Owner: The Road to the Horizon URL:http://theroadtothehorizon.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 03:34:26 -0600 Rating:0 Site Description: Short stories about travel to the world's most remote places, working in war torn countries, life as a humanitarian worker, and about the road which is more important than the destination. Site statistics:Click here
Rumble: Aid Work with a Different Flair.... 2007-03-30 11:07:00 One of the advantages of being an aid worker, is to come in areas where few people go. [Tine says that the places I go to, nobody in his right mind would want to go anyway! :-) ] When I worked in Goma in a country then called Zaire, we once drove to the Virunga National Park to see the mountain gorillas. You remember, from the movie 'Gorillas in the Mist'. At that time, just after the Rwanda genocide, the whole area was off-limits for tourists, so we had the park rangers and the primates 'all to ourselves'. We sat for hours in the dense jungle surrounded by gorillas.Last night, I tried to find the link to the Virunga Park, and stumbled onto a wonderful blogsite from Wild Life Direct, titled "Blogs from the Wild". It is the 'mother' site to dozens of others blogsites, all with one common team: wild life and nature preservation in Africa. From blogs by park rangers to blogs of people working with communities in protected areas. From blogs about habitat conservation to the field blo
Rumble: 46 days, 11 countries and 37 flights later... 2007-03-29 10:56:00 When 9/11 hit, I was based in Islamabad-Pakistan, and stood with one leg in a plane, ready to leave for a long assessment mission to Central and South America.. As we all knew it was going to be a busy time in Central Asia for the next six months, I cancelled my trip. Mats has been my "partner in crime" at work since many years, so I called him to do the trip in my place. This was the story he wrote about his trip. A typical story of "us being on the road the whole time"...Dear all,I am on the final stage of my mission through our Central and South America offices in eleven countries: Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Cuba.This mission was organised in less than a week following the Sep 11th bombing in the US. I was on my way to West Africa for another assessment mission when I got a call from HQ to re-prioritize, with departure... euh.. immediately. I have been away for 46 days now. During those 46 days I have Read more:flights
, later
News Round-up: The World's View of the US 2007-03-31 19:21:00 The global view of the United States’ role in world affairs has significantly deteriorated over the last year according to a BBC World
Service poll of more than 26,000 people across 25 different countries.The survey reveals that three in four (73%) disapprove of how the US government has dealt with Iraq.Across all 25 countries polled, one citizen in two (49%) now says the US is playing a mainly negative role in the world.Over two-thirds (68%) believe the US military presence in the Middle East provokes more conflict than it prevents and only 17 percent believes US troops there are a stabilizing force. More in this article.Picture courtesy www.alertnet.org, Reuters, Kareem Raheem
Rumble: Talking about other interesting sites... 2007-03-31 15:07:00 Talking
about other interesting
sites: have a look at my blogrolling index in the right column. It lists all the sites I check daily myself: blogs and alternative news sites.Also in the right column, you can now find some inspiration: videos from aid work, books and music I travel with. The books and music link with Amazon.Last but not least (I spent a week to figure this one out! I tell you, I am a novice at this!): at the bottom of the right column, you will now see automatically updated feeds with alternative news made by bloggers (if you are tired of watching Fox, Sky, BBC and CNN all the time!), and several feeds with news and updates from the humanitarian field. Have fun. Remember, you can always find the latest structural updates here.Oh, before I forget: within 30 days, my sabbatical is over. While I will continue to publish rumbles, stories etc when I get back to work and real life, I will have less time to work on the structure of this site. So NOW is the time to tell me wha
Rumble: Pictures from Chechnya. 2007-04-01 12:23:00 I have always wanted to go to Chechnya. Was about to several times, but the mission always got cancelled. It is one of those places that has been a mess since such a long time... There is plenty of work to do there. Here is an excellent series of pictures a blogger took from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Feel the vibe of the place.. Amazing...Picture courtesy of Kunstkamera Read more:Pictures
The Volcano 2007-02-01 13:24:00 SORRY, APRIL 1... REMEMBER? APRIL FOOL'S DAY? Read more:Volcano
NEWS FLASH: VOLCANO ERUPTS IN BELGIUM 2006-04-01 14:17:00 NEWSFLASH: AT 14:00 TODAY, A VOLCANO ERUPTED IN BRUSSELS BELGIUM.The sky just got pitch dark, lava poured out. NATO headquarters is already reduced to ashes. There is no more airport. The king and the royal family has been seen on bicycles fleeing the capital. Read more of this newsflash here.
Rumble: Ready to Conquer the World! Of Sorts... 2007-04-03 19:37:00 In my post "GPS Navigation for Dummies", I wrote that -despite the fact I have been to the most remote corners of the world - I still succeed in loosing my way in our village at home. Tine, my wife, had been "encouraging" (hum) me to buy a GPS for the car, certainly as soon we will be driving from Belgium to Italy on our skiing holiday. That trip has always been the climax of marriage tension and bad team dynamics...Just for fun, I added a poll in the article, asking you to advise me what I should do... "To GPS or not to GPS?..." Tine has been following the survey results on the web. To her delight, her sound reasoning and the $5 she gave me to put an advertisement in favour of GPS-husbands under the poll, have all paid off. 17 people answered the poll, of which 16 said "Yep, you need a GPS"... With less than a week left before we leave on holiday, Tine has been refreshing my memory of the fierce discussion we had last year. Scene:Husband and wife drive with the kids in the back. The w Read more:World
Rumble: So You Want to Be an Aidworker, hey? 2007-04-02 23:11:00 I regularly get emails from people asking more information on how to join one of the humanitarian organisations, either full time, part-time or as a volunteer.One of the goals of this site is to provide people with inspiration, and -if possible- make them think about humanitarian issues. So, getting that amount of queries is really great, and I try to give sufficient information to get them on their way.If you have been interested in this field of work, but never dared to ask the question, then today's post, is your post: "How to become an aidworker, in 1-2-3" or something like that :-) I write this with the fear of being grossly incomplete and vague. But it should set you on your way.On the crossroads of life?Many of the people who wrote to me, talked about being on the crossroads of life. Looking for a new challenge, a new meaning-full job. Have a read how I got into this work...What is Aid Work? What is Development Work? How does it all Work?Before we start, you should definitively
Rumble: Recycling, the Afghani Way. 2007-04-02 10:33:00 Each time I go through my collection of pictures, I find back some treasures. This photo is taken by Oz, in Mazar-Afghanistan. I wonder if the manufacturer of the insecticide would have known his cans would end up in a locally made TV satellite dish.. Picture: Ozdzan Hadziemin Read more:Recycling
Rumble: Saddam Found to Still Work on WMDs 2007-04-04 23:57:00 I am sorry, but I can't not help it. This is just too good. This video shows Saddam
is still not giving up... Or who is not giving up here? :-)(thanks for the link, Ekram!)
Rumble: So You Want to Be an Aidworker, hey? 2006-04-03 22:11:00 I regularly get emails from people asking more information on how to join one of the humanitarian organisations, either full time, part-time or as a volunteer.One of the goals of this site is to provide people with inspiration, and -if possible- make them think about humanitarian issues. So, getting that amount of queries is really great, and I try to give sufficient information to get them on their way.If you have been interested in this field of work, but never dared to ask the question, then today's post, is your post: "How to become an aidworker, in 1-2-3" or something like that :-) I write this with the fear of being grossly incomplete and vague. But it should set you on your way.On the crossroads of life?Many of the people who wrote to me, talked about being on the crossroads of life. Looking for a new challenge, a new meaning-full job. Have a read how I got into this work...What is Aid Work? What is Development Work? How does it all Work?Before we start, you should definitively
Tips & Tricks: Matching Colours on Your Website 2006-03-03 22:15:00 I had a lot of trouble matching backgrounds of frames, widgets etc.. to the background of my website. I could only find matching colours after hours of trying...Until I found this free tool: Colorpic.It is a simple Windows program that lets you zoom into any area on your screen - including into your browser window. With a magnifying glass, you go over an area, and it tells you the hex value of the colour on that spot of your screen.Matching colours became a breeze for me.Have fun. Read more:Colours
Gone Skiing 2007-04-05 21:46:00 We're gone for a week.. Hopefully without Internet.. :-) Check if you can see us on the webcams! Read more:Skiing
Rumble: And now for something different... 2007-04-07 22:22:00 Not everything can be about climate changes, developing countries and other depressing stuff...It is amazing what travel does.. I thought not to post while I was on skiing holiday, but traveling brings inspiration. New places, unfamiliar faces, new stories... When we left home yesterday morning, the scenery looked like the picture on the left..And just a few hours traveling, the scenery completely changed. Life is different
. But nature is just as beautiful. I love the mountains. South Tirol in the North of Italy, the Dolomiti... This is what we looked at today... Read more:something
Rumble: Climate Change... Once More... 2007-04-06 23:55:00 As we were driving from Belgium to Italy today, I kept on being astonished about the beauty of the scenery... We do this drive every year. But this year, something was really different, as a lot of the trees were already in bloom, or sprouting green leaves. Too much, too early.I thought of my previous posts on global warming, and specifically what this weather change could mean for developing countries.Tonight, I checked the humanitarian news headlines. Coincidence (or not?) I saw in the headlines a new report came out today in which climate experts issued the starkest warning yet about the impact of global warming, ranging from hunger in Africa to a fast thaw in the Himalayas.More than 100 nations in the U.N. climate panel agreed to a final text from a report driven by the Intergovernmental Panel on ClimateChange
(IPCC). The IPCC groups 2,500 scientists and is the world authority on climate change.The report said warming, widely blamed on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burn
News Round-up: Chinese Media Report Darfur To Be "Stable and Natural" 2007-04-08 18:09:00 A Chinese
government delegation visited refugee camps and met officials in western Sudan's strife-torn Darfur
province to "get acquainted" with the situation there, Chinese state media reported on Sunday. "Administrative officials said that life of some 50,000 internally displaced people (at the camp) was stable and natural."Continuing their four-day official visit, the delegation also visited a refugee camp with 14,000 people in Nyala, South Darfur province, and met provincial governor Al-Haj Atta al-Mannan Idris. Idris said the general situation was "stable and improving".Yeah, right! Read more here Read more:Stable
, Natural
Rumble: South Tyrol. Wars and Skiing... 2007-04-07 22:55:00 The area we are visiting now, is South
Tyrol. In German: Südtirol. In Italian: Alto Adige, Sudtirolo or Sud Tirolo. Officially, it is called the "Autonomous Province of Bolzano-Bozen".It lays south of the Alps, and is a part of Italy, even though everyone here has German as their mother tongue. They must be the only Italians who greet you, not with "Buongiorno", but with "Gruessgott" (translated:"Greet God"), just like in Austria.It is a piece of land which the Italians nicked from Austria during World War I. This makes interesting history.When Austria-Hungary, in 1914, declared war against Serbia, thus starting World War I, Italy remained neutral at first, but was soon dragged into the turmoil. The front line followed mostly the then Austrian-Italian border, which ran right through the highest mountains of the Alps. The ensuing front became known as the "War in ice and snow", as troops occupied the highest mountains and glaciers all year long. Twelve metres (40 feet) of snow were a u Read more:Skiing
News: China, the West and Darfur: Why Do We Still Buy This Shit? 2006-01-01 17:40:00 April 8, 2007.Warning: This piece is opinionated.1. Darfur
According to the Chinese State Media: "Stable and Natural" Reuters Alertnet reports:"A Chinese government delegation visited refugee camps and met officials in western Sudan's strife-torn Darfur province to "get acquainted" with the situation there, Chinese state media reported on Sunday.More than 200,000 people are believed to have died in Darfur and some 2.5 million have been driven from their homes into squalid camps since ethnic tensions erupted into revolt in 2003.The United States and other Western powers have sought to authorise U.N. peacekeepers to quell violence in Darfur, where government-backed militia have been fighting rebel forces. African Union troops have failed to stop massacres.China
, which buys much of Sudan's oil and wields veto power over U.N. resolutions, is facing rising criticism from Western governments and rights campaigners for having rejected U.N. forces without Khartoum's agreement.On Saturday th
Rumble: Suspicious Food 2007-04-10 18:30:00 When skiing today, we had lunch up on the mountain. The bill said we had two versions of "Tageshit"... "Tage" means "Day". "Shit" is universal, I guess.So had we just eaten two versions of the "Shit of the Day" ? Read more:Suspicious
Rumble: King Laurin and his Rose Garden 2007-04-09 23:47:00 One of the sagas from this region explains why the Rosengarten ("Rose Garden
"), an imposing Dolomite chain which dominates the scenery to the west of Bolzano, glows pink at dusk.Once-upon-a-time, there was a magnificent rose garden high among the grey rocks, which belonged to the mighty dwarf King Laurin. He owned immense riches, but still his rose garden was the most dearest of his treasures. King Laurin protected it with golden thread of silk and anyone who touched even a single rose, could count on a punishment beyond imagination.King Laurin fell hopelessly in love with a princess called Similde, so much that he abducted her. When her father's soldiers came to rescue her, Laurin camouflaged himself and hid among the roses, where he thought to be invisible. In vain, though, as the knights discovered his whereabouts and trampled all the roses to catch him. Led into captivity, King Laurin, in a rage over his fate, turned and put a curse on the rose garden; "Neither by day nor by nigh
Rumble: A Father's Pride 2007-04-12 22:11:00 Just by seeing the other kids coming in with broken legs in the emergency room yesterday, Hannah healed miraculously....My two angels.... Old dad already has to do an effort to keep up with them on the ski slopes. And I used to be a ski instructor in my younger years...Another 18 days and my sabbatical is over. I will miss my angels.Just after I wrote this, I read this news article about an Iraqi father who lost his children in the war. I have to admit, as a relief worker, I could handle other people's misery much better before I had kids. Now, each time I look a suffering child in the eyes, I think "These could be my kids"... Read more:Father
, Pride
Rumble: You Meet People in the Strangest Places 2007-04-11 21:41:00 No skiing today... Hannah hurt her leg yesterday. We thought it was safer to have a doctor take a look at it. So off we went to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. A depressing place. You would get sick just sitting there... They were bringing in, one after the other, people with broken legs, dislocated shoulders, bruised lips... Hannah was feeling better in five minutes already...As we were waiting in the corridor, a guy brought in his daughter with a strained wrist. I look at him, he looks at me... "Oh, Peter", he said. "No, not possible, you!". 1,000 km from home, in an emergency room, I met my best friend from kindergarten times. We had not seen each other for years.. And both of us had brought in our daughters... Read more:Places
Rumble: An Un-natural Mix: German and Italian... 2007-04-13 22:36:00 How does the joke go again? Heaven is where the police men are English, the lovers are Italian
, the car makers are German
, the cook is French..And hell is... (ok, will not tell the 2nd part of the joke as I do not want to insult any nationalities...)Still, you will agree with me that the combination of Italian and German (well... Austrian) in South Tyrol is rather un-natural. Italian always being associated with the frivolous, and German with strictness... Or maybe it is a natural match, as opposites often attract.Whatever.. It makes their roadsigns a mess.. And it upsets the lady in my GPS, as she only knows the Italian names of the towns. :-)
Rumble: Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder 2007-04-13 18:52:00 You might think this is silly, but I am fascinated about the barns which dot this landscape.You find them everywhere, even in the most remote mountain passes. Just standing in the field. Looking at the structure of the wood, the way the tiling is done, they have been standing there for decades.The barns are used to stow hay and tools, so the farmer does not have to haul everything to and fro the farm. They are usually built in two storeys. They hay is stuffed under the roof, so it can not get wet once the land is flooded by the melting snow. The tools are stowed below. Often they also have a space for cattle to shelter from bad weather. Read more:Beauty
, Beholder
Rumble: Picnic at the Mosel 2007-04-15 22:26:00 On the ride back from Italy, we stopped for a short picnic, up on a ridge, overlooking the river Mosel.The Mosel lends its name to a light white wine. No surprise we sat smack in the middle of vineyards.It was close to the location I wrote about in the epilogue of "The Man With the Air Conditioner on his Head, Shot at Us".A beautiful scenery, and we were just in time to see the sun set. It was still warm. 23°C.. Later in the evening, we heard on the radio it was 29°C in some parts of Belgium. Most of the time, it does not get that hot even in summer. And we're mid April. Today was even warmer...Nope, I am not going to whine about global warming again. I just thought I'd mention the temperature. And the fact it was a new record. Again. ;-) Read more:Picnic
The Dudettes 2007-04-17 12:41:00 (Peterpedia: “a dudette: female version of a dude”)“Who the f**k has put pink paper in the printer?”, I hear one of the guys shouting in the corridor. Loads the cupboard doors bang as he is looking for the normal plain white paper… Loads of cursing..I duck.. I did not put the pink paper in the printer, but I know who did.. Well, I kinda know.. I also know she got away with the blue paper, too. And with the light-green.But that was two weeks ago, and none of the technicians was around then. Mats, Zouhair and me were the only men in the office. All the others were out. In Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey. We were the only three men… Three men against the rest of the world. And ‘the rest of the world’, as far as the office was concerned, was female. I mean, what were we supposed to do? Against all those women? They took over the place. They overrun the office. A palace revolution! And those in power wanted “pink”.Traditionally, we have always been a “real men’s o
News Round-up: 4 Million Iraqis Flee the Violence 2007-04-16 20:16:00 A new humanitarian crisis looms in the Middle East unless urgent measures are taken to assist four million Iraqis
uprooted by the escalating violence, Amnesty International warned today.Already two million have fled to Syria and Jordan, another 1.9 million is displaced inside Iraq. (Full article)One month ago, WFP already raised the alarm flag in this appeal.Four million people is about same as the total population of Norway.The latest humanitarian news, you can find in the "News from the Other World" aggregator.Picture credit: IRINnews. Read more:Violence
News Round-up: Sudan Disguises War Planes as UN Aircraft 2007-04-18 14:31:00 April 17. The New York Times reports:A confidential United Nations report says the government of Sudan
is flying arms and heavy military equipment into Darfur in violation of Security Council resolutions and painting Sudanese military planes white to disguise them as United Nations or African Union aircraft.In one case, illustrated with close-up pictures, the report says the letters “U.N.” have been stenciled onto the wing of a whitewashed Sudanese armed forces plane parked on a military apron at a Darfur airport. Bombs guarded by uniformed soldiers are laid out in rows by its side.Read the NY Times article with a copy of the UN report..
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