My relationship with Toyota

It is interesting to see how attached you can get in a short time to a product that you never owned or felt the need for before you actually bought it. Home computers, cell-phones, the internet, MP3 players and TVs are products and services that have only existed a few decades or even years, and yet many people would go so far as to say that they “can’t live without them”. I am myself sort of addicted to my computer and the internet service. In fact, when I experience an internet problem, I literally feel depressed. I don’t even dare to think about how I would be affected by a future hard disc failure.

Another apparent example of this kind of addictive product is the car. It seems that many, if not most, people don’t actually “need” a car until they actually buy it – after that however they easily become very attached to it. Again, I pick myself as an example.

For 36 years I lived a perfectly happy life (and presumably healthier due to all the biking) without owning a car, regardless if I lived in Ekshärad or in New York, in Brussels or in Lund. All in all, I considered cars to be dangerous, expensive, problem-causing (sooner or later they WILL break down) and environmentally polluting status symbols. Excellent as taxis and rental cars, but not as property. Also, for some reason I have come to develop this strange aversion against car salesmen and mechanics.

Some of my family and friends (who were already convinced car-owners) would laugh at my way of reasoning and at times they would try to convince me how much I actually needed a car without really knowing it. When Elias was born, one of them gave it 2 months before we would have a car. In fact, it took one year and three months – and moving to a developing country.

It turned out that the research we made on our future homeland suggested that a car – preferably a four wheel drive – was more or less indispensable for the kind of life we wanted to have here in Cape Verde. So we ended up buying a Toyota RAV4. Why? Because 1) Toyota it is a well known and widely used brand in Africa, 2) Toyota cars are known to be reliable and never break down 3) Toyota are known for taking good care of their customers and fixing problems that nevertheless might happen and 4) the RAV4 is one of the smallest and probably the most fuel-efficient 4WD on the market. (As you will see, some of these assumptions turned out to be false.) Toyota was also one of the relatively few brands actually represented in Cape Verde, and it is not considered a status brand and therefore relatively reasonable in terms of the price.

We bought the car in June 2006. And, yes – I have to confess that it didn’t take very long before I started to feel rather attached to the RAV. My previous doubts about being a car-owner tended to be less present as soon as I turned the ignition key.

Before we signed the contract, we wanted to make sure that it was covered by a worldwide warranty. Just in case. And the local car dealer in Brussels ensured us that the warranty was world-wide for three years. Six months later however, out of the blue, the break system suddenly broke down due to an underlying manufacturing failure. The estimated repair cost was around 2-3000 euros. And to our astonishment, the local Toyota garage refused to accept our warranty.

We immediately contacted the car dealer in Brussels who reconfirmed that the warranty should be valid also in Cape Verde. They then referred us to Toyota Belgium and Toyota Europe (customer service), who were rather unhelpful and would accept no responsibility in the matter. Instead, we were advised to contact Toyotas main office in Japan, which we did on several occasions both through fax and email. We never got any response.

At this stage, the situation looked rather grim. How could it be that nobody in Toyota took any responsibility for a major manufacturing problem on a brand new car? It was quite absurd. In a final and almost desperate effort, I called Toyota Sweden for advice, even though they had nothing to do with this. And for the first time my case was taken more seriously. I was given another helpful contact at Toyota Europe, and after that things finally started to move in the right direction.

It took an incredible eight weeks to fix the car, but at least Toyota Cape Verde finally changed their mind and accepted the warranty. I still don’t really know why but I suspect that my most recent contacts with Toyota Sweden and Toyota Europe might have had something to do with it.

I come to realize that this car issue has taken up a great deal of my focus and energy for the last few months. Upon reflection, it is not easy to understand why I got myself so worked up about something that I previously didn’t care much for at all. Of course – being stranded for almost two months without a car in a developing country, where taxis are unreliable and unsafe, especially when traveling with a small child, is not ideal. But probably much off the agitation actually derived from the feeling of being deceived, disrespected and dismissed by so many of the Toyota representatives. Nobody we talked to assumed direct responsibility for the issue. Toyota Japan didn’t even bother to answer us. Moreover, we weren’t even given a proper apology – a simple “Oh by the way, we are really really sorry that you bought a product from us that didn’t work” would no doubt have made some tangible difference.

OK, so Toyota got their act together in the end, and I am glad that they did. Our car was repaired and covered by the warranty. Nevertheless, the time it took and the way the warranty issue was handled was no doubt disappointing. My long term committment to being a car-owner and my relationship with Toyota is therefore a bit uncertain. Maybe the “car addiction” kicks in again, and all my disbelief will be forgotten and my confidence in Toyota will be recovered in a blink. Or perhaps I was right all the time: cars (including Toyota cars) are just expensive trouble, and its better not to become addicted in the first place. Time will tell.

Let’s talk about the weather

“If you don’t know what to say, just talk about the weather”. I have been told that this is true for all cultures, regardless other differences. Is this true also in Cape Verde, known as a country with, shall we say, limited seasonal changes? It appears so.

When we arrived in August, the weather was very hot and humid, in fact rather horrible for a Northerner like me. Not at all as pleasant as the guidebooks said. Clearly disturbed by the heat, and being a newcomer and a total stranger to most people I met, I often used this classical strategy to “break the ice” (if it hadn’t already melted in the heat, that is). And it actually struck me that people seemed to be just as enthusiastic to talk about the weather here in Cape Verde as in Scandinavia. Mind you: that is tough competition indeed, because Swedes just love to talk about the weather – usually because they hope that it will change.

And maybe it will. In fact, it appears to be already happening. Not because of chatting, but due to the burning of fossil fuels.

I just learnt that several large trees have fallen at our summer house estate, due to a really great storm. Trees normally don’t fall very easily in Sweden, but the same thing happened only two years ago. At that time it was described as the worst storm in 35 years, but apparently it only took two years to occur again.

Moreover, reports from Sweden tell us that it is the warmest winter in ages. No snow, only rain, lots of rain. A friend told me that one of the Swedish ski resorts, offering this weird concept of “snow guarantee”, had to manufacture tons of snow superficially and fly it to the slopes by helicopter! I found it quite bizarre, but maybe we will have to get used to these kinds of absurdities as a consequence of climate change.

Climate change appears to be affecting Cape Verde as well. Even the Cape Verdeans were complaining about the heat during the rainy season, stating that it was hotter than in many years. We were also told that some of the rainfalls (like the one that flooded our house and basement) were unusually heavy. Of course, many welcomed the increased precipitation, as water come in very limited supplies here.

But that was some months ago. Since December, the weather in Cape Verde is just perfect. 25 degrees in the shade, dry cool winds, clear sight, no more rain. Nobody - including me – talks about the weather any more, simply because there is nothing to complain about. Good news is no news, I guess.

This makes me a little nervous however. I will obviously not get any weather-chatting practice for a while. What if I loose this important ability, which I learnt to master so well after 30 years of cultural education in Sweden? It would mean that I have nothing to talk about when I come back…

Out of REACH

This summer, EU:s so called REACH regulation will start to apply for all EU countries. It sets out rules to prohibit and control all industrially produced chemicals. After 6 years of political negotiation, this 849 pages legal act will replace over forty existing EU chemical laws. When I was posted in Brussels as an environmental negotiator for the Swedish Government, I had the privilege of following some of these negotiations from the side, and it feels very satisfying to see that all of this hard work actually will bear fruit in the end.

REACH seeks to revolutionize chemical regulation in the EU by, for the first time ever, taking a comprehensive approach to control the thousands and thousands of chemicals released into our society and environment every year. It shifts the burden of responsibility so that the chemical producers will have to prove that their products are safe to gain market access in the EU. Previously, government and civil society would have to prove that a chemical is harmful before action is taken – a futile if not impossible task considering the large number of chemicals produced. Also, dangerous chemicals will gradually be banned and replaced by safer alternatives (the substitution principle).

While REACH is a compromise between many different interests and therefore not perfect, I believe that it is a major achievement in environmental policymaking in Europe, with many benefits for the environment and for human health alike. Hopefully also producers in other parts of the world will start adjusting their production policies, and perhaps other countries or regions will follow suite.

Cape Verde does not have any major chemical industries, so one would think that the impact of chemical pollution is relatively limited here. But unfortunately, there is no place in the world where you can feel safe from chemical hazards. Many dangerous chemical compounds, such as persistent organic pollutants, are long-ranging, and if they can be found in remote places like Greenland, they most certainly could be found here as well.

Recently, a friend here in Cape Verde told us that her little kid was showing very high levels of heavy metal in the blood during a routine medical check-up in the US. And she had no idea where this problem derived from. Was it the paint on the walls, the water pipes, the soil outside the house, the toys she had bought? The only treatment that worked was to stay away from home in Cape Verde for a certain number of months.

This is a pretty scary story for a father of a two year old. What can I possibly do to protect my little one from this kind of malice? I can see with my own eyes how the shelves in the shops here are filled with different kinds of insect poisons, heavy-duty cleaning chemicals and whatnots. And as a customer, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the benevolent ones from the more poisonous ones. Whereas in Sweden you can’t find any chemical products without some kind of environmental label and information on them, I haven’t found a single product here with an environmental label. Instead, the labels are showing human sculls and cockroaches lying on their backs. And there seems to be no common sense in the use of chemicals here either – our employees all practice the principle of “more is better”, meaning that a bottle of highly concentrated cleaning chemical is finished within days.

Obviously, I try to avoid using strong chemicals, but at the same time we have to do something to kill mosquitoes indoors (some of which can carry malaria) and to prevent the all-invading ants to destroy our food stocks. Also, I have no idea what the contents are in the paint that so easily comes of the walls of our house after the rainy season. Moreover, I know nothing of what is hidden in the dust and the ground around the house – much of which are construction sites. Is asbestos forbidden in Cape Verde? I don’t know. Is DDT used to kill mosquitoes, as it still is in many African countries? I don’t know.

The point is that I (and everybody else, regardless of where in the world you live) am in desperate need of a strong governmental environmental chemical policy to help me out here – one that entirely bans, or in some cases promotes substitution of, the most dangerous chemicals, one that helps me to get information about polluted sites, one that ensures that the products have labels and true information. If not, I simply have no chance of protecting myself or my family from chemical pollution.

I don’t know if Cape Verde has any chemical laws in place, or if they are followed (I have noted that the petrol is lead free, however). But in any case, perhaps the REACH regulation will have a positive impact also in Cape Verde, at least regarding the chemicals imported through Europe. I certainly hope so.

Christmas stress and New Year celebrations

In my view Christmas has unfortunately turned from a family (and before that, religious) tradition to a crude manifestation in consumerism and materialism. From a Western perspective, the hunger for new gadgets and stuff that we think we need at this time of a year gets absurd, especially when living in a developing country and seeing the everyday struggle of many just in order to survive. I was therefore wondering if Christmas might be different here in Cape Verde.

My impression is however that it is surprisingly similar. Most people in Cape Verde are catholic, so at least the Christmas celebration has a genuine origin here. But the pressure to buy new things for yourself and others at Christmas seems to be just as high as elsewhere, despite (or maybe even reinforced by) the widespread poverty.

When people lack the resources to match all the squander expectations of Christmas, they seek other means. We were thus told by the UN security people to be extra careful during December, since the number of robberies and thefts always jumped significantly during this time of year. And a friend of ours actually told us that when they came home some days before Christmas some years ago their DVD was gone and the household cleaner was never seen again. Apparently she was willing to give up here job (in a country with 24% unemployment) and to take the risk of getting caught just to get hold of this gadget for her self or as a gift.

Candidly complaining about all the expenses they would have for gifts, food and beverage, our own household staff fortunately took another strategy. Instead of stealing, they asked for their January salary in advance and hinted that there is a tradition of giving some extra pay for Christmas (which we were intending to do in any case). Many companies seem to offer an extra month’s salary in December, and considering the average wage they pay and the price level of imported goods in Cape Verde, it makes all the sense.

However, when I met our guard again after Christmas, the first thing he showed me was a new fancy watch on his wrist, after which he almost immediately made a long list of all the expenses he had had because of Christmas and then he asked me for yet another advance. Why? Well, he had used 1/3 of the previous advance to make a down payment on a used TV and now he needed to take another loan in order to pay the rest of it.

I have come to know this guy and his family quite well, and I know that he is very poor, living on one wage only in a miserable and small house with his girlfriend and two kids, and with another kid on the side to support. His situation has improved a little since we hired him, as we give him twice the salary he used to earn. But his house doesn’t even have proper electricity installed, and somehow he still considered a TV to be a main priority. It simply does'nt make sense to me, and the only way I can explain it is that it has to do with the imposed urge to over-consume at Christmas time.

New Years Eve was celebrated quietly on our rooftop with a friend, watching fireworks from a distance. Cap Verdeans are known for their late and long parties, and New Years Eve was certainly no exception. When we woke up on New Years Day to the daily morning wail of our two year old, we could hear music and party chatter from still ongoing festivities in the neighborhood. And after a few hours of pause, it seemed to revive and start off again for a second night of festivities. As a consequence (or is it the other way around), most shops and workplaces are closed also on the second day after New Years Eve.

Praia is a small Capital, and I was reminded by this on New Years Day when I took a small tour in the city. Normally, most of Praia’s roads are relatively busy (however rarely jammed, except during the rainy season when parts of the roads readily collapses), especially in the mornings. This morning, I hardly saw a single car that moved. Nevertheless, I drove extra carefully since we have heard many warnings to look out for drunk-drivers, especially after a big party night. Many here seem to be rather relaxed about drunk-driving, quite the contrary to my homeland Sweden where it is taken very seriously, not only by the law enforcement but by people in general. I am not sure if there is a law here on drunk-driving, or what it says if there is one. I have asked around, but nobody seems to know – or care.