Part of getting to know a new place is seeing lots of things that don’t make a lot of sense. A brief selection of things I don’t get, in no particular order:

• In a vacant lot, a boy, probably about ten years old, sat authoritatively on a the wall that ran the length of one side of the compound. In front of him were about five rows of younger boys, sitting cross legged, attentive, watching and listening to this other boy only slightly older than them.
• When you get a beer here, they put a napkin, or if a napkin is not available then a tissue, on top of the cap. It’s opened in front of you, with the napkin on the cap. So far, it just seems like this results is soggy tissue all over the neck of the beer bottle. It seems that people use this soggy tissue to wipe off the top of the newly opened bottle, but I am not convinced of the effectiveness of any part of this method in making your drink less likely to contain things it shouldn’t.
• The supermarket here has more American products than I could imagine in Africa. For example, Oreo Cookies, Crystal Light, Smuckers Jam, etc. All the preservatives and processed food I never wanted!

I get a lot of emails asking for advice on getting started as a journalist in Africa and how I got where I am now.

Thanks to a ten hour flight from JFK to Accra, I finally wrote it all out. In this document, you’ll find information about how I got where I am now, and bits on interning, wire work, freelancing, blogging, and other random ideas: on being ten feet tall and other thoughts about starting out as a journalist in Africa

I’m keeping fine-o.

In about twenty-four hours, a car will pick me up from 106th and Columbus in New York City, and whisk my partner and me to the airport. Ten hours after we depart from JFK, we’ll emerge in Accra, Ghana. We’ll wait there for a few hours and then hop a Kenya Airways flight to Robertson Airfield, just an hour’s drive from Monrovia, Liberia.

I estimate that travel time from door to door will be about twenty-four hours, which means in forty-eight hours from this moment right now, I will be in Liberia. Given that door-to-door from California to East Africa, a trip I’ve made about half a dozen times, is at least thirty-six hours if not forty-eight, I think I’m getting off easy.

A driver named Sando will pick us up at the airport. I’ve heard Sando’s name from about four different people who have given me information and contacts in Liberia. I feel like I already know him.

When we arrive in Monrovia, Sando will take us to stay at John’s house, whose colleague I met at a conference in Uganda this summer. On Thursday evening, my partner and I already have dinner plans with a friend who lived in Uganda about a year ago, then working for Global Youth Partnership for Africa, now working for Liberia’s Ministry of Gender.

The first time I flew to Africa, I went to Kigali. The trip took about forty-eight hours. I went to visit my brother Grant, who was then working with the Rwandan Ministry of Health. Grant just started blogging at Mo’dernity, Mo’problems, and he’s already got some great posts up – African music, goats, and why Somali rappers are way more hard core than anyone from the Bronx.

I’m excited because with the exception of a brief rafting on the Nile trip, Grant and I haven’t been in the same place in Africa since my first visit. But starting next week he’ll be doing an evaluation in upcountry Liberia, and I’ll be able to meet him at the airport this time around.

So basically, I’ll fly thousands of miles for tens of hours to see old friends and friends of friends and my brother, who should be grateful that I’m really resisting the urge to post funny pictures of him as child with big ears, and him as adult with big ears.

I feel so incredibly lucky to travel with my partner, have friends in far flung corners of the continent, and a relative who will arrive days later. It makes leaving a little less hard. It’s still hard – I’ll miss the convenience of the subway, friends on speed dial, fast internet, and plentiful cheese. I won’t miss the cold weather or cold people.

I’m itching to work again, and ready to use my brand spakin‘ new 50 mm camera lens, and start making content and exploring, learning, and understanding.

As sad as it is to leave, I’m ready. Jet plane, here I come.

Here’s hoping for a jet plane with more leg room and luggage room than this one. Image from Sudan-Congo border, April 2008.

This little girl was shy at first, but really liked the camera after a minute. She lives in a compound near Gulu town. Her mother is Lucy Auma, One Mango Tree’s head tailor.

Here are links to some photos and projects that keep me thinking and looking:

Andrea Bruce photographs a seven-year-old Kurdish girl’s circumcision. A truly disturbing and graphic set of photos that, in my opinion, is an answer to questions of cultural relativity.

A casual yet consistent photo blog of daily life in Tehran, by a former LA resident who takes photos with a phone – Life Goes On in Tehran.

South African photographer Pieter Hugo takes uncanny and surprising staged portraits of a group of Nigerian performers who travel with hyenas and baboons. The Hyena and Other Men is a set of photos that makes you stop in your tacks and wonder which leash you’re holding, or who is holding yours.

Jim Chuchu is a comerical photographer based in Nairobi who has done, among other things, the Vuka campaign for the new mobile phone company Zain. His blog shows a bit about how he processes his photos and highlights other interesting things he’s up to.

Internationally acclaimed Samuel Fosso lives in Central African Republic where he runs a passport photo shop and small studio, though his playful dressed up self-portraits have been shown in major museums and galleries. He’s feautred in a piece called African Spirtis in a photography magazine called Foam.

Obama cakes in Kenya! (Hat tip Chirs Blattman)

New York Times is starting a series called One in Eight Million, about the kind of unique personalites that could only result from cramming just that many people into just that small of a space. (I especially liked the Wedding Wardrober piece.)

A new magazine called PopAfricana has the tagline “The African Book of Global Style.” The cool publication lives up to the tagline, and the editor blogs and looks great even in bad light.

Buried in the business briefs of the New York Times is an announcement of a joint operation between Kenya and Uganda to rebuild the railroad that goes from the port in Mombasa to Kampala.

While this doesn’t seem like big news, it’s actually huge. It’s more expensive to ship a ton of wheat from Mombasa to Kampala than to ship it from Chicago to Mombasa. That means that everything in Uganda which is not produced locally, ie, everything but tomatoes, matooke, and Nice Pens, has to come from somewhere else. Since the country is landlocked and the roads are notoriously awful, this could be a huge boom in the economy. Cheaper imports can help the market grow, and a railroad could also mean cheaper exports to sell on an East African and international market.

The train tracks in Kampala, near the Mukwano roundabout, are now more of a market and thoroughfare than trade route. More of my pictures from this side of the tracks (or rather, on the tracks) are on the freshly re-designed site Demotix.

I often think that’s more written about gorillas in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda than about people. Gorillas in Their Midst is a great story because it’s about gorillas, which people love, but not just about gorillas. But people will read it because they love gorillas.

The story looks into how gorilla conservation and gorilla tourism affects people living near and among the gorillas. Journalist Alex Halperin, a friend of mine, spends time with both gorilla conservationists and the local population around Virunga National Park to get both sides of the story.

This observation gets to the heart of what bothers me about the gorilla thing:

The Shingiro clinic doesn’t have a doctor for the 30,000 people in its coverage area. By comparison, a team of veterinarians attended the sick gorilla.

Another good point, not really related to gorillas but more relevant to development:

Micro-entrepreneurship programs have proliferated around Africa, but the most ambitious examples, the ones trying to reach developed-world consumers, struggle with distribution. A group might teach widowed AIDS patients to stitch attractive, durable handbags, but where can they be sold? Tourist areas are already saturated with gift stalls. Big retailers such as Wal-Mart can’t be bothered to import the 500 (or 5,000) necklaces a collective might bead in a month. Selling through online auction giant eBay requires regular mail service and a decent Internet connection, neither of which are available in northern Rwanda. Even if there were vast unmet demand for African souvenirs, it would be cheaper to make them in China. Indeed, much of the “traditional” cloth found in Africa already comes from China.

Alex doesn’t necessarily take sides in the gorilla versus local debate, because that’s not what the article is really about, but about the economic interaction between the two groups.

This kind of perspective is key to conservation, tourism and development.

To me, blogging about working as a journalist in Africa is often as important (if less lucrative) than working as a journalist in Africa (which is also not lucrative). My blog is an outlet for the stories that don’t work in the mainstream media, photos that don’t make the wire, and thoughts about daily life that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day.

Based on how many other Africa journalists also blog, I’m guessing I’m not alone in this.

I’d like to make a sort of ongoing list of foreign correspondents in Africa who blog. Feel free to add to the list in the comments section and eventually I’ll put out a revised full list, complete with your suggestions.

In no particular order, they are:

In Nairobi, Nick Wadhams
In Kigali, Jina Moore
In Khartoum, Andrew Heavens
Also in Nairobi, Derek Kilner
All over the place, David Axe
In Zambia, Aaron Leaf
In Nigeria, Wil Conors
All over the place, G. Paschal Zachary
In Nairobi, and elsewhere, Shashank Bengali
In Nairobi and elsewhere, photojournalist Micah Albert
In Nairobi and elsewhere, Rob Crilly
In Nairobi and elsewhere, Steve Bloomfield
In Monrovia, Myles Estey
In Abidjan, Pauline
In Congo and elsewhere, photojournalist TJ Kirkpatrick
In Nairobi and elsewhere, photojournalist J Carrier
In Cairo, photojournalist and editor Ben Curtis
In Congo and elsewhere, unnamed author of African Heros

And also,
Formerly all over Africa and still writing about Africa, Alex Belida
Formerly in Kampala, now in Mexico City, Alexis Okeowo
JHR folks
Frontline folks