On Being Off Another Kind of Grid In Guinea Bissau

If most Americans have heard of Guinea Bissau, it’s because of cocaine. The country is famous for being an easy transit point for the drug between South American and Europe. After all, the country is home to Africa’s only archipelago -- 80 islands just off the coast that don’t have much in the way of population. A few of them, though, do have airstrips left behind by the Portuguese colonists, making it easy to land a plane, offload and reload kilos of cocaine and take off again, virtually invisibly.

It’s unfortunate that the only thing we know about Guinea Bissau is drugs. In fact, people themselves there know very little about drugs. They know their country’s reputation, of course, and they privately acknowledge the likelihood that some of their top officials are involved in narco-trafficking.  But they don’t see drugs, or drug-related crime, on the streets.

Guinea Bissau is a poor country, and yet there’s something else missing from the country's streets (possibly because of the drug trade): NGOs. Recently, I drove a few hundred kilometers into the countryside for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and I could count on one hand the number of NGO signs I saw. Plan International has an office near Bafata, about three hours from the capital.  So does SOS Children.  Even in the capital, which in most African countries is clotted with NGO headquarters, there were very few establishments to be seen.  Bissau makes the Central African Republic, recognized by all the big aid players as an country in acute humanitarian crisis, look like an aid extravaganza.

It’s not like Bissau-Guineans are any richer than Central Africans (countries I compare because I visited both, for a Pulitzer Center project on the UN Peacebuilding Commission, and because it turns out they’re pretty comparable, at least in some ways).  But they do manage to seem a bit better off.  The territory is secure, unlike Central Africa.  There’s poverty, but there’s not destruction from recent violence.  The roads are better.

But I’m not sure that would make Bissau-Guineans feel much better.  Poverty is only relative if you have something to compare it to.   If you’re living it, it’s yours and it’s absolute.

Photo Credit: Radio Nederland