Wearing Glasses In The Rain

Golden Years

2011-10-27T20:07:00.004-04:00

With my eyes closed I can see my grandfather sitting on the front porch of his home wearing his iconic Pittsburgh Pirates hat, Hemingway beard, boat shoes with socks, tapered navy sweatpants, a long-sleeve, powder blue polo shirt and reading glasses. He is smiling. In his 90th year of life his blue eyes sparkle with a boyish mischief. He was a man of legendary wit, renowned for his sayings, one-liners and a sense of humor that seems to be disproportionately concentrated among Jewish men of his era. Born in 1918 on Fox Street in the south Bronx, his was a long, epic life stuffed with experience. He was prone to repetition but he wasn’t redundant; repeating the same slogans did not dilute his wisdom, it fortified the simple power of his words.
Reflecting on how I try to respond to crisis, I am thinking of one of his sayings in particular. A young man and an aging man, he would gesture towards me, gesture toward himself and say: "These are the golden years."

Steve Jobs, in his now famous Stanford commencement address, had a similar message: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

There is an important difference between the thought process of my grandfather and Steve Jobs, one an older many dying at 90 from wear and tear and the heartbreak of burying his only daughter, one a man dying of cancer before his time. For Jobs, death is the event to consider; for my grandfather, it was life.

On March 5, 2008, my dear friend and former college roommate was abducted from our college house, driven at gun point to multiple ATMs, then executed in the middle of the street and left to die. During the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the heart of Port-Au-Prince, killing hundreds of thousands, leaving millions homeless, millions more traumatized, and an already-precarious country in dire straits. Working at the UN Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti at the time, I played a part in responding to the crisis. On March 17, 2010, my mother was killed while riding her bicycle to work. On April 27, my grandfather, her father, passed away in his home, in a powder-blue long sleeve polo shirt.

With as much sincerity and gravitas I can put on paper - without looking you in the eye and communicating with my expression that I could not mean this more - I hope that you don’t have to suffer crisis to understand the wisdom in my grandfather’s words. Live your life. And, if you do experience crisis, it seems we still have no choice. I am forever different because of the events of the last three years, I miss my mother more than I can say, am baffled by Eve’s senseless murder, and don’t understand how there can be so many people “doing good” or “serving the poor” and yet we are approaching a global population of 7 billion and half of the humans on the planet survive on $2 a day. Even still, despite heartache and uncertainty, life is the event to behold, enjoy, and maximize. These are the golden years.

I See, Therefore It Is

2009-03-30T06:26:00.001-04:00

“Optimism is a force multiplier.” – zcp quoting someone else

Each morning I read the news and each morning the news backs me into a corner of pessimism. In capital letters and bold fonts, headlines scream of genocide, war, plans of war, violence - systematic and singular but always horrific – civil strife, and seemingly insolvable historic struggles. Death. Bombarded by constant reports of death the natural place to end up is that corner that does not allow hope for humanity.

Newspapers, radio stations, magazines, web sites, blogs, and TV channels – the media – scramble for an ‘angle’ that presents information about the same event in a way that is unique and distinct from the thousands of other news agencies. In this they fail, there is no diversity of opinion or perspective, all roads lead to pessimism. There are no reports of life or love, only death.

So do not read the newspaper, read the life you live and the world you see. This world is full of love, it is all around us all the time. Neglect sensationalist, oversimplified banners and look.

Perhaps we can make the case that death is the constitutive ingredient to a ‘story,’ the ingredient that makes an unfolding “newsworthy;” the conclusion of life – the definitive aspect of existence – is what makes an event consequential. But the rationale behind hourly broadcasts of death and destruction is not to honor life, the rationale is something else, something that dehumanizes and perverts our value of them. In ‘covering’ death we do not honor life.

We need to know what is going on in the world, we cannot shy away from the gruesome but neither can we allow our appreciation for this world to be blunted by pessimism. For every headline there are thousands of smiles. Indeed, what better place than from smiles, acts of kindness and love, to summon strength and fight the injustices we know.

All around me I see people trying, laughing, working, hoping, believing, helping, loving. I see skinny security guards in baggie uniforms welcoming me in unfamiliar corporate lobbies. I see a cute, fat boy punch his friend and watch them laugh with mischievous looks in their eyes.

A daughter helps her hunchbacked mother up the stairs of a restaurant for a Saturday night family dinner. I see a group of old Chinese women with up-dos to make the Golden Girls jealous, wrinkled skin and joy in their eyes as they share tea. I see a family picnic on a mat on the sidewalk, a mother holding her world, her baby, in her lap as she sleeps quietly. I see proud fathers taking their sweaty, sunburned sons home from soccer and their daughters for a special ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. An in-love couple flirts on the train. In the park, an old man does Tai Chi with no shirt on. I hear the women in our office laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I see small, family businesses struggling to get by, four generations living above their food stall and shop. I see high school students prowl the mall looking for girly girls and boyish boys for crushes and almost conversations. I see toddlers giggle as they smear ice cream all over their face, and eat some too. I see a father and son run a noodle stand and laugh the entire time.

I do not see hatred or feel malice. Everywhere around me I see infinite reasons to believe in our world. For every one, single act of hatred that we read of in the news, hear on the radio or watch on TV, there are thousands of acts of love. They just don’t make the headlines.

2009-03-10T12:13:00.006-04:00

“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“Grab one thumb with the opposite hand and SQUEEZE the lemons, SQUEEZE the lemons. GREAT!” “Now,” in a tone of voice reserved for gushing at small children and orphaned puppies, the grown woman kept on, “interlock your fingers and rub. GREAT!” My hands were dripping in hand sanitizer. Mimicking her exaggerated gesticulations, I squeezed my lemons, interlocked my fingers and focused on my cuticles – a common place for virulent bacteria to hide, especially if you wipe your ass wrong.

Confident about my new hand washing skills I had learned during the last hour in the Avian Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Training, I was ready for the real deal. “Excuse me, I need to use the toilet,” I said politely. At the sink, properly lathered and squeezing my lemons, my boss walked in. Following the unwritten codes of male behavior in the bathroom – spitting in the urinal before pissing, taking a peak, clearing your throat, checking yourself out - I looked at him in the mirror and asked if he knew how to wash his hands.

“Yes, I do. My mother taught me when I was 4.”

Yea, me too. No big deal. After washing my hands and still following the guy code, I scratched my balls. I wasn’t in here for the last 40 seconds rubbing one palm with the top three fingers of the other hand. I was taking a piss and doing something really smart.

We, a group of professional adults, stood in a conference room at the regional headquarters of an international agency and learned how to wash our hands. The teachers flew in from Rome to teach us. Somehow the hand washing instructions didn’t quite match the hype of the advertised mandatory training and my lemons withered thinking about my boss as a four year old.

The training was silly, but it did ask a very serious question that the world and I grapple with hourly: how can you change people’s behavior? How do you ignore the painstakingly obvious prescriptions in policy papers and public health guidelines and address the underlying, difficult-to-change problems.

Public health tries to do exactly this: tell people that if you wash your hands thoroughly with soap and dry them on a sanitary towel you will greatly reduce the odds of contracting a fatal virus during a pandemic. If you wear a condom, you are less likely to get HIV. If you eat a balanced, healthy diet and exercise regularly you will be healthier. If you wear red-tinted sunglasses everything you look at will be red-tinted.

When I was four, my mother taught me to wash my hands.

Often dressed up in book jackets, these obvious statements are dismissed by realists, scientists, rational minds intent on a more complicated diagnosis for epidemics of violence, disease, and stupidity that can be prevented or stopped by washing our hands, caring for the people next to us, wearing a seat belt, reading books about other parts of the world, wearing a condom. That plainly stated problems are not solved by known, effective, plainly stated solutions is difficult to understand.

When I tell friends that my brother and his wife work in a research lab the thought of them is often garnered in genius flowers. And they are smart, but not geniuses; they are products of their trainings who think about discrete problems with unique solutions. But the scientific method does not apply to social problems, as calculators try to find the square roots of negative numbers the answer is not real. In science, much of the work is done in preparation, knowing biochemistry, understanding protein behavior and how to catalyze or inhibit certain things as you best guess. If you can understand the problem, a solution is possible.

Public health, the brain, individual and collective action is different. Actors in the social sciences, development, public health, and politics fields are often given plastic, scentless leis and lumped in economy class. I think it is because the problems they spend time trying to fix are so obvious, so easy to understand, and their solutions never seem to work. This process is the reverse of science, the difficulty back loaded, the solutions not unique answers to discrete problems, but far more complex, irrational and difficult to get right.

What do you do with children who are not taught to wash their hands by their mothers when they are four years old? What do you do with crumbling, violent inner cities and young people who, in their rational mind, make choices that do not value life? What do you do about non-stop headlines of civil strife and children dying of preventable and treatable diseases?

I’ve always felt a sort of impotence in the liberal arts’ response to problems. I am going to feed that starving child, the child who I am looking in the eyes right now, by taking their photo with my expensive camera and writing about her on my blog. We must do more.

And we must do more still, but these pictures are important: we need to retain our humanity. We cannot continue to force scientific thinking into non-scientific disciplines. A little free trade, 5 days in bed, be sure to sign your international trade treaties, and call me next week if the rash/revolution doesn’t go away. As we continue to try to fix the world in spread sheets and economic regression models, our calculators are spitting out imaginary numbers, imaginary beneficiaries and imaginary improvements. Human suffering, smiles, laughter, weddings, and love are lost in statistical abstraction. We must do more with our hands and hearts and understand the fundamentally complex nature of our problems in an appropriate, non-scientific way.

Change takes time, it is not conceived, summoned by biochemical reactions, grants, bonds, aid or loans. Learning science is not easy and it requires patience and skill to be a good doctor or researcher but there are, often, absolute answers. In public health, in the world, in looking that girl in the eye, I can run as many SPSS cross tabs as I want, and I remain with a best guess.

We are fallible and we will be wrong, but we must try, and try again. We must invest in individuals, take pride in our choices, and understand consequence. Our guesses must be grounded in humility and humanity.

Excuse me, I need to go wash my hands.

A Look Outside, Within

2009-02-12T05:42:00.007-05:00

“On a day the chief executives of eight large banks were questioned about their industry’s excesses on Capitol Hill, Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York State, raised hackles by disclosing how Merrill Lynch distributed its 2008 bonus pool. The payments, made just before Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America in December, have already stirred anger for being paid earlier than usual. And Mr. Cuomo made it clear that the bulk of the bonuses were paid to a small portion of Merrill Lynch’s 39,000 employees. “Merrill chose to make millionaires out of a select group of 700 employees,” Mr. Cuomo wrote in the letter, which was sent to the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday night.” From The New York Times web site, February 11, 2009

If you search Wikipedia for ‘Hank Paulson,’ you find very interesting information about Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson, Jr. His birthday, his children’s names, his religion and that he is the 74th United States Treasury Secretary. Stated clearly, he accumulated enormous personal wealth during a career at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming the CEO. He went to Dartmouth where he was in a fraternity and All-American athlete, Harvard for his MBA.

His fraternity brothers from Dartmouth and classmates from Harvard are, coincidentally, the same men that run Goldman, the financial services firm that magically received government injections of capital to support it during the first waves of the financial crisis. In today’s globalized world, the financial systems that have created unprecedented levels of theoretical money and worth, investment services that have inflated costs and prices and replaced manufacturing economies in many Western countries, are intertwined and incredibly complex. I admit to knowing very little about the algorithms, computer models, contracts, and legal agreements that enable this world, but it is worth considering the global element of, as some call him, King Hank: what if the Goldman scenario happened in another country? Zimbabwe for example.

Robert Mugabe is, the international community agrees, a corrupt, controlling tyrant with an exhibited disdain for innocent civilians. He ruined the country, and the basic financial structures intended to stock shops, pay civil servants, capitalize banks, grant credit – facilitate the most fundamental functions of government. People in Zimbabwe go shopping in the morning because the worth of their money depreciates throughout the day.

Before Mugabe, Collins Onyeangu was president. Onyeangu is Mugabe’s father. Born into a political dynasty, Collins amassed an enormous personal fortune in the private sector before serving as director of the nation’s intelligence agency, eventually vice president, and president.

Mugabe was put forth by one of two rivaling political parties in Zimbabwe after eight years of opposition rule. The results of the election were widely contested, and international voting monitors documented fraud, irregularities in counting, corruption, and intimidation aimed at ethnic minorities. Media and official reports stated that Alfred Ganwengzi won the general election, carried largely by urban areas, but did not have a parliamentary mandate to claim the presidency. The decision, of national and world importance, was left to the courts, a highly politicized, insider’s realm.

At the time of the election, another one of Onyeangu’s sons, Mugabe’s brother Juma Wangyariri, was the Minister of Parliament of the area in dispute, Lingala Province. Lingala province is rife with corruption and criminals, and during election periods ethnic violence is common. With enough votes from Lingala Province, an area populated largely by Mugabe supporters, Mugabe could secure a court-ordered claim to the presidency.

Robert Mugabe was inaugurated president, despite Alfred Ganwengzi’s claims of corruption, brotherly favoritism, cheating, and that he won the national vote.

Mugabe’s presidency was one of the worst in the history of Zimbabwe, warring wantonly, allowing the ruination of the country’s previously sound financial system, imprisoning, spying on, and harassing citizens. With two years left in his presidency, Mugabe appointed Henry Okech, the CEO of Simbaza Securities, as Treasury Minister. Simbaza Securities is known for their egregiously high bonuses and corporate compensation, executives who wear crocodile shoes, lavish private jets, and nights on the town at the capital city’s most expensive brothels.

One of Okech’s main tasks was to save the country’s economy from a recession unprecedented in size and scope. Gigantic firms and institutional players plummeted, the stock market sank, and the economy of Zimbabwe fumbled. Okech spoke strongly in the media, but intervened randomly and haphazardly. He declared that certain firms would not get help and had to be bought out, taken over, or declare bankruptcy.

When board members from Simbaza Securities asked for help, Okech responded. Many of the board members are childhood friends from the elite Shepherd’s Academy for Boys – the most prestigious school in Zimbabwe and the source of countless politicians and business leaders. The former CEO of Simbaza Securities, Okech had a close relationship with all the executives at Simbaza, and many friendships dating back to private clubs during their school days. As other firms disintegrated, he lobbied the government to rescue Simbaza, a firm, he argued, that was so important to the financial system that its collapse would be catastrophic. Simbaza was granted the help they asked for.

After a national election, Mugabe was ousted from power, Okech is no longer the Treasury Minister, and Zimbabwe's economy is crumbling. Both men are rich. Simbaza Securities is the focus of a government query into excessive spending during economic crisis, money they received, without conditions, as a result of Okech’s actions.

These names, schools, and companies are fictitious. None of the above, except all of the info on Hank Paulson, is true.

Zimbabwe is an example, but this happens around the world all the time. We suffer from selective hearing.

If the details of the story sound familiar it is because America is watching its financial systems disintegrate as the result of deregulation, cronyism, corruption and old boys deals. Substitute America for Zimbabwe; this is our story, but we think it isn't. The thought of comparing anything between these two countries seems outlandish, but only because we are less willing to acknowledge the scurrilous when looking at America. We are armed with democratic excuses and airs of American exceptionalism.

Hank Paulson is the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was one of the lead lobbyists in relaxing SEC oversight, control, and regulatory powers of investment banks during his time there, was cashed out before joining the government, watched Lehman, WaMu and others sink but intervened when his boys at Morgan needed help. This stinks odiously of unfair play. If this set of information was a Reuters wire story about a country in west Africa, the West’s assumption and conclusion would be corruption, greedy Africans at it again.

In the US, there seem to be fewer coincidences, reports of disdainful generals, buying voters and unethical influence in business and politics. Or, it is reported, is the lead news story for four days until a hot, young, entertainment couple gets into a fight. Or, we ignore it in a delusional bliss as something less harmful than it is. Criminal acts, acts that have inflicted seemingly irreversible damage to our country’s reputation in the world and the global financial system are not met with outrage, riots in the streets, calls for prosecution, resignation or impeachment. Our actors are as bad, or worse, but look different and we do not hold ourselves accountable in holding them accountable. Uncivilized, downright undemocratic behavior is left for the “developing” world. Actions that happen in Africa, Haiti, countries in Latin America and Asia are attacked as mockeries of electoral politics, specious contracts and phantom companies but in US nothing happens.

The West's behavior can be as reprehensible as the villains we think are so different, even though they are not. Look outside to look within, and we see absurdity consistently across the world. The least we can do is refuse selective hearing, be honest in evaluating ourselves and assessing harm, wherever it happens.

Thankful

2008-11-26T05:16:00.002-05:00

When I give, I give myself.
-Walt Whitman

For the second year in a row I am not in New York City for Thanksgiving. Last year I was living in Ahmedabad, India, working six days a week at a small, poorly-run CBO. I was struggling. Thinking of my time there, I was unhappy, deeply introspective, and brooding. Particularly when I revisit my writing, I am reminded of my frequent contemplative, inward-focused moods. There is no way to say this that is not clichéd, but I learned a lot about myself. Life and work in Bangkok are exponentially different and more comfortable than life in India and my thoughts are different too.

In writing I am able to walk through my thoughts, process the scenes I see and reactions I have, a way of engaging my mind, not just my actions, with the world around me. When in the U.S. I write only for myself, but when I am overseas I post some of my thoughts to the internet with the hope that I might communicate the normalcy of my actions and reactions - life here is different than it is in the US, the people here are different, the poverty can be destitute and conditions human beings live in deeply troubling, yet there is nothing heroic or extraordinary about what I am doing. The heroes are here; I am a proxy. Indeed, in reading my thoughts I hope you see that you can do this- we are similar.

When you see, smell, taste and experience the good in this world that exists in spite of the bad, you will act differently. If you can't go, if you don't go, I hope my words allow you some insight to the ordinary, humane, important, constitution-altering reactions inherent in going new places and seeing the exceptional behavior in the exact places you don't expect it.

--

Lately, two quotes are stuck in my head. In their simplicity and reconcilable contrast they articulate a worldview with a sum stronger than its parts, a worldview I have been struggling to formulate for the past eight months.

"You can’t help people from a distance,” said Sergio Vieira De Mello, one of the UN's best, ever. He was killed in the famous August, 2003, bombing of UN Headquarters in Baghdad where he was the director of the UN's operation. Born in Brazil, he earned a PhD from the Sorbonne, worked at the United Nations for his entire career and earned his reputation in the field on missions in Cambodia, Timor Leste, Lebanon, Kosovo (and others). I never met him, but in reading Samantha Power's new book about him and talking to colleagues who worked with him, a few things become clear: he believed in the UN and its mandate, was a good man, was guided by right, humanitarian ideas, and was most unhappy in his office in Geneva or New York City.

The other quote is from Abraham Lincoln; "We- even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility."

Bridging the gap between thought and action, living life in absolute consistence with our morals is a perpetual challenge that takes years and lifetimes to reconcile. It is a constant source of tension without external answers; rather, it is something deeply personal. But this Thanksgiving, compared to last, I am different, thinking with more nuance and my thoughts and actions are closer then ever before (still, lots of room for improvement). I am thankful.

Last year and the years before that, the fourth Thursday of November summoned that same, thankful sentiment, but I now say it from an enhanced, experiential understanding of what this word means. Language is a form of expression, a system to communicate feeling and last year forced me to feel the sentiment of this word, not merely its articulation, and how to act in accordance. I am thankful. Full stop. Thinking of the message in these two quotes, how I want to live my life, I am not thankful relative to something else, not thankful for or thankful because. I am thankful.

In the middle of the night on March 6, lying in bed in my apartment in Ahmedabad, I got a call that changed me. I miss Eve. This is an example where language, my command and understanding of language, cannot match my feeling. There are not words to say how I feel.

I think of her all the time. I try hard to think about how to be in this world as a result, how to honor her and carry her legacy. I try to do this in every interaction I have, in everything I read, hear, respond to, say. Previous to this, I considered myself sensitive, but my sensitivity for things changed with that phone call. When I read the newspaper I feel the pain of bombings thousands of miles away, when I see homeless beggars I wonder where their families are, violent headlines hurt me. I wish I didn't, but I know something of the pain of these people. So, I smile, listen to people, hold doors, joke, laugh, avoid blame. I am not dumb or naive, I know some of the problems in the world and know they won't get better by smiling, but this is the spirit of De Mello's quote - act. Go there. Do something. Small and large, do something. I take his words beyond smirks and punchlines and try to work on issues that matter to me, and matter to the world, in a setting that is as close to reality as possible. Each day, I try to be there, to understand, and to work, and remove distance. I see each person as capable of being hurt like I’ve been hurt. I think of Eve, try to go there, and act.

But many days it seems that the force of the problems in the world overwhelm action, provide space for excuses and despair, and the creation of mental distance far greater than the miles and meters that sometimes separate us. We shirk responsibility. We create imagine disempowering mindsets, the ultimate form of hopelessness. We tell ourselves that we are not responsible. This is a placating farce. Here, anywhere, everywhere, we have the power. And, we have the responsibility.

I find myself ready for a new bumpersticker, not content with: "Think Globally, Act Locally." Do both. We are both places at the same time. UNC Professor James L. Peacock III wrote a book called "Grounded Globalism" where he talks about 'acting glocally.' Maybe I am thinking of this, but I don't think so. There is nothing academic in how I want to live or the actions I want to take, there is humanity. There is a place for academics and scholarship in how I understand things and grow my mind, but there is nothing complex about any of this: see the people around you, respond to them, and understand that people, real people, not statistics, human beings, sons, daughters, cousins, uncles, lovers, fiancés, husbands and wives, cheaters, gamblers, refugees, criminals, doctors, live everywhere. Do your part. Go there. Act. We are responsible.

Most importantly, smile and have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Shout out to my dad who each year cooks a whole meal for our family, and then a second, identical meal for a soup kitchen near our home.

Sacrificing for Change

2008-11-08T12:59:00.007-05:00

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.

Traveling to Bangkok

2008-09-16T04:36:00.001-04:00

The top right corner of my computer says it is 6:59 a.m. on Sunday, September 14th. I sit in bed awake but my mind and body disagree with the clock, confused by the 17 hours of air travel, 11 hour time difference, and new sights, sounds, and smells of Bangkok. My body is on the other side of the world but my mind it taking its time to catch up.

Mom and I drove to the the airport in NYC early in the morning and my stomach was calm, I was not nervous, I was ready to go. Late into the night before, I gathered my things and thoughts, preparing myself for this next step and I fell asleep feeling the same way I did when saying my goodbyes: peaceful and ready.

Traveling through Abu Dhabi on September 11th during Ramadan on the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, the flight was empty; on a plane built for over 350 people there were fewer than 50. Among those 50 were two of the loudest, most annoying little children with the most inattentive parents in the history of the universe. For the entire flight the little demons screamed, cried, squawked, screeched, wailed, made every unpleasant noise known to man and beast to the point that the relative comfort of spreading across the middle row of seats was likened to dropping an ice cream before the first bite. Enter the modern wonder of direct TV on planes, countless movies, and my own fatigue. Most distracting - and it did not help with sleep - was the facade of modesty in the airline uniforms, beautiful Arab women wearing thin veils, the veils doing nothing more than accentuate their dark eyebrows, red lips, and distant allure.

Landing in Abu Dhabi is unlike anywhere I’ve ever landed. After 12 hours in the air, the pilot prepares the plane for landing but when you look out the window in anticipation of arriving in a new place, there is nothing - no skyscrapers, no visible roads - just sprawling dessert and a low, flat, tan, building designed to tolerate the unforgiving sun. It is possible we landed on Mars. Then you walk into the terminal and are smacked in the face with a contrast unlike most. Sitting along the wall that leads out to the main area are a group of women wearing burkas. Their eyes and feet are the only visible parts of their body. With them is a young boy in jeans and an American Eagle t-shirt. Covered by a blue and green tile mosaic, the terminal is a two-story imperfect sphere, wider than it is tall, the middle open so that you can see down from the second story. It is Ramadan and day time; none of the cafes are open. Red bearded men, their heads covered, wearing white shrouds and no shoes walk by British tourists in tank tops and money belts. A stern, shrouded, female security guard keeps a keen eye on things. Sikhs from India walk by, their trademark beards, curled mustaches, and head covering different from the beards, mustaches, and head coverings of the Saudis waiting for their flight. In an electronics shop an Arab man wearing a long, white, tunic talks with a shopkeeper about the new iPhone; in the window it is advertised at $1,545 - NO WARRANTEE. Duty free shops sell cigarettes, alcohol, perfume, and chocolate, while the shop next door sells mini versions of the Koran and hookas. The loudspeaker announces flights in Arabic while around me I hear Hindi, English, Spanish, French, Farsi, Thai, and other languages that I cannot name. With my eyes wide open, I pace the terminal for 1.5 hours.

Like the pilot, so too did the Western media prepare me for this landing, conditioning me to expect something other than I found. My reaction to being there was what interested me most; I was nervous. When I asked at the Etihad Airlines transfer counter for an aisle seat on the next flight, I hesitated momentarily when the man asked me for my passport. I thought of changing money but was afraid to present American dollars to the clerk, in front of a line. In just two hours of waiting I felt myself go through numerous, split second reactions of bigotry and stereotypical judgement. Ironically, there I stood, my first time in the “Arab World” (if an airport counts) on September 11th. Stupidly, I reacted with fear and anxiety, when around me all I saw were couples readying for a vacation, families traveling together, men waiting to get home to their wives, and grandparents anxiously looking forward to seeing their grandchildren. It is not right for women to be treated as servants, slaves, property or second-class citizens, it is not right to restrict free thought and public expression but neither is it right to judge whole countries, people, histories, cultures, ordinary men and women, based on nothing you’ve lived, seen, tasted, felt, or experienced first hand. There is no just reason for me not to change money in the airport.

Bangkok is cool. It is really cool. There is a skytrain, a metro, river taxis, multiple newspapers, bars, dance clubs, art shows, sports teams, cultural events. The list goes on. I will look at two apartments today, play pick up basketball on Tuesday night, meet mutual friends for dinner this week. On Saturday morning I got a spicy (spikey) haircut. My life here is making itself. There is still much for me to explore, just 40 hours old in this new city and without a day of work but, I fell asleep last night with the same feeling when I said my goodbyes: ready and peaceful.

2008-06-19T14:40:00.001-04:00

Dreams Deferred
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

--

She sits across from me on the train, the exhaustion of her body mimicked in the tattered fibers of her clothing. It is 9:17 p.m.; I am on my way home from work and my ankles throb after eight hours of standing. Sagging over her slight shoulders, engulfing her beanpole wrists, her black jacket is three sizes too big, maybe an older brother’s, the elastic cuffs frayed at the ends, in parallel with her raspy brown hair that is no longer in a pony tail. Nearly empty, the subway car’s orange sherbet seats, bright lights, advertisements for foot surgeons, and new kinds of beer are all too familiar. Distracted by nothing, I stare, saddened to the core by this young girl and everything she represents.

Alone, she sits on the other side of the aisle. No more than ten, she is with no one, on her own. In rhythm with the speeding train, her legs rock back and forth, too short to reach the floor, perfectly childish. She sits forward to allow the backs of her knees to sit perfectly on the edge of the seat. She is a little kid.

After two stops, she reaches into her bag – an oversized, blue shopping bag - with her left hand and pulls out a sandwich wrapped in aluminum foil. Peeling away layers of foil and wax paper, she finally gets to her dinner: a bacon and egg sandwich on a white roll. Parts of the bacon are too crispy so she cracks them off and throws them on the floor to join the foil. Furthering the perfect image of a child, her feet now hang above scraps of food, the same as a toddler who sits in a booster seat above the Cheerios they’ve thrown all over. This is her dinner. For dessert, she eats a donut from Dunkin Donuts. This is her meal.

Instead of a booster seat, a mother and father sitting with her for dinner, a family member with her on the train, a schoolbag, she continues her journey alone. She looks comfortable, as if she has done this many times before. But, in spite of her hardened shell and the independence defaulted upon her, she is still just a child with a playful curiosity in her eye. She starts to play with her food, the aluminum foil of her dinner becomes her distraction for the few remaining stops.

With great attention to detail, she tears one piece into a rectangle and folds it in half two times. Playing dress up, imitating, emulating, the role models from T.V., her block, movies, music, magazines, she puts the foil in her mouth, suctions it around her top teeth, and smiles into the window to admire her new grill. Stretching her neck to see her reflection, she laughs out loud in delight, pleased, smiling with joy at the altered reality she dressed-up her way into. Thrilled, her eyes sparkle, someone all of a sudden.

Three seconds later, as quickly as it comes, it goes, her amusement stops. With no one to acknowledge her or play along, to believe, to pretend, defeat sets in and, with a face of dejection she removes her grill and throws it on the floor. Her dreams, like the drool on the side of her mouth, wiped off and thrown away.

The doors open at her stop. She hops off her chair, grabs the huge blue shopping bag, and gets off the train in one of the most crime-ridden areas of the Bronx. Below her seat sit bits of crispy bacon, stale bread, and her dreams. Still alone, she climbs the stairs.

--

I worry about the state of our children. I miss my friend Eve, I mourn for her future (Gabriela’s beautiful phrasing), think of her family, miss our friendship, her laughter, smarts, concern for people. I just miss her. Her death and the violent way she left the world is on my mind all the time and affects me all the time in complicated ways I am not fully able to understand or articulate. Yet, one of the questions I come back to again and again is this: What are we doing to our young people? As I ride my bike through the streets and pages of case studies, crime statistics, and Op-Ed columns, I am saddened by the state of childhood, by how we have failed a generation of young people. It hurts me to know that 10-year-old children do not believe in their dreams -- dreams not just deferred, but dreams they never believed to begin with.

2008-03-09T04:10:00.001-04:00

dthonline.com

I am home from India having concluded my fellowship early to return to the US, family and friends to say goodbye to my former roomate and dear friend.

2008-02-20T09:58:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from February’s monthly report (names changed and organization called AA). ‘Rents and a break get here tomorrow; thank god.

I am totally frustrated, fed up, and out of patience, feeling like I don’t want to be working in Ahmedabad any longer. There is no one event that tipped the scale. In the beginning months I was fine to do anything, handling (more or less) certain frustrations, trying to work hard, excited at times and looking to contribute however possible. Seven months in, my patience is lost and my nerves are on their last legs, sick of people hissing at me in the street, the chaos of our office, and most things in between. Within AA I am an english-speaking secretary and the expectation with which people ask me to do menial tasks is annoying. People still stare in the streets, are rude, the city is dusty and loud. I don’t like it.

What I like least about it is my reaction. In a previous life I was a happy, energetic, (relatively) patient, stress-free person with an optimist’s outlook on each day, an appreciation for human interactions, and a generally pleasant countenance. Now, my interactions are curt, sometimes rude. I hate this, I don’t want to be rude to anyone, in my office, rickshaw drivers – anyone -- but it is a coping mechanism, one that I have done my best to avoid for months and months but find myself reverting to. It is not nice to be unkind it is not how I care to live my life but, sadly, I am.

This infects everything, my work with and commitment to AA most notably. I’ve started looking ahead, counting the days until I run the marathon and leave right after that. This is not a good way to be here and I don’t know how to change it – it must improve – for the remaining time. Hopefully a week with my parents, a break (we just had a break), and some time away will reinvigorate me for the balance.

What I find most problematic is dealing with _____ji, a man I have grown to appreciate so deeply for his archetypal imperfection. He is such a good man, a sweet man with a caring heart and the best intentions, but he doesn’t know what he is doing running an NGO and makes it up as he goes. He is stubborn, sexist in ways he is not aware of, frantic, a great talker. In him I see someone struggling to lead, to support a staff where funding might be running out, to help these workers, to play a part – to act in a space that requires a skill set he does not have and he tries every day, as best he knows, to cover his bases. He is not dumb or naïve, he is cunning, manipulative at times (I think he has ADHD. I mean that. I have never seen the man sit still for more than 10 minutes and even when he is sitting his eyes constantly dart around the room, and his hands fiddle with something. He does not focus or listen. At first I thought it was just his personality, and in part it is, but so too do I think he has ADHD. Yes, this is my professional, psychiatric opinion).

Because of his character, I have a very hard time telling him no. When he asks me to do something, we are not really able to talk through why he/AA is doing it – language is a problem but the bigger problem is that he doesn’t work in this way - what he is getting at, any sort of broader strategy or plan, so I have two options; “_____ji, this is a good idea,” and his excited reply of, “Good good good, very good!” or my reply of “_____ji, I don’t think this is the best option” and his defeated admission: “As you like.”

Living Here

2008-02-16T05:45:00.002-05:00

From the window of my room on the tenth floor I can see a lot. Facing the intersection, I see the empty plot next door sprinkled with litter and surviving plants. A stray dog and her puppies roam for food. Across the street on both corners are empty lots and high rises just beyond, tall buildings of poured concrete that don’t sweat and will soon buckle under the yearly stress of ten months of dry heat and two months of biblical rains. Opposite our compound is a party plot, a series of three grass cordons decorated with flowers, ribbon, music, stages, and gross amounts of food in an over the top, tacky show of wealth. Announced by blaring eight-person bands, horse and carriage, and dancing processions, arranged marriages unfold here, the platform for wealthy, exclusive families to broadcast their mergers. Love is absent. Motorbikes speed by, green and yellow rickshaws spewing fumes prowl in the search for customers. A man wearing a wrinkled white dhoti rolls along on his fruit cart smoking a bidi, absent-mindedly steering his camel. Each morning, this is what I see. This is where I live.

At the train station last night I dismissed a mother of no more than twenty, her infant child swaddled on her hip, when she asked me for ten rupees. My nod so fast, it was almost instinctual, a reflex.

Living here worries me. Every day I see things that are not right and they’ve phased from outrageous to normal, my reaction no longer disgust or sadness or indignation, but of shrugged shoulders and self-centered concerns.

This afternoon, on the way to the store to buy 500 rupees of phone credit, I passed a construction site. Under the noon sun, two young women worked together to haul bricks from the street to the mason 100 yards away. One of the women, in a yellow sari, her muscular mid drift exposed, bangles covering her biceps, shoulders pulled back with a strong, royal stature, stood with a piece of rolled cloth on her head and a plank of wood on top of that -- the cloth serving as a shock absorber and soft base for balance. The other woman symmetrically placed bricks onto the piece of wood, five across and four high. Without looking down and with twenty bricks stacked on her head, the woman in the yellow sari walked to the mason.

Nearby, on a pile of sand, two young boys in t-shirts and nothing else were playing, their hair matted and dirty, almost dredded in filth, snot crusted to their upper lips.

Every night around 10 p.m., our doorbell rings. I know who it is; when it rings I scamper into the kitchen and look for something to give. A piece of fruit, some biscuits, leftover food if there is any, I try to find something. The man at the door is a Dalit (untouchable) sweeper who works in our compound and the neighboring ones. Without fail, he, and sometimes his son, make rounds of the building to beg for food. People toss him one or two rottis, some daal, vegetables on a good day. What he collects will be his family’s food for the day.

These are easy examples, obvious examples of destitution that stands in the most marked contrast to Western norms of what is and what is not acceptable. These are the norms. There are others that are as obvious – the caste system – and countless subtler ones that also stand in contradiction to what I’ve lived: most middle/upper class families have several house help (cleaners, cooks, ironers, drivers, washers); it is ok to drive like a lunatic (yes, a comparative measure against a Western norm that could very easily be tame driving by Indian standards – like all norms); it is ok to harass women; blatant corruption; piss anywhere you want; litter; answer the phone in the middle of an important meeting; wear white denim, ass-hugging bellbottoms.

Maybe adjusting or adapting or accepting norms is a coping mechanism, something you have to do not to go crazy in a new place where the customs are different from what you know. Sometimes there is no choice and you eat what you are served. In this international volunteer game, this is often encouraged and called acculturation or behavioral fluency, substituting Skippy peanut butter for locally roasted peanuts, or jeans for a lungi, or your greeting for a more appropriate, local one. In so doing, foreigners try to fit in, to assume a normal life as dictated by what’s around them, to substitute some of what they’ve known for the new world they’ve landed in.

But, I don’t want to be rude (yes yes, conversations on what is rude, what isn’t rude, social

constructions, etc.) to people just because everyone else is and it is not right for children to shit in the street, for families of a dozen to live in one room, to grope women on the bus, to throw trash anywhere, or to wear ass-hugging, white denim bellbottoms in the year 2008.

Maybe it is a coping mechanism -- it is not that hard to relinquish Skippy peanut butter - but at what point is the acceptance of norms an excuse for a dulled sense of morality, responsibility, right and wrong excused by anthropological masturbation that permits you to write it all of as a local norm. When did I go from fearing the approaching beggar because of how uncomfortable he/she made me feel, to brazenly dismissing illiterate, dirty children with a motion of my arm because everyone around me does the same.

I missed something, I’ve tipped too far, gotten used to things that no one should get used to, neither the person seeing it nor the person living it.

Maybe accepting norms is buckling under the pressure, acquiescing in the face of enormity. But it is not about the enormity, it is about what I see everyday and reacting. This is about personal behavior in response to norms, about looking out the window each morning and rejecting comfort, refusing to say that the view from my window is acceptable. My answer should not depend on what those around me say.

I can clean my own apartment, wash my own clothes, and, no matter how many times I see someone jump into a sewer in their underpants, remain indignant about something that is normal here but loathsome, inhumane and unjust. Even though I live here, I can remain outraged at the outrageous.

2008-02-13T04:40:00.002-05:00

Yesterday someone stole my bike. In the morning, like usual, I rode to work, listening to music, taking in some warm morning sun, dodging cow shit mines, cars, bikes, and camels, on my morning route that cuts through the village, over the train tracks and then parallel to them. I parked my bike, locked it, and went upstairs to start my day. Normal, it’s the same day I’ve been living since September. At our office, the parking deck is on the ground floor of the building, bicycles and motorbikes perched in-between concrete support columns, making it impossible to keep watch out the window (not that I would). Just above the back wheel, where bikes in the West have a rear brake and brakepad, sits a single handcuff serving as the lock, jamming the back wheel before it is perched onto the kickstand that really is a stand; the bike is locked to itself. It is a joke of a lock, the handcuff from a police officer Halloween costume. Not more than 20 feet long, the driveway leads to a busy street, making this the easiest of thefts – the bike parked in a sheltered place, the lock a formality but not a deterrent, no guard, no gate, and a waiting, bustling street to disappear into. Quick cash.

When I first got the bike everyone told me that I should get a second lock. In the U.S. I rarely lock my bike on the street, bringing it inside whenever possible, well aware that in NYC it is just dumb to think that a lock will deter theft. Here, I didn’t get another lock, thinking I was invincible, or that no one else uses a second lock why should I. I don’t really know why, but I didn’t. “I will be back in 20 minutes, I am just going to the post office,” I told my co workers. At the bottom of the stairs, jingling the key in my right hand, I turned the corner and didn’t see it. Maybe someone moved it. The corner, the nook where a bike can’t fit, the street, the neighboring balconies, pan parlors – I looked everywhere. My bike was gone. My bike is gone and it ain’t coming back.

What a shitty feeling. Maybe there should have been another seven locks, maybe I should have had an alarm system on it, it is a moot point. I was robbed and that feeling sucks. It was probably someone from the neighborhood, someone who watches me come and go and finally worked up the gall the make his move. Loosing my bike and the money sucks, but the world goes on – the feeling of being robbed and totally helpless to do anything about it is the worst part. I just hope he needs the money and uses it for something good.

With my tail between my legs, I sulked upstairs in search of a: “Sorry, that stinks.” Instead,“You should have had another lock,” was the response from everyone. Great. Thanks a lot. That is really sweet. Your right, getting my bike stolen was my fault. I apologize. They mean well but it wasn’t what I was looking for. When the director returned he went crazy, ranting about how that person is a bad man, he must be caught, my cycle will be replaced in one or two or three or four days, and that man is a thief and a bad man. He is such a sweet man and is extra careful when dealing with me, but this enthusiasm was more than I wanted to deal with right then. I just wanted for someone to say, “Sorry man, that sucks,” and then get on with it, take a few days to think about the best next move and let is pass with time. More ranting, I must call the police, file a report. In the middle of his best-intentioned tirade, I looked outside and chuckled – good luck finding my bike, the same bike that every other person in Ahmedabad rides. That’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack, it is like looking for a specific needle in a needle factory.

I walked home.

My Biggest Fear

2008-02-08T07:13:00.000-05:00

BC answers the phone. It is 9 a.m. in Great Neck. I know he is just beginning to stir at this hour, awake but in bed, eyes open but not on, periodically bothering Lezley to see if the paper came, if he pissed the bed, or for no good reason. I see his bedroom in my head, the very empty bed next him, the remodeled bathroom to help him bathe, the Venetian blinds drawn, a shoe horn about, powder on his dresser, an oft used comb. Through the crackle of the connection, a wire carries my voice across the world. The distance remains. Immediately I miss him. Hearing his voice lets me see his face; his patent hello, an upturn in the O after the few seconds it takes for him to place the receiver to his ear. Whhhats happening, he asks not just with his voice but with his personality. I hear his wise cracks, feel the sweet gestures, the semi circle of the receiver somehow now resembling his mischievous smirk as it communicates his thoughts and I feel his warm smile amongst these cold lonely mountain clouds. Soft hands, blue eyes, thin hair. I think back to shooting baskets in the park, teaching me to drive, when he let me use the remote ignition on the Maxima, days at the pool, lunches at Scobee, his Pittsburgh hat, that bad moustache, bar mitzvahs, baseball games, days in the hospital for him, days in the hospital for Doc, Tobey Gale, playing drums in the basement, the first Thanksgiving after Doc died, the look of 50 years of love he gave Doc and Doc gave him when she was inundated with tubes and machines - my Simoney he said as she turned, somehow, even though the doctor said she was going to die -- Montauk, swims in the ocean, walks to the park, everyday is fathers day to me, how lucky can a guy get, take it take it take it, Chanukah, sleep overs, tokens for the bridge, birthday parties, stories of UVa, Fuzzala, driving backwards in a rental car, meeting Doc at Grossinger’s, the bungalows, eating at that Italian restaurant outside of Liberty, bagels and lox, foster kids, basketball games, support and advice. A perennial presence.

It takes him a while to place my voice. Today he answers the phone without his dentures. "As far as I can tell I am all right." His words slither off his gums, aspirating his syllables. I’ve called too early. He is out of it, unsure at first who I am, where I am, or what hour it is. But, when I close my eyes and see him, my blue eyes just like his, I see the glitter in his eye looking for trouble the way he always does, his mind witty and ever ready with a sarcastic retort. Those quips don't come as fast now and their delivery is unreliable. This month he turns 89 and with each day his momentum increases, no longer aging with the invincibility of youth but aging in a real, mortal time, in units of faded memories, panicky midnights and medications required.

His routine is paramount, without it he is easily disoriented, rattled, confused, stressed and worried, inconsolable by anyone other than my mother, Lezley, or Big G. No more snooze buttons, he gets up when he is ready and eventually makes his way to the shower, already thinking about what to have breakfast. He eats the same thing every morning. Once dressed, he thinks more about what to have for breakfast, filling at least a half an hour and the empty room. Wheat Bran, half a banana, skim milk and his medication. That takes him to about 10:30 or 11, the perfect time to read the paper and start thinking about what to have for lunch. But, such a monumental contemplation definitely requires a change of scenery. From the kitchen, he goes to the living room to sit on the old couch in the white slip cover closest to the front door. Near the phone and with a clear view of the street, he is ready for action. He asks Lezley: “whatta we got?” He will eat lunch, take a nap, think about dinner, maybe watch jeopardy, worry about things, talk to my mom and my uncle, and get ready for bed. Small things like a note in the mail, a call from his grandkids, trip to the barber shop or supermarket, the occasional visitor or a walk to the park when it is warm, make his day, an event to rattle the monotony.

Such is aging I suppose – I don’t know - and the glass is overfull, an unbelievable life ripe with good fortune, love, health, and family. I think, but don’t really know, BC is living the last years of a wonderful life. His health is good and his medical coverage comprehensive – there is no immediate reason to think this - but at 89 the thought is there.

I don’t want him to die. This is my biggest fear and the single hardest relationship to be away from.

It pains me to be so far away. During university I saw him during the breaks and between summer forays, called often and felt nearby. Now, I call but it is not the same. Before I left my mom asked me what I would do if BC got sick. It was on my mind and yet her asking made gravity seem real, the thought holding more weight if she too was thinking about it.

I am here, I chose to be here and I try to stay in touch. It is not the same and in these important years it is not sufficient. I miss BC; thinking about it melts me into a 11-year-old child at sleepover camp for the first time, whimpering, helpless, a pain the rests just behind your stomach when you curl in your sleeping bag and try to fall asleep. What I fear most is the onset of some sort of Alzheimer’s (his memory is still sharp – there is no reason to think that he will develop it now) or another stroke, the fear that he is alive when I return but does not remember me. Or, of course, that he might die, that I might have said goodbye to him forever. I don’t pray often, but I pray to see him soon.

A Eulogy for Toi Market

2008-02-05T23:40:00.000-05:00

Outside of the black gate, take a left, walk by the nursery of ferns and every color green, follow the path as it heads to the Adams Arcade roundabout, bumping and dipping, closer to the road at times, spackled with litter. Cross the street to the right, the petrol pump on one corner, the furniture maker on the other. Watch out for stopping matatus – you will probably hear Shakira not lying about her hips before you see the likeness of Wesley Snipes airbrushed on the side door – and the gutter that serves as a latrine. In the cold air of Nairobi’s July winter, shops open later in the morning, women with their over-bundled babies strapped on their backs dust off vegetables to make them look extra fresh for one more day, men gather around one newspaper and read about the latest celebrity scandal out of Hollywood, children on their way to school walk in groups of three or four, their uniforms perfectly assembled, their shoes somehow spotless despite the mud and puddles. Stray dogs that don’t know the difference between Monday and Thursday stay close to the butcher shops, sometimes venturing out to see what they can find but always close enough. The bag seller unpacks his duffels, rucksacks, knapsacks big and large, stuffs them full and hangs them carefully. A stall of hats next to a stall of shoes, then pants, then children’s shirts, then men’s shirts, then a heap of children’s clothes. The big Church on the right side of the street. The homemade church to the left, as big as the one on the right, is forever expanding and the only thing more certain than construction its lumber walls and plastic tarp roof is some sort of witch healing ceremony.

Directly ahead is storage, the safe where everyone’s wares are stored nightly in overstuffed burlap sacks the size of offensive linemen. Each morning the sacks are loaded onto carts and delivered to their owners who carefully unpack the carefully packed goods. At the corner it is more like J walking, a quick left and the next right just as quick, the street straight but snaking momentarily. The first strip is a locksmith on the left and fruit and vegetable sellers – all women – on the right. Red tomatoes, that beautiful purple of eggplant, interior decorated eggshells, parsley, mustard greens, avocados, mangos, bananas, onions, garlic, pineapples, potatoes stacked five and six on top of each other readying for a sharpshooter contest. This stretch of the road gets bumpier. Just past the vegetables starts the coat sellers, and a long stretch of men’s shirts. These shirts take you to the corner capped by a large pile of socks. Rose’s house is in the compound through the gate on the right and the school children file through the gate to the secondary school on the left. Running between the wall of that compound and the retaining wall of the school is the entrance into the heart of the market, as if this street is one finger leading to a forearm, the elbow intersection now towards the core. Now the path is jagged.but mkokotenies push on, hissing from behind, they have the right of way. Often, the stop, look for a smoother path, rock back, redirect and push their wheelbarrow forward. The bicep starts with a shirt seller with shirts on three levels in parallel lines to the ground, as if out to dry. Trees canopy over the path and the light sprinkles through. Cackles from the school yard rain down, shirts now untucked, footballs entertaining by the dozens. Stalls only one the right hand side, next is another locksmith who also sells radios, then a stand for women’s undergarments, a place of necessity and embarrassment, women trying to try on bras over full sets of clothing.

Oily smoke enters your lungs at the shoulder. This corner is mad, an gulf of an intersection, people speeding from the many rivers, tributaries, brooks, and streams that empty there. Bubbling, frying cauldrons and tea stands. A sharp right leads to the most dangerous part of the market, food kiosks, billiards stands, and checkers depots, all made out of wood scraps, tin or plastic bag roofing. There are few colors there and many young men with the stayed look of glue fumes in the eyes. Paths don’t go straight for more than several steps. Music blasts. It is here that salaries are gambled away and drown in alcohol.

If you go straight you head directly into the heart of the market, down a wider row of shops that has constant, surprising, smaller paths emerging where you think they can’t. A left takes you past more vegetable stands, live meat marts, and confusion. A left is alive, churning you through total confusion, spitting you out higher up on Kibera Drive near a popular hang out for drunk matatu drivers, high beggar children, a huge, smoldering garbage pit.

Most days I went straight, right through to the end, a right passed the hotels, empty homemade churches and avocado seller, stepping on the precariously placed piece of wood bridging the latrine trench, and towards what looks like a dead end. There is a blue kiosk there and a path to the left, next to the woman who sells hair brushes and wire sponges for scrubbing. These shops are sad, poorly stocked. At the end, women often sit to have their hair plaited just opposite the woman selling fish. Stepping just beyond her, the market stops but never ends. In Kibera, on Ngong Road, in lots of Nairobi Toi Market is connected to everyone by the goods it supplies to hundreds of thousands of people, the jobs it provided, commerce it facilitated, the institution it was.

Most days, whether it had rained or not, that street had a huge puddle, making it a tip toe on one section of concrete to pass the shop where Tommy would sit chewing miraa. Then Salim’s old house, and right, through the blue gate that advertised the video arcade that doesn’t exist and out to the almost-main road that, down at the bottom of the hill, forms the corner with Kibera Drive.

Sat in piles of three or four empty tires, the Car Wash staff say what’s up. For some reason, this corner also always has someone pissing in the bushes. Up the hill towards the matatu stage. This hill is tough for those same mkokotenies, grueling to get their goods up the hill. Stalls all along the left, groups of men up along the fence behind the bus stop to the right..Left. Straight for a while and either further straight towards Kibera Primary and the path that leads down from Olympic towards the heart of Kibera, or right, past the junkyard and new sparklng, Coke-built, usually locked toilets, and Swahili Dishezz. Straight goes by the travel agent and the man with a copy machine and as you curve to the right you pass MoMos supermarket, the military outpost, some abandoned cars, and the woman making samosas just before reaching the CFK compound. If you go right, there is a barber shop on the right, several general provisions stores, a hair salon or five, furniture maker or three, and then the CFK compound.

No more. Toi Market was burned down in the violence that is corroding Kenya’s core. All of it. Emails tell me: “Toi Market was burned down”; “Toi Market doesn’t exist.” No more socks, squawking chickens, 15-year-old Lacoste polos, avocados, hideous jeans, bootleg sneakers. My memory is erased. Now, in my mind, where to I walk? Those lives, those shopkeepers, that heart of Nairobi.

--

Things in Kenya are bad. People are murdering each other for no reason. Both politicians rigged the election, both are corrupt, neither care for the people: they are killing them. Triggered by politics but now largely unrelated, the hate has exploded. This is a festering hatred that rots people’s insides over years, fermented in the toils of poverty, destitution, malnutrition, waiting to explode at the given chance. Raging at the world, at living in their filth, at having no drinking water, of siblings dying of diarrhea, of no electricity, chaos creates someone to blame, someone to kill, someone to, at last, stand over. Mob violence conflagrated.

NGO work is stopped. Adolescent girls’ health takes a back seat to murder, rape, robbery, and burning, erasing years of work, creating a new set of victims and issues. Bed net distribution schemes can’t happen during flaming ethnic violence.

Think of what people carry in their hearts that they can do what they are doing, for how long they were mad at the world, a hatred so pernicious on a low boil. For so many in Nairobi life is a pressure cooker and it is exploding.

Good Morning February

2008-02-01T10:37:00.000-05:00

I got back to Ahmedabad on Monday and back from the toilet three minutes ago. It feels good to be back, refreshed after a nice break, and that, just the third time on the shitter this morning, is a vast improvement from the record-setting shits-in-a-day pace I’d been on since Monday night. On Wednesday I went to the doctor, shat in a film canister which presented lots of logistical difficulties, at one point the initial blast almost knocking the container into the abyss, peed in a film canister (why do they give you two containers, the same size, for two jobs that are very different… different angles, pressure releases, smells, colors. One of those lab techs should try managing explosive diarrhea into a small plastic container and they would soon learn to provide a receptacle that is better suited for the work), had my blood pulled and thanks be to the lord I don’t have Typhoid or Malaria. Instead, I’ve got some other creature, or colony of millions of creatures, living in my body in a place that survived the nuclear Cipro attack. The doctor called in for back-ups, air cover, ground fire, two new types of antibiotics, 4 days in bed – these suckers don’t stand a chance. Forget world peace, I just hope I stop peeing out of my butt. It’s the small things in life.

My mind is in a good place. Leaving and returning lets you see things more clearly, realize what you do and do not have. I don’t like Ahmedabad, work is not good, and this is not the life I want. But, it doesn’t matter. Somehow, with your help (thank you for the packages, letters, emails, calls, comments), I made it through the most lonely, confusing five months of my life and here I sit (near the toilet), refreshed, just back from a 10-day gallivant to Mumbai, Bangkok (it was very weird to be reading magazines in the international airport terminals of the most famous cities in the world, waiting for my flight, and not be on my way home) and Goa, looking at February, my parents’ arrival in three weeks, and then three short months beyond that. This year has been good for me and taught me a lot about how I want to be in the world, what is important, what is annoying and stupid, etc, and I am still trying to understand all those lessons, there are many more still to come and I will be working to understand this period of time for many months and years after it concludes. But, the labor of getting through simple tasks, the burden of communicating is gone; now, instead of frustration and confused confusion, I laugh. Go ahead and state; I don’t care. I ride my bike in peace, joke at work, able to manage the little things and the larger thoughts in an engaged and healthy way.

Daydreaming

2008-01-05T07:23:00.000-05:00

In 2005, the median White household with toddlers in Manhattan had an annual income of ~$284,000. For Black households in Manhattan the median was $31,000, and for Hispanic households it was $25,000

--

My head is in the clouds and my heart is lost, the two periodically, momentarily grounded by the change of songs as iTunes shuffles through the depths of my daydreams. Lauryn Hill coos and I want. Companionship. Jack Johnson pines. Cary Brothers tell me of inspiring eyes. Radiohead’s had their heart broken. The Temptations know I am looking for my girl. At my desk in a daze, I sit with a blank face concocting images of perfection and beauty, writing fairytales of love on the ceiling tiles in the next room. This is a feeling I get in the middle of crowds and when I am all alone. This is a feeling I have sitting in the most comfortable places, with familiar faces, in the arms of lovers. This is a feeling of painful hope that makes every love song feel like it is made for me and that dreamy someone I am yet to meet. Alone, only she understands.

Indian women are everywhere and nowhere, all around and unapproachable. Their beauty, the color of their dress, perfection of their hair present constantly but guarded by cultural norms, sexual repression, lack of freedom, choice. This is the part of my life that makes me feel the most like a tourist, in a museum, walking through hallowed halls with high ceilings, riding my bicycle on the streets of a living gallery, a contradictory exhibition on the Western media’s obsession with these often-fetishized women and my chaste existence. Vaguely Indian, international-looking women writhing on the screens of Bollywood’s latest release cloud the Western mind. Fair skinned and traditionally dressed, Itialian, Brazilian, Spanish, Puerto Rican, Persian, Greek, North Indian, Turkish, Saudi, Moroccan, Egyptian, Sri Lankan all at the same time, this ambiguous, skinny, tame caricatures emerges as the pedigree of beauty. Her eyebrows are perfect, clothes exactly stitched, blemishes airbrushed, skin fair. Of course she can cook. But the brochure for this installation piece leaves an expectant Westerner wanting. The women of those glossy pictures and billboards do not exist, real women do and they are beautiful, but repressive gender roles guard this museum’s many Mona Lisas.

In the streets, cafes, restaurants, and shops in my life the eyebrows are less perfect and there are blemishes. There are real women everywhere and they are beautiful; every day I fall in love. I try to be conscious of my coached response to this ‘exotic’ beauty. But I can’t help it and I don’t care too, refusing the sociological unpacking of my mind. I fall in love with a distant grace, a perfect braid, exposed shoulder blades, stunning silk saris, a beauty that assaults my senses, women that I have no adequate response to, no understanding of. A fleeting glance, hennaed hands and feet, bindis, exactly matching outfits, gold.

No touching, no talking, no photos, please move along sir.

I cannot talk to them; usually my armpits smell too bad. Perhaps in other, more cosmopolitan Indian cities it is possible, but here in the home of resurgent Hindu conservatism, I can count on one hand the times I have had a one on one conversation with a single Gujarati woman. A friendly wave hello is met by suspicion. I am just saying hello. We live in the same building. We see each other all the time. Just hello. You don’t have to insult my soul with that sneer; a simple wave would do. I’m fine, thank you for asking.

I left the U.S. on August 11; I am horny. It is more than that. I am horny to be horny. I want my brain to be active, to be stimulated by a glance from across the room, that it might be her calling, a stupid text message, body language, dancing, writing her name in the margin of the page. I crave the fun part of crushes and courting. The physicality is nice (really nice?) and missed, but it is secondary. I want to share this with someone, to have someone to retreat to, to work with, to be there for. So I retreat into my mind and I think of her, giddy not with a person in my life but with an idea in my mind, a classic move for me, consoled by the deity I dream of.

Jon tells me that I am good at putting myself out there, going out on a limb to far places outside of my comfort zone. But only in certain areas. When it comes to loving, partnerships, relationships, I rarely crawl outside of my tree trunk and never on to branches far from the ground, afraid to be cut down. It is usually worse than that, letting someone in for a peek, then like a paranoid old Jewish lady living in the South Bronx with seven cats and newspapers from the past 40 years, scare them away, close down, bolt the eight locks of the door and, alone, eat my matzo ball soup, almost resenting that they got to see my prized newspapers and antique phone -- places strangers don’t get to see.

Maybe this is why I travel, an escape, a place to do the opposite of what I just said, to be vulnerable far from friends and family, to love, to work hard in a place that I enter already knowing when I am going to leave. So too does it make a firm excuse to avoid relationships in the U.S., convenient excuses that I convince myself of and tell to others: now is not a good time because I am going to Kenya for the summer, Scotland for the semester, India for the year.

Thelonius Monk plays beauty into a religious experience. The Beatles tell me love is all I need.

Deep down I know I am not lying. I want to be in love, to be loved, to pain through it, to have someone to share things with, to make me stronger. I want this so badly. I want to write love songs with my actions, to write corny things like: I want to write love songs with my actions and I sit here dancing through this thought in the love songs of the world, indulging in a thoughtful loneliness that makes me smile.

But I can’t live in love songs, or the thought of writing them. This is the least mature facet of me. I see that limb right in front of me but I am so cozy with my newspapers and my cats, aware that I got the best friends in the world, family who love and support me, a core group that is there for me no matter what and all they ask for in return is some warm milk. The thought of compromising that for someone new is a branch I can’t crawl out on just yet, knowing full well that it is the only place where I will ever meet the imperfect version of the woman in my mind.

And I want to be with her so badly. Since arriving in India I have thought a lot about the world, how I want to be in it, what is important, my priorities, work. Sitting here daydreaming on a Saturday, I know what my long term priorities are: to never have to work on Saturday. Saturdays are going to be for cartoons, making pancakes, loving, learning, growing, tee ball and recitals and little league, dinner with my wife, the newspaper in bed in the morning, work around the house, school projects, a partner I adore and family I love more than anything. Family will define me. Consistence in my life and in my work will be the litmus test for the type of person I am, and my children will be how I change this world.

This is not magic, it takes sacrifice, selflessness, commitment, acknowledgment of imperfection; or so I am told. One day I will be ready. For now maybe it is better that I am in a museum because it is more difficult to drive recklessly, to hurt people, to showcase my immaturity. For now I just feel alone. Alone and thinking of her, lost in love songs made for us.

Great New Year

2008-01-04T06:41:00.000-05:00

“If you have any sense of responsibility at all, stay with your riots here at home. Work for the coming elections: You will know what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how to communicate with those to whom you speak. And you will know when you fail. If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. It is incredibly unfair for you to impose yourselves on a village where you are so linguistically deaf and dumb that you don't even understand what you are doing, or what people think of you. And it is profoundly damaging to yourselves when you define something that you want to do as "good," a "sacrifice" and "help."” From: “To Hell With Good Intentions,” an address given by Monsignor Ivan Illich to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968

This morning I woke up smiling. It is a new year and feels like it. I am happy. My mind is clearer than it’s been in months. People are staring a little less. Work feels like it is going better. Merchants don’t try to rip me off as often. Rickshaw drivers know where they are going. It doesn’t always smell like cow shit. The air is cleaner. There is less traffic. Adolescent boys used the mighty Internet to answer their questions about Western women. Young men combing their hair in packs and posing on their motorbikes don’t hiss at me as I go by.

No, none of this changed in the calendar page that went from 2007 to 2008, there are still Mondays to start the week and no one in my office learned english as Cinderella left at midnight, but it’s in my head. Just like that my brother’s words snuck up on me: optimism is a modifier. Minutes, days, weeks, and months before, my mood, mentality, feelings about being here were not positive – at best, they were neutral, defeated to the point of contentment, inaction, sedation -- which made summoning positive energy in response to the insanity around me very difficult. Today is different. I feel hopeful, happy, more like my old self, less volatile. No more a hormonal, 12-year-old cat spraying on the curtains one moment, curled sleeping in the sun the next.

My actual celebration of the New Year was hardly a celebration at all. In bed with a fever, wearing 5 layers, scurrying to the toilet for my drop at midnight, I was not at an open bar, dancing at a club, or mingling at a party. But, I couldn’t be with friends so it didn’t matter. I was tucked under the covers, shivering, promising not to make empty promises, thinking about former lovers, family, friends, remarkably at peace with spending this over-hyped, anticlimactic party night in bed healing.

I woke up half way home, looking down at the 5.5 months in front of me. No longer am I wearing a diaper, sucking my thumb with Dumbo tears forming in my eyes staring at this beastly, never-ending, fanged, 9-month loneliness in Ahmedabad. And the last two weeks were definitely the bottom of the barrel, the holidays, the expectation of a break in the action, quality time with friends and family. Instead, just more work. No longer. Optimism now.

Who knows what I’ve done so far, if I’ve contributed at all, “helped,” hurt, been a total waste of space, ate too much, done too little -- the only thing that I can say for sure is that I’ve made it. I made it half way and it feels really good. There is a mid year retreat in two weeks, my parents will visit in February, and all of a sudden the end is in sight, there is a touch of immediacy around my work, thoughts of what happen next legitimately enter the picture, travel in June and July, thinking about how I am going to deal with the cost and disconnection of living in the U.S. again, getting to have lunch with B.C.

It is just January 4th, but climbing down is always easier.

2007-12-28T06:04:00.000-05:00

“There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, reinvented, made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether or not we use them. Bombs will destroy us either way.” The End of Imagination, 1998, Arundhati Roy

--

This morning I want my words to cry, my sadness to run down these pages, scrolling through an intense, disillusioning, consuming despair. I want the reflection of this monitor to show my vapid eyes, an overcome expression. I want this unfeeling machine to implode from the intensity of the emotions bleeding through my tapping, typing, fingertips. We woke this morning or we went to sleep this evening in a murderous world, a world of hate, killing. Assassination.

Pictures of her coffin. Ensuing riots. Outrage. Chaos. Speculation about what went wrong, how this was allowed to happen, what will happen now in an already tumultuous political climate. Graphic designers walk us through her final steps. Elections on January 8th. Nuclear security. Photos of her life. Terrorism. Extremists. Condolences and apologies, promises for investigation, public condemnations, vows of vengeance, blame.
If there are ever, I do not know, but today there surely are no sufficient words of consolation. Interrogations might find out who planned this attack, but they can’t tell us how much bad there is in the world. We know. We’ve just witnessed.

No energy for this. Exhausted. A moment that makes you believe in nothing.

Alex asked me about things in Pakistan. I hadn’t checked the news. I told him it was just politics as usual, thinking she were still alive and that he was referring to the approaching elections, political posturing, power hungry dictator. I checked the newspaper and was uppercut by a heavyweight headline.

Dead.

My knees wobbling, already in the 8th round of a title bout against Holiday Time Homesickness, I smashed against the canvas, not out for the count, but infected with a feeling that will take a day to pass. This hit landed before the bell, below the belt.
I never met Benazir Bhutto. I am not from Pakistan. People are murdered all the time. In large numbers people die tragic deaths. Yet something about watching that web page load screamed into my soul of a world so sick, so wrong, so polluted that today I want to disengage, to refuse this world, to fold my hand, to be 7, to be lied to and told that everything will be ok.

That groups -- groups made of human beings -- are competing to take claim for killing her. That most of my colleagues flip past this news to the “year in films lookback, the 25 most influential Bollywood films of the year” (can there be 25 most influential films in a year?). What is going on in the world when people compete for credit of an assassination? What is really going on in the world when this doesn’t phase people? That that man stood in the crowd with explosives strapped to his body and a sense of duty or right-doing planted in his mind, the goal of killing her and as many others as possible, maybe in the name of god, that somehow this action was justifiable, or right, that he pulled the trigger.

Today I want my words to cry.

Child Labor on the 18th Green

2007-12-17T07:15:00.000-05:00

“I work outside for nine months a year as a construction laborer and survive on daily wages. Going to vote means loss of three days of wages and an expenditure of Rs. 350. How can I afford that when I am not sure where my next meal will come from?” Varsinbhai, a worker quoted in The Indian Express, December 16, 2007, when asked if he was going to vote in the state-wide elections

This was the last place I expected to play golf. India, the land of 1.2 billion, the Mahatma, Taj Mahal, non alignment, the third highest number of HIV/AIDS affected persons in the world, spices, Bengal tigers, countless languages, yoga, caste, the hundreds of millions of rural poor, weddings, saris, the Kama Sutra. Going to Scotland, the home of golf, it made sense. Here, it just wasn’t in my mind; the first -- and second -- set of associations of India, its culture, tourist destinations, non tourist destinations, likely don’t involve golf and for most people here life and golf rarely meet. What’s golf? Few know and fewer play. But, this morning I saw the face of the 7, 8, 9, 10 percent growth rate investors in the West fawn over, of the relatively small but growing (in number and in wealth) urban upper class, of ‘development’ and its dumbfounding complexity.

It is winter in Ahmedabad and it’s cold. Before and after the sun, shawls make nocturnal appearances, caps come out and this is not the kind of weather that makes you want to wake up. Momma pajama doesn’t jump out of bed, let alone at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. It was more like a roll, stirring only at the second alarm and even then wondering if it wasn’t too late to make the call – I am just too tired, sorry. No shower, quick transition from pajamas to pants, switch the shirts, glasses no contacts, jacket and into the elevator.

My fault for being on time; I wait. Rahul pulls up half an hour late. Since arriving, he has been the most gracious of hosts in his city, welcoming me warmly, inviting me to family events, giving me shirts, always asking if there is anything I need or that he can do. He is going to lend me a blanket. Twenty four, he and his older brother work at the textile company started by their father. In time, it will be theirs. They own 4 cars; conspicuously on the dashboard are his Burberry sunglasses. Golf clubs on the back seat. Digging in his pocket, he takes out and answers his iPhone. Their company survived the decline of the textile industry in Ahmedabad and they are surviving well.

Ahmedabad is growing and it is growing fast. It is growing out, not up, without a plan, in concentric circles of mega malls, cinemas, office parks and 10-story apartment compounds. Residents who grew up here no longer know when the city starts and when it ends, the landmarks they once referenced gone, parks for an ice cream on a Sunday subsumed in the belly of the beast, remodeled, renovated, now a hotel or a parking lot. Two-year-old malls, with only half of the shops rented, cower in the shadow of the newer, bigger, brighter mall going up immediately next door.

Behind both those malls and every construction project in the city are the shanty towns where the men, women and children who do the work live. Following the construction like the harvest, they live where there is work, unskilled, cheap to hire and easy to fire. They don’t shop at these malls and they don’t play golf. On their backs buildings and profit-margins are built. Developers want their projects up as fast as possible, money is the end goal. The demand for developments is high, the demand for labor is high and cheap labor is the best kind. Respect, fair pay, the legal working day are absent. Labor laws exist and NGOs scramble to keep up, but the pace of growth is too fast.

“Do you like Ace of Base?” Rahul asks. Sure. I don’t see any signs, but the roads are smooth, two lanes going in each direction, divided by a concrete wall, street lamps every 30 feet. Long haul trucks zoom by, delivering the concrete that will build the malls. For these truck drivers, the roads are good. The roads are good for the person they are rushing to meet. For the worker who is following the cement delivery, the roads are good. Easier on the hooves than a rocky, dusty, potholed, uneven road, the camels and elephants also appreciate this road. It is faster and easier to ride a bike, push a lorry and drive a car, motorbike, rickshaw, or donkey on a smooth road. Potholes help no one. Roads that do what roads are meant to do are really helpful.

Without that road it would have taken us two hours to get to the golf club. Instead, it takes 40 minutes. We take a left turn into the gate and are greeted by two men in uniforms and crisp salutes. They look like toy soldiers. This is not Westminster. They are not actually soldiers, they are cold. But, the boss obviously told them every car that comes and goes must be met by a crisp salute. He probably holds an MBA and this is the business culture he is going to create in his club, how he is going to increase brand equity and establish a strong reputation, the guard is the first and last thing members will see, what they will remember.

Construction is still going. When it is ready, Rahul tells me, this will be the most happening, exclusive club in the city. The driving range, club shop, Tee Off Café are complete; the course, clubhouse, pool, two restaurants, tennis courts, track and gym are still being built. Some of the landscaping is done, some fixtures have light bulbs, some merchandise is stocked.

Immediately upon parking – we are going to build our reputation on service -- two boys open the car doors. In t-shirts made in Mexico during the mid 90s, sold in the US, used for a year, donated to the Salvation Army and barged to India, they’ve been cast as Bellhop 1 and Bellhop 2. No starch, no uniform, no khakis. This Sunday is not their day off from school – they don’t go to school; mom is sweeping the steps and dad is climbing the scaffolding of the clubhouse. They are good boys and do their best to play the part. One of them awkwardly removes the golf bag from the back seat and slings it on his right shoulder, walking to the driving range on his tip toes. The bag is taller than he is. The other boy stares at me, blinded by the light.

Rahul drops his membership number nonchalantly and we saunter in, shoulders back, head high, looking around a little, stopping in the shop never with the intention to buy. He’s got the walk down. At the club.

His golf game is not as good as his walk. In fact, he can’t hit the ball. Visibly embarrassed, he takes his time in between swings. He is a beginner with really nice equipment. His clubs are from the US, a friend of his from school working in Chicago brought them home from his last business trip. Swooping to the rescue, the golf pro comes over. Now Rahul just looks like he is having a lesson, working on his game. Saved. His shirt is from Ralph Lauren, new, not the Salvation Army, but he too is playing his part.

In between swings, a woman reaches with a broom to wipe cobwebs from the rafters. Some of the staff stop working and stare. Snapped at the waist, their knees locked, women pick weeds from the landscaping. Off to the right the clubhouse is being built, ensconced in bamboo scaffolding and catwalking workers, a poured concrete skeleton, a Frankenstein of exclusivity that will soon be finished with oak panels and big egos, handshakes, bets, and gentlemen’s agreements.

Fifty balls later, we walk the walk and have breakfast at the café. Rahul’s phone rings, he answers, and two minutes later we are joined by a man with a pointed, scrupulously waxed moustache. It is his trademark and the trademark of many others from military homes. His father is a hot shot in the Army, a man with a moustache and public appearance of starched uniform, shadowed, glassy eyes, and expression of Spartan duty. Privately, behind the walls of the Army club -- a club only high ranking officials are allowed to join -- he is a different kind of man, a whiskey drinking, gambling man looking after his own interests. The one constant, public and private, are the orders he gives. Rahul belongs to this golf club and the mustached man belongs to his father’s. They want what the other has.

We finish eating and bullshit our way to the practice bunker, strolling, making sure the trees see us, our hands in our pockets. It is supposed to be sand. It’s not. It is a mud pit. Two young men are working on their short game, their crisp, new, white Nike sneakers muddy, no longer as white as their crisp, new, white Nike golf caps. Tots in the sandbox, they just hack away, mud going farther than the ball. “Hey yaar, you can’t touch the sand before your shot,” one tells the other in impeccable boarding school English. His friend doesn’t like being coached, contemplates the advice for half a second, shrugs his shoulders, and goes right back to punishing his clubs.

Short phrases, whispers, pats on the back, discretion, favors, the charade of importance.

Off to the side, leaning casually on a pitching wedge, moustache man walks Rahul through the policy of ‘introduction’ at the Army club.

See, even though I am not in the army, I gain my father’s membership. No one, absolutely no one who is not from a military family can get membership to this club. Wishing he were Bond, he takes a long, dramatic drag on this imaginary cigar. Unless, of course, I introduce you and my father makes a phone call.

A break in the action for a couple of swings. You have these two introductions, now it is just a matter of formality, paperwork, etc. Don’t worry.

Hundreds of thousands of rupees will change hands.

Ready with his touché, Rahul politely thanks him for all the trouble, adequately patting the moustache’s ego, then begins. I’ve been talking to my friend here and he is going to give me the membership forms this week. When I get them I will give them to you. He’s agreed to the discount.

Rahul’s father is one of the most esteemed members at a different club in Ahmedabad. The man who owns that club is opening this golf club and agreed to give the waxed moustache a Rs. 50,000 discount as a favor to Rahul’s family.

Go right here, then left, and just before that roundabout near the Reliance Supermarket take another left – our office is the pink building on the right. It’s easy to find.

There are no street signs. This is normal. Giving directions is not easy and things are not easy to find.

If you get lost or need directions just call. Great. Call you next week.

Still in the mud pit, the two young men continue to hit balls out of the bunker. When they are finished, they chip them back into the bunker, and then do it all over again. The man with the moustache joins them. In between shots he talks to me about his friends in Jackson Heights. We trade formalities. I am working for an NGO here that does sewage worker organizing. Great; I did my schooling in social work, specializing in rural and urban development but now I run a security company. He bashes a ball. It flies out of the bunker and onto the putting green, barely missing the man and his son practicing there. They are standing in the direct line of where he is hitting and he is not holding back, again and again bashing the balls like grapefruits and cantaloupes, vengeful, punishing, rapid fire right at this man and his son. They putt on.

He tells me he just wasn’t cut out for it. You don’t say.

Rahul and I head out. No one is at the driving range at the moment. Two boys scamper around collecting balls.

Growth is not inevitable; growth and ‘development’ are the results of policies, of business, currency, markets, speculation, government, investment, intentions good and bad, selfish and selfless, nationalistic and humanitarian, tariffs, trade agreements, acquisitions, loans. Capitalism demands growth but it doesn’t demand how that growth happens, it is guided, steered, and controlled by the decisions of real people, real people with hearts, children, families, reputations, ambitions, careers, hobbies, dreams, boards, stock packages, interests. The influential are influenced by human concerns the same way we all are None of this is inevitable.Their decisions affect real people.

This golf course is proof of the very difficult task of counting in the billions and trillions and not loosing people, at any level, to the system. It shoes that we have far to go in how we think about and do ‘development,’ that India’s growth rates are helping few, failing most, and lacking nuance. India’s growth is not considering the people or how it grows, it is focusing on the easy part of building buildings and roads with temperate success, ignoring the hard part and failing.

India is playing the game without the etiquette.

Technocratic schemes are easy to cook up on paper but they don’t work unless they consider the reality of the ground, the people they will most impact and it is by these people that these programs ought to be judged. Building private golf clubs and shopping malls is not ‘advancement’ (ever?) when they are built by displaced, homeless, illiterate, tribal laborers. Child labor on the putting green is not a success.

Human indicators are the ones that matter most and by these metrics India is failing.

The importation of Western values on exactly this topic is creating a critical mass of affluence that cares about nothing but indicators of their own wealth. Actors playing a part. Men who act as they think they should, as their Western business colleagues do, but have no idea what they are doing. The influential easily influenced, in power but not in control of the values they are driving their country towards, a dangerous materialism and inequity implanted in their minds as a just end goal. A proliferation of MBAs who want to build brand equity while employing illiterate middle age men as security guards. Business deals on the golf course. At the club on a Sunday. Desires to be Western, iPhones, but still way behind, Ace of Base blaring. Mud pits. Men who have studied the problems, are aware of them, but have been coached into a preferred lifestyle, not cut out for it.

There is no effective coordination at any level, no sense of equity, a variety of different actors playing towards the same hole but unconcerned with the other actors on the course, swinging away in their interest. Maybe the economic indicators are improving, for a few, but the social ones are not. Some of the roads are getting better, some jobs are being created, but the upper class urban elite, comfortable behind their gates, in their clubs and A/C cars, the face of the booming India the West adores, doesn’t care about the people they’ve left in the wake of capitalism’s growth, become more ‘developed’ than.

Be Exceptional

2007-12-12T07:18:00.000-05:00

“You decide to venture from the sanctity of your tropical compound. You see natives. You marvel at the things they can do with their hair. The things they fashion out of cheap twine or ordinary cloth. Squatting on the side of the road. Hanging out with all the time in the world. You might look at them and think: “They’re so relaxed, so laid-back, they’re never in a hurry.

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives – most natives in the world- cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the realities of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go – so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” -- Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”

Sunday concluded a three-day impact assessment. I am glad that it is over, I don’t like working on Saturdays and I definitely don’t like working on Sundays. Tiring, this trip let me taste something, see the term ‘sewage worker’ with my nose, understand the work we are doing in a lived way.

For three days we sat and talked about our work, went to the field to see it, to talk with the stakeholders, the people to whom the funding is supposed to go, the communities on the ground, the marginalized communities, low-caste. In a proposal, “empowerment” is a prerequisite – it must be mentioned. It can be linked to women or community or the veritable individual (women’s empowerment, community empowerment, individual empowerment), but regardless of who it is that is empowered, someone is going to get empowered. Saturday was not a proposal; I saw it. Empowerment is taking place here.

She stood up, her shoulders back, her head held high and when she spoke, people listened. Her sari was worn thin, cotton, not the warmer silk that would be worn for this colder weather. From where I sat her hair looked like a brand new record, the sun shinning in a round reflection that hugged the shape of her skull, her perfect part the first track of many songs of fine, jet black hair. With motions to rival even the most over exaggerated Italian stereotype, she spoke, conducting her discordant symphony. Nothing in her words was rehearsed, nothing about her was reserved, this was not a speech but a testament, a dictated autobiography, the cadence of her speech mesmerizing. Her body supported her, not sad, but a verification, the wrinkles in her face telling of the long days, the scars on her ankles, callous hands, tough feet.

She is pissed. She doesn’t cry, there is no sorrow, just anger. She lives what development literature tries, and constantly fails, to communicate.

Crescendo. She concludes with an ending that wins filmmakers awards and writers acclaim. Except this is real. Slowly, the reality of her words and the power with which they were spoken sinking in, she turns to the NGO assessor who is listening intently, with a mask of grave concern, sympathetic. “What do I do? Tell me what do to?” Using the most polite Hindi conjugation: “Boliye (please tell me).”

Overmatched, the NGO woman does her best, regurgitating what she would say; “You’ve started, you are empowered, you are thinking differently, here today, fighting for what’s yours, your rights.”

In that instant, this is an impressively impotent response, a pale of water to extinguish a forest fire.

For that woman to stand up and demand her rights is exceptional – it is not the norm. Why would she stand up? What is in it for her? Her liberation? Maybe. In the short term, to do so is likely not in her interest. The system is slow to change. Empowered women look good in the glossy pages of NGO brochures but often times they are not well received by husbands and bosses and there is a probability that some sort of violence will be committed against her.

With everything stacked against her, she refuses to relent for some reason beyond the improbable wage increase of 40 rupees a day to 70 rupees a day - $1 to $1.75. Maybe she believes in the world, in people, a better future for her children. No longer will she swallow her words. It is not easy, but she stands up for her rights.

Friends, family, people I know care for me very deeply and write only out of love, tell me to take it easy, that I am being too hard on myself.

I am not that woman, but she asks a very important and hard to answer question: What would it take for me to do something exceptional? For you to do something exceptional?

We often hear or read stories like this in the national media, color features recounting the work of individuals with remarkable personal constitutions and commitment to change despite the ubiquity of destitution in their lives. Women’s groups. Micro credit schemes. Former child soldiers. Community based organizations. Survivors of genocide. Peace activists. Surviving orphans. A clinic. Sewage workers. This woman.

Sitting in the living room with a full stomach, the heat working, the kids home from college, cars in the garage, Muppet curled up by the fire, it is easy to hear stories like this and feel overwhelmed, outmatched by such courage, that nothing we do in our sterile world can be as gutsy as that woman, as exceptional as these amazing stories in the national media, as people who choose to believe in something when everything in their world tells them not to.

But, we are not that lady, we don’t carry shit on our heads for a living. We have it much easier. We don’t need her courage to make change. We need our courage.

It is not enough for us only to think differently or to be empowered. We are thinking differently, we’ve taken the classes, read the articles, been to the lectures, studied this inside and out – for us, it is about how we act. Think of what America and its citizens communicate with their bodies, cars, policies, consumer choices, think of what it means to be not-exceptional. Think of the excuses you make for not acting. The messages are spurious. We are aware of the dangers of climate change, of the racism endemic to our country, crumbling inner cities and impoverished rural areas, murderous foreign policy, global poverty, unjust wealth distribution, a deplorable public school system, ills that have settled into normalcy as a result of political apathy, a delinquent White House, and cutthroat capitalism. For us, it is time to move beyond thinking and to act differently

That we don’t carry shit on our heads is a good thing - it is not something to feel embarrassed about and the good fortune of our global positioning should not diminish your contribution. From that living room, with the fire still warm, we have the power to make great change – at a different level but part of the same solution – and we face the fewest risks.

But, don’t offer a pale to this forest fire - it must be exceptional action. It is time to look at the norms and rise above them, to take offense at the polluting, apathetic course that is expected of you and surpass the expectation that you will continue living in a world of violence, hate, a world where billions of people live on less than $2 a day, where 40,000 people die each day of preventable diseases, where 2 million Americans are incarcerated, children die of diarrhea, where we have enough food to feed the world and greed handcuffs us. The negative examples abound. You need to be a positive one.

This might sound preachy, but so too do those emails. Look around. Don’t tell me that I am being too hard on myself. Are you being hard enough?

Give money, ride your bike, change your lifestyle, think of the jobs you take and consider more than money, understand where and with whom you hang out, write a letter, volunteer, defy the norms in actions small and large but in actions all the time. Be exceptional by doing exactly what is not expected of you, doing what the world needs. Think of this woman and think of the questions she asks you in your life.
What will it mean to be exceptional? If she can stand up, surely so can we.

2007-12-04T00:10:00.000-05:00

“The problem with a rat race is that even if you win you are still a rat.” -Lily Tomlin

I don’t know. A bad stand up comedian returning to his punch line again and again: I don’t know. I don’t. Crickets. Sometimes you are going to bomb, and right now it feels like the bottom’s fallen out. Nothing’s clear, no answers, just uncertainty. Questions that beget questions that lead only to the surrender of shrugged shoulders, dejection, and feelings of total confusion; I don’t know. At the bottom of the year-abroad curve, I look forward often.

My boogers are black. People offer me cigarettes and I tell them: “No thank you, I’ve already been outside today.” Ahmedabad is home to the most polluted air out of all cities in India – illustrious company. Foods are starting to taste the same. Traffic is mad; my fits of bike rage returned. Gujarat is a dry state, doubly dry when you consider the prospects of meeting women, triply dry when you recall the weather. The task of communication is grinding, I still pantomime and over enunciate my way through simple conversations. Cars, bikes, buses, trucks, motorbikes, and rickshaws honk and honk and honk. I wonder why I feel so homesick, why I feel that I’ve been away for so long. This is the only question I can answer for sure: because I have. I left NYC on August 11 and it feels like it.

There is a partner on this seesaw. Bright colors and delicious tea. Wonderful smiles, strong families, gracious hospitality, foods that are delicious and don’t taste the same, yoga, an exhilarating history of legend and lore alive in the streets and buildings, fresh fruit, old men in the park, ice cream, monkeys, week-long weddings, my new room, Bollywood films, a state holiday kite festival, and dozens of other details that sit at the other end of the plank, pushing down to pick me up, and sometimes disappearing in plain sight, Purloined Letters, watching me fall.

But shitty air and beautiful women are symptoms, they are not what really troubles me, telltales that something deeper is awry. Kiwis, working in translation, and papayas reflect a confounded moral compass that is under attack, emaciated by a lack of familiar nourishment, perplexed by questions from a new world, disorienting weaponry that destroys reference points and leaves me in need of recalibration. Small events probe and burrow, adding up to big questions that I do and do not understand, questions that, when explored, leave no sure answer. I stare in the mirror at uncertainty. I don’t know.

My mind is numb, underwhelmed with work, this city, the people, the monotony. This is a massive change, something I hate, and try all the time to remedy but it takes a lot of energy to meet new people, to initiate, be the new guy – especially when you don’t understand anything – that I sometimes concede defeat, sit and read. I do know people, I have friends, there is cool work going on in Ahmedabad, but not in my office. Most of my time is spent in a chair at a desk looking at a computer. There are some projects that I am cooking up, but there is no buzz among the staff, no pep, no scrambling, over-committed excitement, no energetic frenzy that excites, no team that you want to be a part of. Could be that I don’t understand these things when they are expressed, I don’t understand all the time, but it is not a working environment I like, am used to, or allow myself to grow comfortable in.

All the time I feel misunderstood; friends and co workers don’t really understand how to get my mind firing, and when it is firing they offer little oxygen. I am never at full speed, never totally loose, always speak slowly, rarely curse, sedate. Never before have I been in a more different place and never before have I felt so medicated; some sort of charade is constantly maintained. When I do hang out with someone who I think might get me I end up going overboard, overwhelming him/her with what’s been pent up.

I miss friends and family who know me, who are smart in my language, who push back, spar, offer something new and different, tell me to stop being an idiot, tell me that I’ve guessed right, that I can work with, that have something to contribute. I miss my comfort zone, bike rides, salad, NYC, my brother, BC, stupid nights, stupid jokes, flirting, sweaters, dancing, dark beer, the possibility of meeting new, engaging, exciting people, pasta, UNC, not having to work, basketball. I look forward.

To what?

What do I want to do next? What is important to me? Why am I here? How do I want to live my life? What makes me happy? How do I want to be in the world?

Each time I think I have an answer to any of these questions I stop myself before I can finish my thought, interrupted in my mind by the counterpoint that springs up and sounds equally right. Counterpoint after counterpoint, I don’t know.

Supposedly I came to India to work at the grassroots level, at the forefront of human rights advocacy, to partner with an NGO serving as the interface between the most marginalized communities and the services, laws, and rights that they are entitled to. Lila Watson’s quote [“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.”]
tells me that I am not here to help. Somehow, wearing my white skin, a foot taller than everyone and without language skills my presence is to supposed to defy the power dynamics of North/South, Rich/Poor, 3rd/1st and be ‘fair.’ This program hopes that I work and talk with, not at, the flow of information is supposed to go both ways, honest communication, mutual learning, skills transfer, thoughts of sustainability, capacity building. In training we talked about cultural sensitivity, American attitudes, socio political climates, histories that set the tone today, values, morals, sympathy, empathy, body language, norms, conscientious consumerism, the importance of patience, understandings of time, control, ownership, dress, nonverbal messages.

We ran the gamut of development practitioner basics to create young adults with the skills, knowledge, and awareness to operate in this mutually benefiting space that ‘good’ models suggest.

Right now, this all feels like total bullshit. From where I sit, any and all ideas of development are a fantastic fairy tale. Talk of advocacy, organizing, rallying for Dalit rights has been happening in India for over a hundred years. It is India and it isn’t. Substitute any issue – AIDS, poverty, domestic violence, malnutrition, sex trafficking, potable water, aboriginal rights, indigenous rights, ethnic tensions, peace and reconciliation, disaster relief, race relations, displaced persons, genetically modified crops, asthma, obesity, starvation, heart disease, health care, TB, malaria, illiteracy, child slavery, civil war, malnourishment, housing -- at any level – community, city, state, national, international, global - and the same gap between lip service and results exists. Admitted: these issues persist because they are so complex and hard to solve. There are no easy solutions or quick fixes. But, at any level, the impacts pale in comparison to the money, time, attention spent trying to remedy whatever the stated need is. The resultant rat race is a system, a beast, created by best intentions that is as unfair, unresponsive, political, and inefficient as the unfair, bureaucratic, inefficient system it was created to fix.

People still carry shit on their head. Pick an issue, fill in the blank, the need is there and the system sucks.

Human history has never known more material wealth. Billions of people live on less than $2 a day. Each day tens of thousands of people die of preventable diseases. Disparity, by any indicator, between rich and poor has never been as great. How do we know this? Some NGO did years of research, paying exorbitant bribes and salaries, to find out the problems. Using their figures another NGO did research on how best to reduce these problems. Then another NGO wrote a proposal, vetted by an NGO consulting NGO, for funding for community work to reduce said problem. Another NGO attacked them for a wrong model. A different NGO did work on the harm caused by the original intervention. Another NGO was hired to conduct an assessment of their work. More research on the changed, emerging new face of the same problem. People still carry shit on their head.

Looking out from the eye of the storm, this development beast looks like a downright stupid proliferation of NGOs, NGOs that help NGOs, NGO’s that really are governmental bodies (organizations that have become exactly what they hope to reverse), consultants, models, papers, academics, competition for funding, conferences, workshops, trainings, meetings, summits, World Days, awards, honors, fellowships, grants, support, photo essays, empowering projects, films, documentaries, photographs.

The big houses drive around in Land Rovers, A/C blasting. Small NGOs sprout up like flowers in the April, each organization is staffed by people who care, will be that much closer to the frontline, better, more local, more fair, more participatory in its development model, more focused on involving women, locally staffed and better able to address the needs of the people by the people. Everyone you meet is working with an NGO on these same, vague issues of community development with the most marginalized, the most downtrodden, the lowest. It doesn’t count unless they are really marginalized.

Awards scramble to keep up with these social entrepreneurs, global citizens, people of the year, leaders of the future. First the Nobel Prize to award outstanding accomplishment. Now, the X Prize, Rolex, Ashoka, Macarthur, Echoing Green… universities and corporations affiliate their names.

Let’s be honest for a second: my liberation is not bound up in yours. I don’t carry shit on my head. The thought of a common humanity that unites the world, stops our destruction of the Earth, feeds, clothes, shelters, provides medical treatment and safety to each and every person in the world is a powerful, right idea. NGOs don’t work with me. I am not the member of a marginalized community. I am liberated. My life is far more impacting on the Earth than it should be, but according to most of the key socio-economic indicators, I am where billions of people want to be. Equitable change will take sacrifice from my global bracket and we are connected, but that is a tangential connection. If my liberation is bound up in yours we are talking about a very different kind of liberation. Do we quote Lila Watson because we agree with her or because it makes us feel good? How do our actions answer this question?

Most people do as much as they need to feel good and as little as they can to be helpful. Paul Farmer calls these people White Liberals. Photos holding starving children. International volunteer trips. Volunteer cores. Me. Mission trips. Sighs of sympathy. They mean well. But, good-intentionsare not enough. Watson’s words are all over dorm rooms and profiles, t shirts and posters. Millions of people have read Mountains Beyond Mountains. These are the same people who work at NGOs. They are good people, they mean well, they have good intentions. But, so what? What does that poster on the wall mean to the person who’s liberation hangs in the balance.

I don’t know. Yet, I am here. I am not taking pot shots from afar, for reasons that are stronger that my disdain for the nonsense of the NGO world I am here, trying to answer these questions. Looking around makes me wonder if this was a good decision. Thinking of the world and just how fucked things sometimes seem, the wholly inadequate responses we well-intentioned actors muster, the stupidity of non governmental posturing, I am skeptical. So too is there so much beauty, love, support, hope, and success. Still I wonder: is the urge to help helpful? Is the desire to ‘help’ entirely self indulgent and disconnected from the sacrifice required to maybe make a difference. A coached impulse that quells some inner discomfort, some perceived injustice, a wrong. Where does this come from? How does one make a difference, how do you know? Can you change the world or can you change the people you meet, control what you can control, be in the world how you want to be.

Next year I am going to move to New York City, be near my family, interesting people I can speak with, bike rides and adventures, friends, comfort. I want to do what makes me happy. The world is fucked, let’s admit it. The problems are not going anywhere. I know I need a job but I don’t need a career. Each morning I want to wake up excited for the day, my work, my play, them being the same thing, my partner, my location. My liberation is bound up in my liberation. You are only young once and now is the time to do what you love. Maybe.

Do I have the courage to take my own advice? I give it quite often, to friends deliberating between grad school and something cooler and less orthodox. Do what you love, now is your time I tell them. What will I do?

That stupid impulse to help, work with – whatever we are going to call it.

Do I want to sit in an office and write grants, review proposals, assess things that I am far far away from and don’t understand, quote Lila Watson on my facebook profile and work for an NGO? If I learned anything from Kenya it is that smell is the only sense that allows you to understand the absence of proper sewer systems – not a movie, a report, not a photo. They help, but you don’t get it. To understand you’ve got the be there, not in an office in NYC with really bright white lights.

That sounds boring, but it might be the best way for me to ‘help’ If helping is a good idea, something I want to do, what can I contribute and from where. Why am I in India? A blonde hair, blue eyed American who can’t speak Hindi or Gujarati, I stand out, I am a foot taller than most people - I am not doing grassroots development, I am writing documents that non-english speakers can’t write. Good thing I flew all this way. Let’s talk about carbon footprints. I ride my bike here but took a jet around the world first. How do I want to be in the world?

These are the questions that trouble me right now. People still carry shit on their heads. I don’t know.

Thursday the 22 (Thanksgiving)

2007-11-22T07:56:00.000-05:00

“Between the worlds of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field; I will meet you there. “ Rumi, Sufi Poet

It is 12:45 a.m. on a Tuesday night and I feel great, on my bike, the cool night air stealing the sweat from my skin, leaving goosebumps like the Joker left a playing card. In through my nose, out through my mouth, I breathe deeply, punctuate my exhalations by adding some voice to them. These AHHHS fall into rhythm with the movement of my pedals. Things seem like they are in slow motion, the world for me, a higher definition than high definition, crisp. Shinning almost at full, the moon looks close, like it’s snuck in for a peek, closer and bigger than usual, perfectly round, pulled in tight by the full tide of my happiness, the peace I have in that moment.

Thousands of miles from home, I think of Thanksgiving. On Thursday evening my family will gather, eat more than they should, talk about school, work, the delicious mashed potatoes, watch football, wash the dishes, joke. Most people that pass the piano will hit a few notes. Chairs will be brought up from downstairs. My grandfather at his happiest – his reasons for living all around him. Someone will set the table. My father will cook a whole extra dinner and bring it to the soup kitchen. Like a slideshow, I see the images in my head. My mom teary eyed as B.C. talks about another year of good health but the absence of people, his wife, his son and family in Israel. My uncle and father sandwich my younger cousins with their corny but fun routines, my sister braids hair. A nap on the white couch after dinner. My brother will say just the wrong thing at just the wrong time. Cinematographers change the lighting for scenes like this, they might call it ‘candlelight warmth,’ an attempt to capture emotions darting about in the air.

A left outside of the gate, my peace is assaulted. There are no cameras or microphones – the circumstances lob grenades and difficult questions at my core. In the shadows of the 12-foot high retaining wall marking the perimeter of India’s premier business school, families sleep, children curl into the valley between their parents to avoid a draft, small fires smolder, dirt continues its slow chemical reaction in the shirts, pants, saris, blankets, actually bonding to their fibers. Sidewalk beds. Jerry can sinks. No toilets. No light switches, street lamps and passing cars. These men and women, boys and girls, have a home, they have family, they have a community, people they love and who love them in return, feelings, somewhere they belong to. They matter. They have a network to rely on, but immediate concerns of eating, drinking, staying healthy and surviving dominate and persist, constant in their minds. Clothes hang against the walls, pots, pans, and little more, the easiest observation is that they are homeless, manual laborers, beggars, the people that do what no one else will, this is true but too easy, the severity of the circumstance blurring the strong social networks in place, the support, familial bonds that exist even in this big, unforgiving city. It is hard to see their parents, their village homes, farms, games they played as children, rivers they swam in, the places they’ve left for whatever reasons -- caste, finances, natural disasters, illiteracy, dreams of a better life, marriage. They have homes, years of tradition, a place of belonging.

My brother is really bad at this part. Before we eat we go around the table and ask everyone to take a moment and say what they are thankful for. Without me there he should be better, he can’t say something like: “I am thankful for Aaron’s gas,” or “Really big adenoids.” He can’t help himself. Susan just had heart surgery. Someone will say ‘good health.’ Family. Secure finances. Safety. Staring at the food on the table staring back, ‘Food.’ Diana will make everyone cry, the sound of her child’s voice piercingly sincere; she says it just right. A home. A job. A mixture of personal issues and larger World Peace type topics will be said and everyone means the words they say.

The moon’s disappeared. I know these people have family next time them and in their villages, but they are still sleeping on the ground, in the cold, outside of the walls. This is the first time I have missed Thanksgiving, thousands and thousands of miles away from home and I miss my family, that warm, familiar scene, but never on this day have I been more thankful. Yes this is an unoriginal comment from the young American living in the face of poverty. But it is true. The absurd amount of wealth, social capital, support I have in my life is, at times, unfathomable; the glasses I wear cost more than that man makes in a year, the credit card in my pocket can mobilize more money than that woman will make in the rest of her life, this bike costs what that boy will earn begging in a month, the ice cream I ate costs more than the whole family will earn today.

I think about the rationalizing barriers I build in my mind. Maybe this is an observation to offer, wondering about how I build that same wall between business school and destitution, plush green grass, and a lack of drinking water, somehow telling myself that the little I do is good enough. I sit in rickshaws for the longest 70-second intervals one can bear. As the clock counts down from 70, red to green, a woman taps my arm again and again, asking me for 10 rupees. Again and again all she says is 10, 10, 10. Her infant child, with snot exploding from its nose, perched on her hip. Ten, ten, ten. Ten rupees is $.25. I have that much and more in my pocket. She doesn’t ask me for a house. She doesn’t ask me why I am healthy, why I have a home, why I can get a job, why I don’t have to beg. She asks me for 10 rupees. Somehow, for that entire 70 seconds I find ways to tell her no, to look her in the eye as I feel my spine melting and my head pathetically sinking into my stomach, my torso like a jelly fish, no integrity, flapping like a plastic bag filled with water. I stand behind some wall I’ve built in my mind.

You should give it to a street children’s organization instead. It is likely that her husband will take the money and use it on alcohol. Sometimes there are beggar mafias that operate, and some goon will demand a cut of her money, basically renting her a certain corner to beg on. It is better if she goes to school and learns to get a real job. It is just a band aid, not a solution.

In that moment right there, there really is no good reason not to give money to that woman.

If she were sat at our table, I wonder what she would say. Besides, “Where is the rotti?” I wonder what things make her smile, what she appreciates, what she is thankful for this day.

The black and white of the contrast is too stark for my mind to process, to really understand. Why me with this and you with that? I am used to more shades of grey, space to interject ‘buts,’ and modifying clauses, usually not venturing too far away from a wall to duck behind.

The last 5 seconds on the clock switch pace, engines race all around me but the slow motion of my mind returns. I get lost in my thoughts, trying to think of the next steps from this place of appreciation to the action of showing it, to try and shatter the walls that I’ve managed to build on foundations of excuse, avoidance, and the preference for comfort. Actions instead of words. When I say I am thankful, instead of saying it with a tone of resignation - I am thankful I have this, that I am not them - to instead try to take action to show someone who might be farther from their support network and family, home, closer to the baselines of reality and survival, preoccupied with more pressing concerns, without a support network at all, that my appreciation is not a comparative one, but a true one, thankful for what I have because I am lucky to, not because you don’t. Before the light turns green I push myself to do more, to act, refuse to be passive, attempt to slowly rebuild my spine and moral standings on actions and not words.

These Eyes

2007-11-16T02:30:00.000-05:00

After a half and hour, I found the office. Before getting in the rickshaw I asked the driver if he knew where he was going and he didn’t answer, set his mirror to zero and motioned his head for me to get in. He didn’t know. This is common and sometimes so frustrating and sometimes really fun – you know a landmark, get there and ask around, get pointed in every direction and somehow end up right where you needed to be. Normal. Here we are.

Everything about this doctor’s visit was different, mostly in ways subtle, a touch unnerving but I am in India, not bad just unfamiliar. But, so too were there differences that stirred me deep in my stomach – not bad, just too adult for me to handle.

I walk up the stairs, take off my shoes, approach the counter, tell the secretary that I have an appointment with Dr. Dipan Desai for a Lasik surgery consultation. Hindi is her first language. Gujarati is her second language; English her third. I pay in cash, Rs. 200. I sit. I wait and look at the monkeys outside the window. Sunlight beams in. After 3 minutes my name is called.

The walls are not white. The floor is not tile. None of the staff are wearing scrubs, it doesn’t smell like bleach, the couches are not made of vomit resistant material. We walk past examination rooms and offices, staff hustle about, don’t knock, prepare for their afternoon patients, dropping something off, asking a question, not interrupting, just working. Normal. The cadence of office operations play on, a different rhythm in a different tone from what I know of eye examinations and doctor’s offices, but this is the best eye clinic in the state, treating people how they do, in a way that is new to me. My feet are clammy. I am adjusting.

There are no other patients in the office. I am alone. As I walk down the hall behind a woman wearing a salwar kamiz and bindi, I am alone. I am 22 and my mother is not with me. With my head high trying to fool people, I hold the strap of my bag a little tighter. People make fun of me because I went to my pediatrician until I was 21. Familiar, I liked his bow tie and he was the doctor who knew my body best. When I had surgery during my freshman year in college, I had it in the Children’s Hospital. Since I was three I’ve been seeing the same two doctors for my eyes.

With my teeth clattering in the waiting room of a clnic in Kibera, I was not this nervous. You have malaria, take these tablets and if you are not better in three days, come back. Done and done. Back to work in 2 days, no big deal. Something about having my eyes worked on by a new doctor is hard to face on my own.

It’s been a long journey. Since birth this has been an issue for me, a constant, nothing too traumatic but a something to deal with. Not seeing the corn on my plate, my lazy eye, wearing a patch, the chiropractor, more broken frames than stars in the sky, bifocals, surgery in 8th grade, contacts, really thick lenses, that stupid fly, slow improvement, astigmatism, strabismus, the flirtatious introduction of the idea of Lasik, more contacts, poor binocularity, shitty depth perception, more glasses, getting my eyes dialated, and the beat goes on. Standing in the smalls pools of my sweat from my feet, I am getting ready to talk to a doctor about ending this, a surgery that will fix my eyes. Just like that. 22 years later. Out patient, some drops, 3 days later back at ‘em 20/20. My parents aren’t with me, here I am as an adult facing decisions that feel really important, all on my own. The color of the walls don’t matter – it is this that is unsettling.

Arrogant, this doctor is a surgeon. Daily he plays god, knows it, and wears his hubris in his smile, posture. He calls me Boss. This is his normal sales pitch, a confidence that is meant to be overwhelming and irresistibly reassuring. He doesn’t get how long I’ve been waiting for this appointment, that it is important to me, but that I could just as well wait another 2 years. He has the best machine and is the best at doing what he does, and this makes it harder to dismiss him with my normal response to people who are this smug. He talks a lot, some of it bullshit, a lot of it not, his tone hasn’t changed – this is who he is, a surgeon who is proud of himself, broadcasting.

Today I will go back to his office, have my eye mapped, cornea analyzed, eyes dilated and examined, and he will study these results, after which he will tell me if he thinks he can perform this operation.

It is possible that my vision is still too bad, the technology, despite its advances in the past years, is not ready for my eyes. So too is it possible that I could be in a position to make a decision, here, on my own, alone, an important one, a touch overwhelmed. No support system here, no one to sit in the waiting room with. 22.

A painful irony bubbles up, his surgical hubris met by my American ego. Surely, without question, we in America have the best medical technology, the smartest doctors, latest techniques. Right? No. I know this. I know that technology in other parts of the world is way ahead of what we have in the U.S. We send our computers to be fixed in India. India produces some of the smartest scientists and engineers in the world. One third of practicing doctors in the U.S. are of Indian descent. I know this. And yet, I am a little uneasy. There is no good reason to support this. This man is trained in Germany, indeed has the best machine in the world right now for this procedure – the same machine that FDA bureaucracy and medical supply company infighting prevents from reaching American markets – a machine developed in Germany, tested in Sweden and Japan. Tested. Proven. Accurate. Succesful. Still uneasy.

I spent last summer combing the slums of Kenya looking for brilliant and innovative new designs among the ‘base of the pyramid’ – the poorest of the poor. I read development literature praising the resourcefulness of non traditional ways of thinking, alternative knowledge bases. Oral traditions. Collective memories. Homemade solar panels. Self constructed prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs. All sorts of inventions and ways of capturing knowledge that are non-Western. Call them what you will – they are not practiced by surgeons. Parts of me admire this thought processes, innovation. But, there is a stark contradiction in my appreciation and acceptance of lessons from non traditional places and my refusal or discomfort with lessons, advancement, medical treatment in traditional places that I trust with other ways of healing me. Maybe I do some yoga, drink certain types of cleansing teas, pour water through my nose, consider my energy and that of other people. But, if I get sick I am going to go to a doctor, not take ayurvedic treatment. If I have a headache, I take advil.

So why is this doctor any different from the advil I take. Why am I suspicious of his technicians? There are some really stupid technicians in the US, no? Are the patients that he has operated successfully on over here any different than Americans? How can I rationalize my discomfort when I will spew water through my nose or do yoga as a way to tend to my health for some things, but trust western medicine far more for sickness and disease? Here this man lies at the pinnacle of his profession within that tradition of medical treatment I trust most, the only difference is that he practices in India and not NYC.

It is stupid, but I am still uneasy.

Maybe it is because I am doing this on my own, maybe it is because I am being stupid, I don’t know. This afternoon will let me know if I really need to push this forward, or if it was just another exercising in exploring my independence.

Doing This Work

2007-11-14T05:03:00.001-05:00

It’s been a while since I posted last. This, I think, is a good thing, a sign that I am growing more comfortable, a comfort that is sincere and grows from my core, not from my desire to communicate messages of surety during a time of insane personal transition. I know I have this tendency, to bluff my way through talking about deeper things despite my very real experiences with them, writing instead. So, not writing is a sign that deep down, I’ve arrived to a place of less emotional volatility. Maybe.

This is not to say that things are any smoother, just that I am coping better. Work remains a shit show but the bowel movements are a tad more predictable (this wordplay seems tasteless in the context of work with sewage workers). People won’t meet me for breakfast meetings before work, the days won’t be full of productive meetings, there are no agendas or minutes, tea interrupts, no consistent email access. Orientations can’t prepare you to be a new person. Call it culture, call it the American college graduate working with an NGO in India, call it what you will, blame it on the visceral forces that be, my experiences remain. Non-native english speakers don’t write well in english. Workshops can’t fix this. The staff don’t really understand how to relate to other NGOs, funders, keep proper documentation, think strategically – this is the reality, and I am learning what is set and what is open for change. These problems were here before me and will be here. And then there are other things that I can do, that will take a lot of work and prodding, but I know will be helpful. Above all, I am learning a lot about NGO politics - that in the same way that no good deed goes unpunished, no initiative goes uncontested. In India, there are expressions to the same effect – that you only get into trouble once you start following the law.

For my first six weeks in Ahmedabad I worked patiently with people, sat in three-day workshops where I really didn’t understand a single word, took tea and more tea, went to the field, helped with grants as they came up, talked with the staff, conducted impact assessments, participatory observation at my best, trying to make sense, mold my edges to fit into the puzzle. When I made a move to try and shake some things up, to take initiative, to split my time between the hair splitting, but important work here, and a different, equally important, related project to be overlooked by a partner NGO, New York, in the nicest, most sensitive, political, guarded NGO speak, came down as clearly as things come in this arena. Aaron: There were many options to explore, feelings to be sensitive too, caution against haste, dynamics in play, precedent to be wary of, mutual learning experiences to be cognizant of, cultural differences, norms and expectations, pride in play, power dynamics that need to be addressed and considered in going forward.

Yes, there are all of these things and they are important. But, this is exactly what I had been doing since arriving. Admitted: I ranted on emails and phone calls, left the office early one day so that I could ride around on my bike and scream my frustration, and approached my wit’s end many, many times. But, at work I was patient, responsive, did what was asked, sensitive and bla bla bla, assessing the situation as best as I could and coming up with a plan that I sincerely feel would be the best for me and the organizations involved.

New York says that conference calls are going to get to the bottom of it -- meaning well and intending to create the best of the situation, but effectively stating that my efforts are not relevant and that they, from NYC over the phone in an hour, will get to the bottom of the exact complexities their terms warned me of. Chosen because I would be a flexible volunteer who would work well in an uncertain situation, I was quite confused; Wasn’t I doing exactly that? I must have followed the law or done a good deed.

This is tremendously frustrating. It doesn’t, however, make me furrow my brow – my telltale of stress. Initially, it did, and as this was going down, I was going bizerk, writing more emails and making more phone calls than an agent on draft night, trying to guide the situation in the direction I envisioned, trading this for that, bluffing a little here, liberally interpreting phrases there. Now, I just do my work, work that I understand to be needed and important, work with the community, with my organization, putting my time and energy into the progress on the ground and not the titles of that progress or headings of the project it falls under, the MOU that guides it. I am learning; sometimes egos are managed best by sacrificing yours, telling people what they need to hear, and going ahead. I will go ahead.

On Sunday night, crawling through traffic on the overnight bus from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, I was thinking of the weekend. It was a nice weekend. Nice to see some of the other people on the trip, to joke, share common memories, hear gossip, eat nice food, take a hot shower, go swimming. Of course we talked about our work. Some of the details are different, but the premises largely the same – lack of clarity, not much work, no communication, and a large amount of uncertainty. Wide awake in the plush leather chair of the air conditioned Volvo bus (the roads are so bad that every 10 minutes it felt like the bus was hit by a mortar round) thinking of conversations from the weekend and news of other fellows throughout the country, their posture bothered me, the tone of some of the things said, an acceptance, a complacence. Placing a distance between their organization, its work, and the people it works for, they’ve retreated in large part to a disconnected place that relieves them of responsibility, any implication to the reality on the ground, a bystander. Whether they actually have a stake in the ground is another question, but the point of this year is to at least explore, engage, see, feel, react, work hard, make things happen. Or, maybe its not and that’s why I feel very different from most of the people on this trip.

Regardless, all of us are struggling with what to do, adjusting to a new country, living, and working situation and this is not easy, but with seven months to go it feels that people on this program are accepting the situations they are in, content to do what comes up, forego initiative because of daunting circumstances, jamming excuses or matters of convenience between achievable work and possible accomplishments, and ideas of what is ‘realistic’ or ‘sensitive’ or ‘their role.’

Banksy, a British graffiti artist, has a quote in his book to the effect: people don’t take initiative because no one ever told them they could. This bothers me and I don’t want to be one of these people. It is this thought that was in my mind Sunday night on the way back from Mumbai. It is time to get shit going.

--

I am happy; I smile often, and feel peaceful with where I am, what I am doing, what I am trying to do. At my nucleus, there is balance. So too is there a lot of activity, energy, ideas shooting around, a healthy amount of discomfort and confusion, schemes for projects and initiatives, a couple more protons than neutrons, doing my best never to be neutral and always be positive. Sure there is volatility, electrons bounce around and sometimes this strikes me deep down, but for the most part I am dealing with what is before me, doing my best, and when that is not good enough, working harder or from a different angle, but aware too that there are things I can’t change no matter how badly I want to.

Pakistan is insane, I feel lonely in the ok and usual way that I usually do, desiring companionship but afraid to make the sacrifices that it requires (and unable to meet any single women here), loved the package, appreciate the emails, hope the field hockey women win the championship, am glad the Yankees signed Jorge, miss my friends, fart, look forward to moving into my apartment and my new, green room, am going to see my first Bollywood movie tonight, try to grow a beard while not becoming the guy with nasty facial hair, think often about jobs next year, dream of the trip I will take before returning to NYC, read a lot, eat too much mango ice cream, consider Lasik surgery, love the food, ring the bell on my bike, and do my best to smile all the while.

I am a very lucky young man.

Training

2007-11-01T14:51:00.001-04:00

Surprisingly, the day was scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. Our office normally opens at 10 a.m. and even then we normally just mull about, read the paper and drink tea until about 11 a.m. Nothing in Ahmedabad is open at this time. I don’t expect the staff to be open. On my way to work the coffee shops hibernate through the dark winter hours of night and show no signs of stirring for the approaching Spring day of business. Days are jolted to a start, and jolted again and again, not with a caffeine narcotic in a coffee form, but a different, more saccharine British version – a cup of tea, and it is these tea stalls that start the day. Throughout the world, this combination of water, milk, black tea, and sugar sustains millions of people as breakfast lunch, a welcoming offering, a medicine, and a snack. The day revolves around tea. It is made in the office, on the street, in homes, in stalls, on the sidewalk, served with the natural ease of a pendulum’s path.

Around 9:20, the staff begin to trickle in. Some are bleary eyed, visibly tired from the long journey on loud uncomfortable busses, likely sat next to fat coughing men. I so much appreciate the effort they’ve made. By 9:32, I am being chided to begin, to start my training to a half empty room because, the assistant director tells me, the staff were told to arrive on time and we should start without them. For a second, because of the dust in the air, I couldn’t see just right. Punctuality? Is that you? This is like the first sighting of land, a beacon of hope in a sea of confusion that lies between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer as the goalposts of punctuality. Whether you touch down at 9:30 a.m. in Panama or 10 a.m. in Costa Rica, it doesn’t really matter – you’ve made it, you’re here. Where’s the tea? And, the training is not for the empty white plastic chairs staring at me, it is for the people who will sit in them.

A boxer before a match, I mull about, jump a little rope through the slides of my presentation, break a sweat not on purpose, and try to think of my best, really bad Hindi. More sweat now. Am I trying to fit too much in too little time? Will they understand? How am I going to communicate?

Who cares – it is time to start and like all anti-climactic New Years countdowns, I realize that 9:47 is not that different from 9:48.

Thank you all for coming. This training is for you, so please please please, if you have any questions, just ask. I am really happy to be here and want this to be a conversation more than a lecture, something helpful that you can walk away with, an introduction of a skill that will translate back to the field…

Blank stares. Great start. I really wowed ‘em.

My workshop is on work plans. All week I’ve been planning a program on how to plan programs, hoping to introduce a more logical, long-term, specific sort of thinking. I know I am between Capricorn and Cancer, but the Equator is gone, there is no direct line of communication. With the hopes of getting as much across as possible, I continue.

Anjali and I stand at the front and while I flounder in the ocean of blank stares, she calmly extends a life jacket from the rescue boat. It isn’t easy working in translation, but she is so familiar with the staff and understands what I am trying to communicate that she really if a lifesaver. Slowly, we start to move., a few notes jotted down here, a request to hold that slide just a touch longer, a question.

We talk through some more things and then I just skip a couple of slides to get to the exercise. In developing this training I was trying to think of an example that was relatable, that would get the women involved, and require detail but not be too excruciating. Cooking – a perfect example of my ineptitude that would allow the staff to laugh at me and the women to stand in a position of power.

Screaming in capital letters at the top of the screen, the slide read: I need your help!!! The premise: I was having 10 dinner guests but don’t know how to cook. Develop a work plan (goals, objectives, activities, needs, timelines, person responsible, deliverables) for this event.

Buzz. Confusion. A few smiles.

And then, one of the most brilliant 15-second interactions, a marvelous exchange that summarizes the millions of pages of development literature on the importance of women in the ‘third’ world.

Above the hum of giddy voices, one man belted out: “Tell the women to do it.”

No sooner than the T was pronounced, without missing a single beat, one of the women said: “Order in.”

Game. Set. Match..

In break out groups, the women scolded the men on their stupid suggestions of starting the rottie before the vegetables, or cleaning the table before the cooking was complete. Teams worked together, creating grand ballrooms and five star hotels out of my house, creative and imaginative to an inspiring degree.

Once tea was served, we came back together. This took a long time, people comparing notes, scrambling to add something last minute before handing in their exam, see what other people were serving, what they forgot. Everyone wanted to present first. I was hoping to “just run through some stuff,” in an attempt to get to the next step, of making the connection between this exercise and their work, but there would be no such running. Each group had to speak and with time, pride, and eloquence.

A feast of work plans prepared, we moved forward, overfull with the practical applications of such a process. It was awesome, divine intervention I am sure. I asked if this was helpful and, after the delay in translation, a dramatic pause that allowed me to notice each drop of sweat as it crawled down the side of my body from my armpit, the staff erupted in nods and smiles.

That moment was euphoric. I felt very proud of that work, to have provided something that was fun and useful. Asking how we could go forward, the staff demanded that I do a training once a month at the monthly staff meetings.

Later in the day, I pulled one of the staff aside and asked him if the training was good, of what I could do better next time. He just smiled at me and said, “Very usefiul.”

Dancing & Navratri

2007-10-23T08:21:00.000-04:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/theLastCP/Navratri

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIQL9B2Jz6I

These are the sort of nights that makes Chevrolet donate money to scholarship funds, Gatorade declare impact performers of the week, and Vodafone hold press conferences on the pitch after the most thrilling match of the year. During action like these cameramen sweat, anxious that they are not capturing all the action, that they might miss the play of the century that could happen at any approaching moment. The air is right for history to be written. Bulbs flash and cameras click, the beauty of each movement so perfect, so fluid, executed from a subconscious muscle memory that wows the on looking crowd of wide-eyed fathers, tip toeing girls and boys and admiring mothers. Only the archivists rest, well aware that this night will not be stowed in any dusty drawer or computer file. The people’s champ -- with an ending suited for a leader returned from exile, a sports great retiring after his/her last game, triumphant, carried off on the shoulders of two total strangers to the beat of blaring music and the hearts of my supporters gathered in hordes. Triumphant.

If only. Reality speaks: I am just a white guy who showed up at a garba on a Saturday night, was in the right place at the right time and got love for the audacity to dance, not the dance itself, respect for my energy, not my steps, the intrigue of a gangly foreigner. Still, it was the most memorable of nights – a night of improbable, fortuitous connections that could not have ended better.

An old friend from high school, and by that I mean someone I hadn’t seen since graduation but once, 3 weeks earlier in Delhi. Alumni grapevines put us in touch, and her free weekend brought her to Ahmedabad. Her name is Anna and because she is a she my landlord prohibited her from staying at our flat. So, on the Wednesday before her Friday arrival I emailed a girl I met on Sunday to politely and oh so subtly just see, just ask, if she had space in her dorm room. No Kevin Bacon, but as the small world of fancy college students turns, the would be host, Shubha, and Anna lived in the same dorm last year.

Anna arrived safely and on Saturday night we three went to Amanda and Conner’s apartment– two people Shubha knows from an arts academy in Ahmedabad. One of Conner and Amanda’s coworker’s uncle had passes to a garba (dance) so we packed into his pimped out 4x4 and were on our way. Like a big family sneaking kids into a drive-in movie, our car swam passed the guards and into the parking lot. Exiting through the drunk, I was handed a pass to the Academy Awards – or the garba equivalent, and though I was not up for any awards or had any business being there my shoulders back and sauntered in like any New Yorker would – like it was my party – taking photos on the red carpet, waving to onlookers, tossing my pass to the guard.

Membership at this club is $10,000. It is nice, replete with every luxury imaginable. Thousands of people dressed in traditional costumes swarmed about, buzzing, dancing, calling, eating, judging, fawning. I walked into a rainbow, but was in the midst of it, able to walk through the gradations of color change in the costumes all around me, seeing the difference between periwinkle, salmon, coral, pink, rose, and magenta – each obviously discrete members of the color wheel and each requiring a different complement, shade of show, bindi, and accompanying henna. Wearing dirty cloths from the U.S., I was the sore thumb. Bullied by the massive sign over the entrance to the dance floor – TRADITIONAL DRESS ONLY – I kicked it with Juice on the side.

Juice is the man who got me into the party. Juice is not his real name, I don’t know his real name, but he has a video screen for a rearview mirror. Juice.

With my hands in my pockets I stood watching the concentric circles of dancers in step with the beat, my head rotating occasionally, awestruck and overwhelmed. Juice was checkin’ out the babes. I soon joined him, traveling through the world’s Springs to see the most colorful flowers blossom, the most evolutionarily isolated courting rituals unfold right in front of me. The roles of the sexes switched, biology informing the costume’s colors, the women the suitors and many mates they did attract, with a grace, an exposed back, a maddeningly simple beauty. Women who whose curves spite the perfect shape of the Os of gorgeous, whose hair is a more perfect tale then than the y of beauty. Birds of paradise in a rhythmic circle, the taste buds of my eyes accosted by the colors, flavors, heat and spice captured in the vibrant chili pepper coloring of their clothing, the fleshy brightness of the inside of every fresh fruit in the world immediately after being cracked open, the stark contrast between jet black of seeds and hair at the center with the glow of a color that pulses with life.

I was happy watching.

As the night went on, prizes were given out, children dragged their parents home early, that bully of a sign sat lording over me popping the urges to dance as the bubbled up inside of me.

Then, my jam came on. I had never heard the song before, but watching one round of the dance that accompanied it was enough of a rush to launch me to an irrationality of revenge on all the times in the E.G. program I got picked on. No more bully.

Sprinting onto the converted cricket pitch to join my buddy Conner, we danced. A crowd gathered. We danced. For this dance, everyone squats while there is a lull in the music. Then it builds. And builds. And builds to the point where at one specific beat everyone jumps up and goes crazy, dancing like possessed beasts, happiness raining down like gum drops and world peace. Danced we did and happy we were.

The crowd grew, with each round of the dance, more and more people gathered, some to dance, most to watch. Cell phone cameras. Stares. Laughs. Smiles. Cameramen. Video cameras on a live video feed to the movie-sized screens all around the venue. The lull. The build. The build. Explosion and joy. We just danced and loved it. Before I knew what was going on, I was in the air, on the shoulders of two men. I just smiled and kept bouncing my shoulders.

As the music ended, the energy didn’t. I was on top of the world. Walking out, drenched in sweat, grown men walked by and thanked me for dancing. I was the king of the world.

I Had A Good Day

2007-10-12T07:36:00.000-04:00

I rode my bike home with a sense of satisfaction. I emailed my supervisor with a document (I never said that what I did was good, helpful, or mattered to people). Today was a good day.

This is not the script of an anti depressant commercial, it is the lead story of my nightly broadcast and as I stand in the kitchen eating yogurt, fruit, raisins, and peanuts for dinner, it finally feels good to know that the sun is setting on a day where I did something.

Tea and newspapers still dominate the morning. But, just before lunch I was able to complete a needs assessment survey, get it translated into Gujarati and have it photocopied so that when I go on field visits next week I will be able to clearly, and with some methodology, ask the field staff basic questions that will guide me on my way to helpful work. Lunch was delicious. In the afternoon I finished an organizational map, trying to filter my thoughts and observations from the past month into a chart and series of paragraphs that show funding flows, interpersonal, and interorganizationl power dynamics. Completing this proved to be a good exercise, a way to walk through my thoughts see which ones were clear enough to put down, which need further exploration and which are just wrong. The real challenge now is to understand how to use this constructively, to present this information is constructive feedback that can be used to improve the relationships, communications, and work in general. I even got on the schedule for an upcoming three-day capacity building workshop for the staff which gives me a project to prepare. A good day.

As I close my eyes to the lullaby of circling gnats, my boss’s (the in-country AJWS coordinator) words echo in my brain, haunting almost, as if I may have betrayed all my academic training and the good advice so many smart people have given me. Is my push towards productivity counterproductive in this context, rushing me along to the point where I am missing the lessons? Why am I so happy that I wrote a document? Parts of me hate that I even entertain this thought, peeved two days ago by not having anything to do and now actually taking mental bandwidth to consider if doing work is bad. In the call she toed the anthropological party line, urging me to rethink what productivity means, how the people at my organization view this word in the course of their work, and where the real lessons might lie.

Defending my desires for productivity before she finished her thought, I found myself quite the scientist among liberal arts majors, punishing ideas of cultural relativity, shredding notions of non-traditional knowledge, and suplexing the too common thought that history has many paths and outcomes. Problem is, I am not a scientist. I am an anthropology major. I appreciate a holistic way of looking at the world and appreciating different peoples, places, and mental paradigms.

Balance is what I seek. Not surprisingly, I fall into an anthropological thought to save me – like anything I am a product of my environment and how I view the world, the opinions that I hold deep down, unconscious reactions to certain situations, my impulses, are cultural constructions that rise from an upbringing in America. Despite desires to distance myself with the most spurious American stereotypes, or think my upbringing non traditional, these ideas don’t stretch this far. Standing next to other Americans, my childhood was unique. Nothing radical, but substantially different and how I think, the people I know, and who I have become as a result is atypical in America (it may be fairly typical of kids of liberal parents, kids who like to think their upbringings different – but that’s another conversation) but standing in India, my mind stands out as American, Western perhaps, modern, in how I approach things, in my judgments of good and bad, assessments of culture and ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and productivity. Seesawing, trying to find a space that is balanced, respectful of local customs, patient with the office, staff, and organization on the one hand and ideas of helping, improvement, efficiency on the other, I keep this in my mind, happy, and unashamed to say it, that I did some work while hoping to put that work within a framework that is not imposing, scientific or didactic, but guided by those mushy and important anthropological thoughts.

I think of my time in intervals, intervals structured around big events, events that I can look forward, that can make a week pass extra fast, can crack a month in half, or put my mind into the next year. This week a friend is coming to visit, then site visits next week with Navratri going on all along. Easily, without even noticing that time is passing, that gets me to the late 20s of October when I am going to present at the staff training and my roommate is having an engagement party on the 28^th. Preparations for that will kill the last days of the previous week. With the Impact Assessment in the first week of November, I should be able to get all the way to Divali before I know it. And, once I do, I am off to Mumbai and Pune to see some friends and celebrate. Basically, it is already mid November and I’ve not gotten to planning that far but hopefully I will have consistent work by then that will be exciting and engaging. A couple of days off for Hanukah, the mid year retreat in Thailand in January, hopefully the ‘rents will visit in February, another retreat for Passover and things are cooking. Time flies when you are planning to make it so.

At the moment though, I feel like a Vespa trying to merge onto an interstate mega highway. I do not have the right vehicle to be doing this, but I’ve got what I got, I am here and there is traffic behind me. Life is racing everywhere around me and I can’t turn back, there is no shoulder, I have to drive. If I can just jump in, start on my way in the right lane, time will tell, I will catch some help from an updraft or downhill, and there will be uphills too, but my signal is on and I’ve got to pick a spot. Despite mechanical difficulty, I’ve made it to the on ramp and am sticking my nose out just a bit, not quite ready to jump in, the traffic still too fast and unforgiving, unprepared on this big road to stop for such a different, puny scooter. But, soon I will be driving along just like everyone else.

Academics and politicians constantly remind the world that India invented the zero. More importantly, I think they invented the color, that before India life must have been in black and white, a charcoal sketch, that when planes cross country borders in the air, you can watch the colors disappear, from front to back, first class to the last cabin, an etch-a-sketch eraser being shaken as the go across that phantom line. If there was color before India it was a boring primary color scheme, Crayola couldn’t fathom the names or the hues of its box of 64 without coming here. Even if the rest of the world figured out how to use more than primary colors, they would still be boring, and pale in comparison to the Technicolor reality throughout India. India’s colors are what technology cant figure out how to capture in megapixels, HD, or HiFi. It is the festival season right now and Sony’s finest engineers scramble from garba to garba, trying to compute the composition of timeless colors, colors that invented the category, predated their names or patents or imitations in television.

The director returned from his three week trip and it is good having him back. He returned from a series of meetings on the national sewage workers rights campaign. It took him three weeks, and he did stop in his home village to visit his mother, but it raises a tactical and logistical question: how would you run/coordinate a national campaign? The NYT just published an article that says diesel transport trucks average 10 km/hour on trips from Kolkatta to Mumbai. This is a long journey traversing the continent, but the roads are so bad and process to collect road taxes to bad that travel is painstakingly slow. A trip from Ahmedebad to Mumbai takes ~ 9-11 hours on bus. Trains are more expensive than busses and planes the most expensive of all. Most of the leaders from the state levels are not computer literate and phone access is usually reliable but prone to signal problems and many dropped calls and it is not cheap.

Communication with him is difficult but because he is the leader, what he says goes. He is not shy about telling me what do to and I appreciate this. Contrasted by the working environment when he was gone, when there was no clear leader, no person to direct, I prefer this. We have work to do in growing to think in a more long-term way, but it is good that he is back.

At lunch, in broken english, with his right arm punctuating each point, he makes it clear why he is the man. His voice’s passion is undeniable. On a dime, his tone turns from relaxed, talking of cricket or clothes or what’s for lunch, he starts talking about NGO culture in Delhi. That right arm is his tell, when it is flailing, pointing, exploding, ducking, flying, smacking you know he is on, talking from his soul. When it is still, sat on a table, rested at his side, he is trying to be more calculated, a bluff of sorts, an attempt to be more careful in his word choice, the topic not of his liking or comfort. For this comment his right arm is where it likes to be. ‘In Delhi,’ he tells me, ’20 percent of organizations are real. The rest only meeting, eating, speaking and reporting.’

He knows what is important for an organization despite not knowing the word grassroots.

An article in this morning’s paper helped me get a better sense of the danger of the work. Power in numbers. In the last two and a half years, 227 people in Pune working as sewage workers and street sweepers died. Not all died on the job, but most did.

In the U.S., a story on trapped coal miners in West Virginia enthralls the nation, leads on the nightly news with the packages bearing headlines like ‘What Went Wrong?’ and ‘The Victim’s Families,’ or ‘Is This Work Safe.’ Those men died, and they were brothers, fathers, friends, and sons – it is tragic. I don’t dare suggest otherwise.

Here, there is very little media coverage and the numbers of people who die, fathers, brothers, lovers, and cousins just the same, is not news, it is normal. The corporate representative responded that the workers would be issues gumboots and gloves. Laughable really. As I plunge into a sewer, fully immersed, with toxic gasses in my eyes and lungs, gum boots are really going to save me. Yes, protection of any kind is better than none at all, but the bigger question remains: what is going on that these people are allowed to, that it is their job to, and their children are being groomed to, jump into an open sewer?

Repressed

2007-10-09T07:57:00.000-04:00

Talking over tea at his house in Chapel Hill, Naman told me people were going to stare. He was right. They do. And so too was he right that they are innocent and mean well, curious to know this person they have seen in the movies, read about in the newspapers, a fascinating creature from the other side of the world in their city. With this in my mind, I often wave back (sometimes I am annoyed), aware and understanding of this sweet curiosity.

In the three weeks since I arrived, these cultural courtships continue consistently but are waning in intensity as the smells and sights of the garishly colored male fade. Past the initial steps of our relationship, my mind and this new world are in a new place, a distilled, refined next step in understanding what’s around, searching for the legs, body and tannins, not just the grape – that men use their breast pocket on their dress shirts, that women keep their money in the left strap of their brow just under their sari, that no one puts their lips on a glass but pours it into their mouth instead. Academic training is largely overblown, people holding more degrees than names but trapped in a formal education system that conditions thoughts away from creativity and into a box of success, right and wrong, good and bad. One of my co workers took the day off for her exams. She is 33, but still taking classes, adding certificates to her C.V. but unable to scan two pieces of paper into one document, making one document for each side of each page – just as she was taught 12 years ago when she completed her coursework.

A bobble head reply for yes.

These things are amusing, the small bright things that add living color to complete the composite of a national flag. And so too are their drabs grays and diluted browns. Here, I am not speaking of caste, or poverty, or anything of such international renown, but instead, of the deeply confused, horny generation that watches Bollywood movies with sparkling women and bare flesh and then goes home to arranged marriages and sexual repression in their horniest years.

American women, they, uh, are cooperative in these matters? One 25-year old asks this way. Another, when I tell him I am from America grabs his right forearm with his left arm while franticly wiggling the fingers on his right arm. One night stands? You can get girls? The questions come in all forms, and I dumbfounded by them. I get questions like this all the time, understand where they come from, but am repulsed by the comfort with which they are asked and the expectation of certain answers.

Cooperative in these matters? Are you serious? Did that just happen? Uncomfortable saying the word sex, but with internet access in his home he is horny beyond repair in the context of acceptable Indian behavior and wants to live vicariously through the words I am about to tell him: that American women are easy.

Instead, I shut them all down and tell them that it is impossible to find women in the U.S. and I am thinking of arranging a marriage while I am here.

Lazy Eyes

2007-10-07T08:22:00.001-04:00

It is fitting that this post sits below the excerpt above, the blurb that I wrote 4 years ago when I started this blog, thinking it clever then, liking its sentiments but not its word choices now, but still indicative of my mental achilles heel, something I know doesn’t actually set me apart, is not that big of a deal in the scheme of things, but feels so to me. New acquaintances find this out in the evenings when I switch from contacts to eyeglasses and feel self conscious. With my glasses on, I rarely look people right in the eyes or just don’t wear them around people I am just coming to know.

Wearing a patch as a little guy, bifocals, surgery in 8^th grade, depth perception, lazy eye, the chiropractor, astigmatism, contact lenses, my eyes have always been something to deal with. As a result, it is something I notice.

Living here is the ultimate retort to questions about my coke bottle glasses, prescription or bad vision. The man at the internet café and one of the unions leaders have the most pronounced lazy eyes but I seen them everywhere on people of all ages. My roomate’s is very subtle and is corrected by his eyeglasses. The little girl who lives on the corner turns her head to the right to look forward. The man at the internet tilts his chin down and looks up. Countless others

They can all see, but they can’t use their eyes together and their eyes are not straight. They will never be. I’ll take my thick glasses. Lucky me.

Cutting of a Camel

2007-10-07T07:34:00.000-04:00

Each morning pigeons outside our window wake me up. They are properly stupid birds and don’t know how to shut up. Cooled by the fan, I roll over for thirty more minutes until my watch alarm goes off. Slowly, I get up, but before I do I debate with myself for 13 seconds if I really want to go running or if I want to go back to sleep. Surprisingly, because I don’t just love running for the sake of running or getting fit, running has been winning out. Standard morning things: brush my teeth, take a vitamin, eat a banana, and drink lots of water. Smelly from yesterday, I grab my shorts and t-shirt, throw on my shoes and socks and head out.

Everyday I say hello to the guard. He always waves back but looks confused. Still, he smiles. Out of the gate I make a right, give a jocular What’s Up Fellas to the three rickshaw drivers parker there, themselves waking up from the comforts of their back seat. With the rains extended this late into the year, the ground is always moist in the morning, and the biggest puddles are always on our block. By this time of the day the sun is warm and busy drinking any moisture left in the air but it is my favorite part of the day because the streets are not yet crowded, the shops just opening, it is the most opportune time to think myself inconspicuous. Compared to the U.S., the days here are shifted later with all the same meals and meetings, but everything just pushed later in the day. I like the morning.

At the top of our street I take another right, cross the street, pass the internet café, walk another 1000 feet and get to the lake. While walking I steal a page a book from Mom’s book and get many of the same responses. Usually I am dressed as ridiculously as she is when she goes running, she always wears tights, a massive hoodie, bunched socks, running shoes, maybe a hat, and I am wearing pink and purple Umbros, a blue shirt and bright yellow hat, and do some exercises to limber up while waving and smiling at everyone I pass. A couple toe touches, elbows to opposite knee, heel to butt. No matter what, people are going to stare so I step to center stage.

I’ve become a regular at the lake in the mornings and recognize a few others and each day our greetings become a little warmer. It’s nice. Stretching for a couple of minutes, I jog, huff and puff, and fart a lot. Those farts always feel good because dairy and I ge along so well on the front end and then our relationship is a little more noisy and clamorous on the backend. We’ve reached an impasse and this just seems to be our working relationship.

With my shirt soaked through, brow dripping, my mind clear and body feeling good, I start walking back to the flat, stopping off at the fruit seller. Of course, without fail, when I get back the rest of the guys are sleepily draped on the chairs in the living room with the T.V. blasting. With my fruit and the newspaper I sit on the balcony, cool off, pump some potassium and catch up on the latest Bollywood gossip.

Around 8:45 the maid comes. She is a great woman and we have a great relationship that consists of me getting in her way despite my every and best intention not too. She gets pissed when I leave banana peals on the counter, shoos me with her broom and cleans like a goddess. I run away and jump in the shower. These bucket showers are growing on me, a lot more playful and interactive than normal showers, not to mention that they save a lot of water. A little air dry under the fan, iron action (everyone here irons their clothing, it is unacceptable not to), lotion, hat and sunglasses and I am out the door.

Riding my bike is an experience in and of itself. People gawk – what the hell is that white guy doing riding a bike. Every single bike and car that passes jabs at me with its horn and I carefully counterattack with the poison of my bell. I fight bullets with flowers at every opportunity, sometimes just sprinkling serenades to lucky passerbys. Intersections are the worst. Riding towards them I feel like a NOAA pilot approaching the eye of the storm, survivors strewn about and speeding on their way, happy for their good fortune of survival. Like a good running back, I patiently wait for an opening and good lead blocker, then burst forward, hoping to get through but prepared for a collision.

Driving and riding a bike here is what conducting a vehicle will be like in 1,000 years on Mars. Will Smith stole the idea of his bad futuristic movies from the drivers here – there are no rules, no planes, no directions, cars going everywhere in every direction, cows, elephants, goats. Literally, people just do whatever they want, the wrong way down highways, u-turns, no signal… these are mild, not-even infractions. Drivers in the US and Europe just don’t understand it and will have to wait for commercial space travel prices to come down.

This madness is grating. People don’t honk as an insult, more as a warning but there are only so many blasts one can hear each morning without going crazy. I cant take all the honking and bad driving. It is instinctual. The New Yorker in me erupts all the time and it’s all I can do to cage it, like when people honk at me, as if I am at fault for driving on the correct side of the street and they and 2 passengers are speeding at me on their motorbike in the wrong direction right at me. What the fuck asshole, I think. You are wrong and I am right – move. But, instead I merge back into traffic and almost get nailed by an oncoming camel.

Finally I get to work, pouring sweat, happy to be safe, ready to start the day.

These Seasons Aren't Mine

2007-10-07T07:32:00.000-04:00

rLunar; Solar; Academic; Pol Pot’s; Norman; Nordic; Native American; Aztec; Olmec; Many different Hindu versions; China’s history owns dozens; Islam and the Middle East their own renditions. In the course of time there have been countless inventions to measure its passing, attempts at demarcating the passing of the days, the settings of the suns, the revolutions of the earth, the birth of saviors and dictators, or the first day of class.

My new life and the calendar it rests on don’t match my mind and the weather. In a meeting this morning I wrote the date across the top of the page: October 6. With the sweat of my palm smudging the ink, it felt wrong, too hot to be October. I don’t know what I am going to be for Halloween and I don’t know not because I am trying to think of something phenomenal for Franklin Street, but because Halloween isn’t celebrated in Ahmedabad.

Other holidays yes, but not the ones on my calendar. Newspaper headlines are buzzing with consumer forecasts, travel advice, and one-day shopping events in preparation of the holiday season, bonuses are being doled out for Navrati and Diwali – massive festivals, one in October the other in November, lasting a week each -- not Christmas, Hanukah, New Years, or Thanksgiving. My mind’s paradigm for understanding the world I occupy, for knowing what to look forward to, what clothes to ready, days off to expect, joyous occasions to anticipate, is disharmonious with reality.

It felt wrong not just because it is too warm for October – we ought to be cozying into sweater weather – but also because it is Saturday, and thus the duality of my mindfuck reveals itself. Living in a new city in a new country poses challenges. Finding my identity out of college does too. Here, across the world and just out of college, these challenges are dialectical, exacerbating each other all the time.

For the first time in my life I am on my own, the exact path before me is not clear and the responsibility for deciding how I want to lead my life, what I want to be, how to go forward into young adulthood, is solely mine. Everyone goes through this process of questioning and introspection at some point or many points in their life, and emails tell me that my friends and most of the class of ’07 are too. Knowing that others are also grappling is comforting, but still, for me, it feels like a very important time. Without being too dramatic and self righteous, I do worry about happiness, love, career, a family, balance, good health, health insurance, money, real estate – all on some levels reflective of deeper questions about life choices, morals, and the constitution of my life and my self.

With these questions in my mind, I’ve landed on the other side of the world where I don’t know the language, look like anyone, and have yet to really land with my feet confidently on the ground, uncertainty pervasive in all that I do. Exploring these things at this time in my life is tough. Sitting in work, I question if I want to work in the non profit world. I also question if I want to work overseas. These seem like different questions, but they are so closely related that I am having a tough time finding myself, making sense of my work, exploring parts of India, and processing it all in a way that is not wholly confusing. All the time, this dichotomy exists and looking forward, I just don’t know what holds life lessons, and what holds India lessons, and when I can and cannot make such distinctions. Right now I am just trying to match the calendar and the weather.

Gandhiji's Birthday

2007-10-02T03:06:00.000-04:00

Today is Gandhi’s birthday. My roommates ask me if I know who he is, smirking as they poke the helpless American, a test and a joke. I am almost offended that they might think I don’t know who he is, parts of me want to ask back, do you know who Gandhi is? It is just a question and it is meant to test me in part but they mean well. Still, this question screams of a deeper problem: no one knows how to relate to me, understand what I am doing, or how I am here. Sometimes the phrasing of this fellowship is hollow despite its best intention to sloganize our work here, and yet there is no resonance at all, from hollow language or my attempts to tell people what I am doing. American Jewish World Services (AJWS) has devolved into just another acronym, pronounced like ‘address’ with a j instead of the double d sound. That I could be a college graduate who has read about Gandhi, who is understanding of his message and sympathetic to the people he tried to uplift just does not register with my roommates or anyone else I meet, the culture of my good will butting heads with the dominant culture of this city.

This morning’s paper features some op-eds on Gandhi’s vision, but below the fold on the front cover is a half-page expose on the growing brand equity of Gandhi’s likeness. Yesterday’s front page, above the fold, in the place that journalism school says is the lay out space for the most important news, showcased the growing trend among Ahmedabad’s wealthiest of upgrading from BMWs and Mercedes Benzs to Rolls Royces and Bentleys. The wealthiest city in one of India’s wealthier states, Ahmedebad and I are not getting along: it is pompous, opulent, and pimpled with massive shopping malls.

On Sunday night my roommates and I went out for dinner. We ate a wonderful Gujarati thali (the best meal I’ve had thus far) and after paying half of us ‘went for fun’ and the other half went home. Entirely unsure of what ‘go for fun’ meant I was excited to find out and too excited from our meal to go back to the apartment and sit in front of the blaring TV. We cruised and cruised some more, eventually parking at the lake near our house. Crowded with young people like us doing the same thing, I realized this is the fun for a Sunday night: to sit by the lake, watch people, drink a soda. Gujarat is a dry state so there are no bars, but the posturing young men leaned on their motorbikes and slowly sipped their cokes with the same suave that a true ladies man leans on the bar and sips his tequila sunrise. We don’t talk to anyone we don’t know, stare at girls who ride by, and balance our weight somehow so that we look really really cool. I have not hair gel and realize that no matter what I do I just can’t look cool, besides, my clothes would never be accepted by the in crowd. Worst of all, I didn’t drown myself in body spray before leaving the apartment.

My eyes glaze over, hypnotized by the bright neon lights, and I flashback to nights in high school wandering the streets, eating pizza, not talking to girls, trying to untuck my shirt in the coolest way possible. The last time I used body spray was sophomore year in high school, the same year I got wasted drinking at Guy Cerino’s, the same year I used to hang out in Pelham and cruise around on bikes. Slowly, I fade back to reality, and my roommates are still looking really cool. All around us there are adverts for the latest bollywood film; India produces over 1,000 movies a year and the ones that I have seen are bad, dominated by product placement, corny looking guys, really beautiful women, and bad too-practiced facial expressions of heartbreak.

Of all the commercials I’ve seen, the one that sticks in my mind all the time is not the Nivea skin bleaching cream but the other one, the one that concludes its 30 second spot on making your skin whiter with its unforgettable slogan: “Evolve.”

I would rather be hanging out with the sewage workers I met last week. People who speak only Gujarati, people I can’t communicate with in words but smile and laugh with, people I admire for the work in their hands, for what I know they do, for the fact that they are organizing to better their lives, because they are real. Parts of me know that the typical-young-person-in-the-developing-world thing to do is emote in such a way, but I can’t help myself, I am overwhelmed by the thought of what they do, their ability to keep on, to be so nice to me, to greet me and ask if I am married, to tell jokes, to sing songs, to sit through a three day training. Throughout the training I sat there, trying to understand, but more just scanning the room and taking it all in, the power of the sarees, the strength in their voices – a certain understanding of the injustices committed against them – a TB cough, warm smile. These people, not Amitabh Bachan, are who I would like to spend more time with.

This seems drastic and of course part of it has to do with my unrealistic romantic notions that I can solve people’s problems but I am in the process of trying to find that balance, that comfortable middle ground of people who understand why I am here and hold similar personal politics, but people who I can also speak to, hang out with in a city that must have cool parts to its personality.

Minority Report

2007-10-02T03:05:00.000-04:00

It has always been a topic of conversation, an obvious symptom for a deeper problem rooted in American history and culture, discussed throughout high school, dominant in workshops, trainings and roundtables throughout college. Liberal politics in mind, I never placed blame, often organized the events, and tried to articulate answers in an attempt towards change, to make others understand. But, I never had an experiential understanding of these issues, and despite my best efforts couldn’t answer from a real place. Living here, I understand.

Why do all the black kids sit together? How come all the Asians won’t chill with anyone else? When you walk on campus, it looks like defacto segregation, there is little mixing. For as much lipservice as we give to race relations, why don’t more people mingle across racial lines?

I have friends from all over and try to answers these questions in the way I live my life. But, as a white man in the United Stated my behavior is rarely questioned, I usually look like everyone else, my behavior is not seen as anathema of norms, representative of my people, counter productive to social progress, or problematic. Those questions inevitably focus on groups who don’t look like me.

Walking around the streets here, people stare. They laugh. Kids point and giggle, wide-eyed. Riding my bicycle home from work is like comedy hour. I don’t speak the language, and I am not fluent in the culture. Rickshaw drivers hiss at me. Horns honk. Really, I have no idea what is going on, feel like a foreigner in a foreign land, and have not seen another white person in two weeks. People approach me and ask me stupid questions about America based on stupid movies, waiting for me to answer the question on behalf of 300 million people. The food is different. It is hotter than god and I sweat constantly. There is no one to date.

In trying to draw parallels back to the US, my newly minted minority status’ application stops here. There is too much history, the stereotypes that apply to me are generally considered good (having money chief among then) not bad despite my desire to be separate from them. Above all, it is just pretentious to think you can understand other people’s struggles and what I face is hardly struggle, it is just me in a new place. But, if I walked into a cafeteria right now I would sit with the people who looked like me.

Head Massage

2007-09-29T07:22:00.001-04:00

For Yom Kippur Anna Oppenheim traveled from Vadodra to Ahmedebad for services at the synagogue here. Overwhelmed by this new city and my very raw loneliness, I was really excited to see her. “I will meet you at the bus station and we can find the synagogue from there, together.” Unsure of traffic congestion, where I was going, or where anything is in this city, I had no idea how long it would take for her bus to arrive or for me to get to the bus station. I decided to leave with plenty of time and while I was wobbling along in a rickshaw to the bus station a text message told me that I had smoothly left way too early – she wasn’t scheduled (and schedules rarely run on schedule) to arrive for 1.5 hours. Sweating like a mad man on this cool 90 degree day, already in transit I figured I was best to keep going, grab a coffee and read for a while. The time would fly by. Silly Aaron, Trix are for kids.

The bus station stands at a sweltering hot intersection where it is rusting, crowded, and putrid. No coffee. No nothing. A couple of fruit sellers, kiosks, and countless taxis. With few other options I decided to go for a walk to pass the time. Because it is in the old part of the city, the bus station is surrounded mostly by factories and crumbling 6-story apartment buildings. There isn’t must to see and in the heat that is no such thing has a leisurely stroll so I calmly park under the shade of a nice tree and revel in the super modern form of entertainment popular on Nokia phones: Snake II. Soon enough two boys chat me up, and we hack our way through a conversation. It only really gets as far as me telling them that I am from U.S. Before I know it, the three of us are surprised by an older man, roughly 60, telling us he is Bruce Lee.

After Mr. Lee kindly makes our acquaintance, he backs up a little and starts to show us some of the latest, most lethal karate combos. I really have no idea what is going on but am totally amused and tell him that he is SICK! He loved it, prompted by my enthusiasm and energetic response to dice the air something fierce. What a lame organic compound, it didn’t stand a change. With the air properly annihilated he sat down next to me. We talked about everything and nothing. Interrupting me mid sentence while I was trying to explain what I am doing in Ahmedebad sitting on the side of the road under a tree by myself, he told me he is a masseuse. I laughed. Bruce Lee had just become a massage therapist.

Bait, line, and sinker, I bit the bait. I don’t know what I said, or how “No, thank you, I’m fine, I really don’t need a head massage, but that is quite kind of you to offer,” was misheard as a ‘yes’ but I sat there and watched him walk into a nearby shop and return with a packet of hair oil with Shah Rukh Khan’s photo on it. Casually, with the airs of normalcy common between two old friends, he flicked his shoes aside and straddled me, sitting on the top part of the bench against which my back was resting, his knees on the outside of my shoulders like we were getting ready for a chicken fight.

And, sure enough, some warm goo splattered all over my head and Bruce started to massage my head, still on the side of the road, still under the tree. Everyone who passed reacted: giggles, full-on laughs, looks of absolute confusion, nods saying: “That’s right, give that boy a head massage.” The entire time I grinned from ear to ear, just waiting for Anna or anyone to call so that I could tell them what was going on.

Thoughts on a Tuesday

2007-09-25T05:30:00.000-04:00

This is a rough cut, some thoughts thrown together about the past few days and the next few days… didn’t have much time to work on it but it gives an idea of what’s going on and where my head’s at.

Work is going slowly. Each day I arrive at 10 a.m. and for the rest of the time I never know what I am going to do. So far I’ve been able to help with a few proposals, proof read a few other documents, and read a substantial amount of literature so that I add nuance to my understanding, but as we get started in the beginning things are very unclear and I have no projects. At the moment, just a week in the office, I don’t expect anything else but I am trying to think about my time here and how I can begin a conversation that will result in a clear understanding of what is going on within the organization over the next months, what I will be expected to do, and by when. Thus far I have been surprised by the lack of enthusiasm over my presence in regards to the work we are doing. People at the office are very happy to have me here and we talk often about our homes, favorite foods, and the lot, but I have not been inundated with questions or requests. Compared with the other experience I have in the developing world, admittedly very little, people were much more deferential in the work setting, assuming and expecting an expertise in any and all areas. Maybe these expectations will come, maybe they won’t, or maybe there just isn’t that much work, but my bluff had been called, arrived with the expectation that I would be doling out cure-alls within hours on any and all issues but instead, and rightly so, being treated like the little man that I am.

Part of this has to do with my age, and part of it has to do with confusion over what I studied. My colleagues, flat mates, and the other people I’ve spoken with about my background don’t understand what qualifications I have. In part they are right, I don’t really have qualifications. I have a few clues to guide and a small amount of experience, but I don’t really have a background. But, that is not what they don’t understand. They don’t understand the crossing over of fields, that I could have studied anthropology but that I am here working on documentation, workers rights, web design, etc. Why aren’t I doing anthropology? Liberal arts as a concept, as an idea for career preparation, that you read a lot, write well, and think critically is anathema to the dogmatic thinking of professional development and the immediate connection between a track of studies and the field of work one will enter. Each discipline within the liberal arts canon exists here but not as a part to a whole, a whole itself, geographers becoming map makers and English students writers. Surely this rigid view does not hold up across the boards, some of the most prolific contemporary Indian minds are hybrid thinkers, but they are the exception. People I met do what they studied and can’t understand why I am here or how I am doing differently.

Yesterday I bought a bicycle. It is a beast. Made in China out of the heaviest steel in the galaxy, it is the quintessential bike of the ‘developing’ world. Kenya had the same bikes. Exactly the same. Big, heavy, designed for work. A kick stand that lifts the whole back wheel of the floor in case you want to exercise in your home. I am glad to have it because it affords me a basic level of independence for personal transport. This city is too sprawling to really rely on it as a way to get around, but I can commute to work, get to shops, and explore at a faster pace. I am very happy to have it.

This morning woke up, went running, showered, read the paper, and biked to work. It felt like a very adult routine, a routine I expect to repeat for the rest of my time here. So too is it a routine that frightens me and is making the transition to this new place very difficult. Living in India, part of the developing world, has made me rethink both of these words. India is a confusing place with more diversity and disparity between classes and cultures than anywhere I’ve ever been, and sitting in a glittering mall makes thinking of it as a developing place difficult. Attempting to understand these issues will continue no doubt. Compounding these baseline thoughts is the thought that I am no longer in college, I am not here on a summer fellowship, I don’t get to return to Never Never Land. Riding my bike this morning I was singing to myself, and so too am I not sure that I want to grow up. This is the issue that has been most difficult to deal with in the last week. I can’t leave work early if I am bored and go play sports or meet friends for a drink. I am not in college and life is before me, a life that will mean certain things and I don’t really know what those things are exactly and of course much is in my hands to control but I have to pay rent, be at work on time, do things that I don’t like, produce results, work in situations that are not ordeal. All of these questions are questions that recent graduates face but facing them here makes them a little more harsh because I am so far out on my own, facing that same conversation on development and India in the context of the exploration of my post-college, young adult self.

Last night India beat Pakistan in cricket in the finals of the World Cup. It was a great match that went down to the wire and the moment India won I thought our apartment was being fire bombed. Everywhere people swarmed the streets, set fireworks, cheered, and danced. It was a joyous day for India and a fun time to be here.

Checking my email this morning, I feel very distant from my life. I packed my suitcase 7 weeks ago and supposedly brought my life with me, but my heart, my answers to peoples questions about where I’m from or where I went to school, those emails, my nights, are not convincing of that fact. I know that I am new here and it takes time to build community but so too do I know that my dear friends and family are at home or somewhere and many of them are going through times of great transition and uncertainty and it would be nice to be there for them.

On Thursday we are going for a site visit and then there is three days of training over the weekend. Those days should keep me busy, my mind active, and teach me a lot about what is going on.

Hunt for Housing

2007-09-23T03:09:00.001-04:00

Searching for housing has been fun. Amusing really. In a hotel for the first three nights, I was keen to find a permanent place, get set up, meet people, unpack my bags, and begin creating a routine. As arranged previously, several paid accommodation rooms were located and appointments made to scout them out.

On the first afternoon we quest. After a couple wrong turns, some confusing directions and many bumps, we get to one house in a fine neighborhood. A small ad in the newspaper directed us there. Up the stairs, we ring a doorbell and hang tight. We wait a little longer and as I go to ring the bell once more, I hear noise inside and decide against it.

His shadow lurches to the door, the bare light bulb behind him illuminating the tufts of white hair escaping from his turban. With each step, the shuffle of slippers. He gets closer, fiddling with his pajama pants as they fall below his hips, a white undershirt hugging his fat middle age torso. This man is a wreck. Like a character out of “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest,” he looks deranged, glassed cockeyed, a few more wrinkles on the left side of his face than on his right, a scraggily beard, and a suspicious look in his eye. Awesome. I really want to stay here. “Come in.” We go in. Perfunctory words are exchanged, how long I am going to be here, my name, he offers me water, the weather, all the while his eyes traitorous of his mind, broadcasting what he hears: “Bla bla bla..”

“You want to see the room.” It is more a statement than a question. I guess, I think to myself but say, “Yes, sir, please, of course.” Those slippers are even more harrowing resonating in the hollows of a hallway with no light. I’ve seen this movie. I am glad I registered with the embassy, they will find my rotted carcass at some point. Lurching, struggling, pushing, the door finally decides to let us in. More tinkering with the drawstring. Lucky me -- he could have been a plumber. We are standing in a room that looks like it’s been underwater for three days. Black mold like wall paper, one cracked window, a bed, and broken dresser strewn about from the crane that dragged it from the ocean floor.

With a sleazy smirk, a slow motion turn, eyebrows aflutter, a touch of used car salesman, “You like?” Are you mad you insane old man? This is a dungeon. I am not picky. I just want a room where my things can be safe, a bed, some water, and a shower, and no looney old men creeping about with their pants falling down. I am super mellow but I am not staying in this opium den.

I nod, “It’s ok.” Then I turn and slowly make for the door as if to redirect our school of fish. Before he can say any more I kindly thank him, refuse to stop at his floor and continue down the steps on our way.
Later that afternoon we go to meet a broker who is set to show us two places. We trade phone calls around lunch time and finally get a hold of him. We are set for 3 p.m. So as not to be late we catch an auto rickshaw around 2:30 and head to a corner. It is not exactly cool but we wait for a while. We wait a while longer, put in a couple of phone calls, and then leave feeling like a divorced tax attorney who has been properly stood up for on an internet dating site rendezvous.

With our ears to the floor and our purebred bloodhound hunting skills guiding us, the next day we go to a house arranged by someone close to the organization. If I have learned anything thus far it is that it is standard protocol to go somewhere and not know exactly where it is, asking for directions along the way. We head in the right direction, ask around and one man finally knows where we are to go. He casually tosses his left arm and chin in ‘that’ direction.’ Again, it is standard practice but this time ‘that’ direction is down a dirt path that appears to go into a thicket. Those ears are so good at wafting hot scents right to our nose. At a loss for options, we go ‘that’ way. Luckily we find the place.

We walk in the door to a warm reception of a young man in a pressed white shirt. After offering us water we sit and cycle through the standard conversation. At the point where one gets to the point, we ask to have a look around. Look. Around. We are sitting in the room, the only room on the first floor, the room he uses like a swiss army knife, a versatile space as capable as opening a bottle of wine or cutting a toenail as it is to being a kitchen, study, or bedroom. There are two beds in the corner, tackling the angle in an L shape. Immediately I wonder if we go head to head, feet to feet or head to feet. Thinking about this man’s feet near my mouth as I try to fall asleep is more unnerving the thought of the water I just drank. Since there’s not much else to see, we kindly thank him for his gracious offer and head out.

This time the recommendation for the room comes from a colleague who works with my host organization often and with great success. Set to examine the house after work, I have a good feeling about this third-time’s-a-charm place. Six creeps around so we head there for a 6:30 appointment. With the help of some merchant navigators we find it without too much fuss. Trying to look like I am not holding bottled water, I wait. Trying to look like he is not with me, my coworker waits. In attempt to diffuse the tension, and because he actually is with me, we go for a walk around the block and quickly realize that the block bleeds into a slum, the pathway peppered with dead dogs, trash, and shitting children. Cozy really. Something the real estate world might call an “up and coming neighborhood,” or “a community with room for growth.” Truly, I am not perturbed by the thought of living in this neighborhood, but do want to know what the house looks like.

Over an hour late, the man staying at the house rushes up panting, sorry, and eager to have a roommate. He has never met me so I am not so sure why he is so keen to invite me in but as soon as we step foot inside the door and he turns on the light I understand. He lives inside of an indoor swimming pool. Brand new, some wires visible and the lot next door still unfinished, this one man lives on a blanket in a white room with white tile floors and a bare light bulb, his only companion his echo because there is nothing – no chairs, beds, rugs, pillows, light fixtures, paintings, yarn, stove, refrigerator, pot, pan – to absorb any sound.

Hosting me is not an easy task and I understand that many hours and dollars have been invested in my placement and the last thing on my mind is to be difficult. Surely I am flexible and am deeply appreciative of all that’s been done for me and is still being done , a personal favor called in to make this a possibility. It must be a massive bed sore, head ache or some sort of tropical infection to host your first Western volunteer for an extended amount of time and find him housing. That said, I don’t want to live in a swimming pool.

By the grace of god I find a place the next day. Delerious with joy I see Nike’s statue on my eyelids, the clouds opening, lightening clapping, drops of joy pouring down. Divine intervention is the only possible explanation for such a blessing. I happen into sharing a flat with four Indian bachelors who are living and studying in Ahmedebad and are stoked to take on another roommate, live with a dude from the U.S. and lower the rent. Not only has my housing been solved, but so too have so many issues around my social life been remedied. The guys I am going to live with are smart, know the city, speak English, have more degrees than a thermometer (just thought of this one, pretty bad huh), and are just chill, sweet guys.

Grinning from ear to ear I leave, set to move into the apartment and my life the next day.

What do you DO?

2007-09-23T03:08:00.001-04:00

“Good Intentions are useless in the absence of common sense.” Jami, Baharistan
From “India Unbound” by Gurcharan Das

--

Emails, MOUs, funders, and friends ask me what I am going to during my 9 months here. Right now I don’t know and am in the process of trying to understand that process that might let me understand what needs doing and where I fit into that – so may processes and lots of trying. In these beginning days there are no deliverables, no tactics grounded in any methodology, thoughts of sustainability and capacity building are in the distance. Right now I sit with people, gain their confidence, make jokes, laugh, smile a lot and hack my way through some Hindi, trying to make an effort and willing to be the brunt of a joke.

In the mornings we sit, take tea, and read the newspaper in search of coverage on the mistreatment of sewage workers. Each day passes slowly. A proposal is revised, a receipt stamped and submitted for reimbursement, lunch, more tea, training manuals stapled. Western thoughts of output and efficiency sit on one shoulder, but the wiser voice prevails, taking my time in the beginning, in no rush to push things along, trying to understand the dynamics of the office, who does what, who really does what, and each person’s strengths and weaknesses. Showing pictures of my family and friends, the staff agree that I was fat -- we are communicating and that’s good. I ask about their children, pepper some serious work questions, but mostly I am just trying to land delicately like the ballerino I am at heart. Of course I wonder about what I am going to do, know that the work plan is not going to write itself, and that I came here because I want to contribute in a meaningful way, but right now I can only learn what’s in front of me. So, I learn about the organization and I learn about sewage workers.

It is by far the most disgusting work I can imagine (I am not calling the people who do this work disgusting -- to the contrary, I have an immense respect for the work they do each day and the epic personal constitution it must take). I contemplate the actual details of the work, of what it must require to go from sitting on the edge of a manhole to the action of propelling yourself into it. These men dive, depending on where the stop up or blockage is, into the network of pipes that drain pit latrines and industrial waste.

They are real life snakes and plungers. Up to their waste and higher, wearing nothing or just their underpants (no protective gear), a string tied around their waste, they wade in the vilest sludge of weeks worth of fermented human feces and industrial waste and use any kind of homemade implement to clear the pipe. Each year dozens of men die this way when they suffocate in a pipe that has no oxygen or inhale a toxic gas trapped below the street. From a recent report, quoting Justice Ramesh A Mehta (Retd.), “In Gujarat within a short span of 56 days there were 16 deaths of manhole workers in the manholes.”

There are many issues in play: caste, the law and the gap between its words and its enforcement, money, corporations… I have an idea of this scenario in a bigger setting, the common themes of the abusing the poor and taking advantage of the most at risk, but I don’t know the details of this situation. Each day I learn a lot, trying to understand the problem first, then the details of this organization, and then my place within it over the upcoming months.

Arriving in Ahmedebad

2007-09-23T03:07:00.000-04:00

It feels like what it really is.

The shit has hit the fan, I am not in the corner, there is no spotlight, it is not the summer of ’69, and it doesn’t smell like teen spirit. Maybe I will write a song about it one day, but right now I am on my own and it feels like it. Wandering around this new city, in a new state, in a new country, on a new continent where I don’t know the language, I walk with hopeful, yearning eyes, corners are especially suspenseful, that I might see someone I know on the street, a small world story, a familiar face, a couple of degrees of separation and the resultant drink, my friend from Kindergarten, my sister for her birthday. I don’t know a single soul; I feel like a pixel on a screen displaying an image of Earth from space. I am not visible, don’t know any of the pixels around me, have no idea what this all amounts to and the people who complement me best stand in the starkest of contrasts thousands and dozens of thousands, oceans and landmasses away.

We left the guest house in Mussori at 6 a.m. on Sunday, and the damp morning air bettered only by the pleasant surprise of not vomiting on the 2-hour, 30 km descent. In a cluster for the last time, our backpacks, luggage, bags, and suitcases bumpering our way onto the train – no one even noticed us -- we load up, stuff big things into small compartments and buy water. Stretched out on the lower bunk of a second class sleeper, I am chilling, chatting it up, swollen from my last post that I am readier than ready to be on my own, snoozing some. Anna, Sunita, and the heat greet us in Delhi. Four of the fellows set off for their train to Mumbai, and as they walk up the stairs, dragging their center of gravity in their packs behind them, I calmly look on while the Everglades encroach on my ass.

Just for practice, to get us back into the pace of city life, the taxi drivers waiting outside like lions at a river during the wildebeest migration across the Mara and Serengeti in late July, put us through an exercise in bargaining, and manage to rip us off just enough so that we felt good about slashing the original price and they knew who was screwing who. At Anna’s apartment, the remaining 11 of us waiting for later overnight trains relax, cool, check email, and eat like wildebeests. Slowly, in 45-minute increments, taxi’s come, honk, go, the trickle of geographically labeled clusters of people, some to the south, some to the west, some the south then the east, return to the station, the last place of familiarity any of us will return to for a long while.

Unlike the trip down the mountain, for this trip across half of India, I have the top bunk, accompanied by a very able and on cooling vent, spraying me directly with freezing cold air. Luckily, my blanket handy, I form a chrysalis and defeat the enemy attack. As 16-hour train rides go, it is good. At the station, a man from my host organization meets me along with another type of different, drier, somehow as hot, heat. With all my things, the rickshaw lurching back on its two hind wheels, we speed, sorta speed, to the hotel.

Ahmedebad is a busy city. It is dirty, bustling. There is traffic. Millions of people, swarms everywhere. Bicycles, cars, carts, horns, motorbikes, camels, dogs, goats. Buildings are stone, cool, some brick. On the roller coaster of my emotions, the ride to the hotel is the slow, exaggerated, dramatic, teasing, ascent to the pinnacle of the ride. Inside the door of my hotel, the operator pulls the crank and that roller coaster car dives straight to the ground, physics lessons enter my mind, my stomach clenches, literally freefalling. As the cold air of loneliness encroaches on my body, my mind and heart catch up with the goosebumps of my skin – the room empty, standing there alone. Really alone, no friends down the hall, around the corner, a couple blocks, a few miles on my bike, several hours in a car. No phone.

Writing this the Thursday after the Monday, these feelings have waned, with each passing day my comfort growing, but in that moment I was mortified. Admitting so is not easy for me, the person who likes to think himself a world class adapter, converting any voltage or wattage output with ease, someone capable of hoping a flight to any part of the world, somersaulting through customs and landing on my feet at baggage claim on my way to a direct taxi ride, familiarity with a place and rapport with the people, thoughts of trepidation never evident in my face – in my armpits of course – but able to make the best of any situation. That’s always been the style I’ve tried to command, and I know I’ve not always done it, too cool, unflappable, able to get along with any and all. That door slammed and with it slammed many of these ideas but their remnants firmly present, important lessons on the good and the bad, that life is not all ups, that the downs are as instructive as the ups. My growth lies here I and I know it, I don’t like it, but this time will make me a better, more complete person.

Rather than putting my hair in a high pony tail and bashing things with a spiked club, after sitting in the room with my sadness for 20 minutes, I walk. Without direction or purpose other than to get my mind off myself, I walk. Hot and humid, I sweat, but I walk.

There are no other white people. I don’t see them and from the looks on people’s faces, they haven’t seen any in a while either. And yet people don’t seem to care or take much notice. Smiles smile back. Young boys wave, a few cyclists dare a touch, others ignore me plain and simple, children gawk, grandmother glower. I walk on.

Down a main street, onto a side street that spits me out blocks later onto a bigger artery, a quick right, down a bank, up the stairs, over the bridge, a moment of hesitation then left. Each step pounding the pavement with the most profound anxiety I have ever known, each step speaks and the ground hears me. My tensions trickle from the furrow in my brow, through my hunched shoulders, compressed spine, tight lower back, aching hamstrings, flexed calf muscles, and exit through the soles of my feet into the ground of my new home. Organically, in time, with my mind and body together I will grow to learn this new city and it will learn me, its people, make friends, do good work. It will take time, but that walk was the first and most important set of steps to doing so.

A little less empty when I return, I sit with my thoughts and fall asleep, still afraid, shutting my eyes for a second that feels like an hour, but a little happier, a touch more comfortable, a touch more prepared.

Ready to Go

2007-09-17T06:39:00.000-04:00

I wrote this on Saturday night, September 15, 2007

Walking home from the Internet cafe, Mussori glows in the hills below, calmly, comfortably, its routine done for the day, children and shops warmly tucked away, dreaming now. Meandering, the path leads me home, visible in the light of quaint century old street lamps. Remnants of my conversation with Sidney bounce around in my mind, thinking of NYC in the cooling summer days, streets my heels know, long time friends, a city I call home. B.C.'s warm hello makes me smile. He sounds good. We wished each other a happy new year.
In the past month, my life has settled into a routine, easy and without challenge, woken by a bell, meals prepared, white people all around, English spoken. Challenge has been absent. Emails and phone calls fill out the frame, inform me of the comfort zone that I know so well and has crept over this latest locale. But, as comfortable as its been, so too has it been stifling. Scuba diving since I've arrived, my air is delivered through one tube, my interactions staged, group dynamics swimming with me as a school of fellows, trapped near shore during low tide of this new and foreign ocean. We can't swim too far, our instructor watches intently. Terribly frustrated, I am ready for this to end. No more masks, no more groups. After a month of being in India I am ready to be in India.

That comfort zone is nice and I think of it often, question the decision to leave it and participate in this trip. Absent from the lives of friends and family during a time of much transition and uncertainty, guilt often enters my mind. At times I too provide that comfort zone for others and my choice to be here impacts them. Computer screens and Internet profiles type to them, tell them that I am there for them, a sounding board for any thoughts they might be having but my dot com aliases are wholly insufficient, failing people in their times of need.

Lucky for me, despite my absence, I know they remain there for them, and me for them, in whatever ways we can. A tight rope walker's safety net, there, but not in sight, sure to catch me if I fall or waver, looking down to see people who love me, encourage me, advise me, put my eyes back where they need to be.

These are the questions I am curious about. What sort of personal constitution does it take to live overseas? Could I work in international development, live worlds away from the people I adore and rely on? Aware that these questions are not easy, aware that there answers lie, in part, in the next nine months, this land of fairytale clouds needs to end.

With that safety net secured, my mask set to be torn off tomorrow morning, my time in India starts. Finally I cast off into the ocean on my own, without any one way to go, no instructions on how to breath, where to go. I can't wait; I am terrified. More than anything, I am ready. I am ready to try and learn the language that has stared back at me from textbooks and grammar exercises, to get to work, to understand Dalit discrimination in a lived sense, to meet my coworkers, move out of a pack, breath city air again, get lost on buses, meet new people, work, feel alive, useful, exploring throughout the tough questions that arise, aware that they hold the key to personal growth. Comfort forces me nowhere.

Walking on, there are fewer street lamps now. Tomorrow's path, my time for the next nine months on the other side of the world is before me: there, but I can't see it. It is not lite. Wise trees line the road, guiding me back to the hotel. Tomorrow these wise trees, these calm mountains, this comfort zone is going to be traded for honking cars, smog, uncertainty. No more street lights to show me home. Safely, I arrive at our hotel where I will sleep for the last time. Smiling, I am ready to try and light my way from now on.

Whose Responsibility

2007-09-11T00:24:00.000-04:00

From Octavio Paz's "In Light of India:"

"Besides the intellectual and political elite, who have been the historical protagonists of India for over a century, one must also note the emergence of a new middle class in the principal cities. This class -- without much culture and with no great sense of tradition -- is, as in the rest of the world, enamored of technology and the values of individualism, especially in its American version. This class is destined to have more and more influence on society. A strange situation: the middle class, in India and on the rest of the planet, disdains public life and cultivates the private sphere -- business, family, personal pleasures -- and yet they increasingly determine the course of history. They are the children of television."

--

From Edward Luce's "In Spite of the Gods:"

"Perhaps the most conspicuous item of consumption in today's India is the wedding, which owes a lot to Bollywood and vice versa. Vandana Moha, owner of the Wedding Design company and New Delhi's most successful wedding planner, told me the smallest metropolitan middle-class weddings start at $20,000, and climb to more than a hundred thousand dollars. In 2003, Subroto Roy, a prominent industrialist based in Lucknow, spent an estimated $10 million on the joint wedding of his two sons. The event, which almost every Indian politician attended, was stage-managed by Bollywood directors, stage managers, and choreographers... One much-publicized Punjabi wedding in 2004 had South Africa as the motif. The parents of the bride actually transported eight giraffes from Africa to add that authentic touch. "It is as is if some kind of madness has gripped India's middle classes," says Mohan, laughing."

--

From "Freedom at Midnight" by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins:

[Of Gandhi] "His nightmare was a machine-dominated industrial society which would suck India's villagers from the countryside into her blighted urban slums, sever their contact with the social unit that was their natural environment, destroy their ties to family and religion, all for the faceless, miserable existence of an industrial complex spewing out goods men didn't really need."

On a Saturday for myself, I take some time to walk through Missouri, eat every two hours, and enjoy my independence in a new place. Dehydrated and too close to the end of my book to keep walking by this coffee shop, I duck in. Tucked into the corner, I start to read but my attention is stolen. Bad Indian pop music is blaring, scattering my thoughts initially before they fall into a state of intent focus on a group of women and their teen girls against the window. Lip-synching with the performative flair and accuracy required to fill the biggest venues in Mumbai, the words to this song are sung as second nature. Articulate, well-coached English broadcasts the very vague, unmeaning lyrics. Plush, brown leather couches and the complementary earth-tone cushions comfortably support the on looking women, creating a court scene, performers performing and their adoring patrons draped elegantly on an exotic fur as they drink exotic concoctions from far off lands. Wearing sari's themselves, their daughters don the most notorious name brands, the same ones bootlegged all over the world, available on Canal Street and Fifth avenue. Daughter and mother alike are painted a certain complexion, their eyebrows maintained.

My mind is captivated, enraptured by their speech, enchanted by the scene playing out in front of me, a scene I just read about, was told about by the leading commentators on India. As the bill arrives one of the mothers dismissively places a large bill on the check presenter and shoos the boy away. She doesn't say thank you; she's busy gossiping about the latest on Salman Kahn, what earrings she had on at dinner or what clothes he was wearing on his day off from boarding school. Louder than they music, the composition of this scene far more telling of something bigger, more 'Indian,' these women represent the future of India and it is a frightening future that no amount of decadent leather couches can warm me to.

Converted from the theoretical to the real, Octavio Paz's "In Light of India," Amaryta Sen's "The Argumentative Indian," and Henry Luce's "In Spite of the Gods," words enter my mind, their warnings of a rapidly growing population - growing in population and power - of wealthy, educated, privileged, consumer-crazed, well connected, disconnected Indians. This burgeoning sub section of the population, vastly atypical of the average Indian, is a critical mass that is responsible in large part for furthering an obsession with money, products, packaging, labels, the conveyance of status at the expense of the starving people who live in the shadows of their mansions.

Surely this is an overly simplistic diagnosis, reducing the economic problems of the 12th largest economy of the world to a sentence, to the people who go to Bollywood movies on a Friday night. But, it is undeniable that a pernicious classism is emerging and the rich are setting the agenda, controlling the flow of money, entertaining foreign investors. This isn't different from the other countries I have been to and the larger trend of the world today. But, I think about why I am here. Arrived in this country on the wings of funding meant to prompt sustainable development, to cultivate a class of leaders who will try reverse these harmful patterns, poverty. So, often, in the front of my mind are questions about how to do that, how to effectuate positive change in a meaningful, lasting, fair way and in this coffee shop right now the real question is: whose responsibility is this? This fellowship has one thought, suggesting me as a possible answer, and hearing that from them sounds nice, flattering to think that I might be able to do something so big. But, it seems, these women sitting there have also suggested me as answer, seemingly unfazed by such questions, choosing instead to purport the exact system I am thinking about. In Delhi, on the train, in Mussori, in the billboards, malls, advertisements, it feels that the percentage of Indians who have "made it" do not care about where they have made it from, this history that has put them there and the opportunity they represent going forward, instead choosing to blame the poor, caste differences, or varying State cultures as the reasons for the inability of other people to pull themselves up.

They are now taking pictures of the three girls, divas, sprawled on the couch, their shiny digital camera clicking away.

The earth can't support this growth; I know this. So too am I aware that it is hypocritical of me to sit here at the same cafe paying, the same inflated prices for a coffee, very much the product of a consumer crazed country controlled in large part by class structures, to be passing judgment. Admitted. But it feels, thinking about ideas of development and the future and India somehow falling into this term -- set to surpass China in 2030 as the most populated country -- that there is an opportunity to reconsider these assumed thoughts of progress, material gain etc. and change a course because the goal ought not and can not be an American lifestyle of consumption. There are things we can do better, cleaner, more inclusively, to not make the same mistakes that the "developed world" made and continues to make.
Cue the violins. Sure this is idealistic but there is not reason this music should be so bad, - it is a product catered to a consumer class more concerned with communicating their status than listening to good music. A bottle of Jack Daniels costs $90, a sign the stinks of a desire to be American, not to drink good bourbon.

Walking

2007-09-11T00:23:00.000-04:00

On the walk down here I finally had the chance to be present in my mind and my body, to participate in this town as an individual, not a member of a group. An old man farted as I walked by. The egg seller sat among his riches, crates stacked by the dozen higher than his seated posture. An antique store shopkeeper sits with his daughter, still wearing her starched school uniform, looking at school photos. A woman's bangles clank exactly in step with her stride, her own personal bandleader. An impromptu director of traffic asserts his force, funneling one car to a parking spot, another to honk a little less, carefully pupeteering a overfull truck through a tight squeeze, then walking on with his shoulders back and chin out. Bangra music blares. A group of old men play cards on a milk crate, one smirking as he smacks a card down with the distinct motion of putting an ace on a king. A donkey yawns; so bored, dumb. Samosas fry. Binidis rival the Japanese flag in the intensity of red and perfection of an exact circle. Tailors stitch.

It feels so nice to walk, on my own.

Development and Me

2007-09-11T00:18:00.000-04:00

Walking home, this mountain makes an indelible mark in my mind, a parable for approaches to development - this ever enigmatic term that is constantly on the tips of too many tongues. But I'm guilty too, and the wisdom of this summit takes me on as an ignorant nubile, shedding light on the ever important idea of perspective. Walking, I think about the work I will be doing, and how to do to it best, learn all the time, and leave with lessons for myself and some sort of deliverable on the ground.

Through the haze of the clouds blowing over, many paths are visible. All eventually will get to the antenna at the peak. Some look more direct, some bend out of sight, others curve and curve and curve. Trucks roar by, cars zoom, the fastest two ways of getting to the top, traveling in an enclosed vessel, bullying people with your horn, blurring images in haste. Motorbikes are an option. Some speed, the air in your hair, things slow down and you get there. I e signed away my right to ride on a motorbike, but I have a feeling that I prefer walking. Each brick under my feet. Slower, yes, but ferns come into focus, I stop if I want, watch monkeys in the trees, squashed butterflies in the road, appreciate laborers as they haul stones on their back, people say hello, snippets of their conversations buzz - the importance of the details emerge, details that are only accessible on foot. Clouds come and go, unsure at times of where I've been, my goal not always in sight, the goal unsure, out of reach. But, I am in no rush. I am slowly progressing, sure of that, accompanied by peace of mind that I've done this journey well, appreciated the things around me, considered them, my body with my mind, understanding the process that begets the process. Though, at times, I may have had to go backwards to go forwards, I didn't drive, hurry, spending time with each pixel of the picture, not the easiest way or the fastest, but it feels right.

Haircut

2007-09-05T10:32:00.001-04:00

Sitting in class I decided I was going to get my haircut after lunch. My self-cut and styled faux-hawk/mohawk was at a Eurotrashy point that needed to go. On top it was hanging on to cool, standing up, sorta stylin', but the back had grown to look like a wet rodent, and because the top didn’t exist without the back and the back existed at all, it was time.

Walking down the mountain, zig zagging on the roads to the town of Landour, tunnel vision engulfed my eyes, people's hair was all I noticed and this new country provided a lot of variate fodder for consideration. My last teacher of the day wears a bob, a Golden Girls middle aged do with little style, lots of natural curl, and the humid air. Voluminous always.

Approaching me was a nice looking older man in a button-up shirt, grey slacks that looked to be about the same age as me, sandals, and a sharp part swooping his hair from left to right. It smelled nothing of a balding accountant or first communion participant in a white suit and dotting mother. Clean shaven. Smart.

Zooming by on his motorbike a young stud strut his stuff, his brown locks on full display, perhaps the only reason he bought the bike in the first place. Flowing behind, tended to with much time, loving comb strokes, overpriced product, and a constant dose of vanity, his hair matched his tight shirt, tighter pants, and designer sneakers. He too was clean shaven. Around the curve was an older man, seemingly wise because of his hair, venerable in grey. Long and kempt, his beard was wise in its own right. Nothing special in his style, organic, growing from the tested proteins of his oft-tested brain.

That beard opened a can of worms, blaring new tunes of facial hair styles at me in keys I've never heard. Paramount among them: the moustache -- a style often made fun of in the U.S., at parties organized around the theme, pedophile jokes, and white trash punch lines. In India, the 'stache is in. It is everywhere, cooler than bellbottoms, sliced bread, or what that guy on the motorbike thought of himself. Fruitseller, bus driver, tailor - a man assumed to have a sense of style, sporting the stache without shame -- another guy on a motorbike, one of my teachers at the school, business men in the newspaper. The list could go on. Pubescent boys do their best, but need to wait their turn. The moustache, replete with wax, attention, trims, and a garish air, is hip.

Sikh men grow their hair long but rock their turbans with the same concern for appearance as the trendiest secular Bollywood star. Purple shoes, a violet shirt, and darker hue in the turban, one Sikh man struts his stuff like the coolest rooster in the pen, feathers puffed, chest out. There are an array of colors, but the most common are black and white - white is the new black once again, just after black was the new white, equally timeless despite the best efforts of marketers and fashion magazines to suggest something outlandish like earth tones. Simple, becoming.

Some men use henna in their hair, an orange like a tiger, fuming almost in the intensity. That color, if put on a dude in leather with piercings is available on St Marks Place, but here it is just right, fitting and fantastic.

Women are far more understated, a part in the middle, their natural beauty does the talking, not highlights or bloated chests. Most school girls put their hair in two braids, looping the bottoms with ribbon, but even still there are no bells or whistles, texture and natural beauty the expression here.

I'm ready to part with my current style. One week into Hindi language school, we've not yet learned, "Please shave my head." Turning into one shop, a storefront no more than 4" by 6", I am met by a blank face. May I please have a haircut? Still blank. More blank. Then some hand waving, frantic, a two handed fast forwarded hello. He is not the barber. Walking on, another sweet beard on another owl-like older man, the moustache featured but aware of its strong supporting cast. About the same size, two chairs, two mirrors, a small bench, some pictures of Ricky Martin, I feel good about this barber. May I have a haircut, please? Yes, please sit. Doing better already, I like where this is going, ready for this teen of about 14 to go get someone. Instead, this young man, unable to even enter as a contestant in the ratty 14-year-old moustache growing contest, is, it seems, the barber.

His hair is awesome, well oiled, trimmed, a meticulous part in the middle, not as slick as Alfalfa and without the cowlick, a little more air underneath it, wing-like. A sweet guy, yes, but I don't want his haircut. Grinning in amusement, laughing at the absurdity of the situation and absence of my Hindi skills I begin: Can you please cut it all one length? Reminded by his face and the mirror, I have a mohawk on my head. Touching the sides, he asks me something. Language barrier. I pick up the clipper and ask him for the #2 attachment. Nice, now we're going. He shuffles through a drawer that doesn’t glide open, but in its worn wood that just fits, it sits in place, hanging down, its contents rushing forward. There are matches, papers from the Dark Ages, rusty scissors, magazine shards, and lucky number #2. Right where I put it, perfectly organized, a little smile peeps through from the barber, amused at what is going on. I’m right there with him, still smiling. One length please, all, cut it off... I try numerous approaches to the same end, taking the clippers and motioning them through my hair. Enter hands: not just saying "one length, #2" but pushing my hands through my hair as if I just surfaced from underwater, then scissorhands, back to the water motion again. Slowly, the boulder creaks forward; we are on to something, about to start rolling down the hill. The sweet buzz of a hair clipper, a soft hmm like a blue mosquito light, my hair running to the blades and their dramatic end. Smoothly, the sides are crisply clipped. Now I really look ridiculous.

Getting the clippers through the thicket on top proves challenging, far more testing of the clippers, mosquitoes upgraded to Madagascar hissing cockroaches, a wild animal far more difficult to tame, but not unconquerable. With great care, this young man, a young man with great experience but no frame of reference for this foreign species, crouches slightly, pauses, unplugs the weapon and calls for backup, reaching into a bag on the wall to produce another clipper. "New." My smile grows, as does his, and my mohawkquivers in fear, eyes darting like a cornered mouse, aware that it doesn’t stand a This new clipper has been raring to go, a young colt pleading for the track, a Porsche feigning for the Audubon, no seat belts, bets placed, harnessed with current, plowing ahead. There is a lot of hair, but his savvy enters here, the homestretch in sight, he saves enough for the straightaway and comes up strong to challenge and over take A Few Stray Hairs, Precarious Ear Area as well as the favored Encroaching Back Moss.

A deep breath on both our parts; little did I know we were just getting started. Those awesome rusty scissors jumped out of the drawer. I'm stoked to think that they are going to touch me with the intent of cutting things off my body. Sweet. But, young Luke Skywalker uses the force, shaping the hairs around my ear keenly. Nice. I think we're done. Then, like a samurai wielding numbchucks, he does this crazy thing with a straight razor, like a ninja with a butterfly knife, too fast for a mere mortal to really understand, aided by instant replay and dramatic camera work. A new razor inserted, my neck is cleaner than a newly Zambonied ice skating rink.

Unknowingly, we had now arrived at the final frontier. With his palms down, arms bent at the elbow, and my body the location of a fire, he started fanning me and saying some words. Clueless, my face blank stare said that I didn't know what was going on. More flapping and I finally got it. I crouched in my chair, deciphering the "can you please schooch down" motion that he was trying to tell me - there wasn't actually a fire. Then, Spider Fingers went to work with a divine touch to rival that of Brancussi, massaging my head in ways I didn’t know were possible. Jammed into the chair in a proper crouch, I was delighted.

Baby powder, payment, and the awesome burst of air on my newly shorn head. One last look back, our smiles were mutual, entirely amused with what just transpired.

Trying to Learn Hindi

2007-08-29T07:13:00.000-04:00

This morning I woke up thinking of work. Tucked in the mountain town of Moossoori, a town built by the British as a holiday launch point, my head is literally in the clouds 6,000 feet tucked into the Himalayas. Fresh air, hot tea, dew on the trees, valleys funnel clouds along their way, my mind wanders to the sublime, beauty and things disconnected entirely. I dream of home, literature, writing, friends, love, my family, career goals - self absorbed topics of contemplation - topics that are important and feel to be invited by these surroundings. And, being here, I want to inhabit this space with all of me, think about what it would be like to move to a mountain town and live the life that I supposedly purport, grow my own food, write, smile, and live in a state of contentment. But then I think about why I am here, and it is for exactly the opposite reason, to prepare me to engage, to enhance my skills so as to effectuate "good" change in a lasting way, not a way that is entirely self focused. We came to this town because of a world-renowned Hindi language school. Indeed, this step is the antithesis of what my mind has slipped to since arriving last night. I am nervous because Hindi is such a different language, but also because it this process is a very symbolic step, it signifies a real measure of preparation for a fast-approaching work start date. My days now have structure and consequence, we are no longer sitting around talking of everything and nothing, no more orientation, massive groups of white people, arranged travel, planned meals, English speakers.

Furthermore, I need to learn this language. In three weeks I don’t expect to become fluent, but I do feel the weight of expectation at my host organization and the fact that acquiring this skill directly impacts my ability to meet those expectations, do my job well, and walk away at the end of 9 months with a concrete skill. Surely I have enthusiasm, some experience, a great support network, etc. but it is stupid of me to think I can do workers organizing or help an organization to that end without speaking some of the language, ignoring the fact that Gujarati and not Hindi really ought to be my focus. I very much feel this pressure.

So, I go forward with full enthusiasm, sincere intentions of learning and the understanding that it takes much time. Beneath the anxiety of worrying about my job, ability to learn Hindi, living on the other side of the world for a year, eating new foods, meeting women, staying healthy, this anxiety around learning language is telling of a new concern in my life because the list above is not new or exhaustive but healthy and expected, a proper exercise for a thinking person going through change. What pushes me the most is that the task of learning Hindi is not an assignment, not a paper, it exists not in the tangentially connected world of campus life but in a very real sense, in the real world and is impacting on me as a professional going forward. This new mindset is one that I am working to understand, to understand that from here on out, the onus is mine, for better or worse, and translates into real terms, terms that make me better at certain jobs, more hirable, efficient, knowledgeable, savvy, productive, and in turn happy with the outcomes that I am able to get. Fake it until you make it doesn’t apply here, but rather I need to learn and make it, faking it will not suffice. In short, my work matters and I need to take it seriously.

Sitting in the clouds, literally, becomes problematic, an ironic place to engage with real life skills acquisition if for no other reason than its symbolism. In life, the challenge lies, how do I balance between these clouds and the disconnect they offer, and the real world that exists all around me. The implications are many, thinking of career, money, location, partnership, how do I remain happy, invested in literature, love, family, writing, art, nonsense, things that matter and matter deeply to me while at the same time, not lost, disconnected, clueless as to the reality on the ground. Setting it up like this creates a false dichotomy, nothing is this black and white, but it is helpful for me to think about as a young person now figuring out his life. The clouds this morning asked all these questions and what better place to think about them. Off to language school to work on them for now.

Two Weeks Now, Some Thoughts

2007-08-29T07:02:00.000-04:00

As the plane descended, the city came into focus. My boarding pass read Heathrow to Delhi. Half British, half Indian nationals, the staff was put together for a flight bound to India. Food requests switched, the norm veg and the exception meat. Baseball caps traded, in large part, for turbans. I knew I was on my way to India and I still today know that I am sitting here, the languages around me different, signs foreign, and a map that indicates thousands of miles between me and home are constant in my mind. We touch down, the PA crackles and a polite British accent welcomes us all to Delhi's international airport. All the signs are screaming at me but I know I’ve landed not because our wheels are on the ground or the ground staff is Indian, I know we've landed because as I step onto the extended jet way my glasses fog. It is not raining and the sun in shining, my glasses should not be fogging like they did on rainy days in 7th grade on the public bus home. It is that hot and humid. This is the weather people have told me about, the Delhi heat, sweet air that hangs out at the equator, heat that packing lists have tried to prepare my lightweight pants for and guide books warn me about. I inhale. The air is different, I am in India; now I know.

Each day is filled with moments like this, constant barrages of obvious signs that scream of another country, world, set of religions, movies, languages, foods, customs, but my armor deflects most of the obvious indicators. Kenya arises here, my encounters with the non-American world informing my mind of some of the intricacies that lie beneath the presence of slums, open sewers, the faces of statistics we too often read about. Yet I know this is not Kenya, it is not the Bronx, Scotland, this new land that greets me with unique cologne in each breath is incomprehensibly different from anywhere I’ve been. So, before trying to understand those major differences, over 5,000 years of recorded history, what 1.2 billion people even means, thoughts about development, modernity, governance, I am stuck in this thick air trying to first understand how to engage with the small things. As I exit restaurants I am not taken with the wide streets and impressive infrastructure - such is noted in a book somewhere, to be found out later -- or auto rigshaws, the apparently different thing, or even the auditions of uniformed men with waxed mustaches and wads of chewing tobacco as they bicker for my business. What takes me, what I focus on for its insight, knowledge on pushing me to be better able to adjust, is the resilience of everything we - Westerners - give up on, the cars my family has gotten rid of, dumped refrigerators, wires, engines, phones, radios... here, things don’t break, repairmen are everywhere and nothing is ever on its last leg, always salvageable. This is telling.

Two weeks in, these are the things I notice, trying to get my mind around what I can, see what is different and what is the same. Underground passages, train stations, still house people who are without homes, men sleep on the bare sidewalk, cozied up in a blanket for the night, wholly without shelter. I’ve seen homelessness before, bashed over the head by its ubiquity on the streets of Kenya, especially amongst orphans. I know people are homeless all over the world, and this is a sad reality that will continue to exist. But never before have I been so bothered by the presence of an infant, a new way of encountering homelessness and the often times concomitant begging. At stop lights, choked in smog, noses running and clothes dirty babies are used as a competitive advantage in a game that often links looking the most desperate to monetary success. Young women's hips often set the stage, babies slung on hips, pawns in a negotiation for money, a prop to pull a heartstring, a surety for soliciting funds. Surely many of these families need the money they get from begging, but in the justice of my mind, babies, innocent, ought not play a part in this -- better left home with grandma or sister. Presumptuous perhaps. In the end, as the woman holds her child on one hip and taps me with her free hand, wrinkled with her burdens, her clothing saturated with dirt, face pleading, I give her money, aware that I may have been worked, but really just feeling empty inside, truly and wholly sad.

We roll off into a cacophony of horns - in India, they say, you can drive without brakes but not without horn -- passing bollywood billboards, the fully extended leg of a cyclist as his pedal comes full circle, a glistening sweaty back of a day laborer, kiosks, malls, mansions, hotels, embassies, baboons, motorbikes, roundabouts, sandals, shapely shadows of leaves I’ve never seen, policemen, buses gurgling black diesel emissions, intoxicating colors of women's saris. As we ride I try to get away from any and all preparation that I've had, to avoid the tendency to exotisize the foreign, fetishism the different. My challenges lie in each person I pass, yearning to understand each one as they fit into this complicated Indian fabric each as human beings, seeing laborers not as laborers, but as husbands and fathers, politicians not at officials but people, women not as victims of gender bias but IT professionals, all fallible, all implicated through their interactions, histories, and converging futures in a larger scheme that I too am now a part of.

2006-08-24T11:28:00.000-04:00

It is official. Today at 8:57 a.m. it was empirically proven that there is no correlation between intelligence and the capital letters postdating one’s name. In the university setting and the world over there is a gross assumption that an individual’s smarts can be equated with the prestige of their major, profession, or number of degrees they hold. The majority of the people who believe this have the Ms, Ds, PHs, Js, and BAs after their names and send their children to college, perpetuating a self fulfilling societal farce that masks pedanticity as intelligence.

My appointment is at 8:15 a.m. Blood pressure, no pain, a solid temperature, (and) I am ushered into the exam room. Crappy cologne first, then the doctor himself; sporting a navy blue polo shirt with vertical rows of sailing flags, a detective’s moustache, and high school county championship ring he asks me if I am ready.

I am as ready as I am going to be.

He escorts me to another room where he confuses my right foot for my left foot several times, finally drooling iodine all over my ingrown toenail. Running before walking, he now puts on his exam gloves. Clumsily, he fills the syringe and proceeds to jab my foot six times, obviously unsure about what he is doing, like a toddler who struggles to play with a toy that is meant for a child three years older, a Looney Tunes character trying to blow out its tail.

His plastic hospital I.D. card shimmers on the counter: First Name, Last Name, M.D.

Twenty minutes and my toe is numb. Hunting for the scissors and gauze, he puts gloves on and does the procedure. At one point he yelps, “Wow! Look at all the pus,” the medical professional response to an infected wound. Gloves bloody, he pours through every cabinet in the room wiping blood on all the handles and some of the cabinet doors. My toe hurts but I pinch myself to make sure this is actually happening. A doctor wiping blood all over a room, surely sanitary and surely an 11-year-old knows not to do that.

He can’t find the bottle of alcohol he is looking for so picks up a can that is lying around. Holding it upside down he flips it in the air, displaying that he’s still got his high school finesse, reads it, chuckles, proud of himself, and squirts some white soap on my foot.

No, not actually empirical, but telling. This man has being practicing medicine for decades. He told me so. He has those prestigious, awe-inspiring initials after his name yet he is one of the least competent individuals I have ever met.

Coming off a week of orientation for incoming freshman where I met countless pre-med students, students who want to be lawyers and joint J.D./Ph.D.s, today was a harrowing experience that typifies a crippling lack of creativity within the adolescent/young professional mindset. Intellect, pursuit out of curiosity not a teleological, career obsessed, money making impetus for learning, is lost. Students care about their grades but not their minds. The majority of undergraduates obsess over internships, jobs, grades, and graduate school before they ask questions that might make them better writers, thinkers, or more holistic young adults. Such is the climate of college campuses today and it is blinding, rendering most students unable to function in non traditional capacities and non traditionally in professional careers. Able to pay for Kaplan and get into med school sure, but to think for themselves, take a risk, read a book that is not assigned or on Oprah’s book club, no. Worst of all, this literally mind-numbing set of expectations has become the norm – the laudable norm, the revered doctor, the brilliant lawyer, you must be smart of you have a PhD.

My toe knows better.

Pretty Much The Coolest Thing Ever

2006-08-04T04:43:00.000-04:00

Complete with soda, too much food, cake and extended family, the pomp of the birthday celebration August 1st was the same as any other I’ve been to but the circumstance was different. It wasn’t my birthday but it was the anniversary of the coolest thing that has ever happened to me. The coolest thing by far.

During the summer of ’05 I volunteered for an NGO in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Nairobi and East Africa. My project finished before the date of my departure so much of my time was dedicated to letting children pet my milky skin, spending time with people, and doing my best to lighten the mood whenever inappropriate. Up to nothing of note, the head of the organization summoned my volunteer title and volunteered me to paint the clinic. Situated within the slum, the clinic provides basic health care on a sliding scale for residents of the community and was in the process of formal registration in the hopes of getting free vaccines from the government. Regulations stipulated that the clinic be white.

Replete with a coverall, paint and brushes, turpentine, no clue, drop clothes, and a foot stool, I set to work. Unlike my jokes or vague development lingo painting the clinic was a tangible contribution. It made me feel good. The work I did in the clinic on August 1st, 2005, however, made me feel even better.

Hopped up on turpentine fumes, I was brushing away, a veritable painting machine -- the Arnold of slum clinic painting like you’d never believe. Most of the patients just stared at my like I was nuts. One patient was different, in far too much pain to notice the connect the dots pattern spackled on my face, eight centimeters preoccupied.

Another volunteer burst into my studio – there is going to be a baby she effervesced. Flashing back to the Miracle of Life video in Mr. Aptekar’s class my initial reaction was: eww. Another couple of minutes and I poked my head in to ask the nurse to ask the woman giving birth if it would be ok for me to sit in. She said yes. With the paint still on my face I gloved up, put on a white coat and did what I thought I was supposed to. “You are doing great momma,” I cooed in English to a Kswahili speaking woman in labor. She froze me with a look, “shut up boy, this is not a sitcom, this is number six and the last” curtly communicated her wrinkled face. My pit stains continued to grow.

I meant well but took the hint, content to hold her hand and wipe her forehead. With a strong push, there was another life in the world. In that moment, there was a presence in the room bigger than any individual – in the balance of the Earth, creation, destruction, life, death, I saw a child born. There was no conservation of mass in this equation. A new baby in the world, a new person. Slimy, gross and more beautiful than anything I have ever seen, the recently converted amphibian was handed to me. Thirteen seconds old. My hands were quaking. A new person in the world and I was holding him, before the mother, before the father, as he was taking his first breaths.

As the nurse focused on the mom, I focused on the baby wrapping him in a sweatshirt, cleaning him up, in awe. Newborn topped with a hat, the mother in recovery holding her new son, I was now up to effervescing, writing the word “baby” all over the walls of my masterpiece, a best attempt at trapping a the enormity what just happened.

At the end of the day, exhausted, I cleaned up, washed my hands, got dressed and went to thank the mother. Babbling in a mixture of English and almost Kswahili, I told her thank you, thank you, and thank you, my best attempt failing again, unsure of what really just happened but knowing I was forever indebted to her sharing his birth with me.

Asante sana, mother. I can’t thank you enough.

Your welcome, she said, in a tone of voice that told me how tired her soul was. HIV positive, like her husband, neither employed, there was now another mouth to feed.

What is his name?

She looked up at me, her eyes glowing, a smile more sincere than any I’ve ever seen, 'Baby Aaron.

--

August 1, 2006 was baby Aaron’s 1st birthday -- happy birthday baby Aaron.

Secular Missionaries And A Life Disconnected

2006-07-26T15:12:00.000-04:00

Experiencing turbulence, I awoke startled. Tired, cramped, I was ready to land in Kenya but the map said we were just crossing over the Mediterranean. To my left snored a middle aged man wearing a black shirt with bold orange letters that read: Baptists for Botswana.

Missionaries speckle the Kenyan landscape, roaming in Range Rovers, rivaling the cheetah population, wild creatures in the own right as they bible thump their way into the slums proselytizing predatorily on the starving poor, poaching tribal traditions towards the brink of extinction. Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion in the world. Kenya is a Christian country. Most mission work that is done in East Africa is headquartered in Nairobi, the largest city between Cape Town and Cairo, the control center for thousands of sentinels seeking to civilize the barbarians, redeem them in Christ.

The presence of Christian missionaries is undeniable, but it is easily eclipsed by the bigger cars, budgets, houses, egos, and bolder t-shirts of the secular missionaries that occupy the gated neighborhoods surrounding the city center. Forget cheetahs, we are the wildebeest. Like the religious work that is headquartered here, any news agency, NGO, micro credit scheme, fair trade organization, women’s empowerment group, or foundation has an East Africa office here. I am a disciple of the secular gospel, doling out condoms, pushing women’s rights, starting sustainable enterprise, empowering youth, in command of all the jargon, the development testaments new and old.

With a faith as strong as a Baptist for Botswana, I believe that the work I do is right, part of a larger plan that will help positively impact the lives of those same starving poor. I choose not to think of my work as predatory, but when I walk through Kibera on a Sunday and hear the sermons, revival meetings, and exorcisms my scoffing at religious mission work doesn’t make my white skin, my presence in the largest slum in East Africa, any less obnoxious. Neither condoms nor communion are helping in the long term.

Both sets of missionaries are equally culpable, both to blame for the problems that aren’t fixed, for living a lifestyle that is entirely disharmonious, prowling the slums by day, be it to convert or vaccinate, and eating $15 dollar meals by night before retreating to a gated compound. Doctrines aside, there is a common baseline that indicts missionaries of all belief systems. There are no simple solutions, and while both sides insist they are right and the other wrong, neither is consistent. Lifestyle is a choice. Inevitably, the most religious and the most secular, both passionate, live disconnected from the work they do, keeping them in business by driving, buying, living, socializing, drinking, sleeping, the system that causes the problems they work to solve.

2006-07-20T23:38:00.000-04:00

As the sun rises over Kibera, a balmy mist lingers backlighting exhales, putting second-hand wool hats on. Dew forms on the cocotenies [wheelbarrows] while the men who sleep in them fight the sun for five more minutes of slumber, five more minutes of procrastination from the day labor that might mean eating but definitely means sleeping well. Cool is typical for July in the slum but not the typical vision of Kenya, trading lion postcards for wet paths and shade for jackets.

George Ngeta emerges as the dew retreats. It is cold, but this is home. With an unflappable calm, he stretches, concerned less with the cold and more with the to-do list in his head. Checking it twice, he knows who is nice but refuses to give up on the naughty. Cold suits him. Development literature often babbles on about being of the community, participatory development, tapping indigenous knowledge sets. Usually, there is some talk of thinking outside of the box, of leveling the playing field between Western and Third. Deliberately vague terms or the ideas behind them, despite best efforts, are not working; Ngeta is the creativity that exists within the cracks of ambiguous phrases, the Kris Kringle of development, far out of the box, what is working, a touch of the Fourth world, the North Pole of sustainable enterprise.

Ngeta’s mind didn’t always reside in the North Pole. Born in Western Province, like most people in Kibera, he came looking for excitement but called it work. Luckily, he found work at a hotel cleaning toilets. Stomaching the smell, aware of the hordes of young people flocking to the city, he scrubbed away, humming as he still does today. One night he filled in for the no show DJ, birthing DJ George. Seduced by bright lights and bumping baselines, nightlife consumed him. So too did the less pleasant aspects. After a while, the danger of Nairobi’s nightlife dulled the shine of discos. It wasn’t worth it. In time, he found his reindeer in social work, guiding him to do the work that he does today.

He has been poor, out of work, hungry, drunk. He doesn’t know what it means to be hopeless. His smile communicates his unrelenting optimism.

Sprawling in the shadows of Nairobi’s waning skyline, nobody actually knows Kibera’s population. Except Ngeta. He knows everyone. He knows that there are 822, 328 people in the bordering villages. He would know, constantly bringing them good wishes, sincere hellos, and parcels of distraction. Cause enough for hope. Shaking dreams from his bones he dresses. A hooded sweatshirt, grey and black cap, jeans, and durable shoes. 320KSH in his pocket, he sets out for the day. Grizzly, he hasn’t shaved in a week. He never brings a pen but always needs one. On his left hand around his ring finger prides his luster-free wedding band. Rested upon his melon belly, his hands are clasped with a disarming confidence, raised only to greet. Walking to his workshop ought to take 15 minutes but takes 40. Humming with the blaring reggae from the aging radio in the barber shop, Ngeta takes the time to greet each person as he passes them, “Habari Mami” he coos at the woman frying mandazi, “Niaje Mdos” he defers to the elder fundi, “Sasa!” he intonates at the bundled baby. It is cold, but without asking he knows what his neighbors need, naughty or nice, stopping to show you care, a smile and a greeting warm the soul.

2006-07-03T05:41:00.000-04:00

Can't you see that it's just raining, Jack Johnson croons, there ain't not need to go outside. Solitaire bores me and his word-drawn pictures of infatuation take my mind to women past, the gap between love and the idea of love, and the drought in my love life. Drought in my sex life. It hasn't rained in a while.

Clicking and tapping, the sounds of the keyboard and rain on the window sing the harmony meant to accompany the song and my interior monologue. I feel sorry for myself, lonely, and wanting. It is companionship I lack. I want someone to reassure me, not to ask but know what's bothering me, beauty like a Marquez sentence, a reason not to go outside. Like the weather, these thoughts are always present and always changing, sunny and hopeful some days, cloudy and melancholy others. Today my mood is grey, waxing pathetic in step with the guitar rhythm. It seems natural. I have come to expect these bouts of loneliness. I've not grown taller in a couple of years but these tempestuous horizons seem right, post-pubescent growing pains of a 21-year-old in a foreign land, unsure of who to trust, what to believe, wishing there was an easy answer, someone to console him in a primal way, quelling the anxiety that constantly spreads with the mechanical regularity of his beating heart.

All this from the rain.

More than anything, the sad rain pines on about the importance of detail. Perfect companionship that flourishes on the details of the counterpart. Partners who complement, make happy, communicate with their eyes, know through their touch, trigger inside jokes with random words, love through living. Indeed, it is the small things. Small things that I think I miss because of the mood I summon from the rain highlight the screaming disconnect between my reactions and realities, a gaping hole between my fairytale life and truth in front of me. My reactions to small things are the most obvious indicators of ignorance. Large signs, Welcome to Nairobi, seeing poverty, hearing Kiswahili, speaking with Kenyans, tell me I am in Kenya but the small things tell me that I am in a real place, a different place, a country, city and slum that is not an entry in the Lonely Planet or coordinate location on a map but a contrasting reality. Something as massive and amorphous as poverty, a slum of ~1 million, are thoughts that loom larger than logic. Palpable yes, different certainly, harrowing and unforgettable but easily ignored because poverty is so impersonal, too massive, untouchable, entirely unfounded within most Westerner's database of reactions. So it is the small things that make it real. Contrasting reactions to the exact same things allow me to understand that I really don't understand. Poverty is too big, but I know what reactions are triggered by rain and a grey day. Prompted by the small things, my reactions are telling of the extent to which my mind is simply conditioned differently. It rains and I pine while tomorrow the mud paths will be impassable. Sex-life; companionship; these romantic notions of what life ought to be are in and of themselves different realities in my mind than they are for most Kenyans. Moreover, the rain, a natural event, a small thing, a common occurrence worldwide, means something so different to me in my head than it does in life here.

Sheets now. A crowd gathers below the canopy at the entrance to our compound. Miles, not just a window, gate, electrical fence, guard dog, are wedged between me and the people I see reaching for umbrellas, jogging for shelter, covering new hair dos. Running for shelter, rushing to get home, stay dry, stay clean, stay warm, most of the people I look down on don't look so different from a crowd in midtown when the skies open. But, chances are their reactions are different. Frolicking in the rain is only fun when you know you can warm up afterwards. It is even more fun when warming up is an assumption. A warm shower, a dry home, a cup of tea made with clean water, inviting clothing. People in Kibera don’t chase rainbows.

What does the rain mean to you if you live in a structure made of mud, don’t have running water, an extra pair of shoes, or paved road to your house. What does the rain mean to you if you can't open your business, or your child will get sick? What does the rain mean if it is your drinking water?

I don’t know. It is probably not a prompt to feel pathetic in the confines of your warm home. I don’t know. That is the whole point. The small things point out: I have no idea.

2006-06-28T02:24:00.000-04:00

Before I left for Kenya last summer, Carolina for Kibera, Inc. gave me a 15-page release listing, in great detail, all the dangers of Nairobbery. Yesterday was a hard day.

One of the things that they stress the most is understanding that as a white person working in a slum you are, to some degree or another, a target. Money is associated with you. So, you need to anticipate what your reaction would be if you were to get robbed. Less about being the hero or not – don’t be the hero, give up your money, phone, camera etc. – the question is: Do you make a scene?

That liability release form has half-a-page on mob justice. Yesterday was a hard day; Mob justice is real.

If a thief is found, a mob of people beat the shit out of him, most times until he is dead. No trial, no first amendment, no Miranda cards, no qualms. Don’t steal and if you get robbed don’t say anything. That is the lesson from yesterday.

We had a great training in the morning with one of the smarter, less organized youth groups. They are sharp and see right through our handouts. What are SCJ products going to do rats the size of cats? No answer. Their questions, criticism, and interaction are good though. They make me think again and again about what I am doing but I also know that if this is ever going to work it is only going to work when the youth groups tear the protocol to pieces, take what they think is good, and make it their own. Our discussion is lively, we stress the need to be as creative as possible when approaching these issues, and do an in-home training, pointing out the main places to look for pest infestation, how to relate to the customer, safety procedures etc.

A great training. I am not sure that this group is ready to start but they are just as ready or not ready as any of the other groups. At this point one year after the initial idea generation workshop it is time to start, understand what works, what doesn’t, and what we can do to make it better.

On the way out the rabid guard dogs scare me a little, but I am in a good mood. Muddy and stank, the path from the house dips and snakes out to the main drag where right away the tension is tangible. What the fuck, I think, what is going on?

My face is obviously not relaxed, and the guy next to me, a member of the youth group no older than 18 leans to me, without any sense of violence, calm and ordinary, “mob violence.”

Just another day in Kibera really, nothing new. Mob justice, that’s all.

We walk around the crowd that is jam-packed 5-deep in a neat circle around the thief. Men stand above him, panting, with a look on their face expressing a life worth of frustration. Each day, each month and each year, for most of the people in Kibera is a life of injustice. Systematic exploitation, a gross disregard for human life, for the poor, for people who just don’t matter enough, screams from the muscles of their clenched jaws. Beating that man means not biting your tongue, not being ignored, not being the victim again and again of the world’s injustice. Cathartic and rare, mob justice seems to be a community coping exercise.

Walking by, the bloody man’s eyes dart around like a cornered rodent. He has nowhere to go. He just looks relieved that the beating has stopped - momentarily. Some whispers - those other people should not have intervened on his behalf. If they hadn’t, he would be dead. Sirens grow closer. Police arrive as we walk on. His beating is prevented momentarily. When he gets in that car or to the cell he will get it. He is not dead.

Yesterday was a hard day.

Racing, confused, and relieved, my mind tries to make sense of what just happened. No, it can’t just yet. Before a processing session, we walk by a grown man crawling on all fours. He is postured over a pile of ash. Garbage isn’t collected in the slums so people burn it. Meticulously raking through the ash that is no longer garbage he picks out bones and makes a smaller pile off to the side. Carefully, he breaks each one open looking for marrow.

I wonder what I would do if someone robbed me. That wonder doesn’t last long. My mind doesn’t actual understand that last 2 minutes. I wouldn’t do anything. Take it, just take it.

2006-06-23T07:17:00.000-04:00

Stars shine and I miss my comfort zone. Five- beers-pensive and an electrical black out, Counting Crows whine and my thoughts this summer have never been more cogent. Cutting through the bullshit, smog, language barriers it is obvious, present always and unavoidable: my life here exists behind bars, fences, gates, locks, and security systems. The biggest barrier is the internally programed security system: my ability to rationalize, validate, and reason life hour by hour in an attempt to avoid digesting reality because of the bad taste it might leave on my life, wanting to paint in shades of grey, constructing things how they are not. There is no grey. Black and white. Me and Kenya. People in Kibera live in their own shit.

My "work" this summer exists withing a rigid, meant-to-guide-but-confused framework. Development, the undergraduate do gooder, liberal white democrat, priveleged and Base of Pyramid Protocol paradigms collude to stir me in circles, round and round between believing in what I am doing - that what I am doing is good - and being totally overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, the skills I don't have, and that truth that the world just does not care about the poor. It is easier not to but those paradigms have pointed me in a caring direction, without true guidance, just suggestions about what I ought to do, should feel, uphold as important; so, I want to care. The question is, how much do I really care. What does caring actually mean. Since when has caring ever made a difference. It is not about me. A better question is: What is it going to take? There are no more secrets about disease, the world's poor, dirty drinking water, kids dying all the time - the normalcy of death for the majority of the world and the lack of understanding by the controling minority.

"A,"my emails read, "it is going to take more people like you." I am not convinced.

Electricity in our apartment is out. It happens all the time. So what - there are no consequences. Each day I do what I want, take it seriously, choose to do "good" and when the thought of what happens next enters my mind, images inevitably lead to graduation, fun this Fall and the family and friends I miss - never do I think, for example, of what I might eat next. If I do, I think about it because I would love an ice cream sundae. Malaria meds, diarrhea pills and multi vitamins are swallowed without an afterthought. If I get sick - so what? I can get medicine. I am a tall white male with money. What if I get really sick. I can go home where I can get world-class treatment in a hospital that gives preferential treatment to the upper middle class. Just put that ticket on my credit card. So, so what. Some people in Kibera have no electricity. Every day in the world 40,000 people die of preventable diseases. World cup fever sweeps the world while diarhea kills children. That pint, jersey, and match ticket is enough to vaccinate villages.

"A, don't be so hard on yourself," emails from the U.S. read.

As we were walking today I said to Vivian, I hope we are not those people that mean well but just fuck things up even further, setting up expectations but only creating more need. A classic aid/development mistake.

"A, you mean well," my emails read.

Since when has meaning well ever made a difference.

Thanks to a generous per diem and sweet funding from SCJ, we live in a beautiful apartment complex - swimming pool, sauna, steam room, my own bathroom, 24-hour security. Make a left out of our compound, walk 15 minutes and you arrive on the outer rim of Kibera - one of the largest informal settlements/slums in the world. On our way home from the office we walk out of the nicest part of Kibera, past the bus station and heckling matatu touts, turn left at the car wash where the women are cat called the sweet smell of burning garbage at Christo Church wafts by, my boogers are black, hang a right at the huge puddle, surely a mosquito favorite, into the market. Welcome, Karibu, Myzoungou how are you, suspicous stares, fleeting glances, blaring music, burning oil, and the odor of human shit blend together to create a backdrop for my darting eyes. I have been told the market can be dangerous. My sunglasses provide just another layer. My life exists behind bars. Dark sunglasses or not, I try not to wear my confusion on my face. Layer upon layer of conditioned thinking, media reports, electrical fences, barb wire, complexion, studies, studies that study studies, combine to block my way not through the market but through making sense of anything, never fully allowing my guard down, trained too well to empathize just enough. My sun burned face is the most honest, telling aspect of my life here - a natural, unconcious reflection of how embarrased I really feel. An ethos of blushing. Apologizing for not being able to stand up to the same sun, the same smells, the same drinking water, the same earth shelters, the same lack of medicine. Red and sorry, sorry for my inability, hoping that I am not one of the people that books are written about because they just fuck things up but blushing nonetheless because no matter how I try or what my intenions are, I just have no idea if what I am doing or if what I am doing will have any impact on anyone whatsoever.

"A," one email reads, "such is the nature of this work"

Musty market paths give way to diesel fumes as we get out to the street. Mammas hawk their veggies. When we buy prodcue we buy from the mothers, thinking it good that we give our money to the local women and not the supermarket chain. Shifting sand really. I'm a little re, a little embarrased by the 5 minute quest I put this merchant through in search of change for my 500 shilling note. Twenty shilling mango in hand, I cringe at the buchery, judge the psychos at the pentacostal church blaring exorcisms over their PA system, eye the t-shirt seller up ahead. A quick glance is all I give, keeping my face disinterested, hiding behind the opaque lenses that mask whatever fear might be screaming in my eyes. Forget Greenpoint, these are the thrift store items hipsters scour eBay for. I want to buy a cool t shirt that I can wear to a bar in the Fall. A great chat piece no doubt. "Where did you get that shirt, she might ask" In Kenya. Wow what were you doing in Kenya. Cue the monologue about slum work, Kibera, and life there. Cue the empathetic smile. Cue the comment about what the money I used to buy my beer could buy there and watch her walk away. A little too wierd. Old books, hats, socks, more hats, mangoes, sausages, sugarcane, white range rovers with whiter people, suits, trousers, bras, boxer shorts, a Massai, jewlery made of camel bone that is actually plastic, sneakers, all color my conusumer pallet beckoning with an air of trendy flair as I make the left up Ngong Road. Right then a City Hoppa bus downshifts and belches a plume of black diesel smoke, masacring my lungs. If you could have an asthma like a heart attack, by now I would have had 68 asthmas. Four men saunter by in pressed suits, olive, tan, black, and blue - well dressed, shoulders back, proud. Olive suits dont look good on me. Apex court, the place I stayed last visit is on my right, but I dont stop because Jane is probably at work and I dont care to see her. It would be nice I am sure but I just had another asthma and my heavy bookbag is making my back sweat like an old man playing basketball at the Y. Careful not to fall over the uneven paths, I make the right, walk up the street and greet the guards. They know me, but it usually doesnt matter - I am white and they like their job. Guards rarely stop me. Up the stairs, through the door. I am home. Safe behind a gate, the guards, the electric fence, my ability rationalize, facts, figures, money, white skin, light hair, dark sunglasses, conditioned responses, no sense of consequence, and constant reassurances from people that the work I am doing is good.

Bed time.

When I wake up, I am just as confused, restless, discontent. I do not know what to do. What is it going to take? I know only one thing, it is going to ta

ke a lot more than me.

What is it going to take?

I read the New York Times. An article reads:

In less than a decade, an estimated four million people have died, mostly of hunger and disease caused by the fighting. It has been the deadliest conflict since World War II, with more than 1,000 people still dying each day. For many here, survival, not elections, is the milestone.

Surviving for me is not an issue. I mean well but live behind bars. What is it going to take?

2006-04-18T10:17:00.000-04:00

(the following article was written for Boiling Point Magazine and will be published in the April 2006 issue)

In Kenya men hold hands. Boys, teens, young men, married men, and grandfathers all hold hands as a term of endearment, not just to cross the street. Sexual orientation and holding hands are not related. Some of the most ‘manly’ men, men who might believe homosexuality is a sin, hold hands. Ignorance is bliss when thinking of physical affection between two guys, it is simply not a symptom of sexual orientation. At first, seeing this is a refreshing change from an unrelentingly homophobic American culture that links any form of physical affection between men as ‘gay,’ as not manly. Picture it: two men, chests out, heads high, laughing through a market on the busiest day of the week, hands locked. No weird glances, no fleeting glowers of disapproval. Now picture that in America, two power suits and big knots on bold colored ties in a financial district of a big city at rush hour, hands locked. It is hard to imagine the picture without imagining the looks, expressing feelings from discomfort to disgust. But make no mistake, Kenya, as a nation, is not comfortable with the any of the letters in the LQBTQ conversation. Initially settling, the fact the sexuality is never questioned, on second thought, becomes unsettling. It is assumed that no man would be gay.
In Kenya, sodomy is still a crime and men are still prosecuted for it. In 1998, the notoriously corrupt and ruthless Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi was quoted as saying, "Kenya has no room or time for homosexuals and lesbians." In a country where Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religion, there is an enormous conservative Christian presence that preaches homosexuality as a sin. A lot of those same manly men hold hands on their way to church. Regardless of where they are going, Kenya is not a LGBTQ-friendly country.
My time in Scotland has proved different. An equally, if not more, Christian country, it seems that religion has less flex here, overwhelmed by a relatively liberal public. Religion aside, homosexuality is far more talked about and accepted. My gay co-worker wears a wedding band and talks of his fiancé; they are to be married and afforded all the civil rights that a married man and woman would be given. People make fun of him because he wears tapered pants, but in this instance it is the inverse of Kenya. People in Scotland make ‘gay’ jokes as pejoratives but the foundations for acceptance and equality for people of all sexual preferences is poured and set in society. Of all places I have been, Scotland is the most likely to see those same men in suits with their hands clasped and not bat an eye. Incendiary debate raged leading up to the ratification of The Civil Partnership Act in December of 2005, but out of conflict has come progress. As a nation, Scotland is as sexually ecumenical as I have been to.
Yet, my time in Kenya and Scotland is not sufficient to draw absolute conclusions about national opinion. Such questions have no definitive answers, what do people really think about homosexuality? LGBTQ persons? Why is there an assumed discomfort and where does that discomfort come from? How is it remedied? Indeed, as Scotland has always known but recently confronted, and any queer person in Kenya would tell you, these are not easy questions. For heterosexual members of the world these questions are easily dismissed – they are not a daily reality. As Karen Booth, associate professor of Women's Studies and openly queer faculty member of the sexual studies minor at UNC, admits: “I do feel vulnerable to being dismissed, discounted, and despised when I come out to students and other members of Carolina's community.”
So a question that does deal directly with each of us resounds: Where does UNC stand when it comes to the acceptance of LGBTQ persons? Are some of those same men who think homosexuality is a sin sitting next to you in class?
An uncomfortable question for some, but it is exactly this discomfort that needs to be addressed because those awkward moments result in learning. When asked if he thought there was a fear of homosexuals on campus, former Student Body President Seth Dearmin conceded that there was work to do make campus more welcoming but, “I think we offer a very safe and friendly environmentfor all.” Dearmin’s concession is as telling as his statement. As accepting and diverse a place as UNC is, there is an undeniable discomfort with all students who are different. It is a visceral discomfort, hard to locate, or blame one person for, but difference is disquieting and often leads to fear. “Often times if they are afraid,” says Dr. Cecil Wooten, professor of classics, “they are afraid of differences. People, especially those who are unsure of themselves, often feel uncomfortable around people who are different. “
Enter education. Members of the LGBTQ community are not at Carolina to serve as a tool for education; they struggle, like all people who are discrimated against, for fair and equal treatment from everyone, institutions and people alike. But their struggle must not be pushed to the fringes; it should be embraced. The ‘eww’ faces at kiss-ins in the Pit that teach the lasting life lessons. This teaching must take place on two levels: peer-to-peer and university-wide. Fear of homosexuals, the perceived different, “could be remedied to a degree by frequent reminders from the administration of the University's non-discrimination policy; more funding of the LGBT office and of sexuality studies; more courses on LGBT issues; mandatory "safe zone" and anti-harassment workshops; the granting of health and other benefits to same sex partners of faculty, staff, and students,” says Karen Booth. Support from the University is essential, because it must, as an institution spearhead the fight against all discrimination and hatred on campus.
When asked the same question on combating fear of homosexuals, Dr. Wooten made an equally salient point: “I have never known anyone who knew a gay person who was afraid of gay people.” People to person, the myths are shattered.. As part of their education, students must be forced from their comfort zones by the University - the LGBTQ office helps facilitate these teaching moments - but they must also realize that growing up consists of challenging oneself. Carolina is not high school, it is time to begin thinking for yourself, critically, and realize that whatever the Bible might say, whatever your ignorance has allowed you believe up to the that point, is insufficient. A fear of the different, of LGBTQ persons does not withstand face-to-face interactions and all students need to be pushed and push themselves to be challenged.
This is not an easy thing to do but it is a necessary and important task as important as an A on a creative writing paper or biology final. Dr. Wooten asks: “Isn’t the removal of unreasonable fears and prejudices one of the functions of education?”

social graces

2006-04-18T10:11:00.000-04:00

How was your break?

“Shut up,” I reply. Well, not actually, I say it in my head

I’ve been back in St. Andrews for a week now and every time I get asked that question I cant stand it; this is me maturing.

It is like the scripted conversation you have when you first meet someone. Hi. What’s your name? Where are you from? Where do you go to school? What do you study? Do you know ________? By the time you get to the second question you have already forgotten the persons name and make some stupid excuse like “Oh I am so bad with names” Insert an awkward laugh. The next time you see that same person, who might know the kid you sat next to in 7th grade, haven’t spoken to in 10 years but heard goes to the same school, you introduce a friend, whose name you do know, with the hopes that they learn the unnamed acquaintance’s name.

Growing up I was taught to be open-minded, not to ‘judge a book by its cover’ and accept all people. However, in my young adulthood I’m finding that some books aren’t worth reading. You need to decide that just by looking at their covers. Some people just suck, are not fun or interesting, and there is no problem in brushing them off – I am going to forget your name anyway. For the sake of the really good people out there, the ones worth reading, you must be discerning with the ways you spend your time and with whom you spend it.

That’s why Hong Kong kicked ass. One girl asked Alex if he was gay because he chose to hang out with Jon and me instead of her, two guys with comparatively not- pert bosoms. He laughed and we went drinking. His actions are telling of a certain level of maturity. How you spend your time, whom you invest in and develop friendships with is so important. If you think someone sucks, don’t spend time with them. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a good thing.

Alex, Jon, and I explored the city, went out, played basketball, and just chilled doing what we wanted when we wanted, making fun of each other as we went, telling stories from both freshman years. When playing basketball is was obvious we know each other better than we sometimes know ourselves. Alex knew I was going to use my left hand before I had dribbled and Jon knew I was going to spin before Alex checked it. Jon was red after two beers; Alex and I were still thirsty. Walking down the crowded street shoulder to shoulder loud and obnoxious, talkative but perceptive, there were no fake conversations. It was time well spent with two of the guys who consider my parents their friends, will be my mates for the rest of my life, probably buy my underage kids beer, and tell stories at my wedding. There were other guys on their programs, and yes of course there were women (although they weren’t entirely sure what to make of me, a gangly 6’3” bearded white guy with a beast of hair on his head) but so what… the truth is, those people just don’t matter that much to me.

Of course there is this idea of social grace, being a nice person, a sociable character, and there is nothing wrong with that. But, when knowing other people or seeking to be cool somehow validates who you are, you need to consider your motivations. St. Andrews is a university predicated on social networks, authenticating people by what societies they are in, who they know, what golf score they shoot, how much money their parents make and what animal they have emblazoned on their polo shirts. Never have I been in a place where there is larger concern with outward appearance and the class you convey. Worst of all, most people are unsure if they think it is okay or not, entirely unclear as whether being a blue blooded aristocrat is for them enviable or worth flaunting, so they spinelessly play to their audience, content to cognac with the old boys one day and deride them behind their back another. Consistency is rare, boiling down to an insecure sense of self. Somehow, if I can know a lot of people, not even know there names, but have many friends I wave to in the street, I am more complete.

To these people I think, “Shut up.” You don’t care how my break was and knowing people doesn’t validate me. I don’t mind the fact that I find the books on my shelf more exciting than the people here. And while that is not entirely fair because of course I haven’t met everyone. I know I have good friends and am just as content not have superficial heartless conversations.

Each person needs to figure out how they want to read other people, what are they going to look for, who is worth you time, who is going to make you laugh, challenge you, force you to grow, be at your wedding? It is vital to make good friends and keep those friends around you. For different people, there is different criterion. I have mine and I don’t feel bad about it. I am still a nice person, but I am a nice person who knows how he wants to spend his time. Being opinionated is not bad. Call me anti-social, a hermit, abrasive, standoffish or get more colourful with your adjectives. It doesn’t bother me.

This is me maturing.

A sleepless night's thoughts on Hong Kong

2006-04-09T04:11:00.000-04:00

Jetlag is one of those words that people use a lot, but I don’t really know what it means. Likewise, my body doesn’t know what time it is. I didn’t sleep last night. Each time I closed my eyes images of Hong Kong danced on my eyelids, Chinese characters kept me from sleeping, flitting around, each to their own beat, rhythmically obeying their respective tones, inflecting different meaning with each subtle step across the dome of my eye. I remain enchanted.
Despite being from New York City, the greatest city in the world, Hong Kong makes little sense to me. Nine days is only nine days and I didn’t expect to leave with definite conclusions, but my reactions are more confused than I anticipated. New York hardly seems like the city that never sleeps; not only does Hong Kong not sleep, it doesn’t appear to rest.
Meeting Jon at the airport was the sweet reunion I had anticipated, an old friend who, at times, knows me better than I know myself, our common history readily apparent from our first step in the same direction – goofy body language, obnoxious volume to our voice, painfully obvious stares at passing women, a random jump shot and an undeniable camaraderie that is founded in time spent together. Yet it was weird seeing him in Hong Kong. I know Jon is Chinese. His last name is Chan, I take my shoes off before I go into his house, and his parents have told me their stories of immigration. Doi, Jon is Chinese. But never before did he look so white. This struggle to unite with a culture that he identifies with but feels he does not own was apparent in his face. In showing me around, he wanted to speak Chinese and facilitate an experience as authentic as possible, but he has just a hard a time facilitating it for himself as he does for me, a gangly white guy a head taller than everyone in the crowd. I drowned in my cultural illiteracy, content to rely on Chinese speakers for help and to stand out on the train. Jon struggles to swim in a culture his eyes and last name indicate are his own, but western mind and language skills tell him otherwise.
I do stand out in the train. I really stand out. No matter the time of the day, if the train is open it is crowded. Like the streets, there are always people packed around you bustling somewhere, children, bags, partners, and trendy shopping bags in tow. Each train is divided into cars, but doors do not separate the cars so you can see from the head of the snake to the tail, watching it wend its way through the well-planned underground. It is evident that the subway has been planned flawlessly, moving millions of people throughout the day without breaking a sweat. It is a good thing for me because the last thing I want to do is look at a map with a blank stare drawing more attention to myself. I am the only not-Chinese person in sight. I stand where the snakes stomach would be, can see both ends, and it really is true, I am the only non-Chinese person in sight. My head is cocked slightly to the right, clearing the ceiling by no more than four inches as the stale train air is exhausted on my neck. In that moment, I feel like Gulliver, landed in a foreign place where I am unlike anyone around me.
But, I am not attacked, tied down, or stared at. As I gaze around the train, I realize that no one gazes back. People chat on their cell phones, kids play with their parents, the guys in suits look uptight and stressed, the little grandmas look so adorable – I want to scoop one up and pinch her wrinkled little cheeks – teens negotiate their sexual tension through awkward touches and suggestive stares; I don’t stop anyone from doing what they normally do. People don’t care that I am standing there. So what, there’s a big white guy standing in the train. They notice me, but their attention is nothing more than a fleeting glance, more concerned about what stop they need to get off at, what’s for dinner, or the woman’s cleavage on the other side of the car.
My feeling of being out of place is entirely self-imposed, a creation of my mind, a narcissistic obsession to think that my skin color might be of consequence to people. It is almost as if I want people to gawk at me, but they have better things to do than worry about some almost-bearded American with smelly armpits. That being said, it answered a question that so often is raised in discussions on race: Why do all the black kids sit together? With each stop I look around the car to see of any people who are not Chinese get on the train. I won’t know them and probably won’t talk to them but there will be an undeniable moment of eye-contact solidarity between any non-Chinese person and me. I know that the Chinese people don’t care; I too am preoccupied with that woman’s cleavage, but I seek that empathy in the eyes of people who I think are like me. Constructed and contrived, I still feel out of place and yurn for my comfort zone.
Ironically enough, it is only the look that I seek from the other non-Chinese people on the train, in the street, or at a bar; I don’t actually care to know them because I can see we look alike, but I hope so badly that we are not actually alike. During my stay there is a massive rugby tournament on, The Sevens, and the bars, clubs, and streets are overrun with Western tourists hoped up on imported beer and sunburns. With all of me, I hope I don’t look like them, pathetic white people in Hong Kong to get drunk and watch rugby, a real change from a British pub – good thing they took an 11-hour flight to do it. Chop sticks? Yea right, may I have a fork. They don’t say please, they don’t say thank you, and they don’t really care about being in Hong Kong. The neon signs make for a good photo, the Filipina prostitute makes for a good story and the cheap Carlsberg makes for a good drunk. They flaunt their money and say hi to their queen on the back of the coins, imposing their culture with their obnoxious ethos, sweating an air of cultural superiority that has never left the island, it has only spread to the other western countries. American exchange students don’t know who the woman on the back of the 100 dollar bills is, but are just as happy to spend them at Happy Hour.
I look the same, but want so badly to be received differently, as a person attune to cultural distinctions, foods, and languages. I want people to know that I respect them, that I am not just another obnoxious guy along for a good time. I will use chop sticks – I swear. But, I use them poorly, and no matter how badly I want to deny it, reject it, or admit it, to a certain degree I am just another white guy.
Western influence looms large in Hong Kong, not just in the arrogant approach of foreigners who couldn’t care less about anything Chinese. It is hard to walk more than two blocks without seeing a 7-11. Louis Vuitton, Mark Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Armani, Lacoste, Fendi, Chanel, and Burberry are just a few of the stores that dominate opulent malls across the city. Capitalism, implemented and perpetuated on western terms has become part of Hong Kong. In these stores the salesmen and women are Chinese, but their English grammar is better than mine, their clothes were designed in France and made in a factory in China, but the label is flaunted with a classist air that stinks of neo-colonialism. The irony is stupid. Hong Kong is hardly independent.
Many of the malls and high-end shops are housed in the lobbies of Hong Kong’s famed skyscrapers. HSBC, The Bank of America, Standard Charter, and The Bank of China, to name a few, rise over the island, imposing their presence in an unmistakable way. They finance the Western-planted consumer cult that infects Hong Kong. Their buildings dance each night in the world-famous light show but these lights also blind the picture-taking tourists from the harrowing reality – Hong Kong island has been methodically stripped of its culture. The people look different, but they don’t care that I am there. There is nothing new about me, the West has been here for a long time, the presence has become natural and people continue to buy it.

--

Yet I remain enchanted by a city that looks, tastes, smells and most defiantly sounds unlike anything I know. What a complex place, full of so many different vibrant people. Of course my conclusions about the ghosts of colonialism and western influence are premature. I think also, partly right. But, more than anything, they are wholly insufficient. I still don’t understand that city, the language, the people, or the customs; each is too beautiful and complex, but I delight in trying.
My trip was not an anti-Western diatribe. It was two of the best weeks of my life, complementing a new city with great friends, laughing the entire time.

A Month Old

2006-02-28T19:59:00.000-05:00

If hindsight is 20/20, then the view of the US from Scotland, while not perfect, does provide a new vantage point to see America. With that newness has come revelation. I am only a month old in this grey land but my study abroad semester has provided me with a unique way of critiquing America: a Scottish one. I am neither Scottish nor do I pretend to be, but living here has concentrated my thinking and turned typical gripes somehow salient; there is another non-American way of doing things. Compared to America, Scottish life is based on a patently different set of values; national policy and personal choice largely these values. This rainy country of five million upholds healthcare as a right, minimum wage provides enough for the poor to live, higher education is affordable, and violent crime is rare. Yes, partisan debates rage in Parliament, rugby die-hards pummel one another at the pub, many dentists have begun to privatize, and there are flaws in the system, but basic services persist. Scots assume that humans have inalienable rights; a familiar word in America but one that looks very different here.
In 1998-1999, one third of Scotland’s entire national budget, £5 billion, was dedicated to healthcare. In the United States, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every day on military defense. At first, comparing the world’s fumbling superpower with a small country that is still part of a kingdom seems totally absurd yet it is not the numbers themselves that are telling but the thoughts they represent. Fiscal policy is indicative of what is important to a country’s citizens. In the U.S., when issues become priorities the money is made available. To cite the obvious examples, after hurricane Katrina, September 11, or the invasion of Iraq, money was allocated according to national opinion and political directives. How money is spent reflects the priorities of a nation.
The United States national budget balloons annually into the trillions while Scotland’s pales in comparison. America does have a very different role in the world and it is undoubtedly a more expensive one. Yet, the implications of national spending stand. In the U.S. the privatized healthcare system leaves the poor, elderly, and unemployed to fend for themselves. There is Medicare and Medicaid but because of inhumane levels of federal funding, massive demand, and a cracking system, millions of Americans go without proper healthcare each year. Why such programs are poorly funded remains highly contentious and like the comparison of the budgets, an oversimplified analysis is not the point. Budgetary policy in America and the endless attempts at explaining a fractured system do not entertain the Scots. From across the pond, there is no acceptable explanation as to why anyone would go without healthcare because it is seen as a right. From here, healthcare in America appears to be a privilege. Dr. Huw Davies’, professor of health care policy and management at the University of St. Andrews, simple answer to a simple question is telling. When asked if all Americans are entitled to healthcare he simply answered “No.”
Davies’ answer to a follow up question is equally telling. When asked what a nationalized healthcare system says about a society Davies shed his concision but retained his prescience answering: “That health care is a right, and that collective provision, risk-sharing, and contributions based on ability to pay or similar is a practical and fair mechanism; not always - but largely better than any alternative if equity/access are important values.” As a well-informed academic and consultant at the policy setting level Davies answer serves as a litmus test for much of the country. His curt response to the first question and well informed answer to the second is largely indicative of the way most Scots think. Here, even the poor, are provided healthcare. Cutting the fat, his answer probes at one of the main differences that has pervaded my observations so far: the domestic priorities of America are different than in Scotland. Worst of all, from the view point of the Scots, healthcare ought not to be political issue or ideological battlepoint. Their lives bear this out and their observations continually reaffirm their understanding of the U.S. as an upper-class-preferential society.
After all, it is the citizens themselves who fund all of the nationalized systems. The people elect the politicians who allocate the funds and national decisions do mirror public sentiment. Consistent with that national sentiment is the lack of bickering over taxes that, when compared to America is unfathomably high. Each time you make a purchase in Scotland, you are charged 17 percent sales tax. In New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world, tax is 8.25 percent. Across Scotland each month, if you are a full time resident, you pay estate tax for the collection of your trash. If you own a car you pay road tax. We pay taxes in America but there is a consistent tension nationwide about whether or not they are too high. Nationally they choose to focus more on education than military spending and as individuals they don’t gripe about the high percentage of taxes that are removed each month. Here, citizens believe in the public systems.
The United States is a massive country with the world’s largest consumer economy plagued by an ever-growing partisan political split. Scotland is a small country known for whisky, bag pipes and a Mel Gibson movie. Ceaseless fog has not left me foolishly comparing apples and oranges. Yet a change of viewpoint can make even the most complex issues simple. People deserve healthcare. In Scotland, that belief is upheld as a right and is indicative of a deep-seeded cultural belief that regardless of class, race, or religion, all people are entitled to certain things and the state will provide them free of charge for all. In America we don’t put our money where our mouth is.

February 12, 2006

2006-02-12T17:35:00.000-05:00

If nothing else, Sunday nights are great for procrastination.

After a long uneventful weekend of reading, basketball, and alcohol, my thoughts on the people of St. Andrews are looking up. I got a job at a hip coffee shop, have begun to meet students whom I find intriguing, and continue to be blown away by the beauty of this place.

So, like everyone else in this small town of 16,000 I am a confused citizen contributing to an identity crisis: a storied town coping with the realities of modernization. In a town of cobbled streets and medieval churches that radiates history and tradition only one force seems to loom larger. Those forces, the internet, immigration, diversity, and revisionist histories greatly challenge the town and the university it houses, probing at the fundamental tenets that have stood forthright for centuries. Can this town and university withstand cultural change and honor the blue-blood legacy of its past?

And the answer is, like everything, of course it will survive. The better question then becomes, how will it survive? It is this question that is asked daily by many members of the town and while few seem to have concrete answers, the response does reflect the importance of the question.

From an institutional standpoint, the University has confronted the issue head on. IN the past two years, they have funded and began degrees in sustainable development and film studies. This year’s university address will be centered, like it has been for hundreds of years, around one word. This year’s word is sustainability. In addition, there is an entire blueprint put together by the school about how it can be more efficient, greener, and more sustainable. Certainly this new agenda is a response to a trend within the world that increasingly demands large establishments from multi-nationals to universities to publicly acknowledge some sort of environmental reprehensibility.

And yet, while the speech will address a very contemporary issue, where it is given and how are equally telling indicating that there is a conflict. Each year the rector general, a title aging back to the formation of the university, wears a storied robe, assembles in a vaulted chapel to address other academics wearing equally symbolic clothing. It is this clothing that symbolizes the tradition that is the thread of the university – setting it apart as Scotland’s oldest university. Likewise, the departments that garner the most international praise, medieval history, divinity, and English, are not cutting edge.

Thus it appears that the university’s struggle to remain sincere to its valued history and address modern issues is very much a problem. For both the town and the university this issue will continue; figuring out a healthy program going forward will be the challenge of the 21 century. Perhaps someday they will look back and praise an their changing outlook today as part of their impressive past.

February 8, 2006

2006-02-08T16:50:00.000-05:00

A week old in St. Andrews, it is funny to me how the scenery has changed and yet many things have not. Stuffy old women remain overstuffed. Snobby British prep stars persist in their obnoxious condescension. Blue collar grit remains readily apparent on the sleeves, brows, and boots of the groundskeepers, repairmen, and construction workers. And thus, my conclusions after a week: St. Andrews is an enrapturing seaside daydream, built around castles and gothic buildings meant to attract visitors because of its mysticism and like many things there is a gap between the ideas behind the founding and the execution. While this is not a poor attempt at personification for the saintly churches, it is to say that the physical beauty of the town, the history that looms large around each corner is undeniably charming, but many of the people are not. Sadly, this is where I am.

My thoughts in coming here were to meet people with thick Rs in their accents and a distinct outlook on life: a Scottish outlook. But, despite being in Scotland, I have met few Scots. St. Andrews is overrun by obnoxious Americans like myself, public school (which in the UK actually means private) Lacoste flaunting trust fund babies, other overly-privileged internationals and some Scots. Worst of all, it seems that there are labels, similar to the AT&T commercials, about who is getting reception from which country and while one would like to think that there is a difference amongst the spoiled of different countries, I have found there to be very little. Rich women from Spain are equally ‘entitled’ as are the women from Rockland or Rome. The accents differ, the styles differ too, much less than the accents, but the baselines remain.

And so, literature flexes its muscles, charming me into other worlds. I am escaping my social discontents in the pages of the great writers and the rooms of the gothic architects. Launched back centuries, I find solace in the vocabulary, precision, imagination, and wit of the world’s best writers, trying to rip them off, improved my vocabulary and fall unrelentingly in love with the idea of falling in love. Right now, I am enthralled with the passions, scents, and convolutions of early 20th century upper-class life. Marquez has flown me from the gloomy skies to a place of unrequited love and pungent almonds. Awesome indeed.

And yet, this is not entirely true. Of course, it is a judgmental, hyper-critical and unfair of me to arrive and these lofty conclusions after just 7 days. There is much to explore and I need not settle. I need to persist in my pursuit of the native Scot, unique outlooks on life, and grounded UK-ers who do not dawn horses on their breast. Pub life is cool and it awaits me in an awesome way that I have yet to taste. Someone out there is cooking a great time and I can’t settle.

So that’s where I am; needing to meet people because most of the people I have met are unexciting and revolting.

Like the skies, my time here will become sunny enough; there are just some clouds to break through.