The Prodigal Son around the world

This post comes to you from the Sunbird Capital Hotel in Lilongwe, Malawi. It's a bit run down, in the approved way of sleepy African city hotels, but clean and comfortable, and the flowers on the dining tables are real. The service may be leisurely but the friendly helpfulness of the staff never fails. I feel much more at home here than in the icily glamorous Intercontinental Citystars in Cairo. (Please relax, PC, I have not forgotten the conference.)

I am here to discuss financial switches and sundry other technical details with colleagues from Malawi, Rwanda, Ghana, the United States and the Philippines. This may sound boring to the uninitiated, until you learn that the dominant local switch was recently thrown into disarray (or, greater disarray than before) when its CEO was arrested for "pornographic acts". Naturally I didn't rest until I got the full story - which turned out to be that he'd been photographed kissing a woman dressed in bra and panties. Malawians are so conservative. When Mozambican bankers run off the rails, they do it in style - exemplified by the central bank official who earlier this year got drunk at one of Maputo's most popular restaurants and expressed his dissatisfaction with the bill by producing a pistol and firing it into the ceiling. (That's the sort of story that's fun to tell foreigners when you want to impress them with the perils of Africa, but the fact is that it's no longer possible to get away with such idiocy in Mozambique. Not only was this top government official arrested, but since his boss discovered that he wasn't at work due to being locked in a police cell awaiting charge, the central bank has no longer required his presence. We await the trail.)

To approach the subject of bad behaviour from a completely different angle, our sister bank here in Malawi is linked with a recent downturn in prostitution. The main cash crop here is tobacco, and tobacco auctions attract hordes of good-time girls looking to separate newly cashed-up farmers from their money before they can get home to their wives. It seems the market has dried up considerably since our sister bank made savings accounts accessible to the rural poor and opened a branch just outside the auction house.

Over breakfast today our American colleague told a story about a pastor he knows whose work has taken him around the world. On one occasion this pastor led a group of American teenagers in a session on the parable of the prodigal son, asking them to read it and then to summarise the story in their own words and to explain what sin had been committed. The statement that "there was a great famine in the land" went right past these teenagers; the sin was that the prodigal son had squandered his inheritance. Later the pastor did the same exercise with teenagers in St Petersburg, Russia, a city which has seen its share of hardship. These young people noticed the famine and reasoned that as a result, the son would lose his inheritance anyway. For them, his sin was that he had abandoned his family. Finally the pastor led a group of teenagers in the same study in Tanzania. They noted that a man was eating worse than his employer's pigs, and for them the greatest sin of the story was that the community had permitted this degradation to happen.

A far-off evening

No more than a quick photo essay today. In truth my memories of Luxor and Cairo become harder and harder to summon up, now that a widening gulf of everyday challenges separates me from them. This will be a lesson to me: get the blog posts up quickly after the next holiday, before the central bank can get in edgeways with their unreasonable reporting requests.

The view from my dining table in Midan Hussein, Old Cairo. "Midan" means "square"; the Hussein referred to is the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, whose relics are preserved in the mosque on the right of this picture.

The view in the other direction, with the minarets of Al-Azhar mosque cunningly disguising themselves as chair finials. Al-Azhar is a centre of Sunni orthodoxy which keeps getting mentioned in Albert Hourani's A History of the Arab Peoples (a very dense read, which I'm still working through). Hourani is so parsimonious with his human interest that it's good to be able to put a facade to a name.

I hope this shot doesn't give anyone headaches, but it does epitomise the endless round of vendors who throng the Midan Hussein restaurants. That over-laden boy is hawking bread to the restaurants, without much success that I could see. The vendors who did best were those selling luxuries, like music - lute-players (some commenter will correct my musical terminology) will join your table and play your request for a fee. (Those elegant missiles in the background, by the way, are metal parasols which open to shelter the crowds who gather before the mosque on Fridays.)

I ate chicken kebab on a bed of some parsley-like salad, and drank lemon juice (lots of it: throughout my trip I must have drunk about three times as much as usual in the arid heat). That meal was the most expensive I had in Egypt outside the five-star conference hotel. It would have been more so if I hadn't insisted on an itemised bill, which brought the price down by a quarter, and then corrected an arithmetical error, which saved me another twenty Egyptian pounds or so. Throughout the negotiations I cast frequent glances over the cashier's shoulder to the tourist policeman on the corner of the square; I didn't need to call him over, but he may have had something to do with the restaurant's flexibility.