Golden Years

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

“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.

“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

“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

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

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

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.