Zimbabwe Trip 4 - Part I

Wednesday - May 24, 2006

Today it was quite cloudy which made it cooler than usual. I bet it didn't even reach 60 degrees. So for me, it was pretty nice weather. For everyone else around here, they are bundled up in sweaters and winter coats!

Talked with Casey about the futility of this assignment I'm on. She pretty much agreed, but said we'd need to present it to Balcha who has dreams of reports that cannot be made without way too much effort. You really would need a forensic account to work for about 2-3 months to make sense out of all this. So I'm just adapting what Casey started and will recommend we continue to work with that. Woo-hoo. Can I go home now? :)

I talked with Debra about the idea that racism is inherent at CDC. Apparently, while my division does well at not being racist and judging people on their credentials, other parts of CDC are not quite so open. Apparently, Debra is always questioned by people about how she's qualified for the jobs she has held. As if the fact that she made it through the hiring process to hold a job doesn't speak for itself! And in GAP, they apparently won't allow blacks to go to assignments in India or Asia on the grounds that the locals in those areas don't like black people. Well, that's news to me. It would be news to Anne Renee too, who has been working in India for YEARS as a black woman. They seem to only want black people to work in Africa, and those assignments tend to be the most difficult. The India and Asia assignments tend to be nicer, so the GAP powers want to save them for themselves. I've never heard anything so outrageous. Unless you have proof that blacks are not welcome, send them! I know WHO has rules about nationality in who can fill a job, but that's WHO. I would require a nation itself to tell me that if we send a black person to them, they will refuse to work with them. Even then, I'd be tempted to pull out of that country unless I was forced to stay from above. When Debra got here, she was questioned about her qualifications even though her CV had already been vetted and accepted. This is a subtle kind of racism that people should get rid of. It never occurred to me that people would do that, but I suppose that was naive.

I had a really good meat lasagne today for lunch from that Kenge place which has fabulous takeout. For dinner, it was a greek salad. I went to the internet cafe for an hour too to do some email. A friend of mine was frustrated about the fallout over the whole Cathy Cox thing, worried that we Dems were going to tear ourselves apart at the very time we need to be concentrating on beating the opposition which is Sonny Perdue and the Republicans. I agreed to an extent, but this issue is one of trust. If Cathy lied to us about her support, how can we trust any of the any other things she says about topics of importance from the elderly, Medicaid, education, etc? So it's a matter of conscience and principle. Hopefully it won't engender ill will in the Democratic community.

Otherwise, it was a quiet day. I finally got my room cool by having the windows open, although water leaked in the bathroom from the floor above me around 10:30pm. I didn't call the front desk because I didn't want them rushing up to keep me up when I was trying to go to sleep. We'll see if it happens again tomorrow night.

Tomorrow promises to be a quiet day too, as it's a national holiday in Zimbabwe. It's Africa Day, celebrating the founding of the African Union in 1963 and the idea of a United States of Africa (no joke) where a socialist workers (read communist) paradise will finally economically punish the West for its sins (this according to the state owned media here). Should be fun with everything closed except WHO.