World Safety Day 2008

I saw it coming about 6 weeks in advance - the client instructed us that we would participate in this cheese bag UN-sponsored harmonic convergence. It was sold as an opportunity to raise world-wide awareness about worker safety to address the 2 million work-related fatalities each year. (Our project is not immune - 2 deaths so far, both Koreans.)

What I saw coming was that the planning was going to languish until the last minute, and then there would be a mad rush to schlep together a program. I also premonitioned that I would draw the short straw to do the slave work as event organizer.

And that is, in fact, what happened.

The math worked out like this: YLNG and Yemgas ponied up a $100K budget for booths, poster competitions, t-shirts, rescue demonstrations, fire drills, interactive educational software, exhibits, awards ceremonies (several of the EOs from Total and from Technip came from Paris to hand out prizes), and - this part actually didn't suck - live music as a capper at the end of the day. We moved about 70% of the 9,000 workers through the training and recreation centers in five waves of 1,500 at a time. There were 6 jillion details including road closures, bottled water, shuttle busses, security, translations of educational material, development of the drill scenarios, hiring and logistics for the live music. We had to build a stage and run a power line to it in order to get around using a noisey generator, and mobilize cranes to redirect the high mast lighting from the soccer fields to the concert area.

Amazingly, it all came off like competitent people were in control. The best part, of course, was the music, which started after the 7 pm prayers and went on until about 11 pm. The dancers were OK; I'm not much on all guy dancers, but the locals got a kick out of it. It was telling to see the grounds the morning after: thousands of pink strings - very recognizable: they are the binders used for packaging Qat. The show came off suprisingly well; the ex-pats enjoyed it (almost) as much as the Yemenis.

Strange Day in Mukulla

I traveled to Mukulla on Thursday to deal with a recalcitrant contractor. The owner, Abdullah, is clueless. The contract that we have with him is to transport mixed waste to his facility, sort it into recyclable and non-recyclable components, and then haul the non-recyclable part to a legit final resting place. (hint: "legit" does not include the nearest hole in the ground in the desert)

Clueless.

Instead of hauling this guk to a landfill, Abdullah has, instead, accumulated 3 months worth of it at his hell-like facility on the east side of Mukulla, and I am in the skittish position of wanting to revoke his contract, but not wanting to do it before he follows through on the sort-and-dispose routine. In fact, I don't want him to get a sniff that that is my intention, otherwise he will abandon many many tonnes of crap in his fenced place in the desert, said crap strobing with identification with a certain largest construction project in Yemen.

So I spent the day visiting landfills with Abdullah, explaining to him that this is the most important part of our contractual relationship, not hiring armed guards to greet me with abundant fanfare whenever I visit his facility.

OK. All that background info was just to set the stage for the strangeness of the place I wandered into during the afternoon.

We drove to the Mukulla municipal landfill, if you can call it that. Otherworldly is my name for it. I'll skip the elaboration: in a word - strange. We extracted the necessary information from the resident (literally) landfill workers (tipping fees, etc) in order for me to map out a solution to the Abdullah issue. Then, as we were leaving the landfill, my assistant pointed out a very crowded market place, which, he explained, we needed to inspect. So we parked and went in.

Turns out, it was a Qat market. On a Thrusday late morning at 11 AM it was a mob scene - hundreds of people milling around in an open air market sprawling with vendor booths selling nothing but Qat.

For the uninitiated (and for the record, I am uninitiated) Qat is a natural narcotic similar to cocaine. It is EXTREMELY popular in northeastern Africa and the Saudi peninsula. It is so pervasively used by Yemenis that the workers at the Balhaf project cannot comprehend the prohibition against using it. Backhoe operators at the Balhaf project, who have been told a million times not to chew it while at work, are dumbfounded when they are ordered to be removed from their jobs by Ex-Pat managers. The president of Yemen chews it while in conference with members of his cabinet.

I think it would be an interesting study to compare Qat with some of the other well-known drugs in terms of effects on motor control, addictiveness, long term health effects, etc. These things I know: it gobbles up a lot of the Balhaf employees income and there is no remorse - on payday, these guys make a beeline to the Qat dealers. I have read reports that its most incidious effect is that much of the arable land in Yemen (hint: there ain't much) has been converted to Qat crops. This, in spite of increasing rioting because of inflating food prices.

Pretty strange. Anyway, here is an insightful article from Yemen Times. The last couple of paragraphs touch on the Qat issue http://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=1152&p=view&a=1

Also, here are some photos of the Qat market and landfill.



My assistant, Hussein, squeezing the tomatos, so to speak. My guard, not guarding me. My contractor, Abdullah, in black.







Hundreds of people buying and selling Qat. The market area is huge.






Beggar woman working the parking lot outside the Qat market. I haven't seen any men beggars, but there are many women beggars, mostly at places where discretionary spending is occurring, like a Qat market. This is the first woman that I have seen wearing any color. Every other woman I have seen wears uniformly undistinguished black robes







Mukulla Municipal Landfill

Visit to Maifa

Sheik Bahnjah and William of Arabia

Most times when I have work outside the compound, it is in the direction of Al Mukullah, towards Oman to the east. Today I visited a small village named Maifa, about 100 miles to the west in the direction of Aden. The mission: a contract interview with Sheik Abdullah Ahmed Bahnjah, tribal elder and businessman. That’s what his business card says: tribal elder and businessman. Actually it says: auk geek hawlyk. Just kidding. Couldn’t resist.

While I am digressing, I’ll mention that there are no correct spellings of Arab words or names. Al Mukullah is variously spelled Mukalla, Mukulla, or Mukalluh. The Koran can also be spelled Quran or Qoran. The actual spelling is: squiggle with upstroke, two dots, backwards c with curly cue, vertical dash with hat. And you read it from right to left. When you ask a Yemeni to spell his name he looks at you like you’re kidding.

Anyway, I and an entourage of clients (ie, Total, Inc.) and soldiers, visited the village of Maifa to wheel and deal with Sheik Bahnjah. I was the lead negotiator, and I had translators straining to hear my every word, which I can get used to. And soldiers following behind me at all times. I don't think I will ever get used to that.

Abdullah’s qualifications in business lean more to the client relations side; I guess he leaves the technical details to others, who apparently had comittments elsewhere. By tradition, Sheik Bahnjah exrcises absolute control over contracts in his part of Shabwah. There really is no competition. It is not unusual for a tribe to set up a roadblock and stop competitors’ trucks going to and from the YLNG project. So, Abdullah had limited patience with my insistence on visiting his place of business, which was an open patch of desert surrounded by a cinder block wall. I recited a list of prepared questions, which he laughed at. Stuff like, what do you plan to do with 20,000 liters of waste oil per month? He assured me that he would deal with it, and all his sycophants nodded in agreement. I was really looking for something more like it will be accumulated in a bunded storage tank pending transfer to a blended fuels program in Dubai. But I could tell that Abdullah was more interested in showing us his farm, so I relented. Good move.

The best I can figure, Maifa is positioned over a huge sand lens that is underlain by impervious volcanic rock. The rock is an inclined plane and it drains water like an underground river through the sand lens from the mountains many miles to the north, where it actually rains occasionally, to the lower desert elevation, where it doesn’t.

Abdullah owns a vast spread of land in the valley where he runs a profitable farm raising bananas and papayas to sell in the markets in Mukullah and Aden. The village that he lords over, and provides for, is perched on the hillside nearby, but we drove instead to a small hill next to an irrigated crop of banana trees, where a tent had been set up and cushions spread around with ornamented pillows, just like in the movies. It was totally comfortable and inviting, and I took off my shoes and moved in. While the servants attended to grilling the goat and lamb over the open fire, I sipped on sweetened tea and watched the banana leaves do the herky jerk in the light midday breeze, the first green I had seen in 30 days.

We ended up spending most of the afternoon feasting, joking and loafing. Very little business was discussed. Abdullah was gracious and in good humor. He wished us the peace of Allah if he won the contract, and the peace of Allah if he didn’t. Everyone laughed and nodded in agreement.

What I did on my spring vacation

I attended my 21st South by Southwest music festival in Austin. This has become a reflex – I don’t even think about it, I just go. It is one of two favorite weekends of the year. The other being the Harvest Moon Regatta: 250 sports yachts beat themselves up for 2-3 days racing offshore from Galveston to Corpus Christi, and then cap it with a day or two of intensive bragging and (ideally) victory celebrations on sandy Padre Island.

SXSW is as good, but different. The annual music event has grown to superlative proportions; it may be the largest music festival in the world for all I know. Some years ago it expanded to include a 3-day interactive conference and trade show, and there is also a SXSW film festival rolled into the mix. I understand from people who care about such things that the interactive and the film festivals are well regarded in their respective industries, and you hear about this or that movie star who was seen shooting tequila shots at the Driskill Bar, etc. But for me, the music is the draw of SXSW.

Actually, the music is one of the draws. Strategically slotted in the middle of March, the festival waits for 50,000 UT students to leave town on spring break to free up space for the out-of-towners who jam the nightclubs and concert venues in and around downtown Austin. The weekend coincides with the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. So here’s the drill: music and partying at night; catch the games during the day; repeat three times. It’s a heady cocktail: the NCAA players and the SXSW musicians all know that this is their 15 minutes of fame. For someone who enjoys live music (check) and basketball (check) it’s heaven.

St. Patrick’s Day also falls in there, which ratchets the party up still more.

1700 bands played over the four nights of SXSW 2008, up from 1300 the year before, and for the first time, I sensed an emphasis on quantity over quality. There was less of the cohesiveness and inclusiveness that has always been one of the charms of SXSW. It was as if the band count was a metric that the promoters were shooting for in order to earn some kind of a favorable consideration – similar to the way a newspaper’s circulation drives its advertising rates. That part didn’t bother me. The folks at the Austin Chronicle who created SXSW, for whom I have tremendous respect, have made no secret that the festival is intended as an industry event, with a collateral benefit to the casual wristbander who just wants to drink beer and listen to music. The downside of the SXSW super sizing is that the overall quality of the music has taken a hit. Everyone knows that SXSW is a matter of trial and error. Listen and walk on, listen and walk, until you stumble upon a gem that you’ve never heard of – like that reggae band from Monterrey at Sholtz’s, the Swedish pop trio last year, Norah Jones eight years ago. Seems like this year’s gem-to-walk ratio was low. Maybe I’m getting old.

Technology continues to make inroads, with lots of bands using sampling, sequencing and pre-recorded tracks to enhance their sound. There are pros and cons to this: the music is often better for it, but the performance isn’t. I am curious whether the SXSW band selection committee makes any attempt to determine how much of the demo CD they base their decision on will be performed live at the gig in Austin. This year I heard a lot of quartets with only 2 or 3 people on stage. Part of it may be economics. The only compensation for playing SXSW are wristbands for the band members and a $100 stipend. Recorded bass lines and drum parts must be a powerful temptation for an undiscovered techno pop band from Iceland. But for the random listener who has never heard of the Four Thors, there is a fine line between techno art and karaoke.

The other area where technology enters in is real time MIDI performance. This is where one or more performers push previously created sounds through a variety of computer effects, all to the repeating beat of digitally perfect, but un-live drum and bass. A semi-nauseating example of this was the 11 o’clock band on Japanese night: three guys grooving out behind stacks of Sony (of course) equipment, each of them continuously adjusting knobs and slide switches without eliciting any noticeable effect on the sound. All of this was layered over the only listenable component: canned drums and bass.

But there was plenty of good stuff. The gem for me was Brooklyn – a rock band from Paris playing their first show in the US. Their songs were three minute bursts of pop harmonies with interesting, short guitar hooks. It is definitely music you would play in your car. A beautiful girl playing bass doesn’t hurt. They were the midnight show on Friday at Maggie’s Upper Deck, which turned out to be one of the good venues this year. I saw British Sea Power there the following night.