Sacrificing for Change

Ev'ry day's an endless stream
Of cigarettes and magazines.
And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories
And ev'ry stranger's face I see reminds me that I long to be,
Homeward bound,
I wish I was,
Homeward bound,
Home where my thoughts escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.
Simon and Garfunkel, “Homeward Bound”

--

I am in Yangon International Airport waiting for my flight back to Bangkok. It is Sunday night, 6:52 p.m. Yangon local time, 7:22 p.m. Bangkok time, and 8:22 a.m. in New York. Flying through the atmosphere in a pressurized cabin, vaguely aware that I am 30,000 feet above sea level, I will trade the monks in crimson robes and stacks of 1,000 Kyat notes for bright lights, women and massage parlors, and the skytrain ride to work tomorrow morning. After 15 days in Myanmar, on helicopters and speedboats, sleeping in monasteries and moldy guest houses, I am looking forward to going back to Bangkok, unpacking and sleeping in my bed.

Yangon and Bangkok are not close but the Boeing City In The Sky will travel ~700 miles in an hour and a fifteen minutes and I will expectantly step into another part of the world. Our headquarters is in Rome and trips back and forth are common but these cities are very far apart. This obvious statement is easy to forget as meetings, summits, emergencies, trainings and conferences constantly call people around the world. How often and and in what mindset many UN staff fly is absurd. There are any number of rationalizations, some valid, some self placating but consistence in work and lifestyle is rare (my favorite example is when influential, high net worth individuals fly their private, personal jet to two-day climate change conferences on the opposite side of the world).

Exponentially farther than the miles traveled are the distances between the multiple worlds. On the first day of this mission we traveled to many of these worlds: from the first class lounge in the Bangkok Airport, to our crowded country office in Yangon, to a fancy restaurant for lunch, to the nicest hotel, and onto a helicopter at 5 a.m. the next morning destined for the areas most affected by Cyclone Nargis. Such stark and sudden contrast is confusing and discomforting. With an academic understanding of the situation and always in translation we work in the field only to get back into our air-conditioned 4x4 at the end of the day. We conclude a day of household interviews on access to food - does your family have enough to eat, are there times you go to sleep at night hungry, in a week, how often does that happen - at the all you can eat buffet.

(Throughout our time in Myanmar, I struggled in the field. I rely on my ability to relate to people, to discern underlying dynamics, to ask questions based on non-verbal clues, and I did well in that space. My struggle was with the methodology and our organization. Last year we fed more than 90 million people all over the world. These people live in remote pockets, in the middle of civil war, refugee camps, floods and cyclones. Without the food we bring, they would not eat. All the time, all over the world, there are disasters and shocks, we are the first ones there and we are the best at what we do. To run an operation like this on a global scale we need reliable, accurate information about roads, weather, household behavior, healthcare access, nutrition, etc. To intervene effectively and efficiently, we need to know where people are, what their situation is, and how we can reach them.

So, six months after the cyclone in the South, during an ongoing rat infestation in the North, and human rights abuses everywhere we went to Myanmar to gather information on household access and utilization of food. Our goal was to cover the country, to go as many places as the government would allow on our 15-day visa (they issued it). In most places the roads are terrible. Sometimes we took a helicopter or a boat. Many places you have to hike. Everywhere, transportation takes a long time. When we got to a village we were focused, gathered information, interviewed people and left. The nature of our organization demands this. But, it is hard to sit with someone, ask them intimate, detailed questions, and leave. While traveling to the next place, the analysis of the previous one begins, turning people and smiles and households into numbers,tables and statistics, sometimes quickly calculating: they are not poor enough. They need help but not from us, from a different organization using a different aid model.

We work this way because we must, It allows us to provide a service no other group in the world can, but in the field, in that one on one moment, it is deeply challenging to be so ruthlessly analytical. At the very least we could bring some of our high-energy biscuits or educational posters on nutrition, something to make it seem a little more fair.)

On planes and in my mind, moving quickly and constantly between worlds and places whose geography and reality are not close, ‘normal’ grows distorted.



--

I am stuck on the idea of home.

This airport is familiar. I have been on this plane before, destined at other times for Nairobi, Tel Aviv, Raleigh-Durham, New Delhi. Tonight, I wonder where home is. A warm welcome awaits me in Bangkok, one of familiarity and friendship. But another, different, warm welcome awaits me in New York when I return in December and always. Bangkok and New York are familiar but the feelings of familiarity are incomparable. If home is where you feel comfortable, I have too many homes to count; by this logic I build homes in new places with new people and the materials around me. In several parts of the world I have made friends, learned the streets, found my favorite pub. I’ve created cities and rooms and flats and communities that I looked forward to returning to. Yet when people ask me where I am from I say New York City and I say it with pride. Many of my memories are there, most of my immediate family, my childhood. I refer to The Bronx, to Decatur Avenue, the city I credit my swagger to, as home.

Perhaps, what I wonder is what home is.

Within this question are important answers for my work, lifestyle, and future.

Flying on helicopters is cool. Seeing new places, meeting new people who think differently from you is invaluable. Understanding that right now in this world there are millions of people living in war and destitute poverty, dying of preventable sickness is important and acting to change this is more important. To have a smelled understanding of this reality is unique. The traveling that I’ve done informs my world view from a lived perspective that affords me a more nuanced, human understanding of the familiar statistics that shamefully no longer startle us. Balance remains the challenge.

I don’t want to hop around the world as if continents are small and capital cities are close, further polluting the world I know needs cleaning. I don’t want to live behind bars, in air conditioned bubbles and expensive restaurants or to work with starving children by day and drink fancy cocktails by night, using those starving children as chatpiece. My grandfather is 90, my siblings are all paired off (the stinky cheese stands alone) and the immediate future will continue to be a time of transition for our family. One day, I want to buy my 15-year-old nieces and nephews beer, to know them, not send postcards. When I fall more in love with one woman than I once thought possible, I want to be near her, our children, our families and their lives. I want my children to interact with real people, to be grounded, appreciative, and wash their own dishes. All of this is in my control, I choose how to live, but the life and work of an expat are often contrary to many of the things I think are of fundamental importance.

Lifestyle is only part of the equation. Where and how I earn money, my work, contributions to this troubled and hopeful world are important to me. I will ‘give back’ but the devil is in the details. What is home? Where do I belong? What are my battles? Feeding people in the most tumultuous, troubled places on Earth is humane, essential work that the international community must continue. But is it my work?

--

When you return from a trip people ask: How was it? In the past I have not handled this question well, sometimes dismissing people as incapable of understanding or giving a curt, uninviting answer. To see the complexity and confusion of the corners of the Earth, the people, the poverty, the hope, the smiles, the contrast between the so rich and the so poor, the disregard of the wealthy, the sickness and disease is personally challenging, deeply troubling and hard to summarize for polite conversation. This trip was as challenging as any, but I know my answer: I feel responsible.

Chin state is in the northwest part of Myanmar and is home to the Chin people, a people with a distinct culture and history from the Burmese. They are an ethnic minority, actively discriminated against by Burmese and right now there is a forced, often-violent, relocation campaign being committed by the government/military. By any indicator it is the poorest state in Myanmar, among one of the poorest areas in the world. Steep mountains, terrible roads, and a harsh climate leave few choices but subsistence agriculture.

One man in Chin State I will never forget.

It was a cold, rainy day at the end of October.The village he lives in is on a muddy path accessible only by foot. There is no school or medical clinic and one ground pump for safe drinking water that everyone shares. Children of all ages, with runny noses, heavy coughs wearing just T-shirts, were everywhere. Everywhere but school. We asked him for an interview and with a bright smile he said yes. With his wife and five of his six children, he lives in a thatched hut with a leaky roof. In his home there is no bed, electricity, battery-powered radio, or mosquito net. Looking around, I could see everything he owned. At least three times a week he goes to sleep feeling hungry because he lets his children eat first and there is not enough for him. His wife is not well and he worries about her. Their oldest son left the village at 16 and works in Malaysia as in illegal laborer (“No, he doesn’t send money home, he is just a boy”).

One goal of our household questionnaire was to understand what families are eating and how often - are they providing their bodies with the nutrients it must have? We are not talking putanesca or sashimi, only the most basic kilocaloric and nutritional requirements. In a week, how often do you eat meat, I asked. He looked me in the eye and told me that in the past month the only time he and his family ate meat was when he illegally poached a monkey in the nearby national forest. Later, he showed me the gun he hunts with. Union and Confederate soldiers used more advanced weapons. For each shot he must hand load the gunpowder down the barrel, he uses bullets he smelts out of scrap metal if he is able to find it, and he gets one shot at a time.

At the end of our interview he looked me in the eye again and thanked me. He said: Thank you for coming to my home, for listening to me, for taking the time to hear my story and of my life. He told me he was honored that I took the time to sit with him. Honored.

Then his wife handed me a cup of tea.

In my world of everything, people constantly speculate about the dire state of the world. Newspaper headlines and magazine columns compose doomsday tales filled with fatalistic predictions of violence, crime, and suffering in the future. We, those with everything and every reason to believe in the world choose not to and this man, with every reason not to, does. In the truest sense of the word, he is exceptional.

All over the world, in situations similar, there are people - human beings - with an equally exceptional outlook on life. This man owns nothing. On a day where he can find work he earns 1,500 Kyats ($1= 1,250 Kyats). He lives in absolute poverty, each day he struggles to find the money to feed his family. This is not a dramatization or exaggeration, this is his life each morning and each night and he offered me tea, he looked me in the eye and thanked me. He did not ask me for anything. He does not despair, he chooses hope.

But, you can’t go to his home and he can’t look you in the eye. His story is my burden. How was my trip? I feel responsible.



--

On Tuesday night, the world changed. After two years of campaigning, Barack Hussein Obama was elected 44th president of The United States of America on the promise of change and a belief in hope. Kenya declared a national holiday; the world is excited. I am excited, aware that I am living history.

President-elect Obama speaks often of the sacrifice that hopes of change necessitates. For me, what would sacrifice be?

For the first time in my life I am thinking of working in government, of working at home. With Barack Obama as president America, for the first time in my life, is in a position to match the exceptional action of that man in Chin state and change the world for the better.. Sacrifice would mean fewer planes and exotic locations, upholding my responsibility by entering government, working at home on a battle that is mine, and leading a life of balance close to friends and family.