Af-riikka

Two weeks in Brussels have passed by so quickly - it also means that already one tenth of my traineeship period at the European Commission has been completed. Have to say that I am still overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of this whole machinery of European development cooperation. From next week on, I am supposed to "replace" for a month one of our office workers who is moving to a EU delegation in the Philippines. That includes functioning as the expert on conflict prevention issues: I know the basic content of SSR (security sector reform), LRRD (linking relief, rehabilitation and development), SALW (Small Arms and Light Weapons), and some other nice abbreviations I have learnt so far, but it does not make me an expert...we'll see if I need to do something else besides taking notes in meetings. After work there is the limited amount of freetime in Brussels, which I have mostly been spending with other stagiaires. On my own I have been going to cinema, and it has lately ...

My bus voyage is interrupted for one night as we are sleeping the night at Kayes (former capital of Mali and reputedly the hottest town in West Africa...), near the border of Senegal. What a wonderful opportunity to put some old texts - Blogger sucks way too often with African internet connections - online! So here we go. The last movie I saw in Ouagadougou's film festival was a big, Hollywood-starred movie Blood Diamond. Both main actors, Leonardo DiCaprio (who spoke French a bit too quickly for me in the dubbed version, so I didn't quite get all the jokes) and Djimon Hounsou (originally from Benin, but nowadays totally americanized),were nomineed for Oscar. The story is about a South African (or Rhodesian, as the main character puts it) diamond smuggler, Danny Archer (Leo), who is doing business in Sierra Leone during the civil war in 1999. The war is basicly financed by the diamonds, which are found plentiful in the country. The plot includes obligatory moral lessons, a love...