A photo tour of Djibouti City

I took a guided bus tour of Djibouti City. The poverty here is hard to capture with a drive by camera. Lots of people just sleep next to the road, bathe in the ocean and leave there waste where the urge finds them. The guide told us how Dubai is buying up lots of the area to build it into a great trade port like Dubai. The base gets 90% of it's supplies through Dubai, because it is the only modern shipping/warehouse area around that is fully stocked. Djibouti sits at a very strategic geographical crossroads, so Dubai is trying to build it up. Everyone around Djibouti has long histories of fighting each other, but Djibouti is seen as the neutral middle territory, like Switzerland. The goal is to develop Djibouti as a launching platform out into the rest of the neighboring countries for trade and resource development. The Chinese have been dumping a lot into this area while we have been busy in Iraq, but they have only focused on resource extraction, and not at building up the local populace. So the US is trying to push humanitarian missions to buildup the populace to prevent the area from becoming an Al Qaeda sanctuary, and help them become our allies. Part of this is to skew them away from the Chinese, or at least prevent them from being the only dominant party in the area. Click on the link below to see some of the pictures of the city.

Tour of Djibouti City