. It lays bare the truth that opportunities aren't equally distributed; that people in developing countries are rightfully ambitious and unflinching in seeking advancement; it belies the curiosity that people are still keenly interested in coming to America, even though some parts of America clearly aren't interested in welcoming them; and for me, it stirs up a nest of unresolved feelings about how the place of your birth sets a course of fortune or misfortune that can be hard to disrupt, and why some people are born with the luck of geography and others aren't.

"How can we come to the U.S.?"

My thoughts on this are so tangled that I can feel my chest fill with emotion, and yet my answer in careful English is entirely anodyne and superficial. "I know there are training programs that exist for journalists, and I'm sorry I don't have details about them." Ugh. Pathetic dodge.

I was on more comfortable ground with their other lines of questioning. So much of the equipment and setup of Ocean FM was familiar. The studio mics, the desktop editing software, the mixing boards -- you'd find versions of this equipment (maybe slightly newer) in most radio stations in the U.S. One small workroom had tables around its perimeter with computers and mixers where reporters and producers wrote and mixed their stories. The larger workroom had a large common table at its center, but everyone's attention was oriented to the assignment board that filled one wall. In the workrooms, lazy ceiling fans half-heartedly dispersed the heat and humidity, but the studio and control room were noticeably cooler, preserving the temperature-sensitive equipment.

I do love an organized assignment board!

Why is radio important? In America, my answer would resemble a lot of what you hear people like me tell you during public radio pledge drives. But my brief introduction to Benin led me to this conclusion: education levels are low and poverty is high, but Benin is still one of the most stable republics in West Africa. This is exactly the kind of place where reliable, solidly reported news on the radio can make an important impact on how citizens relate to their government and their communities. Good radio is democratizing: you do not need wealth to hear it, you do not need literacy to learn from it and it can reach nearly everywhere.

[April 2018.]

News In The Garden

This is what the sky looked like, almost every single day.

"Our president just fired our secretary of state."

I was sitting at the wooden table under one of the gazebos with the purest of blue skies overhead, in the midst of a carefully designed rock garden surrounded by orange trees. The shocking fuchsia blooms of a bougainvillea cloaked the nearby stucco wall. This place is idyllic. The news was not.

"I'm so sorry!!" Oumaima exclaimed sympathetically, as if I personally was the one who just got axed on Twitter.

My volunteer gig at the nonprofit Amal Association in Marrakech was to help them rebuild parts of their web site, and being constantly online meant I could also enjoy a steady feed of news all day while I worked. I could start the day with Monocle and BBC, and then around midday Morocco-time I transitioned to public radio as the east coast of the US woke up. Sitting in a beautiful garden, helping incredibly good people who do inspiring work, mainlining global and political news -- this is pretty much as good as gets!

Oumaima is the director of Amal's Targa Center, and the garden was my workspace during the time I volunteered there. The wifi from the upstairs office reached far enough that I could sit in the warm shade amidst the plants and birds while I built web pages, rewrote copy and edited photos. From here, I could watch the daily rhythm of the tourists coming in for cooking classes, the trainees hurrying to their kitchen stations, the kitchen prepping and dispatching meals. At predictable intervals, staff and trainees would congregate for sweet mint tea, and to eat fresh bread dipped in honey and olive oil. At unpredictable intervals, Oumaima would appear full of excitement for new ideas, rushing from meeting to phone call to meeting, but always taking time to focus her attention on the person in front of her. (Even when the person in front of her was focused on what's happening in the White House on the other side of the planet.)

While energy swirled through the classrooms and kitchen each day at Amal, I found my groove outside. When I hit an HTML snag that I couldn't solve or just generally reached my limit of screen time, I'd leave my laptop in the front garden and take my earbuds with me to the herb and vegetable patches in the backyard... and I would pull weeds.

The 'Solidarity' gazebo was my outdoor office, more often than not.

Honestly, pulling weeds was more fun for me than building web pages, but that wasn't what they needed from me most. Pulling weeds was a treat, the web site was my job.

The first time I visited Amal it was February, and the garden beds had tiny sprigs of green that seemed adorably optimistic in the vast tracts of brown dirt. By mid-March though, the tiny shoots had transformed into self-respecting plants and by April the green had overtaken the brown completely, with stems and leaves and vines rioting in defiance of their garden beds' neat edges.

I would happily spend hours in that garden, carefully teasing out individual weeds out from among the coriander, sage and spearmint. I would attack with vicious joy the noxious creepers that overtook the gravel walkways, and feel satisfied when their eradication was complete. While I worked, I would not come close to draining the reservoir of news podcasts on my phone, but I would occasionally instead crank up the Hamilton soundtrack and sing along (badly) while I freed the potato plants from the crab grass that encroached their space.

The staff and trainees at Amal seemed partly amused and partly mystified by my love of weeding; only the head gardener was unambiguously delighted by my hobby. I loved the satisfaction of applying just the right amount of tension to a reedy, annoying stem and seeing its full root emerge from the ground. I loved the immediate difference that was visible -- rows of beautiful greens in fluffy soil, free of pestering interlopers. I really loved the massive haystack of weeds that would pile up at the edge of the garden as I worked.

I think Rex Tillerson's firing stands out among all the news stories I heard during the untold hours I spent in those gardens for two reasons. First, Oumaima's response was uniquely un-American in that she was thinking of me personally, rather than reacting to the information itself. If I had relayed the same breaking news to an American, it would have been met with a highly charged opinion -- about the president, the circumstance, Twitter, something. So that fact that she said, "I'm so sorry!" struck me as humorously unusual, and also very kind.

But second, my departure for Morocco and West Africa was only weeks away when President Trump reportedly demanded to know why the US should accept immigrants from "shithole" African countries. And now Rex Tillerson was in Africa, apparently to smooth over the fissures that statement caused, and he gets called back to Washington in time to read his firing on Twitter.  I felt a personalized proximity to the bookends of this news story. And I listened to coverage of the fallout while working in a beautiful garden, surrounded by an incredible group of people who are truly making the world a better place every day.

[March 2018]

Travel Karma In Marrakech

The courtyard at the center of our riad, home for the next three nights.

The few hours we've spent in Marrakech have proven the advice I'd heard from several people: Casablanca is okay, but Marrakech! Marrakech is amaaaaazing.

Liz rallied through jet lag, arriving on a red-eye in the morning and going straight to the train station for the three-and-a-half hour ride to Marrakech. I had purchased our tickets and learned the tram system the day before, and we made the train with zero problems. In Marrakech, we were booked at a riad, a guest house converted from a traditional home. Riads, there are thousands to choose from, but most evoke traditional architecture, homestyle hospitality and a peaceful escape from the city that swirls outside the riad's walls.

But being nestled deep in a neighborhood of tightly wound and high-walled streets, most riads offer to meet guests in the city and escort them in, and Liz and I were expecting our to meet host at the train station. Sadly, our host was expecting to meet us at the airport, and so we stood for a few minutes in the modern, earth-toned Marrakech train station unsure what to do.

Enter Jamal.

As we were figuring out how to call the riad (I swear, using phones internationally drains me of all travel confidence) Jamal offered to help us place the call on his cell phone. He works for a tour agency and had a few minutes while he was waiting.

The phone line was busy, but Jamal finished the task that had brought him to the train station and offered to help us catch a bus to the medina. He was going that way to meet up with friends, and our stop was one beyond his. As we waited for the bus he told us that actually he would go with us to our stop and help us find the right direction to walk in. I had perfect change to pay for our three bus tickets, and he laughed off the offer. "You are kind!" he smiled. "And because you are kind I will walk with you the whole way to find your riad."

The bus was slow to show up, and Jamal had friends to meet so he suggested a taxi instead, and then paid for the taxi against our protestations. We walked into the medina, following Jamal and peppering him with questions about his work (he arranges tours to Mecca) and his family (his mother is still living, his father has died) and the languages he knows (he lived in Japan for 10 years and taught Arabic there.)

Fast forward an hour, and Jamal had personally guided us to our riad, stopping at least eight times to ask directions of local shopkeepers as we wound through the maze of earthen walls and vendors selling shoes, souvenirs and tiny live turtles. I asked if we were making him late, and he assured us, no problem, and we kept walking briskly through the vendors and locals and tourists.

Jamal works in tourism, and has traveled extensively himself, and it was natural for him to want to help us, he said. People have helped him countless times. The situation unfolded from his kindness and taking the next logical step, but by the end his generosity was remarkable. At every stop, his smile and warm exchange with a shopkeeper offering directions was delightful and genuine. When we arrived at the riad and learned the driver was waiting at the airport, I could easily imagine a person in Jamal's position being irritated, at least. You made made a mistake that inconvenienced your guests, and I went out of my way to correct it for you.

That's one way you might look at it.

But as our riad host explained the logistics mishap, Jamal laughed and smiled understandingly. It's a mistake anyone could make! Aren't we all fortunate that ended it well? And it was lovely to meet you! The sun is setting over the old town and I'm going to meet my friends for tea. Would you like to meet us? Cafe du France, on the terrace overlooking the market. Peace be with you.

Me, Jamal and Liz, moments after finding the front door of our riad.

Casablanca, The City Not The Movie

Not that interesting, spend time in other places.

This is generally the advice I got when I told people who've visited Morocco that I was going to Casablanca. But my free (awards mileage) plane ticket landed here after 30 hours of travel and two red-eye flights, and I checked into a hotel to sleep off the road weariness.

Hassan II Mosque. I spent a disproportionate amount of my two days in Casablanca here.

My friend Liz would be arriving in Casablanca two days later, so staying in town made sense, even if that town did not get glowing recommendations. But Casa did provide me with a few key experiences: I resolved some practical questions and got a small immersion into city life in a Euro-centric Moroccan city.

Checked off the to-do list:

1. Buy local SIM card and get smartphone online with data and local phone number.

2. Learn taxi system. (Grand Taxis vs Petit Taxis vs random reliable guy with car. I used the latter to get from the airport to downtown, and Mustafa could not have been nicer, and also didn't overcharge me.)

3. Learn public transportation system, take the light rail tram around town.

4. Find the train station and buy train tickets for the next day to Marrakech.

Shay na na, te de la menthe, mint tea. Oui oui!

I was feeling accomplished about these tasks, and treated myself to my first cup of sugary mint tea. 

From here, I still had all afternoon and I went walking. First to an arts and crafts museum, then through the medina to the Hassan II Mosque. Said to be the third largest mosque in the world, it's built on the edge of the ocean and commands a starkly beautiful open square. From the mosque, I could see a small lighthouse on a spit of land just down the coast, and headed there despite the slightly unwalkable road. The view of the mosque from the rocks was worth it, and the people walking among the striated exposed bedrock in the waves reminded me of the tidepools I'd seen in Santa Barbara just a couple weeks ago on the edge of different ocean.

Hassan II Mosque, seen from El Hank, Casablanca.

Rocks and tidepools below Phare El Hank, Casablanca.

Sunset behind Hassan II, seen from the seawall north of the mosque.

I walked back to the mosque and north from there on the seawall, ending at sunset in the neighborhood that's home to Rick's Cafe, of Hollywood movie fame. The entrance to Rick's is guarded by valets, with a lot of white people lined up between velvet ropes waiting to get in. I was curious enough to stop, and not nearly curious enough to join them. (I haven't even seen Casablanca, to be honest.)

The highlight of the day, and I'm told of the city, was the mosque by far. The curved and straight lines of the sand-colored building and the bright blues and greens of the tile work were transfixing.

Hassan II Mosque

Detail of tile exterior.

Hassan II Mosque

Hassan II Mosque

Hassan II Mosque

Prayer hall, said to hold 25,000 worshippers.

Hassan II Mosque

Prayer hall, detail.

Hassan II Mosque

Detail of ceiling, prayer hall.

Hassan II Mosque

Bath house, for ablutions before prayer.

As I looked at my photos later that day,  realization dawned that I had been in Morocco only one day, and already I was dozens deep in close-up photos of tile and architectural details. And apparently, I still hadn't even seen the "real" Morocco, yet.