In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  Harry explains that it's rare to have strangers in your home – the Inuit have enough on their hands dealing with their vast extended families, so who needs the bother of strangers?

  He takes me outside to fetch the igunak. I've never been shocked by a slab of meat before, but this is a revelation: out of his shed Harry lugs a vast hunk of mouldly, slurry-covered meat about the size of your average engine block, wrapped in polythene. He unwraps it and instantly a foul and loathsome stench rises up, but before I can vomit over him, Harry starts attacking it with an axe. Call me naive, but it's the first time I've ever seen an axe used to cut a steak. He hacks off the end, pronouncing it fit only for dogs, and simultaneously the smell gets ten times worse. Ah, yes, he says, nose twitching in what looks like olfactory ecstasy. He hacks off a huge 4-kilo section of the middle, and we take it inside. He lays out a piece of mucky cardboard on the kitchen floor and suddenly everyone in the house, plus a bunch of strangers who appear out of nowhere, fall upon it in what I can only describe as a frenzy while I look on in amazement.

  Igunak is a speciality of Igloolik and is famous throughout the Arctic region. It's made from huge slabs of raw walrus meat that are rolled up, wrapped in plastic and secured with rope. These are then buried under piles of rocks and left for a year. First they rot during the summer months, then as winter sets in, they freeze. The idea is that they freeze before botulism takes hold – either way, the stuff offers up a fearsome stench, a little like durian fruit, but mainly like . . . well . . . imagine what rotting walrus might taste like: you don't really need ever to have smelt it – your imagination will be right on the money. This stuff is vintage 2005, now over a year old, and it is pronounced the bee's knees by Harry's folks.

  It's valuable stuff – this batch is worth $500 Canadian, and everyone in town knows about it. They'd heard that some bloke from London had convinced Harry to open a batch, and after a decent delay of about five minutes, they all start arriving and phoning for a chunk.

  I kneel on the floor next to Harry and dig in – no one looks up to offer me advice about which bit to eat so I grab the nearest piece. Someone throws me a knife and I slice off a few chunks. It tastes, frankly, disgusting. This might not sound surprising to you, but I have a pretty high tolerance for strange tastes and odd foods, so I was really hoping that I'd enjoy it. I try another piece, but no. Really, really disgusting. I persevere and keep eating more and more of it, hoping that I'll break through my disgust and start enjoying it. No. I try a bit of the intestines. No, that's worse. Harry warns me not to eat too much – first timers often make themselves sick on it.

  You don't say.

  I wonder if igunak is just an elaborate joke that they play on journalists, but the young kids are tucking in too – it's a kind of igunak madness.

  'Why do you like this stuff?' I ask.

  'It's an acquired taste,' Theo says. 'We grew up on it, and when the new batch comes out at the start of the winter season, it's a cause for huge celebration.'

  After 30 minutes or so, everyone collapses, spent from ingesting this toxic waste, and then more neighbours arrive. Just as when I arrived, there is no ceremony: they just drop their coats and shoes, smile at no one in particular, and hunker down on the floor to eat their fill. One elderly woman calls up on the UHF radio to ask for one of the young lads to bring some over as she can't walk.

  • • • • •

  The stormy weather continues , and I'm overcome by the desire to go home. I've tried to like Igloolik, I really have. But the truth is it's a bloody miserable place. Physically, it's a grid of terrapin huts clinging to the side of a small slope. There's no vegetation and no physical features other than snow and ice, the weather is gruesome and there's nothing to do.

  Marc and I are thoroughly disconsolate by now, so it's time to crack open the emergency supplies. Igloolik is a dry town and it's illegal for visitors to bring in alcohol. Luckily for us, having been warned that if the weather came in we'd be stuck for days, we'd decided to smuggle in a few litres of hard liquor, which we now drink like naughty teenagers. It transpires that Marc had scarfed all the bourbon himself one particularly depressing evening a little while back, so we mix the gin with 7-Up to make it vaguely palatable. Its a little like drinking lighter fluid (especially at the strength that Marc pours it).

  That night we drink rather a lot, and when we wake up, temperatures have plummeted to -25 and it seems as though winter may finally be here.

  Although extreme cold sounds like bad news to me, the town is abuzz with excitement. These people are wired differently: they genuinely love the cold and the new hunting opportunities it brings. It's very disturbing that winter is about a month late – I've noticed similar disruption to weather patterns back home, but up here in the Arctic Circle the shift is much more dramatic.

  Theo takes us out hunting on snowmobiles, but the trip doesn't go well. We don't find any animals – Harry says they are confused by the shifts in the weather. Theo does his best to keep things interesting by paddling out onto a patch of unfrozen water in a precarious-looking coracle-type kayak, but you can tell that his heart's not in it.

  We sit staring out beyond the ice at the ocean, scanning the water in vain for walrus. Quite what Theo would do if he saw one, I don't know. I don't fancy his chances of shooting one from the shore, let alone dragging it in using his tiny boat, but I'm sure he has a plan. In any case, we watch in vain for a couple of freezing hours. My feet are beginning to get that searing cold pain from standing on the ice, but I daren't complain in case it gives these hardened hunters more reason to pity my pathetic southern ways.

  To my relief, we finally move off and drive for an hour around the island, looking for a place to hunt. We stop every now and then, but we find nothing. My face is so cold from the wind chill that it feels like it's about to snap off. I try to ignore it, but when I smile, it looks like I'm doing a vampire impersonation and my lips are in danger of disintegrating. I give up trying to communicate and just sit there. Then Theo's machine breaks down, belching clouds of thick smoke and he has to abandon it. Soon afterwards, the skis on Harry's machine collapse and we have to cannibalize parts from another machine to get it going. Eventually it breaks down irreparably, so we tie it to the last working machine and head away from the hunting grounds.

  It's fair to say that our snowmobile hunting trip is an unqualified disaster, and we limp back into town. I sense that Theo's getting grumpy, although John and Harry are in good spirits. Marc and I scuttle back into the Tujormivik Hotel and our faces slowly defrost. I am secretly glad that there is only one more day of hunting left before I start the long hike home.

  But at our early meeting with Theo the next day it's immediately apparent that he's an angry man. There seem to be two reasons for this: first, that the snowmobile breaking down was our fault, which is an interesting reading of events (we forced them to drive on terrain that was unsuitable, apparently); and second, that one of Theo's friends told him about a news article I'd written. Nothing to do with me writing about the social problems in Igloolik (which I had been worried about), and everything to do with the fact that I said it had taken them seven or eight rifle shots before they killed the seal.

  So Theo is humiliated and apparently furious with me, and he's come for his expenses for having helped us. I wander off into town, keen not to cause more trouble. I go on a little tour of the town with one of the two policemen who keep the peace here. He tells me that domestic violence is one of the big problems, but the townspeople are to some extent self-governing. He's about to go south on holiday, and he can't wait for a beer.

  I wander down to the bay, which is now packed full of ice. After the ice had blown in, the sky cleared and everything froze over. The hunting season is finished for anyone whose boat is still here in the bay – there's no way of getting boats out now as the ice stretches for hundreds of metres.

  The change in the climate is dramatic this far north, and summer sea ice is melting at a rate of 9.6
per cent per decade, which is bad news if you're a polar bear or an ice-dwelling seal. But the most disturbing part of the trip is not the killing and eating of large sea mammals, but quite the opposite: the complete lack of them. Theo, for all his grumpiness, is one of the best hunters around, but although we had modern boats and rifles at our disposal, all we managed to find during two weeks of hunting was one small seal and a dead walrus. It's a huge amount of effort for precious little return, and a hunting-based culture may well be doomed in a place where people's cupboards are full of cans of subsidized food, and a pizza is just a subsidized phone call away.

  • • • • •

  To torture myself with contrasts, I'm off somewhere really hot again now. I've been telling my family that this one's going to be really difficult, but deep inside I'll admit that I'm over the moon. How bad can the Caribbean really be? I'm heading for Haiti.

  HAITI

  Hell's Kitchen

  POPULATION: 10 million

  PERCENTAGE LIVING ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY: 80%

  UNDP HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX: 154/177

  CORRUPTION PERCEPTIONS INDEX POSITION: 163/163

  GDP (NOMINAL) PER CAPITA: $528 (150/179)

  FOOD AID RECIPIENTS: n/a

  MALNUTRITION: 47% of the population

  It's a hot sticky night on Ocean Drive, the frouffed, bouffed, promenading fleshpot of Miami's South Beach, Florida. From my plate a lobster stares forlornly at the Ferraris, Range Rovers and Hummers that crawl the strip. The lobster seems to have been involved in a strange military torture experiment – it's been turned inside out, but is still attached to its shell. I sincerely hope this didn't happen whilst it was still alive.

  To the casual observer, Ocean Drive is the epitome of brash American glamour: beautiful whitewashed art nouveau buildings oozing glitz and cash, facing a glorious wide beach of white sand along which ladies with taut bodies and big hair saunter. Up close, though, the ladies and the buildings alike seem tacky, and the restaurants offer shabby food, dreadful service and spectacularly high prices.

  The sloshing of filthy lucre around here verges on the obscene, but in a contrast that would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic, just a couple of hours beyond that white sand and through the sweaty night lies Haiti, one of the poorest places on the planet. I'm hoping to get there tomorrow, and the lobster sitting in front of me is a heavy-handed gesture to help me feel the contrast.

  • • • • •

  After a series of airport cock-ups (US airport staff are almost as nasty as their odious immigration colleagues), I miss my flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital, along with about 50 Haitians who all arrived on time but stood in a queue for hours. The airline doesn't seem to give a toss – it's already got our money, so why should it care?

  Stepping out of the stale, cool air of the plane into the shit-flavoured sauna that is Haiti, I am almost immediately covered in a slime of sweat that I know is unlikely to dry off for the next two weeks. So it's with gratitude that I hop into a huge white Land Cruiser lent to us by the UN's World Food Programme. Charity workers across the world despise the UN for driving these big expensive cars around poor countries, but I confess to a guilty relief each time I get in them – they can negotiate God-awful roads, they're safe, clean and even mildly air-conditioned. Attached to the bull bars is a vast short-wave radio antenna, lending a slight (possibly false) sense of security. When you're working in difficult places these vehicles make life just a little bit better. I'll be spending a fair amount of my time here with the UN military and the WFP, so I hope I'll get a couple of days' use of these.

  A Brief History of Haiti

  We don't hear much about Haiti apart from tales of voodoo and the latest military coup, so here's the potted guide: Haiti has been given a rough ride by the world since 1492 when it was discovered by Columbus. The kindly Spanish managed to annihilate all the native Taino Amerindians within 25 years, but kept the place going as a handy staging post. In the 17th century, the French took charge, importing tens of thousands of African slaves to work the forestry and sugar-related industries.

  In 1804, after a brutal struggle, Haiti had a brief high point when it became the first black republic to declare independence, having hosted the only successful slave rebellion and defeated Napoleon as well as the English and the Spanish. But it was pretty much downhill from there, when Haiti proved less of a match for the world's businessmen. It was totally isolated by slave-holding countries eager to avoid their own rebellions, and then devastated by the French who refused to recognize independence unless an indemnity of 150 million francs was paid to compensate French plantation owners (they do look after their farmers, the French). The indemnity was paid, but the government was thrown into debt and the economy was crippled, and it's never really recovered. Haiti has been in a state of perpetual poverty and political violence ever since.

  The USA has mucked about in Haiti a fair bit: they refused to recognize independence until 1862 and then, in 1915, worried about growing German influence, the USA invaded, occupied and set about improving the country . . . to no avail. The 1930 Forbes Commission concluded that 'the social forces that created [the social instability] still remain – poverty, ignorance, and the lack of a tradition or desire for orderly free government'. Roosevelt got fed up and pulled out in 1934, setting off a cycle of vicious, brutal and corrupt leaderships that inevitably ended in coups, including those of Papa Doc (Francois Duvalier, elected on an official count of 1.32 million votes for, 0 against) and his son Baby Doc (Jean-Claude Duvalier), two of the nastiest and most corrupt leaders to grace the world stage. Jean-Bertrand Aristide briefly came into power before a military junta decided it knew better. After three years of hell, the USA invaded again in 1994 and brought Aristide back. His rule eventually descended into corruption and violence and, would you believe it, another coup in 2004 . . . whereupon 1,000 US Marines arrived to help. Again.

  Haiti is a social relativist's dream, a benchmark of misery by which we can all judge our lives to be so much better. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere and aid and donations from abroad make up nearly 25 per cent of GDP. Plus, if you take a quick look at the stats at the beginning of the chapter you will notice that it stands at no. 163 out of 163 countries in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Enough said.

  When I arrive I get an update on the security situation here: don't drive after dark, don't go out in the city after dark, don't enter Cite Soleil, the sprawling slum that houses the poorest Haitians in Port-au-Prince, and don't eat the food. Great.

  Embed with MINUSTAH

  Next morning I wake early and head straight for the UN army base. It's my first ever military embed, a strange arrangement whereby journalists live and patrol with soldiers in order to get a realistic impression of what life is like on the front line. Here in Haiti the clumsily named MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, has been struggling to control the armed gangs of the country since it was created in 2004. There are 7,000 troops (mostly Brazilian) stationed here, trying to restore order in a country where the government is too weak, poor and under-resourced to do the job itself. Before the UN arrived there were up to 300 kidnappings here every month, and gun battles regularly raged on the streets of the capital, including an enormous one a few months before my arrival.

  I get a cold but polite reception at the MINUSTAH barracks. Unsurprising really as a few months previously a BBC crew had managed to get an interview with their commander on the pretext of asking about the progress of the UN operations, then sprang allegations of child sex offences implicating Brazilian soldiers. As a result the BBC name is synonymous with excrement here at the Brazilian base.

  I meet Colonel Pedrosa, who will be running my trip. The Brazilians run an army unlike any I've ever seen before. UK and US troops are obsessed with hierarchy, saluting endlessly as they move around a barracks, and keeping the place in the sort of strict, impersonal order you'd rather hope your army ins
ists upon. Not the Brazilians. They wander around base hugging and waving, joking with and taking the mickey out of their superiors, and there's not a salute to be seen during my entire morning here. They're a little like the nascent Afghan army I met in Kabul, but without the moustaches.

  They kit me out with a flak jacket: hot, very heavy and not actually offering much protection. There are two metal plates the height and width of an A4 sheet of paper, and 1 cm thick. There's one at the front and one at the back. The rest of the jacket is just a structure to keep those plates in place. The idea is that they protect the major internal organs which, if shot with a high-velocity rifle, could fail and kill you. You can live without an arm or a leg, but you really don't want a bullet in the guts. It's not that much of a consolation when you're heading into the unknown, I can tell you, and in the feverish heat of Haiti, it's the last thing I fancy wearing.

  The ensemble is topped with a thick, heavy, bright blue helmet with UN stencilled on the side in white. It's so heavy that I feel a little like a weeble. They make soldiers look harsh but fair, protectors of the people, but with a killing-machine edge. I, however, look like a pillock.

  I sit in the back of a pick-up truck next to a soldier who faces backwards, scanning his gun around the streets as we head to a secondary base. Here we get in one of three huge white APCs (Armoured Personnel Carriers). From afar, these look like high-tech fighting machines, but once inside I realize they're just noisy, scorching-hot steel boxes on wheels. I poke my head out of the top and get a great view and an odd feeling of power . . . mixed with the uncomfortable knowledge that I stand out like a big white weebly target.

  We head off in convoy towards the sprawling slum area at the centre of the city where a quarter of a million people live in squalor and extreme deprivation. Our commanding officer, Captain Ferrarez, shows me the divot that was blown out of his rifle when he led a raid a few months ago. He takes me on a tour of military checkpoints and observation posts and then we enter the notorious Cite Soleil.