A word of advice: don’t try to buy a domain and web hosting from BlueHost from Egypt with a French credit card. That is, unless you enjoy being lectured about “country mismatches” and treated like a common criminal.

Since emerging from the Yotel two Saturdays ago, I spent three days in Barcelona (about which more later) before coming to Alexandria, Egypt, where I’ve been working with a group of women journalists from Europe and North Africa on a citizen media project. Apart from the mistreatment at the hands of BlueHost, it’s been extremely rewarding and enjoyable experience. The language of instruction is French, though a few of the participants are stronger in English, so I spend the day switching between the two languages, not to mention helping troubleshoot computers with operating systems in French, Italian and English, often with either European or Arabic keyboards. By the end of the day my head is spinning, and I’ve arrived at the point now where both my French and English are in a pretty sorry state.

Barbara and Djahida film each other

As usual, my Flickr page is probably the best vantage point from which to keep track of my activities, at least for now. Photos of Alexandria here, and of the workshop here.

(9:52pm Barcelona time) Pictured above, my cabin in the Yotel at Gatwick airport, and also the reason I still feel vaguely human after having spent most of last night on a plane and been shaken out of REM sleep at the equivalent of 2am Trinidad time to disembark.

I knew nothing of the Yotel’s existence until, having been told by EasyJet that I couldn’t check in for my flight to Barcelona six hours ahead of time, I was wandering around that odd zone in Gatwick that accommodates both arrivals and departures looking for somewhere to park myself and my bags and came upon a poster advertising short-term accommodation starting at £25 for four hours. This sounded way too reasonable by London standards (a pre-packaged Coronation Chicken sandwich in Boots runs you about £25 these days), but as I still had five hours and 55 minutes to kill I figured I’d at least take a look at this Yotel thing.

Within minutes of arriving in the Yotel’s vestibule, which, bathed in a soft purplish glow, reminded me of cross between a space ship and an ultra-modern medical dispensary, Julien, the pleasant young front desk clerk who turned out be from Martinique, had checked me in and dispatched a member of the cleaning staff to prepare my cabin. While I was waiting, Julien told me that Yotels are being planned for Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol.

The Yotel’s cabins are a study in the judicious use of space–if you’re carrying extra-large suitcases you’d be better of leaving them with the left luggage service. A narrow passage separates a padded cubicle containing an elevated bed from a glass-walled stall with shower, sink and toilet. Should you require a work desk, a pull-down table and folding stool are provided, as is both wired and wifi internet access. The bed linen was impeccable and the mattress struck the perfect balance between firmness and give. Once I’d changed into sleepwear, pulled down the blinds in the cabin door window and turned off the lights, it took me no time to fall into a coma-grade sleep.

A few hours later my PDA alarm told me it was time to get up and deal with EasyJet. My body didn’t want to co-operate, but I promised it that if it did, it would be rewarded with a warm Yotel shower.

I’m willing to bet that this will be the best £25 I spend this entire trip.

So the new cabinet has been announced (congrats to Campaign41 for getting the information online in record time, ie yesterday afternoon). A few of the appointments make me downright queasy and I have to admit that I’m tired of men like Manning boasting about how many appointments he’s given to women, as though this is some kind of magnanimous act (and especially when one of the women is his wife).

Finding myself agreeing with the activist quoted this morning in the Express, who said that, with the exception of Attorney General Bridget Annisette George (whom I cannot say I know much about), “none of them have shown any sympathy, empathy, indication or understanding of what is required or expected of women in those positions. . . . The fact that the Prime Minister chose them is a strike against them.”

I’m willing to wait and see whether some of the appointees — female and otherwise — of whom I have such low expectations surprise me and learn the meaning of the term “gender policy” and why such might be necessary in a country where issues like reproductive rights remain at the bottom of the agenda. But I ain’t holding my breath.

Technorati Tags: trinidadandtobago, trinidad, caribbean, politics, government

Who told The World’s Marco Werman he could talk to 3Canal?? That’s what I get, I suppose, for letting my house band travel without me.

Kidding, of course.

3Canal can talk with whoever they wish, as long as they don’t stop talking to me. Which, incidentally, they should be doing tomorrow. Stay tuned for CFR podcast #48, coming some time over this weekend!

Technorati Tags: 3canal, caribbean, podcast, trinidad, rapso, PRI’s The World

A person I know called a while ago to enquire about the mood in the neighbourhood following the results of yesterday’s election. I told him it was hard to tell, as this isn’t the kind of area where you necessarily know what’s going on behind closed doors. We went on to discuss why Prime Minister Manning is choosing to break with tradition and hold the swearing-in session in Woodford Square instead of the President’s House.

Apart from rather obvious desire to co-opt the Square’s historic allure, even if the President’s House remains unfit for ceremonial purposes, we wondered, why not hold the event in the new Diplomatic Centre, where the National Awards were held back in August? Could there be something in the Diplomatic Centre the Honourable Prime Minister doesn’t wish us to see? “You mean like a throne?” said my acquaintance.

It’s people like this who have this country in such a state.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, has just announced another round of microgrant funding for citizen media outreach projects. Receive up to US$5,000 for projects designed to teach citizen media skills to “communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own”.

Read all about it here.

It turns out that 12pm was the perfect time to go and cast one’s vote at polling station 0136 (known as the Diego Martin Junior Secondary School when it’s not election day). A parking spot awaited me in the schoolyard, in the shade of a mango tree, and apart from a handful of voters and a number of my COP activist neighbours roving the dingy corridors and walkways in between shifts as polling agents, the place was deserted. After visiting a main classroom where an Elections and Boundaries Commission officer checked to make sure my name was on the list, I was directed to the room for voters with surnames beginning with L-Z, where where voters with and without ID cards were separated into lines demarcated by strips of red and green paper stuck on the floor.

A certified “without” (I deliberately misplaced my ID card some years ago, largely on account of the horrifying photo), I took the red line. Once there, I proffered my passport and the polling card I’d received in the mail. The officer consulted the electoral list and drew a red line through my name, then rifled through a massive ledger and found a blue card with my registration info and a copy of the dreadful photo (now thankfully faded) from my lost ID card stuck to it. (I hope a copy of information in this ledger is stored on a computer somewhere.) Then the officer made me swear that I wasn’t lying about being unable to produce an ID card and that I hadn’t sold it, after which I had to sign a note confirming same. Then my name and consecutive number (198, for the record) were announced, mainly for the benefit of the two polling agents present (one of whom was probably COP and the other PNM–the UNC Alliance probably not bothering to waste further resources in this constituency), whose task is to try and figure out who I’m likely to be voting for.

Then I moved on to the voting officer, who signed and handed me my ballot paper and showed me how to fold it and to use the “X” stamp. Then I went behind a screen propped up on a school desk, considered briefly whether to inaugurate Jeremy’s proposed plan for proportional representation by putting a percentage instead of put an “X” next to the name of my candidate of choice, but decided on the “X” instead. Then I inserted my ballot through a slot into a padlocked metal box, dipped my finger into a pot of red ink, wiped off the excess, and left the room. So I’ve exercised my constitutional right, as the people like to say.

All morning the words to Bally’s “Party Time“, one of the undisputed hits of the 1986 election season, have been ringing in my head; belatedly, I know, as yesterday marked the end of the mindless and particularly Trinidadian brand of campaigning that Bally parodies in his calypso and which seems to have been taken to unprecedented heights this year. And of course I’m remembering 1986, the first and only time I ever felt deeply involved in an election campaign, not to mention hopeful about the outcome. That year my neighbourhood threw their support, predictably, behind the NAR, and I, not long back from university abroad, joined in. I spent most of that election day either at the polling station (I was a polling agent) or at the house up the street which had been designated NAR activist headquarters, getting high on the buzz.

The NAR won 33 out of 36 seats, of course, and swept into power on a tremendous tide of goodwill. Who knew then that, a mere three and a half years later, I’d be sitting in traffic on a highway in northern California (having left Trinidad only five days earlier) and hear an announcement over National Public Radio about a coup in Trinidad and Tobago. A journalist friend of mine says that when she hears the calypso “Vote Dem Out”, the campaign song that rocked the worlds of NAR supporters in 1986, chills still run up her spine–though not for quite the same reasons they did in 1986.

I envy my COP activist neighbours, some of whom were key figures in the NAR frenzy of 21 years ago, their commitment and passion and the sense of hope they’ve clearly been able to muster about the outcome of this year’s election. But try as I might, I can’t share in it.

Tonight I’ll be getting together with a few friends here at home to watch the election results. We’ll order some food, and Jonty is poised to grab a few bottles of wine once the polls close and the prohibition against the sale of alcohol during polling time is lifted. Nikipedia says he may blog, but we (or rather I) have warned him that relatively sociability is one of the requirements for being a part of this lime. We probably won’t make it a very late night. J9 has to be up early for a shoot tomorrow, and in any case we’ll probably all drink more than we should. Then wake up tomorrow and face the music.