The Course Of Understanding

Recollection Shelf #1: The India Angel

2011-11-19T18:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start a series about my Recollection Shelf. This is an area on my bookshelf where I keep random mementoes of my travels. It helps keep me tied to who I’ve been and what I’ve done, and I still need that. Each item has a story behind it, and no story is without significance if told the right way! So when nothing else is going on here in Germany (like this week, study study study!) I’ll tell the story of one of these items. This week: The India Angel

My Recollection Shelf

For a long time I believed that exhaustion, stress, frustration, or panic were all “mind over matter” problems, that I could always talk myself out of them and stay in control. After two months in a rural orphanage in India, I’d stopped believing that… or at least I had to realize that when my mind had reached its limits, it couldn’t overcome even the smallest thing. It was time to leave.

Why this experience was so intense and impossible for me to bear any longer is very difficult to explain, and it would take much longer than the story I intend to tell here, the simple and stunning events of my last night which somehow reached into my shell-shocked soul and became a memory that will stay with me all my life.

There was an old man who lived at the orphanage. No one seemed to know where he came from, or why he was here. After a couple weeks I asked about him, and Vinod, the director, told me “He just came one day, and he stayed.” “What’s his name?” I asked. Vinod looked surprised. “Everyone just calls him old man,” he answered, and that was that. Old Man couldn’t speak much, and when he did it was in the coarse, too loud voice of the nearly senile. He seemed to have assigned himself the job of sweeping the dusty grounds every day, and afterwards he would sit on a log outside the main building and occasionally yell and the children or me. It took several weeks before I realized that one or two of the words he was yelling were English (at least in origin), but there was no question of trying to communicate… not only because of language problems, but more because I was already overwhelmed by the barrage of communication failures on every level and I’d started rejecting any extra effort that seemed futile from the start. So, for two months, I ignored him, like everyone else, and I focused all my energy on keeping myself sane amidst the flood of frustrations, noise, alienation, loneliness, and anger.

On my last night I was sitting outside my hut with a few other volunteers, talking about the situation in which we found ourselves. I was sad to leave the children who were sweet (despite the fact that they’d nearly driven me insane), and I was disturbed by the way the experience was ending. Still, not much was in my mind but getting away and getting some peace. So when Old Man shuffled across the yard towards where we sat, I nearly started smiling and nodding him away even before the inarticulate screeches began. He stopped in front of me, looked into my eyes, and said loudly, gravelly, but shockingly clearly: “My….name….is….Mallappa Kamati.” I was take so off guard that I immediately stood up and shook his hand, as if we’d just met and not spend the last two months “together.” But he wasn’t done. “This..” he waved his hand unsteadily toward the schoolhouse I’d been building that stood shrouded in the dark, “Thank….you. I…. am….. protestant …..Christian.” My eyes must have widened to their limit at this. It was inconceivable! I’d not met a single protestant in a year! But there’s no way he could have known what this meant to me. I exclaimed “You are?! I am protestant Christian!” He looked up at me again, smiled, and slowly reached out his frail arm to shake my hand again. Those were the only three sentences he said, and looking back I can’t imagine how anyone could have packed more meaning into so few words, meaning that touched me deeply. I suddenly had a thought, and motioned to him to wait there while I went into my hut.

I don’t know what put it into my head, but it’s a testament to the many tangled emotions I was dealing with. I suddenly thought of my cross, which used to be nearly a part of me (I wore it every day for over 10 years), which I’d stopped wearing several months before. I’m not entirely sure why… it was a combination of things: in Japan realizing that it meant almost nothing at all (or meant something completely different than I intended), while travelling in poor countries for the first time I realized I still had more questions than answers, and meeting people from so many different places I realized I was being held to represent idea or assumptions that were no part of the reason why I wore it. But mostly, I felt that something in me was changing, and putting away this symbol of my identity left me feeling like a blank-slate with no bias between me and the new world I had jumped into. I still carried the cross with me for many months of travel, and I think I assumed I’d be ready to put it back on at some point.

But I knew this was an opportunity to do something better, and maybe, in some small way, make up for all my personal failures which were all suddenly embodied by one lonely old man whom I’d deliberately dismissed. I came out of the hut with the necklace in my hand, and I carefully put it over his head and laid the cross on his chest. He held it in his hand and looked at it, then looked up at me and smiled, not widely but deeply. He nodded several times, slowly turned around, and shuffled away into the dark. I never saw him again.

There’s always someone watching in India. No small part of my daily stress was from the complete lack of privacy, from locking my door only to find a line of eyes peering intently at me through the whicker weave, to fleeing to the hills for some solitude only to attract the attention of half the village children who then sit down nearby to get in a good long stare at the foreigner. So until this moment I didn’t even realize that several of the orphanage children had been sitting nearby watching us for quite some time, and one especially had taken careful note of the exchange between Mr. Kamati and me. “You wait,” he told me, and ran off.

This was Depu, one of my unabashedly favorites at the orphanage. You could immediately tell from his eyes that he was bright and sharp, and you could tell from a few days with him that somewhere in his dog-eat-dog environment he’d picked up an instinct of decency and empathy for others. He wasn’t perfect, far from it, but he was the only one I felt I could “count on.”

Depu came running back, and taking my hand he pressed into it a small, shiny, beautiful angel strung on a piece of string. He closed my hand around it and said very matter-of-factly, “You Christian, me Hindu.” “Depu, where did you get this?!” “Girl in Goa,” he smiled back. That made sense; a few weeks earlier we’d all made a trip to the nearby state of Goa, the only Christian state in India, and we’d stayed with a friend of Vinod who had two daughters, one of them Depu’s age. I’m sure she liked him, and maybe he liked her. This angel had been a parting gift from her that he’d keep in the weeks since, probably the only possession he could call his own besides his clothes. But I didn’t think of all that at the time, I only felt the weight and power of the gift, that it was from the heart. And even if I’d realized at the time what this angel might have meant to him I still would have accepted it; after all, Depu’s gift was prompted by seeing that a possession can be made more valuable by giving it away than by keeping it close. We all have the power to imbue objects with great significance, and in no way more than giving it away in an act of love and selflessness. Somehow Depu understood that, and I never would have denied him the poetry of that moment.

I left the next morning, walking over the fields as the last sunrise lit up the orphanage behind me. If nothing else came of those two months, one thing definitely changed: I went from carrying a cross in my backpack, to wearing an angel around my neck. This angel immediately symbolized more things than I can list here. But more than anything else it symbolizes my snatched-from-the-flames hope, the hope that even faced with all the divisions of culture, language, religion, stress, anger, and the limitations of our humanity that none of us escape, that even through all that people can still reach out and touch another human being… almost like an angel.

Making Dream(er)s Work

2011-11-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.” -Winston Churchill

     I’ve been thinking about work lately. No, not a in the sense of a job, and not in the sense of “function,” but about general old-fashioned, nose-to-the-grindstone, roll-up-your-sleeves work. I know this isn’t a crowd-pleasing subject, but it’s a recurring theme for me, usually popping up again whenever I have to do something I don’t want to do. See, the problem is I’m a dreamer. And what is a dreamer but someone who wants to be somewhere else, or be doing something else, or thinking something else… what were we talking about? Ah right, work. Well, suddenly my life is full of it. That sounds whiny and childish, and just let me say that it IS, because the point is I’ve gotten lazy in the last few years. My travels have not been all fun and games, and much of it has been difficult and uncomfortable, but it’s been rare that I’ve absolutely had to do something I absolutely don’t feel like doing. And it shows. Sure I still can (and do) spend 14 hours on weekend days in the deserted library, but would you like to know how much of that time is spent staring out the window, or dozing on the table, or clicking “refresh” on facebook?.... No, I don’t want to know either.
     The above quote from Churchill has been firmly stuck in my head ever since I read it six months ago, knowing that I was coming up on a period in life when my determination and aspirations would be truly put to the test. “Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.” It’s a different perspective than what you usually hear in our instant-success, skilless-stardom, inalienable-right-to-the-spotlight generation. I guess I’d actually accepted the message that “dreams” or “full potential” are things that would HAPPEN to me, sooner or later, or if I’m lucky enough, or if that’s my destiny, and I’d always been led to believe that it is my destiny, by sports commercials, or by the manifest-destiny version of my religion, or the unconditional assertion of my parents that I could do whatever I want to do… I don’t think they realized that already Spiderman, Michel Jordan, and Bono had decided that what I wanted to do was take over the world one fan at a time…… now what was I talking about?
     It’s hard to find anyone talking about hard work anymore… at least, anyone we can take seriously. Most of them are too old, or too old-fashioned, or look too much like an English bulldog (I wonder which category this blog post will get me thrown into?….). In fact this IS a faint-hearted new world, where hard work is NOT necessary for the most glorious success on offer. There are other ways, and why not hope for that? The plan to do our best has changed to the hope of being given-a-shot, to a chance of being “discovered,” to waiting for our god-given 15 minutes to arrive. And I’m ranting because this is about me, because I bought it, I believed Walt Disney when he said "If you can dream it, you can do it." I believed R Kelly when he sang “If I just believe it, there's nothing to it! I believe I can fly!” I believed Obama when he chanted “Yes We CAN” full-stop. The strange thing is that all of these people (some more than others) WORKED, and worked HARD, to get where they got. But no one wants to hear about that, it’s such a downer.
     It’s the word “continuous” that makes this quote so Churchillian, so ballsy. That’s what really hooked me. I keep waiting for it to end, you know, to finally reach my potential and be DONE with all this stress and effort and WORK.   Listening to Rusty Berkus who said: “There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential,” I’ve been waiting for someone to acknowledge me and spark my potential; it’s like magic that adults can believe in, too. I’ve been counting on my intelligence to get me to the top, while I watch some sit-coms and wait to “arrive.” After all, why should I exhaust myself when so many people get their dreams dropped in their laps? Why should I read 100s of dull pages a week, study foreign languages, develop my writing, or exercise my body, when one lottery ticket, one TV camera, one viral youtube video could make all that irrelevant?
     I guess the important difference is the 21st century’s division between “success” and the “potential” Churchill was talking about. Potential is about what we CAN achieve, not what luck we stumble upon. I honestly think that if I can fulfill my potential on a day-to-day basis, then I won’t care if anyone else knows about it. I think so, at least. It’s up for internal debate… But in any case that unlocking of potential will now require luck (which can give me what I want but not in the way I want it), not intelligence or strength (which gives me potential but no substance), and not dreams (which gives me ideas but no reality)…. It will require effort. Continuous effort, because as soon as I stop, as soon as I’m distracted for a moment, my potential sprints ahead of me and leaves me clicking on facebook and watching leaves fall off the trees. Endless work.
    So that’s the way of it, that's how dreams come true. I would like to believe that Disney, Kelly, and Obama aren’t sugar-coating reality, but truth is rarely so comfortable or easy to live with. Churchill speaks with the cold, hard, sharp ring of truth: there is no rest for those who want to live fully, no easy way for those who aren’t satisfied with dreams alone, there is no finish line but the final one. So if that’s possible, if I’m even capable of that anymore, only one question remains: is it worth it? I’ve put a lot of thought into that…. and I have no idea. I think the only way to be sure is to ask Churchill himself.

Is I Where?

2011-11-05T19:34:00.000-07:00

In A Nutshell:

The purpose of this post is simple, to knock this blog out of its seven-month coma, to explain my past absence, to establish the present, and chart the future. Explanation of absence: Tanzania, Kenya, Turkey, France, Germany, France, South Korea, France, Germany. As for the present: I’m one month into an MA program in Modern Global History at Jacob’s University in Bremen, Germany. As for the future, I plan to post something (SOMETHING, I say) here once a week. That’s the nuts and bolts! If you’re honestly interested in all the confused personal details (especially about the last seven months) then read on!

I'm Back!

A few months ago a student in Korea asked me “Please to tell, is I where?” I immediately recognized that this is exactly the question I’ve been trying to ask myself for months, but hadn’t been able to find the words. I’m still trying to find the answer.

Since my last post:

2 Foot Injuries.

5 homes established and abandoned in 4 countries.
5 times reunited and separated from Celine.
7 different planes.
29 different beds.
250+ official/bureaucratic emails.
28,000 miles (more than the circumference of the equator).

In what seems like the blink of an eye I’ve gone from sitting crippled and alone in vast African wildernesses, to settling into luxury a Korean bullet-train, picnicking under the Eiffel Tower, eating squirming tentacles under faux-bamboo, days and days of jet-lag, languages like a soup in my head, intimate candle-lit dinner with the woman I love. I’d be a fool to try to summarize it… so here it goes.

1. Out Of Africa:

The last thing I had to do in Africa was my Pilgrimage to Ol-Doinyo Lengai, The Mountain of God. Everything was perfect, terrifying, and thrilling, except for my choice of shoes. Two days into the trek, miles from even the smallest drivable-track, I had baseball-sized blisters and was barely able to stand. I had to be rescued by a friend from the city, and I was eventually driven out crippled, dehydrated, helplessly enchanted with the wildness I’d walked into with my own two feet, and completely humiliated that my feet got me just far enough to leave me stranded.

By the time I could walk again it was time to fly out and close my time in Africa… and in some ways to close the time of world-travel I’d planned out five years previously. About Africa, a couple months later I wrote my academic mentor Jaime O’Neill this:

“The most I can say about Africa is that it's a REAL place, with all the power and thrill and horror that entails. For the first time in all my travels I stepped onto completely unrestricted places, places where I could do anything that I had the strength to do, and anything could be done to me if I didn't have the strength to stop it. If nothing else, there's a forceful blow of truth in places like that, and you realize how much is artificial... and how grateful one can be for some artifice! Even in the worst moments I loved my time there. I think the only thing I really require out of life is to FEEL alive, and Africa is the kind of place where you cannot escape the bracing grip of life, until you're dead. And I mean that in the completely non-morbid pragmatic way of the Africans themselves.”

I miss it, in many ways, and The Mountain of God still lies in the distant dark behind my eyes.

2. Reunion

From Nairobi I flew to Istanbul to meet Celine, after seven months apart. It was a powerful moment, but the strangest this was how normal it felt. Even in that exotic city straddling Asia and Europe and separate from both, as soon as she was by my side, I felt at home, at peace. Celine completes me in a way I didn’t know was possible, and every time we part I feel like she’s taken a bigger and bigger piece of me away with her.

After Istanbul we flew to France, where we got to stay together for two months (the longest time we’ve been in the same country during our 15 month relationship), and I met her family, food, and culture. During this time I spent 5-8 hours a day hunting for and applying to summer jobs in Korea, America, UK, Germany, Thailand, and Japan, sorting through nearly 300 English-taught MA programs in Germany, and gathering in the scraps of paper that prove my life from all corners of the world. I rarely went a day without communicating with three continents, but I rarely went outside. Other than that, it was all about getting to know Celine. During this time I wrote my Grandma:

“Every day I'm stunned anew by some new evidence of how well we fit. Of course I knew about all the big things before we got together, and all the essential things checked out perfectly... I never counted on her pacing when she talks on the phone, or blowing her nose very loudly, or disliking deep water, or being fascinated by swords, or being messy... LIKE ME! :-) She's so easy to be with, so laid-back and rational about what is and isn't a big deal, so ready to talk about anything.”

In April my parent arrived in France for a visit, and we spent a whirl-wind three weeks in Paris and all over “Celine’s France,” covering the main sites in her current state Alsace and her home-state Lorraine. Then it was time for my whirl-wind tour of German Universities, hitchhiking and couchsurfing through 9 cities in two weeks. I met amazing strangers and wonderful old friends, and I got excited about studying in Germany.

I returned to Celine just in time to catch a flight to South Korea, where I’d landed a job that fit my needs perfectly…

3. Asia Redux: South Korea

I’m going to burn for this (Koreans nurture an intense dislike of the Japanese), but the conclusion that stuck in my head is “South Korea is exactly like Japan… only less so.” It’s smaller, less intense, less foreign, less mono-lingual (easier to find an English speaker in Korea any day), less socially-exclusive, less expensive. I greatly enjoyed my time there, for one simple reason: the Korean people. My students all warmly welcomed me as a friend almost from day-one, and I’ve never spent such a short time in a place and been so sad to leave.

Besides the visit of two close Czech friends and Celine during my final month (I think I used every word I know (doesn’t take long) in Czech, French, Japanese, and Korean in a week!), I traveled very little, explored very little, studied very little. This was the closed I’ve ever come to a “working holiday,” and I needed the down-time. The inactivity (along with surviving on spaghetti and sandwiches) allowed me to save nearly $3000 in a summer, which was essential for the next stage of the plan.

4. À Nouveau en France

I flew back to spend another session of jet-lag and double reverse-culture shock (white people everywhere!!! Speaking French!!!!!) with Celine in her new home near Mulhouse. During this time I again spent hours daily on the computer, this time looking for a flat in Bremen. Between her work and mine we discovered a mutual dormant love of retro computer games, a shared talent for breaking glass objects, and shocking signs that she might succeed in teaching me to cook! All too soon it was again time to put a national boundary between us.

5. Hallo Deutschland!

I didn’t mention that while in Korea the acceptance letters came in, and with much hemming and hawing I chose Modern Global History at Jacobs University for a variety reasons. I’ve now been in Bremen for exactly a month, and already immersed in another life. I’m comfortable and engaged here, not to mention over-my-head busy, and I rarely have time to reflect back or look very far ahead. When I do look back, it’s strangely unsettling to try decide where I’m actually coming from, and when I look forward it makes me as panicky as excited. The Challenge is not over, not by a long shot.

For a long time I’ve been aware that life is about priorities, and somehow that’s always gotten me through. But I’ve known for many months now that I would have to face too many Number One Priorities during this chapter of life:

-Priority Number One: School. It is a master’s program, and it is serious. The program could be more intense, but I’ve been out of school for years and the readings and presentations already keep me in the library more than out of it. If I don’t make this my Number One Priority I’ll fall behind immediately.
-Priority Number One: Learn French. Celine speaks perfect English, but I’m never going to feel fully comfortable about our life together until I can actually speak with her parents and not feel like a baby when I’m in her country. I’m taking a French class and trying
(often failing) to spend an hour a day on it. If I don’t make this my Top Priority I’ll fail in the most important element of my future.
-Priority Number One: Part-Time Job. If I don’t find a job soon then all these other plans might not matter. Savings from Korea got me here and give me a buffer for a few months, but I always knew this was something of a leap of faith. I counted on getting a job on campus but didn’t realize that my program starts a month later than all other students at Jacobs… Not speaking a word of German makes other opportunities frighteningly limited. I’m applying to language schools and international bars. No luck so far and this is Priority Numero Uno.
-Should-Be Priority Number One: Study German. I can survive without speaking German here, but I hate the thought of spending two years here and not learning a good bit of the language. I can’t make myself give up entirely (nor find time to really start).
-Should-Be Priority Number One: Writing. The only career goal I really get excited about is writing. And however much it’s obvious to you that 6 months without practice leaves its mark, you can be sure it’s more obvious to me. I’m determined to post something here every week.
-Should-Be Priority Number One: Website. More and more people (many of them friends of friends) have asked me for advice about living abroad. I realized that the main ways most young Americas do it is by studying abroad, teaching English, being a missionary, volunteering, or long-term travel. I’ve done all of those in several countries. In fact, living abroad is the only thing I feel legitimately knowledgeable about. I’ve gotten the idea to create a website called “How To Go Abroad.” It would take a great deal of work, but it could be awesome. When? I’ve no idea.
-A Close-Second Priority (aka: Never Going To Happen): Exercise. I haven’t exercised for months, and I feel myself getting weaker. Must… move…. my….lazy…..
-A Close-Third Priority (aka shouldn’t give it time but will anyway): Socialization. My classmates and flat-mates are awesome people and I want to spent time with them. And let’s face it, I need a social life.

There’s not enough time in the day to do half of this, even if I was absolutely efficient, which I’m not. The problem is deciding what to give up when all of it is either essential, or extremely important. Something tells me the next two years in Bremen will fly by.

6. La Vie Internationale, Mezinárodního života, Des Internationalen Lebens, 국제 생활, Uluslararası Yaşam, 国際的な生活, Maisha Ya Kimataifa....

It’s never far from my mind that I’m living a life that is far beyond my own wildest dreams, with all the awe and struggle that comes with it. On one hand, everything has gone off without a hitch. Months of research and work produced a workable compromise between reality and the ideal, and then hammered out the details. I did spend the summer working in South Korea, I was accepted to MA programs in German. It has all worked out exactly as I wanted. So why does that make me nervous?...

On the other hand, I often feel that things have spun completely out of control, and I seriously wonder how long I can keep my grip. In the last five years I’ve lived in eight countries, and I’ve gone from spending a full year there (USA, CZ, Japan), to six months in the next three (South East Asia, India, Tanzania), to three months at a time (France, South Korea). My mind has started doing funny things to me, taking strange things for granted (often wrongly), and getting stuck on things that should be normal. “Listen to that chanting loud-speaker…Is it time for Muslim evening prayer already?”… “No, Caleb, you’re in Korea, and that’s the loud-speaker on the vegetable delivery cart.” “Not again! Those kids are giggling at me just because I’m a foreigner.” “No, wait, you’re in Germany and everyone is white here. They don’t know you’re a foreigner.” “Did I just start speaking Japanese to the Korean shop-owner, Germany to the father of my French girlfriend, and Czech to my Serbian classmate?” “Yes, yes you did.” At this point I’ve stopped wondering whether I’m experiencing jet lag, culture shock, reverse culture shock, inverted culture fatigue, or maybe just fatigue… they’re all crushed up against each other and lying in a snarled heap, as are the mountains of paperwork I’ve had to do for each step.

But this is a confusion that has been slowly bubbling up for many months, and the need for a bit more stability has led me on a topsy-turvy ride to the here and now: looking forward to two years in the same place, happy to be on the same continent as my girlfriend. It’s still a foreign country, and I’m still 100s of miles from the person I want to be with, but the Merry-Go-Round comes to a stop very very slowly, and I’ll take it with gratitude, since I was getting pretty dizzy. As I slowly make my way around the plastic Unicorns and Zebras and carefully step off this ride, will I finally stumble out of the Circus, or be sick on my shoes, or get pushed onto a real roller-coaster? Your guess is as good as mine.

Flabbergasted

2011-01-30T13:54:00.009-08:00

It’s been a while since I’ve been truly flabbergasted. That word sounds funnier than its real meaning, which is a shame when it fits a particularly unhumorous situation. In any case, chuckle-worthy or not, that’s exactly what I was a couple days ago as I took a few minutes to assess this moment of my life in the big picture: flabbergasted. Be careful about exploring the big picture unless you’re ready to take a good, long look… more often than not, it’s really big. Some might say TOO big…

Can you tell it’s late at night and I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say? That’s exactly the point, though. Because while I was sitting and thinking, and sitting and thinking, all about my last three weeks in Africa, how much I had to do and how fast it would go, how fast it had already gone, and how fast it was coming at me (“it” being time, of course, not an albatross or something silly like that) I realized that I have only been focusing on my time in Africa ending and the next chapter with the girl of my dreams beginning, and not what any of that means. I flashed back to another moment, when I was sitting and thinking… thinking how to explain to my parents my wild idea about heading off into the wild blue yonder and living in East Asia, India, and Africa for the next 2-3 years. After 30 minutes of breathless and scattered explanation, they leaned back, looked at each other, and said “sounds great, go for it!” That was four and a half years ago, and it all seemed so dreamlike, so far away, even when I was right in the thick of it. But for the first time it now hits me that in three weeks that plan, every step of it and more, will be finished. The path I’ve been walking on for years has come to its conclusion, and I have absolutely no idea how I feel about that, except for one word: Flabbergasted.

What I do know is how I expect the next month to feel… and the closest I can come to describing it forces me to use “tornado” as an adjective. The next month with be extremely tornadoy! The week in front of me must produce a first draft of my survey report. This project has taken up most of my working hours (a motley collection of sporadic lengths of time, I confess) in the last four months, and the database of results

alone has taken four people working most of the last three weeks to complete. Now it’s time to start churning out charts, graphs, and ideally lots of intelligent words to explain the charts and graphs, with very little time to do all that churning.


Ndelilio and Sig translate tirelessly

Kirsten dives into data-entry!

Jacob crunches the unrurly numbers

I run about waving large stacks of paper...


...and twitching nervously whenever piles of data rear their...stacks.

The following week (Feb 5-12) I intended to set out on my long-planned trek. No, not up Kilimanjaro ($1000+ is a wee bit out of my price range after 18 months of gallivanting), and not even through any national parks or any place that a tourist has heard of ($100 per day is still out of my price range). But I was determined to find something to match to my Buddhist pilgrimage in Japan and Hindu Pilgrimage in India, so when I heard about a large volcano in the wilderness north of the Serengeti which the Maasai call

Ol Doinyo Lengai - The Mountain of God

“The Mountain of God,”I knew I had to go there. And it’s only 150 km from Arusha, why not walk there? Okay, 150km across sun-baked wilderness, where water is scarce, people are scarcer, roads are nonexistent, and animals are not scarce enough for comfort… but hey, who wouldn’t call that fun?! Yes, I’m nervous about this one, it will not be easy, and I’m not in good enough shape for it. And I hope to end 5 days of walking at a massive volcano, and still have the energy to spend a day climbing up to its steaming bubbling peak. The guys I work with at Pamoja have found a guide for me, a local guy they refer to as “Bushman,” who lives “about 15 km off a path that is about 50 km past the middle of nowhere” where he lives traditionally as a hunter-gatherer (seems it’s not unlikely that I might get to sample antelope that was killed by an arrow while on my trek). He’s agreed to guide me, though he lives on the other side of Arusha and doesn’t know the area around the Mountain of God: “But Bushman,” says Jeremy, my director, on the phone with him, “won’t you get lost?” “I CAN’T GET LOST” he thundered back. At least I’ll be in very confident hands! And I know what the first words of my chapter about the experience will be!

The next chapter...
Need I say more?

When/if I return from that trek, I’ll have 5 days left in Arusha to tie up loose ends, maybe try to fit in an actual safari (unlikely, which means I will have spent 6 months in east Africa without seeing a single lion), maybe visit a few more schools to do some meta-surveys (“80% of your friends want to meet Obama, why do you think that is?”), do some last minute shopping, then bussing up to Nairobi and flying out on the 20^th to Istanbul. Celine will meet me there the next day, and then I’ll have 5 days in a new exotic city to do nothing but walk old streets, eat good food, and be with the woman I’ve been falling more in love with every day for the last 7 months. Enough said.

After that we fly to France, and I try to understand the notion of slowing down a bit… while I work on finishing the Tanzanian survey report, getting a summer job in Korea, applying to universities in Germany, learning French, and continuing to spend real time with my girlfriend that’s not interrupted by power-outages or time-differences. Hmm, maybe “slowing down” won’t be that slower…

If you want to know the plan from there, it surprisingly hasn’t changed since my most recent “THE PLAN” post.

I realize this post isn’t that interesting, but I haven’t been able to pull together anything more interesting in the last month, and probably won’t have time to post much in the month of February. Never fear (and don’t go away!), I’ll be back in force in March, if not before, with tales of Maasai volcanoes, Turkish rendezvous, and French cuisine! Until then, thank you all for your messages, interest, and friendship! I’m constantly reminded that the best and most intrinsic part of this amazing life I’m leading is you, each of you reading this now. You so often leave me flabbergasted! I’ll see you on the other side of here-and-now!

The Wild West

2011-01-13T10:50:00.000-08:00

My best stories almost always go untold because I wait until I have the time to tell them properly.. and that never happens! One of the main stories of my recent trip to West Tanzania is quite a yarn, and my girlfriend wanted to know what I'd gone through as soon as possible, so I summarized it for her as quickly as I could... and then realized that it's not half bad, so I'm just going to post it unpolished here, and leave it at that! Enjoy!

Hitching a ride with some
truckers, SLOWLY transporting
a massive amount of beer to Kigoma
for New Years Day.

So the most exhausting thing physically I already told you, sitting on buses or trucks for 12-18 hours a day, on roads you wouldn't believe! Even Greg (French traveler, MUCH more experienced than me) was aghast at these roads, I don't think I'd like to WALK on them! From Kigali in the north, to Mbeya in south Tanz, covering over 1600 km ( 1000 miles), by bus, truck, and boat, the AVERAGE speed was about 19 km/hour (12 m/h). It's not just about sitting and waiting, it's about holding on to not fall off your seat! It's so bumpy (and the vehicles have no shock-absorbers) that usually my teeth hurt at the end of the day. Often the bus was jumping too much to even eat! Imagine that for 15-18 hours a day...

Always a sense that anything
could happen...

So THAT'S pretty exhausting! Mentally the greatest stress was that in Kasanga (the village at the Tanz end of lake Tanganyika), where you can see Tanzania, Zambia, and Democratic Republic of the Congo at once, we stayed with the wrong person (or maybe the right person, it's still hard to know!). This realization came very slowly, and it was rather scary when the truth finally pounced on us! We'd heard about criminal activity in the area: there were raids from the DRC into Zambia, all kinds of violence in DRC (happening just over the mountains we could see across the lake), and on the ferry we heard from some foreigners who decided to not leave the ferry in Kasanga because their friend claims he got kidnapped and held for ransom in Kasanga. It's a tiny VILLAGE, but so far from anywhere (by boat, road, or even plane, you'd need two days to get there from anywhere on the map); this IS the Wild West, for sure! Nothing is stable or certain. Well, you never know what information to believe around here, even from westerners (all the locals assured us it was safe (also not true), so we decided to believe the middle-ground and be very careful). We were careful, and maybe it helped.... or maybe not...

We're not in Kansas anymore!

It's more rural than anything I've seen, and Greg and I were both looking at each other like "what have we done!". Still, it's a little like Eden; no electricity, happy children playing in the dirt and NOT begging, bare-chested women doing laundry in the lake, just a few huts, fishing boats, and the lake shore...

Beachside at the hotel

Anyway, this hotel on the beach about two km away from the docks was the only decent place, though the owner had a particular "Indian" attitude I didn't like (If Indians think they have any authority they'll make it very clear that they don't need to waste their time with you, like they're the most important person on earth. This guy had a little of that attitude). He had a very nice new speed boat that we thought could get us to the falls the next day, pretty nice facilities... strangely we noticed in the guestbook that this nice "beach resort" had had about 80 guests in two years... how could it possibly survive?!

Well, I didn't think too hard about it because I was focused on how to get to the falls in one day and then as far as possible out of town the next day. I'd spent nearly a week just to get here, and though it was more about the journey that did not mean I was going to let the destination slip away! However, within four days I needed to get back to Arusha, so we only had one shot at the falls and it was not going to be easy. They're in the middle of nowhere, on the other side of the Zambian border, either an hour by car and four hours on foot, or two hours by boat and two hours on foot, one way.

So, especially because I was pretending to be Russian (you have to sign your nationality into everything, and an American and French would be good targets, so I was Russian and Greg was Greek) I got into the role and did some very strong negotiations with the owner guy (Oscar was his name, but EVERYONE called him "Boss"). About accommodation prices (really expensive, considering it takes two days minimum to get there from ANYWHERE and the place was empty. I ended up paying $5 to pitch my own tent on the sand; at least better than the $12 he wanted!), and about renting the boat for the trip (from about $85 down to $60). The next day when he sent his speed boat off for his Indian friends (who run a trucking business... remember this), and our replacement boat was 90 minutes late, I was especially hard on him and pushed him a lot to fix the situation.. which is pretty normal; NOTHING gets done here unless you MAKE it happen, but because I was Russian I was a bit more direct than usual, and I didn't notice that his reactions to it were a little different than usual.. Russians don't care.

So Oscar finally recruited a passing fishing boat to take us (we were NOT pleased to see that one of the crew members was assigned to perpetually bailing out the leaky boat with a cup!), and I noticed that the HUGE muscular fishermen were standing with their heads down, nodding submissively to the orders of this short, fat balding man... strange.

Now we're sailing!

The 90 minute boat ride in the sun and the two hour hike UP through the hills was exhausting (though beautiful), and expensive! $60 is close to the average salary for a MONTH in this region! Oscar told us we'd also have to pay 5,000 shillings ($3) each as entry to the waterfall as well.. We were both reaching the limits of affordability, especially since I had no access to cash until I got back to Arusha and was running very low (in the end I arrived in Arusha with about $30 left!). So, money was tight.. so when we finally arrived at the gate for the waterfall (in the middle of freakin' nowhere!!) and saw the sign saying "entry $15 per person" (we didn't know at the time they'd try to charge for our guide also!! $45 after the major headache and expense of getting there!!) we were not pleased.

Kalambo Falls! Finally!

BUT, no one was at the gate, it was new years day and a saturday, so we thought we might get lucky, and hurried past and down to the waterfall!! And there it was!! and SO amazing! We ignored the villagers washing their clothes in the river and started taking pictures, enjoying the success of our plans (for me made two months ago!). After 10 minutes when we tried to move higher up the trail one of the shirtless villages came to us, and said we must pay him the entry fee... THEN it got interesting. He demanded $45 dollars, we refused, he got angry, we got more angry, I was stupid and tried to move up the trail ignoring him, he got more angry and violent, I got more stupid and tried to intimidate him (works in India and sometimes in Tanz, but we were in Zambia now and the different character was clear). This guy did NOT like being challenged! I've never seen a Tanzanian get truly aggressive, but a few miles over the border was enough to make a big difference. He was pretty wild.

So, we kept trying to leave, he refused to let us leave, even grabbing our bags to stop us. He was screaming and flailing his fists so wildly for a while I was ready for him to attack us ( i would have been worried without our HUGE fisherman guide standing calmly and stable at our sides, with arms crossed and muscles bulging. With him there I wasn’t much worried about a fight, so we just held to our position. But he physically stopped us from walking away, and even though after a while it was clear he wouldn’t try to punch us (this probably would get him into trouble), the only way we could get away would be to fight him, which we were also of course not going to do. Stalemate! Then when he sent a boy to the village to call several men from there it got more interesting, everyone shouting and shaking fists and looking like murder. I actually got some of it on film, and it’s amazing and very frightening (more than being there!).

This went on for about an hour, with no end in sight. We tried EVRYTHING, and used every argument, constantly trying to just start some kind of negotiations (offering 5,000 shillings like we’d been told, making the case that he didn‘t tell us the price immediately, and when he did we tried to leave, that it was entrapment, etc.). Nothing, they all still talked like they were going to kill us, eat us, and then turn us over to the police to be beaten, killed, and eaten again. It got very tiring after a while. It was like arguing with a brick wall that is screaming at you and shaking its fist under your nose...

Greg did heroic work trying to resolve the issue and calm him down, and was just beginning to get a little success until suddenly the guard seem to think of something...
“Look, sometimes people are coming with note from that man..”
Greg: “what?”
“From the Big Boss, they come from him. You know? You have note?”
Greg: “Big Boss?”
“Yes yes, where you are staying?”
Greg: “In Kasanga, a guesthouse”
“Yes, that place! you stay with Big Boss?”
Greg: “What, Oscar?
“Yes Oscar! He’s my friend!”
Me: “He’s not a good friend! He told us 5,000 shillings for the waterfall, he’s made this problem for you!”
And suddenly, he transformed. It was like an angry demon mask was ripped off and an innocent baby face was put on. Seriously, Celine, I’ve never seen such a transformation ever. It still gives me chills thinking about it.
“Oh, no problem my friend! If you say this from beginning, I give you right price!!”
Did it seem like he was shaking a little bit?
“What?!”
“Come come, I show you all view point, please welcome!”
“NOW we can see it for 5,000?!”
“Yes of course! Please come! You know, you must tell me you are coming from Big Boss at first time, and no problems!” And he took Greg’s hand, put it around his own shoulder like his best friend in the world, and pulled him back to the gate.

Back to the Falls!
This time under the
protection of the
Big Boss!

And in a second he became the best tour guide ever. He brought us back to the waterfall, he gave us fruit that was probably his lunch, he took us to extra views of the waterfall off the trail, he told us all about the history, he virtually laid down over puddles and had us walk over his body!! And Greg and I were officially in shock. All because we’d said one name....

And then it all made sense. In the tri-border region, with no control on the lake between borders, a sharp businessman has a shiny speedboat and control over a swarm of fishing boats... running a nice hotel with no guests... with enough power and influence to make a government employee 100 km away in ANOTHER COUNTRY tremble and talk quietly about “The Big Boss”... yes, we were staying with the mafia smuggler of the entire region. If there was any serious crime going on in the region (and that’s not a question, it IS the Wild West) we’d knocked on its front door and demanded to come in, at half price.. It was a scary moment, and I’ll never forget when the guard parted with us: “so, paying 5 is correct please” Me: “okay, you mean 5 dollars, 5,000 shillings, Zambian money?” “Oh, all okay sir!” (the difference is at least double). So we paid 5,000 each, and signed his book.. Then he looked each of us straight in the eye, one at a time, and almost whimpering said “and please, no need to speak about our discussion, yes? Please say nothing, okay? Yes? Please.” I don’t know what he was afraid of losing, but this big, strong, confident (and 20 minutes ago FURIOUS) man was terrified. Terrified that he’d insulted guests of the Big Boss, who lives farther away then he’d probably ever traveled, in a different country. THAT’S the man we were staying with.

The dark peaks of the DR Congo were never far
from our sight or our thoughts.. I'd rather walk into
North Korea than over those mountains.

That evening, we had a nice chat with Oscar, while his 2 year old daughter slept on his lap and he told us about the “many very good possibilities for business here!” Turns out he’d spend two years in DRC searching for “ornamental fish” to export. Right, THAT’S what you do in DRC! Nice export cover, though! He said that ministers from Dar es Salam come to visit him in Kasanga, one was his partner in the hotel (the empty hotel... politics and crime are rarely separated here, and major criminals can’t survive without partnering with powerful politicians)... Fortunately, he seemed to like us, and of course he had no reason to ruin the tiny trickle of tourism in the region by foreigners having bad experiences and reporting it unsafe, so he was eager to please us, even cooking our dinners when the cook had to go to the village!

Still, that was VERY emotionally and mentally stressful, and I realized how careless I’d been to assume I knew how things worked in these places. The whole way back from the waterfall Greg regaled me with stories from his 10 years living and working in South East Asia, about westerners who refuse to play the game of bribery, or to submit to social hierarchy, or who try to throw weight around in a context where it means nothing... none of these stories ended well... considering our fight with the guard would have happened regardless, maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing we’d stumbled under the roof of the Big Boss...

So many other things on that trip, like being left at 11:30pm in the middle of a dangerous border town on the Zambian border, and having to stay at an obvious whore-house in a very insecure room...

...or spending two nights on a 100 year old ferry going to the same unchanged villages, and being “attacked” by motorboats FULL of screaming people in the middle of the night all trying to catch the racing ferry and climb aboard...

...or taking a decrepit mini-bus packed with people and chickens in a FLOOD of a storm, and the insane driver racing over the turns until suddenly there’s an explosion and he starts to hydroplane straight into a 2 meter (6 ft) ditch, dodging just in time and skidding 20 meters (60ft) down the road, were we can’t start the engine and wait in the storm for other buses to take 1 or 2 of us at a time (if we‘d crashed off the road, I THINK I would have survived, but the people in front of me had about a 10% chance... In the same storm Greg‘s bus went into a ditch, but it was a big bus so everyone was okay, and some foreigners on the ferry said their bus tipped over on a turn and they had to climb out the side windows... NO ONE knows how to drive here, especially in the rain!)...

...or exploring into caves in Rwanda with candles, where in 1994 thousands of people hid during the genocide and were trapped there and slaughtered, and we found the bones to prove it, just laying there where they fell 16 years ago

.... and many other things! It was a challenging, rewarding, exhausting trip, and some of the most adventurous and actually a little dangerous situations I’d ever been in!

But those stories WILL have to wait, because I’m still catching up on sleep, and have a full day of work tomorrow!! Good night for now my Love!

Rwanda

2011-01-08T04:53:00.000-08:00

Broken skulls of victims bear testimony

It all just... shattered. It's like an earthquake: the fissure is there, and it will stir, it will open, it must be fed. We've built our world on a fissure, dividing "us" and "them," defining our existence by the side and height and strength of where WE stand. Today we're trying to build a house for all, a happy home for humanity where we ignore the cracking and creaking in the basement. Sometimes, the chasm must open. In Rwanda, the walls, doors, windows, curtains, locks, and ceiling of civilization were swallowed in an instant... tearing down with it all rules, morality, relationships, ideas, and histories, except for the laws of hate, the instincts of the beasts, and the blood pooling on the trembling earth.

There were eight million people in Rwanda that day... in 100 days, one million of them were dead. It took Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao years to kill their millions... but they used bullets, gas chambers, detention zones; they had... a system, a system to separate the killers and the killed. How could anything make these murderers of millions look humanitarian?

Machetes, and hammers, and sharpened stakes. Neighbor hacking neighbor, pastors burning children, protectors raping the dying. Rivers were stopped, streets flowed red, and screams were slaughtered by laughter for 100 days. All face to face, all done by hand, while the hunted beseech the hunters by name. 16 years ago. I was 12.

Bodies from a mass grave containing
250,000 victims, many children from
the nearby school. They've been preserved
for display at the Huye Genocide Memorial.

And now I'm here, drifting through the florescent green hills, quiet villages, past little rivers and terraced slopes... Such a beautiful place, organized to fine detail, smiles and humility written across every face. It’s clean enough to be called sterile, its streets wide and smooth, and safety is assured by police on every corner. Today, Rwanda is eager to please (a little too eager?) and racing to join a higher stage (a little to quickly?)... It's very hard to see the young ghosts of the blood-washed past walking over the well-paved streets, pleasant hills, and spotless front porches. Where have they gone, so far beyond the world of today? Does it matter, if they've been put to rest? Does it matter, in a shiny new world for all?

Leaving a mysterious place of mist and low light.

Straight from my Notebook: Lake Tanganyika

2011-01-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

My God, it's glorious. To be woken by swahili laughs, to step out into a world of sea and sky. Blue is separated only by soaring peaks of green and a thin necklace of gold on the quiet coast. Village huts glide by with distant curiosity; our own curiosity flashes happily back at them, reaching out to touch the gold and green. But we are sailing, softly, through a world of sky and sea. Through Swahili Laughs. Through the Glory of God.

"To The West" trip, By the Numbers

2011-01-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

- 22 days, 3 countries, 13 different beds, approx 4500 km (2800 miles) covered.

- Over 100 hours on buses, trucks, and motorcycles.

- Over 45 hours spent on boats of various sizes.

- 250 meters (820 feet): free-fall height of Kalambo Falls

- 250,000: number of victims buried at the Kigali's Genocide Memorial.

- 500 km (310 mile): length of Tanzanian section of Lake Tanganyika, the longest lake in the world.

- Rwandan caves explored (by candle-light): 6 (out of 35)

- Most expensive lodging: $20, Kigali, Rwanda. Cheapest lodging: $2, Kibondo, Tanzania.

- $500/ 1hr: price of chilling with the mountain gorillas... didn't go.

- Price of one large beer at Hotel des milles collins (Hotel Rwanda): $6

- Price of same beer at local restaurant: $1

- 10: types of African beer tested

- Total price of trip $750

A Bad Night

2010-12-10T12:39:00.000-08:00

As you will quickly notice, the upcoming world-shaking transformation of this site... has not come yet. In a few days I will be leaving town for a few weeks, to Rwanda and Lake Tanganyika, so please bare with me and stretch your breathless anticipation to January. Some of you might have other things on your mind in the meantime anyway, maybe. For now, I will continue my aimless literary experimentation in yet another format: the 100 word story. The following story is true, every unfortunate word.

12am. Bedtime! Drifting... CLAMOR! Americans. Young. Drunk. Celebrating. Outside my door. LAUGH! Sigh... 2am... Quiet.... SCREAM!! Foreigner? Street. Look! Thai woman. Friend. Drunk. Fighting. "DON'T TOUCH! NO! WHERE MY FRIENDS!" Go! Rescue! "YOU! LEAVE! WALK!" Saved! What? Alley? Friends? No! Inside! Sleeping! Danger! No?! Sigh... Wandering. Stumbling. Carrying. Heavy Thai. 3am. Please, inside! Ok! Carry. Pull. Drag. Upstairs... Inarticulate. Immobile. Collapse. Night-guard: Wide-eyed. Megan: "What the hell?!" Team-Carry! OUF! On bed! SPLUNK! Off bed... OUF! On bed. CLINK! Megan's ring. Search. Vanished. Sigh... Leave. Click. Bedtime! Drifting... KNOCK!!! Night-guard: "Key?" "?" "Listen"... Drumming?... Thai kicking. Inside locked room. 4am. Sigh...

Thank You!

2010-11-30T05:29:00.000-08:00

I guess I'm old fashioned. I've always thought that if I have something to say, and want to engage a wide audience, that the way to do it is to publish a book. I've never put much stock in blogs or webpages; the internet just seems like too loud a room for anyone to be heard clearly. However, getting a book published has become an increasingly impossible task. These days publishers live in a make-or-break world, and have no reason to risk precious time and resources even glancing at the work of another unknown "aspiring writer." Add to this the inevitability of experience, setting out to boldly understand the world, and landing in the dusty footsteps of Socrates: "The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know." I've almost completed the Course of Understanding, at least this one that I set out on almost four years ago. I've lived on four continents, from European capitals to tiny Asian villages, made friends with people from other worlds, and been constantly forced to confront frightening truths about myself. In the end, what can I say? I have no answers, have found no silver bullets, gained no transcendence, achieved nothing but a clear understanding of just how messed up we really are. That is not what I'd hoped to find, not at all, and that is not what most people want to hear.

Yet somehow I'm more determined than ever to write. I don't know what, or how, or who will care, but in my darkest moments I'm always reminded that someone somewhere is listening. That's you, you who are reading this now. You who take the time to read my writing, who send me thoughtful and helpful feedback, who express excitement over my future book or even offer to help edit and translate it! You strangers I've met on the road who expressed heartfelt interest in my experiences (strangers no more!), and you who drop me a note just to tell me you admire what I'm doing and how I strive to live. I so thankful for you. Let me be absolutely clear: you are the ONLY thing that keeps me moving forward. Your support, encouragement, and interest are the only things that convince me that the last four years of my life can be turned into something meaningful and useful. This month especially you have encouraged me powerfully, when I needed it most. This blog has received more visitors this month than any two previous months combined (even assuming that all the Tanzanian visits are actually me, which I'm reasonably sure is the case). Yes, I'm easy to please, but that's not the point! Your visits, notes, and comments have reassured me that maybe people could be interested in what I have to say, and maybe all this actually has some sense. For that I thank you deeply. I wouldn't be able to keep the spark alive for long without you.

To build on the success and encouragement of this month, to be more interesting and useful to you, and to reach people I haven't actually met personally, I've decided that I need to move past my habitual moody self-reflections and dry academic theorizing that you've all patiently born with. If all goes as planned, the next week will bring a major and long-overdue transition in my work here, so please stay tuned! If you want to make sure you don't miss out, consider clicking the "follow" button on the right, and otherwise continue looking for announcements on facebook!

This months' visitor locations

Again, thank you. I'm truly constantly humbled by how many amazing people I'm fortunate enough to know, in so many amazing places, and more encouraged by your support than anything else in the world.

P.S. My pageview audience today:

Paraguay?! Foster, would you happen to know anything about this?

A Billion Wars, part 3

2010-11-26T12:28:00.000-08:00

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2

The next time you hear someone bemoaning the inevitable uniform flattening of world culture, take a step back and think about all the people you spoke to today, where they’re from, how they think, what they value, where they’re going, and compare it to the likely selection of people you would have interacted with in the same place 50 years ago. Which image seems more “uniform” and “flat”? Diversity is blossoming all around us. But in the end these might be very dark blossoms indeed.

Someone sure is thrilled to see tourists...

Don’t think that my belief in the exponential growth of diversity means I’m suggesting we’re entering a brave new world of tolerance and the breaking down of social walls. While the fabric of cultural identity is being transformed, the foundation of conflict has not budged. Even as the behavior becomes more strained and contrived, we are still determined to see the world from an “us” and “them” perspective. In the past “they” were often a faceless symbol on the other side of the world, and “those damned Russians” and “Remember the Alamo, kill the Mexicans!” was a manageable and natural way to maintain a close-knit society. But suddenly the Mexicans are living next door, the Russian is your landlord, and don’t forget the Indian, Vietnamese, and Iranian who own the nearest shops. Sadly, the fact that “they” suddenly have a face and humanity (although “strange” and “not quite right”) has not bound us together into a world of peace and good will, it has made us all more threatened by the proximity of such foreignness. In a world of increasing contact between vastly different perspectives and lifestyles, the potential for conflict is heightened within a rapidly shrinking psychological space. There will be increased reactions against "them," because "they" are suddenly in our backyards. There will be countless new lines of conflict as the breakdown of cultural, ideological, religious, and ethnic integrity within groups triggers the splintering into smaller and smaller social cells. There will be increased frustration with the "exoticism" we morn, because they‘re “just so weird“ or "refuse to live in the 21st century!" While the demons of conflict, violence, and hate were once often forced to journey from nation to nation or culture to culture, they can now hop lightly from door to door, where a different culture, religion, lifestyle, skin color, and language is already residing! The dry beams of society could so easily ignite into one fiery purge after another, jumping to the slightly stronger side of one social division after another, until - too late! - it becomes clear that everyone is a “them” in one way or another.

Look at that body language!

Can’t we all just learn to get along? Certainly we can! Will we? Very questionable, considering the rate and direction we’re going. But my reasons for believing that are part of another story.

However, within these age-old and suddenly imperative problems a possible source of help is emerging. On the forefront of these developments are the people that author Pico Iyer names "The Global Souls." They are raised without a specific national, cultural, or even linguistic identity, and can only consistently consider themselves to be citizens of the world. People like the young girl in the beginning of part two of this post are increasingly common, having a passport from one country, a language from another, a skin color from a third place, and a cultural identity from yet another. They are still rare, yes, but as the boundaries of the world continue to blur, their numbers can only increase. You probably know a few already, although you’ll have to think hard to identify them, as one of their gifts is to blend into whatever social context they’re in. One the inside, however, they know that they belong neither here nor there completely.

At least the expectations are clear...
She almost didn't make it out alive.

Because of their inherent independence from any one identity, these Global Souls present unique possibilities in the evolution of society. As this young girl grows up, with her head in Japan, her papers in Thailand, her soul in Brazil and the Philippines, and perhaps even a toe or two in Portugal and America, let's say there comes a time when Japan enters into conflict with China... or, to make it more interesting, with Brazil. Whose side will she fall on? She certainly won't be pulled along with the mindless “It‘s us or them!” crowd, whichever crowd that may be. Her tendency will most like be the opposite of nationalistic, or judgmental, or even invested. The easiest way is to not take sides at all, and as she's increasingly reminded that Japan is not where she belongs, perhaps she will even leave for another "half-home" in Thailand, or Portugal, or somewhere else entirely. And here is the possibility these Global Souls present. They don’t care. They will not be pulled into "Us vs. Them," because they are always "Them." They will not go with the herd mentality that pulled most Americans into hating the Russians, or most Germans into blaming the Jews, or most Jews into demonizing the Pakistanis. They will see both sides, and often, when forced to choose sides, they will leave.

Too much culture. We are NOT amused.

The Global Souls offer an new approach to the increasingly volatile "in-group/out-group" mentality that has thus far defined human society and will eventually destroy us as all the groups are mashed together. In the end it could go one of two ways: The Global Souls can lead us into a different way of seeing the world and each other, a world-view that expects and thrives on strangeness instead of being threatened by it. They are not invested into any of our silly little "in-groups," and therefore don't have to care about our silly conflicts. On the other hand, the fact is that they don't have to care at all, and as the conflicts, fear-mongering, and wall-building continues, they could just as easily check-out, live as untangled lives as they can manage, and watch us destroy ourselves for identities and ideas that they can't quite understand.

Future leaders of a bright new tomorrow, or simply not part of problem in a world of a billion little wars? I don’t know, but they have managed to divest themselves of the borders and boundaries that toss most of us against each other, so there’s hope in that at least.

For myself I am just as susceptible to frustration and knee-jerk reactions against those who are different than me as anyone, if not more so. I’m not writing to reveal the answers, I don’t have any. But we all need to be part of the discussion on this one, to observe, consider, explore, and one by one to discover a way for our billions of new worlds to exist on one shrinking planet. If we fail, as a society, as cultures, as individuals, there can only one alternative.

A Billion Cultures? Part 2

2010-11-25T10:04:00.000-08:00

Continued from Part 1

Jan is a Czech Catholic

Medical student. Probably
not the first person you'd
ask about Muslim merchants
on Zanzibar... but he just
might surprise you.

The fact is we're concerned about losing the predictability of exoticism. We recently had at least the theoretical guarantee that if we go here and there we will experience this and that, a guarantee that is all but vanished. But even many of the most experienced travelers still take for granted the explosion of (totally unpredictable) diversity and novelty around every human corner.

When in history could you bump into a young girl born to a Brazilian father (he was part Portuguese) and a Philippine mother (she was part American) who was born in Thailand and raised in Japan? I met this girl, she has blue eyes and dark skin, and could translate for her parents in each of these languages except Thai, the language on the front of her passport. What good does it do to ask "where are you from?" What is her culture? Her native language? Her home? She's something new, maybe unique, a direct product of globalization and impossible perhaps only 50 years ago. Her lifestyle, personal identity, and perspective on the world are bound to be fascinating and as worthy of exploration as any "authentic" pigmy tribe or lost civilization.

Mario is Spanish, with a fascination for Sikh culture and
fashion, even here in the deserts of Rajasthan.
Anachronistic? Sure! Unique and interesting? I think so!

When I ask a Dutchman (well, half Spanish and born in America (US passport) but raised in Amsterdam) who has lived his entire adult live in Vietnam what he thinks about the disappearance of tulips in Holland, what sense will it make? The question is based on the assumption that when he tells me he's from Holland, that he is informed and concerned about all things I consider "Dutch."

All over Japan you can see a bizarre
cultural transfusion. It's all about
cartoon characters, yes, but
charaters borrowed from all over
the world, from French Maids to
American High School students.
All imitated and emulated by an
otherwise mono-cultural society.

Even I, who fit pretty well into the American "box," can't deliver an explanation of the latest Hollywood movie, US election, war, fashion innovation, or newest slang. I constantly disappoint people who are excited to speak to an "American," who haven't realized that these definitions are breaking down. However, if you want to talk about chopsticks, the Ganges River, wildebeest migrations, or the Velvet Revolution, I'm your man. For the place(s) I come from, the languages I speak, the things I know about, and the things I'm interested in, I'm pretty confident in saying I'm unique too, a product of globalization, certainly not impossible 50 years ago, but very unlikely. Sure, something is being lost as the world mixes together, but something unprecedented and exciting is being gained.

Me with my Japanese "bride" at
our "wedding" with 400 of our
closest Indian "friends."
Some experiences leave you
changed forever.

This complexity is slowly permeating society on the level of individuals. Of course the degree of access still varies dramatically, but even 50 years ago a Maasai was a Maasai was a Maasai. Today a "Maasai" could be a pastoralist in the wilderness with a spear and shuka unchanged from a 1000 year ago, or a bowtied waiter in a restaurant, or an international businessman in a three piece suit. Asking him if he's Maasai guarantees nothing else about his lifestyle, you have to explore him. While this is certainly a pity for the integrity of the cultural "box," it means that every individual is becoming a world unto themselves, a culture to be explored, an "exotic" with new thoughts and ideas and experiences.

(Tomorrow: Part 3: A Billion Wars?)

A Billion Cultures?

2010-11-24T15:12:00.000-08:00

These days everyone is talking about globalization. The economists warn us about staggering levels of inter-dependence (aka "mutually assured destruction"), while politicians promote the rise of democracy (whether you like it or not), linguists hail the inevitable doom of all languages except The One (need to negotiate with an Indian in Tanzania for a "Free Tibet" t-shirt sewn in China and printed in Mexico? English!), travelers discuss how small the world has become ("you can be anywhere in the world in 24 hours!"), inventers plan the next barrier-breaking paradigm shift in technology ("hand-held transporters, man. It's gonna be huge!"), sociologist examine the infusion of Levis, McDonalds, and Bruce Willis into the core of every culture ("It seems, ladies and gentlemen, that Rammstein was right. We all live in America"), and Google brings everyone and everything just one click away ("Google, making stalking a celebrity on the other side of the world a little bit easier"). It's easy to sit at home and be flooded with pictures of Chinese children in Mickey Mouse hats, East Africans huts covered with Bollywood posters, Americans in line for the next Pokemon, and people everywhere discarding their Kimonos, Saris, Burkas, and Shukas to grab "well worn style" jeans, spagetti string tops, and high heels. It’s easy to feel that something valuable is being lost forever.

And it is, I don’t deny it, but there’s another side to all this, one that few people notice or mention. For the most part, all of these unprecedented changes are taking place very much on the macro level, or superficially. On an individual and personal level - the level on which one human being interacts with another - we are all fast becoming more complicated, unique, and "exotic" than anything that has ever existed. The individualization of complexity launches the quantity of “uniqueness” and “exoticism” from hundreds of cultures into the realm of billions of individuals.

Until very recently, all the people in the world have mostly fit into one of a few hundred boxes. Each box carried a relatively uniform checklist: America = English = Christian = White-skinned = Independent = Jeans = Hamburger = Cowboy, etc. Japan = Japanese = Buddhist = Narrow-Eyed = Introverted = Kimono = Sushi = Samurai, etc. Indian = Hindi = Hindu = Dark-haired = Outgoing = Sari = Curry = Guru, etc. These were (and still are) the boxes, and of course there were always exceptions and broad misconceptions in these views, but often when people talk about the loss of diversity in the world they're talking about going to Japan and seeing lines out the door at McDonalds and Starbucks, or to Thailand and seeing everyone in jeans, or to America and finding noticeable social dependence. The various categories within each "box" were always strongly linked together, and you could make an assumption about all categories by knowing the answer to one, usually "Where are you from?" "India." "Oh, I love curry!" "Japan." "Oh, I love flower arranging!" "America." "Ah, Wild West!!"

Rapidly these beloved cultural icons have become diffused, marginalized, replaced, or relocated (How long will it take to hear "You're from America? I love Sushi!" "You're from Japan? Oh I love McDonalds!" "You're from India? I love IT!"?). A few dozen years ago all you needed to know was where someone was from, and you had them in a box, a box containing tens or hundreds of millions of people. But within the space of a generation things have become much more complicated. As I still ask people "Where are you from" as a first grasp at a handle, I notice a growing number of people who have to pause before answering to understand exactly what I'm asking, and which category (no longer a package deal) I'm trying to determine. It's clear that the walls of those cultural and national boxes are cracking and crumbling, and something unprecedented is emerging...

To Be Continued... Mañana!

Scars

2010-11-16T10:52:00.000-08:00

I do have a few scars, actually. You can't lead my kind of life for long without getting marked by the experience... No, wait, that's a lie. It's what I want you to believe, the mold I press myself into by any means necessary. It's remarkable how one moment, one look into a stranger's eyes, can turn all the lies I tell myself on their head, and confront me with the simple cold truth. The truth is I carry a few scratches, the marks of a couple stupid moments, and one or two well-anesthetized operations. These are not the necessary price of living in India or Africa, they are the price of displacement, the feeling that I must somehow prove I'm someone I'm not. Each of these breaks in my skin started with great expectations, the hope for some permanent mark of suffering and endurance in an otherwise comfortable and soft existence. At some point every man (meaning every man in my culture and my generation, at least) finds himself playing "scar wars," topping each other with stories of passage through pain and blood, proudly proven by the scars stamped onto flesh like footsteps through wet concrete. It's embarrassing to bring only stories without scars, like passage through snow; no less real but fleeting, unquantifiable, impossible to be sure it ever really happened.

Western society has achieved something that no species or other group of people has ever achieved, a result of effort greater than any ever expended. Not the construction of the Great Wall or the Pyramids, the conquest of lost civilizations, nor any religious fervor to transform humanity, none have been as single-minded, exhaustive, and successful as the western world's resolve to be comfortable. Have we so quickly become ashamed of ourselves that we must prove we still feel pain, or is life so empty without hardship that we take such pride in every sign that our blood was spilt? I don't know, but I know this need digs deep into me. Somehow I feel a lack of pain and hardship to be a lack of masculinity, and an absence of scars stands as a negation of the challenging life I try to live, a betrayal of my claims of adventure and difficulty. What would she say about that, the woman sitting across from me on this ancient dusty bus?

The scars I do have are mostly from India, living in a village and collecting firewood from a thorny forest daily. There was no escape from scratches, even cuts, but my body heals quickly and well, as it’s intended to do. I knew none of these would leave the faintest mark, leaving me with no silent proof of what a difficult experience I was surviving. Months later I remember telling a friend “Yes, you see my arms? Here, and here? Most of my scars are from India.” And that was all I needed to prove I’d done something real and brave. I didn’t explain that the children I was living with carried wounds that would reveal mine to be what they are, scratches. I didn’t point out that after two months I was free to leave that perilously thorny environment and head to the beach, which I did. And I certainly didn’t say that I was “scared by the experience” only because I’d meticulously picked away at the scabs of every scratch and scrape for weeks, with the sole purpose of making sure that my body would prove I live the kind of life I claim to live. That’s not an easy thing to confess, by the way. But I’m trying hard to not protect myself behind my usual mask of honesty. Truthfully, this behavior is insane, and shameful in a much more real way than the shame that provoked it... and yet I don’t expect to be committed to an asylum for these confessions. It’s not enough of a deviation from our culture, and I believe there are more than a few people reading this who can understand and even relate to this behavior, this insanity. Why?

Why was this never a question I asked myself until today, stuffed into a stifling rattling African bus across from a middle-aged village woman? She’s Maasai, as evidenced by the stretched holes in her earlobes that would easily accommodate my big toe... should there ever be a need for such unlikely acrobatics. Her head is shaven beyond the mere suggestion that hair every existed there, and small bits of metal hang from her ears, nose, and neck. She is wrapped up in the bright and multi-colored fabrics that somehow defy the African dust, and left bare against these happy colors are her thick, dark arms. My God, her arms.

As hollow as my experience may be, I do know something about scars, or at least what it takes to create one. The ones I'd reopened again and again, trying so hard to turn them into something impressive, had still eventually faded to almost nothing, and now it needs a certain light to even know they're there. So when I saw her arms, more covered than not with dark, deep, eternal marks, I could at least begin to read the story there. Burns, long thick ones from boiling water, and small sharp ones from brushing against red-hot pots, were scattered thickly from shoulder to fingertips. Dark shadows of holes from pointed sticks in the night, short marks from the edge of knives or razors - is that a jagged saw cut across her hand? - and a half-circle left by angry teeth - could it be human? - draw the eyes from one dim window of tragedy to the next. A fine network of straight angles across her left shoulder might mean broken window glass or jagged metal scraps, and a mesh of lines covering her right arm like a sleeve speaks of hurried passage through thorns or a daily journey pressed close to barbed-wire fences. Over every new inch I could almost feel the pain, see the blood, smell the melting flesh, and hear the cries of shock, fear, agony, and despair. And I was filled with a shame so intense I wanted to cover myself and hide.

And then, after a long time, I looked into her face. You expect scars like these to go deep, and I mean deeper than flesh. You expect to see a haunted shadow of recognition that pain will come again, or a bright purity of acceptance. You expect to see an impact; how could trauma such as this not shape one's whole understanding of life? But somehow, inexplicably, it wasn't there. Except for her neck and shoulders, I could find nothing that connected this woman's face to her arms. Her face was smooth, unwrinkled and unblemished, without the spark of a smile or the cringe of concern. I could not see any clear sign of the shy timidity common in Japan or the smiling confidence of Americans, not the blank emptiness in Indian stares nor the eager cheerfulness of many Africans. There was no clear sign of wisdom or stupidity, no clue whether she is haunted or cheerful, an expression not engaged with the world around her but not particularly disinterested either. She was just, simply, human. Just living her life, same as me, lives absolutely, completely, unfathomably different.

I cannot imagine what those scars, real scars, would do to me. Should I ever survive such experiences I know I'd loose all desire to display them or speak about them. It would change me, that kind of life, that kind of pain on a regular inescapable basis. For her, they mean nothing, not good or bad, not significant or remarkable or shameful, it’s just life, her life, her real life.

I do have a few scars, actually. My scars are in my mind, the result of conflict between pride and guilt, confusion and certainty, the conflict of a culture that values everything and nothing, that demands self-construction and despises it, that despises self-destruction and glorifies it. I find myself crying out desperately "Look at me, I am real!" And I try to prove it with yet another construction. Her scars are on her body, the result of living real life in the real world, no more no less. Looking at her scars - looking at her life - I don't envy her, not at all. And truthfully, seemingly, hopefully, she doesn't envy me.

“Make no mistake, my friend, we are all scared and scarred. The only difference between us is what we choose to do with it.”

The New Plan! (Or Catch Me If You Can, part III)

2010-11-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

Over a year ago I posted a plan for the following year (if you’re interested in knowing if things went according to plan, see for yourself! http://discoverthepenguinsworld.blogspot.com/2009/06/plan-in-its-current-form.html) Now it’s time for a new plan!

The new center of gravity, unexpectedly and wonderfully, is Cèline, a wonderful French friend I’ve recently fallen completely in love with (it seems she‘s also managed to fall in love with me, so it works out well)! Her job as a history teacher has her tied to France for a couple of years at least, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that France has surprisingly become the new center of gravity. Unfortunately France, along with almost all the countries of the EU, has recently made it very difficult for an American to live in their country. In short the process requires getting hired, for which your employer must prove that no European citizen can do the job instead, THEN returning to the states and waiting for the application to go through, which can take 3-6 months, and carries no guarantee of success.

The exception is Germany, which allows Americans to arrive, look for a job, and start working while paperwork goes through, and then stay, easy as pie.

That’s enough background to give the context of the plan, but each of these steps is the result of massive research, consideration, negotiations, twists, retwists, sub-plots, and puzzle-piece-pounding that has gotten the plan to the feasible state it’s in now. If you want to know more about motivations, rationalizations or even vague justifications or recommendations, just leave a comment!

-Present -Feb 2011: Finish my projects and travels in East Africa.

-March -May 2011: Return to Europe to spend time with Cèline, visit possible work/study locations in

France, CZ (can’t hurt to ask!), and mainly Universities and Language Schools in Western Germany.
-June-August 2011: Fly to South Korea and teach at an intensive English summer camp to save some money.

-September 2011: Return to Europe to prepare to start with the best opportunity that present itself before the summer, which will most likely be...

-October 2011- May 2012: ... studying at one of Germany’s many Master’s Programs taught in English, ideally in something along the lines of “Intercultural Communication” or “International Media.”
During the first year Celine will still be in France and we’ll be trying to visit often, though after the first three months I won’t technically be allowed to LEGALLY enter France...
-June - August 2012: Possible summer travel or work, depending.
-September 2012 - May 2013: There’s a strong chance that Celine will be able to transfer to Germany to join me, hopefully at least in the same city, for my second and final year of studies.
-June 2013 - 2015: Then Celine will be free to transfer to another continent for a few years, and we both want to experience living in a foreign culture together, so we’re eager to take advantage of this! The location for that hasn’t been discussed in any detail, but the sky’s the limit (literally, in fact, I don’t think the moon holds much appeal).

That’s what’s next in the life of Caleb! Drop me a comment, and please catch me if you can!!

Historic Tanzanian Elections

2010-11-03T10:21:00.000-07:00

Today in major urban centers across Tanzania an historic political revolution is being vocally celebrated. The results of yesterday’s election were announced to waiting crowds in the capital Dar Es Salam, major tourist centers such as Moshi and Arusha, and other cities such as Musoma, revealing that these cities will send members of the young opposition party Chadema to parliament. This news represents the first cracks in the hold of the ruling party CCM, which has held nearly 100% of major government positions since independence in 1964. Campaigning was especially heated in Arusha, where no opposition party had ever gained a foothold. In front of City Hall growing crowds waited through the night without sleep, encouraging each other by screaming the Chadema campaign chants of “People’s Power” and “Cha-de-ma!” Some were angry at the wait; while other cities had announced results in the morning, the eager crowds in Arusha were left to wait until late into the afternoon. “They must tell us! They must give us power!” said one. “If not it will be like Kenya as soon as possible!” alluring to the political turmoil that resulting from a disputed election in December 2008 in Kenya. But most were peaceful, consistent with a country that has seen little political violence in its history. “If they are not honest, what can we do?” said another. “We are not here to fight, but we want the truth.” Still a strong police present was very visible, fitting the atmosphere of uncertainty and possible change. When the results of Arusha’s parliamentary election were announced in favor of Chadema’s candidate, Godbless Lema, the crowds exploded into dancing and screaming. The police used hoses and army jeeps to control the crowds, but both sides remained amiable. Within minutes crowds were choking traffic in all major streets in the city center and celebrating vocally. The national results are less dramatic. CCM’s president, Kikwete, will remain as head of state, and the ruling party will maintain majority control over all major institutions. “It’s the first step, for Chadema,” said a member of the dancing crowd who was proud to be a supporter of Chadema since its humble beginnings. “This is the first time we can win! In next election, in five years, we will see what bigger change we can make! It’s time for a change in Tanzania. Today we can start it!” Pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=573219&id=768420318&l=c5fc2bc876

I Get a Haircut - Insignificant Moments of Life Abroad

2010-10-22T05:47:00.000-07:00

It’s time for me to get a haircut. I know because I now have to choose between gelling my hair to a concrete-like consistency, or sporting an Afro (which is nowhere near as appropriate in Africa as the name would claim). You’d think that after seven years abroad I’d be used to navigating the various pitfalls of foreign barbers, but I still hate it, and always put it off as long as I can find any excuse to do so. I’ve often thought that my “Bohemian look” in Czech Republic could be attributed less to my desire to “fit in” than my need for a reason to avoid barbers for several years. Sadly, that look didn’t make the cut, and unless I want to go down that slippery slope again it’s time to surrender to The African Haircut. Yes, “The.” If God is merciful there will only be one. What’s the big deal? I don’t think I’m the only one who gets a little nervous about going for a haircut, even in one’s home country. Just assume that it’s your first time visiting a new hairdresser, you have no information about the hairdresser’s ability, and more importantly imagine that the only communication you can manage is handing him the scissors and saying “go!” Also, to simulate the fact that in many countries there’s absolutely no guarantee or regulation of the skill of any would be “professional,” imagine that he’s blind; for all you know about his skill, he might as well be. Nervous now? “GO!” I remembered a likely looking barber’s shop on the other side of town, and walked about 45 minutes to find it. You learn to notice certain things and pin them onto your mental map long before you’ll ever need it; there are no yellow pages or services listed online to speak of, and if the need becomes urgent and you don’t know where to look you could wander futilely for hours. In the case of a haircut, for example, you have to spot a place that will cut your hair (many places are gender specific), won’t try to charge you 10 times the proper amount AND will be able to communicate somewhat (which means outside the expensive town center, but not so far that they only speak Ma or some other tribal language). I’d noticed a likely looking place a month ago and it was worth walking across town for it. It was closed. At 1:00 on a Tuesday. I started to develop theories, and then I remembered that my theories didn’t mean a fig. Time to wander! About 15 minutes later I find another, in a similar area, staffed by a young man, all good signs. “Habari!” He looks up from his newspaper and goes through the necessary triple-take at the tall white foreigner who’s materialized in his tiny shop. “Mzuri.” Silence. “Can you cut my hair?” Pantomiming accompanies. “Ndeyo, ok.” “How much?” I’m not going to elaborate on this for the pages and pages of anecdotal, cultural, and historical evidence that supports this advice, just trust me that you must always Always ALWAYS ask the price first for EVERYTHING. Always. “Hmm…” He’s going to overcharge me. Whenever someone who sells one thing all day long has to pause for 30 seconds to remember the price, he’s considering how much he can get from you. Sometimes the thing to remember is that that IS the price. The “real price” is not how much the thing costs, it’s how much you’re willing to pay for it. Still, it irks me and most travelers, and a pause like this can often be reason enough to just walk out. I shift my feet. “1,000 shilling.” $0.70. Or, maybe he was just trying to remember how to say “thousand” in English. “Ok.” I start to sit down, and remember. There are always unexpected idiosyncrasies to every element of life in every new place. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have, how many times you’ve gone through it already, or how carefully you try to make no assumptions; some things you will just have to learn the hard way. However, experience and observation CAN teach you what to watch out for. I’d noticed that the local men had two hairstyles: short and none. Neither were my cup of tea. “Cut, yes? Haircut?” Scissor motions. “Bzzzzzz no.” Sheering motions. “Ah, um…” He holds up an electric razor and points to his own well-sheered head. “Scissors? Snip snip?” “Ah.…” I still have to remind myself every day that in many cultures across the world it is rude to say “no.” Ever. Sometimes the best you can hope for is someone who won’t say “yes,” meaning “no.” It’s much more common than you might think. “Oh, ok. Hapana, asanti!” Exit. Wander. Amazing that just a year ago, in the same situation, I would have walked out of that shop 5 minutes later as bald as Bob Hope and glowing like a ball dropped on Time Square. About 30 minutes later I see a “Hair Cutting Salon.” “Habari!” “ah, mzuri!” “Haircut? No bzzzz, ok?” “Yes yes, ok.” “How much?” Always always always ask the price first. “Two thousand shillings.” “Ok.” I show him my desired length, of about 2 centimeters. “Yes, ok.” I settle back, then wince slightly when he pulls out a well-loved electric razor. Fortunately, he also has attachments. The three attachments are “short,” “shorter,” and “hair-no-more.” There’s something I’ve had to learn the hard way, over and over and over again: you must assert yourself, constantly, and the moment that you start being passive about anything you will be taken down a road you don’t want to be on - sometimes literally! I’m passive by nature, and inevitably have relapses every day, which is the main reason I have anything to write about (hey now, I didn‘t say anything GOOD to write about)! The appearance of the razor, the limited size of the attachments, and the compensating smile on the barber’s face all told me very clearly that it was time to walk away. But it was too late, I was stuck. And so, with a passionate Muslim sermon blasting out of the radio in Swahili and the barber nervously humming to himself, the haircut began. The first thing that was clear was that he had never encountered hair like mine. My hair is thick, thick like a Russian accent, and almost as unruly and unpredictable as the Russian himself. Remember what I said about gelling to a concrete consistency? Usually the prep work involves spraying on lots of water and combing, then scissor snipping through the bulk of the bush, but clearly that’s not the way things are done here. He switched on the razor, and dove in. But if he thought that he would just buzz through, he quickly had to abandon that idea. The next thing I noticed revealed a fascinating fact about globalization: although technology is becoming so universal that you can see the same modern items from New York City to an Indian mud hut, the creativity in using it is endless: I’d never seen anyone apply lubricant directly to the blades of an electric razor before! We all do the same things, but we’ll always find different ways to do it. We have to, the world will never be globalized enough to eliminate our need to assert our identity. And the key is that in so many places, there is and will always be only ONE way to skin a cat. Let an African see you doing laundry in the Indian style, or an Indian see you bathing in the Burmese way, and you will either be laughed out of sight or meticulous instructed in what you’ve done terribly wrong, how to do it right, and why the very fabric of time and space has been threatened by your foolishness. Evidently, the way to use an electric razor in Tanzania is to pour lubricant on the blade until it can glide through anything. It still wasn’t easy, for either of us, but this guy was determined and focused. He could have buzzed and lubricated his way through a brick wall if the price were right. As he charged onward and locks of hair fell around me like angel feathers in a lightning storm (hmm, there’s a new one), I squinted at the mirror trying desperately to assess the sway of the battle without the benefit of my glasses. After about 15 minutes I reach for my glasses and put them on, then look carefully at the mirror. Whatever face I made the guy thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. I tried to be stoic, but I’d already whipped off my glasses so I don’t know if I managed it. In any case, I recognized that I was once again in that familiar situation: caught in a cultural current without a paddle, and I’d have to sit tight until the river took me wherever it wanted to go. When it seemed like my head couldn’t get any lighter, THEN the scissors came out. On the second snip he nicks me. It’s a good thing I didn’t insist on scissors from the beginning! I’d be sheered AND scarred! I began to get really nervous when he started some “detail work” on my brow, which I know from many disastrous years of cutting my own hair is like trying to defuse a bomb: one false snip and you blow it. Knowing there was really nothing I could do, I decided to not look until it was all over. Being the exhibitionist that I am, I consoled myself by thinking that the worse the haircut the better the story and accompanying picture would be... You can see how desperate my optimism was trying to grasp onto something. He continued with the detail work for quite a while, sometimes so detailed that it seemed he wasn’t actually cutting anything at all. Well, we’re all guilty of doing “filler work” to seem busy, or to convince a customer that the service is worth the price. After all if you just “get the job done” and it’s all over too quickly... But that’s a different story. Anyway, I’m pretty sure foreigners get this “filler work” stuff most, based on the hope that the silly outsider might not know that a haircut should take 15 minutes and if it takes 45 they’ll pay more. “Sorry, buddy,” I thought, “but my money’s waiting for the moment when I finally put on my glasses and see the face that my friends will have to live with for a month.” The electric razor comes out again, with a new attachment. It wasn’t a longer one. Either this elaborate process had been carefully and ritually developed over centuries of African hairdressing, or this guy was really bored. And then it got interesting again. I’ve never seen someone use baby powder with an electric razor before! Using a shaving brush he liberally doused the back of my neck with what smelled very much like baby powder and then went at it with the electric razor again. Douse, shave, repeat. I started to think about probable attrition rates of African electric razors. Might be something to invest in.. and baby powder. Who knows, maybe baby powder is the “fix-all” of Tanzania, like duct tape in America... Now THAT would be a fast haircut! Maybe baby powder is actually more useful, which my barber clearly considered to be obvious as he doused me again. I’ll bet he’d also use it for skinning a cat. Having been sheered, buzzed, lubricated, snipped nipped and powdered, THEN out came the spray bottle of water and the comb. I could feel there was very little left to comb. Finally he motions I should put my glasses on, and I look. “Safi?” he asks. “Ndiyo, safi sana,” I say. Yes, very good. And it was. Now I just need to find a place that can take about 50% off my ears... On the other hand, it’s now certain that this WILL be my only African Haircut. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150303880035319&set=a.10150266737500319.525542.768420318&ref=fbx_album

My Thoughts on Travel, Thus Far...

2010-10-11T05:50:00.000-07:00

- People don’t understand travel, it’s just like walking around your house... Only it’s someone else's house. - I remember when I used to believe that travel eliminates prejudices. It turns out the truth can be really ugly! - When traveling, you are one side of a great game, and every negotiation or exchange of money, thoughts, directions, ideas are one round of it... Only you never know the rules, hold any cards, or learn anything that is valid for more than a few minutes. Those rare times you manage to win, you only know it if the other players decide to tell you, and it’s very hard to believe it was anything but blind luck. We’re the outsiders, like Cubans playing hockey, we’re just going to lose. That is part of the price of travel. - Travel murders mystery. - Anywhere you go, no matter how exotic, exciting, or intimidating, you find there people for whom it is daily life, mundane, uninteresting, normal in every sense. The true value of travel it not to adopt to and accept every exotic lifestyle as normal, but to learn that every “normal” is exotic and exciting from the right perspective. - A famous war-correspondent was asked “which stamp in your passport are you most proud of?” “None, what’s there to be proud of?” Travel is so glamorized: it’s just a matter of going! - If it’s more important for you to be comfortable than to be stimulated (whether you like it or not!), don’t travel. -The ideal traveling: Think, go, see, think again, do! Miss a step, and you’re a tourist. - I used to think travel was about becoming a different person: In Japan you learn to BE Japanese, in India you learn to live like an Indian... Ha! Travel only to enrich who you fundamentally are. If you travel to change who you are, you will smack into the immovable facts of your self like a brick wall. That is, however, probably the fastest way to determine who you really are.. - Real travel is not a break from life, it is life. Do it long enough, and you’ll never stop traveling, even when you stop moving. - Travel is following: somehow, everywhere, someone already lives there. - The world never stops moving. Travel is learning to follow its rhythm.

What I'm Doing in Tanzania -- or -- Sometimes Things Work Out

2010-10-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

I remember my carefully detailed plan before going to India: go there, wander around for a month, fall into an interesting project and volunteer for another five months. After all, how hard can it be to find someone to help in India? My lesson from India: It’s hard to help a person. My lesson so far from Tanzania: Sometimes, things work out. My level of proactivity has increased only be the smallest degree, and while comparing India and Tanzania is like comparing mangoes and bananas (trust me on this!), a little proactivism evidently goes a long way. My miniscule change in approach amounted to contacting a number of NGOs (Non Government Organization) and asking to talk to them about their projects when I was in their area. Telling people you’re writing a book about international involvement has a way of opening doors! The first project I visited was Pamoja Ministries: Discipleship through Media ( www.pamoja.info/), based a little outside Arusha in Tengeru. Pamoja is a Christian ministry made up of several professional graphic designers, film makers, musicians, etc., and their goal is to provide positive role-models, values, and a psychological infrastructure of hope for the much-ignored children of Tanzania. On the other side they aspire to “bring to best of Africa to Africans” to combat the pattern of successful African musicians and actors signing contracts with western countries and never been heard by their countrymen, which propagated the mentality of “success is found outside my country.” Pamoja creates records and music videos of up-and-coming African artists and tries to demonstrate the possibility of high aspirations without leaving the continent. They also want to address the complete lack of quality TV programs for children that present anything like positive values and ethics (at this point it seems most children get their role models and values from Rappers, corrupt politicians (no joke! They’re successful!), and adult soap-operas). Within a few minutes of walking onto the compound I was met by Sig Feser, the founder of Pamoja, who’s been in East Africa for decades. “What’s your background?” he asked almost immediately. “Well, my degree is in Social Science, and -” “I think I have a project for you. For a long time we’ve talked about doing a psychological survey of the children of the area. You’re here, you’re trained in social science, God has sent you here for a reason.” I later remarked to Honza, my traveling companion, that I get a kick how long-term missionaries everywhere talk with the same “God dialect.” His certainty of God’s will certainly surpasses my own, but in any case the idea appealed to me immensely. It sounded like exactly the kind of work I would choose in every country I’d lived in if I had the resources for it, and with the staff and experience of Pamoja to support me... In the discussions during the weeks that followed the scope of the project consistently sprinted past anything I’d conceived of. I remember the brain-numbing meeting with Jeremy Feser (directing Pamoja while his father Sig is back in Canada), where he said matter-of-factly “So how many children do you think you could interview? How about 5000, could you do that?” “Ubbbllllbbbb?” The details have been mostly ironed out by now (for the official Project Goals and Timeline click here ( http://courseofunderstanding.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2001-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2002-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=1 ), but it’s still huge. The topics of the survey will be Heroes/Role-models, Hopes, Fears, and Media Access. The ultimate goal is to give Pamoja a solid sense of how children will relate to the characters and messages they put up on screen. “If we someday want to create the Tanzanian “Sesame Street,” we need to know how they’ll respond to the main character being a 14 year old girl, or a business man, or a teacher, for example? Who’s the everyman? Who’s a clear hero character? If they see a snake on the screen will it automatically give a sinister vibe like it would for American kids? Is the father figure a symbol of security or of fear? What’s the picture of an ideal world? Should the “treasure quest” be about a pot of candy or a new school uniform? If we don’t know these things, we are just taking shots in the dark with huge amounts of resources, and we can’t afford to do that. We always have to make certain assumptions in this work; I want to make those assumptions based on as much concrete data as you can possibly generate.” The other main reason this is a huge project is that nothing of this type has been done on any significant scale in Tanzania, hardly in Africa. Children are almost entirely ignored and not acknowledged as members of society. I’ve been able to find a small handful of studies the survey the views of children, and all but two of them are completely focused on HIV/AIDS or concrete educational issues. Studies of how children here think about the world, what they want, who they aspire to be, what they worry about, has not been touched. No one has done a study like this, period. “I just want us to realize that when this study is finished no one in the world will know more about these issues than the three of us in this room. No one. We will be the foremost experts on the topic, after only a few months of study” said Jacob Mills, another Pamoja member who will be overseeing my work and who (coincidentally?) worked as a professional pollster in the USA. The plan is to take two (and a half) phases. In the first phase we’ll create a wide variety of questions in a wide variety of styles and ask a number of children around the urban and rural area of Arusha. This is a “test” survey, and we’ll use the data to decide what styles and approaches work, and what specific interesting content we want to pursue. The students will be speaking Swahili, so one of Pamoja’s main commitments is to hire a translator to accompany me. The next phase will involve an extensive refining of the questions and surveying ideally 1000-1200 students from the ages 7-14. Again, huge, because many of these children will be functionally illiterate or will produce gibberish on a paper survey, so it will all have to verbal, one student at a time, over a wide range of urban/rural, economic, and ethnic locations. This part of the process will probably take about three weeks. We’ll then process and analyze the data, and return to a small number of students with very representative or atypical answers and ask “why” to get one step deeper into the factors behind the values and to glean some useful quotations straight from the children’s mouths. “In the end,” said Jacob, “if we’re willing to share our data - and we are - people are going to want to know about this, because they are desperate for this kind of information... And practically anything you write about the results will be publishable simply by merit of what you’ve done and what you’re talking about.” So the end result will be a paper on the findings for Pamoja to distribute to a wide range of NGOs that could benefit from knowing more about the values of children (hundreds if not thousands of people in the Arusha area alone), and to send for publication to a number of African-issues journals. All very exciting stuff for me! Beyond that there’s the constant sense from everyone I talk to that this is important work and so applicable and valuable for so many areas of developmental work here. I’ve bumped into people in AIDS education, wildlife conservation, agricultural development, poverty alleviation, education improvement, orphanages, hospitals, and churches, and practically every single person has heard what I’m doing and started talking about how they could apply the information in their field of work. Children are the next generation in Tanzania, but no one really knows how they’re motivated, what they want, how they see their place in the world, how they expect the future to be, what role they aspire to play in society when they grow up, etc. I think the significance of thousands of westerners trying to make a sustainable improvement in the lives of the people here without really knowing how those people are thinking and acting is clear. I’m left baffled that nothing like this has been done before, but everyone’s time and resources are taken up by more “immediate” concerns. During this process I’ve constantly had the feeling that I’m ever so slightly over my head here, but just enough that I’ll barely manage to drink up all the extra water before I drown.. Just where I like to be! A few days after the first visit to Pamoja I sat down with Lara Warren from Adopt a School, Tanzania. ( www.adoptaschool.info/). Adopt a School is another NGO that uses government statistics to find the worst-performing public schools in the greater Arusha area and then “Adopts” that school, recruiting financers from the West and instituting a five-year process that aims to make the school one of the best performing in the district. It starts with construction (often a school of 250 students has a single dilapidated school room), moves on to creating water supplies on the school grounds (many of these locations are 10 km from the nearest water supply, and students spend several periods carrying the day’s water to school), supplies schoolroom material (pens and notebooks are often non-existent, and one ancient textbook might be shared with an entire class), then tries to address personnel shortages (one school I visited had 250 students in six grades, and four teachers) and teacher-training, etc. There are three elements I most admire about Adopt a School process. First, they carefully screen potential sites for commitment, lack of corruption (it’s rare that a school doesn’t have at least one teacher who uses government school-supplies money to support his alcoholism, and in “biggest problems” surveys students often list “teacher attendance” in the top three) and schools are only adopted when it’s clear that the staff is committed to the needs of the children. A rare thing already; teachers are paid 100,000 Tanzanian Shillings (= $66, or $2 a day), and are often moved to a new school anywhere else in the country every few years. Teachers are not trained in how to teach a class, and most teaching seems to consist of reading out of a textbook while students repeat each sentence or copying it on the blackboard. Little thought is given to effective transfer of information, it’s the students’ responsibility to memorize and the regurgitate the information. Desire to do more than the (very demanding!) bare minimum is very rare. Second, once a school has been selected for adoption, Adopt a School staff meet with the school and village council and ask “what do you need?” “What do we know about what they need,” says Lara, an Oxford Law graduate who is directing the organization in the absence of her Father, Brad Warren, who founded it. “They know what they need. If they say the need water, you can be pretty sure that they need water! If they say chalk, they need chalk. It cuts out a lot of guesswork and cross-cultural misunderstanding that way.” Third, the process of funding and development ruthlessly adheres to the philosophy of “bega kwa bega” (Swahili for “Shoulder to Shoulder”). At the very beginning of the process agreements are made about what the local community can provide, and what Adopt a School will supply. Usually the local community volunteers labor and local resources, Adopt a school funds the more expensive materials. “It’s all clear from the beginning: they do this, we do that. If they stop, we stop... It’s hard, and sometimes we’ve had to completely walk away from projects and lose everything we put into it, but you give too much; it destroys people. That’s what creates nations of beggars and lay-abouts. They’ll have no motivation to maintain and value the facilities and material, and three years later it will be like you were never there. If you can’t get the community to be involved in the project then there’s no point in anyone else being involved either.” These principles line up with everything I’ve witnessed about how and how not to do development work. The focus on education and the improvement of opportunities for the younger generation also seems like where I’d put my proverbial money. “Brad has always focused on the education of a person. Being a good person is more important than being smart.” Adopt a School seems to be going everything right in the effort to facilitate both better educated students, and simply good and hopeful people. After meeting six different NGOs I asked Honza which one he would fund if he could only choose one, and after much thought he chose Adopt a School, saying that it seems to be making the most difference out of the least resources. After a couple of hours of chatting about Adopt a School Lara was eager to find a way for me to be involved. Over the next weeks I visited several of their adopted schools with her, and saw first hand the transformation taking place. In the end it was decided that I will live for at least one month in one of these schools, where I would have several goals. The headmaster of the school (where 250 students have four teachers) was desperate for me to stay on immediately. “come, you stay for only two days now, teaching English and sports, it can help up very much!” I took this as a warm welcome and managed to leave, saying I would come back for a longer time if I could. He suggested I take over the English teaching for the entire school, teach basic math (ha!) and lead sports. He also wants me to oversee the construction of new buildings (I’ve already seen several examples of the fact that if you don’t watch laborers carefully, within hours you can guarantee hollow walls, watery cement, and crooked ceilings, and the “extra” material will “disappear”). Lara wants to help the school with their teaching needs, but has other motivations for my involvement: “First of all, I’d like you to keep an eye on everything for me. This is the first school we adopted, it’s pretty far along the process and we’d like it to be a model school, but I need someone inside to tell me what’s really going on. Then I’d like you to observe the teachers. Our newest project is to develop teacher-training programs to improve the awful teaching, but no one with Adopt a School has any teaching experience, so it would be really helpful for you to get a sense of the needs and then help us figure out how to improve it. And also, you’re the first volunteer in this area, so if you could keep a record of your experience and afterward write up a kind of introduction to the culture-shock and experience for now volunteers that would be great!” Again, all right up my alley! And again, just a bit over my head. The school is extremely rural. Really rural. And for anyone who’s seen the pictures of my Indian village you know that really means something. It’s at the end of about 30km of a spider web of jarring dirt “roads,” and has no electricity, running water, or shops anywhere near. The “no electricity” part worries mean, since it pretty much cuts me off from my computer, music, cell phone, camera, etc. But I suppose for a month I’ll survive. The house where I’ll live is pretty nice! It actually has rooms, concrete walls, and a real door! So there you have it! Man, I thought it would be easier to summarize this! Thanks for your interest, feel free to ask any questions and you can be sure that I’ll update you on significant mile-stones! For pictures of my Adopt a School visit: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=561383&id=768420318&l=91facbf293

One Way Or Another, It’s The Little Things: Part 2

2010-09-21T14:21:00.000-07:00

19-IX Arusha Hmm, cheese burger! Of course it will be terrible, but there’s only one way to find out! “You have cheeseburger?” We’d missed breakfast, spent an hour going through countless restaurants that didn’t serve lunch, it was getting past noon, and we were hungry! The stage was set for another day of the traveler’s eternal game of “battle and surrender.” Dealing with cultural and developmental obstacles is just part daily life - make that minute to minute life - in many places in the world, and if you don‘t learn to deal with nothing going your way, you won‘t last long. But when it concerns something that MUST work out, such as food or lodgings or time-sensitive transport, then things get a bit more personal. It can be anything from life-and-death to “just one of those days,” and as I looked up at our waiter I knew the game was on. You learn to recognize instantly when things are going to be a little more complicated... which is most of the time for a budget traveler. “You have cheeseburger?” The waiter squints at me with the exact expression usually provoked by someone suddenly squealing "Ekwa Gobbly Goo!" “Yes?” “cheeseburger.” I point it out carefully on the menu. “You have?” “chapati?” “cheeseburger.. Here.” “yes. ” “One cheeseburger please.” “Yes.” My experienced traveling companion Steffen has already ordered by pointing to a dish served to the next table and holding up one finger. “One of these.” “Yes.” My not-so-experienced companion Jan spends the next 10 minutes tearing (almost literally) through the menu. “Do you have milk?” “Milk finished.” “Milk finished. Okay, what about some chicken with rice or vegitables or something, do you have anything like that?” “chicken finished.” “Finished. Then I’ll have a hamburger.” “Burger finished.” “Of course, then maybe some fish. What kind of fish is it? Is it fresh?” “Yes?” “Yes it’s fresh or yes you have?” “Yes?” “Fish?” “Fish finished.” “Fish finished. So I guess I’ll just have some pastries. You have some pastries there behind the counter, right? What kind do you have?” “…” “There, what’s that?” “chapati?” “No, no chapati, that one there. The fluffy one.” “…” “Here!” Jan gets up and points through the glass. “Give me two of these.” “yes.” “And now to drink I’ll take... I suppose if you don’t have milk you don’t have milk tea, right?” “yes?” “Milk tea? Do you have it or not?” “Yes.” “You have it? How do you have milk tea if you don’t have milk?” “Milk finished.” “Yes I know milk’s finished, so how do you have milk tea?” “Milk finished.” “I’m almost finished with this restaurant, you know that?” “Yes?” Somehow Jan ordered something, all the while with Steffen and myself stiffling our snorts of amusement and bracing ourselves for whatever could (and probably would) go wrong with our orders. But in a few minutes Steffen had his meal, a nice sausage thali, and I had my coke, and there seemed to be some hopeful activity in the kitchen. Jan got his pastries, Steffen was informed that “coffee finished,” Jan that “Fanta finished,” and I waited happily for my cheeseburger. Both finished eating, I finished drinking, and after another 10 minutes I called over the waiter. “cheeseburger coming, yes?” “Yes?” “cheeseburger.” “chapati?” “No, here, look. Cheese-burg-er. Coming?” “yes.” “Okay.” It’s always a good idea to check your watch often in these countries. Once you adapt to “African time” or “Indian time” you can find yourself waiting two hours for something before realizing that it’s never going to happen. I set my timer for 15 minutes. The time passes quickly. I stand and peer into the kitchen, a risky move but sometimes necessary. I see the cook leaning against a wall, and no cooking in sight. I return to my table and call the waited. “my cheeseburger?” I point again to cheeseburger on the menu and tap my watch. “cheeseburger finished.” “You tell me three times yes and now finished?” “Yes?” “Right, great. Bring me three samosa.” “Samosa. Four?” “Three.” “yes.” Two minutes later four samosa arrive. I eat them hungrily. The bills shows a predictable attempt to overcharge us by 50%. After a few minutes of obligatory arguing we calculate our own bill, underpay ever so slightly, leave the money on the table, and leave. Finished, yes?

The Hunter Winks

2010-09-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

15-IX -Yushoto You don’t meet them often, but there are people who know that living means searching. They’ve developed a certain degree of comfort with the futility of ever ending the search, and just embrace it with the smallest (but necessary) hint of a wink offstage. Knowing they can only search, they keep their eyes and ears open. Every person or piece of information can be essential, or meaningless, or both. A conversation between two such individuals has the tone of two career treasure-hunters, chatting about past experiences and sharing a laugh, always sifting through each word for a clue, a hint, a secret that neither can be sure exists, but is worth being sought anyway, must be sought regardless! A wink, a laugh, a knowing look; these moments rarely take place without deep ripples over the surface of all that follows.

A Blue I Never Knew

2010-09-21T14:17:00.000-07:00

8-IX Kendwa Rocks, Zanzibar Zanzibar is now little more than the echo of all its name evokes, and apart from the “real African” interior of ubiquitous red dust roads and crumbling villages it exists as a long string of beach resorts walled off from the “Africa” outside, complete with barbwired gates and beefy security guards to ensure that “the outsiders inside” are not disturbed by anything close to reality. Still, sitting in the middle of a perfect tropical paradise, surrounded by honeymooners and flirtatious singles, and especially carefully whispering under your breath the syllables “Zan-za-bar, Zan-za-bar” over and over, can hardly fail to produce something like nostalgia for something too distant to know, and in the writer it time and again brings to the cold blue surface the type of shameless dribble that follows: Straight from my notebook: A Blue I Never Knew On Snow-white sands of Zanzibar, a ruby sun slips off the edge of the world, behind gulls and palms and canvas sails; and all is drifting, drifting, drifting away, as I miss you. Heaven’s a mirage without you here to see it, warm sand through my toes all unreal without your hand in mine. I don’t know who you are, or where, or when our eyes will meet, but I love you, I need you, I want you here with me, in Zanzibar.

Strraight From My Notebook

2010-09-02T16:14:00.000-07:00

27-VIII Lake Naivasha “There are few feelings like crouching in the grass on a wide landscape, creeping closer to a grazing Antelope, trying to ignore the distant roaring of the bathing Hippos, when suddenly you catch a glimpse of sharp black and white stripes gliding silently by you, almost close enough to touch; the feeling of being part of it all again, of belonging to a wilder realer world, feeling a little closer to home.” 28-VIII Hell's Gate “The sounds of the wild drift in on the breeze. The snorting Boar, the rutting Antelope, strange trillings and the snap of a twig as the Zebra pass. Looking out over an ancient gorge full of ghosts of Maasai Warriors and far-from-home Explorers, as stars wink and storms brush over the roof of Creation, and there’s no one else in all the world, a world that has never known loneliness. This is Africa.” 29-VIII Kenya-Tanzania Border "I’m now on a very bumpy dusty bus from Nairobi to Arusha, jumping and rattling down a red dirt road under the equatorial sun, passing cloud-crowned mountains leaping up from the red Serengeti plains, an occasional hut crowded with goats and color-clad women at a well peek through the thorny umbrella trees and disappear, and sometimes, if you watch carefully, a red-checkered figure almost as tall and thin as his spear treads his slow way over an ancient Maasai hunting path; lives and ages glimmer into sight, then vanish like frightened antelope into the dust and bush."

Straight From My Notebook...

2010-09-02T16:12:00.001-07:00

16-VIII Mombasa

First impressions of Africa? Looking out the plane window past the runway to warm red hills fading into the morning, a richness in the air, not hot or humid even, just full; full of something else… another world, again, and this one stirred excitement in my chest, like a kind-eyed stranger it wiped away my love-tears and with a wordless wave revealed all the beauty and hope around me. The first words? Not even through the gate, the grinning WC cleaner exclaims “Welcome to Kenya!” with a smile to rival Christmas morning. A subtle request for change? Perhaps, but warm nonetheless. No haggling with the taxi driver, no commission scams in sight. When I finally ask for guest house recommendations he just points out the cheapest and lets me be. Such a friendly guy helps me find my guesthouse, and after initial reservations from the reception my US passport provokes jokes about Obama and “you must take me to America! Problem? You married?”

Rest of the day spent sleeping, thinking of what I’ve left behind, walking the streets and enjoying not getting stared at… when people do look here it’s discrete, with a curiosity and creativity that is… human.

Of course this is Mombasa, the most touristy place that is not Nairobi, but it could not give a better first impression of Kenya. I’m still very pleased Honza is coming, and very curious about this hospital project; I would be quite aimless alone! This first month should be a blast!

Three Things

2010-09-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

The first page of my book? Probably not, but it's a start.. I've spent my life searching. It hasn't been a simple search, stubbornly focused on one thing and one thing only. For some years, during my brightest or darkest moments, I strained every muscle to see up past the stars or to peer down at the far boundaries of my soul. I've sought answers of all kinds, hunted meaning and hope and love, and have caught myself countless times chasing after fame, money, success, pleasure, and all those passing things we so dearly want to believe have value.

We all pass our days seeking things high and low, like some collective secret hobby. But in the step by step of life, I think we're all hoping and yearning for the Path to lead us through three things: the right place, the right profession, and the right person. Few of us find all three, at least not at the same time, but without at least one fewer still are strong enough to be content anyway, or lazy enough to be indifferent.

This is the story of my dance with these three treasures, my personal jewels that only I can light up and that only have light for me. For years I tried to ignore them, wanting to live for something "higher." I really believed I could substitute beauty for belonging, means for meaning, or freedom for love, at least for a time. But as my search drove me on, through strange lands and stranger people, my road kept curving under my feet, leading me back to what I might never find but couldn't live without, leading me home. This is the story of how I slowly, in the hardest way possible, found out what really matters in life, and tried to let go of everything else.

On Leaving

2009-09-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

When I was 21 I’d lived my entire life essentially in one house. I’d never crossed a national border, said good-bye to more than one friend at a time, or packed for more than a month away. If you’d told me then that within 6 years I’d be in the middle of my 5th inter-continental move (with two more bearing down on me), I might not have laughed, but I’m sure I would have smiled, taking it, strangely, as rather blatant flattery. I remember my first real departure, the intensity of it, the thrill and pain and the tears through laughter. I remember how alive I felt. In the years since, filled with heart-wrenching goodbyes under the security cameras and joyful meetings at baggage claim, the airports and faces and tears have slowly bled into one anonymous past, as if I were acting in a film based on a true story, trying to touch a flame that can’t touch me. The strongest ache now comes not from the bracing punch of reality, but from the inability to feel anything that could do justice to the moment, to what those around me are feeling. But like fear, most passion - perhaps even most emotion - is rooted in the unknown, and it is inevitable that those who leave expose the truth that can’t be learned by staying: mere moments after saying goodbye to everything we’ve ever known, life goes on. That is, at least, what we tell ourselves, as we step through another metal detector and wave that final wave again. It is clear to me that experience grants a certain familiarity with what I will feel, what will be said to me, and what I must do. But familiarity can only take me so far. The one certainty about every departure is uncertainty; we never step out of the same river twice. Departures are like a treadmill that’s just a bit too fast for me - no matter how hard I run it will throw me off. Even though repetition may take away the initial shock of being thrown, even if I learn to approximate when the fall will come, the fact remains that the ground on which I stand is about to make a dramatic change of speed. The only thing that really changes is how quickly I can get up, dust myself off, and step back on. “Certainly it hurts,” says H.W. Lawrence. “The trick… is not minding that it hurts.” We are sedentary creatures by nature. The desire to be rooted is in our bones, the act of uprooting ourselves always strikes a nerve. Leaving a group of people sets the clock ticking away against me a little faster than it should, and I rarely get the right words out in time (and when I do there are always more right words that come too late). To whatever lengths I go, the sought for feeling of being “ready” to leave the person is never quite achieved. Of course not, as long as I’m trying to heal all trace of heartache, since the deepest ache demands one and only one remedy: to not leave. Aches will linger, loose-ends will dangle, and regrets are as inevitable as mistakes. The only true completion is the one that starts with birth and ends with death, all other acts leave something incomplete, a farewell to what has become my life and yet I live on. And so departures always catch us off guard, feeling unprepared in some corner of our hearts. I know this all too well, but just as understanding the force of gravity might alleviate some confusion but do nothing to free me from the effects, so it is with the force of leaving. No matter how collected I manage to be, no matter how quickly I can get up off the floor, I will always leave something behind. 　

The Living Museum

2009-06-03T22:49:00.000-07:00

What must it feel like to be a living museum? How can one exist as part of a past so remote, so indistinct, so lost, without becoming lost as well? Undeniably the past has parented this present world, but no silvery mirror, no drop of blood, no spark of the mind betrays a thread of common lineage. The present age is an orphan, raised in a world of foster families and half-brothers, all unsure of what a parent is, even as the ghosts of our mothers and fathers drift through the haunted orphanage, barely seen but impossible to ignore. There are those who choose the shadow world; as ghosts they walk through our world while living in the world we came from, too long ago to remember. What must it feel like to put on the face of a mother, a father, a Creator, and see the child gawk, chatter nervously, take a picture, and remember nothing?

This young woman walked past me, and though I don't know where she came from or where she was going - doubtless from one meticulously recreated world to another - her transition through the world of broad daylight was spellbinding indeed. Though avoiding the main bustling streets her quiet passage drew a crowd; not of foreigners longing for an elusive glimpse of the Japan they came to see, but of Japanese schoolchildren and grandmas and adults going home from work, digging for their cameras and hesitantly mumbling the one-word request "picture?" They're uncomfortable, uncertain how to speak with this specter, frightened by their fascination, and she is just as reluctant, silent, as displaced as a deer transported to the streets of Tokyo. The contrast is drawn by one old man whose confidence is grating "Hey there, where are you going? I'll bet you're going to the tea houses? Isn't that right? Right? Hey, Maiko-san, say something!"

Maiko means "dancing girl," the title for an apprentice geisha, a rigorous year-long trial by fire entered into -in Kyoto and Nara- usually before the age of 18. Her averted gaze and nervous grace begin to take on new meaning, new poignancy. What must it feel like to choose a life of mystery in a world where ever rattle is broken and every lock picked? Can ghosts of our past survive in the blinding light we've created? What happens when we look back without memory, stare into the eyes of our parents without recognition? What can we do with this exhibit, out of joint, too real, too strange? What must it feel like to be a living museum?

Random Thoughts, May

2009-05-31T20:54:00.001-07:00

-Do birds know that cats can’t fly, Or are they just relieved to not be followed into the sky? -Sometimes I feel like the only one who thinks that happiness and contentment ought not to be the highest goals of life. -Humanity’s greatest need is to stop needing anything beyond what we have. -The written word will never be able to compete with the spoken word. In print we all hear the words in our own voice, spoken in a way we would expect. Only the words spoken into our ears from an existence separate from our own allows the full power of the “other” to sink its teeth into us. -Rather than miss people who are far away, I spend much more time missing the people who are right in front of me. -When dealing with a captive audience, the only thing that counts is the ending. -Having no one to rely on by no means guarantees the development of self-sufficiency; the fires of loneliness and disorientation can destroy as easily as refine. But still it is immeasurably easier to find the strength within one’s self when there is nowhere else to look. When the dream-like possibilities of romantic salvation and heroic leaders whisper and reach out, it’s extraordinarily difficult to not reach back, regardless of all hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of it all.

Wakayama Wanderings Illustrated

2009-05-27T00:29:00.000-07:00

I've been unusually busy this week, and legitimately haven't had time and/or energy to continue with the story of Wakayama Wanderings. I did, however, have the energy to tinker with my pictures from the trip, and here are the results. I'm trying to expand the limits of my editing ability, since that now strikes me as more essential with a SLR camera, and as a result these pictures are obviously over-processed. Still, if not all of them are exactly art, they at least give a good idea of what I saw and experienced on the trip. Please let me know what you think, and any critical pointers are very welcome. These are in no particular order, because pictures are a pain to organize on this site. :-) You can click on them for a full-sized (though low quality) version. Once again, to be continued...!

In Search of the Real Japan: Wakayama Wanderings

2009-05-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

“Sometimes reality is bigger than your dreams.” A friend wrote me these words years ago, speaking about hard-learned lessons in her young life. But somehow they kept echoing in my head while I was facing a very different struggle: how to describe the unimaginable force of an experience that I can’t quite explain to myself?

What is it about a still forest path fading around a bend that touches my soul? Why do stray wisps of clouds dancing on a mountainside make me more content than all the company and possessions I could desire? How can a subtle shift of self-perception so slight that it falls into the dark crack between words seem to light up the world with new colors and shades? I may never know, just as I may never really be able to explain the momentous non-events of the past two weeks.

In my teenage years I used to hang from a bar for two minutes every night for chiropractic reasons. Quickly I learned that being able to see the timer count down the slow seconds was the worst kind of torture, that the task was significantly less difficult if I just closed my eyes and waited for the beep. When I knew exactly when I could let go, somehow it seems like I couldn't have held on a second longer.

I had a relapse of this lesson in the weeks before my recent vacation. I just had to get out, had to get time to breathe, and I was counting the days, the hours even, watching freedom drift imperceptible closer. Tick...Tck...Tick... By the time the final beep came I exploded out of the office with the speed of gravity yanking my twitching fingers off that bar. “Mountains,” my soul sang, “mountains mountains mountains!” It’s strange how loneliness can make me yearn for solitude. I guess humans are prepared to adapt to almost any circumstances; it’s half-life that kills us. The majority of my time in Japan is spent alone, but only in the worst way. Every minute of the work day is spent surrounded by people with whom I can’t communicate or who don’t have time to communicate with me, and I can find neither the opportunity for company nor the freedom to be alone. Ironically I was about to use my two weeks of freedom in an attempt to seize both ends of the spectrum. Along with planning a long awaited soul-cleansing trek though the majestic mountains to the south, I’d also invited one of my closest friends to come down from Tokyo and join me during the time that our holidays overlapped. I had a few days before she was free, however, so on a whim I decided to head for a monastic center called Koya-san, by way of Osaka. Osaka was, as always, the perfect launching pad for a quest for “Serene Japan,” for the simply reason that Osaka is anything, absolutely anything, but serene. A showcase for the modern “Real Japan” in all it’s glorious facsimile and impenetrable superficiality, this city makes my head spin every time. After this, I reasoned, almost any place would seem peaceful and simple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eBkmBIifQ0&feature=channel_page

I then headed to Koya-san, with very few expectations. http://www.youtube.com/user/extravpenguin Koya-san filled me with two very strong and diametrically opposed reactions. Wandering through the vast mossy lantern-lit cemetery long after dark, for the first time I was suddenly seized with the thought that I don’t want to leaveJapan. The cemetery overwhelmed me, and quite defeated my camera at all times of day or night. I could have spent days there, and this is to say nothing of the 100+ temples nestled into the mountains nearby. Rooms full of golden lanterns and thick incense, massive pagodas housing enchanted goddesses, monks robes swishing over tatami, bells at dawn and dusk; and to think I nearly didn’t come. The rub is that there are so many places in Japan that could be equally inspiring, and yet I have plans that pull on me and very little time or money to see much more than I’ve already seen. I’ve been killing time, waiting for the real adventure to begin (much by necessity, the majority of my time is killed at work whether I assist in the “mercy killing” or not). Now I realize that I need more time, that I’ve missed so much.

It’s more than sightseeing that I’m talking about. As I walked past wave after wave of unique Buddhist statues, some barely peeking their noses out of dark knotholes, others towering over me in the gloom, most standing quiet guard over the glint of scattered coins, cups of sake, oranges small and big, vases of flowers, I felt myself being confronted with devotion. Japan is anything but a country of religious fervor. The most pronounced spiritual characteristics are an adherence to tradition and a passive tolerance that comes not from an acceptance of all, but a happy indifference to all. But here, with every chisel mark, every fresh flower, every chanted prayer, I could feel faith. It’s different than any faith I’ve known before, the material and function is different, but it’s real faith. The temple where I slept welcomed its visitors to morning prayers, and in the candle-lit room shrouded in incense, as I listened to the chants and prayers of these mostly young men, I realized that I was looking at them as a kind of living museum, put on display in an “historically-accurate” environment, fulfilling tradition and duty with their lives. Just as quickly I realized that they in no way see themselves this way. Unlike the geisha in Kyoto, living a life of history for those who want a taste of the past, these monks have a sense of their own value and meaningfulness in the here and now. They live in sincere devotion to a belief in something they cannot see or touch. In the face of the tourist’s camera their eyes do not flit away as do the geisha’s, who knows she’s on display; they smile, ignore, frown, in essence they react as someone who lives a real life in a real world, not a prop for historical reenactment. They live lives of devotion, of faith. Back in the cemetery after morning prayers row after row of stone figures roll out of sight beyond the towering trees, chronicling age upon age of that faith and devotion. And the visitors to these monuments come, wearing dark ropes or “well-worn style” jeans, carrying a pilgrim’s staff or the newest digital camera, they walk, they ride, they fly, covering the distance in hours or weeks, but the sounds of a splash, a clap, a chant are the same in this place as they have been for a thousand years, perhaps for a thousand years more.

These revelations crowded my mind, and I am overwhelmed by what more this country could reveal to me, if only time were not running out.

At the same time, other thoughts balance my awe. No site of any note in Japan can fully escape the country’s compulsive “Will to Convenience.” Never mind that some things were intended to be difficult; I suppose nothing feels cheapened as long as the price-tag stays high. In Koya-san the primary manifestation of Modern Japan’s restless tentacles is a road. It’s the only main road, can’t be too old, and it runs right through the middle of the temples, literally past their front doors, and the sound of engines can be heard everywhere: the raked rock gardens, the painted tea rooms, the inner sanctuaries, none escape the roar of traffic. Kobo-Daishi, the founding monk of the 8th century, hunted for years to find this place far from the distractions of the ancient capitals in Kyoto and Nara. It would have taken weeks to get here from anywhere in those days, and all would be left behind in the process. Now it’s a day trip, there and back again within hours, and the accessibility of all the world has to offer is as impossible to ignore as the ever-flowing river of cars.

Could not the region’s inter-city highway be built away from this place of serenity? Would it be impossible to ask visitors seeking peace to park their cars a few blocks away and walk into a refuge from noise and commotion? But I’m sure that when the road was prepared for automobiles that no thought was given to this, only to convenience and access. And with that access other elements of the world have infiltrated as well. Every guest room in the temple I slept at was fitted with a T.V. Yes, if we want to stay at the temple we must respect the monastic lifestyle by getting up for prayers at 5:30, but we can spend the rest of the time soaking up Japanese game shows and American sitcoms. The austere temple hallways include barely-concealed vending-machines and “western style” toilets with heated seats and an array of buttons, and down the street lines of shops sell “collectable” Buddha key-chains and “vegetarian snacks.”

Somehow these worlds live side-by-side, and let’s not forget that I myself am a tourist here, but somehow it feels diluted, and much that the location and history of this place intended has not escaped the world of “all things to all people, at a fair price and a convenient time.” Enlightenment out for sampling with the pickled ginger, spiritual pilgrimage by way of a weekend package bus tour, a soothing escape from all we bring with us. This is a place of strength, a real place, and it seems that Koya-san has managed to use its spirit of vitality as a selling point without selling its soul. But something is missing. No matter how deep I breathe there’s still a tightness in my heart, and the simple darkness behind my eyelids is inevitably invaded by the noise of complexity. The world was held back, but it never seemed very far away, reminding me that my escape is temporary. Now I know more clearly what I am looking for, and I’m ready to go deeper.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Preview

2009-05-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

Like dreaming,

Like slowly waking,

The Mountains welcome me home.

As clouds kiss the trees,

The rain ends.

Devotion in stone, even prayers sent up alone, still cut to the bone. Just a preview of the upcoming multi-media presentation of my recent trip, coming soon to a computer near you (I promise!).

Snapshots

2009-04-20T00:25:00.000-07:00

We are besieged by the images surrounding us, and all too often overrun and enslaved by them. We see those stunningly serene photographs, of a Japanese garden, say, or dawn over a mountain lake, and we want it; not what is shown, per se, but what is felt, though the distinction is lost on us these days. So we go out in search of that feeling, represented in our minds by a picture which froze a temporary conduit of peace. We hike, climb, run, and these days even fly the world over. We scour the guidebooks, set our cameras to burst mode in hopes of a “lucky capture,” and race against our limited time to find stillness by lightly sprinting from one sight to the next, like window-shopping with loose change or visiting a buffet on a half-full stomach; we can’t afford to commit to anything exclusively. We are mystified that we’re never able to grasp what we came to find, that the city we saw in that movie looks more like a movie set, that the pristine wilderness is filled with bugs and tourists, that seeing the perfect picture through our lenses doesn’t bring our spirits closer to it. We seem to really believe that quantity will bring us quality, that given enough 25 minute visits sooner or later one moment will magically open and reveal eternity. The picture may be captured, an escape from routine may be achieved, but like wisps of cotton candy these can only tease at substance; and we know, in those moments when all attempts at distraction fall short, that we are starving. The irony is clear, that the deep peace we seek is exactly what cannot be found in the shallowly ferocious way we hunt it. The tragedy might be less clear, that what we catch whiffs of through glossy magazines and flashing screens is not something to seek, but something to claim. The longing we feel from that glassy mountain lake cannot be captured, it comes with stillness and deep breaths and quiet rejection of the frantic pace of life (a pace that most travel embraces). Real purification and serenity is exactly what we don’t have time for, and in our hurry to find it we rush past every opportunity to stop and claim it. But cannot the same be said of peace no matter where we are? Sitting on the floor in the middle of a silent room, eyes closed, breath deep, petty complications put aside, can we not feel peace, touch eternity, taste the renewal that all the travel agencies try to sell us? Perhaps the view, once we open our eyes, of a cluttered room will not compare to that quiet lake, or the interruptions might be a crying baby rather than a startled deer, but the moment, the stillness, the renewal, is the same. Wherever we are, we must know what we seek, rejecting all cheap (or expensive!) substitutes and flashy counterfeits, and claim it firmly. No more desperate snapshops, no more escapes to new cages, no more dreaming of shadows. It’s time to be where we are, be who we are, and be at peace.

Speaker Beware

2009-04-13T01:10:00.000-07:00

In Japan there seems to be no understanding of the need to express things, in the most Latin sense of the word: to communicate feelings, ideas, experiences, just to get them out. Being in such a close-quarters self-contained culture for so long, one of the exceptional elements of Japanese people is their ability to stay inside themselves. It doesn’t demand the same kind of effort of them as it would in the West to take a secret to the grave, or to wear a mask that is never lifted. If there is something you don’t want to make public, then you keep it to yourself, it’s as simple as that. Once something is spoken it’s communal property, with none of the unspoken understanding that this-and-that shouldn’t reach so-and-so’s ears. After all, if it was any kind of secret, why not just keep it inside? Before I realized this it took many experiences of voicing half-private impressions, thoughts, or questions about a colleague to another in unspoken confidence, only to have my “confidante” quickly translate it and shout it across the room to the person in question, all in complete innocence, oblivious to the notion that if I’d wanted my words broadcasted I would have asked for such services. If you want privacy here, you have to find it within yourself.

Spider Web Cracks

2009-04-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

“Everywhere you go, people are people.” My grandma said these words to me over 10 years ago when she returned from a trip to Kenya. I believed them, and still do, but somehow after 8 months Japan still seems like a different planet to me, and not in spite of the people, but because of them. In actual fact the parameters that define humanity really are quite narrow, especially when you allow the imagination free rein to consider all the potential variations that could manifest themselves in the human condition. The catch is that we are sensitive, hypersensitive even, to the slightest deviation from what we’ve learned to be “the norm.” We are creatures of habit, and absolutely anything that forces us to reevaluate our surroundings casts an alien tint to the whole environment. Logic has nothing to do with it, and understanding does not dilute the response. I can understand how some people have no problem with their food looking back at them with unblinking eyes, and they can understand my hesitancy, but they still find my squeamishness humorous, and I find their crunching on an intact head disgusting. The tables are turned when my colleagues silently stare wide-eyed at me as I nonchalantly munch on an apple without removing the skin. If Europeans can travel across the Atlantic and eat a meal using a knife and fork at the same time and the Americans “looked at us like monkeys,” what do we feel when the Japanese restaurant offers only untried chopsticks, or the African hut offers no utensils at all? Just today my misreading of the Japanese date system (yy.mm.dd, with the Japanese year system, so that today is 21.4.6) resulted in a bit of chaos, several times in Prague (dd.mm.yy) a similar mistake resulted in a hefty expiration fine, and returning to America (mm.dd.yy) always forces me to think twice before filling in any paperwork (or gets me strange looks from the bank employees when I don’t think twice). Driving on the left still gives me an occasional heart attack, the dance between bowing and handshaking is a complication frequently added to already complicated introductions, and the sight of knee-high socks with tights or the sharing of motor-functions between a bike, a cell phone, and a sun-brella never fails to make me smile in bewilderment. Last week I arrived at my school’s graduation in my best three-piece brown suit, to discover that I was the only person in a crowd of two hundred not wearing a black suit with a white shirt and tie (as if being a head taller didn’t make me stand out enough). While the Japanese sleep on the floor on a thin mattress and find western beds unbearably soft (my Japanese friends in America quickly started sleeping on the floor), most foreigners here spend a week with stiff backs and buy a bed. Are these big, paradigm-altering differences? No, they are mere matters of preference and condition, easily explained if somewhat harder to accept, and sometimes nearly impossible to adopt. Can these be the variations that drive cultures apart and into conflict, sparking fear and hate and violence? Probably not. But it takes nothing more extreme to shake us out of our habitual auto-pilot and simplifying assumptions and to force us to question everything; to return– in a sense– to wide-eyed infancy, with all the hang-ups of adulthood. These trivial differences are enough to remind me, every single day, that I am in a place that is alien to me, as I am to it, that their way is not my way, that I will always need the words “them” and “us.” If all it takes is a wrinkled nose, a poorly-timed look, or a misunderstood smile to cause discomfort, uncertainty, and alienation, then what of the divergences that creep minusculely closer – while cutting disproportionately deeper – to the foundation we share? Of course we can understand – if we actually want to – how one culture says “individual” like a holy incantation while another uses it as an insult, why a woman unveiled is almost as threatening in one country as a woman veiled in another, that “unclean” might have nothing to do with germs or might have nothing to do with religion, how aid might be taken as a blessing or a burden, or where direct communication might be essential or essentially rude. But understanding only allows navigation through these pitfalls, and while that is the first step, it is still far from acceptance, tolerance, harmony, and community. The theories are clear enough, but face to face with foreignness the truisms - “We all smile in the same language,” “No man is an island” “Wherever you go, people are people” - begin to loose some of their soothing magic. The fact is that we’re not that different, really. An alien race looking down on us would have no trouble identifying us as one race, even without seeing our nearly identical physical forms. None of us are designed to be alone, we seek pleasure, we all know what it means to feel fear, anger, pain, embarrassment, satisfaction, affection, and, although cultural interpretations vary, love is universally understood. In groups we all need an “other” as much as we need a community, hierarchy comes naturally, and despite historical deviations the measure of “success” has always returned to the quantity of material possessions. We laugh, we sing, we dance, we cry, we fight, we love, and we die, every one, yesterday and today, in the east and west, north and south. Perhaps it’s the overwhelmingly foundational similarities that make the petty differences stand out so brightly. Especially evident in the globalized world, we have a remarkable ability to stand surrounded by familiar sights, clothing, brands, technology, faces, and even ideas, and be consumed by the slightest unfamiliarity. With ironically universal consistency, our ability to see aliens usually eclipses our ability to see brothers and sisters. So how to live in a world that is reducing the space of our lives much faster than the diversity therein? While the world is being brought together the people are as distant as ever, the main difference being that now the alien lives next door. Wherever real harmony lies, it is not in factual education. A standard day of errands in town brings us into contact with a dozen cultures, and while it would be a great start to know to bow to this person, to not hand this person money with the left hand, or to look over this person’s right ear and not at his eyes, this quickly descends into a mere memorization of infinite trivia that doesn’t bring true community or even guarantee a hospitable reception (some people have left their culture behind for a reason, or feel alienated by being treated as “different”). So if the attempt to memorize the varying behavior of every culture we meet is a futile dead-end, how can we responsibly respond to the globalized world? This is one of the large questions I’ve set to work out, and I have barely the beginning of an answer. As ideas occur to me, I’ll add to the following list, in hopes of creating a kind of blueprint for the best kind of understanding, a shortcut, if you will, to memorizing the detailed ins and outs of each culture we might encounter. 1. When it comes to responding to a new or foreign situation, I’ve observed three kinds of people. I’m not sure how these behavioral patterns are adopted, or if they can be changed once they are firmly established, but they are extremely easy to recognize. There are those whose instinct is to adjust the environment to suit their own needs and norms as much as possible. Others automatically tend to adjust themselves to the environment despite the personal inconvenience. In the context of multiculturalism, it should be clear which is more conductive to harmonious interaction. The third type is exceedingly rare and still something of a mystery to me: those who can effortlessly approach a situation in both the above ways at the same time without any apparent contradiction. Ex: One evening a few weeks ago I took four hungry friends to a restaurant I’d been raving about. I’d been there for the wonderfully presented and well-priced lunch, and wanted to share it with others. I led them through the bustling city, marched into “my restaurant”, and announced that there were five of us for dinner. After some initial uncertainty (which I chalked up to the usual hesitancy in the face of a group of foreigners) the employees guided us upstairs, showed us where to put our shoes and coats, brought us to a nice table, and left some menus that seemed strangely unfamiliar to me. I tried vainly to find the meals I’d enjoyed before, and after about five minutes the waitress returned with small bowls of unordered food. My Japan-savvy friend and I exchanged frightened glances. Instantly we knew that somehow we had stumbled into a izakaya, a place for Japanese company meetings and drinking parties, usually exorbitantly expensive and operating on a very different system than a typical restaurant. I learned that night that many of these places operate a regular restaurant during lunch time, and change to a izakaya in the evening, which explains why it was different than I remembered. What to do? We’d already been sitting there too long to slip out without affront. The first type of person from my description would of course just stand and leave anyway, feeling no obligation to continue with the unwritten contract he had mistakenly entered into. My friends and I were shown to be the second type, since once we realized what had happened we whispered to each other “well, it’s too late to leave now.” We decided to order the minimum amount of food that would allow us to escape without rudeness (about 4 bites of meat each, which ended up costing us $36), and then fled feeling embarrassed and robbed. In retrospect, I imagine that the third type of person would quickly size up the situation, and then communicate to the waitress that he’d made a mistake (I could have asked “is this a izakaya?” and then expressed shock to find out that it was, giving us a pretence to leave. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to us at the time (probably because we were already in the mindset of paying the price of awkwardness and inconvenience ourselves in order to shield the employees from it, a very Japanese reaction)… But even if the person knew not a word of the language, he could still make it clear that he was looking for something the restaurant didn’t have, or focus on the unordered food, etc). Then – this being Japan– bowing and apologizing profusely all the way to the door, making comments or signs about what a foolish foreigner he is, he could make his escape without causing any unnecessary ripples but also not inconveniencing himself. The keys to this third type, I’m beginning to see, are communication, graciousness, and an ability to charmingly manipulate the situation.

Make-Up

2009-03-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

"The problem with Japan is that I like the aesthetic a lot, but I don’t like the actual operation." -Foreign Resident of Japan

Suddenly my vision clears, and I find myself caught in a flood of bright wide eyes, swaying capes and skirts, flowing wigs of sexy color, and lashes fluttering like butterflies.

I’m captivated by it all, awed by how attractive and alluring this country can be, or knows how to be. A shy smile and wide innocent eyes are proven to be the most seductive, though both messages are affected. Images, ideas – people – are crafted here, in stunning, meticulous, effortless detail, crafted to and for perfection. No reservation here, no need for dignity when you have what you want. The display is on, batting eyes at clicking shutters, selling the image – self – for the thrill of a flash. All fear and uncertainty washed away, all safe behind the mask. A mask over masks, nothing more, and no hiding that, at least. There’s no claim to be anything but superficial, playing at hope, escape, a touch; all that we can’t stop wanting but can’t ever have. It’s all here to see, all here to want. Looking through the contacts, the lenses, the empty rims;

Let’s act like life, sleep through dreams, grin at love, snap a picture. It’s as close as we will get.

Spring Photography

2009-03-19T00:48:00.001-07:00

Spring is here, which means Plum and Cherry trees perform slow-motion explosions of color, birds burst into long-stifled song, the gracefully stunning kimonoed flowers of Japanese youth walk the lanes of Kyoto, and fire-festivals abound. Yes, Spring is here.

Being an ALT in Japan

2009-03-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

For those interested in knowing why I talk about "working" and "teaching" in Japan with quotation marks, and understanding what it's like (for me, at least) to be employed in the context of Japanese culture, I point you to this essay on my other blog: http://discoverthepenguinsworld.blogspot.com/2009/03/being-alt-in-japan.html

History

2009-03-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

In response to a question about the nuclear bombing of Japan, Azuma-san (who was 6 when the bombs were dropped) said: "You musn't ever forget it, but you have to forget it."

Melting-Pot Anyone?

2009-03-11T01:02:00.000-07:00

Why are so many people drawn to America? What is it about the “American Life,” whatever that might mean, that makes one country the destination or dream or perceived “Promise Land” of so many disparate cultures? The fact is that the American Dream is just that, a dream, for the majority of immigrants, and many cultures set up their own closed communities as if they wanted no part of the “American Life.” Yet the migration continues. It is not that America has found the perfect cultural common denominator, but rather that the material goods and quality of life that draws in every culture and lifestyle. In short, the key is not the American lifestyle but the perceived American easy of life. And this is important, because often we talk of people seeking out the “American way of life,” and then wonder how they can complain or refuse to adapt themselves when they finally arrive. They didn’t come for an “American way of life,” they came to continue their own lives and dreams (rooted in their own cultures, religions, languages, and experiences), only more comfortably.

(Photo: New York City, August 2007)

International Church

2009-03-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

After an afternoon of reading Pico Iyer’s (an Indian born in England, raised in California, now living in Japan) account of Toronto, where one typical school “had fewer than a thousand students, in all.. but seventy-six different languages could be heard along its hallways, and more than 70 percent of its students spoke a mother tongue other than English... not a melting pot, as the people in Toronto politely reminded me, but a mosaic”, I was picked up by my new Japanese friend (a retired sailor with a myriad of stories and a zest for life) to go to a catholic mass in the small city nearby. I wasn’t sure what to expect, except that it was a Japanese church, and this service (every Saturday evening) catered to the Latin American population in the city. What met me was astonishing, especially in the context of the famously homogenous and impenetrable Japan. I first followed my guide into the meeting room, and as he entered I heard a stream of Japanese greetings, so I came in bowing, only to be confronted with an obviously Latin face of a young woman who turned to me with a friendly “Hola!” This was enough to throw a monkey-wrench into my determinedly mono-linguistic mind, but there was much more to come. The young lady, Senorita Maria, was from Peru (though her grandfather was Japanese), and had lived in Japan for over 10 years. She taught Japanese to foreigners and Spanish in the university and “No no, I don’t understand English. I mean, I studied it for 10 years, but I don’t know it very well,” she said in barely accented English. At that point the Father came in, an 80 year old American, with a Japanese name and face, who leads the mass alternatively in Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. His English had a forced feel to it, perfect in grammar and accent, but somehow too deliberate and self-aware. He’d been a priest in Japan for 50 years. Already I was a little bewildered in trying to get my bearings, as the (officially) American, Peruvian, and Japanese all chatted away in Japanese, then somehow switched to Spanish (even my friend unveiled his Spanish sentences), as I tried desperately to drudge up my high school Spanish without loosing a grip on my few vital words of Japanese. And then the children came in. I’ve never been so aware of my compulsion to read someone’s nationality in their face, first and foremost. It always seemed essential to me, to know what we have in common, what language we might be able to communicate in, how I should interpret a touch on my arm, and how life had taught them to view the world (or, at least, to help myself think that I know). These kids, however, defied my most desperate attempts to snatch up the slightest clue as to what was going behind their eyes. I eventually decided -more to give my mind a rest than any sense of certainty- that they were all Japanese, with the exception of the obviously Latin girl and boy, even when the 7 year old boy (Juan Garcia), started chattering away in Japanese and translating for his father. “No, he’s full Peruvian,” I was told, “and has only been in the country for 3 years.” The girl, however, was half Filipino, though she spoke not a word of English. One obviously Japanese girl was actually half Brazilian, and helped translate from Portuguese, while another jerkily introduced herself in an English thick with a typical Japanese accent “Hello, my name is Laida, I’m from the Philippians,” all the while turning the deepest shade of pink I’ve ever seen. The only fully Japanese girl in the room kept interjecting in Spanish. I felt my sense of bewilderment intensifying to dizziness. Having all the answers made orienting myself even more daunting, for what is the nationality of a half Brazilian, half Filipino, born and raised in Japan? Or a half Japanese half Peruvian living with a Mexican relative? “Oh, I have an American passport!” said little Juan to me, almost impishly, in Japanese. “Stop the room please,” I wanted to say, “I’d like to get off.” What does nationality or ethnicity even mean in a context like this? For the young girl with a Japanese face and language, yet born in Peru to a Brazilian mother, how ought this child respond to the most basic of questions “where are you from?” Whenever possible, of course, she will say “from here,” since all the question really seeks is a connection, but is it a lie? Is it ever the whole truth? The UN declaration of human right states as one of its basic tenants for humanity that “Everyone has the right to a nationality,” which is a core need for those who lack it, but might be just as much a source of friction in abundance. Of course all we’re really just looking is a label, a starting point, and nationality has been a fool-proof way to expedite an understanding of where the other is coming from. But in a world where I can sit behind a couple and eventually deduce (based on overheard language, accent, and appearance) that I’m seeing a Japanese man and his Brazilian wife, only later to learn that it’s a Peruvian man and his Filipino wife (what does that make their 5 year old daughter, born and raised in Japan?), in this world, is nationality quickly becoming less a convenient coat hanger and more a mental hang-up? And if nationality is, like family, something a man does not choose – as many of us are becoming more and more like an individual passed from one foster parent to the next, none really making a claim on “belonging”- then language is like the friends he can choose, which tell more about how he sees himself and wants to be seen. For in this small church room the ability to navigate is no longer dominated by origin, but by language. All around I can begin to track the web-like lines of communicate, as I try to keep up with “Buenos Noches”s here, “Konban wa”s there, and everywhere a deer-in-headlights look as the other follows up on my signals that we can communicate. I find out that Spanish speakers can understand Portuguese, but not the other way around. I meet adults who have lived in Japan for 10 years, yet their kids have to translate my most basic of Japanese to them. Some few who speak all the languages gathered there rush around like whirlwinds of activity, while others close into small circles of those they could communicate with. In this place, a forerunner of the world stage, the “sense of belonging” goes not to the highest bidder, nor to the holder of the correct passport, but to the speakers of the right languages. And so while the world is shrinking, it’s becoming exponentially more fractured. The teenage girl next to me might indeed hold an American passport, but I can’t speak Spanish, and if I did I wouldn’t know where to begin commenting on her favorite childhood cartoon in Japan, or what kind of relationship she has with her English-only father. It’s still true of course that speaking the same language doesn’t mean you have anything to talk about. So that’s one more thing that struck me about this place, again in contrast to the norms of the country waiting outside the front doors: warmth. I spent 10 minutes speaking mutually broken Japanese with a Bolivian who thumped me on the back more times then I can count, and discussed religious culture with a Japanese woman using little more than sincere smiles and hand-motions (not an unusual exercise, but somehow it felt like real communication). During the greeting time a full 20 people gave me a double-handed handshake (even the Japanese had picked it up!), unintentionally teaching me to say “Peace be with you” in four languages. The world has changed, again, without most of us realizing it. The number of people falling through the cracks of how we traditionally see and understand the world is growing, but once the cracks are full it is we “normal” ones who will be out of place. Our ways of seeing each other will have to change, categories must be reorganized, What question will replace “Where are you from?”? Will it be “What language do you speak,” “Where do you live?” or perhaps even “Where are you going?”? In any case mankind shows no signs of abandoning the need to see itself in groups, but the rules of membership and the shape of the anchors we toss out are all changing rapidly. If it can be so visible in a small church in suburban Japan, the world can’t be far behind.

Japan Anecdotes 1, The Informer

2009-03-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

Most foreigners in Japan quickly learn that there are certain unwritten rules about what you do and do not tell Japanese people. These rules are motivated by two main characteristics: 1. Japanese people are not generally interested in foreign countries, or at least not interested enough to inconvenience you by asking. In 7 months in Japan I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been asked anything about the culture, history, politics, education, economic, or lifestyle of my home country America (and this during the time of the wars on terror, Obama’s election, and the financial crisis). For the most part questions revolve around my thoughts on Japan, which brings up the fact that 2. Japanese people do not respond well to anything said critically (or for that matter, anything not glowingly optimistic) about their country. The main purpose of foreigners I’d say – and I’m not the first to go this far – is to confirm the remarkableness and even superiority of Japan. Try telling them honestly that the education system is a little misguided, or that the temples start to all look the same after awhile, or that you actually prefer Korean food to Japanese, and... well, the short answer is that the subject will be changed faster than a samurai drawing his sword, the conversation will go downhill rapidly, and you will get signals (verbal or otherwise) that you clearly “don’t get it,” as no gaijin can, after all. Or perhaps the results of allowing a little real honesty to slip into conversation will hit closer to home, as befell one of my fellow American teachers here in Kansai inaka (central Japan countryside). He was riding the train one evening and fell into conversation with a curious (in all senses) old gentleman, who wanted to know where he lived in Japan, what he was doing here, what school he worked at, etc. After the standard introductory small talk, the man moved on to the standard line of questioning, which included “what do you think of Japanese students?” My friend replied that the elementary school students are genki (energetic), and in Jr. High the first graders were also pretty genki, second graders average, and the third graders sleep a lot. There’s nothing remarkable about this evaluation, it’s simply true, though probably not a truth we’d express to the teachers we work with; it often seems that we’re honestly expected to just not notice anything negative in the school. My friend might have also mentioned that he gets rather bored in school at times, and perhaps even implied that the students didn’t seem to learn much English overall, but he’s not sure how much of his opinions he let show. Soon his station arrived and he bid the man adieu. But apparently his opinions and lighthearted evaluations had struck a chord, or perhaps the old man was more disturbed by the audacity of a foreigner being allowed to experience anything short of heaven-on-earth for a single moment in Japan. Several days later my friend was sitting at his desk and got called to talk with the English teacher for the third graders. A few minutes ago, the teacher said through a nervous grin, she had gotten a call from a certain old man who had expressed severe concern over reports that the third graders were sleeping in class, which had made a certain foreigner very dissatisfied. This old man had in fact been a teacher himself, and proceeded to enlighten her as to what she had to do to fix this intolerable situation. My friend was informed of all this, and then the conversation was over. Of course all the details of the call were not divulged, and to this day he doesn’t know how much he told the old man, or how much was passed on. In any case the simple answer to both questions is “too much.” The work environment has now become noticeably awkward. My Dad, in response to this story, replied “so it takes a village, huh?” And yes, that about sums it up.

Random Thoughts, March 2009

2009-03-03T23:13:00.000-08:00

-If you find that the only thing preventing you from becoming who you want to be is the people around you, then it’s time to reevaluate who you want to be. -1.III -The fact is that the answers to all humanity’s deepest problems have been given, again and again, but never really followed more than half-heartedly, to the point where we decided that they must not really be answers after all. So we go scurrying around in the dark searching for something else, anything else, just so long as it be new. -3.III -In any observation that a man makes about humanity it should be remembered that he is his own primary source of evidence. 22.III -Made in the image we’ve made. 23.III -The only thing more staggering than man’s capacity to learn is man’s capacity to not learn. 23.III -I keep forgetting that I seek to be broken. I think when you get close without being pushed over the edge then all the survival mechanisms kick in and you flail about just trying to keep your footing. But once you’re over, all the voices go silent, the mind releases the heart, the eyes loose their protective scales, and all you can do is feel. Those are the moments that Life is made of. 24.III -A passive civilization is best equipped to be a passive by-stander. -31.III

Blurred, Into Nothing, Almost

2009-03-03T23:04:00.000-08:00

At the oddest, most mundane moment, I feel both my heart and head about to explode. I’m just standing in the corner of class, though it is the last class, of a difficult and frustrating group of students, students with whom I have failed to connect, and I'm thinking of nothing, but a nothing surrounded and suffocated with revelations and feelings that can’t quite get in. An odd moment, about to explode.

Saving Culture

2009-02-26T00:01:00.001-08:00

If there’s any hope for maintaining a diversity of culture in the world, I think we need to be more specific about the very different types of cultural transference. Off the top of my head I can think of three distinct types that I routinely see lumped together. 1. Absorption. This might look bad on the surface - Japanese festivals populated by Disney-mask-wearing children or South American homes plastered with Bruce Willis and John Wayne movie posters is not what we came to see – but it’s not nearly as bad as it looks. The fact is that every new context produces a new creation. Vietnamese watching “The Sixth Sense” do not see the same movie as when Americans watch it, and the same goes for all music, movies, and McDonalds, for every message and meaning. While it may not look like it, diversity of world-view and lifestyle is still maintained (for now). 2. Improvement. This also looks bad, since we came to see traditional adobe, kimono, and cooking fires, not concrete, levis, and microwaves. But how can we even suggest denying cooling, comfort, convenience, and coolness to people when we wouldn’t dream of giving them up ourselves (think covered wagons, skinning buffalo, and bonnets to get a picture of what that denial would demand of us!). In the end culture was made for man, not man for culture. 3. Craving: This is where the truly negative transference lies. People everywhere, on the most grassroots level, need to realize that what’s obviously better for “them” isn’t necessarily better for “us”. There’s no question that the average quality of life is better in America than in India, but the resulting rush for American products like coke, fast food, and even American art and architecture helps no one except the few Americans behind these products. It’s perfectly understandable that those in less fortunate countries desire the entertainment and comfort afforded by affluent nations. Maybe they’ll manage to move, but more likely they’ll try to adapt those technologies and customs to their own lives. Some of these things will unquestionably improve the individual’s life. Many products, however, are desired simply because of the suggestion of luxury without actually granting any. This results in a waste of financial resources, disuse of indigenous resources, and a general disrespect for elements of the native culture which could stand up to the imported culture in a fair fight. It is those elements which are now being clobbered in a heavily weighted fight that can and should be saved.

Caged

2009-02-25T01:25:00.000-08:00

In the West you do whatever has to be done in order to "get the job done," even if that means behaving badly. In Japan, you do whatever is necessary to "behave correctly." The real hardship for the Japanese comes from "getting the job done" being part of "proper behavior."

In a Word, I'd Say....

2009-02-22T19:14:00.001-08:00

We have a new front-runner in the search for a single word to describe modern Japan, submitted by a good friend and fellow JET (you know who you are): "Sheltered" Previous top entries include: "Constrained" "Comfortable" "Dazed" "Unexpected" "Sterile" Those that aren`t a single word but I like them anyway: "There`s something in the water..." "Cookie-cutter country" And a final one you can`t be expected to understand if you haven`t lived in Japan, but if you have then it says it all: "I`m fine thanks, and you?"

Zen And The Art Of Beauty Maintenance

2009-02-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

One of my many assumtions about Japan was that people here know how to live in balance with nature better than people in the West...

A Hawk From A Handsaw

2009-02-21T08:21:00.000-08:00

The previous post helped me make a connection that might have serious consequences for my "course of understanding." Years ago I realized that all the effort I put into understanding my emotions was not leading me where I wanted to go, because in the end understanding one of your emotions gives you the ability to scoff at that emotion, but not to control it. Now I'm beginning to wonder if understanding a culture might give one the ability to scoff at it and analyze it, but not adapt to it. If understanding doesn't necessarily lead to tolerance and a reduction of friction, then I might be on a wild goose chase.

Hehehehehehe?

2009-02-18T19:36:00.000-08:00

It often annoys or confuses me that no Japanese person seems able make a request of me without a wide smile (not a sign of friendliness, I eventually learned, but of discomfort). Imposing on another person in any way, or entering into any situation that has even the smallest possibility of leading to a conflict, is grounds for turbo-powered tension-defusing politeness, which means bows, smiles, and “thank-you-so-very-much-for-your-trouble”s and “I’m-so-very-sorry-to-have-inconvenienced-you-with-my-insignificant-request”s all around. This is especially true when addressing a foreigner, because one can never be sure when a foreigner is going to inexplicably go berserk, and because it’s vitally important that the foreigner have only good experiences and thoughts about Japan and Japanese people. Ironically, this never fails to rub me the wrong way. The thought has more than once flashed through my mind “if he apologizes one more time for asking me to prepared a 10-minute English game, I’m gonna punch him.” Thankfully I’ve been able to maintain my plastered smile instead, so far. When you think about it, however, most of the things we laugh at in the West are things out of control in some way, or something that turned out other than the doer intended. Seeing someone slipping on a banana peel, or jumping with fright, farting, diarrhea, sex, over-eating or drinking, and even death can all provoke roaring laughter or stifled giggles, especially when it’s clear that the victim of the laughter does not have himself under control. The sight of someone sitting on a toilet taking care of business, not funny. The sight of someone suddenly having to race to the bathroom and barely making it (or better yet, not making it), funny. Watching a civilized dinner, not funny. Watching someone discover that the pie is just too delicious to resist and messily inhaling the entire thing, funny. The strange thing is that humans don’t generally like it when the situations – or they themselves – are out of control. We like to be in control, and rarely appreciate being reminded of things that might instead control us. And so all these same things portrayed in a different way can be sources of discomfort: death, addiction, bodily functions, injury, and sex among the most potent conversation stoppers if handled clumsily. Perhaps what we think is pure joviality on our part is really the evolution of our own nervous laughter in the face of these things that could make us uncomfortable. It’s our way of handling it, and over time we’ve simply learned to call it “humor.” So it still bothers me that my colleagues seem so uncomfortable about asking me to do the smallest things, but it’s good to realize that we all have odd ways of handling our discomfort. Next time a wildly grinning colleague apologizes for interrupting my bored reading to give me something useful to do, I’ll just think about suddenly letting off a loud fart instead of hitting him.

Excitement At The Elementary School

2009-02-16T22:29:00.000-08:00

For the most part Japanese elementary school students are the sweetest, cutest, most lovable representations of humanity on earth. The high-point of my week (as it is for many of the teachers in my program all across Japan) is the day at the elementary school (see video).

But today there were some poorly-hidden exceptions to the rule. I would’ve had no notion of the upheaval under the glassy surface if I hadn't noticed that hardly any of the teachers were in the office eating lunch at the regular time. I asked where they were, and after getting through a couple attempts to dodge the question I was told that two of the 4th graders hadn't returned from recess and had probably ran off into the nearby hills to escape. Most of the teachers were out looking for them. It was snowing, by the way. Then I noticed a 2nd grade boy eating his lunch alone in a corner of the teacher's office. I asked why he was there, and was told that one of his classmates (who happens to be one of my favorite students and is practically communicative in English) punched this boy in the eye and he'd just returned from the hospital. Of course I would not have been informed about any of this if I hadn't pursued the information myself. Now I'm wondering what else I've incorrectly assumed about the going-ons at the schools. I also have to wonder how much conscious effort is put into showing a good face for the foreigner. I've definitely heard students told to behave better so as to make a good impression on "the foreigner", and seen problems and conflicts postponed because of my presence. Sometimes I really wonder how much of the picture I'm being allowed to see.

To Be Not Alone

2009-02-15T22:02:00.000-08:00

A line that stays with me (recited by, of all people, Drew Barrymore, in, of all movies, “Lucky You”) is "You know what I think? I think we’re all just trying not to be lonely." At first glance Japan might seem to refute this. Social interaction here is not what it is in the West, and is not focused on the same goals. My first Japanese friend, who was studying in my University in California, told me that she’d come to America with the assumption –shared by many whose impression of Americans is shaped purely by the image that America exports – that Americans are fiercely independent, self-sufficient, and, in general, strong in themselves. It was only a matter of days before she was confronted with the sights of American college life, dominated by sororities and fraternities, nightly parties filled with strangers, a dating scene characterized by “it’s probably not going anywhere, but it’s better than being alone,” and the omnipresent hum of the mantra “thy shall not eat alone, study alone, play alone, or sleep alone. If thou dost, thou art a looser.” My friend’s ideas about American independence were crushed in light of the obvious dependence on the group for definition and significance, especially when compared to the quiet Japanese willingness to suppress the individual needs and feelings in favor of conforming to the collectively-selected “norm”. While many Westerners would truly be unable to maintain mental health if they did not have a least a couple friends with whom they could really “be themselves,” many Japanese still operate under the principle that the deepest core of one’s self is something to never be shown, to anyone, not ever. And oftentimes they never do, something the average American (like myself) finds unfathomable, in a very literal way. The difference is that in the West people look to others to be recognized and actualized as individuals; in Japan it is to be accepted and incorporated into the group. Both, however, are driven by the fear of being alone. In terms of needing the affirmation of the group, the Japanese can seem greatly more self-sufficient than Westerners, but they are just as likely to go to any lengths to avoid being alone. I see it in the way my Jr. High school boys all sit in each other’s laps and the girls waddle around the halls entangled in group hugs (no joke) and in the way that my colleagues and supervisors arrange my schedule so that I’m never unattended (which strangely does not strike me as supervision, just a mind-set that a person shouldn’t be alone, which explains the fact that never being alone here does not make me feel socialized, but rather provokes that most dreaded sense of being alone in a crowd). When I do manage to get off to a quiet corner for a breather there’s a kind of quiet confusion radiating from the group over my behavior. What really strikes me is how extraordinarily polarized the rules of operation can be in a society, and yet it all comes around to at least one of the same things: people don’t want to be alone. The question I have to ask next, then, is “why?” What do we sense deep within our (perhaps truest) selves that propels us to the arms of company that often demeans or diminishes our dignity as individuals, to fill the silence with the white noise of mindless “entertainment,” or to distort or mask our character, all to avoid coming face to face with ourselves? Whether it’s worth it or not, either way it frightens me.

The Beginning (Introducing the Blog)

2009-02-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

It all started on a wintry day in 2006 when my life-long friend Bethany and I unfolded a world map on the floor of my flat in Prague. We’d been raised in northern California, but now I was in my third year in the Czech Republic, Bethany was spending a year in Lithuania, and filled with the youthful sensation of unlimited possibility, we fell to listing all the countries we wanted to live in someday. My foray into Central Europe had sparked my interest culture, and so I mocked up a list of countries that I now call “The Course of Understanding Tour,” consisting of 4-5 countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. It was several months before I actually thought about it seriously... I remember over a decade ago when my grandmother came back from a trip to Kenya, and told me that “the culture is so different, but I’ve found that wherever you go, people are people.” Years later my cultural anthropology professor told us stories about throwing up over the mere sight of dinner in an African jungle: “Culture is not a ‘mind over matter’ kind of thing; it can provoke an innate and uncontrollable physical reaction.” Where’s the common ground between these statements? When you strip away all the differences between us that cause discomfort, fear, or vomit, what “people are people” elements are you left with?... I’m now halfway through a year in a Japanese village. Next I’ll be spending six months in India, and then six months in a Kenyan orphanage. The culture shock I most fear is one day returning to America. This blog is to bring you along with me as I experience many of those vomit-inducing differences, and slowly try to piece together an understanding of what makes us all members of the human race anyway.

A Few Doors Away

2009-01-01T23:22:00.000-08:00

(The essay I submitted to the 2009 JET essay contest):

I stand on the top steps of a hushed mountain shrine, looking through trees and bamboo to the rice fields far below. I am but 20 kilometers from my home of seven months, yet this place of simple serenity is essentially inaccessible to me without a car. “500 years old, this shrine,” says a quiet voice behind me. It is the same voice that had already led me through the birthplace of the poet Bashō, had explained the workings of a traditional carpentry workshop, and had introduced me to a fascinating English speaking priest, all in the same day. It is the voice of Azuma-san, my newest Japanese friend and the first, perhaps, that is not a friendship of convenience. He is also the first person I’ve met in my scattered village of 3,000 with whom I can really communicate, the kind of communication that goes beyond the definition of words to real connection. In the last few weeks he has taken me under his wing, my long awaited guide into the world of rural Japan. And as the wind rises up from the valley floor to gently rustle the leaves and bells, I sense it carrying change. I’ve put a lot of thought into how to answer the inevitable question “Wow, you lived in Japan? How was that?” Until recently, the response I’d settled on was “lonely.” That at least begins to hint at the details of the daily routine, the creeping surprise of real struggle, and the frustrations that seem trivialized by phrases like “culture shock” when you face a new life, country, language, food, friends; everything new. The village where I live is deep in the mountains, so deep that grocery shopping involves a 30 minute train ride, and I’ve met all of one resident who was within 10 years of my age. All this is nothing compared to friends who are buried in snow in the middle of Hokkaido, or even the semi-famous JET who lives on an actively volcanic island that is a 24 hour ferry ride away from the mainland with a population of 200. Even though the mantra that “every situation is different” is one of the great truths of the JET program, still, regardless of placement, some degree of isolation is just part of the package. The simple fact is that it’s difficult to meet people in Japan, especially if you come in with limited Japanese. Most of us in rural areas will spend more time on our own than during any other period of our lives, and a great deal of the difficulty and brainstorming will be centered on how to connect with the community. When I first arrived in Japan I had enough sense of these obstacles, and enough awareness of my need for social support, to know that finding friends should be my highest priority. I also knew that my village consists of a few thousand people scattered over 26 square kilometers of mountains and forest, and that I would be unable to communicate with most of them for at least six months. I think part of me was hoping that the English speakers in the village would come and find me! After two months of exploring mountain roads, letting out many a cheery “Konnichiwa!” and often being greeted by stunned silence, I began to realize that the finding would be up to me. I decided to go on the offensive. But how to sift through hundreds of houses and draw out the people who would like to meet and talk with me? I eventually hit on the rather obvious idea of offering an evening English conversation class for adults. After overcoming my supervisor’s concern about my work-hour limitations by assuring her that I’d gladly volunteer to teach the class (since success would help me just as much as I helped the students), she was thrilled with the idea and agreed to put an announcement in the village paper that went to every door in the area. She warned me that probably only a few people would be interested, but I felt that it would be worth it, even if only one or two relationships came from it, as that foundation would inevitably lead to others. Sometimes the smallest foothold is all you need to start feeling grounded. The first day of class arrived, and 16 nervous students sat expectantly in the classroom, ages 17 to 82, of every English level from dead beginner to fluent. This is the main problem, of course, and I had a lot to learn about juggling multiple levels in a class. I made many mistakes in the beginning, like trying to lecture and to teach level-specific grammar or vocabulary. Eventually I learned to elicit answers to general questions so everyone could input their own level of English, and to focus on conversational activities in which the more advanced students were paired with the beginners. I didn’t adapt quite quickly enough to hold everyone’s interest, however, and lately the class has shrunk to about 5-10 people a week, but naturally they are the ones who really belong in a “conversation class.” I was very conscious of the challenges from the beginning, but looking back it’s hard to imagine not taking the plunge, as the ripple effects of this class have begun to encompass all the best elements of my life here. There is of course the immediate satisfaction of getting to plan and teach my own lessons all in English, and here more than anywhere else I feel like I’m truly contributing something. One member of the class is practicing her English for a trip to New Zealand (to visit my predecessor), another would like to communicate better with his British son-in-law and English-speaking grandchildren, while a third has maintained an international correspondence with a number of well-known photographers using a very limited English vocabulary. In many cases I can see the small difference that an extra word or two of English makes for them individually, even in a place as rural as this. I also have the opportunity to share insights into America and other countries I’ve lived in, meeting their affirming curiosity about the world outside Japan with my own curiosity about the world inside Japan. The secondary benefits have often come in the form of unexpected blessings. Gifts of food, friendly support, and even the offer of a car for my private use have been sources of constant amazement and gratitude, while tips about shopping, services, and sights in the area have been essential to a comfortable “settling-in.” Perhaps most significantly, whenever I run into a class member in a shop, train station, or while out on a walk, I experience a budding sense of having a place in the community. I’ve also been thrilled to find that many of the students have extensive experience abroad, and I get to enjoy countless amazing stories during class. But it wasn’t until we started spending time together outside of class that I realized just how lucky I was to meet Azuma-san. He was a career sailor for most of his working life, and at one time or another set foot on just about every country that touches the sea. He worked for a Japanese construction company in Iraq for 10 years during the war with Iran, and told me stories of near-death experiences when his work camp was bombed by Iranian artillery, or when he was confronted by wild dogs in the desert. A year in Manila gave him a dangerous brush with the Mafia when an employee made trouble in the wrong nightclub, and returning to a busy office job in Tokyo showed him a side of his home country that he couldn’t quite relate to. He chose early retirement for his emotional health, and now lives in this tiny village, tending a small house and garden, just a few minute walk from my home. Azuma-san loves meeting people, all people, and given his experience he has as much in common with foreigners as with his fellow countrymen. He loves discussing modern Japan, travel, culture, language, religion, and he brings to every subject an amazingly objective sense of inquiry and search for truth. “What you think about Buddhist temples?” he asked me suddenly one day. As I prepared the standard compliments of Japanese architecture he continued, “You are Christian, so what you feel around temple?” It was a question I hadn’t asked myself, and I had to think, harder than I have in months, before I could begin to find the answer. Conversations with him, just as spring is arriving in earnest, have been like sunlight breaking through the winter clouds. As he drives me home we pass his house, just a couple of rice paddies away from mine. I think about my 5 predecessors who never met him, how isolated I know some of them felt, and how Azuma-san talks so often about wishing he’d known sooner that this house, shouting distance from his own, has housed internationals for ten years. I think about how easily I might have missed meeting him, whereas now the experiences he’s making possible for me are quickly becoming the most impactful of this year. It’s not that the little mountain shrine is more impressive than Kiyomizu-dera, or that the carpentry shop is more interesting than the Tokyo fish market, but with Azuma-san I no longer feel like a tourist, an outsider. I am being involved in everything, made to feel that I am part of it. Now I have to restart my search for a word to summarize my life in Japan. Only time will tell what word fits best, but I think “memorable” will be a strong contender. Under the tutelage of such an individual, we might even make it, sincerely, to the ultimate cliché of “life-changing.” It’s astonishing what a difference one person can make. Every one of us is going to experience times of isolation during our stay in Japan, some for days and some for months. I think the most important thing to realize from the beginning is that we are the newcomers, and especially in the context of Japanese culture it is incumbent upon us to put ourselves out there and find creative ways to make ourselves useful in our communities. I cannot even count the number of times I’ve failed to live up to this idea, but taking the initiative to start this adult class has proved to be the best thing I could have done, both for the community and for myself. If your first few months in Japan leave you feeling disconnected then I highly recommend trying something similar. Chances are that your village is also hiding a life-changing person or two, and maybe just a few doors away.

TANZANIA’S CHILDREN ON HEROES, HOPES, AND FEARS, Sept 2010 - January 2011

2001-10-06T08:47:00.000-07:00

TANZANIA’S CHILDREN ON HEROES, HOPES, AND FEARS Overall Goals: 1. To assess the perspectives of children in the greater Arusha area on the topics of Heroes, Hopes, and Fears. 2. To create a survey system that can be applied independently of any individual to determine these perspectives across a wide range of geographic and situational demographics. 3. Create a publishable paper on the findings. PHASES: Phase 1: Preparation of Initial Phase Goal: Fishing for perspectives and values in the categories of Heroes, Hopes, and Fears that bear the potential of value to the survey sponsors and are deemed worthy of the allocation of resources in further study and confirmation. Application: Create a list of 100 questions of a broad range of approaches and styles, limited only by having some correlation to the three main topics. These questions should be intended to produce primarily one-word nouns as answers, providing simple and quantifiable results. Visit three schools and at each question 100 students, asking each 5-10 of the questions (3-4 minutes max each). This results in asking each question 3-6 time, with gender and age information included. If possible, additional information can be acquired by requesting one-on-one time with a single student who will answer all the questions. At the same time, the questions in written form can be given to the headmaster to answer according to how he thinks most students would answer. All this data - and more importantly the careful observation of the process of questioning and answering - will provide the initial foundation of which questions to ask and how to ask them. Phase 2: Initial phase (Dry Run) Goal: Find out what the right questions are. Demonstrate the ability of certain questions and topics to generate valuable information. Develop a system of questioning that can be applied independent of any individual. Application: Take the refined list of questions to several schools and apply survey as it has been developed in light of Phase 1. Include at least one control group that does not involve a westerner. Phase 3: Application Goal: Ask the right questions. Make the first official application of system on Arusha Primary School students, gleaning confirmable and reliable analysis of perspectives on the topics of heroes, hopes, and dreams. Demonstrate the consistency, efficiency, and applicability of the survey system. This information should also confidently indicate the most important specific areas for deeper study and confirmation. Phase 3.5: Report Goal: Write up an official report of the project and the information gleaned. The report should: 1. Give the survey sponsors a clear explanation of the potential and limitations of the survey system, demonstrate what general and specific valuable information within the survey topic has been confirmed, and what areas of study are worth deeper investigation. 2. Be presentable to other NGOs and pertinent organizations as an aid to their own work in similar fields and as a platform for anyone interested in deeper study in the subject. 3. Be presentable to publications as publishable material on this little-studied but significant issue, with the goal to spark greater interest in survey work among children in the developing world, an aid to a wide range of organizations world wide for whom the specific information can be helpful, and the increased recognition of the work being done by the sponsor organization. Phase 4: Depth and Breadth Goal: Using the validated system of survey, produce the specific information that will be influential in specific instances of development and decision-making by survey sponsors, according to various demographical needs. TIMELINE: October 1-15: Phase 1 -Meeting individuals with pertinent experience/knowledge -Preparation of the list of 100 “raw” questions -Planning of project goals, intended application, and timeline. October 15 - November 15: Phase 1 -Initial “raw” survey of three schools and additional “question style” experimentation while survey author lives in rural school during this period. November 15 - November 21: Phase 1 - Phase 2 -Analyze data from “raw” survey. -Discuss with translators and survey sponsors. -Create more focused list of questions. -Develop more accurate and efficient method of survey application. -Set up further school visits for following week. November 22 -28: Phase 2 (Dry Run) -Visit three -five schools and apply survey, including at least one where survey is applied without the involvement of any westerner. -Set up visits in further schools November 29 - December 3: Phase 2 - Phase 3 - Analyze and discuss data with translator, survey sponsors, and several experienced outsiders (from initial meetings) for guidance and feedback on the results thus far. - Refine question list in length, selection, and question style. - Refine survey style to glean maximum amount of specific, quantifiable, and usable information from each location. - set up school visits for the next three weeks. December 6 - December 22 (until winter break): Phase 3 !!Warning, not enough time for enough schools!! -Visit as many schools as possible in as wide a range of geographic and economic environments as possible, with at least three being applied without the involvement of any westerner. December 23- January 3: -Winter break -Analysis of data and crunching of the numbers. -Initial bullet-point outline of numeric results. January 3 - 7: Phase 3 - Phase 3.5 !!Warning, not enough time for follow-up interview visits!! - Analyze and discuss data and results with translator, survey sponsors, and several experienced outsiders (from initial meetings) for interpretational guidance and feedback. -Visit three schools where specific students had valuable answers, whether extremely representative, divergent, or thoughtful. Interview these students in greater depth for deeper feedback on the reasons for these perspectives. January 8 - 16: Phase 3.5 -Write report January 17 - 21: Phase 3.5 -review and feedback on report. January 22 - 28: Phase 3.5 -Editing of report. -Final feedback. -Final editing. January 31: Phase 3.5 -Submit final report Jeremy and Sig, This is the initial brain-storm list of Phase One questions which Jacob helped me refine. Right now there are about 150 questions here, which we hope to limit to about half that for Phase One, but I want to send this list to you both as-is to get your feedback before we continue refining the style and content of the questions. It’s possible that not a single question here will be used verbatim for the final Phase Three survey, (which we hope to limit to 10-20 questions). These questions are intended to “fish” for the right style of questions and the content that seems to produce interesting answers. That being the case these questions are often very broad, and are almost entirely intended to produce single-word answers that will be easy to quantify and analyze. The next Phase might introduce more open-ended questions, more pointed questions, and/or a much different selection of question style, depending on the results of Phase One. The purpose of these questions for Phase One is to be open to as wide a variety of creative responses as possible while still producing simple results than can be easily entered into a spread-sheet. The questions will also be randomized before applying the survey so that each student get’s a broad range of question style and content in their five-ten questions. Phase 1: Preparation of Initial Phase Goal: Fishing for perspectives and values in the categories of Heroes, Hopes, and Fears that bear the potential of value to the sponsors of the survey and are deemed worthy of the allocation of resources in further study and confirmation. Questions Approaches: -Be VERY general and see what they can come up with without prodding (umbrella questions). -Ask specific situational questions. - “Mirror” questions: “What do most people in your class want to be/have/do?” “How would your parents answer this question?” -To select for perspectives that might be different than Western perspectives, ask questions with an assumption of western values and see how they react. - Multiple choice, true/false, “finish this sentence” (copy common question style from exams). -Comparative answers: What do you want more than___? Who is more important than____? - “List three things.” -Add “why.” Topics: -Heroes/Role-models -Hopes -Fears -Media access and interest HEROES: -Who are your heroes? Why? -I want to be a _____. -Who is your favorite person? -Who is your least favorite person? -Who do you most respect Fear Love Admire Want to be like? -Who is the most powerful person you know? -Who is your favorite musician? -Who is your favorite actor? -Someday I want to meet _____. -If you are running from a dangerous dog, who will you run to for help? -If you need 500 shillings, who will you ask? -If you fail an exam, who will you tell first? -If you fail an exam who will you hide it from? -If you do something very well, who will you most want to tell? -I always obey _______. -List three adults that you don’t need to obey. -In what ways do you want to be the same as your parents when you grow up? -In what ways do you want to be different from your parents when you grow up? -List three things about your parents that you want to copy when you grow up. -List three things about your parents that you don’t want to copy when you grow up. -What job do you want when you grow up? -When you grow up do you want to be different than you are now? -List three ways that you want to be different when you grow up? -When I grow up I want to be like _____. -The person in my family who most helps me is ______. -The person in my life I most like is _____. -The person who most helps me in my life is _____. -In all the stories you’ve heard, who is the best character you’ve heard about? -Who is your favorite person you’ve learned about in school? -Who is your favorite person from the Bible? -Do you want to be like God? -I love ______. -The best person in the world is _____. -Who is the worst person in the world? -The best person I know is _____. -Who is the most powerful person in the world? -Who is the most important person in your village? Do you want to like that person when you grow up? -Who is the most important person in the world? Do you want to be that person when you grow up? -What person in the world would you like to change places with? -Would you like to be president? -Could you be president? -What job do most people in your class want when they grow up? -If I ask your class who is their favorite person, what will most of them say? -Most of my classmates want to be like ____. -Who do your classmates think is the most powerful person they know? -Who do your classmates think is the most powerful person in the world? -If your classmates do something bad, will they go to a teacher, a father, a mother, a friend, or someone else for help? HOPES: -What can make your life better? -I want to be like ____. -I want to have ____. -I am happy when ____. -What can make your life perfect? -The world will be perfect when/if _____. -What do you want to own when you grow up? -What do your classmates want to own when they grow up? -Who do you want to live with when you grow up? -Where do you want to live when you grow up? -What do adults want? -Do you want to be an adult? -I am happy when my father says ____. -I am happy when my mother says _____. -I am happy when my teacher says _____. -Can people make themselves rich? -Can people make themselves poor? -Can people make the world a better place? -Will education help you when you grow up? -When you grow up, will your life be better than it is now? -When you grow up will you be more successful than your parents? -I am a successful person when I _____. -If I had 1,000 shillings I would buy ____. -What would you do with 1,000,000 shillings? -What would you rather have than 10,000 shillings? - What would you rather have than 100,000 shillings? -What do you want more than candy? -What do you want more than a bike? -What do you want more than a new house? -Do you want a new radio or a new school uniform? -Do you want candy or a new textbook? -I want to see____. -I never want to see ___. -At least once in my life I want to ____. -When you grow up do you want to be rich or happy? -Can you be happy without being rich? -When you grow up do you want to be powerful? -What will make you powerful? -Do you want to be married or single? -Do you want to have children? -Do you want your own house? -When you grow up do you want to visit other countries? -Do you want to live in another village? -If you had one wish, what would you wish for? -If you could change one thing about your life, what would you change? -Can you make that change happen? -Who can make that change happen? -What do you want to change about your village/school? -Can you make that change happen? - ____ can make that change happen. -The world will be happier if _____. -Do you think this change will ever happen? -Can people make this change happen? -Who can make that change happen? -What makes you happy? -What makes you sad? -What makes you angry? -What makes adults happy? -What makes adults sad? -What makes adults angry? -What makes people happy? -What makes people sad? -What makes people angry? -What makes your classmates happy? -What makes your classmates sad? -What makes your classmates angry? FEARS: -I am afraid of ____. -List three things you’re afraid of. -What is the last thing you were afraid of? -What can make you cry? -What was the last thing you cried about? -Are you afraid of being alone? -Are you afraid of your teacher? -Are you afraid of dying? -Are you afraid of your mother? -Are you afraid of your father? -Are you afraid of going to sleep? -What are you more afraid of than a snake? -What are you more afraid of than getting sick? -Who is the most frightening person you ever heard about? -What is the most frightening thing in the world? -The most dangerous thing in the world is ______. -I wish the world had no ____. -If you break something at home, what will you do? -If you lose a textbook, what will you do? -If you think you are sick, what will you do? -I am afraid in school when ____. -I am afraid at home when ____. -What are the other students in your class most afraid of? -Are your classmates afraid of your teacher? -Are your classmates afraid of adults? -Are your classmates afraid of a family member? -The worst thing that could happen to me is ____. -The worst thing that could happen to my family is _____. -The worst thing that could happen to the world is _____. MEDIA: -I listen to the radio ___hours a day/week. -I watch TV ___ hours a day/week. -I listen to the radio: every day/ more than once a day/ once a week/ more than once a week/ less than once a week -I watch TV every day/ more than once a day/ once a week/ more than once a week/ less than once a week -I usually watch about 1/ 1-5 / 5-10 / more than 10 movies a month. -If I gave you a DVD / CD / cassette tape could you listen to it? - Would you rather buy a music CD or a movie DVD? - On the radio I like to listen to ______. - On TV I like to watch _____. - My favorite type of movie is _____.