It was July 2006.
I was very excited to get the itinerary. But I have to say I was also a little shocked. I didn’t know Belinda that well, but I assumed she would, when possible, travel in style (this proved to be true) and at a leisurely pace (nothing could be farther from the truth). If I was going somewhere far, I liked to break up the initial travel. Not Belinda.
The first leg of our trip was two legs sewn together. We took the seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Toronto Pearson to London Heathrow. Then we had a few hours to kill at the airport before taking the eight-and-a-half-hour flight from Heathrow to Nairobi, Kenya.
Welcome to Africa. When I arrived, I was one discombobulated traveller.
Mike was, too. Meanwhile, getting off the plane, Belinda looked refreshed and rested, like she was emerging from a Four Seasons spa. Finding our way through customs and immigration, Mike and I were walking into walls, and she looked like she was walking a runway.
Initially there was little culture shock. Nairobi, being the capital, is a modern metropolis. It has a glittering skyline and is home to the stock exchange—and, I assume, the African corporate headquarters of a pile of Fortune 500 companies.
The hotel was quite lovely, although as anyone who has experienced extreme jet lag will tell you, nothing matters at that point. You just want a glass of water and bed.
At the time, the United Nations were championing a development model called the Millennium Villages Project. In a nutshell, this meant that an area of extreme poverty would not only receive aid in the traditional sense—for example, emergency food or shelter—they would also receive certain “inputs” that Sachs believed would lead to long-term sustainability.
Sachs’s argument was that a community experiencing extreme poverty doesn’t just need food, they need fertilizer, which will allow them to grow food. They also need a place to store this food. They need a truck as a means to get their food to market.
They do not just need an occasional fly-in visit from doctors from an aid organization; they need a small permanent clinic staffed by a nurse. They need bed nets to keep them healthy. They need to be healthy to work and have a decent quality of life.
These inputs, he argued, would lead to a sustainable future. He believed people needed not just aid but the ability to create an economy. To riff on the Chinese proverb, he wasn’t suggesting that the UN teach a man to fish, he was suggesting they give the man the means to fish.
Sounded good on paper, but Belinda wanted to see for herself. That was the entire purpose of the trip. So, the next day we were up early. Very early, so we could drive to a series of Millennium Villages already in operation and catch up with the Sachs team.
We were headed to an area called Sauri. It was a short drive outside of the capital—a scant six hours. Piece of cake. Not unlike waking up in Toronto at four in the morning and driving to Woodstock, New York, for a lunch meeting.
The Millennium Villages we visited were almost exactly as advertised. Each village had a small school and clinic; there were children playing; there was a well with clean water; there were—and this is the most important thing—fields of corn. Food was growing in fertilized ground, and surplus food was being stored and would later be brought to market.
The next week was a blur. There was no downtime. We covered a lot of territory. Five countries in under seven days.
It’s almost impossible to describe the highs and lows of this trip or the extremes that we experienced. I want to be very careful about judging anything we saw or experienced by “Western standards.” But I will report that upon checking into a small hotel in rural Ethiopia and being told, “There is no water tonight,” Belinda didn’t bat an eyelash. She slept on top of her bed, fully clothed, wrapped in her bed net. I had a suit bag, so I removed the contents, crawled inside and slept in there. Mike, out of chivalry, slept in Belinda’s room on the floor by the door.
When you roll with the likes of Belinda Stronach, you are rolling in the big time.
The next day, after a long drive into the North, the reason for the trip became evidently clear. It was there that I witnessed poverty like I had never seen before. Dr. Sachs took us to an area where the population had literally nothing. This is where he wanted the next Millennium Villages to be built.
There was a desperation here that I knew existed theoretically, but which I had no real concept of. Women would walk up to four hours every day to reach small amounts of water that they used for cooking. Along the way they would have to collect firewood. Food was incredibly scarce. What crops there were seemed to be failing. There were no schools and there were hardly any children. Many of the men seemed quite sick. There was nothing here but suffering.
Sachs again talked of inputs. He talked about the difference that nitrogen would bring to the soil. The difference a single deep well would bring to the community. And they needed bed nets, he declared. The most important input of all was bed nets. The reason there were so few children in this area was that so many of them had died from malaria in the previous two years. “When the children die, there is no point in carrying on. These people need nets.”
Not only did I feel helpless, but I felt intense shame at the contents of my briefcase: the little “in case” kit I had prepared for this week-long journey to the continent. I had more drugs and antibiotics in my bag than could be found for probably two hundred kilometres. If there was a nurse, if there was a clinic, I could have handed the drugs over. There was nothing.
I also had a thousand American dollars hidden in the wall of my backpack, “just in case.” Even if I wanted to, there was nobody to give money to. There was no economy here. A protein bar would carry more value than a fifty-dollar bill. These people were completely on their own in devastating circumstances. This is why Sachs was so passionate about the villages.
Northern Ethiopia has stayed with me. The idea that Millennium Villages could be established there was a grand vision, but an important one.
After witnessing the extreme poverty in northern Ethiopia, I realized the villages that Sachs initially showed us were, in fact, paradise. The schools, the clinic and those fields of corn weren’t rudimentary; they weren’t rustic. They were game changers. They were oxygen.
It was on the walk back to our SUV, with our bottled water and air conditioning, that Belinda said, “I guess when we get home, we’re going to have to find a way to buy a lot of bed nets.”
“What’s a bed net cost?” I remember asking.
She said, “Does it matter?”
The rest of the journey involved so many experiences that I have a hard time processing even now.
We toured the port of Djibouti. One of the busiest container ports in the world. Modern in some areas, but in others you saw hundreds of men loading and unloading ships by hand. Scurrying up and down ladders. The air was so dry and hot it felt like being in a blast furnace. It was hard to imagine standing in this heat for an hour, let alone performing hard physical labour.
Belinda was travelling as a private citizen with no security—save occasionally for Mike, asleep by the door—but the RCMP presumably knew where the cabinet minister was at all times. It was in Djibouti that we were contacted and told we shouldn’t spend the night there. The advice was to move on. We headed to Rwanda, where we stayed at the Hotel Rwanda, well known as the place where roughly a thousand foreign nationals and civilians holed up during the genocide. A movie of that name had been released not much earlier.
In popular culture it is often portrayed as a luxury hotel, and perhaps by Rwandan standards of the time it was. By Western standards it very much felt like a perfectly fine Holiday Inn you might find on the outskirts of Edmonton. It did have a small swimming pool. It wasn’t lost on us that, having just witnessed some of the most extreme poverty on earth, we were checking into a hotel and saying, “See you by the pool in twenty minutes.”
The world has seen many genocides, but the Rwandan genocide of 1994 is history’s most recent. Over a period of a hundred days, from April 7 to July 15, civil war reigned outside the walls of this hotel. The Hutu majority slaughtered the Tutsi minority indiscriminately and in the streets. Over five hundred thousand people were murdered. That many, or more, were left seriously wounded.
And here we were, just eleven years later, bobbing around in the pool that hotel guests had to drink from to stay alive while taking shelter from a horrific conflict.
It felt very recent because it was. To put it in context, at the peak of the Rwandan genocide, Seinfeld was the number one TV show in America and Céline Dion was at the top of the charts with The Colour of My Love. That seems like yesterday by today’s standards. On that day in the pool, it seemed like five minutes ago.
The next day, we toured the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which is not just a permanent exhibition that tells the story of the genocide, but is also the final resting place of a quarter of a million Tutsi people. The horrors are well illustrated by the display of thousands of preserved human skulls with machete wounds.
That’s a day trip that will never leave you.
The next day we travelled on to Uganda and saw more Millennium Villages. Smiling children, schools, the whole nine yards. To my eyes now, the villages were the greatest places on earth.
And, of course, we saw areas in desperate need of aid. In desperate need of Sachs’s vision. In the last country we visited, Uganda, we had perhaps the strangest experience of them all.
It was here, in the capital city of Kampala, that Dr. Sachs was scheduled to meet with President Yoweri Museveni. Museveni had discovered that a Canadian delegation that included a cabinet minister was travelling with Sachs and insisted we come along. He was extending his hospitality.
And so it was, on the last day of our trip to Africa, that Belinda, Mike and I found ourselves standing in the lobby of our hotel, waiting to be picked up by a presidential motorcade. If memory serves me correctly, we were to be picked up at 6 p.m. for a one-hour meeting, after which the three of us were going to find some food.
The motorcade didn’t show. But we waited. And waited some more. We didn’t even want to attend, and now it looked like we were being stood up. Or were we? It was impossible to tell.
I didn’t care. If it weren’t for Belinda, I would have gone back to my room or out for a stroll. I’m pretty sure she would have left as well, but she has a cooler head than I do, and she was a minister of the Crown. “Canadian TV dork skips meeting with Ugandan president” was hardly going to cause any diplomatic ripples, but with her, who knew.
When the motorcade did show up, three hours late, it was exactly as you might think. At the risk of sounding culturally insensitive, knowing what I did about Uganda and Museveni, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we were on our way to an over-the-top evening we would never forget or were soon to be never seen again.
The ride to the palace was surreal. I had never been in a motorcade before, and certainly not one screaming through the streets of Kampala. Is Scorsese directing this? I wondered.
We arrived at the palace and my first takeaway was gold. Lots of gold.
I find gold gaudy at the best of times. Seeing gratuitous gold in vast quantities just hours after seeing unspeakable poverty is very unsettling. I remember suggesting we steal a few candle holders and put them in Belinda’s purse. We could open a Millennium Village with that.
At the palace we were directed to a waiting room where Sachs and his group were also waiting. And together we waited. And waited some more.
At some point someone entered and explained that Museveni is very much “the late owl.”
And then the thirst kicked in. Actual thirst. But there was no water and no washrooms we could see. This had to be intentional. Under Museveni, Uganda received vast amounts of financial aid every year from the United Nations—and so, indirectly, from countries like Canada. He clearly wanted to show his gratitude by making Mr. United Nations and Ms. Canadian Government wait in a room for hours without water.
Finally, Belinda stood up and knocked on a door, and when a man answered, she said politely, “My colleagues and I are leaving. I have a meeting. We will need a car to take us back to the hotel, or we can walk.”
“Oh, but President Museveni would like to see you now!”
God, how I wish he had said something else.
We were directed to a lavish dining room and introduced to the man himself. I assume it was a dining room. There was nothing to dine on. I wasn’t expecting dinner, but at this point I would have killed for a box of raisins.
On this day, the dining hall was doubling as a lecture hall. Sachs and Museveni were supposed to discuss aid. Museveni had other plans. He wanted to lecture Sachs on a myriad of subjects, very few of which were relevant. Try as he might, Sachs could barely get a word in edgewise. Museveni held forth like Castro on coke.
The room was scorching hot. Other parts of the palace were air-conditioned. Museveni didn’t seem to mind. We, on the other hand, were fading fast. Mike looked unwell. About an hour into the lecture, I finally thought, This is insane. I stood up and walked out the door I came in. Not to leave, but to look for water. As I walked out, Museveni looked at me with what I would have to suggest was complete contempt. I sensed he did not like me.
Outside, I found “a guy” and asked for water. He brought me one glass. I walked it back in and laid it in front of Mike and took my seat. Again, there were daggers. I thought, Dude, I didn’t go outside and take a leak on your floor. I got my buddy some water. Relax.
The lecture continued. The upshot, as far as I could tell, was that he didn’t care about poverty very much at all. His favourite subjects seemed to be how great he was and what a genius he was. If you needed proof, look no farther than the gold hat he owns.
At this point, Museveni had been president of Uganda since 1986. I am sad to say that as of this writing, he is still president. Politics has been good to him. He is estimated to be worth over sixty million dollars, he has a legacy that includes the use of child soldiers, and he continues to champion legislation that would see gay men imprisoned for life for being, well, gay. Was he aware, I wonder, that he had in his dining room that night two big homos and a politician who had made same-sex marriage a cornerstone of her political career?
Also, to this day, he still doesn’t care about his people starving.
In hindsight I wish I had taken a leak on the floor. Would have been time better spent.
It’s unfortunate that our last evening in Africa was spent in his company. We had met so many wonderful people at the villages. So many great locals everywhere we went. To be in his company was a low point.
Somehow, we got up the next morning and started travelling, and again muscled straight on through to Toronto Pearson. When we landed, I don’t know if I was ever so tired and confused in my life. The last week had left me—left all of us—with a lot to digest and a lot to unpack.
And when we were saying goodbye to one another at the airport, Belinda said, “About those bed nets?”
I told her, “Remember when I said I would go on this trip? I said I would not come back from Africa having turned into one of those people who never stops talking about Africa.”
“Agreed,” said Belinda. “Think about it and give me a call.”
Four months later, this release went out:
MONTREAL, 9 November 2006—“1 Net. 10 Bucks. Save Lives. Spreadthenet.org.” It’s a mantra that Belinda Stronach and satirist Rick Mercer want everyone to understand, repeat and do something about over the next two years. The member of Parliament for Newmarket–Aurora joined one of Canada’s funniest comedians, Rick Mercer, and world-leading economist and global anti-poverty advocate Dr. Jeffrey Sachs to launch Spread the Net.
It’s an innovative partnership with UNICEF Canada with the goal of purchasing 500,000 insecticide-treated bed nets at the cost of $10 each over the next two years…
“The problems of disease and poverty in Africa can seem overwhelming,” said Rick Mercer. “Spread the Net brings it all down to a straightforward human level. Canadians don’t agree on much, but we can all support a war on mosquitoes…It’s the ultimate Canadian solution.”
And just like that, I was in. I became that guy.