Equatorial Guinea 2001
Malabo, Equatorial Guinea
July 2001
Bueno Dias from Equatorial Guinea!
Welcome to my first trip across the pond since early February. I’m doing time in Equatorial Guinea, as opposed to New Guinea or just Guinea. However, although very close, I am still north of the equator as I have always been; therefore I cannot confirm that water swirls in the opposite direction going down the drain, as it is supposed to do south of the equator. Equatorial Guinea is in West Africa and a former Spanish colony. The primary language is still Spanish, although Spain sold the former colony in a garage sale for $75 in the 1960’s. And, I mean Spain paid the $75 to get rid of it.
I have been eating lunch at the company’s staff house next to the office. They always have interesting conversations there over meals. Monday’s argument was whether there were only 4 or 6 cars on the island of Bioko when the first person around the table arrived in 1986. Bioko is about the size of New Jersey and the primary city is Malabo. Malabo is the capitol of Equatorial Guinea which includes some real estate on the continent. Back to lunch, 4 cars won. The primary food for natives on the island countryside is primates. The soil is extremely fertile here. Any plants will grow and any animals prosper here. Therefore, they eat monkeys.
The water and electricity are dangerous and sporadic here, respectively and interchangeably. When we arrived on Sunday, the phones weren’t working. I asked why. Or, at least attempted to ask in part Spanish and mostly English. When I finally made the desk clerk understand what I was asking, he looked at me with a puzzled look and said “It’s Sunday.” At least he didn’t say “you idiot!” It seems the phones rarely work on Sunday and, duh, everyone knows that! After narrowly missing a blackout while in the shower the first morning, I have learned to only go into the bathroom with the door open and the shade on the window open. Otherwise, I could end up in trouble in total darkness when the blackout occurs. Notice I did not say “if” a blackout occurs. It’s almost as bad as California, except energy is cheap here. Gas is about 32 cents a gallon. Cars probably cost about $2 million each, however, so ultimately, they only come out slightly ahead of us.
This is the number one region (West Africa) in the world for the bad malaria. As opposed to the “good” malaria, this malaria attacks the central nervous system so that none of your senses work while you have no water to drink or no phone to use while you sit in the dark. The good thing is that medical science has provided us with Lariam to take to prevent malaria. Or, prevent most of the time as the label says. But no guarantees. I was charged $78 for 6 Lariam pills that I take once a week beginning one week before I leave and continue taking until the Lariam kills me. Side effects of Lariam include dizziness, loss of appetite (ha – fat chance of that!), stomach pain, headaches, diarrhea, vomiting, rash, ringing in ears, repeating yourself, muscle pain, seizures, confusion, repeating yourself, emotional or mood changes, agitation or hallucinations and repeating yourself. OK, I added the “repeating yourself”, but the rest is straight off the warning label. It further says to read enclosed booklet or contact your doctor for further symptoms. I’m reading the preceding list thinking I’ve never heard of any additional symptoms, ever. This list has just covered every symptom by every disease or injury I am aware of. My question for the booklet or doctor is, “just how bad is malaria, and what are the symptoms?” I think they have given me a placebo of 6 pills at a cost of $78 and then listed every possible symptom malaria might cause. That way, when I contract malaria, I will think the medicine is working and I only have some side effects.
Our first day here, my boss and I were sitting in the hotel restaurant in which everyone speaks Spanish reading a menu handwritten in French arguing over how monkey brains would be listed. Well, that’s not exactly true…I wouldn’t call it a restaurant. A white lady followed by a husband and two sons in their teens marches up to our table and asks if we are here as tourists. (It is pretty obvious that we are not natives.) We both burst out laughing and I start to tell a joke back, when she tells us she is a tourist! She explains that her oldest son just graduated from high school in Los Angeles, and they (her and the husband) said he could have anything he wanted for graduation. He wanted to go to Equatorial Guinea. She just smiled and said, “what could we do?” I was thinking “slap some sense into him, hire a psychiatrist, and put the younger son in a different school.” However, instead of saying that, I just dropped my chin and stared. When we arrived in Malabo, we were whisked off into a special line for oilfield workers. It still took about 30 minutes to go through customs, then we went to the office for a 2-3 hour meeting. After that, one of the managers drove us around the city dump, or “business district” as it is called, and helped us get settled in the hotel. We then freshened up and met in the hotel lobby after a while prior to meeting this woman. After she talked for 2-3 additional minutes about how gifted (ie, stupid) her son was, we discovered they had actually arrived in Malabo on the same flight we did. (This was not a shocker since there are a total of six flights a week into Malabo for all airlines combined.) She then asked how we got here so quickly. Not clear on the question, I asked if she was referring to the two day trip from Dallas. She clarified our trip through the Malabo airport and to the hotel. It seems during our meetings, visiting and cleaning up, they had been interrogated, searched and forced to pay bribes. About that time, her “gifted” son wondered back up to our table excited that this was the “best place he had ever been.” My boss commented that although this was “different”, sunset on Wakiki beach couldn’t be beat. “It is nice.” said the father speaking up for the first time, “we all just spent three weeks there before coming here, but this is special!” At that point, we decided to avoid direct eye contact and any speech or movements that could misinterpreted as threatening.
The airport and most of the town are literally carved out of the jungle. And, the jungle is constantly trying to reclaim it. At the airport, when we landed, I looked out the window and saw 12 foot cane thicker than Bermuda grass about 20 feet beyond the wing of our airplane on the runway. And, shortly beyond that were huge rain forest trees. It didn’t give me the impression of an international airport. I half expected to see some shady looking characters load up the plane with bales of marijuana, and then we would continue on to Malabo. Instead, we taxied to some adobe shacks connected by asphalt with about 50-60 people standing around waiting for victims..er..passengers to disembark.
The phone that took Sunday off still has yet to come back on and it is now Wednesday. I do have some email access through work, so drop a note if you get a chance. I have finally learned that if I sleep with the light on and a shoe next to my pillow, I can bolt awake, grab the shoe and kill the roach that crawled across me before he takes cover to tease me again. By the way, this is the top hotel in not only the town, but the entire country. Really! The others (there are three total) don’t have private bathrooms, air conditioning or sheets on the bed in some or all the rooms. Here I have a private bathroom (but the water may not work), air conditioning (when the electricity is on) and sheets on the bed (so the roaches don’t have to crawl directly on the mattress).
I have to say things are interesting here. On Sunday, they had a guy basically loose his mind on the rig. They got him back to Malabo, but the next flight out was this morning, so he stayed in the staff house for a couple of days. Yesterday, he kept wondering the hall with this glazed/crazed look. I asked one of the Aussies what was for lunch and he responded I don’t know, but we would be eating it by hand because all the sharp objects had been locked away. The manager asked the whack job to take a drug test several times, a mandatory requirement of both ours and Mobil’s (the client) when there is an incident. He refused, so he was terminated. He kept trying to corner everyone to talk about how you should give up sleeping to stop the nightmares. One exchange with my boss, who at the time had not been warned who this guy was, came up and said “You’ve got to feed them hay.” My boss responded with a confused look and he added, “The mares. The nightmares. They want your hay!” The country manager was sitting down to a bowl of corn flakes this morning and this guy came up behind him and dumped something liquid all over his head and started shouting “there’s your #$&@@*#*ing drug test!!!
That wasn’t the only excitement. My boss and I went to a bar one night with the managers and the “working women” outnumbered the men 10 to 1. I got my coke and huddled in a corner with a couple of the managers. At some point a woman pulled a knife on one of the patrons and chased him out of the room. There was constant hollering and when she came running back through, she still had the knife, but was shirtless and the guy was chasing her and swinging a bar stool back and forth. I just looked at my local coworkers and they decided it was probably time to go.
The finance manager would always drive us was back to the hotel each evening. The hotel is at the end of the port road. Let me inject here that the international port in Malabo is only two blocks long and leans noticeably toward the water. There were people everywhere. Usually the streets are deserted by the time we quit work and have dinner at the staff house. The Finance Manager was concerned we had driven into a protest, which can turn bad when the military arrives, but everyone was just standing around, no one appeared aggressive or protesting. The next morning, we found out from the local purchaser, Matadoor, when he walked in with a few hundred condoms. The WHO (World Health Organization, not the English rock band) had docked at the port the previous evening and was passing out condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS. Equatorial Guinea has one of the highest percentages of infections in Africa. That was the crowd we passed up at the port. Seems the managers had been talking to Matadoor about his risky lifestyle, so he was buying up condoms from the islanders as the WHO passed them out and brought them in to show the managers he was being careful. He probably caused the entire island to be exposed to AIDS, but he is protected for years!
Boy, I’m really going to miss this place!.
Wish you were here,
Keit