A positive headline about West Africa is a little bit of an occassion in itself! Coming on the heels of horrible, terrible, no good, very bad days in the Mother Earth department for going-on-two months, this calls for a link:
www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/02liberian.html
For those of us near and/or dear to Sierra Leone, this story hits close to home, because the drug trade has periodically tried to establish a way-station here as well. A fascinating factoid that sheds a lot of light on how the drug trade can so flexibly try to penetrate Africa to access European markets is that a fully fueled Cessna (the little six-seater, indeed) can apparently make its way from South or Central America all the way to West Africa without refueling. Adding to the appeal of exploiting developing countries for drug trafficking by buying off officials (or trying and failing, c.f. NYT article), is that there are a number of fairly unsupervised landing strips throughout the region. The Sierra Leone government successfully foiled a racket enabling cocaine runners a few years ago.
By the way, I've given it more thought and the generators are less like struggling refrigerators, and more like lots of gassy lawnmowers having a party without music. Next time you hear a leafblower herding freshly clipped grass, you can think of me dozing off to sleep! goodnight :)
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