Day One: Three Vignettes

The computer centre is so full it is humming with an electronic drone. At the far end of one row a young woman is intently – furiously – hunched over a keyboard. A colleague comes up and asks her how she is. She does not hear him. He tries again and lays a hand on her shoulder. She glares up, enraged by the interruption but relaxes when she sees it is him. “How's it going?” he asks. “Horrible” is the unsurprising response. “I have to finish this report on the plenary. I have a pass but they won't let me in”. He looks her up and down, “well, I guess you look more pro-bono than I do today”.

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Sixteen people, all but two of them women, are seated in a large semi-circle around a television screen. Most are cross-legged on the ground, except for a few older women who have stolen chairs from the nearby computer centre. Most are intent on the screen, but others are half listening. One young woman is checking facebook.

The opening plenary has been running all morning but NGOs were not allocated seats. Instead they were “advised to view the opening on the CCTV monitors located around the conference centre”. I join the group and tuck my feet under me. We listen as representative after representative from the global south makes their case for greater adaptation funding and deeper emission reductions from developed countries. It is unrelenting and genuine.

But no-one is expecting a deal in Durban.

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The city is whizzing by. Fences are topped by swirls of barbed wire. Everyone's windows are covered in bars. I am being read the riot act by Peter, a student at the university. Lacking any means of transportation, and emphatically forbidden by everyone I meet from riding what little public transit exists, I have hired him to drive me the six kilometers to the conference centre. “You must be careful. You must not go out alone”, he tells me. “Just last week a nurse was stabbed five times for her cellphone, that is what is so different from the crime at home in Zambia, here it is violent”.

I look longingly at the city as it passes us. It is alive. Warm, moist air pours in the windows. It is the perfect temperature to be outside. People are doing their shopping, lounging on stoops, leisurely walking inches away from flying vehicles.

We get to the conference centre and I don my badge, go through the first set of gates, then the second, then the security clearance, and finally into the convention centre complex. Open courtyards fluttering with purple flowers spill out of the corridors. Cafes splay open to reveal cast iron chairs and round tables under palm trees. It could almost trick us into believing we are free, except for the urban hum the fences cannot exclude.