Traveling through Africa with Border Jumpers

A very cool blog contacted me last week. It's called Border Jumpers and it's pretty much what it says on the tin. Bernard Pollack and Danielle Nierenberg are on a mission to visit nearly every country in Africa, writing about their experiences with a special focus on community groups, NGOs, and local people. Sounds a bit like the Africa Heartbeat project I've covered here before.

They started in Addis Ababa last year and so far have made it to an impressive list of nations. They've talked with conservationist farmers in Ghana and written about using traditional crops to fight climate change in Zimbabwe. These are just two of the dozens of projects they've covered.

As I discovered on my recent trip through Ethiopia and Somaliland, Africa thrusts beauty and poverty at you simultaneously. Just look at the above photo, courtesy of Border Jumpers, of a palm oil processing center. It's little more than a bunch of grotty drums and a lot of hot steam in an already hot climate. Yet the woman standing in front radiates grace, beauty, and pride.

Border Jumpers, Africa Heartbeat, and I are headed the same direction with our writing. We're experienced travelers who have learned that the world is not the big, scary place TV tells us it is. It's big alright, but filled with intelligent, kind people doing all sorts of interesting things. The single most important thing a travel writer can do is communicate that simple truth to as many people as possible. So check out those sites for some uplifting reading, and some facts about Africa the mainstream media don't bother to cover.

Facebook Culture

As I said in my last post, I've joined Facebook. It's an interesting little world. I've already hooked up with a lot of my old Tucson crowd, now spread over several states and a couple of countries. I've even had a few of my blog readers request to be my friends! So it's fun.

One thing I've noticed though is that it's all very frivolous. "Well yeah," you say, "It's a social networking site, what did you expect?" OK, I expected it to be a bit light, but I didn't expect people to be spending real money to send their friends virtual balloons and birthday cakes. I mean come on.

But is it really so frivolous? In her excellent book Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, anthropologist Kate Fox says that all this social networking, texting, and twittering is important for its very frivolity. It replaces the day-to-day casual interaction our species got from millennia living in villages or wandering in tribes. Now we live in sprawling suburbs or impersonal cities, and we don't get the friendly "Hello, looks like we're in for rain" that we exchanged with the farmer two fields over, or the semi-concerned "Is your mother over her lumbago?" from the second-cousin-twice-removed at the village well.

Apparantly we need that, and it only took a generation without it before modern civilization found a way to replace it.

But I'm still not paying good money for virtual puppies.