An outsider’s guide to the annulment of the 2019 Malawi Elections and all the politics since

The president of Malawi really likes power. It is not at all clear he actually won the 2019 election, but it is very clear he isn’t becoming an ex-president without a fight. The latest elections were annulled by the Constitutional Court in February, but that is just one battle in a prolonged war. It’s a pretty damming indictment of our press that, even before Corona, no one knew this was happening, so here is the story of that war.

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In 2019 Malawi held elections that were widely seen as unfair. The Human Rights Defenders Coalition, a local NGO and perhaps the only organisation in this story with an accurate name, started organising mass protests that sometimes turned violent.

Resetting politics back to 2014

In February the Constitutional Court ruled that voting irregularities were sufficiently widespread the “the integrity of the result was severely compromised”. The annulled it and called for fresh elections within 150 days (The eminently quotable head of the Malawi Electoral Commission, Jane Ansah, said the ruling was a mistake because “Tipex was used to correct votes, not to change them”).  The court also suggested firing the Malawi Electoral Committee, or MEC, and clarified that the winner needs “50 per cent plus one” of the vote. Even with the help of tipex the president, Peter Mutharika, head of Democratic Progressive Party, only managed 38.6% of the vote, with the rest split between the other candidates.

Although Mutharika had been re-elected in 2019, the vice-presidency had changed hands. In the previous 2014 election the Democratic Progressive’s Party and the smaller United Transformation Party, which had split from it, fought the elections as a coalition. That has since broken down. The freedom of assembly laws the Human Rights Defenders have benefited from are UTM legislation and UTM have entered an uneasy coalition with the other political parties to become the DPP’s biggest rival. It is fair to say Peter is a bit hacked off to be back working with deputy president and UTM leader Saulos Chilima.

Fighting in Malawi’s Courts

The Malawi Electoral Committee, or MEC, and the president have been annoying the court with appeals ever since the original decision. MEC claim they can’t register voters in time. The courts told them to make it happen. MEC argue they don’t have capacity to implement the 50% plus one rule and any new elections need to be fought under the old rules. The Constitutional Court repeated it had clarified the existing rules as set out in the constitution, and it hadn’t changed anything. (The opposition have done MEC a solid and formed a coalition, so someone should win with at least 51% of the vote). MEC argue new elections will be expensive. As that is not a legal argument the court are unswayed so MEC have engaged very expensive South African lawyers. This went down really badly. The Nation, the paper we get delivered to the office, had an op-ed asking why they couldn’t engage local lawyers and quoted a politics professor accused the finance minister of lying when he denied all knowledge of the payments to the firm. It turns out no local lawyer was prepared to represent the president and MEC, but people still think the finance minister lies.

The Nation reports that various people have said MEC is incompetent. Ansah says “are people mad? Do they know what incompetent means?”

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Fighting in Malawi’s National Assembly

Peter doesn’t want to go anywhere but unfortunately for him the National Assembly has the ability to write legislation. Even worse, the DPP only hold 50 seats of 193. As a result the National Assembly have drawn up and passed a bill calling for new elections. It just needs presidential approval.

Fighting in public

The Human Rights Defenders have been keeping the pressure on. Then three of them were arrested. There is some controversy over the timing of this, did the police act just before or just after the president threatened the leaders by name? Journalists, commentators and interviewees filled the papers the next day pointing out that none of the police officers accused of gang rape have been arrested yet HRDC leaders are immediately behind bars on trumped up charges. When I lived in Syria no national news outlet would print something like that, and after three days the Malawi courts freed the HRDC on bail. I try not to annoy people by saying I think things could be a lot worse (I think Malawi is doing much better than the US did with the impeachment).

Then Mutharika announced he wasn’t signing the bill mandating new elections and fired his entire cabinet. He’s since reformed it without the deputy president. He clearly likes sacking people, because he fired the head of the army a few days later. However in the same way the House of Commons can force the Lords to acquiesce to legislation the Malawi National Assembly can push bills through and they certainly seem determined to do so, so there’s a new bill on Mutharika’s desk.

The HRDC have declared tomorrow a day of rage, but due to Corona that is manifesting as a strike not a mass protest. In fact Corona may be just what Mutharika was hoping would turn up when he stalled for time; gatherings of more than 100 people are banned. The MEC seem to have acquiesced to new elections on July 2^nd, if it is safe to hold them, and there is at least one more appeal due to be heard before then.

It seems like there is going to be lots more politics still to happen.

Who are the parties?

• United Transformation Party – The kingmakers. Apparently they stand for maintaining cultural norms, but with freedom of speech.  
• Democratic Progressive Party – A colleague said the DPP stand for the family. I assumed she meant family values, but she meant the Mutharika family. Before Peter was president Malawi had his brother Bingu, who died in office. Apparently there is a third brother waiting his turn. Peter has said he doesn’t like the North, the North doesn’t like him
• Malawi Congress Party – The party of the 30 year Hastings Banda dictatorship, they’re for the good old days (possibly minus beatings administered by the youth wing), subsidised chemical fertilizer, and infrastructure
• PP – The party that won the first, 1994 multi-party elections, a misallocation of funds scandal has tarnished their rep.   
• Umodzi party – my colleague says they’re a nonentity and as I’m not a real journalist I’m leaving it at that.

(If you like reading my thoughts about the government’s of my temporary homes collapsing Iceland and Canada both lost their governments shortly after I arrived too)

Usisya Part Two – Legitimately Uplifting

I don’t know if our impromptu stop at the Usingini Watershed Management Project was designed to cheer us up after our encounter with the brutal outcomes of village life, but it definitely did.  The community are understandably fed up with seasonal streams undermining the road, washing away soil and then flooding crops as they join the river in the valley. The project involves Temwa’s agro-forestry experience, the villagers’ in-depth local knowledge and volunteer labour, and the odd expert when necessary. They’re now doing all the things that re-wilders claim beavers do better to slow seasonal streams and improve irrigation.

Sometimes people get excited in meetings and decide on quite ambitious plans, but then everyone hopes their neighbours will do the actual work. In this case it has gone the other way; the community is ahead of schedule. They’ve acquired some banana suckers to demarcate a buffer zone they’re taking out of cultivation on the banks of the main river. If you lop off the branch of a type of local tree and stick it in the ground it puts roots down within a fortnight. Annoyingly you can’t make charcoal out of it, but the staves are just beginning to green in the buffer zone. Our boss was clapping his hands and shouting with excitement to see the project going so well.

Hills near Usingini with newly planted vetiver grass slowing run off by the road

We also stopped in a village where the primary school and teachers house were destroyed by the rains some years ago (no one in Malawi is a climate change denialist). The teacher’s walk-in is challenging in mud and trees are more effective sun shades than umbrellas, so now school is seasonal. However the locals saw a project in Usisya. Rhe community donated labour and materials to stretch a grant for latrines at the secondary school so it also covered constructing a hostel for girls from far-flung villages. They thought that if the people in Usisya could build a hostel they could build a school. So they borrowed the building plans, adapted them, found some funding and are now about a third of the way through construction. Our CEO thinks that it has been going too smoothly and that there is trouble ahead for them, but it was great seeing a project having such an unexpected impact. We were much more upbeat as our legendary driver, Mr Moyo, slowly worked the car down a series of hairpins towards a patch of dark we were assured was Usisya.        

Usisya itself is beautiful, relaxing on the flat land between the lake and the mountains. The next day I enjoyed meeting my colleagues based in the village, seeing the projects I’d heard so much about and collecting comms content. However, unlike me Malawi loves a really, really long meeting (although looking like you’re paying attention seems to be optional). After several hours watching people talk in Tumbuka, the woman from head office and I were delighted to skive off from the maize distribution and meetings about reading camps to talk to the local head master and play with kids. Instead of actual balls the children have plastic bags bound into a rough sphere. Rather than playing actual football they take turns trying to get the ‘ball’ past a goalie, shooting from wherever the ball had ricocheted to. One of the boys was seriously good.   

Sasasa Waterfall – great destination for a walk, terrible village water supply

I think that with four more people than seats it would have always taken two trips to get us all back to Mzuzu, even if two of us hadn’t been Brits who bleat on about duties of care and seat-belts and things. But it was really kind of Mr Moyo to collect the two of us and our CEO on Sunday so we could spend the weekend at the Usisya Eco-Lodge, walking, swimming and using the complementary snorkelling gear.  

When we’re at Usisya we stay in a Temwa guesthouse. After smelling it from two houses over I understood why ‘able to live in very basic conditions,’ was top of the list in the person spec. The woman’s bedroom had the right number of beds and mosquito nets, but it didn’t have enough ways to attach the nets to the ceiling, so I shared my double with a colleague. We got into bed, untied the net, and unwittingly let down so much mouse and cockroach shit onto us that we needed to have another shower and change the sheets. I’m pretty sure the eco-lodge would have always seemed idyllic – Dani, the owner, has a real eye for design and pays close attention to every detail – but as it was the contrast was almost impossible to believe.

View from the loo

Dani’s place, Temwa and the government are the only employers in the area. It was interesting chatting to Dani about training people who not only have never worked as a waiter, but also haven’t ever eaten at a restaurant. Her latest hire is very sweet and eager to check you’ve slept well, but only a couple of weeks into his new career, and with just one other guest to practice on, he was getting all embarrassed at the point in the conversation where you’d expect to be offered the breakfast menu. With a staff of seven and three of the cooks she’s trained sending remittances back from South African Thai restaurants, Dani has a big impact on the village and I admire her courage starting a business in such a remote place.     

Usisya Part One – The Sad Half

Malawi’s vibrant greenery and the thriving maize plots in Mzuzu gardens are deceptive. It is hunger season. Maize is the country’s main carbohydrate and harvest is still a couple of months away. Last year’s rains were poor. People’s supplies are running out.

Worse still, in parts of the country this year’s rains have been too strong – climate change is hitting Malawi hard. They’ve washed crops away, as well as causing floods, landslides and bridge collapses. In the north, where I am, we’re hoping the rains will ease off a bit; they could still destroy this year’s crop.

In a country where most people are subsistence farmers finding the money to buy food is a challenge. In lots of the villages the businesses people have to supplement their farming are seasonal; at this time of year people only spend money on maize, with school fees as a luxury item. Hunger season puts Malawi’s forests under pressure as people turn to selling charcoal in the cities. The steep, narrow hills are far more beautiful when they’re forested, and without trees the soils are soon washed away. The forests encourage rainfall, so people are forced to undermine their long term food security to eat now.

For all your earthly and heavenly needs

Temwa does a lot of food security and income diversification work – most of the people we work with eat at least twice a day now – and we don’t usually distribute food. However anti retro viral medication controls HIV less effectively in undernourished people, increasing the risk of transmission (along with illness and death). All of this is a long way of saying that less than 36 hours after I arrived (but having sent some content back to the UK) the team decamped to our project base in Usisya to give maize flour to people living with HIV.

Usisya has an unpaved road in, meaning it is rather better connected than some of ‘our’ villages, accessible only by foot or by boat. However depending on the state of the road the journey lasts between two and nine hours and it’s been known to eat 4x4s. Our journey would have been at the two hours end of the scale, but we kept stopping to chat to people who live a long it. It was all very jolly, the scenery is amazing, and I was delighted when a monkey lolloped across the road and into a tree.

A delivery for a project, a few weeks before our journey

Then one of the people we talked to said a pregnant woman had died recently. She’d developed complications and called for an ambulance. It was raining, the road was more mud than dirt and the ambulance couldn’t make it up one of the hills. It was forced to turn round, and by the time the road had dried out enough for a vehicle to make it through the woman was dead. We were much more subdued for the rest of the journey.

(Pt II is much more cheerful) 

 

Mzuzu

Malawi has made a great first impression, although it is obvious people are poor. Everyone I’ve met has been genuinely lovely, although short enough to make you wonder about childhood malnutrition. Everyone is shorter than me, apparently I’ve ‘got American height.’

I love dilapidated modernist buildings that aren’t as functional as the architect hoped, so I was a fan right from the ATM-free airport. We had to wash our hands in 95% chlorine and fill in a form asking if we’d been to China recently, but otherwise no one seemed that bothered about whether we met the requirements to receive a visa.

The charity, Temwa, sent Blessings the taxi driver to meet me and a college from Bristol who is out for a few weeks. Equipped with Malawian SIM cards, phone credit and, of course, his taxi, Blessings was chosen as he is a safe driver and unrelated to the staff team.  The CEO’s brother and the husband of a woman in the finance department drive taxis but rather touchingly it was felt sending one of them to get us would be verging on corruption.

I thought Malawi looked surprisingly like northern Cuba, although with significantly more coffin shops. We passed through Jenda, where Blessings explained the border with Zambia runs right through the houses. He has visited all of Malawi’s next-door-neighbours and was interested to see the ways they’re similar to Malawi and the things they do differently. He says it is clear that they’re all more developed, but that what he loves best about Malawi is that the people are peaceful. He says that the people disagree with each other, but when it is clear that they can’t win the looser just gives up rather than making a fight. We also passed Kasungu, my brother’s local town when he spent summers coaching football in Malawi.

After about seven hours, thick fog, a giant pothole even Blessings couldn’t save us from, and a lorry that had lost two wheels and spun across the road almost blocking it, we arrived in Mzuzu. We were met at our guesthouse-cum-office by Peter, a Londoner who spends chunks of his retirement helping Temwa Malawi with whatever it is finance departments do. He’d cooked for us and stocked the fridge with ‘greens’ – Carlsberg beer, earning our eternal gratitude in the process.

Although Peter only had one full day left before flying home he took us out for lunch and dinner and showed us some local necessities. Our CEO nominated himself to take us past all the bars ‘so people would see us with him and know to react appropriately to us.’ This crash course introduction to Mzuzu was particularly welcome as after only two nights in our new beds we were off to our project office in remote Usisya. None the less Mzuzu feels surprisingly like home for a town I’ve barely seen.

Icelandic trees and elections

Autumn is pretty much over, which is a shame because it was nice while it lasted. When I’m working out of the Breðholt office my commute takes me through Elliðárdalur Park, home of Reykjavik’s salmon river, complete with waterfalls, and lots of feral bunnies with attendant carrot wielding Icelandic children. I’ve enjoyed watching the poplar trees go from mainly green to pretty much bare over my time here.

It’s not Waterloo Bridge, but it has it’s charms

Both Man Bun and his boss, who I’m told was a TV journalist my parents would be excited by if they were Icelandic, have told me that whether poplars in particular and afforestation in general are good or not is THE the generational divide. They told me this separately, and must be 30 years apart in age. Man Bun is too reasonable to really lay into the tree haters, but TV journo left me unsure of his commitment to impartiality. Apparently poplars grow too tall & destroy the lines of the landscape, obscure the view, precipitate neighbours’ disputes, and are non-native anyway.

It’s illegal to cut down trees older than 30 years old, making forestry a rare area where youth are overcoming the status quo. The city planting is mainly rowan, which I love, but I’m either underestimating how passionate people are about poplars or Man Bun & TV Journo are in denial about Iceland’s biggest social cleavage; the election is on Saturday.

The government fell when it emerged the Prime Minister and head of The Independence Party, which has governed off but mainly on since Iceland split from Denmark, had tried to cover up the fact his father had written a letter to ‘restore the honour’ of an unrepentant convicted paedophile. Bright Futures left the ruling right-wing coalition, and new elections were called a year and a day after the previous ones. These had been held because the Panama Papers’ revelations about the then PM collapsed the old coalition, headed by the other right-wing party, the so-called Progressive Party.

The current prime minister was implicated in both the Ashley Madison scandal and the Panama Papers. Everyone I know hates him, but his campaign video of him making a cake is the most liked in Icelandic political history. The old PM is also back with a new party, complete with acidic new logo, and is polling very respectably despite the circles I role in finding people liking him incomprehensible.

If you google ‘horse vector’ this little pony is the first thing that comes up. 

The volunteers for the project I launched on Wednesday are optimistic the Left-Greens will finally overtake the Independence Party, who drop their share of the vote at every election, as the largest party. The office is doubtful, and don’t think they are left enough or green enough anyway. One of the volunteers, who comes across as completely reasonable and not in any way a conspiracy nut job, said it doesn’t matter if the Independence Party fails to get a single vote, all the judges and police chiefs are party members.

The Establishment certainly manages to protect its own when it comes to sex crimes, this is not the first controversial ‘restoration of honour’ for powerful men convicted of rape and pedophilia. Meanwhile an Icelandic newspaper has been banned from publishing on the current PM’s financial dealings in the run up to the collapse by the Reykjavik District Commissioner. This is controversial as the election will have happened by the time the courts examine the injunction, and the Commissioner is a member of the same party as the PM.

The flip side of Iceland’s low professional standards is how can-do almost everyone is, and how easy it is to get involved in things. My other boss H is standing for Bright Futures, the guy who shares our Breðholt office is on the list for the Pirates, someone who volunteers on our refugee hikes represented first the Social Democrats and then Bright Future in the Alþing before deciding he’d done his time, and pretty much everyone seems to have run for president. Working at an NGO does self-select for an interest in current affairs, but people are personally invested to a greater degree than at home.  

Everyone in my office has suddenly started working more effectively to create more time to sit around chatting politics. Man Bun & The Pirate in particular have been absolute babes about doing it in English, I think partly out of gratitude for the amount of what is more properly their work that I’m doing. It all pretty cosy when we rock up, which is nice as we arrive just as the sun rises, the park is now icy and its dark again at six thirty so you really need to enjoy the not quite winter days. 

Stalking

When I brought a ten trip pass to Reykjavik’s climbing wall I was surprised when the guy on the desk asked if I knew my kennitala, the Icelandic equivalent of a national insurance number, had been processed.

The kennitala is the first thing we enter into our database when we are adding a new volunteer. This is connected to the national registry, saving me the tedious task of entering their name and address but blowing my mind.

I tried processing someone with bad handwriting and, no matter what numbers I used, I kept on getting a ‘kennitala doesnt exist error’ message with no way to proceed.

I asked my boss Þ, who I will now refer to as Man Bun, what to do. He said it was no biggy, he’d find the actual kennitala through his internet banking. He logged in and discovered the are are three people with the same name as this woman in Iceland, but you also get a handy link to their house on Google Street View and only one of them lived in Greater Reykjavik, so it was easy to work out which one it was. Man Bun said she had a nice house, but I was too busy looking at him like he was the representative of a freakishly freaky society of freaks to really notice.

It was very obvious that he didn’t think using online banking to find the names, addresses and national insurance numbers of compleat strangers was odd, but I asked anyway. He said he had maybe taken a small risk and explained a record is kept of people who look up a kennitala, so if any money or anything goes missing the police know where to look. I asked about stalking, he said they have a law against that now. I asked about other sex crimes, he pointed out the majority are committed by people the victim knows. I asked about identity theft, he conceded that this is probably easier if you can find out everything about someone through your banking, but it didnt seem to be an issue. We looked at each other in a way that said ‘what’s your problem,’ we got back to work. 

Once you’ve found someone’s kennitala you can do all sorts of enjoyable things, like find how much tax they pay or how (not if, if you’re both Icelandic) you are related. Unwilling to let anyone  miss out on the fun, midwives issue your kennitala the day you’re born. The first six digits are your date of birth. Man Bun tried to find out how midwives come up with the next four numbers. I gather everyone thought he should focus on the birth of his second child, but he thinks the midwives are issued random number generators.

Despite Icelandic post people being able to look at your house through the banking app of their choice they won’t drop your letters off unless your name is on your door. I don’t know why they won’t take someone living in a building on trust, but they won’t. We didn’t realise this till after the post office had tried and failed to deliver our kennitalas, so it’s been pretty convenient that people have been able to fish them out of their banking so we can buy swimming passes and things.

Man Bun did say that all though he is completely fine with all this emotionally, intellectually he can see it is strange if you aren’t used to it. None the less he is as interested in my surprise as I am by his acceptance. He claims that one-third of Icelanders’ willingness to hand over their DNA to deCODE’s project synthesising the nation and cross referencing it to genealogical records is unrelated to their blasé attitude to privacy and is instead all about the t-shirt you get as a thank you. I don’t belive him, and got him on the defensive when he admitted vague privacy concerns had stopped him contributing his own genome. He rallied, and said it was only inertia and his inability to focus that stopped him overcoming his his worries about privacy. Of course deCODE’s research is really the best advert for a laid back approach to privacy around, I just dont share it.   

Mayonnaise in the Mid-Atlantic

The first processed food available in Iceland was Gunnar’s mayonnaise, first produced in 1960. As recipes in Icelandic cookbooks said you could make mayo with clean paraffin if you were out of cooking oil I feel confident saying it was a vast improvement despite having yet to try the stuff, and Iceland went wild for it. My boss says it was in everything, and that mayonnaise cake was particularly popular at confirmations. I gather mayonnaise cake is a giant club sandwich, filled with mayo & salad, covered in mayo ‘icing’ which then has piped mayo decorations on top.

I’d describe myself as wildly pro mayonnaise, but this is too much. I think my face betrayed my feelings, because my boss pointed out he wasn’t even born until 1989.

Gunnar, apparently, thought it would be nice to have some international recognition, and decided to break the world record for biggest mayonnaise jar. He commissioned a giant tub, but was very surprised to get a letter from the Guinness Book of World Records, saying that it didn’t count unless he actually put mayonnaise in it. Gunnar thought this was extremely wasteful, and that being big in Iceland was enough after all.

Apparently the mayo jar that could have been the biggest in the world is on a roundabout in Hafnarfjörður, my boss’s home town. I’m considerably more impressed than he is.

Libya with love

As we walked across Martyr’s Square the first time, as we looked for a hotel, I said something about how Libya had better be the epitome of kickass to justify the hassle we’d had to get here. Gerard said I was just making it easy for me to be disappointed. He was wrong. Libya is worth everything we put into getting here: the money, the week queuing outside the Libyan consulate in Alex, the flights up and down the Med, the lot.

 

Tripoli is an easy city to like, with its sea front and proper commercial ships overlooked by the coastal that forms the corner of the tumble down old city. It cleverly manages to combine feeling safer than Tunis with a bit of revolutionary excitement. Everything that could possibly have been painted with the red, black and green of the new flag has been, and there was a small protest in the square when we arrived. By the time we’d dumped our bags it had shrunk, but had some information signs that we checked out. The demonstrators explained they objected to a clause in the current draft of what will one day be a constitution allowing anyone who’d defected by the 20th of March, the day after Gaddafi attacked Benghazi, to hold office. They were all really friendly, interesting and pleased to see us. Unlike the people we talked to in Egypt and Tunisia they, like everyone else in Tripoli, all said the revolution had changed everything and were confident that things would improve dramatically in the coming years. Which is not to say; people aren’t concerned about the future. Everyone says Gaddafi neglected education, and worry about what that will do to the country. People say the Youth have no respect, and a Sufi mystic said the Salafis are bigots with too much power and confidence and not enough knowledge of Islam. But everyone is confident that whatever happens, it’ll be better than Gaddafi. The city feels like its celebrating, and has got out its biros to cross his (gormless) face of the one dinar note, and scratched Jamhariya, his name for Libya’s government, off the car licence plates. The odd burst of celebratory gun fire, fireworks and, worst of all, the sticks that go bang which kids throw all over the place has almost given me post traumatic stress, and I wasn’t there during the war, but Tripoli seems happy. No one, not even the people with touristy shops in the old city, tries to sell us anything. If the national museum wasn’t still dismantling the galleries about Gaddafi and cataloguing what went missing during the war the city would be practically perfect.

Tunisia – not smelling of Jasmin

There is nothing like being proved right about something to make you like it. In Tunis, Sousse, Kairoun and Sfax the cities provided a backdrop to our disscussions about how they felt like like they were waiting for something. Consequently when on Friday our louage, as Tunisia calls the serveece, was stopped by a neat line of rocks across the road outside Metlouie we were not surprised at all. Protesters milling around, stopping traffic into the mining town in Gafsa governorate seemed to explain the atmosphere, rather than confusing us.

Tunisians are pretty keen to chat, and none of the people we talked to thought the revolution had changed anything. In Egypt we met people who were inspired by the revolution and others who were disillusioned with it, people who were determined to create a country worthy of its martyrs and people who thought the revolutionaries had already lost. In Tunisia only a group of students Gerard met thought anything had even started to change. The students from Sidi Bouzid, where the revolution started, who invited us to stay with them, were completely uninterested in politics.

We talked about all this as we waited on the road for a couple of hours, watching the police watch the townsfolk watch us before our driver decided to take us over a desert track. My boyfriend checked the news for us and read it to us over the phone. Like much of the south Gasfa province had been on strike the day before.

Tunisians have told us a lot (blue repels mosquitoes, the yellow doors in Tunis are on houses that belonged to money loving Jews) and we might now be able to explain the weird atmosphere in Tunisia, but we will never understand Tunisians obsession with complicated change manoeuvres. They have way more small denomination coins than Egypt, but instead of handing them over they will go to any lengths (while reckoning in thousands of milliems, in French) to work out a way of giving one a note. If you buy something for, say, eight dinar they’d definitely prefer to take 22 and give you a ten dinar note than accept a ten and give you two as change. Nor will we ever understand why they go to bed so early – we arrived in Tripoli, Libya on Wednesday and, since leaving the airport, have loved everything.

 

Drunk and Disturbing Me

We’re still in Tunisia, and I don’t really know what I think about it. Tunisians and I need to work really hard to understand each other’s Arabic, and they can’t believe it wouldn’t just be easier to talk French. The Tunisian old cities are similar enough to Damascus to remind me how much I miss Sham. It’s worse than being homesick because the Damascus I miss has been shot to shit, the people I shared it with scattered and scarred by the war. My relationship with Sham is in its Sinead O’Connor phase; obviously it’s over but Nothing Compares To You, Damascus. Our break up is still too recent for me to want to be impartial; I just wanna be in pre-war Syria.

So clearly I’m not fair to Tunisia. It’s probably amazing really. I’m swinging from loving the rolling hills of Cap Bon, backed the improbably blue Med and the medina’s narrow alleys, with doors and windows picked out in blues as unlikely as the sea, and thinking about Syria. But I don’t think it’s only that my second country has dumped me. Too many Tunisians just seem unloved, uncared for. So far only one person to come up to us after dark hasn’t reeked of beer. My Syrian friends drank, some of them allot, often cheep vodka outside, but it seems Tunisia’s public drunkenness is of a different breed. My friends enjoyed getting pissed. Simple as that. Both Syria and Egypt had an underclass for whom survival was a struggle, but somehow they didn’t seem as desolate as their Tunisian counterparts. I can’t think of a Syrian equivalent of the man who showed me and Gerard round a mosque today and smelt of alcohol, madness and neglect. Despite living on the edge of a refugee camp in an Iraqi suburb I saw one person in Syria combine hopelessness and booze. After two years it is literally shocking to see the pairing again. I discussed it with Gerard a, who made thinking noises. The boys not being as surprised as me (although they were pretty surprised by the toothless beggar who tried to kiss me at 10am) makes me wonder about Britain.

We’re in Kairoun at the moment which claims to be the fourth holiest place in the Islamic world. They’re wrong, Damascus’ Umayyad mosque is, but it’s still a relaxed, residential old city. I like it, particularly the well that’s linked to one in Mecca. A bunch of guys with a banging sound system have taken over the piazza between our hotel and the walls of the old city. They’re playing a catchy song about Jihad, draped everything with posters about spreading the revolution and are busy fund raising for Gaza. They’re having a great time. Tunisia is as changeable as my feelings.