In a pile of recent (terrific!) posts on Roba Al-Assi’s blog, “And Far Away” (don’t miss the one about her pink hair) is a great post about the rise of hip hop culture in Jordan and throughout the Middle East.

Roba says that she “got” the importance of hiphop once she started listening to Palestinian rappers, like the crews featured in the upcoming documentary “Slingshot”. Featuring ten crews united under the banner of “The Palestinian Lyrical Front”, the documentary follows Palestinian MCs from their homes to the stage, around their neighborhoods in Palestine and Israel. (The five minute trailer is a must-see.)

Roba points to Yazan Malakha’s blog, which includes more information about the film, the music and the lyrics, including downloadable mp3 of several tracks from DAM and Iron Sheik.

Musically it’s a mixed bag – Iron Sheik rap in English over minimal, electronic beats, which makes it easier to hear the lyrics, which include rhymes I’ve never heard in hiphop before:

Zionism called for a Jewish homeland
but they picked Palestine as a land with no man
one major flaw with all of this –
they forgot the indigenous populus, from Olive Trees

Photo by Hanan Cohen

DAM’s tracks are a rich mix of voices and samples, featuring male and female MCs and have more for the melodically inclined to hang onto. (The name’s an acronym – “Da Arab MCs”, though the fact that “dam” translates as “blood” in Hebrew (and in Arabic?) can’t be a coincidence…) The video for “Born Here” (Windows Media, mp3 here, lyrics here) took me right back to the years I most loved American hiphop – the “golden age” – when BDP and Public Enemy added a political edge to party music, but didn’t take it to the absurdist cliff “gangsta” rappers drove it over.

Like Kris Parker or Chuck D, these kids are angry. And while it makes their lyrics hard for some people to listen to or read, it’s makes their tracks very, very real. When Kris recorded “Sound of Da Police” with verses like this:

The overseer rode around the plantation
The officer is off patroling all the nation
The overseer could stop you what you’re doing
The officer will pull you over just when he’s pursuing
The overseer had the right to get ill
And if you fought back, the overseer had the right to kill
The officer has the right to arrest
And if you fight back they put a hole in your chest!
(Woop!) They both ride horses
After 400 years, I’ve _got_ no choices!

…I didn’t have to agree with him that it was a fair comparison between policemen and slave overseers. (And I didn’t.) But I did have to acknowledge that the man was pissed off and that he meant what he was saying. And I had to acknowledge that there were people listening to the track who felt the way Kris felt. (And that they probably weren’t longhaired white boys in rural Massachusetts.)

And whether or not my interpretation of the situation in Palestine and Israel is the same as that of these MCs, I’m glad they have the chance to say it and that I have the chance to hear it.

Update:
Hanan Cohen, webmaster for Shatil, a progressive Israeli organization that “Promote[s] Jewish-Arab equality and coexistence”, has written in with a great comment. Shatil organized the “Born Here” tour that featured DAM and other Israeli and Palestinian crews – he shares his backstage and onstage photos from the tour. Thanks, Hanan!

When Niger’s president Mamadou Tanja declared that his nation wasn’t facing a famine, but local food shortages, his statements were met with widespread skepticism. (See my earlier post, “When is a famine not a famine?”)

BBC’S Henri Astier has followed up on the story, talking to aid workers and experts on African aid, and concludes that, on balance, President Tanja was probably right. Paraphrasing comments by Professor William Easterly of NYU, Astier writes:

There were localised food shortages this year – but they were not particularly acute, and are now easing.

What Niger is experiencing is not a sudden catastrophe, but chronic malnutrition that makes people vulnerable to rises in food prices.

The piece goes on to quote Kenyan economist James Shikwati at length. Shikwati was recently interviewed in Der Spiegel, in a wonderful piece titled “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”, and much of what he says in the BBC piece will be familiar to folks who’ve read the interview, or who follow this blog closely. He adds an interesting additional explanation to the Niger famine: a (likely illegal) ban by Nigeria on exporting grain to Niger, which likely would have helped alleviate shortages. (I’ve not been able to confirm this ban, but there have been a number of recent reports on unusual trade practices in Nigeria, including a ban on import of Ghanaian goods, which is likely to badly damage the Ghanaian economy if it holds.)

What’s most interesting to me about the BBC story is the set of comments generated by readers in reactions. Most of the African reactions appear to support Astier’s conclusions and agree that a) there wasn’t a famine, and b) aid alone isn’t the answer.

Spot on! I live in Niger and could not agree more. While the interventions of MSF are laudable, there is no famine here. However, had the BBC and others not reported on the famine, the chronic gut-wrenching poverty would have gone unnoticed by the world. The challenge to the NGOs and donors should not be that they rush to Niger to help during a crisis, but that they remain here for the long haul to help the wonderful people of Niger reach their potential. Will the cameras be back in 6 months to see if anyone is still helping?
JD, Niamey, Niger

Many of the comments from North Americans and Europeans, on the other hand, seem resistant to the idea that African nations could be capable of growing and selling sufficient food to support their populations.

It would be a wonderful solution for NGOs and donor governments to give more cash to people caught in disaster situations – if that cash is edible. The fact is that the proposal to provide greater cash resources will only help if food shortages occur only at a regional level and if well functioning markets can respond to demand. Unfortunately the reality of the situation is that in many situations simply giving more cash, or subsidizing grain sales – as the Nigerian government did earlier this year – will not always solve the problem of food shortages. Sure, we can quibble over how aid is given, and whether it arrives in a timely fashion and gets to the people who need it. These are all important issues. These arguments should not, however, get in the way of providing food to people when they need it.
EM, USA

Besides confusing Niger and Nigeria (happens all the time, EM – Niger’s to the north, drier, and the people speak French there…), EM seems to miss much of the point of the article – even when there are functioning markets, food aid can massively distort those markets and cause increased food insecurity in the long term. Regional solutions, like those Shikwati advocate for, are exactly what’s needed to solve shortages that aren’t massive regional famines… so long as participating governments allow that trade to happen and international donors are able to help subsidize food to poorer areas when neccesary.

The actual debate is less interesting to me than the possibility of this debate. BBC is providing a terrific space where people from inside and outside Africa can offer their opinions on solving African problems… and people from outside Africa can discover, if they listen, that their proposed solutions are often – strongly and validly – opposed by the people they’re trying to help!

¡Hola, mis amigos de VidaExtra! Bienvenidos a mi blog, “Mi Corazón Es En Accra.” ¡Felíz World Blog Day!

Soy un erudito en el colegio del abogados en Harvard University. Escribo sobre todo sobre tecnología, weblogs y África. Viví en Ghana en 1993 como estudiante. He estado en amor con África desde que.

Goce por favor de su visita a mi sitio, y me disculpo que mi español es tan malo.

Israeli blogger Nir Ofir had an excellent idea about two months ago. Squinting at his screen a little bit, he decided the number 3108 (31/08, or August 31st in almost every country but the US) looked a lot like the word “blog”. So he invited bloggers around the world to join him in an exciting project, World Blog Day:

In one long moment on August 31st, bloggers from all over the world will post a recommendation of 5 new Blogs, Preferably, Blogs different from their own culture, point of view and attitude. On this day, blog surfers will find themselves leaping and discovering new, unknown Blogs, celebrating the discovery of new people and new bloggers.

As you might imagine, this is a project I’m a big fan of. As someone who’s spent a good chunk of my blogging career linking to world bloggers, on this blog, on Global Voices, BlogAfrica and the BridgeBlog Index, I’m at a bit of a loss to what to do for World Blog Day. Linking to great blogs from around the globe doesn’t seem like enough of a stretch if I’m trying to break my ordinary patterns.

If I want to feature perspectives you usually don’t see on this blog, should I reach out and link to Windows enthusiasts? Republicans? Yankees fans? (Okay, Stuart’s blog is in there because I admire and respect him. The Yankees and Windows blogs? Not so much…)

To make sure I’m really reaching out and including blogs I wouldn’t normally link to, I thought I’d spend the evening of August 30th looking at blogs and websites from Moldova, a country I know basically nothing about. I’ve read Tony Hawks’ very funny “Playing the Moldovans at Tennis”, where the British author, on a bet, travels to Moldova and defeats each member of the Moldovan national football team at tennis… but I can’t say the book did a great deal to enlighten me about Moldovan politics or national character.

It sounds like any investigation of Moldovan internet culture has to begin with Alexandru Culiuc. According to his profile on OurNet, a Moldovan homepage hosting site (which he evidently founded), Alexandru’s site is:

[a] personal blog covering economic development, public policy, education abroad, photography, IT and e-development. Alexander is the creator of OurNet, founder of Design.md, advanced amateur photographer, and is currently studying international economic development at Harvard.

You better believe I’ll be looking for Alexandru around Cambridge, if only so he can translate his blog for me. (It’s in Romanian. Moldovans appear to blog in Romanian, Russian and English.) But I don’t need to speak Romanian to understand his photography, which is beautiful.

The young blogger behind Area51 offers a year-long journal of his final year in high school, in a series of zipped text files. I’ve been focused on his collection of poetry – “Organized Rhyme” – in Romanian, Russian, and English. I’m very fond of “Trippin’ – To Kiev and Back”…

Stardust is a Moldovan DJ, dedicated to “developing club culture in Moldova”. I’ve not been able to download his mp3 files, but I look forward to encountering him and his DJ friends in Chisinau sometime soon.

Barishev Roman is a formidable photographer, with a surrealist touch and an excellent sense for composition. A native of Kishinev (Chisinau, I assume), his works are shown throughout the capital city.

A final site from Moldova – a collection of Murphy’s Laws in Romanian.

Happy World Blog Day, everyone!

My friend and neighbor Jennifer Mattern maintains a consistently hilarious and often poignant parenting blog, Breed ‘Em and Weep. She turns her considerable talents this week towards talking about some of what makes our part of the world (Berkshire County, Massachusetts) so uniquely wonderful: vegetable stands that run on the honor system, pick your own berry farms, agricultural fairs, local politics and unique stories in the crime blotter (vandals squeezing toothpaste into the windows of cars, but very few drive-by shootings…)

It’s a useful reminder for me, because summer is the season I find harder to love here in the Berkshires. Not hard to love, mind you, just harder than the other three seasons, which I love unambiguously and without reservation. Summer is hot – unusually so this year, which has been downright tropical – but any temperature over 20C makes me unhappy, so I spend much of the summer longing for the next time I can put on a sweater and light a fire in the fireplace. It gets crowded here – lots of tourists who enjoy our museums, cultural festivals and greenspace away from Boston and New York. Most of the folks who visit are lovely folks, but it only takes one unhappy individual who is convinced he needs to push and shove or drive aggresively to ruin one’s whole day…

But the grand upside of summer is the annual miracle of food growing out of the ground. I still find this hard to believe. For eight months out of the year, my backyard consists mostly of snow, mud and sticks. For four months, it’s an explosion of green. I take calls on my mobile phone and wander my yard, picking raspberries in June, blackberries in August, and, if they survive the winter, blueberries from our new bushes next July…

Caretaker Farm, as seen from the bean field

For the four green months of the year, much of our food comes from Caretaker Farm, a community supported farm in Williamstown, MA. Community Supported Agriculture is a clever solution to one of the toughest problems of small-scale farming – how can farmers earn enough money to keep their land in bad years as well as good? CSAs invite members of the community to pay annual dues and share in the harvest of the farm – in a good year, members get massive quantities of organic vegetables, and in poor years, they still get a decent harvest, but the farmers are guaranteed a minimum income which allows them to hold onto their land and plan for the future.

I’ve been a member of Caretaker since 1992 and learned years ago that the only way to deal with the bounty the farm produces in August and September was to get good at food preservation. In college, this meant making 10 gallon vats of vegetable-laden spaghetti sauce and freezing it for the winter. These days, it means pickling.

What 20 quarts of pickles looks like. In case you were curious.

Thanks to a few bad (and now mostly forgotten) experiments and lots of reliance on Linda Ziedrich’s “The Joy of Pickling”, we now pickle cucumbers, string beans, carrots, zuchinni and brussel sprouts every year, as well as sun-drying tomatoes and packing them in oil and freezing tomato pulp. While we’re good at it and we enjoy it, it makes for some long, hot summer days packing beans into quart jars and sterilizing them in boiling water.

So this year, we took a page from Tom Saywer and have been enlisting friends and family to share the workload. A few months back, my mother mentioned that regretted never learning about pickling from her mother. So we recruited her to come help pickle the five gallons of green beans my friend Sara and I picked. Two weekends later, my friend (and brilliant science illustrator) Emily Cooper helped me harvest four gallons of tomatoes and an additional two gallons of green beans. And if all goes well, we’ll put up three or four gallons of brussel sprouts later in the year, just before the first hard frost.

Emily readies green beans for pickling

In a world where it’s possible to get raspberries from Chile and lettuce from Southern California in the middle of winter, it seems oddly primitive to preserve one’s own food. And honestly, it’s hard to explain to you why we do it until you taste what a green bean pickled with basil tastes like on a February night. Suffice it to say that there’s something tremendously reassuring about a pair of shelves in our kitchen filled with perfect vegetables, getting better with age and waiting to bring a splash of color and flavor to a day that’s otherwise entirely grey.

I’m not the only 21st century technogeek with a sideline in food preservation. Joi Ito has an excellent guide to nukamiso pickling, a Japanese process that involves fermenting vegetables in a mush made from rice husks. It’s about as far process-wise from the technique we use (packing vegetables in salt water and vinegar, then sterilizing them by boiling), but it makes me happy to know that another geek friend is pickling vegetables on the other side of the world as I gaze fondly at the row of green and red jars in my pantry.

The recent shooting of Waleed Khaled, a soundman for Reuters TV, by US military snipers in Iraq is a terrible reminder of how dangerous the war has been not just for military and civilians, but for journalists.

(The cameraman accompanying Khaled, Haider Kadhem, was wounded by US forces and is being held by US forces, who have refused to say where he is being held or what unit is holding him. At present, Reuters is demanding his immediate release.)

Our friends at Reporters Sans Frontières point out that the Iraq war has been the most deadly instrastate conflict for journalists since the Vietnam War: in 29 months, 66 reporters and media assistants have been killed; an additional 29 have been kidnapped. 63 journalists died in Vietnam, but over the course of a twenty year war.

RSF points out that recent conflicts in Algeria and the former Yugoslavia have also been bloody ones for journalists: 49 journalists were killed in Yugoslavia between 1991-5, and 57 journalists and 20 media assistants were slain in Algeria’s civil war (1993-6). The high death tolls of these recent conflicts makes me wonder whether two trends in warfare are likely to make journalist casualties higher in the forseeable future: the targetting of civilians and the 24/7 newsroom.

War has never spared noncombattants, but the conflicts RSF identifies as most deadly for journalists have been especially bloody ones for civilians. Because journalists can be hard to tell from civilians at a distance, and because journalists are interested in documenting war’s impact on civilians, any conflict where one (or more) sides are explicitly targetting civilians is likely to be a deadly one for journalists doing their jobs.

Since the 1991 Gulf War, the US public has been taught to expect moment to moment live coverage of wars where US troops are involved. (I can’t recall a day in the past three years where my GAP research scripts turned up a day where Iraq wasn’t the dominant country mentioned – besides the US – in most US media sources…) This constant, close coverage of conflicts the media decides are most relevant (not the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, blamed for over 3 million deaths, for instance) guarantees that numerous journalists will be in harm’s way for the duration of the fighting.

RSF’s page honoring fallen journalists gives a sense for just how many media outlets are covering the conflict in Iraq: Knight Ridder, AP, Reuters, Washington Post, al-Iraqia, al-Sabah, Nikkan Gendai, El Mundo, Al Arabiya and the BBC are just some of the papers or TV stations that have lost reporters.

RSF’s coverage of the murder of Adnan Al Bayati, who worked for Italian TV station TG3, reveals an added dimension to the danger for journalists in Iraq. A devout Shiite, Al Bayati was kidnapped and murdered by Sunni extremists who oppose Iraqis “collaborating” with foreign powers, especially journalists.

Update: Rebecca just reminded me that Eason Jordan – former chief news executive for CNN – ended up resigning over comments he made at the World Economic Forum that suggested that the US government was targetting journalists. Jordan later made it clear that he hadn’t meant to accuse the US government of deliberately targetting journalists, just that he observed that the situation had become extremely dangerous for journalists. Jay Rosen has an excellent summary of the Jordan controversy…

It’s late summer and change seems to be in the air. Perhaps it’s that students are heading back into classrooms, or that my European friends are coming back from month-long vacations, or that in America, the baseball season will soon give football season. (Go Sox! Go Pack!) Or maybe there’s just a wave of creativity passing through the blogosphere, inspiring people to break away from their ordinary blogging behavior.

Deborah Elizabeth Finn, a prolific and talented blogger who focuses on non-profit and social change organizations, is organizing a non-profit blog exchange. She explains the root of the idea in a post titled “A Bully Pulpit Exchange”, referring to an old North American custom where religious leaders trade congregations for a week (and to former President Theodore Roosevelt’s observation that the presidency is “a bully pulpit”.)

Basically, the non-profit blogger exchange invites anyone who “works for or with mission-based organizations” to trade blogs with another blogger focused on the “third sector” for the day. I’m joining in, and hope other folks who blog and work with nonprofits will join in as well. The exchange starts on September 12th, but the deadline to register to participate is August 31 – if you’re interested, visit the site and put your name in the hat – you might become the first ever guest author on this blog.

August 31, in most of the world, is written as 31/08. If you’re an Israeli blogger (with bad handwriting?), 3108 might look like the word “blog”, and you’d be inspired to start World Blog Day, a simple project that encourages bloggers around the world to link to five blogs they haven’t linked to previously. Ideally, people will go further and link to blogs from countries they don’t know much about and will learn something about in the process of choosing and linking.

Unsurprisingly, we’re hugely supportive of this idea over at Global Voices. David “El Oso” Sakasi’s recent post gives some hints for places to look for great global blogs as well as a bit of background on the idea.

If you’re intimidated by the idea of finding five blogs from countries you know little about, don’t be. We’ve spent the last six months making it easy for you over at the Global Voices BridgeBlog index. While there aren’t blogs listed for every nation, dozens of nations have long, rich lists of great bridgeblogs. Or you could read Ndesanjo Macha’s recent post and find new voices just within the Tanzanian blogosphere…

Again, I’m in. Visit the World Blog Day site to learn how you can participate as well.

The switch where David Ortiz starts at guard for the Packers and Brett Favre is the new closer for the Sox? That one I’m less enthusiastic about…

I’m on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, Washington, at the moment, participating in a board meeting and planning retreat for WorldChanging.com. I’ve been a spotty contributor to WorldChanging over the past year, but have been trying to do my part, sitting on the board of the non-profit company that operates the site.

(Guilted by the thought of showing up at this meeting without having posted anything, I banged out quick articles on zinc supplements in Bangladesh and tropically tolerant software in Ghana. And because the site’s managing editor is trying to participate in the retreat, not write his usual ten thousand words a day, WorldChanging is running some back content, including an interview Alex Steffen did with me months back, now with a new introduction, where he counts coup in convincing me to become a WorldChanging contributor, board member and now board president…)

I’m feeling incredibly lucky at the moment to be involved with two virtual communities that are trying to create online spaces for conversations that rarely take place in the physical world. There’s a huge number of similarities between WorldChanging and Global Voices and at least as many differences, but the gathering is getting me tremendously psyched to bring together some of the Global Voices team at a conference this December in the UK. Lots more on that as we get closer to the date.

A confession: like many bloggers, I go through stretches where I compulsively check my “status” – the number of other bloggers linking to this blog and my resulting position on the “A-List” (or in my case, C- or D-List) of bloggers. Blogpulse, my ego-inflating (or deflating) site of choice, sees 40-odd links to this blog in the past month and tells me that there are at least 1600 bloggers more popular than I am this month…

(Which, honestly, is pretty cool. Thank you all for reading and for linking.)

Loïc LeMeur, entrepreneur, author and blogger, has an honest – and slightly cranky – post on his blog, noting that the various status-ranking tools available to bloggers (Technorati and Feedster are his specific targets) do a poor job of ranking bilingual bloggers like him. Loïc’s French-language blog is one of the most popular French language blogs on the web, and his English blog is quite well read in its own right.

Loic notes that Technorati et. al., rank the two blogs separately, rather than considering them as a single work. Blogpulse does likewise, ranking his French blog 469th, with 101 links in the past month, and his English blog 862nd, with 64 links. For the fun of it, I took blogpulse citation and ranking data for a dozen blogs, calculated an equation that relates citation numbers to rank (for those who care about the geekery, log(citations) and log(rank) covary with R^2=0.98 for this very small data set) and calculated the rank of Loïc’s joint blogs – 221st with 165 links, putting him firmly within most definitions of an A-list.

Whether Loïc is an A-list blogger or two B-list bloggers isn’t generally the sort of question I’m interested in, but the rest of his post raises some interesting questions for bridgebloggers as a whole. Loïc notes that there are a number of possible strategies a bilingual blogger can implement to engage in a global conversation:

- Write only in English, since English has become a lingua franca for the blogosphere, and alienate your local readers.

- Write only in your native language, though comment on blogs in English and other languages, sometimes translating them for your readers. Accept that this means your input into global conversations will be limited.

- Translate every post so that it appears in English and your local language. While this maximizes readership and inclusion in the conversation, it’s an enormous effort.

- Maintain different weblogs in English and your local language. Occasionally translate between the two, but cover some topics in one and others in the other.

While I wish every bilingual blogger had the time, energy and inclination to pursue the third strategy, I find many of the bloggers I’m most interested in follow the fourth strategy, writing on different topics in English and another language. Knowing that this is what Loïc does, I subscribe to both his English and French feeds – while I don’t read French, I don’t read it well enough that I can usually tell if he’s writing about a topic of interest to me, in which case I’ll plug the entry into Babelfish (or, increasingly, into the excellent translation widget built into Tiger…)

This isn’t a worksable strategy for reading my friend Ndesanjo, though – tragically, automated Kiswahili to English translation lags way behind machine translation between romance languages. And since my knowledge of Kiswahili starts and ends at “Jambo!”, I’d have a hard time deciding which posts on Jikomboe to follow… On the other hand, I would hate for Ndesanjo to stop blogging in Kiswahili and focus on his English blog, as I think his primary blog sends two critical messages: that there are Swahili speakers on the web and that people more comfortable writing in Swahili than in English should be able to share their opinions and views in the same ways that English speakers do.

Ndesanjo’s a great example of one of the challenges Loïc’s post raises: if there’s a Kiswahili blogger A-list, Ndesanjo is it. When I met Tanzanian blogger Idya Nkya in Cape Town a few weeks back, I wasn’t at all surprised to discover that Inya and Ndesanjo are old friends. Ndesanjo appears to be single-handedly dragging his countrymen onto the web one at a time, recently convincing prominent Tanzanian opposition candidates that they needed blogs. (Okay, so they haven’t posted on them yet, but it’s just a matter of time… :-)

What would a list like Technorati’s Top 100 or Blogpulse’s Top 40 look like if there were separate lists for different languages? If we featured top French, Spanish, Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Swahili blogs, would people be driven to find out what top bloggers in other languages were talking about? Will Ndesanjo become the blog celebrity Hoder (who blogs in English and Persian) has become as the Swahili blogosphere blossoms? Or will we ignore the reminder that there are other vibrant conversations taking place on the web and be content to know only about the conversations that are easy for us to read?

Obviously, this is a problem we’re trying to address at Global Voices. Having folks like Haitham Sabbah on board – who can translate, both linguistically and culturally, from the Arab blogosphere to the English-speaking one – is letting us open conversations that would be otherwise closed to part of the world. And as we’re starting to look for funding to expand our coverage and content, Rebecca and I are interested in bringing dedicated translators on board to help bridge more of these conversations.

But I worry that there’s still a sense that the English-language blogosphere is “the big time” and that blogs not in English (at least in part) aren’t part of the global conversation in the same way that English language blogs are. As the next billion Internet users – who will speak Chinese, Portuguese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Xhosa better than they speak English – come online, this attitude is likely to limit the horizons of people who look to the web for a bigger picture.

Sleepless in Sudan breaks the news that Humanitarian Air Service, the no-cost “airline” operated by the UN’s World Food Programme to deliver aid workers to refugee camps throughout the Darfur region of Sudan, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

An earlier post from Sleepless details the unique service provided by HAS – no tickets, baggage delivered to the tarmac, and a ticketing system involving a list where you can add your name and hope there’s a seat on the plane for you.

HAS is out of fuel, and has halted most of its services. As a result, Sleepless reports:

No more flights, no visitors or new arrivals, no supplies. No visiting finance manager to come and pay local salaries, no spare parts and no computers or other desperately awaited gadgets delivered by hand from Khartoum. At least food aid has been pre-positioned in most locations, and some cargo flights are still going ahead for now.

Guess the high price of gasoline is affecting all of us… One wonders how little money would be involved with providing adequate fuel supplies to HAS and how this would compate to US military expenditure in Iraq or Afghanistan.
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