Eve of departure



It's the last day before we head off and Adi and Tony (Paula's sister and husband) who will be house sitting are here settling in and running through where everything is. This morning Zoe, Heidi and I had a last effort to boost our French with Cecile, who has been teaching Paula primarily for the last few weeks.

Two figures currently in the news have tangential bearing on our trip. The first is Robert Mugabe, who has just won a fifth term in Zimbabwe, which we will approach this week from the (safer) Zambian side of the Victoria Falls. (Like the BBC, we wont actually be entering Zimbabwe.) Even discounting the various tactics of corruption (getting votes from dead people, terrorising opposition voters, re-defining constituency borders etc) it seems likely that Zanu-PF has more popular domestic support than Blair's or Bush's administrations (does anyone know this to be wrong?).

Apart from Mugabe, the other big Catholic in the news at the moment is, of course, the late Pope. I took a break from the blanket coverage on Radio 4 last night to listen to Songs for Swinging Lovers: since the "news" has been totally news-free it seemed unlikely that the Rome correspondent's 30 minute eulogy was likely to be more interesting. Granted, it is noteworthy that a Polish ex-actor became head of the Catholic church, and, like Reagan, he was very media-friendly with a sure sense for the photo op and the soundbite (the Popemobile, kissing the tarmac, phenomenal amounts of travelling). But shouldn't the news be questioning, say, how the views on contraception of one old man could have so much unchecked influence while AIDS rose to such terrible levels - in the countries we're about to visit between 20% and 50% of the population are infected with HIV! And if the BBC is going to air Cormac Murphy O'Connor every 20 minutes making the unchallenged assertion that the Pope was popular with "the young" why not ask how he and his close colleagues presided over a huge global paedophile network, actively obstructing investigators and protecting known perpetrators over a period of decades. And if the young are so keen on the papacy why is church attendance in steady decline? And why is there a critical shortage of young people (actually men, of course) putting themselves forward for the priesthood? Similarly, as assessment of the Pope's performance as a peacemaker should surely have to balance his one quotable speech on the troubles in Ireland with his apparent absence from the peace process over subsequent years (did he do anything?). Likewise, his record of reconciliation in the UK has to go beyond his photoshoot with the Queen and the set-piece at Westminster Abbey that Runcie talked him to question how his comments about Anglicans not being true priests were supposed to take the ecumenical case forward.

I'm not particularly anti-Pope I'm just fed up with news-free news. The BBC's failure to comment intelligently on the popularity of Zanu-PF (or Osama) and their inanity when reporting on the Pope's death seem to me to be aspects of the same phenomenon.

Given that they are not getting any worthwhile analysis served up to them from most of the media, I hope that our girls will get an opportunity to develop their own powers of observation and reflection over the coming year. This morning Zoe and I put together a template of information that we'd like to collect from/about each of the places that we visit. So far this includes:

Population
Area/Population density
Neighbouring countries (or states)
Capital and major towns/cities
Languages spoken
Religions practised
Type of government
Human rights record
Notable landmarks
Food
Climate
People we meet
Literacy rate
Mortality
Principle sources of income/jobs
Famous people

If you have any other ideas let me know. Ian

Posted: Sun - April 3, 2005 at 02:36 PM              

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