Ladies and Gentlemen we present a drama in several acts offering broken bones, wrecked lenses and other fun adventures in, The White House Press Corps Smash Their Way Across Africa”, or, “How was your African trip dear?”. ‘Smashing!’.
U.S. President George W. Bush has just returned from a week-long trip to Africa, visiting Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia. My Washington colleague Jim Young and I joined dozens of other members of the White House press corps, went along for the ride with some of them getting more than they bargained for. Here’s a glimpse of life within the traveling White House “bubble” on the road in Africa.
Members of the press that regularly cover the White House on foreign trips have a pretty good gig. Travelling on Air Force One is a thrill, the hotels are always top notch and wherever we go the catering is delicious. On the President’s recent trip to Africa however, it didn’t lake long for the rough and tumble in a foreign land to test the ability of the travelling press (and Presidential doctor!) to adapt and make it home in one piece! Who said this was a cushy career?!
The first signal that we are traveling away from the land of milk and honey was the White House medical advisory, emailed to every member of the traveling press. There is one for most foreign trips but this three-page monster is the most comprehensive I have ever seen and enough to scare some folks from leaving their homes ever again! There are dozens of recommendations of the, “don’t drink this, don’t do that,” kind; mostly common sense and useful for those who don’t travel often.
My favourite ‘don’t' is the one about not eating any of the local food sold by food vendors. Like billions of others I ate street food all across Asia for nine years and only had food poisoning twice, contracted on both occasions at five-star hotels in capital cities. The advisory recommends we get immunized for no less than eight diseases, including meningitis, polio, typhoid and yellow fever, which is the one shot I get as it is the minimum required to get on the trip. The advisory says providing a yellow fever vaccination certificate is essential on arrival in some African countries and adds that without one we will not get further than Andrews Air Force Base.
Once my yellow fever card was handed over to members of the White House traveling staff we were on our way. There’s something about stepping into a plane in Washington at minus 10c degrees and 18 stepping off 18 hours later in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, into +35c degrees, that awakens the senses. The smell of diesel fumes, burning wood and sweat hang thick in the humid air. Not only are we eight hours ahead of Washington, but we are upside down in the southern hemisphere in the middle of an African summer. After a 30 minute bus ride, the arctic blast of air conditioning tells us that we have arrived at our press hotel. For the next six days there would be an awkward dance of alternating chill and stifling heat. Not really a big deal until you see what effect this has on camera equipment.
This hazy picture of President Bush and first lady Laura Bush climbing the steps to Air Force One in Ghana (can you make them out?), was taken on a clear, perfectly sunny day with a lens that was completely fogged from within by condensation between the lens elements - the result of being in an air conditioned hotel room overnight and then immediately taken into the equatorial heat. It sometimes takes ½ hour or longer until it de-fogs in these conditions and in the meantime you hope there are no important pictures to be made! If so, you shoot with whichever of your three cameras is the least foggy! Attempts to wipe the fog off the front lens element are futile as the condensation is INSIDE the lens and only acclimatizing to the conditions over time will result in a camera that’s usable again. To further exacerbate the problem, requests by the photographers to have the air conditioning turned off in our press vans for the sake of our equipment is usually met with screams of protest from the accompanying writers who for some reason would rather not suffer in the stifling heat. Who can blame them?
This picture shows a similar image from another stop on the trip without the lens fogging.
One thing that never changes on a White House trip, no matter where in the world we are travelling, are the extremely long days on the go. You are running off planes and into the back of deafening military helicopters which sometimes spew hot oil all over your clothes, and then jump into the motorcade. Repeat three more times in one day and you start to get the picture. Actually I love all of it. It’s definitely an adrenalin rush and sometimes it’s adrenalin alone that will get you through a tough day. We normally assemble at 6-7am and sometimes finish at midnight if there is a state dinner or such. On one of the days, we awake in Tanzania, fly to Rwanda for a full day’s schedule, then get back on the plane and fly six hours to Ghana. On the last day, we leave Ghana, cover Bush’s historic trip to Liberia, then overnight on Air Force One back to Washington. The long days working in unfamiliar environments, hoping you don’t have to break out the satellite phone to transmit your pictures (we never did), and constant time zone changes eventually take their toll on everyone and thankfully most trips don’t last more than a week. But the longer it goes, the more “silly” things start happening to people, sometimes with painful consequences.
For Reuters correspondent Deborah Charles, her day in Rwanda yields a painful experience. After Bush’s colourful airport arrival in Kigali, the 40-car Presidential motorcade takes off into the hills of the capital, winding its way at 80kmh along narrow streets and up steep roads to the genocide memorial and museum. In the time it takes our press van, quite a way back in the motorcade, to pull up at the site, President Bush’s limo has probably been stopped for a good 30 seconds and it’s time to do the 200m SPRINT with all your gear to be in place at the site where Bush will lay a wreath and visit the museum.
The U.S. President’s busy schedule doesn’t wait for a tardy press contingent and we probably run more than we walk on foreign trips in the travel pool. In her haste, running uphill and down dale on uneven rocks and steps, Deborah Charles trips and crashes to the ground. She reaches out to catch herself and CRUNCH, she snaps a bone or two in her wrist. Ouch! Despite the sharp pain, she soldiers on, records the sombre wreath laying and calls it in to colleague Toby Zakariah who is waiting at the press filing center across town, set up in the hotel made famous to you and I as “Hotel Rwanda”.
The President’s personal doctor is summoned, takes a look at her hand and recommends that she be taken immediately to the new U.S. Embassy in Kigali for the doctors there to take a look at it. Using unconventional means (Deborah was asked to not reveal how this was done) they make an x-ray of her wrist which proves inconclusive and splint it. She continues her duties in the White House press pool with the aid of some painkillers and is pictured later that day, complete with her splint, taking notes from White House Press Secretary Dana Perino on the flight to Ghana.
Apparently typing was excruciating and on at least one occasion live insects set up home wedged between her arm and the splint. It will be three more days on the go in Africa until she is able to get an accurate assessment of her injury. She was a real trooper throughout.
The next day, at the end of an outdoor press conference, both President Bush and Ghana’s President John Kufuor sign her splint in front of the world’s press setting the trend for Liberia’s President Elle Johnson-Sirleaf to do the same the following day in Monrovia.
Humanitarian activist Sir Bob Geldof travels with the press on the trip. I believe he was writing an article about Bush’s trip to Africa for a globally-published American news magazine and his name on a White House Press credential was an unusual sight. I hope he has his yellow fever shot card.
Finally the last day arrives, and it’s a big one. We wake up in Ghana and fly to Liberia, so recent riven by a civil war and now enjoying relative peace under Africa’s first female President.
We touch down and then it’s another wild helicopter (chopperliberia1.jpg and chopperliberia2.jpg) and motorcade ride, this time through the streets of Monrovia. (liberianmotorcade.jpg) There were thousands lining the motorcade route to greet the incredibly long procession of vehicles.
A ceremony at the Executive Residence, where President Bush is awarded Liberia’s highest civilian honour, followed by an outdoor lunch in impossibly hot and humid conditions right on the ocean front.
For the first time in the trip I was not bothered by the air conditioning wreaking havoc with my lenses as we filed our pictures indoors while the VIPs suffered outside. But the long days and hot weather were about to claim their next victim. This time it was a newspaper correspondent, who, in an obvious lapse of judgment, runs from a press event and instead of walking through a nearby opened glass doorway, smashes through a 3-metre tall plate glass wall. The sound of a thousand shards of glass smashing to the tiled floor in the lobby of the executive residence is deafening. President Bush’s doctor is again called into service, although the victim is relatively unscathed with some cuts to his arms and hands. Within moments he is bandaged up and can be seen in this picture typing away on his computer with bloodied hands, trying to report on whatever news of Bush eating lunch was more important than the fact he himself had just smashed through a plate glass window!!
Within minutes some poor staffer was sweeping the glass away.
With cuts, broken bones and exhaustion taking their toll on the travel pool, and with some beginning to talk superstitiously about how bad things come in sets of three, we are thankful to be back on the plane and ready for the 10 hour trip back to Washington.
However, the third bad thing has already happened and the evidence is sitting in an overhead luggage bin on the plane. More “broken glass”, this time in the form of a fellow wire photographer’s Canon 400mm F4 DO lens - about US$5,500 dollars worth - broken completely in half, (broken400.jpg) - another casualty of the whirlwind trip across five countries in six days with President Bush that left a trail of broken bones, broken gear and smashed glass.
For the record, both colleague Jim Young and I walk away unscathed and are very thankful for it. It was a great assignment full of wonderful picture opportunities and moments, but not for the faint hearted.
President Bush himself appeared on one or two occasions to be flirting with “danger” on his trip to Africa,
(1) Posing with a lion (bushlion.jpg), but he was not under any immediate threat since the creature had long since been stuffed (a gift from Tanzanian President Kikwete)
(2) Pretending to cut his hair (haircut.jpg) with a giant pair of golden scissors during a ribbon cutting at the new U.S. embassy in Rwanda, before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (condiscissors.jpg) thought it best that she “confiscate” them.
(3) An awkward moment with him and Laura Bush watching a skit about the benefits of sexual abstinence to protect again AIDS and pregnancy, performed by schoolchildren in Ghana and featuring a boy playing the part of a man begging for sex from a girl.
(4) He was in the line of fire from errant fly-balls in the dugout with the Little Saints team during a T-ball game in Ghana.
(5) Oh, and then there was the time he courted with the most extreme peril, making all the wrong moves on the dance floor during a state dinner in Accra.
The stuffed lion and the dancing picture were taken by White House photographers and subsequently presented during a slide show at an event in Washington this past week.
