Back to the Congo.

Since last Tuesday morning I am on my way to the Democratic Republic of Congo; with a detour through Kenya (a few days to meet friends) and South Africa (three weeks to support the Dutch team to the semi-finals). I will then be in the DRC for six months - coming back the end of January 2011.

So, because I am back in Africa, I will blog at Coding in the Congo in the months to come.

Diversity.

So the Dutch parliamentary elections took place and the result is horrible (in total there are 150 seats):

Party Peter's summary Seats Change

VVD The liberals 31 +9

PVDA The labor party 30 -3

PVV The right 24 +15

CDA The christen-democrats 21 -20

SP The socialists 15 -10

GL The greens 10 +3

D66 The social-democrats 10 +7

CU The religious ones 5 -1

SGP The more strict religious ones 2 +0

PVD Yes, a party for animals 2 +0

The result is bad for two reasons:

1. It will be difficult to create a stable government that survives to the next elections because the voters either went for very left or very right. Our queen now has to appoint an 'informateur' who will meet party leaders and try to come up with a solid government: i.e. a combination of parties that are like-minded, has a majority, and consists out of as few parties as possible.
2. The biggest winner is the PVV. While they have some good points, they have many (many) bad ones: they want to stop (Islamic) immigration into the Netherlands all together, no money should be spend on development aid, and the role of the European Union should be diminished substantially. Why are so many Dutch people - almost 1.5 million of them - afraid of the rest of the world?

I like the following poster from Loesje:

Purity and Exile.

I just finished "Purity and Exile" by Liisa Malkki - associate professor of anthropology at Stanford [1]. The book is based upon anthropological fieldwork done in 1985/1986 in Tanzania’s regions of Rukwa and Kigoma. Her subjects of study are the Hutu refugees that fled Burundi in 1972 when the the Tutsi-controlled Burundi army initiated mass killings of the country's majority group the Hutu; an estimated 100,000 people were killed.

After placing the massacre in historical context - discussing the long history of oppression and inequality between Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi - Malkki gets to the core of her argument: "The social and imaginative processes of the construction of nationness and identity can come to be influenced by the local, everyday circumstances of life in exile, and how spatial and social isolation of refugees can figure in these processes."

In brief, there were two groups of Hutu refugees in Tanzania. One group was settled in a carefully planned, physically isolated refugee camp in Mishamo. The other group lived in Kigoma - a city on Lake Tanganyika - outside of any camp context and dispersed in non-refugee neighborhoods. These two groups ascribed meanings to national identity and history, to notions of home and homeland, and to exile as a collectively experienced condition in very different ways. The "camp refugees" were constantly engaged in the construction and reconstruction of their (Hutu) history as a people. The "town refugees", on the other hand, had not constructued a categorically distinct, collective identity. Rather than defining themselves as “the Hutu refugees" or "Hutu", they tended to seek ways of assimilating and inhabiting multiple shifting identities derived or borrowed from the social context of the township.

An interesting read; the 352 pages were finished quickly.

[1] Liisa Helena Malkki. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Floribert Chebeya found death.

Floribert Chebeya - a leading human rights activist in the DRC - was found dead in Kinshasa, Amnesty said yesterday. He died of unknown causes after being summoned to meet the head of the national police force last Tuesday. Please see here for a little bit more information. Amnesty has called for an investigation into his death.

Floribert Chebeya

Dutch elections and migration.

On June 9th there are elections in the Netherlands. We have 10 parties in parliament and they are quite different - we even have a party for animals in parliament [1] - so the different leaders battling over their party programs is great entertainment.

On May 19th Nyfer published a report arguing that non-western immigration into the Netherlands costs the Dutch government 7.2 billion euros a year. The report, commissioned by the PVV (the Dutch right-wing party) is here in Dutch. The reason is that these immigrants make more use of the welfare state and pay less tax than the average native. They are also more likely to be unemployed, criminal, etc.

I finally read the report (127 pages) while in the plane to the Netherlands. The report's scope is very limited; solely looking at the budgetary effects of non-western immigration on the Dutch government's budget. Given this the report seems solid.

Geert Wilders

Unfortunately (but expectedly), the PVV now uses it as ammunition in the Dutch election. To quote Geert Wilders - leader of the PVV - "Ten years of unchanged immigration policy means a cost of 72 billion for Dutch Society. The fact that mass-migration is also financially disastrous emphasizes the necessity of PVV's proposals such as an immigration stop for Islamic countries, a limitation on other immigrants and for upcoming 10 years not paying benefits to immigrants [own translation]."

Three things:

1. How do we get Islamic countries to have a special treatment? That's only 1/3rd of all non-Western immigrants into the Netherlands!?
2. In addition to the above, the PVV also wants to get out of the EU, get rid of the euro and stop all Dutch development aid. What world does he live in?
3. I can't wait to start writing my dissertation. In Eastern Congo we find that migration is positively correlated with public goods provision. Can't wait to provide ammunition to PVV's opposing camps.

[1] The following ten parties are currently in the Dutch parliament (the ones starred are currently in the government):

Party Full name (in Dutch) Peter's summary Seats

CDA* Christen Democratisch Appèl The christen-democrats 41

PVDA* Partij van de Arbeid The labor party 33

SP Socialistische Partij The socialists 25

VVD Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie The liberals 22

PVV Partij voor de Vrijheid The right 9

GL GroenLinks The greens 7

CU* ChristenUnie The religious ones 6

D66 Democraten 66 The social-democrats 3

SGP Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij The more strict religious ones 2

PVD Partij voor de Dieren Yes, a party for animals 2

That's science. From Dirk Jan.

A post from... the Netherlands, where I arrived last Wednesday (last week was therefore rather busy and thus no posts). To get things going again hereby a comic that goes to the heart of science.

Normally these "Dirk Jan" comics are about many different other topics: here another intellectually stimulating one, the sign reads "Men, please sit down while peeing".

USAID/QED conference.

It is 420am and I am at Penn Station; waiting for my train to Washington, DC. About a year ago we received a grant from USAID which made it possible to launch Voix des Kivus. I'm heading to a two-day "mid-term" conference - organized by QED - to present our project. Let's see.

CAPERS.

CAPERS - the Comparative African Political Economy Research Seminar - is a joint NYU-Columbia Working Group for scholars of African political economy and development. It takes place once a semester, a maximum of twenty people attend, and working papers are 'presented'. That is, because people read all the papers in advance, the hour that is booked for each paper is spend completely on discussion. A total of six paper are discussed, there is lunch in between and dinner afterwards. Of those six papers 3 are from faculty and 3 are from students, each faculty paper has a student from the other university as discussant, and vice versa for a student paper.

Last Friday the 3rd CAPERS took place; this time at NYU (last time was at Columbia). As always faculty to student ratios were high (around 1 to 3), and because everybody was well-prepared and we know each other by now and thus we feel free to say what we think the discussions were great. Great to be in in a room with smart people discussing African political economy and development issues!

MONUSCO. Where is that "O" coming from?

Since years the world’s largest UN peacekeeping force (currently around 20,000 peacekeepers) is located in the Democratic Republic of Congo; MONUC after its French acronym for Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo.

MONUC HQ in Sud Kivu.
Picture Simon made when we were in Bukavu last summer.

Recently the Congolese government has asked for them to leave (here). Kinshasa argues that the UN is no longer necessary; most of the fighting is over and its own forces are ready to fill the gap left by MONUC's withdrawal. I am not the biggest fan of MONUC, but this is nonsense and the UN should stay: fighting is not over (especially in the east) and Congolese forces are definitely not able to fill the gap: most haven’t been paid in many months, the Congelese army is guilty of raping and killing civilians, etc. It is more likely Kinshasa wants them to leave for two other reasons:

1. On June 30 the DRC will celebrate its 50th year of independence from Belgium; indeed, symbolically it is probably not great to the world's largest foreign force in your country;
2. Elections are coming up - expected in July 2011 for the legislative and October 2011 for the president - and MONUC not only did most of the logistics in the last one, they also monitor.

A new UN proposal is now on the table. The United Nations will withdraw 2,000 peacekeepers by June 30 (oh so symbolically), but the remaining 20,000 leave only when security improves, France's ambassador to Congo - Pierre Jacquemot - said on Monday. He also said that MONUC may be renamed to include an "S" in the acronym as the organization is refocused on security and stabilization: "The mission of 'MONUSCO' will be focused on essential tasks: the protection of the population and the stabilization of peace." Great; another acronym to learn. Btw, where is that "O" coming from? Security is Sécurité and Stabilization is Stabilisation in French; so no "O"s there. Are we talking about COngo or maybe Observation = Observation? Pierre Jacquemot: HELP.

Matthew effect.

This evening I read a literature overview by Duncan Watts of recent work on the analysis and modeling of networks and networked dynamic systems in mathematics, physics, sociology and computer science [1]. It briefly noted the Matthew effect; also know as the Yule process, the Gibrat principle, cumulative advantage, and, most recently, as the preferential attachment process. I like "Matthew effect" though, coming straight from the Bible which clearly explains the concept:

"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." (Matthew 25:29, New Revised Standard Version)

[1] Duncan J. Watts. 2004. The 'New' Science of Networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, pp. 243-70.

Nicholas Christakis.

I just saw this TED talk by Nicholas Christakis; he is Professor at Harvard and works a lot with James Fowler. The people that read this blog once in a while - hi mom - know that I am very interested in "networks". That is, how behavior is influenced by a person's position in society. Christakis and Fowler also wrote a fantastic book called "Connected". Great TED talk!

Clustering standard errors.

My dissertation's puzzle

Observation 1: The provision of public goods - roads, wells, schools, etc. - is crucial for economic development. Some villages in developing countries are able to provide them, while others are not. There is a large literature that asks: "Why?" The answer most often given is "(ethnic) diversity". The reason is that diverse villages have a harder time sanctioning non-contributors, preferences for public goods can differ across groups, and a million other reasons. Observation 2: Migration is one of the principal characteristics of the developing world; especially of conflict zones. In Eastern Congo, for example, almost 2/3rd of all people have been displaced by war at least once between 1996 and 2007. There is, however, no work that looks at the impact of migration on public goods provision. Puzzle: Intuitively one would expect that migration leads to less public goods provision: their arrival creates diversity (native versus immigrant), it could create tensions in the village, etc. So I carefully looked at our DRC data and found that villages with migrants actually have more public goods! Controlling for many confounds, this result held across the board: for wells, widening roads, clearing roads, patrols, schools and productive measures. Dissertation: In my dissertation, as a result, I will ask two main questions: 1) is this a causal story? 2) if yes, how this could this be? [1]

Clustered standard errors

When presenting my regression results I got the question: "Did you cluster your standard errors?". This is an important question. The data I used for these regressions is data from our baseline survey: in 2007 we held a survey among five households in each of over 600 randomly-selected villages in Eastern Congo, thereby obtaining information on over 3,000 households and well over 20,000 people.

Running a naive regression on this data is likely to give me wrong results because the standard errors that come with it assume that each observation is independent of all other observations in the data set. The latter, however, is not likely to be the case with my data because households of the same village are likely to be more similar on a wide variety of measures than are households that are not part of the village. As a result part of my data is correlated - this type of correlation is called intraclass correlation. The higher this intraclass correlation the less unique information each household provides and this has to be taken into account when running regressions; one has to inflate the standard errors to take this correlation into account. I therefore have to run my regression making sure that I cluster the standard errors at the village level (one can also use a multilevel model).

The answer to the above question was 'yes'; I had clustered my standard errors. Despite the fact that my standard errors - as expected - were substantially higher than would have been in the naive regression, I did not only find that (as the literature suggests) ethnic diversity is negatively correlated with public goods provision, migration (controlling for diversity and many other things) is positively correlated. Indeed a puzzle! One that I am very intrigued by and I hope to figure out why this could be the case in upcoming years.

[1] I have my proposal that includes a much more detailed discussion - also discussing endogeneity issues, hypothesizes different mechanisms how the relationship could be causal, etc. - that I will post online soonish.

Flights, and upcoming months.

My flights for upcoming months are finally booked. It took some effort as it was an optimization problem with quite a few constraints: 1) I have to be in the DRC from July - January for fieldwork, 2) I had already booked a ticket Nairobi - Johannesburg because of the World Cup (here), 3) of course I want to see my parents, and 4) it should be as cheap as possible. Ready? Here we go:

May 25: New York -> Dublin -> Amsterdam;

June 15: Amsterdam -> Istanbul -> Nairobi;

June 18: Nairobi -> Johannesburg;

July 5: Johannesburg -> Nairobi;

January 12: Nairobi -> Istanbul -> Amsterdam;

January 26: Amsterdam -> Dublin -> New York.

So in June I stay several days in Kenya? Yep. Meeting a friend and getting to know Nairobi a bit. How do I get to the Congo? Normally one flies to Kigali, but the flights were really expensive (around $500). So, now I plan to take a bus to Kigali via Kampala (around $50). A great way to see a bit of Kenya and Uganda as well.

Hell.

From xkcd:

Peter = ABD.

"A thesis proposal" is done. Now the rest.

Last Tuesday I successfully defended my dissertation proposal. In brief, in the third year of the PhD we are expected to write a dissertation proposal (takes about a year). Then, after finding two professors that sponsor the proposal, one has to defend it to a committee consisting of four professors. I did so last Tuesday. It was great to spend well over an hour with four very smart people discussing solely my dissertation. So, now I am “All But Dissertation”. That is, now it starts: I actually have to write that thing.

Wave of work
The days before my defense I avoided not-dissertation-related work. So, after celebrating Tuesday evening, I opened my Gmail Wednesday morning and clicked on my starred emails and almost fell over backwards. A brief summary of what’s ahead before I leave to Europe and Africa on May 25:

• DRC network project (with Neelan): Finish games and protocol. Meet with several professors to make sure it makes sense. Run pilot at NYU lab. Revise our IRB application.
• DRC impact evaluation (with Macartan, Caroline and Raul): Finish fill-out forms so that the field teams can geo-locate over 5,500 villages. Clean baseline survey. Present the evaluation design at CAPERS this Friday. And lots (lots!) of other preparation as Raul and I will be in the field for over 6 months.
• CSDS (with Liz and Neelan): Build resource webpage. Write (sampling) code in R.
• Sierra Leone network project (with Neelan): Finish protocol and survey questions. Meet with several professors to make sure it makes sense. Meeting at IRC's HQ downtown. Get IRB approval.
• Logistics: Get Visas. After putting it in the washing machine (story here), I also need a new passport. Buy lots of stuff: flights, netbook, Kindle, external harddrive, etc. Sublease apartment.
• Voix des Kivus (with Macartan): Write expansion protocol for our Technical and Field Coordinators (we are expanding from 4 to tens of villages). Macartan and I still need to get a lot of paid-out-of-our-own-pocket money back; so several hours with receipts ahead. May 18-19: USAID meeting in Washington. Get several batteries (designed by Columbia's engineering department) from Tanzania to our villages in the DRC, so that people don't have to walk for hours to charge their phones.
• Dissertation: Formally work out my dissertation's mechanisms. Get IRB approval. Share proposal widely (policymakers, academics, people in the DRC, etc.).

All great stuff!

The Office UK.

This has nothing to do with my dissertation. Although, maybe it does. It certainly keeps me away from work once in a while. The Office UK - and especially the regional manager David Brent - is absolutely brilliant; typical British-style humor. Hereby one episode:

I also recently came across this episode where David Brent visits Microsoft UK; absolutely fantastic!

IRC photo.

Tomorrow CSDS will host a workshop on leading research on the social impacts of development interventions. Raul and I will give a presentation on the impact evaluation we help Macartan Humphreys with in Eastern Congo. In brief, that project is a large community- driven reconstruction project implemented by the IRC and Care International. There will be lots of IQ points in the crowd and we have almost two hours (we present 45 minutes and then we have more than one hour for discussion), so we prepared well to get most out of it. While preparing I came across this picture (I did not make this picture - I haven't seen roads this bad yet):

Respect for the IRC, and all those other organizations doing good work in difficult circumstances!

China in Africa.

Tazara line (train Tanzania - Zambia)

“As soon as we have problems, we ask someone else to take care of them for us,” Isaac continued. “We ask the Europeans. We ask the Americans. We ask the Chinese. We will run this train into the ground, and then we will tell the Chinese we need another one. This is not development.” I thought of the wreckage by the tracks. In China, there is no such thing as metallic waste. Armies of migrant workers scour the countryside with hammers and chisels, collecting and selling every scrap to the insatiable smelters that feed the country’s industries. Here, by contrast, was a land without industry.

This is Columbia Professor Howard French in a recent article in The Atlantic [1] in which he discusses the infrastructure projects currently being undertaken in Africa by the Chinese. Does it promise the transformation of the continent, or merely its exploitation? He ends with the following, less-then-optimistic paragraph:

I [Howard French] asked him [a Congolese lawyer in Lubumbashi] if the arrival of the Chinese was a new and great opportunity for the continent, as some have said. “The problem is not who is the latest buyer of our commodities,” he replied. “The problem is to determine what is Africa’s place in the future of the global economy, and up to now, we have seen very little that is new. China is taking the place of the West: they take our raw materials and they sell finished goods to the world What Africans are getting in exchange, whether it is roads or schools or finished goods, doesn’t really matter. We remain under the same old schema: our cobalt goes off to China in the form of dusty ore and returns here in the form of expensive batteries.”

[1] Howard W. French. 2010. The Next Empire. The Atlantic. May 2010.

CSDS/ASC miniconference, and Latent Social Spaces.

Last Saturday was great. The Applied Statistics Center and the Center for the Study of Development Strategies held a miniconference at Columbia University for those who had received summer research grants. Eleven people presented their projects' research designs. Topics ranged from the long-term impact of the Peruvian civil war on local level institutions to evaluating the impact of education on HIV/AIDS on sexual behavior. Together with Neelan, I presented our network project in Eastern Congo. Faculty was present, everybody had to read all the project descriptions in advance, and everybody was assigned as a discussant to at least one presentation; we had many long and lively discussions. From seven onwards we had dinner at Macartan's place to continue the discussions in a more informal setting. It was really nice to have people from political science, economics and statistics discussing similar topics together - we do not do this often enough.

Latent Space Models and Aggregate Relations Data

I was discussant for Tyler McCormick's project called "How many X’s do you know?". Tyler is is a PhD Candidate in the statistics department and works together with Tian Zheng. The project builds on Peter Hoff's 2005 seminal article on Latent Space Models [1].

Aggregate relations data

It is often difficult to obtain information about a sensitive group; HIV/AIDS-infected people, people that have been raped, etc. One could ask in a survey "Are you a member of X?" - where X is the sensitive group - and then add up all the people that say 'yes'. However, it is unlikely that people tell the you truth. One can get around this problem by asking "How many members of X do you know?". The answers to these questions is so-called aggregate relations data.

Homophily and diadic interdependence

However, people are more likely to know 'similar' people - something that is called homophily. For example, if X is "Rose" - a common name among older women - and people are more likely to know individuals of the same age it is likely that older people know more people called "Rose" than younger people. If I want to estimate the size of a respondents network based on this information I would over (under) -estimate the network size of older (younger) respondents.

This complicates research on networks. The figure below gives 2 possible network structures among three people. The dotted line is a link that could be formed. On the left hand side we have that T is - for example - friends with N and P (the solid lines), while on the right hand side this is not the case. Consequently, it is more likely that N and P become friends in the structure on the left then on the right.

In other words, whether N and P form a link is dependents on how N and P are connected with a third person. This is the defining characteristic of networks and is called "diadic interdependence".

It is also highly problematic. For example, let's say we want to run a logit or probit regression where the dependent variable is whether person i and j form a link. Whether a link is formed dependents on whether i and j have links with other people (how they are connected in the network). The problem is that one can't just control for that as those other links are dependent variables in their own right. The problem is similar to autocorrelation in time series models.

Latent social space

A solution to this is to bring structure to the error term by making use of a so-called latent network space. In brief, all people have a position in an unobserved d-dimensional social space that gives us information about the underlying social structure. Actors with closer positions in the latent space are more likely to have interactions. For example, let's say that we have a two dimensional space and there is a polygon for the group of people called "Rose" - the size and shape of the polygon dependent on the group's variance over the two dimensions. Then an older person is more closely located to the "Rose"-polygon than than younger people.

Thus by combining the ideas of latent network spaces and aggregate relational data one can get rid of diadic interdependence and obtain information about a sensitive group such as: 1) the size of HIV/AIDS-infected people in society, 2) whom to approach if one wants to find a HIV/AIDS-infected person (who is most likely to know one), and 3) how homogeneous is the group of HIV/AIDS-infected people.

Very interesting stuff!

[1] Peter D Hoff. 2005. Bilinear Mixed-Effects Models for Dyadic Data. Journal of the American Statistical Association. 100, 286-295.

Tropical Gangsters.

I just finished the book "Tropical Gansters" [1] by Robert Klitgaard; an academic and a policy advisor to developing country governments on economic strategy and institutional reform. The book is about his 1986-1988 experiences in Equatorial Guinea when he was an economist/administrator of a (for the country's size) enormous economic rehabilitation project funded by the World Bank. He worked (or at least tried to work) with a team of ministers to design a structural adjustment program, reform sectoral strategies, and undertake rehabilitation projects (see his CV for more information).

What struck me most in this book is how next to (of course) economic issues, especially politics - the process by which groups of people make collective decisions - is important for economic development. Klitgaard candidly writes about the difficulties he faces while (trying to) work because of coups attempts, the replacement of ministers at the whim of the president, and the importance of traditional leaders - in the President's home town of Mongomo - for national politics. Interesting as this is exactly why after studying economics I am now at Columbia. All in all, nice book and an informative read.

[1] Robert Klitgaard. 1991. Tropical Gangsters. One Man's Experience With Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa. New York: Basic Books.

Dubaifrika.

Last June reclamation and construction work began for La Cite du Fleuve; a huge Dubai-like city that is to be built in... the Congo river. Jason Stearns recently had a post on this. According to the plan, La Cite du Fleuve will span 375 hectares, include 10,000 apartments, 10,000 offices, 2,000 shops, 15 diplomatic missions, 3 hotels, 2 churches, 1 university, 3 day care centers and a shopping mall. It will take 8 years to build. The project is financed by Mukwa Investments via Hawkwood Properties, a Lusaka based company that serves US and European investors. Here are two pictures after doing a bit of google-ing:

I was first planning to post my following, very constructive reaction and leave it at that: WTF!

While I am still of that same opinion, this project also reminded me of a recent TED talk by Stanford economist Paul Romer. In brief Romer's idea to help countries break out of poverty is the creation of "charter cities". The latter are city-scale administrative zones governed by a coalition of nations. On his website he discusses three cases: (1) Canada develops a Hong Kong in Cuba, (2) Indonesians flock to a manufacturing hub in Australia, and (3) states in India compete for the chance to build a charter city. What about a fourth one: (4) La Cite du Fleuve? Watch the TED talk or check out the website on Charter Cities.

Hattip to Caroline (the hub of CSDS) for the blog's title.

Post Hamptons.

So I am back from a weekend in the Hamptons; more specifically we were from Friday to Sunday in East Hampton; a village located in a beautiful area on New York's Long Island with much nature and close to the beach. It is also known as the "Playground of the Rich" where people with money helicopter in from New York for a weekend.

Two things made me think of Eastern Congo while in the Hamptons. First, there were a lot of 4x4s and wooden houses. In contrast to the Congo, however, the 4x4s were not owned by development agencies, and the median price of a house in the Hamptons is several million dollars; with a large number of them topping the tens of millions of dollars. Second, I noticed how upset I was with how Hamptonites spend their money: the excessively large houses; the large number of expensive cars standing in the driveways; the over-representation of shops like Ralph Lauren and Tiffany Jewelry Shop in city center; etc.

Probably what upset me most is that it struck me only now again that the difference between us living here and people living in Africa is so large. When I came back from fieldwork last summer I wrote a post using the words "what a fucked up world" when discussing the difference between my living standards here in New York and those I had in Africa. However, over the last months my life in New York has become 'normal' again; I order a bottle of wine when I like, I go to the cinema whenever I want, and I spend almost 100 dollars on a weekend in the Hamptons without thinking.

This sucks. Two things, though. First, when I came back last time from fieldwork I asked some colleagues (with much more field experience) whether they also had difficulties coming back from conflict-torn, poor regions into a city where it is normal to pay hundreds of dollars for a handbag. They said "yes". However, they also said that this feeling lessens over time. People seem to adapt quickly to new environments was their experience - the Hamptons made this clear for me. In addition, I can see how from an emotional point of view this is probably also a good thing. Second, I am happy, though, to go back to Africa soon. I miss it.

Me looking towards mom and dad (the Netherlands).