International Anti-Corruption Conference in Bangkok!

The first thing I was told about my new job was that I had to prepare for a trip to Bangkok to participate in the 4th UNDP Global Community of Practice for Anti-Corruption and the 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference. I of course found this to be super exciting as I have never set my foot in Asia before (and for other reasons as well of course, such as meeting with leading experts in anti-corruption)!

After having struggled with my boss to find a suitable budgetline for the trip, my ticket was finally issued while I was on my way to the airport! Speaking of cutting it close! However, from there it was all smoother than slik travelling businessclass directly from Joburg to Bangkok!

The first two days was meeting with the other UNDP regional offices (globally all UNDP country offices are organized under regional offices - two offices for Asia&Pacific in Bangkok and Fiji, one office for Eastern Europe&CIS in Bratislava, one office in Latin/Meso America in Panama City, Western/Central Africa in Dakar, Senegal and Southern/Eastern Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa) and their anti-corruption people. This was very useful as their regions are far ahead of Africa and there is much to draw upon of what they've already accomplished. That said, it was relatively clear that UNDP has not done a whole lot in anti-corruption, this might also be a problem of how to measure and prove that what we do actually yields results.

Then the BIG day - the opening of the 14th International Anti-corruption Conference. Only BIG people can open such BIG events, thus the Prime Minister of Thailand was there to 'do the signal' - placing his hand on a screen and Star Trek music sounded across the room while discolights lit up the room! Seriously?! Yes, it was a circus with no sensitivity to the issue we were really there to discuss - anti-corruption! As if this was not enough, a few hours later the Princess of Thailand also came unannounced to open the conference for a second time! Whenever in the presence of her honourable majesty the Princess, certain rules apply; 1. Men should have at least one jacket button buttoned 2. Women present should cross their legs when seated! Failing to do so, could result in severe punishment! At least being thrown out of the room. A red carpet was rolled out for her excellency and half the room were filled with her security people! This pretty much summarises the first day!!



The 14th International Anti-Corruption Conference in Bangkok - here the opening remarks of the Chairperson for Transparency International Huguette Labelle

The second day was a bit more substantive, thank god! Although most people seemed to be there merely to meet up and chat about their latest achievements and studies! The night entertainment was also disproprtionately lavish! Why waste all this money on a show when many anti-corruption programmes are actually underfunded? Seems I was among the few to ask this question....



The evening entertainment - here the different cultures of Thailand on display - with drinks, food trees and flowers all around!



Luckily, while at such a conference you also get to see things outside the conference. I'm sure you could be within the conference boundaries the full week and not see any of Bangkok, but this was not my wish!

I arrived a few days earlier than the conferences to explore and see some of the city and had booked a backpacker place called Suk11. It was a perfect spot with green palms around the entrance and long wooden walkways with small temples on each floor. After a small nap I headed out to the Chatuchak weekend Market - supposedly the biggest market in Thailand! Endless stalls of everything from plastic stuff, thai silk fabrics and scarves, electronics, exotic animals, etcetc 



More Chatuchak..





Chatuchak Market's endless stalls



I met up with Elise, which was incredibly nice! She stays in Bangkok as a UN Volunteer, but her heart very much belongs in South Africa! We hung out at Chatuchak, catching up and doing some shopping in between! I love all the streetfood and the safety! You can walk wherever whenever pretty much! There are soo many people out in the streets and it just feels like being alive again! This is something I really miss in Joburg!

Another Norwegian JPO based in Bangkok, Edin, invited us out for dinner close to his place. The place was very nice although only thai menus which proved to be interesting! We ordered drinks first and, wow did we get drinks!! Fluorescent drinks in muggs!! And yes, they tasted as fake as they look! At first we thought they might be alcolhol free, but after a while we felt something, whether it was sugar high or alcohol is difficult to tell really. It might have had something to do with only getting half the food we ordered and being extremely hungry. We ended up leaving to eat more elsewhere.



Blue drinks in mugs! Johannes is excited, Elise not so much...

A street most falangs (white people) who has been to Bangkok, at least backpackers, come across is Khao San Rd  - it's backpacker's meccha, a whole block of only backpacker places and clubs! For other people than the backpackers themselves this street is really closer to hell than heaven! Raving drunk tourist youngsters and clubs pumping out different beats makes a walk down this street a nigghtmare for the senses. But there is still something about this street that attracts me - and we did manage to find a decent place to hang out with only Thais inside, hardly saw any out in the street so this quite surprised me..

Khao San Rd - backpacker heaven or hell?

 I mentioned all the good streetfood, what I did not mention is all the rest - the picture below shows fried scorpios, maggots and cockroaches - bon appetite!

Which do you prefer - scorpios, maggots or perhaps a big fat cockroach?

All ads for Bangkok have a Tuk-Tuk in them, and no wonder, they're everywhere! Oh so wonderful because you get the wind in your face while driving down the road, but oh soo horrible during rush hour when you are in the fumes from all the cars around you with nowhere to escape. No wonder most Tuk-Tuk drivers are wearing face masks!!


Tuk-Tuk-Tuk




Me while still excited about Tuk-Tuks



















Bangkok's formal name is actually: Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit, gasping for breath yet? If you ask a taxi driver about Bangkok's Thai name they will sing it to you, probably a song they learned in kinderkarten and I mean who would be able to remember it otherwise? I asked all the taxi drivers I met (that understood what I wanted) to sing it for me, a nice song while stuck in trafick...

For my birthday I had decided I wanted to go for canal sightseeing on the longtail boats. Much of the older parts of Bangkok are full of small canals..and driving through them you suddenly feel you are in a different place all together and not the big metropole Bangkok - the houses have nice canalside gardens or ports although not all the houses are good quality - and certain parts would definitely be characterized as outright slum.

Our boat driver was supposed to stop for a floating market, but he must have been the grumpiest man in Thai history, he drove like a maniac, straight past the market. However, he did stop at a Orchid Farm at a place that really felt like in the middle of nowhere.


..but you can touch some?

We managed to convince him to stop at a temple on the way back - Wat Arun - but as soon as we got off the boat he drove off without any good byes, excuses or giving us alternative transport options back to where we started off.. But good thing this temple proved to be a great experience.


Wat Arun

7th November is Buddha Day, don't ask me what this entails.. what I know is that the Royal Palace was closed and that the Wat Arun was full of chanting munks facing the oh so great golden Buddha, it was quite the atmosphere in there...


The monks chanting while facing the great Golden Buddha on Buddha Day

Bangkok seems to have this grey haze covering the city most days, mostly due to the ever crazy trafick.

The view from my four star luxury hotel - overlooking the trafick jams and hazed Bangkok.

I was told that a good place to experience some modern Thai culture was to bring my training gear and go to one of the parks around 6 pm. I got Elise to take me to Lumphini Park for a Thai-Aerobics-in-the-Park-work-out! And it was great! Thai ballads and techno/dance pumping in the park with a small Thai man on a small podium and me and Elise trying to keep up with the crazy quick Thais, it must have been quite the sight for the locals - I was also a bit worried that the people behind me couldn't see the instructor past giant me.

Giant me trying to keep up with the aerobics-fit Thais.



 In one of the breaks during teh conference, I went to the Art Centre in Bangkok. A rather big disappointment, but this statue commemorating the start of WWII, who disproprtionately affected the women, (almost) made up for it all, WTF!

  

The second last day of the conference we went to the rooftop of this skyskraper for a sun downer, and wow, what a place! It was really like being at the top of the world with a full view of Bangkok, and probably the stiffest prices in town!! Anyhow, from there one place led to the other until we were sitting by the side of the road on a street bar, everywhere else around closed long time ago. It was here at this street side bar at 5 am that I was convinced to come to Chiang Mai the day after with two very charming girls, Mari - a Norwegian JPO in Cambodia and her friend Jessica from the US. I booked the ticket as I got back to the hotel. Waking up the next morning, I suddenly remembered what had happened a few hours earlier... But the ticket was bought and off we went to Chiang Mai, in Northern Thailand, almost on the border with Burma. This same day we got the news that Aung San Suu Kyi had been released from her house arrest in Burma, so what better place to celebrate than Chiang Mai? Well, maybe inside Burma, but we felt this was pretty close. 

Chaing Mai proved to be a cute and relaxed country town... slower pace and much cleaner than Bangkok!

Beautiful lanterns at the gate to the old city in Chiang Mai

Even what?

 Chiang Mai is full of temples,and we saw some of them. What struck me the most with the whole visit was this Monk (pic below). He did not visibly blink or breath while we were watching him, and this was at least 20 min... He was almost in nirvana, probably the next life already! What a peaceful look on his face!

Monk soon to be in Nirvana

 We had heard rumours of excellent vegetarian food in one of the monasteries, and went for lunch in a restaurant just behind the temple in the pic below. I've never had such flavours in my life! Tastiest vegetarian food I've ever had, and mind you, I'm no vegetarian.

Me in front of Burmese style Temple

These were the crazy Chiang Mai accomplices

Street seller proudly showing a picture of the King and his wife from their youth. Very disappointed when I didn't buy...

A children's dance show in the Night bazaar - how cute is cute?

Putting all bad omens and good wishes into the lantern that we sent into the sky...

The next morning was again off, back to Bangkok to start the long travel back to Africa and Jozi...

 

More pictures from Thailand in a picasa album will be posted soon. This is only a taste of what is to come...

The challenge of working with Anti-corruption in Africa

People ask me, - so what are you doing here? and I answer -well, I'm working with anti-corruption in Eastern and Southern Africa! The person's eyes then goes kind of blank and from his/her expression I gather their thoughts must go in the direction of -is this a mad woman? or -what an impossible task! But instead they merely ask - so how long are you planning to stay for? Would seem I need a lifetime to really achieve anything in this field, and yet I only have a year or two..

Cartoon on how many workshops don't necessarily lead to action...

Cartoon showing the magnitude of the problem.. and how eventually one gets too familiar with it..

 I have a very fancy title - Programme Analyst of Democratic Governance and Anti-corruption. Haven't really figured out what exatctly it entails yet.. but I'm in the Governance Team and together we are 9, although only me and one other working only on anti-corruption - my supervisor Job Ogonda from Kenya. I'm the only whitie in the team, the others are from Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Lesotho and Uganda.

The office is the Regional Service Centre for Eastern and Southern Africa, meaning that we support  and provide policy advice and technical backstopping on various areas (ie democractic governance, poverty reduction, HIV/AIDS, etc) to the country offices in our region - totalling 22 country offices; Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Southern Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mauritius&Seychelles, Comoros Islands and South Africa.  There is one other regional centre in Africa based in Dakar, Senegal for support to West and Central Africa.

The entrance of the UN building in Joburg - for security reasons without any UN flags or signs

I have just been thrown into things and my second week in the office I attended a training for government officials from all over Africa on how to review the UN Convention against Corruption adopted by most African governments. Interesting how they need trainers from Europe to come down to teach 'us' (I'm already putting myself with the Africans, hehe) the technicalities while most of the discussions were actually different african interpretations of the provisions in the convention, leaving the facilitators utterly speechless and confused!

The government officials in big suits and the pale tall me in the back

Last week was a regional Community of Practice meeting on Governance and Anti-corruption in Nairobi, Kenya. It was the first of its kind organised by the regional office, so it required a lot of improvisation, especially from my side! There were at least 80 participants and I could never know when I would be called upon to summarize discussions and present for everyone. It was a good way of meeting all my colleagues scattered across the continent and listen to their challenges and realities in their respective countries. Especially touching was the situation in Southern Sudan where they are preparing for the referndumk to be held in January on whether to seceed or not. Everyone is already assuming they will vote in favour, but there is a lot of politicking with the north as much of the oil is in a border area where the borders are still highly disputed.. it is expected that President Bashir will not recognize the current borders and there are still no conflict resolution mechanism to ensure stability after the referendum.. There are many challenges of voter education as well as there are hardly any paved roads in Southern Sudan, logistics is a major problem. What will happen to Southern Sudan after independence is another question all together - imagine a working bureaucracy without computers, without pens, without skills (or mostly military skills that is..)?

There will be more to come...

Jozie! My new home

Have been meaning to write for a long time, but there has been no mercy at work so have spent my time and energy so far to try to keep up...

So I arrived (already!) three weeks ago - greeted by (a very tired) Martine! We went straight to her place in Pretoria and chilled with her friends. The day after we headed for the big city to be my home for some time, Jo'burg, and my new residence for the next months..



Johannesburg skyline

 I was anxious to find out how it looked, how the area was and get settled in. We found the place relatively easy, located the door with 504 on it and everything - it seemed things were going smoothly. But as we tried to unlock the bars infront of my door the key just didn't seem to fit.. we struggled and tried to wriggle the key in, but to no avail. We were on the verge of giving up and decided to call my landlord, Olav Andre in Norway, he was puzzled by the fact that we couldn't get the door opened. He had never experienced any difficulty, and told us to keep trying.. We kept going for a while longer, my spirits falling by the second, when he called us back to inquire whether we had seen the second door!! Aha, a second door! The key slid in and turned as smoothly as a knife in butter, finally inside!

The flat is nice and spateous -


Bedroom - here with all my mess...

  

Living room

My very 70s kitchen

Additionally, I have no less than three 'bathrooms' - one for the toilet, one for the shower and one for the bathtub! The best of all, my bathtub is PINK!!Not to forget the nice balcony with a nice view of Jacaranda trees in bloom!

The view from my balcony - an ocean of purple!



Flowersflowersflowers - makes me so happy!



The Jacaranda trees as just blooming now as the spring is setting and the rainy season has begun. There are so many avenues lined with Jacaranda trees that now look completely purple, it's amazingly beautiful and it y makes me very happy!



Jacaranda lined street

 The rainy season means hot and dry during the day and thunderstorms and heavy rains in the afternoon and night. The thunderstorms here are amazing - the lightning bolts across the sky and divides itself into many smaller ones..it just lights up the sky!

Some interesting trivia about Jo'burg:
- it is actually the largest man made forest in the world, the indigenous trees are mostly shrubs since this is highveld (highlands but completely flat), so ALL other trees are planted, and there are many trees here!
- it is a HUGE city, covering more area than Greater London - about 1700 km2, divided by mine dumps, highways,railway tracks and MONEY!
- there are such opposities in this city - from the richest few kilometres in Sandton City to the poorest of the poor in the informal settlements scattered around the city and the townships who still have not enjoyed the upgrading from government.
- Jo'burg was established first as a mining camp with the discovery of gold in the 1880s, and eventually it grew out of proportions attracting many settlers!
- the city centre was reserved for whites up untill the end of apartheid, blacks had to stay in designated areas outside the city. These living patterns still persist with one quite considerable exception - the city centre is now completely 'black' and very few dare now venture into the old Joburg city centre (CBD). There is one are called Newtown that has now been 'cleared' and is considered safe, but otherwise you tend to avoid the CBD area.

My area, Killarney, is a nice and mixed area. My flat has a 70s feel to it, but many of the blocks nearby date as far back as the 50s with much of its architecture - both outside and inside still intact! A few blocks down is the Jo'burg Zoo, on my morning jogs I pass by the zebra and antilope area and can spot them through the fence! Good motivation for jogging! It's also relatively safe to walk to the grocery store while light, something I know to appreciate! I have a mixed group of neighbours - my immediate neighbours are Congolese and invite me over for dinner and chats! The Indian neighbour downstairs has also knocked on my door a few times, but he was more interested in certain favours.. bastard!

Christina Court, Killarney

Getting around requires a car, and I'm renting one while waiting for the processing of my work permit, without which I cannot register a car! I'm fearing it might take a while so trying not to stress with the car ourchase yet.. Everything in due time, that is the African mantra! I bought a GPS on my first day and me and the lady voice in it have become well aqcuainted already - impossible to find anything without her! Although we do sometimes behave like an old couple hanging out too much together as I tend to get rather frustrated at her sometimes! Is that a sign that I'm starting to get looney?? So far I haven't really gotten around to seeing a lot of the city - mostly back and forth home-work. And I still feel very disoriented as everywhere looks the same, and there are few landmarks.

Will write more on job related issues in a separate post! This is all for now...