Pipelines, Prophets (Profits?) and Dreams
Pipelines, Prophets (Profits?) and Dreams is another ‘informed adventure’ based on the concept of re-establishing Lake Chad; once one of the world’s largest inland waters, via an international programme largely inspired by the PhD of a young woman; a refugee.
Quiet by chance I managed to incorporate in the story, amongst a lot of other structures, a ‘business’ that goes by the name of ‘The Wagner Group’ which no one I knew had heard of at the time but which has, of late, achieved a degree of notoriety! In another example of this rather strange thing that I like to call ‘prescience’ (‘cos it is flattering to think so!) “The controversial plan to turn a desert green; Ties van der Hoeven’s ambitions are nothing if not grand. The Dutch engineer wants to transform a huge stretch of inhospitable desert into green, fertile land teeming with wildlife”.
In my tale, I imagine and discuss (aka.‘ makeup’) what might be the resultant consequences of the effort to refill the lake. How, as the plan proceeds such things might impact locally, regionally, and internationally; and, perhaps, lead to a confrontation between the US of A, (post-Trump) and Russia (post-Putin).
Chapter Extract:
Pipelines, Prophets (Profits?) and Dreams
1: Rescued from Begemder,
… an ancient ‘village’ destroyed by ‘rebels’ and taken in by a man and wife that were part of a UN observation team, Liya had grown up in a loving and supportive environment in Virginia USA. Later, she had gone on through college to Johns Hopkins University where she was waiting to begin her next phase at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Preparing for her PhD and struggling to find a topic that was considered by her Professors and Supervisor to be worthy of study at that level, she had, by pure chance, been reading the Washington Post when it had published an article on “pipelines that had helped transform the world”.
Reading the text – as always through the filter of her roots and the memories of those times, which her adoptive parents had encouraged her to keep faith with – she noticed that almost all of these great projects were based on ‘investment’ in the movement of oil or gas. Each seemed to have three factors in common, albeit in each case those ‘common factors’, in reality, translated to different things in different places and to different readers. But, she noted, it was true that considerations of security, industry and business, and profits (for someone) were almost always present, or thereabouts, in every case.
Given her background, she read almost everything in the context of what she knew from her links to, and memories of, the society into which she had been born and which she had shared until her ‘rescue’ at the age of eight. Her actual close family was distantly related to Haile Selassie and the Queen of Sheba – she of ‘Kebra Nagast (‘Glory of King’)’ the Ethiopian national epic. She did not yet know it but Liya was possessed with, and perhaps, blest by, the innate grace and beauty of form that might be expected of her lineage.
Thus, she, her family, and friends had been amongst the local aristocracy when the ‘rebels’ arrived on their mission of destruction, or ‘liberation’ as they would have it. Liya’s mother, elder sister, and the males had all been massacred in the incident from which she had, eventually, been rescued, having been hidden from the ‘soldiers’ by a loving servant and his family.
Today, despite all and notwithstanding many difficulties in so doing, she has stoically maintained links with her heritage and the people she remembered all too well – not always easy given the situation prevailing on the ground in modern-day America. But, as a result, she was, from time to time, able to update her understanding of the situation in the place that used to be her home.
She recalled how, in most families, ‘the men’ – father, and boys – would spend much of each day herding the livestock and looking for wood for the cooking fires. Meanwhile, the women – mothers and sisters and girls from the village – would walk miles to get water. That was why, and how, she knew that for others to voice concerns about global pollution, consumption, and waste but, in the same breath, also voice ‘criticisms’ in the context of the contribution of “villagers cutting down trees and burning wood” as being a part of the world’s problems, was as unjust as it was overly simple. She knew, that such people(s) lived the way they lived only to prepare food in homesteads that lacked power and or, often, potable water. From her perspective, to say otherwise was, at worst, an obscenity and, at best, plain ignorance.
This was happening at a time when it was hard for anyone having a brain, and, or, an interest in humanity and the state of the world, to avoid the “Pandora Papers” and the like. Those, and other publications, were publishing a leak of almost 12 million documents that revealed hidden wealth, tax avoidance, and, in some cases, money laundering by some of the world’s most rich and powerful. Perhaps only 1000 businesses and 200,000 people worldwide were involved, but they were, selfishly, holding, or hiding, enough money to change the lives of almost every soul on the planet and at the same time to improve the life of the planet itself.
