In and out of the world

More on the CARE decision

2007-08-18T11:30:00.000-04:00

This article from the Global Development Center talks more about the CARE decision.

To my Anonymous commenter: yes, I do think that my organization is hypocritical. But alas, I am a mere peon here, and have no control over it. I do, however, make my opinion known regularly. Might be why I'm still a peon.

Response to comment

2007-08-17T11:29:00.000-04:00

I don't have a lot of time to write today, but I'd like to that the commenter from CARE. I think that you have a point regarding the balance between the good that can be done with the money and the possible harm done by food aid. I work in program development and fundraising right now, and totally understand regarding the loss of $46 million - you are right that someone (probably my organization!) will step in to fill the void. However, I still applaud CARE for doing what I think is the right thing, and making a decision that I believe will make their programming more effective.

This is a really sensitive and debatable topic. I definitely have my views on food aid, as any regular reader of this blog knows, and think that the entire food aid system should be dismantled, with the possible exception of emergency food aid. I do stand by my statement that those agencies, like my own, that accept food aid are being hypocritical. This comes from my view of the food aid system in general. I also certainly understand the argument the commenter made, even though I don't agree with it.

Anyone else want to chime in? Grandpa, I'm sure you have something to say on this.

CARE: not a hypocrite anymore!

2007-08-16T11:05:00.000-04:00

This article describes CARE International's decision to stop receiving USG food aid for its development work. Basically, they have finally come around to the hypocrisy of selling American commodities to the same folks they do income generating projects with. I wish that the organization that I work with could see it in the same way.

Ding dong, the witch is gone!

2007-08-13T15:57:00.000-04:00

Karl Rove has stepped down! Celebrate!

I'll blog later about my fabulous trip to Colombia (it is an amazing place). For today, I'm going to celebrate the departure of the #1 minion of the Antichrist from the US Government!

La Pit... I mean, La Paz

2007-07-22T17:54:00.000-04:00

Ok, I'll be very up front with you -- I do not like La Paz. Bolivia in general is great, but this city is awful. In addition to having a very frustrating time professionally while here, I'm tired of the atrocious driving, dog poop everywhere, nasty sewer smells, horrible service, blank stares, noise, and no-dinner-Sundays. I'm not kidding about the dog poop -- people walk everywhere here, but still there is dog poop everywhere. I mean, curb your damn animals, people! It is foul.

The city does have a few redeeming qualities (none of which involve bookstores or cinemas). One is the cheap restaurants, most of which are at least decent, and some very good. Another is the great textiles (albeit not yarn, really). And a final one is the fact that they actually have a reasonably good orchestra (no, I'm not delirious).

About the restaurants:

Angelo Colonial (On Mariscal Sucre, not on Linares as it says in the Lonely Planet): The steak was good, the mashed potatoes were good, and the atmosphere is great. The restaurant is filled with fascinating antiques and the candlelight makes it really romantic and cozy. The service, however, was a joke. She forgot what we ordered minutes after asking us, and even though she wrote it down, forgot my water and my salad. I'm not kidding, I have no idea what she wrote down or why, because generally you write things down so you refer back and don't forget, but apparently she was only doing it for show. This isn't the place you want to go for great food and a taste of Bolivia, but rather for a decent romantic date. The price was right, though. Our meal cost less than $5 a person.
Pronto Dalicatessen (Jauregui 2248 in Sopocachi): I love this place. The food is good, and really creative. It has nothing at all to do with a delicatessen, unless it is opposite day. The play is on the "Dali" - and the food is a bit surreal, but lovely. The service was excellent, and the ambiance top notch. I really like this place, and can't recommend it highly enough. Go there. It is relatively cheap, too, with a meal and a 1/2 bottle of wine only costing about $8.
La Comedie (Pasaje Medinacelli 2234, off 20 de Octubre in Sopocachi): This is a lovely restaurante, in a beautiful, ship-shaped building. The food was great, the service could have been better, but the chocolate mousse made the entire city of La Paz fall away and the rest of the night a dream of chocolate. Meal cost about $7, totally totally worth it. Go there.
Alexander Coffee and Pub: These guys are all over the place. Decent but not great food, good coffee, and they let you sit there forever. DO NOT BUY A BROWNIE! They are horrid. A comfy and decent-service cafe nonetheless.
Le Bistrot (Guachalla 399, between 6 de Agosto and 20 de Octubre in Sopocachi): This place is ok, but I always feel a bit let down. It is in the Alliance Francaise building, and has a decent atmosphere, but the food is only ok. It tries to be good, but misses somehow, and the waitress I had both times was a bit spooky and weird. Probably good as a bar, but not so much as a place for a meal.
Terraza (20 de Octubre 2331 in Sopocachi): DO NOT GO TO THIS PLACE. It is one of the worst restaurants I've ever been to. Horrid disgusting food and bad service. They should be ashamed of themselves. The Lonely Planet says that they are "stylish", but that can only be true if your sense of style includes eating food that grosses you out and having to get up from your table and search around the restaurant for your server. If there were restaurant police, they would shut this place down.
Arabica (20 de Octubre, just down from the Terraza): this place is good. Clean, good service, comfy and peaceful, good coffee, and great food. I had a "nido", which is a yummy fresh bread "nest" filled with delicious veggie or other stew, perfect for a cold La Paz day, and a goat cheese and tomato salad, which was lovely and hit the spot (and was ok for foreigners to eat, if you get my drift). I highly recommend this place for a lazy Saturday afternoon, or a workday lunch.
The Lounge (Calle Presbitero Medina 2527 in Sopocachi): I love this place, and it isn't because of the awesome owners, who I didn't meet until after I tried the top-notch food and yummy french fries. Beautiful place, great food, and a really good price. Definitely go there. The owners are a Bolivian musician and his American wife, and they are two of the nicest people I've ever met.

I went to some other places, too, but these are the ones that most stick out in my memory.

Textiles: go to the shop Comart Tukuypaj and its sister store out back and up stairs Inca Pallay. Both are fair trade shops that directly support the artisans, and have lovely products with a just price and high quality. Inca Pallay has saleswomen who can tell you about the weaving and the history of the cooperative. Their work is top notch and stunningly beautiful.

As for the orchestra, I'm not kidding! My friend Joseph and I went last night, and it was lovely. A great break from the ubiquitous pan flutes and guitars, and a solid orchestra. I was pleasantly surprised, expecting a nightmare of noise, but they played well, albeit lacking in discipline and decorum. The music was muddy but good, and the solo cellist was great. I give the conductor a lot of credit -- bravo, Maestro!

Sao Paulo

2007-07-19T17:27:00.000-04:00

I would like to begin by expressing my sorrow at the accident in Sao Paulo. My thoughts are with the families of the victims.

As I have mentioned before, GRU airport is a menace to human civilization. It should probably just be closed, razed, and re-built from scratch. Congohas should definitely be closed, forever. Furthermore, TAM airlines is a joke. For a nation with as much human resource capacity as Brazil, you'd think they would have a more reliable national airline. This accident falls squarely at the feet of the TAM leadership, who are clearly incapable of running a safe and efficient airline.

Update: If you don't take my word for it, I have back up.

If this plane were a man...

2007-07-09T13:54:00.000-04:00

Someone would be in trouble.

I love this plane. I can't wait to fly on this plane. Check out that overhead storage! Check out the "islands"! The lighting -- it changes to keep your circadian rhythms in order! I'm totally going to try to sit on the upper deck!

Woohoo!

Um, yeah.

2007-06-22T11:31:00.000-04:00

Dude. How is this news? Development folks have been saying this stuff for years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/world/africa/21subsidies.html?ex=1340164800&en=a23ffeb38b4a441d&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Apparently, the NYT thinks that it is newsworthy to report that elimination of subsidies on agriculture (cotton in particular, in this article) would help African farmers.

Regular readers of this blog know that I've been harping on this forever, and I'm not alone! This is a regular thread of conversation in our circles.

When are US newspapers going to get with the program?

Brazil

2007-06-17T09:20:00.001-04:00

At first, Brazil didn't want me, now it can't get rid of me.

Because my ticket was purchased a bit late in the game, I ended up on a long flight to Recife, through Lima and then Sao Paulo. Any flight with that many stops is bound to be challenging, and it was.

Everything was fine until I got to Sao Paulo. That airport is a DISASTER. I'm not kidding. I've been in horrible airports, but usually they are horrible because of ugliness, confusion/bad signing, bad smells, or no shopping/food. Sao Paulo's Guarulhos airport, however, is hands down the most chaotic, ugly, noisy, dark, confusing and inefficient place I've ever seen IN MY LIFE. If you read this blog regularly, you know I've been in a lot of airports. Not one holds a candle to GRU.

I arrived on a Taca flight from Lima. I got my bags out of the baggage claim and through customs without a problem, but when I went to re-check them for my onward flight, there was no place in sight to do so for Taca, which is what my ticket said my next flight was on. I decided to just go to the check-in counter, since I had plenty of time. After a quick spin around the domestic terminal, I realized with increasing panic that Taca was nowhere to be had. The information lady, in a combination of Portunol and charades, made it clear to me that my flight didn't exist, and suggested that perhaps it was really a code share with TAM, the Brazilian domestic airline. So, off I went to TAM.

TAM has its own terminal, pretty much, and apparently for good reason. The line for domestic flights wound all the way out of the terminal into the ugly and weak shopping area. This did not bode well. By this time, I was going to be cutting it close to make my flight, so I was nervous. I was also alone, so standing in line for a couple of hours was going to be logistically challenging if I needed, say, to use the ladies' room. Thankfully, during the next 3.5 hours that I stood in line (yes, three and one half hours in line in a noisy, dark, smelly, ugly airport, alone), that issue did not arise. I got to the desk, and, indeed, my flight was on TAM. And it was indefinitely delayed.

I went to the gate area (which has two small and limited places to eat, so if you are hungry, eat before security) to join the mass of humanity packed into the gate area like so many hot, smelly, annoyed sardines. The loudspeaker was crackly, which made it doubly difficult for me to understand the Portugese-only announcements. Everybody and their brother was deluging the staff with questions about their flights, and the departure boards were confusing and kept changing the gate numbers and ETAs. I ate 4 cheese breads for dinner with a Coke Zero and waited. The WiFi wasn't working very well, so I couldn't even play around on the internet.

At one point, they made an announcement that our gate was changed to gate 3, so we traipsed up the broken escalator. There, the loudspeaker was working better, and we heard that there was some sort of Air Traffic Controllers' strike. Every time they announced that a flight was leaving, a cheer would go up among everyone in the gate. I was approached by a Ghanaian man and a bunch of Filippinos who asked me to "be their leader", since I at least understood 50% of what was going on, whereas they understood 0%. I agreed, but immediately made my job a bit easier by convincing announcement guy to do the announcements in Portuguese and English. I knew he spoke good English, and he did a good job helping us out with the announcements. Obrigada, announcement guy!

After about 4 hours of this, they finally announced that our flight was going to leave from yet another gate, and we happily rushed back down the broken escalator and boarded. We were happy. It was weird. This is a good example of extreme discomfort making small happinesses seem huge and amazing.

Recife was nice and fun. Good food, nice beach. Unfortunately, it rained all week, so no real beach time, plus there are a lot of sharks there, so there wouldn't have been any swimming anyway. The Hotel Jangadeiro is adequate and on the beach, but nothing special. If you like food, you MUST eat at the Oficina do Sabor in Olinda. The food there is amazing, and the chef is a great guy. They are also a partner of one of our employment programs, so if you see a Maos de Moleque item on the menu, ordering it will help a really cool project of ours to support kids at risk in poor urban areas. Overall, good trip.

Now, I'm sitting in a Best Western in Sao Paulo. Once again, that freakin' airport has defeated me. The incoming flight from GRU to Recife was delayed, so my outgoing flight was also delayed. All of my connections on the way back were tight, less than 1 hour in between, so any delay basically meant that the rest of my trip was screwed. The check-in agent couldn't check me in for the Taca flights, either, so I was going to have to do that in Sao Paulo as well, and she basically said that I should be prepared for another delay there. True to form, the GRU-Lima flight was the only one that was not delayed that day, so I missed it. I spent last night at the nice Best Western here in SP (definitely recommended mostly because cheap, clean, and convenient), and will try to make at least one more leg of my trip today. I am counting on being stuck overnight in Lima tonight, because my connection to the Quito flight there is only 50 minutes, and, judging from the chaos in GRU, I'm sure that my Lima flight will be delayed.

Somehow, in all of this, I'm not flipping out. Normally, this kind of BS gets my blood pressure up to dangerous highs, but I'm feeling pretty ok with it. Maybe I sprung a gasket or something. Maybe I went right on past exploding head and back to calm? Who knows. I just hope that I get home this week.

Moral of the story: have low expectations when you fly through Sao Paulo's GRU airport, and bring plenty to do in the meantime (books, knitting, whatever).

Please stop killing aid workers

2007-06-11T13:46:00.000-04:00

Two Lebanese Red Cross aid workers were killed in fighting in Lebanon while trying to rescue people.

I've said this before, and I will keep saying it: please stop killing aid workers. No matter who you are, we aren't the enemy. We don't carry arms. We are, for the most part, neutral parties. This is especially true of the Red Cross. We help everyone, and we do our best not to hurt anyone. Killing us will get you nowhere and nothing but reduced credibility and the scorn of people everywhere.

It is things like this that make me want to throw in the towel and give up on the world. When people kill those who are so obviously just trying to do the right thing, I wonder why we should bother.

Update: attacks on aid workers in Darfur.
Update 6/14/2007: attacks on aid workers in Sri Lanka

Design for the Poor

2007-06-01T10:15:00.000-04:00

This NYT article describes innovative design aimed at creating products that can be bought and used by the world's poor. I've often wondered when people were going to catch on that the poor, although they don't have a lot of money, are actually a huge untapped market for good products. I've also wondered why we constantly try to get the poor to use technology that works for us in our environments but clearly is not appropriate to their environment, rather than jointly coming up with technologies that work in their environments for their purposes. This is a good start.

Dr. Weiss, I told you so

2007-05-10T13:24:00.000-04:00

Dani Rodrik backs me up on what I asserted during my oral exam upon graduating from SAIS. Saying "free trade is always good" is simply not an acceptable answer.

Inhumane Humanitarianism

2007-05-02T13:15:00.000-04:00

This article in the WaPo talks about the impunity at the UN, and the way that the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) manages refugee crises around the world.

While I'm not convinced that self-settlement in host countries is the best solution for the problem the article poses, the author makes a solid case for why things need to change in refugee camps, and particularly in those camps managed by UNHCR.

I often think that the humanitarian community, especially those who work in emergencies and complex humanitarian emergencies, fails to appreciate the delicacy of the situation of our beneficiaries. I'm not saying that they are weak or incapable of managing their lives; rather, I'd like for all of us to remember that we are serving people who are living a nanometer away from death, and it is up to us to ensure that we don't push them even closer.

You know it is bad when...

2007-04-27T11:18:00.000-04:00

What does it say about a country when the potential first lady doesn't even want to be there?

The wife of Nikolas Sarkozy, candidate for president of France:

Cécilia Sarkozy, 49, the wife of the front-runner and conservative candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, has been largely absent from the campaign. Asked how she envisioned her life in 10 years, she replied, “In the United States, jogging in Central Park.”

Bush does something good!

2007-04-22T21:18:00.001-04:00

Ok, I'm not the biggest fan of food aid overall, but I really dislike the way that the US has been doing it.  So, reading this article made me very happy.

Celia Dugger from the NY Times does a decent job reporting on Bush's food aid proposal, which will allow food for food aid purposes to be purchased locally.  The article doesn't make it clear how the purchases will be done, and it won't be more than 25% of the total US food aid, but it is a good start.

I have to admit that it turns my stomach to think that I support something that Bush did, but whatever.

Chinatown, Lima

2007-04-22T20:22:00.000-04:00

Saturday was a day for exploration in Lima. My friend, MJ, who is Peruvian, and I went to Chinatown in search of a good chifa, or Peruvian Chinese restaurant. Many folks who haven’t been to Latin America find it difficult to believe the number of Asian immigrants here. Peru likely has more than most, having had even a Japanese-descended president, Fujimori. Chinese food in Peru is similar to Chinese food everywhere, but with some special Peruvian touches. The fortune cookies are different, but the fortunes are the same. Mine said, “The stars are in your favor”.

After eating, MJ and I wandered around Chinatown a bit and saw the arch. It is small, but definitely Chinatown. I think that you can buy everything there, from Peruvian handicrafts to the latest in Japanese technology to Chinese herbal medicine to books in German. Wild.

I will note, Chinatown is not somewhere you want to go with a big handbag and lots of jewelery. You need to be very careful down there, and don’t go alone, even in the daytime.

Tomorrow, you will likely be seeing a rant about depraved backpackers and the damage they inflict on society in general, and some notes about our visit to some project sites in the countryside.

I'm not old, I'm aged to perfection

2007-04-18T17:54:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday to me!
Thanks, Good Husband!

Two things that will do more to end poverty than foreign assistance

2007-04-16T14:50:00.001-04:00

I keep coming back to two basic things that the United States can do to attack global poverty more effectively than we've been doing it for the last 60 years through foreign assistance. 

First, we need to buckle down and make our educational system from Kindergarten through PhD the inarguably best educational system in the world.  Graduates of the US educational system affect every part of the world system, and, by virtue of being graduates from the US system, have an inordinate amount of control over what they affect.  Therefore, if we want better results from the world in general, we need better input.

But that isn't the main subject of today's rant.  Rather, I'd like to touch on the second of my two things: agricultural reform.

I know that I'm a Democrat and that that would lead one to believe that I'm a supporter of farm subsidies, but I'm an economist and pragmatist first, which means that farm subsidies actually give me nightmares.

As this article in the Christian Science Monitor points out, those subsidies once meant to support small farmers are now going to large industrial farms, and skew the world agricultural market in such a way that farmers in the developing world are unable to compete, even though they need the money far more and have a significant comparative advantage in the production of many agricultural products. 

Subsidies in general are not good economic policy, but this one is beyond the pale. 

A longish blog

2007-04-15T20:54:00.000-04:00

First topic: There is this television commercial produced by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) which encourages us all to avoid rummaging for "treasures" in trash dumps. Besides being a poorly produced ad in general, there are some serious problems with it in terms of public health programming.

First, it runs on CNN International. I haven't seen it on any local television stations. I'm not sure about you, but I can't imagine too many folks who would be both garbage-dump rummagers (and apparently allowing their children to rummage as well) and CNN International fans. If the "not garbage rummaging" message were a product and my market were the rummagers, who are most likely poor city-dwellers, I don't think that I would waste money putting my ad on CNN International.

Second, the ad is in English. The Pan American Health Organization, as its name suggests, primarily serves the Americas. The ad features people who are most likely Latino. Most of the people who live in the Americas don't speak English, and I don't really think that this ad is directed to Americans and Canadians. I know, I know, Belize and some Caribbean countries speak English, but really, is an English-language ad on CNN International really the best way to get the message out?

So, in conclusion, Dear PAHO, I promise that I will not let my children rummage in the garbage, and will tell my friends that it is dangerous. You can now focus your efforts on people living in the Spanish-speaking shanty towns or the Portuguese-speaking favelas. Thank you for your concern.

Some things about Lima:
We found this little shop when we were exploring Miraflores one day. I love the name, and wondered what they were videoing.

I think that I'm going to start calling my camera the Bodega Cam.

This next photo is from "Love Park", the Parque del Amor on the Malecon in Miraflores. It is a really pretty little park with a statue of lovers overlooking the sea. The wall is covered in beautiful mosaics with quotes about love. People apparently like to carve their names and messages of love into the leaves of this plant.

Shopping: Go to Dédalo. It is a complete change from the typical tourist stuff, and also supports the work of Peruvian artists and designers. It is in Barranco, on the Paseo Saenz Peña, at the corner of Saenz Peña and El Libertador San Martín.

Sights: Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Anthropología, y Historia del Perú, on the Plaza Bolivar in Pueblo Libre. Next to the equally cool Museo de la República.

The problem of the bad well-intentioned program

2007-04-13T10:56:00.000-04:00

The article that the title links to describes the failures of the national program to counter marijuana production and use. Basically, as I've been saying for years, the program is a complete failure -- production is up and use has not significantly changed since the 1970s.

In a logical world, where things make sense and people make decisions based on information and reason, a program that failed, especially so miserably, would be immediately ended and a new and better approach sought by analyzing what went wrong.

We don't live in that world.

Instead, we live in a world where it is politically better to support a failed counter-drug program than to admit that a counter-drug program failed. No one wants to be seen as soft on drug use. Last year, I took an evaluation class that looked at a similar problem with the "Just Say No" campaign, which had the perverted effect of actually increasing drinking and drug use among participating students by a significant amount, but no one would vote to eliminate funding for it because no one wanted to be the one who didn't support counter-drug measures targeting our youth.

I stand by my assertion that the best way to manage the international drug problem is for the US to legalize drug use. Prohibition allows only one enforcement response: jail time. In these days when we know that our fancy programs and the threat of jail are not working, and jails are increasingly bursting at the seams, it makes infinitely more sense to legalize and regulate. I'm not the only nutcase who thinks so: Milton Friedman wrote a paper on legalization. Below, a quote from the linked article:

"So what's the alternative to this failed war on marijuana? Contrary to claims by Drug Czar John Walters, the alternative isn't "surrender," it’s common-sense regulation: Take marijuana out of the criminal underground and establish sensible controls. Treat it like we do alcoholic beverages, with everyone involved licensed and required to follow a strict set of rules. Educate teens about the dangers of drugs with materials that treat them with respect and present the facts honestly."

Hey, is anyone paying attention?

2007-04-13T09:10:00.001-04:00

This article, pointed out to me by my husband, is really scary.  I love to scuba dive, but that's not the only reason this detailed description of the plague currently ravaging our oceans scares me.  It scares me because things like this are happening, affecting human life tangibly and broadly, and yet most of us remain blithely insensitive to the effects our irresponsible lifestyles are having on the environment.  An environment we depend on for our own lives. 

Dear reader, no longer can we go about our days thinking that myopic scientists are warning us about low-probability dangers.  This stuff is for real.  It is an ugly truth that many of the things we love about being human, and, in the rich northern countries, the "necessary" luxuries we slave for, are exactly what is leading us down the path of our own destruction. 

These days, the news has been a frustrating read to me, because the same stories are being recycled again and again.  What passes for "breaking news" or news analysis is merely a case of journalists taking advantage of the fact that we aren't paying attention.  I think that this is a symptom of our sickness: we can only sleep at night if we delude ourselves into thinking that the prophets are scare mongers and the scare mongers are prophets.  Otherwise, the guilt from our effect on the planet and its people would consume us.

Ah, the beach

2007-04-12T19:24:00.000-04:00

Last week, I went with a friend to San Bartolo, a beach town south of Lima. It was beautiful. The white houses climbing up the sandy-rocky cliffs beside the blue ocean reminded me of pictures of some places in Greece. The surrounding landscape is a desert, which is at first shocking, but really emphasizes the bright blues of the sky and water.

We spent our late mornings lazily eating breakfast followed immediately by lunch on this terrace overlooking the small bay where my friend's house is. What a luxury. In the afternoons, we laid around with friends on the beach, eating the freshest mussels prepared in the Peruvian way and ice cream. In the evenings, a good meal was followed by some leisurely drinks. One of the nights, we went to the discoteca Home, which was ok. I'm not usually into discos, but we had a blast, and didn't get in until near 4 in the morning, which is actually late for Peruvians.

The whole weekend was so lovely that it was almost impossible to return to Lima.

Fey Day

2007-04-11T16:57:00.000-04:00

I'm feeling very strange today. Could be that I overslept. See definition 1b.

Main Entry: fey
Pronunciation: 'fA
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English feye, from Old English f[AE]ge; akin to Old High German feigi doomed and perhaps to Old English fAh hostile, outlawed -- more at FOE
1 a chiefly Scottish : fated to die : DOOMED b : marked by a foreboding of death or calamity
2 a : able to see into the future : VISIONARY b : marked by an otherworldly air or attitude c : CRAZY, TOUCHED
3 a : excessively refined : PRECIOUS b : quaintly unconventional : CAMPY
- fey·ly adverb
- fey·ness noun

Canonization of JPII

2007-04-02T12:21:00.000-04:00

It is pretty easy to see why Pope John Paul II is on the way to sainthood, especially if you are a reasonably faithful Catholic.

The article that piqued my interest today is about the beatification process, the first step in declaring a saint. The BBC article talks about a French nun who claims to have been cured of Parkinson's after praying to the deceased Pope. Ok. No problem. This is the thing that caught my attention:

"Information for the dossier was gathered on the former Pope's life and teachings, including all private writings from the period before he became Pope, and checked for orthodoxy to ensure that he expressed no heretical views."

So, it could be possible that he caused a miracle (or more) even if he were a heretic? That doesn't make any logical sense to me (leaving aside whether or not miracles make any logical sense). If the man were a heretic, and heretics were evil/bad, then why would God let him cause a miracle? God wouldn't, right? So then, if she prayed to JPII and god a miracle, it should stand to reason that he wasn't a heretic.

Right?

Jeffrey Sachs and his pipe dream

2007-03-23T17:58:00.000-04:00

Grandpa asked me to tell him what I thought of this article by Jeffrey D. Sachs, "Rapid Victories Against Extreme Poverty". Dr. Sachs, I used to think that you were really smart and that we just disagreed. Now, I think that you need to revisit some of the basic texts of economics and development theory. Not to mention come visit me in South America.

His definition of poverty is ok, even if his "basic needs" are a bit broad to be basic. I'm not sure that people "need" telecommunications.

However, his proposed solution doesn't at all address what created the situation of poverty in the first place, if not corruption, mismanagement, and weak institutions. It almost seems as if he is saying that poverty is its own cause, which is a tautology. Not to mention, if corruption, mismanagement, and weak institutions are not a problem, what does he think is going to happen to the schools and clinics and roads that are built under his plan? That they are just going to spontaneously rejuvenate themselves? That individuals will suddenly buck the trend of the problem of the commons that has existed since time untold and take care of them in some sort of hokey cooperative utopia? I thought this guy was an economist!

Furthermore, where is the magic market that will absorb, without displacement of market share, distortions, and price issues, all of this suddenly increased agricultural production? What about the environmental effects of increased fertilizer use and run-off? What is the incentive for farmers to re-invest in their farms if they are being subsidized? I thought that this guy was an economist!

Basically, his whole idea is going right back to the charity of early "development" efforts, and there is no reason to believe that the results will be any different. Decaying clinics, schools with no teachers (the corrupt governments aren't paying them enough to be there now, does he think that building a new school will change that?), rusting farm equipment in fields, empty irrigation trenches, etc. If I didn't know that he has traveled extensively in the developing world, I'd think he'd never been here before.

Finally, it is not the responsibility of the developed world taxpayers to relieve the governance burden from corrupt, mismanaged, and weak developing country governments. It is their responsibility to govern. We can provide services to help them do that better, but no way do we take this on ourselves. Then we will be doing it into eternity, while the leaders of these countries while away their time on the beach or at the country club.

That's what I think.

Dia de San Patricio

2007-03-18T00:19:00.000-04:00

I'm in Peru today, with Joe. It is a very long story as to why we are here and not in Quito, but suffice to say that it turned out to be a pleasant change of scenery, in spite of the adverse circumstances. Lima, as I failed to mention here the last time I was in Peru, is a great city, and one I really enjoy.

Tonight we went out to dinner to a great restaurant called Osaka. It serves up a beautiful selection of Japanese-Peruvian fusion food, including some of the best sushi I've ever had, the absolute best seaweed salad ever, and some really great sesame tuna. It is in San Isidro, at Conquistadores 999. They eat late here, but if you need reservations call 222-0405.

After that, we decided to celebrate Saint Patrick's day in the traditional style, at Murphy's Irish Pub (Schell 627 in Miraflores). It was quite an experience, with a wide variety of folks, local and international, young and not-so-young. There was a rather amusing MC leading a beer-drinking tourney and singing Irish drinking songs. The pick at right was from before the bar was packed to the gills. It got even more crowded as the night went on.

A good time was had by all.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia

2007-03-12T12:08:00.000-04:00

While I was in Bolivia, I also visited the city and surroundings of Santa Cruz, where my organization supports housing improvement and water and sanitation projects. The goal of the housing improvement projects is to contribute to the prevention of Chagas disease and malaria, which torment this low-lying, tropical region.

Santa Cruz, unlike La Paz, is low and hot. It is almost a totally different country. The entire time I was there, I felt like I was in a costal tropical city, rather than a land-locked city in the llano of South America. The low, colonial and colonial style architecture in the center of the city make one think that they are in a very old place, but in truth, the city was hardly a large town before the 1950s and import-substituting industrialization created the current industrial and business metropole that it is now. It is a fun city, as well, with a much more active and interesting night life than La Paz, and much better food. The industrial and commercial success, however, is very much limited to the already rich. The surrounding areas suffer from enormous poverty.

We stayed in the Hotel Asturias (info@hotelasturias.net), which I recommend. It was clean and comfortable, and had a decent breakfast. It is also easy to access the rest of the sprawling city from there by taxi or on foot. The hotel is located on Calle Moldes 154, telephone +591-3-333-9611. We ate at the Casa del Camba, which, while incredibly cheesy, is a good place to get local food and beer.

La Paz

2007-03-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

This is my first trip back to Bolivia since 1999. The airport is exactly as I remembered it; I even remembered exactly where Jason stood with the Thermos of mate de coca and a sweater, waiting for me to exit the arrivals door. Weird.

The city is not as nice as Quito, and much bigger. Everything seems a little dingy and sad. Maybe it is just the weater?

My first night (to which I arrived after a typically frustrating and uncomfortable flying experience) was horrible. Please do not ever stay in the Aparthotel Sopocachi. What a dump. No drinking water (which is a big problem when you arrive here at the high altitude), no coffee, no breakfast, horrid bathroom, uncomfortable bed, you name it. It was the first time in my life, after probably nearly a thousand different hotels, that a hotel actually made me cry myself to sleep. I'm SO not kidding.

So don't stay there, ok?

Today, I changed to the cheaper and MUCH nicer Hotel Castellon. Great, simple, comfortable rooms and clean, nice bathroom. Free Internet in the lobby, breakfast included, tea free all day, good service, fridge with beer and coke! You can find it in Miraflores, Avenida Argentina 2145 at the Parque Triangular. Email them at hotelcastellon@latinmail.com, or call at 591-2-2244145.

Tomorrow, after a slew of meetings, we are headed to Santa Cruz! More when I get back.

Quito Update

2007-03-01T15:00:00.000-05:00

There really isn't a lot to tell right now. Not much is going on.

Rafael Correa seems to be doing ok as President. Things seem quiet on the political front.

The weather is concerning me. It is supposed to be the rainiest time of the year right now, and it hasn't rained for days. Other countries in the region are suffering from intense floods due to El Nino. I'm afraid that Ecuador will be looking at crop problems later this year, and maybe other environmental disasters.

If you like jazz and are in the area, you MUST go to the Pobre Diablo, on Isabel la Catolica. Amazing place. Strange system for keeping your tab, but nonetheless, a lovely and musically fantastic place.

For Valentine's Day

2007-02-14T12:59:00.001-05:00

A must-read on love, especially for women.

http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/02/14/love_is_all_you_need.html

To Guatemala and Back

2007-02-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

To the left is a pic of the view to the west over Quito from our condo.

For the past two weeks, I've been holed up in Guatemala for some pretty intense meetings and a workshop. The first week was in beautiful Antigua, of which I got to see very little, but it was a great place to have a conference. The second week was in Guatemala City, which surprised me.

In Antigua, some of the folks attending the conference stayed at the Hostal Santa Ana. It is a beautiful old house with rooms facing a courtyard and free coffee every morning. The owners are as nice as can be, but the rooms are spare. It was a challenge for us to be there on business, as there were no phones or Internet in the rooms, but the place was very clean and comfortable. I highly recommend it to people who want a quiet and sweet place to stay out of the main part of town. It is on Calle del Hemano Pedro. Our conference and the rest of our group was at the Hotel Villa Colonial. I'm not sure about the rooms, but there is OK wireless access around the grounds, and the food is good. It was a lovely place to have a conference, and apparently is also lovely for tour groups of senior citizens from around the world. Not the place to stay if you are a party person, but quiet and beautiful. Don't be fooled by the antique look of the place, it is only 8 years old! During the conference, we had a chance to purchase beautiful handicrafts from Artesanias Rosa, a women's group supported by my organization in Guatemala. They do really nice, high-quality work, and the fair price supports a good cause. They are located on 10 Av. and 7 calle number 18, in Zona 3 of San Marcos. They open on request. I'll post pics tomorrow.

In Guatemala City for our workshop, we stayed at the Radisson Guatemala City, which, on the surface, is a very nice hotel, but really is a crapper. Every room had different services, Internet service is $10/day, which is a rip off, they had no free water in the rooms, which is essential in Latin America, and the food is mediocre at best. Our conference room was nicknamed "the cave" because it was small, dark, and smelly. I recommend you avoid it like the plague.

Overall, it was good, but I'm very happy to be home in Quito, and am excited to finally move into our new condo here. Not sure if it will happen today as planned, due to difficulties getting a mattress, but hopefully tomorrow I'll be in there.

Home sweet condo

2007-01-19T10:58:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday afternoon, I went out with the real estate agent to see some properties to rent. I didn't expect to find a place right away, but went with an open mind. The agent, Maria Paulina, was great, as was her mother and business partner, Elvira. Very talkative and informative on Ecuador and Quito in general.

The first place they showed me was perfect. It is a beautiful condo in a very secure building in a great neighborhood. Three bedrooms, a maid's quarters, a huge kitchen and pantry with all the modern accoutrement, a laundry room, and a gorgeous garden terrace with a built-in barbecue. I think that it has more floor space than our house in Baltimore, and most of the Western wall is window, with a view over Quito to the Pichincha volcano. We can probably move in next week! Woohoo!

Enough politics, now for Quito

2007-01-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

I'm here, safe and sound and out of breath from the altitude.

On the flight down here, there was a moment when I felt myself move mentally from "leaving home" to "going home". It felt strange, but good. Today, when I walked west down Mariscal Foch toward the center of the tourist district, I met the second phase of this transition, and found myself feeling physically linked to this place. I looked up to the mountains that loom over the western side of the city and the Spanish word "ubicarse" came to mind -- to locate oneself, to know where you are. I knew where I was, and that felt good.

My grand plan for the day was to sit for an hour or two at a cafe for a snack and coffee or water and people watch and write and maybe knit. Alas, Quito had another plan. I went to the Coffee Tree, a cafe in the tourist district recommended by a colleague. Normally, these aren't the types of places I hang out when I'm living in a place. I never spent a lot of time in the Inner Harbor or the cheesy "cultural centers" in Kenya. However, I'm new here, and this place was recommended, and I thought that I could muse on the role of tourism in development and cultural exchange. So there I sat, peacefully, surrounded by chill tourists. I ordered an empanada and some water and started to write. No sooner did I get my empanada and get into my book than a bunch of street musicians in black tights showed up. They were loud and mediocre.

I knew that I should have been supportive of them, doing their best to share their culture's music with tourists and make a buck off it, but they were not good at all. All I wanted was a quiet sit at a cafe, and instead I got these jokers. I couldn't even think, because one of them was about a foot away from me, strumming loudly on a poorly tuned guitar and singing everything but the correct notes. So, I got the check, and decided to walk until I found another good place to stop.

I didn't find any other little cafe on my trek, but I did get to see more of the city. Through the Parque Ejido and its artisan market, to the Parque la Alameda with its paddle boats and jungle gyms, toward the old town. Old town is interesting in its way, but not the best place for walking, really. The sidewalks are narrow and full of people bustling about. The store fronts are not meant for tourists, and mostly sell cheap imported products or questionable food to locals. The traffic is horrible. But it is all made better by the beautiful colonial architecture. I found Quito's old town to be strange in comparison with similar sections of other cities. usually, these places are bursting to the seams with cheesy tourist stuff or expensive restaurants, cafes, and high-end bars. Lima was like this, and frankly, I loved it. I don't mind mixing it up with the peeps on occasion, but the cheap and tacky stores don't do justice to the elaborate and well-restored buildings they inhabit.

I admit that I didn't make it all the way to the heart of the old town, the Plaza Grande. I got tired, it was a long walk, and my lungs still aren't up to the altitude. So, I grabbed a cab and came home to the peace and quiet of my lovely apartment in Apartamentos Los Quipus in the La Floresta district.

2006-12-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

Hardrock, Coco, and Joe

This is a very weird and somewhat disturbing Christmas video.

Ding Dong Rummy's Gone!!!

2006-11-08T13:26:00.000-05:00

I'm stunned

Shocked!

Awed!

Afraid to be excited. The devil that you know and all that.

Return to Beirut

2006-11-05T04:57:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Beirut, one of my favorite cities in the world. In spite of the recent conflict, it is still a beautiful and fun city to visit, although there is a palpable sadness now that wasn't present last year. People talk about the conflict in much the same terms as we do in the States -- wondering how this happened and what Israel was thinking. I haven't run into anyone who is supportive of Hezbollah, but I haven't been to the South yet, where they are currently doing really great work with the reconstruction effort. Regardless of what you think of them, they are doing much more to help those who were affected than anyone else.

Right now, I'm in my hotel room, looking out of my tenth floor window at the Mediterranean. It is winter here, too, and has been raining and cool. Right now, it is overcast and windy, with whitecaps in the water and the curtains billowing ominously.

Yesterday, I found a yarn store! It was a really great place. Perfectly done, great staff, friendly, amazing selection, decent prices, and really nice buttons, notions, and handmade gift items. y.not is in Saifi Village, and is very easy to find if you are in Beirut. I went in just to check it out, and maybe buy a few souvenir yarns, but ended up sitting and knitting with the owners and staff and three young Beiruti girls for about 2 hours. It was lovely. If you are in Beirut and you knit, go there. Tell Samera and Dinah that I said hi.

Off to Lebanon and Turkey

2006-10-27T11:00:00.000-04:00

On Monday, I'm going to Beirut again, the first time I will be there after the war. The last time I was in Lebanon, I fell in love with the country. It is a beautiful, multi-faceted, and culturally rich place, where the modern and the ancient, the scars of war and the beauty of reconstruction, come together with an intoxicating grace. Of course there is a dark side to all of that, but, as in every other case, the dark side, the negative space of place, is what makes the beauty of Lebanon so poignant.

While I'm there, I will be writing a proposal, so I probably won't get to do the sitting in cafes writing that I love, but I will get to see my two good friends, who improbably share the same name. There is nothing like a dinner in a restaurant in an exotic city, sharing wine with friends who I haven't seen in a while. I just love the catching-up-sharing-nostalgia that happens.

After Lebanon, I'm making my first trip ever to Turkey. Our regional meeting is in Istanbul. Really, who can argue with that? I have to admit, I'm most excited about the shopping and the food.

End of the Brain Vacation

2006-10-06T13:13:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was finally feeling a little pensive again. I haven’t felt that way for a while, which is why you haven’t seen any blogs up here for a while. I think that it is fall. Fall makes me feel smart and New-Englandish and philosophical.

A couple of questions came to mind yesterday, along with an overwhelming urge to have an intellectual conversation over beers with the Professor and my friend, E. The first one, inspired by my frustration with the stubborn refusal of so many Americans to think outside of their own little worlds, was, is the voluntary ignorance of a large proportion of the population necessary for the maintenance of a large state such as the US? After trying to think of reasonable comparisons to see if I could test the theory (China, no, India, no, Russia, almost-but-not-quite, Brazil, no), I decided that it wasn’t so. I mused about it for a while, imagining the chaos that would happen if everyone started having an opinion about everything this country’s leadership did, and scaring myself. After actually implementing the intellectual conversation plan at Bertha’s, I brought the question up with E, and she succinctly and confidently (she’s like that) stated that no, large states like the US encourage the development of voluntary ignorance, because it becomes increasingly less important for people to know or care about what happens outside their country. I had to agree – for many people living in the US, the most foreign thing that will ever happen to them in their lives is a shirt made in Indonesia they buy at Walmart or a New Yorker’s car breaking down on I-70 on their way to LA.

The second thing on my mind was how we’ve managed to create this political elite that runs the country with little or no practical experience of life outside politics. I’m not going to go on and on about this now, but basically I was asking myself if it was a good thing or not. It certainly frees everyone else up to do what they really want to do, but it prevents our political leadership from being truly representative, and also from having an understanding of what life outside the political circles is really like. Not sure how I feel about it.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Hopefully this means my brain is back from vacation.

Proxy War

2006-07-31T11:32:00.000-04:00

I think that this quote, published in the Washington Post today, is really telling. When put in this light, the implications are horrifying.

"It's really a proxy war between the United States and Iran," said David J. Rothkopf, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of "Running the World," a book on U.S. foreign policy. "When viewed in that context, it puts everything in a different light."

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

2006-07-25T19:00:00.002-04:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

Israel killed four Western UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon. Observers believe that it was deliberate targeting. Somehow I knew that this would happen. Does anyone else need any evidence that this is much more than a routing of Hezbollah? I cannot fathom why Israel would believe that bombing the UN was in its best interest.

I hope that this brings the US and UK to their senses.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

2006-07-25T19:00:00.001-04:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli bomb kills UN observers

2006-07-25T19:00:00.000-04:00

This makes no sense.

2006-07-19T11:53:00.000-04:00

U.S. Appears to Be Waiting to Act on Israeli Airstrikes - New York Times

Someone is going to have to tell me how bombing a Christian neigborhood, Ashrafiyeh, in Beirut has anything to do with dminishing the capacity of Hezbollah. How does the murder of Lebanese civilians hurt Hezbollah? 285 Lebanese have been killed in this campaign by Israelis, and 25 Israelis have been killed by Hezbollah. Am I the only one who thinks that this is complete lunacy?

Furthermore, we are going to let Israel bomb innocent people (because if you really still think that they are just after Hezbollah, you need to be smacked really hard) for another week before we do anything.

I'm at a loss for words at the horror and inhumanity of this entire situation from start to finish.

A colleague today asked whether people were discussing how much Bush's position on this is influenced by his millenial vision of Christianity, or how much his neo-con politics might be influencing his use of religion, and how either way, this is an atrocity. Our sitting out of this and our bullheaded refusal to rein in Israel is a flat out disgrace.

BBC NEWS | Business | Bush lunch chat is caught on tape

2006-07-17T14:16:00.000-04:00

BBC NEWS | Business | Bush lunch chat is caught on tape

Why are we supporting Israel on this? They have killed 120 Lebanese civilians in their bombardment, even though it is Hezbollah, without the support of the Lebanese civilians, who is carrying this out. It seems that we should tell Israel to cut it out, and then protect Lebanon against Hezbollah.

Furthermore, everyone needs to start getting honest about this BS -- all of the parties know exactly what is going on. Hamas knew what would happen when they captured the Israeli soldier and started to hurl rockets at Israel. Israel knew what would happen when they retailiated. Hezbollah knew what would happen when they did their own kidnappings and started to bomb Israel. They knew that Lebanon would be drawn in and that it would start a proxy war between Syria/Iran and Israel, fought on the already scarred and punnished streets of Beirut, Saida, and other cities in Lebanon.

This war is not going to go away, and a few hundred or even a few thousand UN peacekeepers in Lebanon are not going to do anything. We need to get tough with Israel, engage the political arm of Hamas, and break the links between Hezbollah and Iran and Syria. The longer the US supports Israel at the expense of Arab civilians, the more anti-US senitment we will generate around the world, and the more insecure we all are.

Random

2006-07-13T11:11:00.000-04:00

I know I haven't been writing recently, and yes, I will again soon. But for now, on request from enninej, here is my line:

"Fortunately, larger programs went into effect within two years of the armistice." -- Catholic Relief Services: The Beginning Years, Eileen Egan

1. Pick up any book. 2. Go to page 127. 3. Find third sentence 4. Post it on your blog (plus these instructions) 5. Don't choose the book, just pick up the one closest to you.

Pointless, yes. But amusing.

Global Development: Views from the Center: How Much Aid for Africa? This model won't tell you!

2006-05-25T11:30:00.000-04:00

Global Development: Views from the Center: How Much Aid for Africa? This model won't tell you!

Why more money does not more development make. Amen.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Muslims join Da Vinci criticism

2006-05-16T09:34:00.000-04:00

BBC NEWS South Asia Muslims join Da Vinci criticism

Fiction. Fiction, fiction, fiction. It is a word that has a long and lovely history in the English language, and words of equal meaning in many, if not all, of the world's languages.

Maybe I should protest the movie Bring It on, since it insults cheerleaders. Or any of the hundreds of movies and books that vilify Americans or women.

IT'S FICTION, PEOPLE.

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

2006-05-12T11:11:00.000-04:00

What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? - New York Times

I know that this is seriously off-topic, but in this list of the "Best American Fiction", you have to be kidding me that they couldn't come up with more than two women? And the list of men is limited enough to be a complete joke. How are we supposed to take this seriously?

Panel Faults Pfizer in '96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria

2006-05-08T09:58:00.000-04:00

Panel Faults Pfizer in '96 Clinical Trial In Nigeria

For all of you who thought after reading The Constant Gardener that there was no way it could actually happen in real life, please read the above-linked article from the Post.

If this happened in the US, Canada, or Europe, there would be universal outrage. It wouldn't have taken five years or more for this to have gotten to the national press. Pfizer would be the Enron of the pharma industry. But it didn't happen here. It happened in Africa, to poor black children in a country that most American schoolchildren wouldn't be able to find on a map (maybe most adults wouldn't be able to find it, either).

The West uses Africa as guinea pig in many ways, not only through pharmaceutical trials. Many development programs are also tests. I'm not sure what it is, what arrogance we have, that makes us think that it is ok to test our theories on the poor of Africa in ways that would never be acceptable here. Their deaths are such common news to us that we think of it as par for the course, and shrug off our part in the disaster.

We should be outraged with the behavior of Pfizer in Nigeria; not because they took advantage of poor, illiterate Africans, as the author of the article states, but because they took advantage of human beings. Of children.

Torture

2006-05-04T14:44:00.000-04:00

Warning -- another long one. I wrote this in repsonse to a National Catholic Reporter article my Father-in-law sent asking whether the torturers aren't more of a threat to national security than the whistle-blower.

I think that the American ideal of America and the reality of America in the world are often, often purposefully, at odds. The ideal that this is a country devoted to freedom and the pursuit of dreams and excellence both here and abroad; that this is a country that acts as a benevolent hegemon to the other countries of the world without exacting a price for our benevolence; that we somehow uniquely represent the political, social, and economic apogee of human kind.

On the other hand, however, America is a country in a horrifyingly imperfect world, run by imperfect people with contradictory interests. On the surface, we value peace, prosperity, innovation, education, and diversity, but in practice, Americans elect leaders who are nationalistic, conservative (even the Democrats), unconcerned with poverty, and apt to play up ethnic, social, and religious differences for their own benefit. The American media and American educational system breed citizens with little or no concern for the world outside America, and thus create a hermetic seal around knowledge that even the Internet has been unable to break. I think that one could argue that the Internet has had a larger educational impact on the populations of less free nations than on the US, simply because our media and educational systems are so much more efficient at brainwashing citizens with ideas of inherent American superiority.

This reality of America provides and enabling environment for the atrocities to which you refer. As far as most Americans are concerned, the government can do what it needs to to "protect our way of life" (let's not even get into whether or not they ought to), as long as it doesn't a) interrupt daytime TV; b) contradict parochial pseudo-Christian values; or c) expect common citizens to get their hands dirty by participating in any way. This is the outcome of the media and educational system.

That leaves us with wealthy, well-educated, powerful men and women jockeying for position in a world of politicians and pundits. Of course, many of them are actually patriotic and honest, but even those have a warped view of their role as political leaders. There is no accountability mechanism in place to ensure that they actually help America reach toward the ideal. Who really cares about the ideal, apart from simply being able to hold it in one's head undisturbed? So, our political leaders take themselves and their need for power more and more seriously, and justify it with more and more conviction, using the ideal as cover.

But still, the question remains, how can men and women in the 21st century from a "civilized" country acquiesce to torture? I don't have an answer to that, other than that we aren't living in a civilized country. What civilized country in the world continues to impose the death penalty, even though it has been proven that innocents have been killed and that it might qualify as cruel and unusual punishment? What civilized country in the world consistently fails to come up with a serious plan for universal health coverage? What civilized country in the world blames poverty for the failure of education for the poor?

The torture doesn't surprise me at all, actually. We do not live in a civilized country. The only thing that we have left is a modicum of law and order in most places. Apart from that, the statistics on education, malnutrition, and health alone would make the US a prime candidate for development assistance.

So, is national security jeopardized more by those who torture than by those who shed light on it? Yes, definitely. But it is jeopardized most by those of us who can see the wrongs and don't get angry enough to act for change. Security is more than freedom from war. Peace is more than freedom from war. Peace is freedom from injustice. Those who at all turns threaten the justice of our society threaten national security in a way Saddam never could have.

Four Things

2006-04-17T12:44:00.000-04:00

I've definitely got a hankering to post, and not much that I want to post about, so I'll take eninnej up on her "challenge".

Four jobs I've held:
- Short-order cook at the community pool snackbar. I still have pork roll.
- Lifeguard at the pool in the summer
- Student assistant at the U of Richmond computer lab. Learned a lot, did very little.
- Grad-school student librarian (my favorite job ever -- I will be a librarian for real in some future life)

Four movies I can watch over and over:
- The Princess Bride
- The Thomas Crown Affair (new one)
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- Any Harry Potter movie

Four places I've lived:
- Aldan, PA
- Richmond, VA
- Cordoba, Argentina
- Nacaome, Honduras

Four TV shows I like:
- Gilmore Girls
- Charmed
- Crossing Jordan
- Scrubs

Four Family Vacations I've been on:
- Many summers at the beach in New Jersey -- they all run together
- Disney world when I was 8 and my brother was 5. We had a blast. I got sick in China at Epcot and my Dad lost his glasses and wallet and hat at Space Mountain even though they tell you before you get on to take them out and put them somewhere safe.
- A trip to Maine to visit my cousins that I don't remember but of which there are pictures, so it must have happened.
- I can't think of another. We were beach people. That was vacation.

Four of my favorite fast food dishes:
- Hoagies and cheese steaks from Phil and Jim's in Chester and PAT'S in South Philly (not Gino's, never Gino's)
- PB&J and chicken noodle soup at Panera
- kabobs
- Wafflee House waffles

Four sites I visit daily:
- Bloglines
- Slate.com
- Washington Post Crossword
- BBC News

Four places I would rather be right now:
- A clean, sparsely-populated beach with my knitting, music, and a book.
- Costa Rica
- Home in bed
Only three.

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off

2006-04-05T12:47:00.000-04:00

Wired News: Laptop Detractors Shrugged Off

I'm a little worried about this effort. On the surface, and from a Western perspective, this seems like a good solution to the digital divide. However, if you look at similar past programs, they have become seriously problematic. I'm thinking in particular of the early drive to bring mechanized agriculture to smallholders, resulting in rusting tractor carcases strewn about the developing world or sold on the black market; of the mosquito net distribution issue that resulted in black market use of the nets rather than home use to prevent malaria. Of course, having people purchase the computers will avert some of the potential value problems, but even at $50, they will be far out of the reach of those at the 'bottom of the pyramid'. Furthermore, who is going to service all those computers? I'm sure that Negroponte doesn't expect teachers and aid workers to become the help desk for all these devices, and they will break, many of them the first time they are used.

It seems to me that all this money would be better spent improving teaching skills and educational materials and infrastructure and access to education, especially for girls, rather than on a device of questionable value.

Can’t Get Ahead: a review of Barrett and Carter’s Article

2006-03-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

On the whole, this article brings up very important points about the current climate in the development industry. The shift from development assistance to emergency relief is real. Inappropriate or ineffective targeting of beneficiaries is real. Structural poverty is real. However, Barrett and Carter miss a great opportunity to take this discussion to the next level.

It is certainly true that there is a cycle of poverty, vulnerability, and disaster that keeps people from improving their living conditions. This is evidenced by anecdotal evidence from the field, which notes that sometime we work with the exact same beneficiaries for more than a decade, with little discernable change in their quality of life, in spite of numerous small changes in behaviors or environment. This fact alone, however, does not mean that there is not enough money going to development assistance; given the fact that Barrett and Carter also criticize targeting for being ineffective, perhaps we should consider more efficient uses of the development funding that exists before investing more money into a system that demonstrably fails the poorest of the poor.

The authors state that there has been an overall shift from development assistance to emergency relief. They do not present much data to support this, but it is well-supported by both anecdotal evidence and shifting priorities with donors such as Food For Peace. However, food aid is not the only type of assistance, and it is the highest-value assistance. Other types of assistance have been changing, but not necessarily towards emergency relief. We have seen a move toward more high-value contracts, away from medium and small grants. We have also seen a move away from traditional development sectors (education, health, agriculture) toward democracy and governance, civil society, and economic development. This reflects reductions in funding at major USG donor agencies as well as disillusionment with traditional development interventions at the donor agencies. It is not clear whether this has resulted in improved or worsened return on investment, but it does not show a clear movement of cash resources toward emergencies.

There most certainly has not been a serious enough long-term investment in the development industry to determine whether or not development assistance makes a significant impact on global welfare. The decreasing amount of funding available for long-term development makes it increasingly less likely that we will be able to tell if interventions are working on a global scale. Just because an intervention appears to work at the local level within the period of measurement does not mean that it contributes to overall long term improvements in the human condition. If we want to know whether or not development assistance works, then we need to make a serious investment in it, and in honest and long-term monitoring and evaluation that reaches beyond the direct scope of the interventions in question to the indirect by-products, positive and negative.

On the other hand, the money that has gone to development work to date has not always been well-used. Empirical data, anecdotal evidence, and personal experience show that there are a number of inefficiencies in the development industry that would not be tolerated in the corporate world. Regulations on the use of US shippers and transportation for international shipping and travel raise the costs of getting food aid and human resources to developing countries unnecessarily. A lack of systematized organizational learning prevents development organizations from internalizing and implementing improvements to interventions, resulting in less effective programming being repeated.

The article cites the change in the percentage of PL480 resources that goes to emergencies and development projects, and claims that this contributes to the “vicious cycle in which reactive relief efforts further undermine already-fragile market and social institutions”. I agree that a too-heavy focus on emergency response relative to development activities with long-term security-enhancing results exacerbates poverty. However, the change in the proportions of PL480 can’t be evaluated without first asking whether food aid is even an effective means of doing development. There are enough good arguments against food aid as a tool for development that it merits further research. One problem, though probably not one of the greatest, that I see with emergency assistance is that you have Emergency People who work on Emergencies, and Development People who work on Development, and the two groups have more in conflict than in common. I think that we need to see our way to a more integrated, holistic approach to all poverty interventions, so that there is a smoothing of the transition to development.

The article states that the tying of aid to geo-political goals exacerbates the problems associated with an increased proportion of aid going to emergencies. It is true that the political aspects of development aid make it inherently less effective than it would be in a perfect world. However, the question remains, why should countries give development assistance if not to achieve geopolitical goals? Our shared constructs of nation, state, and government do not include motivation for or a mandate fro philanthropy or poverty alleviation abroad: if it is not demonstrably in the interest of the socially-constructed political entity, there is no motivation to do it. The only argument for nations engaging in international poverty reduction is that it is morally good. However, in the context of nations that have poverty and justice issues of their own internally, it is a hard sell to convince people that spending money abroad for a moral good is more important than spending it at home to make citizens better off. We can’t even prove that aid reduces anti-Americanism, thus improving national security, since many of the countries that have received the most assistance from us are the most intransigently anti-American.

Barrett and Carter state that “there is little evidence that [linking relief and development] works.” (36). This is supported by anecdotal evidence, but again, some of this is due to the disconnect between the planners of relief and development responses. It is true that the success of interventions, particularly emergency interventions, depends on a sound institutional and policy environment in recipient nations. However, on the other hand, nations with truly sound institutional and policy environments rarely are the largest recipients of emergency and development aid. Instead, the places where poverty is deepest are countries where corruption reigns, violence is endemic, and the separation between the rich and the poor is huge.

I agree with the authors that aid has not reached the intended beneficiaries effectively, and that there are better ways of doing things. However, under the current political climate and funding structure, it is very difficult to see how we could make the necessary changes in implementation. Implementing organizations know that people-centered holistic community development projects that work with and through successful local social entrepreneurs are the most successful. However, USAID and the other large donors fund large, multi-year, single-sector projects that do not take into consideration the collateral damage of the trendy intervention of the day, and frequently insist on out-dated and ineffective implementation strategies rather than innovative and responsive strategies. As long as governments are giving aid, it will be political. As long as it is political, it will be a market ruled by oligopsony, with USAID, WB, and the EU providing all the meaningful funding, and thus determining the type of product available.

My favorite point in the paper was that “The common denominator to these examples is that poor people respond to insecurity today in ways that compromise their capacity to build a better life tomorrow. Such behavior is rational.” This is 100% true, and if we do not incorporate a more refined sensibility about both transforming negative coping strategies and a fundamental respect for the rationale of people’s choices, we will continue to be a part of the problem. If people are engaging in negative coping strategies, then we need to ask them what they need to switch to positive coping strategies. We can’t just assume that they are only doing these things because they are stupid or don’t know better. Often, there is a lack of access or availability of information or resources that prevents them from coping in positive ways.

Expertise

2006-03-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged by eninnej with the 5 resources meme. The mistress of procrastination and gender is asking me to 'fess up and choose an expertise, and then state which five resources, online or otherwise, I would give someone to introduce them to my field of expertise.

Well, I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, but more than anything else, my field of expertise is International Development Theory and Policy. So, without further ado, here are the recommended resources:

1. Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen. This book is a good introduction to modern thinking about poverty and development, written by a brilliant Indian economist. I don't agree with everything that he says, but I think that it is a good start to getting your mind around the key issues.

2. Food Aid after Fifty Years, Christopher Barrett and Daniel Maxwell. This book is a great introduction to food aid, including a relatively honest assessment of its pros and cons.

3. www.usaid.gov, the US Agency for International Development website. This is a good way to get an idea of how the US government does business in the development industry, and to learn what types of activities are supported in various regions.

4. Paul Krugman and his other site: My favorite economist. Well, second favorite after my father-in-law. This isn't technically International Development-related, but he does write about it once in a while, and his ideas are broadly applicable.

5. The Center for Global Development: a great website for learning about the issues facing the development industry today. You can learn about specific regions, policy issues, or technical progress. My personal favorite is the section on Aid Effectiveness.

So there -- it is done. Now I will tag two people: Grampa and Brother-in-law. I'd tag The Professor, but his blog is all serious and work-related.

Tbilisi, again

2006-02-18T00:54:00.000-05:00

Here in Tbilisi, I’m staying at a nice little hotel called the Villa Mtiebi. It is tucked into a crumblingly charming neighborhood in Old Town, a short walk to great restaurants and shops and interesting sights.

Tbilisi is a complex city. Somehow, all eras of history seem to exist simultaneously here, shifting translucent time. One look out into the city from the hotel window can encompass 6th Century Persian and Christian ruins, 12th Century Byzantine ruins, 19th Century Georgian buildings, 20th Century Soviet ruins and buildings, and 21st Century Georgian construction. The food and wine traditions span time and culture, with a variety of flavors encountered probably nowhere else in the world. Beliefs and practices are a mélange of modern and traditional, international and parochial.

Many of the buildings here retain the scars of the destruction from earthquakes past. Scars is actually an understatement: many of the buildings are broken nearly in half, with one entire part of the building sitting on a perilous angle, or part of the roof fallen into the courtyard. You can actually see into some of the cracks. Formerly elegant townhomes lean against one another as they slowly collapse into history.

In addition to poverty, there are reasons why people, particularly in Old Town, don’t fix their homes. They don’t get government assistance to move unless their home collapses, so they just let the buildings crumble around them. The business people gentrifying and renewing this trendy area just wait. They can’t buy the people out, but when the buildings fall, they are there like vultures, maybe keeping the façade or old shape of the building, maybe demolishing it to build a concrete architectural nightmare. There are some parts of Old Town where the old buildings have been repaired and made into chic restaurants and shops.

The Game
On my first Saturday in Georgia on this trip, I accepted a friend’s invitation to meet for lunch and then head to the Georgia vs. Russia rugby game.

Six of us met for lunch at the World of Wine. This absolutely lovely wine shop/restaurant is worth of visit for the friendly service, good wine selection, and great food. However, it will be forever known among those of us who ate there that day as the House of Urine. Gross, but true. The reason for this is the sign outside. The “w” for wine looks more like a “ur”. The World of Wine is just off Rustaveli, the main drag in Tbilisi (the Lonely Planet guide for the region describes it as “the street you always find yourself walking on”, and they are right), on the street to the left of the Paliashvili Opera.

The rugby game was a real trip. Tickets were dirt cheap: only about $2.50 a piece. The huge arena was barely 1/3 of the way full, but I didn’t see a single Russian. Given the state of relations between Russia and Georgia right now, I’m not surprised. I even felt bad for the ref who had to make the occasional call in favor of the Russian team. The Georgians showed a lot of team spirit, but were surprisingly tame as far as fans go. The Georgian army provided security in the first row, but they were unarmed. The team was supported by a handful of “Castel girls”, apparently some sort of cheerleading squad sponsored by the beer company. They wore shiny pinkish-silver outfits that clearly showed their panty lines and stiletto boots. They didn’t do much cheering, but they did get on TV quite a bit.

It was a rout, and by the end of the game, we were all rooting loudly for Georgia. I’m not sure if it was the skill and brawn of the Georgian team, which ran roughshod over the Russians, leaving a trail of wounded in their path, or the banner of St. George, which a faithful fan held up over the crowd the entire time. Maybe it was the traditional polyphonic singing that followed “We Will Rock You” from the stands. Whatever it was, the Georgians emerged victorious, and we emerged at the German pub Kaiserbrau.

Flying to Georgia (the country)

2006-02-16T23:29:00.000-05:00

This trip began with a very long series of flights: DC to London, London to Munich, Munich to Tbilisi. There were no serious problems on any of the flights, but so many layovers and such long flights is exhausting. I’m sure that this isn’t the first time I’ve griped about Heathrow Airport, and I’m equally sure that there are many who would point out its finer features, but I really don’t like it. It is a huge shopping mall full of bad pop music and jangling food noises. The gates are absolutely secondary to the place, so much so that you could easily miss them amid the noisy advertisements and myriad duty free and cashmere and luggage and food shops.

My biggest pet peeve about Heathrow is that they don’t post the gate for the flights until the last minute, just before it boards. So everyone waits, glancing periodically at the monitors, until suddenly there it is. If you watch consistently, it doesn’t appear, much like the proverbial watched pot. So the monitor secretly announced “Gate 42”, all the way through the gauntlet of shops and down this corridor or that one, a five minute walk, we are notified by the sign on the wall, but it seems like a race against the clock, which it can be if you don’t look at the monitor at just the right time. “Boarding” it reads.

To eat or not to eat? Who knows what the mysterious “snack” on the plane will be, or if the “dinner” will be edible. Eating at the airport passes the time on a layover, but in Heathrow, that requires that you leave the precious monitors.

Anyway. I arrived, short one bag but safely nonetheless. The food was terrible and the child in front of me was noisy, but I arrived.

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him - New York Times

2006-01-30T14:33:00.000-05:00

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him - New York Times

This article, by the NY Times'Andrew Revkin, describes NASA's attempt to stifle the dissemination of scientific information that does not concur with the mythology of the Bush administration. I am not surprised, but I am still horrified. This is probably going on in many fields. The scientist in question is a climate expert, and has spoken and written often over the past 30-odd years on climate change. He is highly respected in the scientific community, and presents his views as his alone, not official statements from NASA. Yet, NASA is trying to prevent him from speaking to the press because his messages do not make the Bush administration look good. I'm not kidding:
"In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority. "

Where does it end? It isn't just at NASA. Apparently this happened at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, too. Who knows where else.

It is absolutely inappropriate and unproductive for politicians to gag or message-manage scientists. The Bush administration has created an alternative to reality, a mythology in which scientists are crazy and religious nuts are credible scientists (ID). They are trying to create a situation in which the only available information is information that supports their version of reality. If this doesn't remind you of The Matrix, it should at least remind you of China and other dictatorships.

I keep saying it, and I will say it again: it will not surprise me if Bush tries to get a third term. It will not surprise me if the elections are rigged. Everywhere else I have seen the symptoms of tyranny, that is what has happened.

A False Balance - New York Times

2006-01-30T09:58:00.000-05:00

A False Balance - New York Times

Just read this.

Foreign Aid Shell Game

2006-01-25T13:28:00.000-05:00

In many ways, government use of foreign aid to further foreign and even domestic policy agendas makes sense. If we accept the human construct of the nation (for, what else is it?), then on some level we must accept that those who are members of the nation have shared interests at stake, both domestically and internationally, that must be protected. As I’ve stated before, I’m still not convinced that there are many good arguments for caring about people in other nations that aren’t implicitly or explicitly moral. If we assume that the nation is not a moral actor, then using foreign aid to support national agendas makes perfect sense. Why else would a nation do it? The biggest problems with this approach are 1) “national interest” is often full of contradictions; 2) members of the nation do not always have an agreed-upon image of what the “national interest” is; and 3) the inherent short-term nature of democratic government makes “national interest” a politically moving target.

So, in response to eninnej’s question, is it a bad thing that NGOs that receive government funding are complicit in furthering government aims, I would say that it depends. It depends on the purpose and the moral stance of the NGO. If the moral stance of the NGO happens to be in line with the national interest stance of the government, then as far as the NGO is concerned, who cares? Take the money and run. On the other hand, if the moral stance of the NGO is at odds with the government, as it often is, then I would say that NGOs in this position that take government funding lack integrity. We can’t expect all NGOs to agree with us as individuals, and these institutions have no representative role vis-à-vis the larger national population. However, an institution that supports and actively implements what are, essentially, a government’s foreign policy objectives has no business portraying itself as neutral.

NGOs that implement the US government’s foreign policy will never rock the boat enough to create meaningful social change (more another time on how, if at all, they might do this; see also Saul Alinsky). If development NGOs do make positive change in the lives of people as individuals, through microfinance, agriculture, or education programs or what have you, great. But saying that there is an improvement is still making a value judgment: this is better than that. Sure, I believe that individuals are capable of making that judgment for themselves on the basis of their unique situation. I like living in a house better than living in an apartment; that statement is culturally bound, but it is individually arrived at by me in my unique circumstance. However, I can’t extrapolate from that and say that living in a house is better for everyone.

NGO workers will certainly be more at risk the closer the ties are between their funding source and the Department of State. In many of the places where these hard-working and well-meaning folk strive (like Sisyphus) to bring justice and progress, they will be targeted because their employers receive funding from the US government. Eventually, all NGO workers, funded or not by the US government, will be targeted, because the terrorist’s weapon is blunt. Their work will surely be negatively affected.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Cash meant for Iraqis 'misused'

2006-01-25T11:27:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS Middle East Cash meant for Iraqis 'misused' This news of US government corruption related to reconstruction in Iraq is likely to be overlooked by most, but the truth is, it is the tip of a disgusting iceberg of corruption and deception related to Iraq. Just the thought of all that money wasted by this administration's incompetence makes my stomach turn. This corruption has hurt everyone who has been concerned about Iraq in good faith, from Liberal to Conservative.

How dare they think that they have any right to use taxpayer money in such an irresponsible way? Taxpaying Americans, especially those who pay honestly, do so with the implicit assumption that their money will be used to pay for the operations of government that benefit Americans and serve our interests as a nation. This fraud, which of course is not beyond my imagining of what this current administration is capable of, has betrayed that trust. I'm not naive enough to think that this is the only black mark on the US government, or that this administration is the only one to sink to this level of depravity. What really gets my goat in this case is that the honest taxpayers across the political spectrum who expected our country to commit in a serious way to reconstruction in Iraq, which convinced some of them to vote for Bush in the last election, were lied to and deceived. Yet I am well aware that the likelihood of them getting angry enough to kick him out is slim at best -- they are still starry-eyed over his religion.

The Iraqis have suffered a double indignity at our hands. I'm not talking about the insurgents or the terrorists. I'm talking about the regular people of Iraq. They never asked for us to destroy their country in the name of their freedom, yet we deigned it our responsibility to do so. And this is how we pay them back for letting us put on the anti-terrorist show: we steal money meant to help them recover and rebuild a functioning country. What a lie. What more proof does the world need that the US, as currently led by the Bush administration, is in itself a danger to humanity. That money could never have been meant to actually rebuild anything for the Iraqis. Look to other post-disaster and war programs the US has funded: the Tsunami, the Balkans. While the progress in those cases has been painfully slow and faced many bureaucratic hurdles, work was being done in good faith. For the most part, the contracts and grants dispersed and managed by USAID and cooperating NGOs were implemented to the benefit of the people who survived. There have been many problems, of course, but nothing like this.

Why, then, did the US government choose not to follow normal, proven procedures for reconstruction programming? This article postulates that it is because of the desire for secrecy before the war. However, that isn't enough. Once we began hostilities, they should have begun to plan for recovery openly, taking advantage of experts in the field. They did not, proving once again that this administration has no interest in the sustainability of change in Iraq. That was never the point.

When we start to take a hard look at the Iraq crisis, I think that we'll be able to see the outlines of the truth about the Bush administration. Nothing they have done to date makes sense within normal American logic or reasoning if we assume that the goal was a stable and democratic Iraq and the end of terrorism, but it must be the result of some coordinated thought process. So what is the motivation? What is the goal? I shudder to think that the entire point of all this death and destruction was only meant to enhance Bush's political standing and take attention away from the crimes his administration is committing against the American people on the domestic front.

Someone will have to tell me what part of this doesn't look exactly like any typical Latin American or African dictatorship. Spying on civilians, limitation or elimination of judicial procedures on executive order, punishment for straying from the party line, senseless war (see the Falklands Islands conflict for another, albeit less drastic, example), propaganda...

BBC NEWS | Africa | Cattle raids 'kill 38' in Kenya

2006-01-19T11:14:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS Africa Cattle raids 'kill 38' in Kenya This article talks about recent cattle raids in the north of Keny, which folks there attribute to the on-going drought and famine in the region. When I read articles like this or hear about these events at work, it really drives home the point for me that this world is not one, but many. I have been to northern Kenya and southern Sudan, and I have seen cattle herders and talked to them about conflict over grazing pastures and water holes, yet still I have trouble getting my Western mind around it. Cattle herders living in the Horn of Africa region are on the edge of survival every day, and they sing love songs to their cows because those cows mean life and hope to them.

I have heard people in the States call these cultures 'primitive', but they have been around a lot longer than our culture has, and yet they have not had the motive or opportunity to 'modernize'. They aren't more noble than we, as many would like to imagine. They aren't necessarily more spiritual or closer to nature. They, like all humans, make rational decisions, and act within what they perceive, given their cultural, geographic, political, and religious perspective, to be their best interests, just as we do.

The most interesting question to me is, "What are the conditions within which is it rational to kill other human beings over cattle?", which leads to the questions, "If it is decided that this is negative, how can the conditions under which is it no longer rational be brought about?" and "Who is in the appropriate position to decide whether a behavior is negative or positive?"

I know that I sound abnormally relativist here, and I can actually feel some of my friends and colleagues cringing as I write this even before they read it, but "development" and "justice" and "peace" depend largely on those questions. When we engage in "development", we implicitly decide, either with or for the targets of our development, that the status quo is inherently worse than the ideal to which we attempt to move them. Either we accept the value judgment of the target beneficiaries, which might be flawed by proximity to the issue, or we impose our own value judgment, which is flawed by distance from the issue.

Furthermore, much "development" work does not aim to create conditions under which rational action conforms to the ideal. Rather, much of it is aimed at treating the symptoms (getting people to dialogue instead of fight, rather than asking why there is conflict in the first place), or trying to encourage people to change their behavior without changing the conditions that made that behavior rational. This approach is absolutely not sustainable. If the conditions do not change, the rational response to them will also not change.

Therefore, if we decide that somehow we can figure out what the ideal world looks like and we commit to bringing that world into being, then we must change the fundamental cultural and social infrastructure of the world. This means activism against the status quo, which is dangerous and can have myriad negative outcomes as it is unpredictable and in conflict with the power structure.

Since I have yet to meet a development worker who is a committed activist for sea changes in culture and society (myself included), my conclusion is that we are lying to ourselves and others, feeding on a pleasant, ego-fulfilling fantasy that somehow we are making a difference. We might have a finger in the dyke, and it might be the right dyke. It might not be a dyke at all.

Sadness

2005-12-27T15:57:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I learned that my beloved Uncle Duke who inspired this blog and has always encouraged me to write and share my experience has died. Please keep his family in your thoughts and prayers. He was a force of a man with a heart of gold, and he will be missed.

From now on, this blog will be written in the memory of Richard "Duke" Schneider, who was one of the first people to call me a writer and mean it.

Yarn Harlot: Diversity

2005-12-27T15:51:00.000-05:00

Yarn Harlot: Diversity

In today's world, full of blind ambition, greed, violence, crime, and despair, the last thing that we need to be doing is threatening and criticizing those who speak plainly about tolerance.

May 2006 find all of us being agents of peace and activists for justice in our communities, with the shared objective of building a world where all have equality of opportunity. We did not select our birth. We did not dictate our culture. We are not responsible for who our parents are, or what skin color we have, or what language we speak. However, as adult human beings with free will, we are each responsible for requiring of ourselves excellence in kindness and sincerity in compassion , regardless of whom we are dealing with.

And that is true regardless of your religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Kansas, alas

2005-11-10T16:08:00.000-05:00

This article from Scientific American by John Rennie is great. Finally, someone is calling a spade a spade in this "intelligent design" conflict.

Seriously folks -- when we have gotten to the point where idiots are in charge of education, we have a major problem in our country. This at a time in the world when it is more important than ever for Americans to excel at science and math and technology to compete in the global labor market.

The next thing we know, they'll put it in the grammar books that "y'all" is the correct plural for "you".

From Lincoln's First Inaugural Address

2005-11-01T15:08:00.000-05:00

"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

They never cease to amaze me

2005-10-25T10:09:00.000-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/politics/25detain.html?th&emc=th

This article talks about the administrations attempts to ensure that legislation prohibiting torture and inhumane abuse of detainees does not apply to the CIA, which probably employs those techniques more than any other organization in the US government.

I understand that we are at war with an enemy that would and has gladly, at times gleefully, tortured and abused Americans and our allies. I abhor them and their methods as much as anyone. And for that, as well as several other reasons, I cannot stomach the idea of giving free reign to our CIA to behave that way.

Minia

2005-10-02T13:27:00.000-04:00

Before and upon arriving in Cairo, our Egypt office asked several times if I could work on Saturday night, and told me over and over again to meet the driver at 5pm sharp outside the hotel for a trip to meet a local partner and see a project site. No problem, I said each time. So I meet up with my colleague and the driver (wondering why my colleague needed to leave her suitcases in my room and was carrying such a large backpack with her) outside the hotel, and hop in the car for what I thought was going to be a car ride to somewhere in the city, but ended up being a ride to the train station. My mind was clicking and buzzing trying to figure out what was going on, but nothing popped into place until I asked my colleague why she had a big backpack, and she mentioned that I was a light packer. Aha, grr, argh, we were SPENDING THE NIGHT AND NO ONE TOLD ME? Ok, I’m a pretty flexible person, but they could have told me – that would have been the nice, normal, thoughtful, and responsible thing to do. So we ran out to get me a toothbrush and toothpaste, hoping that the hotel would have the normal stash of toiletries and hopped on the train for El Minya.

The train ride was relatively uneventful and normal, full of stimulating conversation among my colleague and I. We arrived at the cute town of Minia and the Hotel Aton just in time to crash into our beds, dreaming of the Nile.

Minia, or El Minya, is a beautiful town on the Nile, built of curlicued old decorated-cake buildings, now fallen into disrepair, and the standard concrete third-world architecture that makes globalization ugly. There is much less traffic and pollution there than Cairo, and the pace is more manageable. Our hotel is located just on the Nile, overlooking which we ate our breakfast and watched the relentless sun rise above the escarpment in the distance. It was out of a book, really. Maybe out of this book.

One thing that I didn’t mention was that when the guards at the train station realized that we were three women traveling alone (my colleague and I were accompanied by another, Egyptian, colleague who worked on the project we were about to see), he insisted on sending one of his men along with us on the three-hour train ride as our bodyguard. We insisted that it was unnecessary, but the guy came along anyway, following us doggedly to the hotel. This bodyguard thing was a sort of theme on the Minia trip, as we will see.

After our breakfast, we met up with a fourth woman colleague and headed off to pick up the partner staff and go meet some clients of the project. Again, we were beset by a bodyguard, this time in the form of four guys from the partner organization staff, complete with HF radios. Just in case what? Anyway, we went to a village just outside of Minia, and met four women who have loans out with our microfinance program.

I want you to understand that these are normal women. Two were in their forties, two in their late thirties (although all four of them looked younger than me – are they on to something?), and they were just trying to get by, any way they could. They took the risk of getting a small loan and starting a small business because the risk was worthwhile – if they didn’t take it, they would remain nearly desperately poor, and if they did, even if it didn’t work out, how much worse could things really get? That’s not to say that this project is perfect, or even really that good (although as microfinance projects go, it isn’t a bad one), but just that there are normal women, just like me, just like some of you. They may or may not be natural entrepreneurs, but they’re making a go of it anyhow. They used the money to invest in their microbusinesses, which included small livestock-raising and dairy production. We wondered what their husbands thought, and the only one we met said that he was proud of his wife, and glad to help her out, but we still wondered.

I emphasize their normality really to make my point that development assistance frequently treats the poor as guinea pigs, cavalierly testing methodologies and complicated “solutions” on them. Oops – that didn’t work, and now you’re being beaten by your husband and you’re worse off? Sorry ‘bout that. We’ll try something else next time. And there they are, increasingly dependent on our intervention, their human dignity stripped from them as we pooh pooh their inherent smarts as not being as good as ours. Give me a break. I watched one of the women as she rhythmically shook an inflated sheepskin full of buffalo milk back and forth from where it was tethered, making cheese and butter. Can you make cheese and butter that way? Neither can I. I hated the idea that she or anyone else like her, anyone else like me, would be forced to live grasping at a dollar-bill lifeline that could be pulled up at any time. Oops – sorry, we had to end that program because They cut our funding. Better luck next time!

After our pleasant/weird visit to the clients, we and our entourage of bodyguards went up to Beni Hassan, a Pharaonic archeological site. Up on the escarpment, just beyond the sharp end of the oasis around the river, there are a series of caves, some man-made and some natural. The natural ones are hideouts for bandits, but the man-made ones are burial sites for wealthy Egyptians from the 11th and 12th dynasties, or some 3,000 years ago or more.

The tourism ministry has set up a nice little welcome center that was empty when we arrived. To get onto the path up the hill to the caves, we had to walk through a rickety, dusty, and, given the fact that there was no electricity at the moment, completely useless metal detector, and have our bags inspected. Whatever. If they had put up a wooden arbor covered in flowering vines, it would have been equally useful but much prettier.

The caretaker allowed us into two of the tombs. It was really overwhelming to stand there in a site older than anything that I had ever experienced, looking at vivid wall paintings that the caretaker’s completely fictional explanations could not have obscured.
He told us that Egyptians were doing yoga in this picture (yoga was formalized thousands of years after the Egyptian pharaonic period), and hockey in that picture (yeah, right). We did see the hairdressing that he spoke about, and the monkeys in the fig tree.

Cairo

2005-10-02T13:05:00.000-04:00

Cairo was my base of operations in Egypt, as it unfortunately is for most tourists (but I’m not really a tourist, per se). Cairo has some wonderful nooks and crannies, but my lasting impression of it was the pollution clogging my sinuses and lungs, mind boggling traffic, and the sad decay of once beautiful places. It is definitely worth a visit, especially if you have wonderful friends living there to take you to the secret spots, but don’t plan to stay long unless you have a gas mask.

I have two very cool and accommodating friends in Cairo, who enthusiastically took on the tour guide role during the first two days I was there. The first day, we wandered around Islamic Cairo, a warren of alleys that have housed shops and cafes for ages, and don’t look all that different than they did hundreds of years ago, except they are disrupted by the occasional car. Even the foreigners wandering around (mostly lost and hampered with bags of purchases) probably have their analogs in history.

Behind the busy and crowded storefronts, you can see the remnants of layers of beautiful and old buildings, built on and around one another over time. The walls of arches over the alleys are decorated with intricate carvings, many of which incorporate typical Arabic artistry using Arabic script and quotes from the Koran. I wonder what was inside of those walls, what houses and private spaces they protected. We had lunch on the second floor of a set of shops, on a balcony overlooking an alley occupied by a couple of shisha sellers. It was great to be able to look down and observe the wandering and bargaining while I ate my falafel and chatted about life in Cairo with my friends.

During our wanderings, we entered, after some discussion between one of my friends and the guard that included us leaving after ten minutes and something about a mysterious engineer, an historic mosque that once linked two major madrassas and has what may be the tallest minaret in the city. The building is stunning: tall walls, arched hallways lit by old hanging lamps, a huge courtyard with four wings, a central fountain, and vivid stained glass windows. The painting on the walls and ceiling was so intricate that we wondered out loud who the poor bastards tasked with that tedious but magnificent job were. We also wondered about the pressure that must have been on the guy or guys who were responsible for carving a quote from the Koran around the courtyard wall so that it ended exactly at the corner where the last wall met the first.

We spent our ten minutes just looking around and trying to get photos that would capture it. Then, in blatant defiance of our guard’s warning (we weren’t really worried), we started the epic climb up the endless stairs to the top of the minaret. Step after step up the ancient stairs, through spots so dark you lose a sense of your own height and position in space, and out into the riotously bright afternoon sun, we went. Upon arriving at the top, the effort was made worthwhile by the view: a panorama of Cairo, old and new, shrouded with smog but still fascinating in its inclusion of thousands of hears of history. We breathed hard as we stood there just taking it in: the view and the smog alike.

The smog is really unbelievable. It isn’t as bad as Dhaka in Bangladesh, but it is almost there. It is so offensive and makes just breathing in Cairo so annoying that it feels like the city wants you to leave and never come back. Supposedly, the US government funded a clean air project here several years ago: you’d never know it. If this is better, how was it before?

The next day, we took off on the remarkably clean and efficient metro to the Coptic section of town. The Coptic Church is a branch of Catholic Christianity. Christianity in Egypt pre-dates Islam by many centuries, and the Coptic section is also known as Old Cairo. Many would probably mistake a Coptic Church for a Greek Orthodox Church. There are no statues, only icons, and the sanctuary is surrounded by an intricately carved high wooden screen. We visited the Hanging Church, the Church of Al-Mo’allaqa, which is built over a bastion of an ancient Roman fortress. It is called the Hanging Church because it kind of hangs over the bastion, and the empty spaces inside the bastion now form the basement of the church. The inside is beautiful, with intricately carved wooden elements, beautiful icons from various periods, and walls covered in colorful murals. Through the glass inserts scattered through this oldest and very significant Coptic church, you can look down directly into human history; I could have stood there for hours asking, “How the heck did we get from there to here?”

In addition to this church, we also briefly visited another Coptic church, a mosque, and a synagogue. What struck me most were the similarities between the three types of buildings. All three religions use Arabic script, are decorated with intricate carving and murals, and prohibit statues. All three types of building have similar architectural shapes, as well as a pulpit somewhere in the middle, raised up above the congregation’s space and accessed by steps. This may be the period, of course, as they were all last remodeled probably around the same time by people who were all heavily influenced by the same outside factors, but it just made me think about the number of wars fought over religion when in many ways, we all have a lot more in common than we’ve preferred to believe.

We ended the day smoking a shisha and drinking coffee in the neighborhood where another friend of ours once lived, watching the little girls being ferried home from school, packed into cars like sardines.

Cows Fly

2005-09-23T09:13:00.000-04:00

That is certainly what I feel like these days when traveling by plane. I’ll never understand how they can live with themselves making people travel with so little dignity, but I suppose the airline execs all travel First Class.

The seats are so small, I, a relatively small person, cannot get comfortable. Most people aren’t small, most Americans even less so. Yet here we sit, stuffed like sardines, patiently or not so patiently leaving aside decorum and personal space, sleeping (in the most unfortunate cases drooling) on the shoulders of the stranger with whom we are in more intimate contact than seen on most first dates.

Health authorities and Katie Couric tell us that we should get up regularly on long-haul flights to walk around. This is to prevent death by embolism or something. Someone who also flies coach will have to tell me how it is that one is supposed to get up regularly when in the middle of that loathsome bank of five seats, when the others stuffed in on either side of them are asleep. One gets little enough sleep on a plane – I have no desire to steal any of those restful moments from a fellow passenger just to walk around.

They have recently discontinued free meals and the little pillows and blankets from domestic flights. Airlines are going bankrupt, so they have to charge for a slice of cheese in stale bread ($5.00) and a mini Coke ($5.00). Airlines are going bankrupt, so they have to put more people in the plane, and therefore have to carry less extra weight, so there go the pillows and blankets. So, our stomachs rumble as we freeze to death. The experts tell us to drink plenty of water so as to not get dehydrated on the flight, but who is stupid enough to pay $5.00 for water?

Today, I was told by the woman checking me in that I was only allowed five pounds of weight as carry on. This, to me, is the height of indecency. My laptop alone weighs 4 pounds. Then what about all the other things one needs on the flight? Book: at least 1 pound. Toiletries (including feminine items): at least 1 pound. Oops! I’m over. Forget that really expensive digital camera – I’ll have to trust that an underpaid baggage handler in some backwater airport doesn’t need one today. Forget the pen and crossword book, the crochet project, the extra underwear and change of clothing.

So now, I will be a sleepless and slimy sardine on my arrival to Georgia via a very long layover in Munich, since I forewent the toiletries on this one. Maybe the day room in the hotel will have something I can at least bathe with, although since I also gave up my change of clothing, I’ll just have to climb back into dirty clothes.

And people tell me that all my traveling sounds so romantic. Let me tell you something: airports nearly stimulate tears for me now, as I imagine the indignities and insults I will face during my trip, layover after layover, in increasingly small planes with increasingly smelly fellow passengers. I don’t see how we can do anything to change the situation. We need to travel now, in our globlized world, and fuel prices and liability insurance are exorbitant on the airlines. They need more passengers and lower costs, and we need more flights. It is a match made in hell.

Tbilisi

2005-09-22T09:14:00.000-04:00

I’ve been having some trouble getting started on this description of my time in Tbilisi; I didn’t really have a chance to get a good sense of the place, and don’t really see an obvious entry point to it. The thing that I liked the best about Tbilisi was the food, so I’ll try starting there, and see where we go.

Georgian food is really amazing. Historically, it isn’t surprising that it is so varied and creative. Georgia, over its history, was on the silk and spice roads from east to west. Just about anything can grow in its varied climates, and the country has been part of the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Soviet empires. Migrations and wars brought them into contact with many cultures of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Some of the signature tastes of Georgian food are walnuts, paprika, and pomegranate. Red bell peppers, mushrooms, and eggplants provide the vehicle for pureed spreads of walnut and spices. Some of my favorite things were the minted cheese wrapped with pastry and soaked in minted yogurt, lamb-stuffed ravioli stewed in broth and topped with a bread lid, and the walnut and pomegranate stuffed braised trout.

Tbilisi is a very interesting city, and I feel that it was a shame that I didn’t get more time to explore the museums and older parts of it. The architecture ranges from a fortress built in the 13th or 14th century and religious buildings almost as old to post-Soviet modern glass buildings. On my last day there, one of the drivers took me sightseeing around Tbilisi and Mtsket, the old capital. It became clear why, as people in the office told me, Georgia was considered the tourism capital of the Soviet Union. Along the river and in the hills, there are beautiful buildings, decorated with intricately carved wooden balconies, and there are restaurants everywhere.

I found three buildings particularly interesting: town hall, a church, and the ministry of transportation. Town hall in Tbilisi looks like it was built during the period of heavy French influence, in the mid-19th century. My driver, however, insists that it is only 50 years old, and was built to look like it was very old. This remains to be confirmed, but that seems like an interesting story – why someone would go to the trouble and expense of building a town hall in the Soviet period to look like it was very old. I wonder if it has something to do with the tourist reputation of the country – it may have needed a town hall that was in keeping with its romantic image.

The Church we went to was beautiful and very very old. The driver who was with me thinks that it was probably built in the 15th or 16th century, but I think from being inside that it was built over at least two churches built previously. Georgia is made up mainly of Georgian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Christians, and the church was set up like a Greek Orthodox church would be, with the altar behind a beautiful screen. The walls were painted with very intricate murals, but up to about six feet off the ground, all the faces were rubbed out of the saints, all the way around on every mural. I asked the driver why, but he just laughed at me and shook his head. Hmmm. The entire church was stunningly painted and carved and inlaid. Some of the interior walls had crumbled in places, revealing an earlier structure that was a bit smaller, and there were places in the floor covered with glass to reveal an even earlier site below.

Sarajevo 2

2005-09-21T09:16:00.000-04:00

Today, I bought a rug from a friend of my colleague here. The rug shop owner is an energetic and fun Bosnian who speaks great English. He is a friend to many expats here, including the US ambassador, because he is honest and has a real talent in finding and restoring antique rugs. He told a similar story about the beginning of the war as the staff member who took me to the center. He lived in a building with Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats. They were friends and drank coffee together and their children played together. Then one day, he heard that people were killing each other, and mistrust set in instantly. They were at war, and his friends were his enemies. He couldn’t understand why so few Americans seem to understand how the war started; I explained that we hadn’t even heard the tip of the iceberg about it, and the few Americans could even tell you whose side we were on in the conflict. He shook his head, dragged on his cigarette, and went to tend a customer.

This city is a human and architectural and political textbook on war and its aftereffects. The conflict and horror and mistrust are only millimeters below the surface – where before the war, it was a diverse and relatively integrated place, it is now a place of careful friendship, suspicions, and identity politics. But amidst all that, it is a beautiful and fun and cosmopolitan place.

What would Jesus do? Not this.

2005-09-19T03:03:00.000-04:00

Read this.

I'll have to write about it later. I just don't know where to start now.

One more thing to add to the list of ways Bush is undermining not only America and our American life so hard won, but basic human compassion and global community.

I will not be surprised when he postpones the next presidential election for some trumped up reason. Maybe that's when we'll go to war with Iran or N. Korea. You call me paranoid now, but mark my words -- the man is up to no good. So far, this story reads like any classic Latin American or African dictator, and all too much like The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. But I've been saying that for five years now.

Jablanica

2005-09-17T01:39:00.000-04:00

Today we went out to visit a collective center in Jablanica (pronounced “yablahNEETZah”. Collective centers are the Bosnian version of refugee camps, and internally displaced people have been living in these places for ten to fourteen years. During the war, people being persecuted from all ethnic groups fled their hometowns to places where they were relatively safe. The towns they arrived at allowed them to occupy abandoned factories or schools or other types of buildings, temporarily. After the war ended, aid agencies provided more adequate temporary shelter and some services to the people who were in these places, and they became collective centers or refugee camps.

Supposedly, the people living in these places were eventually supposed to go home, and the governments of the two autonomous entities, the Serb Republic and the Federation of Herzegovina, tried to close them. The Serb Republic claims to have closed all of them, but really they just changed the name to Transition Centers. Until our organization began its project in these centers two years ago, very few people had gone home, in spite of having been offered reconstruction and other assistance through ours and other international development groups.

There are many reasons that people are reluctant to leave. First and foremost, they are scared. They have lived in these camps with these people for a very long time now. They have gotten jobs, maybe, or at least gotten accustomed to receiving assistance. Their children may be in schools near the centers. It is hard to get up the courage to make a change again at this point, even if they could count on their place of return being safe and secure for them, but many don’t.

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to face a return like this. Almost all of the people in the centers lost members of their families, many in their very homes, were the opposing army broke in and killed men, women, or children in front of other family members. Some women were raped in their own homes. Many were persecuted by the neighbors they had known and drank coffee with for years. Those homes must seem almost haunted now with the hellish memories; going there must violently tear any scars right open again. I can’t even believe that anyone would go back. Add that to the uncertainty that they will have any services in their old town or a job, and you can easily imagine why they would prefer to stay.

On the way drive to and from the center, the woman who took us, who manages the program for the returnees, told us her experience of the war. She is the daughter of a Muslim (Bosniak) and an Orthodox (Serb). Her father had spent much of his life as a career soldier in Yugoslavia, and ended up in Sarajevo. They grew up with friends from all of the religious groups, and such differences were barely worth mentioning. Then one day, they started to hear reports of Muslims murdering Serbs. It wasn’t easily believable for them, and they later found out that these first reports weren’t actually true. At some point, and I’m not sure where, because the story came out of chronological order, her Serbian extended family in Serbia called them to let them know that they had sent their sons to be soldiers with the Serbian army “to save them” from the Muslim atrocities. Her father tried to explain that that wasn’t what was happening, and that the Serb army was committing the atrocities and blaming them on the Muslims to create unrest. No one in Serbia believed him because they were getting fake information from the government.

Her father and brothers left to defend Bosnia as soldiers. She felt useless at home, so she ran away and also joined the army without telling them. She had no formal training, so they trained her as a nurse. She was seventeen (one year older than I). For several years during the conflict, I think that she said five years, she worked on the front lines in Sarajevo. She showed us the building where she lived, and the building where she worked. They were right across the street from the Serb army, and remain scarred with bullet holes today. To get from her apartment to the hospital (which they had set up in an abandoned grocery store), she had to run a gauntlet of five Serb snipers.

When the war was over, she made a decision to leave the army and the conflict behind. She says that she still hasn’t been able to really forgive her neighbors and other Serbs she knew for turning against Bosnia like that, for falling prey to paranoia and propaganda. She said that she tries not to hate, and recognizes that there are good and bad people in every group, but that she still has a hard time trusting. All of this is inside of her every day, when she helps both Serbs and Bosnians resettle. She helps them all equally, but says that the hardest thing about her job is going to Srebrenica, where Serbs massacred Bosnians during the war, and the grief remains fresh in the minds of the minority Bosnians she takes back to their homes there. She feels culpable for renewing their pain when they walk the haunted and reconstructed halls of their old homes or old land.

I nearly broke down in tears listening to her. There we were, two women, driving a car along a highway surrounded with some of the most beautiful scenery I have ever seen, talking about the sheer horror and inhumanity that she witnessed. The hardest thing I have ever dealt with was the death of one person in my life. I can’t even imagine watching death the way she did every day for five years. She seems old, and I seem naïve. She is married now, to a Macedonian, and has a four-year-old daughter.

Walking around Sarajevo, the leftovers from the war are everywhere. On the path along the river, you can see where people were shot to death. A line of bullet holes leads to a small, person-sized spot where all the shots converge. From the angle of the shots, you can look up and see which window in the building across the street they came from. The spots became like vacuums for me, spaces where a person should be.

Sarajevo 1

2005-09-16T02:44:00.000-04:00

I arrived here in Sarajevo, Bosnia, after a long flight through Munich. Down the precarious steps out of the small plane, into the recently refurbished airport that already smelled like my Nana's apartment - stale cigarettes and dust. The airport gleamed in its newness, and even though it is small, it is pretty nice. The driver, who speaks nary a word of English, dropped me off at the cute little Hotel Gaj (pronounced "guy") tucked behind a cute pair of restaurants (Vinonteka and Pizzeria Gaj). The hotel reception is managed by these two young girls who are really nice behind their unbelievable makeup. I wonder how they can get their eyelids open with that much mascara.

The office is in many ways an allegory for the city as a whole. It is off a side street of a side street, in a huge building that at one time seems to have been covered with pink stucco, but now is stripped to bare brick. It looks like it is about to crumble, and you can see all over it the pock marks left by bullets and shrapnel. Inside, however, it is overwhelmingly modern. Brand new everything, metal and marble and gleaming clean glass. High speed internet, business people in suits, a coke machine. The difference is surreal, and does not go unnoticed by the staff here.

All over the city, you see buildings wrecked by the war. Beautiful old Austro-Hungarian period buildings with their wedding-cake flourishes and horrid Soviet-chic towers of concrete alike were bombed, bulleted, and burnt. Right beside them, however, are brand-new towers of glass and steel, or newly rehabilitated historic buildings. Art galleries and restaurants and offices function like nothing ever happened, but the scars are not even close to being healed. The whole place seems stretched between an Eastern history that is painful and frightening and a possible European future that holds promise and challenges. It can't be easy.

The city is situated in a valley, surrounded by many rolling green hills, dotted with square two- or three-story houses with sloped tile roofs. It is really beautiful, especially last night. As we walked to dinner at the cozy and good Italian restaurant Fellini, the sun set from behind us, casting a peachy glow down the main street of the city center and out onto the hill in the distance, emphasizing its greenness and the romance of the little houses.

It seems to me that few streets run straight here, and even fewer flat. It is a maze of twisting old lanes, barely one car wide, sometimes not even that. How people find their way around is beyond me. It seems almost as though the city is trying to keep its secrets hidden, a labyrinth challenging you to look a little deeper for the real thing.

They have electric busses that must be older than I am, running on their overhead wires. I love that. There are public gardens and parks that are cared for -- this, I tell you, is one of the key indicators of development. People stop at the traffic lights, and stay stopped until they turn green.

I could stay here for weeks and never tire of exploring and learning about this fascinating city and the amazing people in our office.

Death of a Revolutionary

2005-08-01T11:07:00.000-04:00

This morning John Garang, the leader of Southern Sudan's rebel movement the SPLM, was killed in a helicopter crash.

Regardless of what you think about revolutions, rebel movements, or the Southern Sudanese, John Garang was a unique and powerful character. He managed, albeit by an iron hand, a successful war to gain increased autonomy for Southern Sudan. In the wake of that war, 2 million died, mostly of disease and starvation, and the jury is out as to whether it was worth it.

This conflict has always made me ask myself when do people finally say enough is enough and choose war to effect change? And how can war effect positive change when the human costs are so high?

For the sake of everyone in Sudan, let's hope that the new leader of the SPLM continues Dr. Garang's commitment to the peace accords, and manages to reign in the riots in response to his death.

Lima, Peru

2005-07-21T23:59:00.000-04:00

I'm sitting in the VIP lounge in the airport in Lima, Peru. I'm not usually a VIP at the airport, and I am entirely grateful for the spread of juice and snacks and coffee, since my midnight flight to Atlanta has been postponed until 3 am, and by then I will have been here for six hours.

Lima is a good city, at least the parts of it that I saw. It charmed me and reminded me why I had fallen in love with South America almost ten years ago.

It is winter here now, and the skies have been uniformly overcast since I've been here, but there has been almost no rain, just a London-like mist once in a while. Not enough for an umbrella, just enough to be romantic for the first 15 minutes and to be annoying thereafter. The weather is cool, but the humidity makes it feel like the mist gets under your clothes to stay there and torment you all day. The weather makes the city feel comfortably melancholy.

I always love to look at the architecture when I ride in cars around a new city. A city's architecture and geography are like the lines and expressions of a face -- in them, you can see the story, illustrated. In Lima, most of the buildings are the same rebar-concrete-tile concotions that populate lower and middle class neighborhoods worldwide. Colorful paint and careful gardens do nothing to make these boxy things elegant. They cram together on the road almost fearfully, suspiciously. But then you get the pleasure of seeing the coy little post-colonial or 19th century house, peeking out from the phalanx with a wink of dramatic windows and doorframes. That is the reward for keeping one's face to the taxi window.

Our office is in the Miraflores municipality of Lima. This area is mostly a shopping district, with some cool stores and restaurants, some things for tourists, and some hotels. It isn't bad, but it isn't the place you'd want to live, necessarily, although it is a chic neighborhood. I stayed in the La Paz Aparthotel, and recommend it, except for the atrocious coffee. They were very friendly. I had a basic suite, with a kitchenette and stocked minifridge. Miraflores has a few nice antique shops, so if that is your thing, check out the places on La Paz, just in front of the hotel. It is safe to walk around, even to a reasonable hour at night, as long as you keep your city wits about you. A place I highly recommend for a drink and light Cuban food is the Club de Habana, on Manuel Bonilla. It is actually run by a young Cuban guy, and the clientele is friendly, the decor warm and comfy, and the food is great. Just next door, they have a gallery space where they show work from local artists.

A colleague took me to Barranco, a part of town with more historic buildings and a reputation for a bohemian culture. I could imagine the bohemians of Lima concocting their schemes for bringing down the dictatorship in cafes, smoking endless cigarettes. We walked all over the area, which is beautiful, especially in the early evening, and stopped finally for a drink at a cool place called Posada del Angel. It is full of strange antiques and painted riotous colors. The food is good, but the service is painfully slow. It is worth a trip, though. Also, all along the aqueduct, there are little restaurants where you can get a good meal, just like hundreds of tourists visiting the beach before you for decades past. We also went shopping, of course, to a lovely but expensive store called Dedalo. Local artists sell their craft work there -- not your typical artisan crafts, but more modern, high-quality, home decor stuff. It is expensive, but they have very nice things.

The next day, we went to a museum of Peru's history (I was ill, so I don't remember the name of the museum). It is in the San Isidro section of town, which is a flat stretch of little one- and two-story houses around plazas. The museum is in the home of Simon Bolivar in Lima, which is huge. It is very well curated for a museum of its type, and has all kinds of cool exhibits from the pre-Incan cultures to the present. I loved the textiles they had, and was fascinated by the most recent exhibit on the Fujumori years. I recommend a trip there if you get a chance -- but wear comfortable shoes, as it is big and you could easily spend a couple of hours there. After the museum, cross the street to the old tavern and get a Cusquena beer. We didn't because I felt horrible, but supposedly it is nice. This tavern is one of the oldest in Lima, continually operating.

So, on the whole, it was a good trip. The proposal went ok, everyone in the office was great, good hotel, interesting city. I recommend a trip to Lima.

Pennsylvania Road Trip Vacation

2005-07-09T14:32:00.000-04:00

Since July 4th is all about the United States’ independence and being patriotic, the Professor and I planned a domestic vacation. His parents invited us to hang out with them in a cabin in Cook Forest for a couple days, during which time we could visit with some of their family. We decided to take the long way up and a longer way back, to see some more of the state.

On the way up, we took 83 to Shrewsbury, where we stopped at the Shrewsbury Antique Center. The Center is packed with really great vendors, selling everything from old farm tools to old books to old clothes. If you like antiques, you should make a side trip there on your way into PA.

We also stopped at Homan’s General Store. The Professor took advantage of their coffee, and I wandered around to see what they sold. Being in there, I could imagine what it would be like to live in a small town and go to the store, where you knew the kid who worked there and his family.

The next stop was the Penn State Creamery. Go there. They serve the best ice cream ever – and I’ve had a lot of ice cream in my life! Penn State’s Food Science program runs the Creamery, where they sell ice cream, milk, cheese, yogurt, and other milk products, as well as snacks and coffee. It is all very high quality, and I can’t say enough how much we enjoyed our Bittersweet Mint and Coffee with chocolate chips. My Mom would have loved the Mint, because it has the shaved chocolate instead of chips that she loved. We liked it so much, we returned on our way back for more ice cream, cheese, and iced tea. Yum.

We rolled out of the creamery in the direction of the Bellefonte KOA, where we pitched our tent. The campground was packed with RVs spewing noisy, excited kids. We followed the imps to the pool and took a swim. There was this one kid who kept doing cannonballs and other fancy jumps into the pool. Over and over, in, out, run jump, laugh. He was having a great time, and instead of being annoying, as those things sometimes can be, it was really fun to watch, and reminded us of how much fun we had doing the same thing as kids.

After cleaning up and relaxing for a bit, we went to The Tavern Restaurant in State College for dinner. It reminded me of the Townhouse in Media a little bit. The service and the food were good. I enjoyed my Cajun chicken, and the Professor had good pork loin. We highly recommend the spinach salad. In spite of the good food, though, I think that this place had the worst wine list I have ever seen. Most places that don’t have a good wine selection don’t bother to put it on a list, but this place unabashedly waved its horrid wine selection in one’s face. Get a Pilsner, instead.

Breakfast the next morning was fabulous. We went down to Bellefonte, a cute Victorian town, and ate at Jabco’s Mill Race Café. The Professor had fluffy pancakes and I had French toast, both of which were great. It was our waitress’s first day at work, and she did a great job. We ate outside on the porch overlooking the mill race, which was really pleasant. The café is next to the railroad, just across from the visitor’s center.

On our way up to Cook’s Forest, we stopped by Mount Nittany Vineyard and Winery. The drive to the vineyard was beautiful, following small roads through outrageous green fields and trees. We tried several wines, which were ok. We liked the bought a few bottles, including one bottle of their blueberry wine. Now, I’m not usually into fruit wines, but this one, made only of blueberries, no grapes, was actually really nice, and will make a great desert wine on a summer evening.

We arrived at the cabin in Cook’s Forest for dinner of barbeque and a fun evening of hanging out around the fire roasting marshmallows and playing games. We stayed in the cabin with the Professor’s parents and brother and sister-in-law and their baby. The little guy is so cute! He is almost walking, and crawls at turbo speed, giggling and chattering to everyone along the way.

While in Clarion County, PA, we visited with various members of the family of the Mother of the Professor. They were all very nice and welcoming people. I had been worried that I would feel like I was on display, but I actually felt very accepted and welcomed. Most of the family still lives in the area, some in the ancestral family homes, and some just meters away from their parents and siblings. One of the Professor’s Aunts is an expert quilter. When we went to visit her, she showed us some of the things she had done recently. They were really beautiful.

On the fourth of July, we all packed into the cars and drove to the Lucinda Church Picnic. The Church, St. Joseph, hosts a fair and dinner each year, and has done so now for over 60 years. In the Church parking lot, booths provided ample opportunity to “donate” money, with a chance to win everything from quilts to camp chairs to baked goods.

We bought some raffle tickets for the quilt raffle, put in a few bids on the Chinese auction for camp chairs and a big tent, and then the Professor, that intrepid gambler that he is, won us a loaf of lemon poppyseed bread at the baked goods stand! It is yummy.

The dinner was a true experience. Each person buys a numbered ticket for $6.50. if you want to sit with your friends or family, you need to make sure that your ticket numbers are close, because they seat by number, filling up the tables again as people finish eating. We waited until about 13 members of the family were around, and went in with the 500 group.

Inside, the hall is full of long tables, all set with homemade noodle soup, water, and bread. The noodle soup is a big hit in Lucinda, and there were signs everywhere outside, announcing that the soup was not available for separate sale this year. It lived up to its reputation! Perfectly salty and warm and delicious. The bread was good, too.

The menu for the dinner:
Wheat bread
Homemade noodle soup
Mashed potatoes
Ham
Roasted chicken
Coleslaw
Corn

And the pies. When you walk into the hall, before you sit down, you select your slice of pie. There are more types of homemade pie than you can imagine. I had my first-ever strawberry rhubarb pie, and the Professor had cherry. Oh, it was good. All of the food was wonderful, and we tottered out of the hall full to bursting and happy.

That evening, we went over to Wolfe's Corners fair with the family to watch a horse pull. This was a truly cultural experience; both the Professor and I felt as though we were in a different country. Work horses, which stand several feet taller than an average man, are harnessed to a sled that is piled with concrete blocks. They compete to see which team of two can pull the most weight for 27 feet of distance. I think that they topped off near 7,800 pounds or something. It was amazing. These horses were straining and sweating and beautiful, and they generally worked in tandem with three men controlling the reigns and the metal rigging that connected them to the sled.

It was interesting to watch the people. We were, as far as I could tell, the only people there taking photos. Most of the men wore jeans, some wore work shirts or t-shirts, a few were shirtless, and many had beards or other facial hair. The women were dressed in a variety of ways, from conservative to small and tight approximations of hiphop video dancers. It was fun, and we rooted for a horse team that we liked, and were satisfied that they did well, and another team that we liked won.

I highly recommend a trip to Cook’s Forest. The forst itself is beautiful, you can rent a nice cabin (from Vince, owner of Stone Crest cabins and the Briar Hill furniture place), and do all sorts of outdoor-type activities. Stone Crest has great cabins.

We took an even longer way back, down 80 to Lewisburg, where we took 15 south to Selinsgrove, and found our way to the Foxboro B&B. I had called a number of B&Bs on the way, and this one was the cheapest and the woman seemed nice. It looked convenient to our next-day activities, so we went with it.

The B&B is in a modular log cabin home, which was very nice. Too nice. The Professor even thought that it was spooky how nothing was out of place and everything was insanely clean. Then we figured out that the owners were evangelical Christians, and that most of the people who passed through the place shared that bent. Well, then it was freaky, but still really nice. The Weavers seem like perfectly nice people, and Mrs. Weaver’s breakfast was delicious. But that almost makes it worse, because even then, everything was “just so”. It was a nice place to stay, but I wish that we had known about the religious thing before we went. Plus, she doesn’t take credit cards, which was a little annoying.

That night we had dinner at BJ’s Barbeque. We don’t recommend the BJ’s Ale, but the food was good. The plates are loaded, so share a meal – no healthy person should be able to eat that much in one sitting. Try the Frickles.

After breakfast, we circled back north on 15, across 45 to Mifflinburg, hitting some farmers’ markets and whatnot on the way.

Before we reached Miffilnburg, we went to the Joseph Priestly House. Dr. Priestly was a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and was known for the discovery of oxygen. Also he was the founder of the Unitarianism in the United States. We got a tour with the director of the site, Andrea, who is very knowledgable, not only about Dr. Priestly, but also about women's history. She has done a great job learning about the family and the daily workings of life in the house, and gives an interesting tour.

In Mifflinburg, we had an unsuccessful trip to the Buggy Museum, which only has hours on days inconvenient to us (Thursday through Sunday). We stopped by Mary Koons Quilts (see more on that in the knitting blog) and D&L Soft Pretzels (a must on 45).

Heading south on 104, we stopped at Penns Creek Pottery. Bill Lynch and his wife, and other artisans, make and sell beautiful pottery and other craft work in this carefully converted historic barn. All of their work is beautiful and creative, with colorful and unique glazes. If you like pottery, you must go there. They are talented and friendly people. The barn is located just over Penns Creek, north of the village of Penns Creek on 104, and it is open Tuesday through Saturday.

We stopped quickly at two wineries, Shade Mountain on 104, and Hunters Valley on 11 & 15, and got a few more bottles of wine, including a novelty mint wine from Shade Mountain called Six Dwarves. As you can imagine, there is nothing really special about these wines, but they aren’t bad, either.

We had lunch at a cool hamburger place called Cruisers Café. The owners converted an old Texaco station into a 50’s style burger place, replete with Coke memorabilia and cheerful waitresses. We had bison burgers and fries, which were both tasty. It was a really neat place.

We arrived home in the evening, exhausted but satisfied with our Pennsylvania road trip vacation.

Going to Peru

2005-06-30T16:31:00.000-04:00

I will be headed to Peru for work on the 10th of July. Our office there needs me to help with a proposal, which is due on the 21st of July.

I'm very excited about going to Peru, but not excited to stay in another hotel and never really see anything interesting of the country. I hope that the country rep or someone there can plan a site visit to a project while I'm there, so that I'll actually get to see what we are doing there.

I'm hoping that while I'm there I'll be able to take advantage of the long history of fiber arts in Peru and purchase some handspun alpaca! I would like to get enough yarn to make Joe, myself, and maybe some other lucky soul, a sweater, and a bit more to swap.

I think that I prefer to travel for fun. If I look into my secret mind, I will probably find that I got into this line of work for the adventurous travel opportunities more than for the philanthropic element.

I will post from Peru.

The Professor and I are going on a road trip for vacation to see his clan in NW PA for the fourth. We will be camping and running around, so I'll blog that, too.

Trip to LA

2005-06-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

The Professor and I had a great time visiting our friends in LA. Their little daughter is so cute! She is a really cool baby. Here is a photo of the Professor and I at Tokyo Delve's, a weird sushi place:

In Between Times

2005-06-22T15:09:00.000-04:00

I'm writing on the recommendation of the Professor, my lovely fiancé, who, when I told him that I was bored at work, suggested I write about being bored in one of my blogs. So here you go. I did ask him who would really want to read about my being bored, and he didn't think that it mattered. So, if this is irritating to you, you really have him to blame.

I just started a new blog that I'm pretty excited about. It is all about my knitting, crochet, and other craft projects. I think that if you told me ten years ago that I'd be doing a blog on knitting, I would have told you you were nuts. But, it really is therapeutic and addictive (yes, something can be both!); and it is rewarding to give gifts to people that you make with your own hands.

So, we just finished a huge global proposal here at work, and now we're in this weird limbo state. Most of us have little to do except deal with that way-back-burner stuff that we avoid religiously when we are doing more interesting things. I took care of that stuff, and now have absolutely nothing to do. Really. So, why am I still here you ask? Because the boss of the boss told me that he had something for me to do 1 hour ago. I have something that I would rather be doing -- knitting. Or crocheting. Or the Washington Post Crossword.

In fact, I will do the crossword now. Yesterday, I did the whole thing with no hints. I'm getting better. I can't wait until I actually achieve that elusive goal of being able to go for a whole week with no hints. I am particularly fond of the crosswords that have a theme. I love figuring out the theme. It makes me feel smart. Today's is pretty easy, but I needed two hints. Oh well. Still no word from the boss of the boss as to what the mystery task is.

Maybe I'll read Slate now...

2005-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

1/23/2005
Colombo, Sri Lanka

One of the saddest sights (certainly not the saddest) around Batticaloa is the plethora of thinning, wounded, sad-looking dogs and cats. Some of these animals, especially the dogs, patiently, futilely mope around the ruined foundations of destroyed houses, sniffing at the half-buried saris and shoes. Others wait outside restaurants and snack shops for discarded scraps of food. Some of these were clearly well-loved pets, and others little more than strays, but their presence around the town emphasizes the sadness and death. There was a little cat at the hotel I was staying in. She was an adorable calico, starved and begging. She looked like a little fallen princess, bright collar and all, once loved and comfortable, now begging for her dinner. There was also a rather unlikely pair that wandered the streets together, a cute tan dog with a limp and a marmalade cat. They went everywhere together, and sometimes you would even find them sleeping all curled up with one another. It made me really sad.

Sadness is really under the surface everywhere in this country right now. I know that I keep saying that it isn’t as bad as it seemed, but that’s not to say that this still isn’t a horrible, historic tragedy from which it will take a long time to recover. I left Batticaloa yesterday morning, and along the road to Colombo, white and black mourning flags flew quietly. White flags are a symbol of mourning for Buddhists, and black flags for Christians. Even far from the coasts, the flags were stuck in rice paddies, affixed to street lamp poles, hanging from windows. In such a small country, everyone was touched with grief from this disaster.

2005-01-17T23:38:00.000-05:00

1/17/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

We went to yet another coordination meeting this morning, this one for non-food item household kits at the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) office. This one was better than the last one, because people were talking about how they are already doing things, and what they were going to do this week. Most organizations had done assessments to find out what items were needed, and apparently the local government is gathering the names and information on all the beneficiaries. That is a bit of a different set up than what we had in the Congo. In the Congo, you would never have been able to rely on the local leadership to give you an accurate list of beneficiaries, because there are all kinds of personal relationships that come into play. They would leave off the list their political adversaries and people they didn’t like, and make up fake people so that people they do like could get multiple kits. Here, the government for the most part is working well with the relief effort, which is great.

One of the best things about working here is that it is safe, so you can move around freely. I found a great place for taking walks that starts right in front of the hotel. It takes you up by the estuary, next to a pretty neighborhood (that wasn’t affected), across a causeway, down one of the main roads of town, and then back across the bridge to the hotel. There are fishermen out in the estuary in the traditional style of boat that is like a canoe with a rectangular piece of wood on one side (not sure why, but I think it has something to do with hanging the nets). They look so peaceful out there. Supposedly, singing fish live in the estuary, and they are loudest from April to September. They say that the fishermen know they are there because when it is quiet, you can hear the humming. I haven’t heard the humming, since it isn’t very quiet along the road, but I like to believe that they are in there singing. In the air along the road, there is the pleasant salty-windy smell of the sea. It is nice, even when there is traffic.

So, as I said, it is safe here. Crime is a rare occurrence. That’s why we were all surprised when a freelance photojournalist told us that all her gear, except the cameras she had with her at the time, was stolen from her hotel room, most likely by someone who works there. She lost her laptop, external hard drive, and camera chargers, as well as all the photos she had taken here and in Indonesia for two assignments. None of it was insured, and the police were no help at all. It is easy to say, “well, the person who stole it is probably poor and desperate, and while this is a set back for her, it isn’t the end of her life.” However, anyone who has a job at a hotel, especially here and now, is not hurting, and meanwhile they may have ruined her reputation with the two magazines, because they aren’t going to get the best quality photos from her. We were all shocked. Thankfully, it wasn’t at the hotel I’m staying at, but you never know I guess.

One of the random responsibilities that has just been assigned to me is “staff care”. Not sure yet how serious this is, but I think that I’d like to do that kind of thing. Today I went out and bought stuff for the house, and I will be spending the rest of the week shopping! Not so bad, really, but admittedly I’m a bit annoyed. I didn’t get a master’s degree to go shopping.

1/20/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

Three days have gone by, and, needless to say, much has changed. The Jesuits and I have finally finished their proposal for their project that we are funding, which was hard won. They do exciting work, and are very good at it, but it was hard to wring this proposal out of them because they are very fluid, and kept changing their ideas. Finally we banged it out, but not after a short moment of tension, when it looked like they were about to start some activities that would have short-circuited the coordination that was going on in the shelter group.

I’ll be headed back to Colombo this weekend, which I’m glad about. I’m very homesick, and could use more frequent access to the Internet. Don’t get me wrong, Batticaloa is a nice town and the people are great. It is just that I’m tired of the work, and am ready to go home. I’m not really needed here that badly (as one can tell by my recent shopping assignment). Colombo isn’t bad, so I’ll enjoy some time there, maybe take a day trip to Kandy to see the Temple of the Tooth, and then I’m out of here on the 8th of February, or earlier if I can make that happen. The boss told me that I’d be doing some writing and orienting two new staff members (frankly, I’m not sure why the need any more staff here), but I can’t imagine that taking up too much of my time, certainly not two whole weeks. Besides, he is likely to change his mind yet again.

The little daughters of my fiancé’s boss gave me three of their dolls to give to children here. It was so sweet that they were so concerned about other kids so far away. Those dolls were with me in my backpack for days. I had the hardest time figuring out what to do with them. If I went over to the camp across the street and picked three children out at random, I would have been the pied piper, with kids following me forever asking for dolls. I didn’t find an opportunity to give them to kids who were on their own anywhere, since that is rare here. Nevertheless, I really wanted to give the dolls away, to help the girls make the connection they wanted to make. Yesterday, I gave them to the Jesuit in charge of the relief programs here, so he could take them to the orphanage and give them to the kids there. Then the dolls were in his bag. We went together to a coordination meeting for the education sector, and the whole time I was hard pressed not to laugh, since all three of the dolls had their heads poking out of his bag next to the table, as if they, too, were attending the meeting.

I just finished some shopping. I know I complained about being assigned so low a task, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it. I love talking to the shopkeepers, and seeing all the interesting things they have. Here, the relationship between the storeowner and the client is very friendly, even when they are trying to make you pay more than the normal price! Instead of being able to browse through everything, you just tell them what you want, and the employees run around showing you everything that they have that might suit you. In some places, you can even sit down and have tea while this happens! I wish that I could shop, or be shopped for, like this in the US.

In addition to the things I got for the Caritas house here, such as towels and sheets and pillows, I also bought some beautiful ribbon and a sarong. The 1.5” wide silk sari border ribbon with embroidery all along it that I bought cost me only $2.00 for 10 meters. A roll of ½” satin ribbon was only 50 cents! Traditional Sri Lankan men, especially outside of Colombo and the cities, wear sarongs. These are pieces of fabric sewn into a tube and hemmed that they gather and tuck around their waists. A lot of men in Batticaloa wear them. I guess it must be more comfortable for them, and cooler. Most are in relatively understated patterns, like simple solids, stripes, and plaids in blue, white, dark green, and black. Some of the fancier ones have border ribbon sewn onto the bottom. I bought a plain green one in a nice fabric for my fiancé – I figured he could wear it around the house, since a man in a skirt would look a bit funny in the States.

The stores sell all kinds of things. The fabric store, for example, sells not only fabric, but also some clothing, pillows, sheets, towels, beading, ribbon, etc. The place where I got the knives and silverware sells yarn, ribbon, toys, Hindu idols, Buddha statuettes, knickknacks galore, pots and pans, and big brass stands that you put candles and flowers on for the prayer room in your house. It can be a little confusing at first, but when you realize that you don’t have to look through it all to find what you want because someone else will do that for you, it becomes a surprisingly pleasant experience. Unlike most shopping experiences, the price is also a pleasure, because things are so cheap here.

I’m wondering if any of you who read this are disappointed because I’m not talking more about the disaster and the people. I’m sorry that I can’t give you more about that, but it just isn’t what I’m seeing. I think that is one of the parts of humanitarian work that many people don’t understand. As outsiders, we don’t really get all the way out to the beneficiaries that often. Usually, the local organizations we support do that end of the work. Sometimes we get to go to see building sites for the shelter, oversee emergency distributions, or talk to the local leaders, but those visits are shallow and short. This is especially true in a country like Sri Lanka, which has a lot of local capacity to carry out projects. Plus, my time here is short and focused on administrative issues. Those who are here longer get a better picture of things, and also have more time to work in the beneficiary communities. So, I apologize if all this isn’t terribly interesting, but it is what it is.

2005-01-16T06:16:00.000-05:00

1/13/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka

I finally arrived in Colombo too early Monday morning after a horrid series of flights from Baltimore. In addition to the innumerable delays, I had a long layover in Bangkok. I had expected this layover to be a chance to get a shower and some rest, and maybe do some shopping, but that was not to be. There were no day rooms to be had, so I ended up in a rather dim guesthouse taking a shower in a shared bathroom and trying to keep myself awake all day by eating, doing email, and getting a rather nice Thai massage. I had forgotten how bad Bangkok smells, or maybe it had just gotten worse since the last time I was there.

So, exhausted and jet lagged and dirty, I dropped into Colombo, Sri Lanka at 1 something in the morning on Monday, and got to the hotel and a bed at about 3:30am. Some of the staff, including myself, were put up at the Taj Samudra hotel, which is nice and, if one were there on vacation, very well located. I spent most of Monday in our makeshift office in the library of our local partner, Caritas Sri Lanka/SEDEC.

One of the odd things about the non-profit industry is that it is competitive, with agencies competing not only for the money of private donors, but also for the recognition from public donors. To this end, representation in the media is rather important, and CRS doesn’t do too much of it. The CRS philosophy in the field is that the partners should get the credit for the work, since they do most of it, and we only give them the resources and the support to do it. However, CRS also should bet some of the credit, and to that end, headquarters sent me over with a load of navy-blue T-shirts with CRS in white on front and back. When I got them to the office, no one really wanted to wear them, and we decided that we would don them dutifully for the CBS news guys who were going to film us bustling about the “office” that day, but not in the field. That way, CRS would get some airtime, but when it really counted, the partner would be front and center. I’m not sure which side of the fence I stand on regarding this issue. CRS does do a lot of the work to make a project happen, and I see no reason that we shouldn’t get credit for that. More than one agency can share the applause at a job well done, no? So why can’t the partner and CRS both get the credit? But then on the other hand, people may assume that CRS really did all the work and just let the partner do some symbolic parts, when really there was hard work on both sides. CRS can pay for publicity, but local partners need to get theirs, well deserved, as cheaply as possible without being overshadowed by a bigger sister.

Anyway, Colombo seems to be a nice enough and livable city. There are many historic sites, and it is open and on the sea and has some pretty spots, despite the oversized confetti of colorful signs posted everywhere and anywhere. The shopping appears to be great here – you can get authentic brand name clothing for very cheap in stores in Colombo because the clothes are made in factories on the island. Not to mention that the national arts and crafts are interesting and well developed.

I didn’t get to stay in Colombo long, though. CRS originally sent me out here to write proposals to get more money from the US government for our programs. However, it turns out that the effort here is flush with cash, and is having a hard time programming what it already has. One of my coworkers here said it well, “none of the important things are expensive”. Psychosocial trauma counseling doesn’t cost a lot to implement. Nor do many of the other things that CRS is doing here and is good at. So, I was “repurposed”, and sent to the field with a mandate to help set up the office in Kalamunai in Ampara district.

1/16/2005
Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
The drive across the country was an absolute pleasure. Sri Lanka is beautiful and interesting, with some really nice historic places and good hotels. I highly recommend a trip here – it would not only help with the national recovery from the disaster, but would also be fun and interesting. We spend the night in Habarana, in huge hotel called the Village. It was great, but empty. We were some of the five or so people there, and the bored staff hovered around us, waiting on us hand and foot. The rooms were clean and comfortable, and the place is really well kept.

After arriving at Batticaloa, I was again redeployed, this time to stay in the town and work with one of the partners, Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS), which was going to implement some trauma counseling and other types of activities with CRS funds. Batticaloa is a town of some size, with stores and churches and mosques and temples all over the place. I like it. Sri Lankans are very friendly people, even the police and the military, and so it is easy to get along with everyone.

On Thursday, Cardinal McCarrick from Washington, DC and Ken Hackett, the president of CRS visited Batti. We drove out en masse, a junket of priests and nuns and aid workers, to one of the areas that was hit by the wave. It was stunningly awful. Whole blocks of what were once middle-class (for Sri Lanka) homes were decimated. Chunks of painted brick, broken tiles, and piles of debris wound up with saris and other clothing are everywhere. There are still some houses standing or half-standing, and you can see that the neighborhood, called Dutch Bar, was once almost prosperous. We drove past St. Ignatius School – or at least where the school once was. It is now a blank sand flat.

While the dignitaries were show the barely-damaged church by the slightly over-zealous parish priest, I wandered off to look at the real damage. I have to admit that I was struck at first by the thought that these people weren’t really poor, so they weren’t that badly off, but then I felt guilty for feeling that way, because it doesn’t really matter who you are, if you lose your house and family, you are poor and alone and sad. Looking at a half-destroyed house, the exposed interior walls bright yellow and still decorated with a small painting of a Hindu god, I saw a shoe in the debris. Shoes show up in photos of all disasters, probably because they are so evocative and so symbolic; in a way, this makes the shoe image a bit trite. However, at that moment, I was overwhelmed with an involuntary imagining of a family in the yellow room doing what families do and suddenly the water hits the house and screams in the windows and rushes down on them. They shout and drop everything and run to the door but even the traitorous house comes crashing down on them as the malicious furniture blocks their escape. It was too much, and I lost it. I cried and cried, a lame, useless, too-little-too-late crying.

Yes, the situation here is terrible. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen. Yet it is true that there is too much money, too many aid agencies, and too little work. What needs to be done is construction and reconstruction, but Tower-of-Babel meetings of logo-wearing foreigners from all over the world discuss with local bureaucrats the fate of the people currently languishing in the “welfare” camps. These stupid meetings go on and on, discussing semantics, specifics, methodologies, and sensitivities. Meanwhile, those who lost their homes live in tents or on the floors of schools; they live with relatives in crowded houses and wait for someone to tell them where to go. Some people want to go back to their old places, but most don’t want to be anywhere they can even hear the sea. Some go down each day to clean their home sites, spending their whole day there but returning to the camps at night, even if their homes are standing. I don’t think anyone but the journalists has asked them what they want – we are all talking about theories: keeping neighbors together, 150 square meters for a family of five, the finer points of tin roofs. How noble and how completely useless. I know that these things take time, but we really should be coordinating with the actual survivors. It only makes sense.

Perhaps I am a bit too jaded. It does take a long time to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that agencies aren’t duplicating effort and that everyone is being served by someone. It is necessary to get the buy in from local bureaucrats. But more than anything else, we need to consider the people we are doing this for, and what their needs and hopes are.

JRS, the partner I’m working with, is a pretty good organization that works with refugees in many countries around the world, particularly in education. They have been working here with people displaced by the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers in the north and east of the country. With this emergency, JRS is working with their previous beneficiaries in the displaced camps as well as the people who have taken refuge from the tsunami in the schools and churches of the Jesuits. The priest in charge in Batticaloa for JRS is the regional director of the agency from Dehli, Fr. Amal. Fr. Amal is definitely a dedicated, humble, energetic visionary, but the man cannot think rationally or practically to save his soul. He has us so confused we literally have no idea what he wants to do at any given moment. Working with him to get a formal agreement on what we are going to pay for so his organization can do their activities is maddening.

2004-11-04T17:05:00.000-05:00

Free photo iPod.

I hope to hell this isn't some kind of rip off, but they say that all you have to do is go to this site, complete and online offer, and refer ten people.

Try it, it was on CNN supposedly.

http://www.freephotoiPods.com/?r=11474952

2004-06-15T17:30:00.000-04:00

Haiti
June 11, 2004

From the start, it was clear that I wasn’t in Africa this time around. While the other passengers on the plane, almost all Haitian (well, who else is crazy enough to go there now?), were loaded up with all kinds of insane carry on items (shopping bags, radios, armfuls of whoknowswhat, food in coolers and bags, etc.), which made it look very much like a trip to Africa, the typical body odor of an African flight was absent, replaced with cloyingly sweet perfume. Upon landing, we were herded into the customs area. My experience of such places has been of major pushing and shoving, requests for bribes, unbearable heat, filth, and so on. Not in Haiti. The air conditioning seemed to be working quite well, everyone stood in neat lines without pushing to get their papers checked, and not one single person gave anyone else a hard time about anything. It was amazing. Now, that’s not to say that this airport is somehow a miracle of technology – it looks like there is some sort of rehabilitation going on in the baggage claim area, where the walls are patched and the ceiling is open, and it would be as easy as pie to import all kinds of illegal things, due to the completely lack of a customs search or bag check. But, all in all, it was so easy I kept expecting someone to come running after me with some story about why he needed $5 or for someone to try to mug me. Instead, I was picked up by a cheerful driver and taken to the air conditioned office to meet with the friendly staff.

From all reports, this place is in complete anarchy, chaos reigning over political and natural disaster. As yet, I haven’t seen any sign of either. It is very poor, much poorer than almost any place I’ve ever been, probably on par with Kinshasa (Congo). Port-au-Prince and the neighboring city of Petionville are stacks of dubious concrete-block buildings; they are bright blue, yellow, pink, and green boxes settled among sandy streets and walls, shaded with fantastically green trees. The hotel I’m staying at is lovely, especially the patio and pool areas. It has a panoramic view of Port-au-Prince and Petionville. In spite of all this seeming calm, however, thousands of people have died here over the past 3-4 months, due to political instability and disastrous floods. The latest situation report on the flooding, which hit the hardest in the southern portion of the country, states that at least 1,800 people are dead, and some 25,000 displaced. Haiti is a small country – these are astronomical figures here.

Yesterday, when I arrived, my friend from grad school, Karl, who is working with CRS, took me to lunch at a restaurant/hotel owned by a friend of his father-in-law. We ate good food with the owner, Karl’s father-in-law, and their friend in the upstairs dining room of “El Cubano”, a hybrid Haitian-Cuban place with the most comfortable atmosphere. The three older men reminded me of characters in a Cuban film. They sat talking politics over whisky and cigarettes, grinning and joking with one another, their tight friendship obvious in their communicative glances and gestures. I can imagine them doing the same twenty years ago or twenty years from now, with little change but the color of their hair. They are old-style socialists, they are café revolutionaries.

One other thing that sets Haiti apart from the Congo is that during this crisis, Haitians have been helping out other Haitians. Such would be nearly unheard of in the Congo, where people regularly steal from one another and step on one another to get ahead. Haitian banks have donated money to the flood victims. Where else in the world would banks donate money? Haitian doctors have volunteered their time to work with the injured and sick in affected areas. The Haitian Rotary Club and Chamber of Commerce have raised and donated money for rehabilitation and food relief. There is no way that these things would ever happen in the Congo. Anyone there with money keeps it to himself. The Haitians abroad are giving, too. Money is coming in. It isn’t much, but eventually it will be enough to get things back to normal (not that normal is good, but it certainly is better). If people in the Congo took a lesson from the Haitians, things there would turn around in a day.

Sunday, June 13, 2004

So, on Friday afternoon, I went to the south coast to see a distribution of non-food item kits (similar to the ones we did in the Congo, but in this case made up by CRS, not UNICEF), as well as some Title II food aid, consisting of beans, rice, and wheat-soy blend (like flour, but protein-enriched), and also cooking oil and purified water.

I was with the Logistics and Finance Manager (Dutch) and the Garage Manager (Haitian-American). They are both nice enough guys, and both speak fluent Creole, which helps. We ate dinner at a hotel in down-town Jacmel, an adorable beach city with French colonial architecture, rife with double balconies and gingerbreading and pastel paint. Then, we went to the wonderful above-mentioned Cyvadier. Saturday, we hit the road at about 7:30 for an adventurous and extremely bumpy ride to the distribution site. The distribution was held in the village closest to the place where the people hit by the flood in that area had fled. The site itself was really isolated, so I can only imagine what the place hit by the flood was like. We had four big tractor-trailers and about 30 staff. Compared to the Congo, it was slightly disorganized and it seemed like there were too many staff members around. They had few control systems, and I’m still not convinced as they are that there isn’t any fraud.

Overall, the distribution went without incident. I interviewed 5 people about what they experienced for a report that I have to write. Standard story, you could probably make it up yourself, but sad nonetheless. They were farmers, they lost animals and all their crops mid-season, so they won’t have anything to eat (they grow what they eat) until the end of the next growing season, which doesn’t start for quite some time. Most lost their houses, too, and the village is completely submerged. While I think that the disaster has been exaggerated, there’s no doubt that these people needed the distribution and that what they lived through was horrible. They next step would be to get them cash to restart petty commerce and to provide for any other immediate needs with microfinance.

The road was really bad, but the ride was fun. Haiti is very mountainous, with insanely steep hillsides. The road winds up and down them, hairpin turn after hairpin turn, all rocky and narrow and rutted. There are no guard rails. The views are stupendous. Haiti really is a beautiful country. Tourists are missing out on these beaches and views and (except for at the Hotel Montana) legendary hospitality. Haitians are nice and friendly and down-to-earth.

2004-04-25T09:09:00.000-04:00

Saturday, April 24, 2004

We did the distribution in Lokando yesterday. It went really well, and the team worked like clockwork. We’re all exhausted and proud and relieved. Far from being any hindrance at all yesterday, the military unit in the town provided security for the guys who were bringing the kits from the boats up to the distribution site, and guarded the kits at the distribution site. Now, that was yesterday, and who knows what happened last night when everyone went home with their stuff. At least they didn’t cause problems.

Long before doing each distribution, a team of “animateurs” or field agents visit the target community and do an initial evaluation. This evaluation includes focus groups and individual interviews, with community leaders and with randomly chosen individuals. The field agents also make a map of the village and surrounding smaller villages, including sites of their fields and other community assets or challenges.

After doing the initial evaluation, and determining that we need to work in that community, we plan the survey. The survey lasts for about five days. During this time, the field agents go from door to door interviewing people in the area based on a standard interview format. Nearly everyone in the target communities will be interviewed, and the field agents have even been known to go look for people at their fields. Based on the interview results, we target the neediest people in a community for immediate assistance. Since nearly everyone in these places is destitute, it isn’t easy, so we are planning a second round of assistance for people who weren’t included in the targeting the first time.

After the survey and targeting, the field agents return to the village where the distribution will take place. The first thing they do is finish up any surveys they might not have been able to be to. Then, they distribute vouchers to all those who meet the targeting criteria. Each voucher has the person’s name and a unique number. The people need to bring this voucher with them to the distribution. This helps us to make sure that we are getting the right people. We keep the surveys and they keep the vouchers, and then the two have to match the day of the distribution or they don’t get anything. There have been a few cases of people selling vouchers, stealing vouchers, or claiming that they were targeted but lost their voucher, but not too many. The kits that we are giving out include items such as cooking pots, cooking utensils, a tarp for shelter, blankets, soap, a jerry can for water, rope, a hatchet and a machete.

Under normal circumstances, no development agency in its right mind would just give things out like this. I’m sure that you can imagine the problems that would be (and were when that was the approach in the past) associated with this kind of an approach: breakdown of local markets, removal of the motivation to produce, humiliation for being beholden to charity, etc. In the case of an emergency, however, people literally have nothing, and in order for them to even have a chance to get back on their feet, they need at least some basic items. Ideally, this will be the last time anyone gives them these basics.

Eventually, each village where we’ve done a distribution will host a seed fair sponsored by my agency and our local partner.

At one point, when I was reading some book about some crazy white guy adventuring for no good reason in the forest of the Congo basin, I wondered how people were able to live in the jungle before, but now they can’t. Ok, I don’t normally wonder that, because when you’re out here, it just doesn’t matter, but since it occurred to me, and might occur to someone else, I gave myself an answer. It has been generations since these people have lived full-time in the forest. They probably still have some local knowledge about what is edible, how to hunt, how to protect themselves from animals and the elements, but basically for at least two generations, they have been living in villages, wearing clothes, cooking in metal pots over a fire, etc. Living full-time in the forest is no more natural or normal for them than it would be for most of us. Furthermore, it is a humiliation, culturally, since it is believed that people who do live in the forest are more like animals.

The Kindu Menu

Breakfast:
-Bread, staled to perfection, covered with cheese of the most mediocre quality, or margarine and overly-sweet preserves;
-A half-coffee, and half-chickory mix, with your choice of powdered milk or sugar
-Boiled eggs
-Cold boiled sardines

Lunch:
-Something very like spinach but not quite
-Rice
-Bananas or plantains fried to perfection
-Bean dish of the day
-Your choice of fish (capitane), goat, or chicken

Dinner:
-Goat kabob, roasted chicken, or fish
-Side of fries, fried plantains, or fried manioc, depending on what we felt like buying for you at the market today
-Local beer, coke, or imported beer, if you are lucky

2004-04-21T13:16:00.000-04:00

This is my first post to this blog. Basically, I'm just throwing up some things that I've written about the places I've seen, in a rather raw form. I'm looking forward to questions and discussions about anything here, but take it all with a grain of salt. I'm not editing as I go, so a lot of things may have been written "in the heat of the moment" so to speak!

Monday, April 05, 2004

Joe asked me if I thought that I was the only person in BWI airport that was going to the Congo. I answered yes, and we laughed. The problem was that it wasn’t really funny at all – it was terrifying.

Getting there

Overall, the series of flights from Baltimore to Atlanta to Brussels to Yaoundé to Kinshasa went well. The layover in Brussels was so short as to allow no time at all for exploration. After practically running from the arrival gate to the international departures terminal, getting there with little time to spare, I was faced with a traffic jam of historic proportions. True to the stubborn European need to avoid efficiency at all cost, the security line stretched into the main hall of the terminal and moved at an almost imperceptible pace. This, just as the flight to Kinshasa was announced. My only hope was that just as typically, the flight to Africa would depart later than scheduled. I finally made it through security, and upon arriving at the gate, saw that there was still a mad press of humanity desperately trying to get on the plane as if it were the last flight out on the eve of the Apocalypse.

While I understand the cultural genesis of this strange need to push and shove to get on planes/busses/trains etc., it always fascinates me. I mean, there are assigned seats, you’re already at the gate, they announce all the sections to board in an orderly and predictable fashion, and they do their best not to leave anyone behind. You don’t get a better seat if you push your way to the front – you still only get the seat you’re assigned. You aren’t more likely to be left behind if you are at the back of the mob, in fact, you STILL get the seat you were assigned. But, the mad shoving and pushing goes on.

We flew over the insanely blue Mediterranean, and passed the exquisite line where the azure silk of the sea meets the worn leather of North Africa. Hours later, the plan descended again below the clouds over Cameroon. The landscape changed dramatically from ochre desert to spotty bushland to dense forest to commercial agriculture. After taking off again from Yaoundé, we were soon in Kinshasa. That’s when things got a little more interesting.

We got off the plane in lacksidaisical order and filed into the airport. In the entry hall, there were four windows for passport control. Two were for officials, one for nationals, and one for other internationals. Predictably, the longest lines were for nationals and internationals. The officials went through quickly and without problems. Two windows for them, mind you, and there were far fewer officials than anyone else. The Nationals line was, like the scene at the airport, a mad press of humanity trying desperately to get in as if they would somehow be left behind in the airport if they didn’t get through first. The Internationals lines was an orderly but irritated, sweating and grumbling queue. I was last in the line. After all the officials (all ten of them) had their passports stamped, I asked the guy in the airport shirt if some of us in the long line could pass through that window.

“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials.”

“Yes, but all the officials have gone through, and this line is very long. Things would go faster if some of us went through that line. I’ve seen this done before elsewhere.”

“Oh no Madame. That line is only for officials. He only has the stamp for officials and cannot use the stamp for non-officials.”

“Ah so it is a problem of the stamp.”

“Yes Madame. The problem is the stamp.”

So, after a long humid wait in line, I arrived at the window, handed over my passport, gave the guy some “money for a Coke” and looked for my expediter. Expediters are very important individuals to the traveler in a place like Congo. The bureaucracy, corruption, chaos, and confusion are overwhelming to most people, and if you don’t know your way around, you can be ripped off or worse. Expediters understand the system, speak the language, pay the bribes, and basically grease the cranky wheels of the baggage claim/customs system. They are wonderful. This one did his job in the airport, and then turned me over to a driver who was not the one I was expecting, but rather a friend of the one I was expecting.

Kinshasa

Having been assured repeatedly that the building where my friend lived (also the building where USAID, the US’s international development agency, had its offices) was remarkably easy to find and well-known, I was confident that when I told the driver where I was going he would just know and take me there and I would be on my way to a shower soon enough. Not so fast! How could I possibly expect a taxi driver, sent by CRS, previously informed of where I would be going, to actually know where I was going? Silly American girl! Why would he know? Moreover, why would he bother telling you that he didn’t know? So, instead we drove around Kinshasa, perhaps the biggest dump of a city I’ve ever seen, periodically asking directions of other people who also didn’t know where this famous building was. Finally, I get my friend on the phone and she finds someone who explained to the driver to take me somewhere else to meet her. After a very long drive, I was deposited at a club with my friend, who then graciously took me to her apartment where I got my much-needed shower.

I didn’t get to see much of Kinshasa, so my opinion on it is of limited validity. It seemed like a more or less livable city, with at least one very nice neighborhood, some grocery stores, some bars and some restaurants. The apartments I was in were nice, as were the people I met while there, even the Marines! However, at the same time, the city is a pit, full of ridiculously dilapidated infrastructure, crumbling Soviet-style buildings, overgrown brush, and garbage.

From my friend’s apartment window, you could see the olive-green expanse of the Congo river just below the Stanley Pool. Looking out the kitchen window, I felt a strange sensation of being at the edge of reality. The Congo had settled into my mind’s eye as a near-mythical place characterized by terrifying history, fascinating culture, stunning art, and burning fever. Like a child filling in the rough forms of a coloring-book, I was filling in the blanks of my understanding of this place, and by proxy, of one of the most fascinating and intense parts of Africa. Walking along the bank of the Congo the next day with three friends, I had the feeling again when I heard through the silence the subtle roar of the rapids downriver. This river has caused and witnessed so much death in its history – the sound of the boiling rapids was its perfect anthem.

“It can’t be done”

Everywhere I’ve traveled in the developing world I’ve experienced the “It can’t be done” phenomenon in various cultural manifestations. However, nowhere is it so amusingly and frustratingly prominent as here. I’ll give two more examples of “it can’t be done”, Kinshasa style.

1. On Saturday night, my friend ordered pizza. I asked that whatever she got for me not have mushrooms on it. So, she ordered, they told her it would be there in ten minutes. One hour and two phone calls later, the pizza came. With mushrooms. Another phone call – why didn’t you make the pizza without mushrooms? Because it can’t be done. Ah. I see. Upon pain of death, mushrooms apparently must appear on all pizzas. How silly of us to think otherwise!

2. On Sunday, this same friend and I went to the recreation club to which she belongs to get lunch. Non-members have to pay for use of the rec facilities, but should be able to eat in the restaurant without paying extra. After she signed in, we went to the restaurant, and all the tables on the veranda were full. So, we found a table next to the pool, and asked for an umbrella. The guy was more than happy to oblige with the umbrella, but he asked if we were both members. My friend said that she was and I was her guest. So, he asked me to pay to use the pool. We explained that we were just eating from the restaurant. He told us that it was not possible for me to eat from the restaurant without paying for use of the facilities. My friend pointed out that she has had guests there before, and knows that they can eat without paying for the facilities. He insisted that it was not possible. He said maybe if we were sitting on the veranda instead of on the grass it would be different. My friend asked if there were different menus for the veranda and for the grass. No, of course not. Well, being as there are no tables on the veranda, why can’t we just sit and eat at this table on the grass? It is not possible. So, we asked the manager. He said there was no problem. Then the original guy comes down to the office and says that My friend the member wasn’t the problem, but I was because I wasn’t a member (yes, me being a problem as usual). The manager said again that there was no problem. We were so tired of the other guy by then though that we just left. So, for any of you who may want to eat there, remember that if you aren’t a member, you can only eat on the veranda, not on the grass.

Issues

Things with my organization have also been a bit chaotic since I arrived. Kinshasa is very expensive. I was told that it is recommended that you bring $500 with you in cash to tide you over until you can get per diem. However, it was too late for me to get an advance from HQ, so I could only bring $100 of my own money. Even though the Congo office knew this was the case, I didn’t get any advance from them or per diem to cover my weekend. Not too much of a big deal, but $100 is just about enough to cover one day’s expenses in Kinshasa. I was also given information telling me not to bother bringing sheets or towels, as they were to be provided to me. However, the supervisor told me that I should have brought towels, since those at the place we would be staying were not good. Thanks. So, we had to find a supermarket that was both open on Sunday and sold towels. We did, and two crappy bath towels cost me $26. Some food that I thought it might be nice to take with me set me back another $30 (two packs of instant soup, a can of Coke, macaroni, and some granola bars).

To Kindu
This morning, I was supposed to be waiting in front of my friend’s building at 5:30 am. Now, those of you who know me know that I hate being awake before 10am, let alone 5:30 am in a household with no coffee. So I waited. And waited. Forty-five minutes later, the guy comes up in the minivan to take me to the UN airport. I was about to give up on him. He just got confused and thought that I was someone else, and instead of listening to his instructions, he just did what he felt like doing. I’m sure that he woke up some poor other woman who was just trying to get some sleep. If she ever reads this, I’m very sorry!

All flights for humanitarian agencies, the UN, and diplomats are managed through the Mission Observatoire des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC), the UN mission here. They have an airport that is nicer than the national airport, even though it is “temporary”, and the flight to Kisangani was in a normal-sized passenger plane. They don’t cater on the flight, but in the waiting area, they have decent espresso and some light food. I met a very nice Italian guy who works for another organization, and is familiar with my organization. We chatted, smoked a cigarette, and had some espresso. The flight was uneventful, and left us off at the Kisangani airport. I gather from the architecture that this was originally a regular national airport at some time. Whenever things were closer to normal here. Now, although the area used by the UN are clean and well-organized, the walls of the building are covered in mold, the lights don’t work, and the waiting area is made up of four rows of plastic chairs. Flight information is written on a dry-erase board next to the only gate for check-in. The baggage claim area is just a space on the floor by the door. The flight to Kindu will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 will check in at 3 pm, and leave at 4 or 4:30. It is now 12:02 pm. I could be flying on a puddle-jumper plane (which could really mean anything smaller than a commuter jet) or on a helicopter. My fingers are crossed for the helicopter!

Tuesday, April 06, 2004

It wasn’t a helicopter, but I was the only one on the plane! I flew on a plane called an Antonov. They are made in Russia or the Ukraine, and are mostly used to carry commodities and a few passengers. The inside is big enough to carry two cars. You would probably recognize them as the type of plane that has a ramp in the back that you can drive up on. There aren’t regular seats inside some of them, just benches with seatbelts, and needless to say there aren’t any flight attendants. The flight was smooth, though, and I got to wear ear protectors which made me feel very technical. I sat on one of the benches, and the rest of the plane was packed with food commodities, like potatoes, onions, wheat, and corn.

The Congo and the Forest

There is no way to explain the beauty of the view from the plane window. For as far as the eye could see, there was unbroken forest: deep green and shadowy, a clear inspiration for belief in magic and for fear. Through this beautiful and mysterious canopy winds the great Congo River, like a gleaming bronze ribbon. The section of river over which we flew was mostly calm and appeared navigable, but there were no boats on it that I could see. It is fed by smaller rivers that quilt the forest, noticeable only because of the slight indentation that they make in the green canopy. I was almost disappointed when we touched down into the reality of Kindu.

Kindu

I was met by the regional emergency coordinator, the base manager and the head of Caritas Kindu at the airport, and they took me to the office to introduce me to everyone. The office is in a decent building on the second floor. We share it with Caritas Kindu. Everyone seemed nice, I found my desk and mailbox, and then we left for dinner at the Procure. The food was typically African, and not bad at all. We ate and relaxed with the Bishop, the Vicar, and a couple of others.

After dinner, three colleagues and myself went to the MONUC headquarters for a beer, since I had just arrived and the regional emergency coordinator was going to leave the next day. Any of you who have been to Loki or another UN humanitarian camp know what these places are like. We sat at a long table full of other development and humanitarian workers, apparently from all over the world. The lingua franca was French, but some of us spoke English, too. The beer felt great, and everyone seemed nice enough. I’ll get into this scene more as I get to know it better.

Last night, I slept at the Procure of the diocese. The Procure is like a hostel for traveling priests, other religious, and people, like me, who work with the Church. It was clean and the food was edible at dinner. The room was fine, except perhaps the most important part, the bed. It was a military cot more or less. I barely slept all night, and today I’m a bit hazy.

One project we are going to do is to rebuild two bridges between Kindu, where I am, and Kailo, a town north of here. The people in Kailo have been almost entirely isolated due to the destruction of these bridges. The only way into the town now is by plane or helicopter. It is estimated by the local organization that we are thinking of partnering with on this that due to a lack of hygiene the death rate is 5 people a day. There are only 11,000 inhabitants of Kailo. While this is horrible, I don’t really understand the statistic. The proposal that cites it does not cite how the author arrived at it or where they found it. It doesn’t really say anything tangible about how these people are dying. Furthermore, I’m wondering why they are dying so fast when most Congolese live without hygiene systems and aren’t dying at the rate of 5 a day.

Thursday, April 08, 2004

The “You don’t speak French (or whatever language) well, so you must be stupid” Phenomenon

This particular quirk is not specific to the Congo, it is found worldwide. However, it has been years since I’ve experienced it myself, since it’s been a while since I’ve lived somewhere where I didn’t speak the common language well.

It goes like this. You ask a simple question, most likely correctly or close enough to be understood, and the person you ask treats you like a complete idiot. Some examples:

When I was studying in Argentina, I was just starting to speak Spanish. I asked my host mother where the iron was to iron a shirt or pants or whatever. Instead of just showing me where the iron was, she also commenced to instruct me in the fine art of ironing, pantomiming exactly how one goes about ironing whatever it was I had in exquisite dramatic detail, as though I had never seen an iron before in my life, let alone actually used one. The same thing happened with my roommate in the apartment to which I later moved when I asked where the washing machine was, but she went one step further and proceeded to explain how the light switch worked as well. You would have thought that I had just woken up from a 500 year sleep and couldn’t fathom modern technology.

So, today I was working on an Excel spreadsheet that will capture the monitoring and evaluation data for one of the projects we are doing. I made some of the cells automatic, and wanted to make sure that everything worked, so I asked the project officer for some of the already filled-in questionnaires. He didn’t get me, since I really was just making up the words as I went along, so I asked for help from a visiting engineer who supposedly speaks English. Instead of just telling me the words, he explained how questionnaires work, that there are some already filled-in (which I clearly already knew), that you could put the data from them into Excel (no shit – I guess that’s why I was using Excel and already had the spreadsheet for tracking the questionnaires made up), and that the word for questionnaire was questionnaire, which I already knew and had already used in our conversation several times. “Ok, madame?” Yes, fine, but are there some filled-in questionnaires that I could have please? Again with the same explanations as above as if I was some kind of nitwit. I never got the questionnaires. Something similar is happening with my supervisor here and the cell phone, but not as bad. I’m just convinced that he thinks that cell phones in the US are completely different than here.

Anyway, we bagged work early today because Abbot François gave us Holy Thursday afternoon and Good Friday off. I’m sitting in the monastery where we are living right now, since we don’t yet have an apartment. It is hot. Today makes me think of the part of the Heart of Darkness by Conrad where Marlow talks about “stony hills ablaze with heat” and later, “The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” That is exactly what it feels like to day. My skin can’t sweat fast enough to keep me even a little bit cool. But to make it all Africa, to make it perfect and livable and gorgeous, to make it tangible, the choir is practicing for Easter in the cathedral next door. Their fantastic harmonies blow like a breeze through the air. It feels like time only moves at the encouragement of their song’s rhythm. Their singing is like a view of the African landscape: broad, colorful, and full of texture. Of course my concert is cut short by a chainsaw: the brothers have a project. Hmmm.

Friday, April 09, 2004

The annoying African day

1. I did my laundry yesterday, and hung it outside to dry, so that I would have some clean clothes to take with me to Goma. Today I went to look for them, and they were in a bucket, in a ball, soaked. Apparently the caretaker of the monastery decided to take them off the line after they were only there for two hours. Great. So, I picked out two things that were almost dry, and put the rest on the line.
2. The bread for breakfast was stale. It’s terrible bread anyway, and even worse when stale. I can deal with stale bread if I can make it into French toast or toast of any kind, or bread pudding, but since I’m not in charge of the monastery kitchen, I just tried to chew my way through a couple of pieces.
3. The Engineer, who said that he would be ready to be picked up any time after 6am was not ready when we went to get him. Then…
4. He brought a box of bushmeat with him that filled the vehicle with an odor of decay. I thought that something had died in the car before we pinpointed the source. We drove all the way to the airport with the stink, wondering whether the rather proper Swiss UN guys would even let the dead animal on the plane. They did, and thankfully it was a normal plane where the baggage and the seating area were separated.
5. We arrived in Kisangani, thinking that we were 1/3 of the way finished our trip, but NO! There were other problems. We tried to check in for our onward flight to Goma via Bukavu and Kigali (yes, the capital of Rwanda), and were turned away by one of the rudest people I’ve ever come across. He told us that the flight was full without even looking at our tickets, and then said that there were no more flights that would get us near Goma so we should just go home, but we probably wouldn’t even be able to do that because probably the flight to Kindu wouldn’t come in time. We were flying on the UN system, because it is free for NGOs, and this guy worked for them. Unbelievable. He was really rude, especially to our Senegalese boss. So, we cooled down a bit, and then tried to arrange something, and finally got a private flight ($126 per person each way for a 1 hour flight) directly to Goma. We ended up getting in earlier than we would have with the UN, but it was irritating because we had to pay. And it was raining in Kisangani, so we were wet. And there was no food so we were hungry.

While this is a particularly bad example of the Irritating African Day, there are many other examples, and also examples of the Irritating Latin American or Asian day that aren’t too different. In addition to the larger infuriating moments, there are the ever-present smaller irritations that make it nearly unbearable, like the fact that you have to go through immigration in each city you land in on private airlines, or that the local police try to get bribes from you by grabbing your ticket from your hand and making you wait to get it back until your flight is gone or you pay them, etc. I’m not sure why this happens, but it can really turn you into a jerk if you let it get to you. In small part, it has to do with everyone trying to make themselves as important as possible in their small little job, and with knowing that they can get bribes, and with bureaucracy, but there seems to be some kind of lack of dignity associated with it as well. Add to all this the heat and dust and rain and hunger and you get a recipe for a serious temper tantrum that will only make things worse.

Goma

We arrived at Goma to the welcome face of the Caritas Goma expediter. As I mentioned before, expediters are wonderful amazing people on whom your ability to do most things depends. Eddy is also the head of logistics for Caritas Goma, and is great. He whisked us (as much as one can whisk anything in the Goma airport) through immigration, health, and customs, onto the car, and worked out our return flights, hotel, car needs, and everything for our whole weekend here.

Goma was hit a couple of years ago with a volcanic eruption. Being the Congo, you can still see the black scar left by the lava within and around the city, pouring silently and ashen down the side of the stunning volcano by the city; very little has been done to rebuild since the disaster. It may be for the black volcanic gravel that paves the entire city, or maybe because it is the rainy season here above the equator (it is the dry season in Kindu, south of the equator), but Goma appears darker, although busier and more organized than Kindu. There is something a bit shadowy and sinister in this dimness that doesn’t necessarily make one feel too comfortable. Our hotel is quite nice, though, and even has TV and hot water. The food at the restaurant was good, and served in a timely fashion, and was affordable! I’m looking forward to a dinner out, pizza maybe, and some dancing!

Saturday, April 10, 2004

The Coco Jambo and the Ladies of the Night

So, last night, my two colleagues and I went to a local bar around the corner from our restaurant after dinner for some drinks and maybe dancing. It is actually a nice and comfortable bar with fun music and regularly-served drinks. We did quite a bit of people-watching at first; the place is frequented by better-off Congolese, MONUC people, and people like ourselves from international humanitarian organizations. It is also frequented by prostitutes, who make the whole scene a little more interesting, and a little more surreal.

Our Base Manager is a married older man from Senegal. His wife is still there, but he’s very faithful to her. So, when he attracted a rather persistent prostitute, he was mortified. She kept asking him to dance, and when he repeated that he didn’t want to because he was tired, she said that instead she’d give him a massage to liven him up. The poor man was mortified. She was very determined, and kept coming back throughout the night.

In addition to hitting on men, the prostitutes dance. They dance in predictably “sexy” ways, aiming, one would suppose, to attract customers (usually MONUC guys and international businessmen). The strange thing about this isn’t that it happens, but rather, how the performance is carried out. Most of the girls stand in front of the mirror on the wall at the back of the dance floor and watch themselves dance. So, instead of looking out at the crowd or dancing with each other, they line up like students in a dance class in front of a mirror and watch themselves intently. Very strange.

Just like anywhere else, prostitutes here get a bad name in their communities, are looked down upon by most people, and are more likely to be HIV positive. However, you have to give these girls a bit of credit – they are most likely the most ambitious and financially successful members of their villages, and they had the initiative to find a profitable business. While I’m not sure that the inevitable self-destruction that comes with such a profession is really all that better than the poverty they came from, one can clearly see the draw. They wear nice clothes, make a lot of money, get gifts from rich foreigners, get to eat out at nice places, etc. Most are desperately trying to support their families.

Sunday, April 11, 2004

There is a military contingent in our hotel, meeting about some kind of inclusion of the former rebels into the national military. I have to admit that they freak me out. They’re young guys, slouching about, probably have a hair-trigger…

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Meeting with the Donor

In this business, field office and headquarters offices alike complain that there is a disconnect between the realities of the field and the requirements of managing a worldwide program from a city in the US. This is true not only of NGOs like the one I work for, but also of the donors who finance our programs.

As you can imagine, it isn’t easy determining who has disarmed and decided to return for good to civilian life and who is only claiming to do so, or planning to do so for a little bit. Huge logistical, cultural, and practical obstacles prevent us from being able to guarantee that a soldier who gives up a gun to the UN and states that he wants to go back to his village is actually going to go back and stay back. However, we still need to ensure that these people get the humanitarian assistance they deserve, such as non-food household items, in order to decrease the likelihood that they will take up arms against us for not fulfilling promises, or against the government because they disarmed and then couldn’t make a living.

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Lokando and other things

Yesterday, we went up to Lokando, a town down river (north of here) on the Congo. We went up to arrange the set-up for the distribution we’re going to do there on Friday, and also to make sure that things were calm. Normally, most of the towns we work in are pretty calm, but a couple of days ago, a battalion of MPs had been assigned to the town, along with an appointed “governor” from the west of the country. To you, this may seem like no problem, but to the people of Lokando, this is a potential spark for conflict.

Lokando was a center of activity for the Mayi Mayi, the home grown militias that fought against the Rwanda-backed RCD (Rassemblement Congolaise pour le Developpement – Congolese Assembly for Development, which it most certainly was not), considered an invading force. During the last war, the Congolese military was mandated to protect the population and fight the invasion of Rwandan troops and their supporters, but instead, they just fled, raping and pillaging as they went. The rebels or the Mayi Mayi (whoever the opponent of the day was) moved into the towns virtually without a fight, but they found nothing but devastation. It seems to me that more harm was done to this country by their own military than by any rebels or foreign militias, although all three groups played a significant part in the destruction of the Congo.

So, now Lokando, a formerly Mayi Mayi town, hosts a Congolese Army MP Battalion and a governor appointed to them by a leader who lives far away in Kinshasa, and who was a leader in the Mobutu era, which makes him less popular. When we met with the leader of the MPs, he asked us if we could bring tools for the men and their families when we came to do the distribution on Friday. This is where we get to the heart of why the military pillaged their people instead of fighting: lack of national sentiment, lack of pay, and the culture of “Article 15” or “debrouillez-vous” (make your own way however you can).

During the Mobutu years, the country was kept together tenuously by the magnetic personality of Mobutu and his ruthlessness with perceived threats to his power. However, in order to maintain his power, he played regions and ethnic groups off one another, deepening rather than healing feelings of antagonism between sub-national groups. He systematically kept the focus of loyalty on himself rather than on the country, in essence making of the national army a private security force with no special feelings toward their country. Since they lacked nationalism/patriotism, when the country was beset by incursions from neighboring countries, the armed forces felt no responsibility for protecting the people at the possible expense of their own lives. This was compounded by the fact that they were (and still are) paid very little, if anything.

In spite of the fact that Mobutu and his cronies were making billions by gutting formerly profitable enterprises of the Congo, including the mineral companies that were nationalized under the policy of Zairization, none of that money was seen by the populace, including the military. If they were paid at all, the recruits were paid little, and had to purchase their uniforms out of the small salary they were given, as well as support their families. No wonder that when push came to shove, they were willing to use the guns and power they had by the nature of their jobs to steal from anyone they came across. They had no loyalty to the people, so stealing from them became normal. In fact, the military frequently operated as though the population was obligated to turn everything over to them, including houses, food, clothing, tools, everything.

“Debrouillez-vous” means something like “make your own way, manage for yourself”. The trend began in the south of the country during the Mobutu era. Rather than wait for the state to provide or for things to get better, people were encouraged to make their own way. This sounds well and good, but without rule of law, this turned into a horrible degeneration of the work ethic, massive corruption and theft, and a breakdown in society. This culture is also active in the military. Because they are paid so little, they are expected to figure out how to get along on their own, even if this means pillaging. The leadership not only overlooks this behavior, but they also participate in it and encourage it. There are of course more positive examples of this mentality, such as the incredible black market in Kinshasa, but for the most part, it is played out in kleptocracy and petty corruption.

So, given all that, it is not surprising that the military commander asked for tools from us. He will never get them from Kinshasa no matter how many times he asks. He is expected by his higher-ups to find a way to get them himself. He has little if any money, and how many troops and their families to look after while keeping mutiny at bay. He probably feels that he and his men are entitled to whatever they can lay their hands on. This may cause us problems after the distribution. I’m sure that the soldiers won’t cause problems on the day of the distribution, but we have already heard stories of soldiers in other towns going at night with guns to steal items from the kits that we have given to families. What can we do? We can’t just stop giving out the kits because the people need the things, and the military doesn’t get to everyone (or not just yet). But we most certainly cannot give out kits to the military – that is the purview of the government. There is actually plenty of money to pay these guys at the national level, the mystery is where it leaks out on the way down.

Just take a second to imagine what it would be like to live in constant fear that the soldiers in or near your town will come into your village drunk with their guns, rape you and your children, take everything you own, and burn down your house because you didn’t give it all up voluntarily. There are villages where this has happened more than 20 times. There were two big “Pillages”, in 1991 and 1993, but in both cases, many villages were run into the forest several times. I can’t even begin to imagine the horrifying fear that the Congolese must live with each night. The very people who are supposed to be your proud protectors are armed villains sponsored by your government who will never be called to answer for their actions. Each night, you would lay your head down but not to sleep, just to wait for the banging at the door. Every sound becomes a footstep, voices of soldiers, the cry of your daughter. It would be enough to drive you mad. And yet, the people return to their villages and rebuild their houses and get on with their lives. What else is there to do?

When the military and rebels pillaged the towns during the conflicts, they also frequently raped women and girls. In the Congo, there are no rape hotlines, no kind nurses and doctors at hospitals, no access to the drugs that can help you avert HIV or other infections, no “morning-after” pill, no counselors. Here, women are frequently ousted if not from their communities, then from their homes, divorced by their husbands because they have been raped. These women get no treatment, unless it comes at the hand of an NGO. Not only do they have to go through the normal struggle that any women goes through after such an experience, but they have to do it alone, with almost no one to rely on for friendship, love, and support. Here, Cooperatizione Italiana, the Italian organization, is working with these women to try to help them recover and get back on their feet.

Privacy

There is none here. I’m going crazy. I can’t even have a telephone conversation in private. There is always someone listening. When I heard that my friend’s mother passed away on Sunday night, I didn’t even have a place to cry alone. No where. It is really getting to me. I feel sometimes like I’m peeing in a store window.

2003-11-28T01:02:00.000-05:00

11/2002
Nairobi, Kenya
As planned, I went with my co-workers Andrea and Fred and some 15 Sudanese consultants to the Kenyan town of Lokichoggio, on the border with Sudan, for a two-day training session on field research for conflict and peace-building analysis that would prepare the consultants to go into the field in Southern Sudan to carry out an assessment of the conflict and peace conditions there. I was to receive some of the training, as well as to help with administrative things that inevitably crop up at the last minute in such cases, such as getting immigration papers for people who have known that they needed them for over a month but apparently thought it would be better to wait until the last minute, typing training materials on the laptop (with unreliable electricity), etc. After having taken Practical Research Methods with Grace at SAIS, the training was not new material to me, but watching and listening to the Sudanese was a good learning experience, and it is always good to learn from other trainers.

Loki, as the town is affectionately (or not) called by the aid/development workers and others who pass through it, is very hot and very flat, except for the two mountains that seem to have been left behind by the others that went south long ago, which stand on either side of the “town”. The airport is a long runway and some plywood offices and the customs-bonded warehouse that stores the food aid that gets dropped over the towns of Southern Sudan. All along one side of the tarmac sit neat piles of bushel bags of grain, separated by square pieces of plywood, on shipping palettes, lined up and ready to be loaded onto the white planes marked with “UN” in bright blue letters. The “town” is a maze of zinc and plywood shacks, concrete buildings, and the grass huts of the Turkana. There are some stores that cater to the locals, and other stores that cater to the aid people. After passing through the town, you get to the compounds. For the first training session, we were all staying at the compound of Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), which is a sprawling, flat, sandy space dotted with wood cabins painted pink or brown. The cabins stand around a central area where the mess and the bar and the billiards rooms are. While the accommodations were very plain and the food was nothing special, it was comfortable. There were a mix of people staying there, from those hard-core MSF-France types to the upper-middle range of Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) leaders, to Sudanese and Kenyan and European aid workers.

Across the street there is the 748 compound, a much fancier establishment, with beautifully appointed “tukuls” (round mud or concrete huts with grass roofs) that each had their own bathroom and fans. The food there was catered by the Java House, an American-style restaurant that is based in Nairobi. The bar is much nicer, and the clientele include high-ranking SPLA and Southern government leaders, bush pilots, higher-ranking American development people, and some other characters. The most interesting place in Loki is the Operation Lifeline Sudan/UN compound. It is like a city in a city, with streets of tukuls for those staying there, a restaurant, a disco (!!), and more offices of OLS-member NGOs (which Pact is not). You need a passport of a UN country to get in. That is where the security briefings are held by security people known as Sierra 1-8. I think that there is something wrong with an operation that identifies its employees as numbers, but maybe I’m missing something.

The people in Loki are a mix of aid and development people on their way into or out of Sudan, bush pilots (who are really odd characters), SPLA/M officials, Sudanese refugees, Kenyan development workers, and the Turkana, a tribe that lives in the northwestern part of Kenya. Starting at around 6, people settle into bar stools at the various compounds, and proceed to get toasted. After having been to the Sudan, I think I can see the appeal, but with the heat and the exhaustion of the hurry-up-and-wait rigamarole that we went through each day, sleeping and drinking a couple of liters of water sounded more inviting than beer, which at NPA tends to be warm, even when it is supposedly cold.

As those of you who have worked in the developing world can imagine, getting together a team of about 20 consultants was not an easy task, and it of course did not turn out quite the way we expected. So, since a couple of people didn’t show up, Paul Murphy, the program director, decided that it would be a good idea for me to go. This had been discussed as a possibility when I first go to Nairobi, but I didn’t really see it happening, considering I knew nothing about Sudan and maybe even less about conflict transformation. But, it happened, and I was glad that I had packed for a couple of weeks just in case. That night, as we sat around a table at the bar at NPA, we heard the shelling of a town across the border. The next morning, I packed my things and hopped on a plane to my team’s first destination, Pochalla, in Pibor County, on the border of Southern Sudan and Ethiopia.

Before telling what Pochalla was like, I’ll say a bit about what I expected Sudan to be like. I expected desert, heat, dust, sand, distended bellies, flies, horrible odors, dead animals, constant shelling…probably what many people imagine when the think of Southern Sudan, if indeed they think about it at all. I expected the Sudanese to be hardened and sullen, angry. I expected to be mostly uncomfortable for the ten days of my stint. I expected awful food, little water, uncomfortable beds, snakes, and sleepless nights wondering what was about to sneak into my tukul. What I found was some of that, and something completely different.

We flew into Pochalla over some mountains and a couple of rivers. The airstrip was lined with tall green and brown grass, and was barely visible until we were actually touching down. I looked out the window and saw a knot of very tall, very dark people, men, women, and children, in worn second-hand western clothes, waiting for the plane. It must have been the most amusing and promising time of the day. Who was on the plane? Who was staying in Pochalla? What were they bringing? Is any of it for me? The pilots deposited the four of us into the hands of World Relief, our hosts for the next several days, and we piled into the car for the short ride to the World Relief compound.

Our team was made up of three Sudanese and me. Mama Ayen is from Bahr el Ghazal, the area that was most ravaged in the late 80’s by the Northern army and the two famines of the 70’s and early 80’s. She is Dinka, and is sweet but tough, and has a dream of opening a school for girls in her area. She is about my Mom’s age, and became like a mother to me while we were in the field, introducing me gently to Sudanese culture, and taking care of me when I was disoriented, sick, or sad. Elizabeth is also a Dinka, but from the East Bank of the Nile, from the town of Kongor north of Bor. She works for our partner organization, the New Sudan Council of Churches (NSCC). Elizabeth has four children, and is an intelligent and capable development worker with a degree from a university in Nigeria. Marshal is an SPLA commander on leave who just received his BA in business from Makelle University in Ethiopia. He is almost 40, but looks like an 18-year old. He is completely in love with his wife, and devoted to their children. Marshall has become a very good friend of mine, and is a committed, honest, and hard-working man.

At World Relief, we were installed in our tukuls, which had simple beds equipped with essential mosquito nets. The food was delicious. Pochalla is green and has beautiful flowers growing everywhere. Across the river, we could see Ethiopia. Everyone was very nice and made us feel at home.

That afternoon, we met with the commissioner. He assured us that the only major conflict the town faced was with the Murlei. Pochalla is inhabited by an ethnic group called the Anyuak. They are one of the smaller groups, and span the border between the Sudan and Ethiopia. The Murlei they were complaining about live under Government of Sudan control in Pibor. This group allegedly raids their cattle, kills them, and abducts their children. In fact, this kind of raiding is common among most of the ethnic groups of Southern Sudan, and has been for many generations, and is characterized by shifting alliances between groups depending on where the flood or drought of this year has hit, and which groups the GoS is encouraging in order to divide the South. Only with the introduction of light arms due to the broader North-South conflict did these conflicts become so drastically deadly. Over time, the Anyuak have limited their cultivation and supposedly the number of cattle they keep. The commissioner made arrangements for us to meet with the local women’s group, the chiefs, the farmers, and the Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in the area, who are mostly Dinka.

The women’s group began by telling us of the Murlei attacks in which they have lost their children. Some women lost all of their children and were widowed by the conflicts. After we exhausted the stories of the Murlei and the impact of widowhood and orphaning of children, another issue we weren’t quite expecting cropped up when one of the older women began to speak accusingly of the local women’s treatment of the IDP women. She began to tell of several incidents that happened between them, but when the situation became heated, we decided that it would be better to broach the subject separately with each group. We met with the IDPs the next day, and heard of numerous injustices carried out against them by the local population, including beating and imprisonment, the theft of money they earned, their exclusion from aid and development, and the shunning of women and children from wells and schools. Overall, both this situation and that with the Murlei carved out an indelible impression on me. People can endure so much. I was amazed at what so many of the Anyuak and Dinka had come to see as a permanent fact of life. They herded cattle; others raided the cattle and killed them. Some people took their children. Yes, it is awful, but that is just the way it is. The others told the same story, belying the commissioner’s rosy portrait of the relationship between the locals and the IDPs.

After Pochalla, we hopped back on the plane and were whisked to Panyagor, a completely different kind of place. Panyagor was much more what I had expected of Sudan. In the rainy season, it is a swamp, but we got there in the dry season, when it is a flat, hot, dry, frying pan, swarming with flies and killer bees. The people of Panyagor and the surrounding towns are Dinka, and they, too, recounted stories of Murlei raids, also blaming them on the GoS-controlled area of Pibor. Some of the Dinka in this area practice scarification, when the skin is cut in distinctive designs (in the case of the Dinka Bor, in a V-shape on the forehead), and caused to scar permanently in that design. Among more traditional people, it is a sign of beauty. Some Dinka Bor also remove some of the bottom teeth, and having top teeth that sit horizontally out of the mouth is considered beautiful. An orthodontist would become suicidal among them.

In Panyagor, we stayed in the CARE compound, which was not as comfortable as World Relief, but was nice. The CARE guys mostly sat around all day writing reports about work that I didn’t see them do and composing emails that they would send over the Bushmail system (email over the VHF radio – wonders never cease) before going to bed at night. It was sooooo hot. The commissioner of Panyagor is a good man, and a friend of Marshall’s. He set up some meetings for us, and gave us a goat to welcome us. Yum. Goat meat. Interesting. No, I didn’t try it. I know, I know, I should be more sensitive, but I really didn’t feel like arguing with my stomach.

Again, we heard stories of cattle raiding, child abduction, and village destruction. The enemies of the Dinka in this area are Nuer and Murlei, and most of the crises are blamed on the GoS, lack of water, and competition for grazing areas. We were also told about the split between John Garang, the leader of the mainstream SPLA, and Riek Machar, the Nuer commander who married Emma McCune, the crazy British aid worker. This split caused indescribable massacres in the area around Panyagor. The leaders of each village around Panyagor had compiled lists of the dead and abducted when they heard we were coming, and handed their lists of horror to us when we arrived. There is no way to explain how you can literally see in people’s eyes the trauma caused by living in constant fear of violence and preparation for defense or revenge, the brand of hellish violence that marks them forever. But nonetheless, the people are so humble and welcoming. Everywhere we went, they offered us tea, the best seats, and the best part of the shade.

One day, we drove from Panyagor to one of the villages, Poktap, which is essentially an army garrison and the associated families, right on the front lines of the North-South conflict, on the site of the company town when the government of the North was supposedly trying to build the Jonglei canal, which would relieve the pressure from flooding and irrigate part of the north. Of course, the canal was never finished, and the people of the village mostly live in the containers that were used to bring in equipment. All around are abandoned CATs, cranes, and other machinery. Also, one can see anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, and other types of arms, which litter the landscape. Barefoot soldiers walk around in whatever kind of camouflage or makeshift uniform they can paste together, with automatic rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders. The drive out to Poktap was an experience, too. The “road’ was nothing of the sort. For most of the drive, two dusty tracks could barely be seen in the grass that was taller than I and stretched for as far as the eye can see in both directions, only occasionally broken by a random tree or tukul roof. For hours, we bobbled along, getting stuck in the mud a few times. I was sure that I was going to have severe head injuries when the thing was over, and Marshall did sustain an injury to his kidney when he nearly fell out of the back of the truck at one point. No one would ever let me sit in the back, and now I know why. Our driver was older than God. The quiet, unreadable Deng Dit managed the road like the old pro that he is, having been a driver for various organizations and governments since the 1950’s. He used the radio in the car for the first time in his life to call in and tell the organization he worked for that no one else should drive on the road that day because they would get suck, but yes, we would get back for dinner. I wasn’t convinced until we did, but then I was pretty much convinced that Deng Dit could drive successfully on any road at any time in any car.

The day we were to leave Panyagor was a nightmare. The plane’s ETA was supposedly 9. Hours, hot hours, hot hungry hours passed, and the plane did not come. My team (of which I was oddly the administrator) kept asking when the plane was going to come, did I radio Loki, what was the ETA, would we have to stay another day…they asked over and over and over again the same questions, and it was hot and I was hungry and the plane did not come any faster, even though the girl on the other end of the radio in Loki kept telling me it was just about to land. At 5, we finally heard the engine of the plane like a chorus of angels, but when the plane landed, we realized that it may just have been the Sisters of Charity that were taking up the seats we thought were for us. So, Jim, the pilot, stuffed our luggage into the boot and stuffed us into the cabin, where the two nuns, three other aid workers, and the now five of us (Uncle Phillip Aguer of the Sudan Relief and Reconstruction Agency had joined us) into the seven seats. “You sit on the cold box”, Jim told Marshall. And we took off.

Our next destination was Boma, the first town to be liberated by the SPLA in the most recent outbreak of war against the North. We flew into a beautiful, green, hilly area that looked like the Garden of Eden to the five dusty travelers who got off the plane there. It was cool, and had recently rained. Everything was green. But all that was deceptive. It had only just started to rain, and the people had lost their second crop of the season. Famine was on the horizon, and food aid drops marked the hours. The UN planes roar in, circle to clear the target area, then swing back low, aim, and as they open the doors through which the bombs once passed, shoot straight up, perpendicular to the ground, letting the bags of food I saw on the side of the tarmac in Loki slide out, fall off their palettes, and thump on the ground.

In Boma, we stayed at the Sudan Medical Care compound. From the beginning, the camp manager was a jerk. I had already been a bit sick with a stomach thing for a couple of days, and was staying away from meat until I felt better. At SMC, they only served us goat and the Sudanese flat bread kisra. I wanted to be a good sport about it, but I had just had a terrible day, I felt like crap, everyone was talking in Arabic around me (I don’t speak Arabic yet), I was lonely and tired and dirty, and then they served us goat and kisra with tea. This was when I lost it and started to cry. The more I cried, the more frustrated I got with myself because I thought that I was being a whimp crying because things weren’t going my way when I had just spent the last seven days interviewing people who had lived their whole lives with famine and war. So, the more frustrated I got, the more I cried. Finally, Mama Ayen heard me, and came up and hugged me. “Don’t worry”, she said. “You’ve been doing very well, and I know that it isn’t easy.” It made me feel a lot better, and after that, everyone tried to speak a little English to keep me in the conversation, and the cook brought out bananas. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems when you have been born with as much privilege as we all have.

The next day, we went to the last day of a peace meeting among the four tribes of the SPLA-controlled section of Pibor County. They were taking care of some cattle raiding issues that had been cropping up among them, and enforcing some of the resolutions from the last time. It truly did seem like a good-faith effort to keep the peace momentum going at the level of local leadership. There were about ten women there, as well, representing the women’s groups of the various villages. Elizabeth, Marshal, and I interviewed them. It was a fascinating interview, both because it brought up a lot of new facets of the conflicts we had already heard much about, and because the women had some interesting legends built around some of the conflicts.

Boma area is settled by Murlei (who aren’t all the murderous villains that the Dinka and Anyuak would have you believe), Jiye (one of three closely related tribes, along with the Toposa and the Turkana), Dinka Bor, and Kachipo (those are the ones who stretch their women’s lips with the graduated plates. Check national geographic for them). These tribes, like the others in the region, raid one another’s cattle and abduct children. They are also under siege occasionally from outside by the Toposa who live to the south and are encouraged by a man named George Kinga. Kinga claims to have found a “precious stone” in the Boma mountains in Kachipo land, and wants the Toposa to push the Kachipo out so he can mine it. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’ve been told everything from a new, as-yet-unnamed stone to uranium to sapphires. It might be coltan, the microprocessor stuff, or tanzanite. Who knows. Anyway, he wants it, and is causing a lot of problems to get it. He also tries to hijack the local peace initiatives to manipulate the resolutions in his favor.

The various cultures of Southern Sudan are fascinating. At once they share many common traits and yet are completely different from one another. When I first arrived, I couldn’t tell a Dinka from an Anyuak, but now the difference seems obvious to me. All of the groups are settled, semi-nomadic, and rarely nomadic pastoralists who keep cows as a store of wealth, source of food, and sign of status. Girl children actually have an equal or sometimes higher status than boys, because when they marry, their husbands must pay their families a bride price in cattle. Someone offered Uncle Phillip Aguer 50 cattle for me, which actually isn’t much. I don’t get a whole lot because I’m short and educated. The best women are tall and dumb. Cattle are so important to most of these groups that they will sell their children into indentured servitude or sell them completely to childless families for cattle. Cattle are more likely to get vaccines and health care than children. Due to the desire to have increasing numbers of cattle, the groups are constantly raiding one another’s herds, and there is enormous pressure on water and pastureland. The GoS frequently exploits this culture to weaken the southern rebellion by inciting infighting.

The trade in children is centuries old. According to the people we spoke to, it likely started when the Dinka Bor began to trade the children of their communities who were born with birth defects or other taboo characteristics to the Murlei, who have traditionally been less fertile, for cattle. This was a profitable opportunity, and children eventually became the target of abduction and were a highly desired booty of war. Many people also blame the epidemic infertility that sprung up in the Murlei and Jiye beginning in the 1950’s and 60’s. This infertility is due largely to syphilis. Supposedly, the syphilis was brought in by the British who were stationed near Murlei areas during the war. It is true that this infertility exists, but it is not the main cause of the kidnapping.

Everywhere we went, the Sudanese asked me what Americans think about the war in Sudan. I had to admit that I didn’t think that many of them thought about it at all, and that most wouldn’t be able to find it on a map. That was a very disappointing thing for them to hear. Most southern Sudanese believe that the war they are having with the North is over religion. They blame Islam for all of the evil in the world, and the Northern government for anything bad that happens to them. They love Israel, and hate all of the Arab states. They didn’t believe me when I told them that I had Muslim friends and that there are many Muslims in the United States who weren’t trying to create an Islamic state there, and weren’t at war with the Christians. The love Bush because they believe that he is fighting Islam. Most Southern Sudanese aren’t aware of the global implications of the fact that there is oil and uranium, among other “precious stones” under their soil, and steadfastly refuse to believe that this is anything other than a religious war. This is only one example of a naiveté that is very dangerous in the hands of armed people. Both the North and the SPLA are exploiting that naiveté, as well as the cultural and economic dependence on cattle. There is also an ingrained sense of entitlement and dependence on aid that was constructed bag by bag, dollar by dollar by the huge humanitarian machine that carelessly lorded Western values over cultures and a conflict that defies understanding by outsiders.

After collecting a ton of information, some useful and some useless but interesting, we headed back to Loki for debriefing. I ended up staying in Loki for another week, meeting the other teams as they came back from the field with our French logistics guy, Fred, and then helping Andrea and Paul get everyone debriefed and on a plane home, and then to set up the training for the next round of assessment. Those teams, including Andrea, are in the field now, in Upper Nile, the most screwed up region in a screwed up country.

If you want to read a good book that puts a lot of Southern Sudan in perspective in an eminently readable way, check out Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. The next time someone asks me why I have to work abroad when there are so many poor in the US, I’m likely to give them a black eye, and then tell them to read that book. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like the poverty of Sudan and countries like it. Being there was like watching some sick experiment that was testing the limits of human strength, dignity, and willingness to live.

Right now, I’m sitting on a comfy bed in air conditioning in an unbelievably luxurious house on the beach in Watamu. Bill, my boss, and his wife, and two co-workers of ours and their adorable kids rented the place for Thanksgiving. It is truly the diametric opposite of what I just came out of, but I have to admit that I needed it. I may talk more about these co-workers and their obsession with servants in my next note. I seriously think that they employ half of Nairobi.

We just ate Thanksgiving dinner, overlooking the Indian Ocean, after a day of scuba diving. It was glorious, but I feel like an ass, honestly. A colonial ass. Kenyan servants made a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and served it, and cleaned it up, as the two kids napped so they wouldn’t get in the way. It was not very real, and I missed being with my family a lot.

This morning, we were thankful especially that we weren’t Israelis and weren’t in the hotel they tend to stay at. Not too far from where we were staying, someone drove a vehicle into a hotel owned by an Israeli and blew it up, killing a bunch of people, of whom the majority were Kenyan. At the same time, an Israeli charter leaving the coastal city of Mombassa (get out your damn map and look it up) was shot at with surface to air missiles. All this in Kenya, and Bush is still staring down Saddam Hussein. I feel cursed to be a witness to history – Hurricane Mitch, the Maoists and the Royal Family massacre in Nepal, and now this.

This was a truly amazing experience. I constantly wished that I could share it with each of you, because it is too big for me to carry on my own. I’m glad that Andrea gets to go, so we will be able to talk about it with each other. It is hard to talk about Sudan with people who have worked there, because most of them have been involved for a long time and are jaded and nonchalant about it, or they are Sudanese and know no other reality. Please ask me any questions about it, because I’m still having trouble digesting it all, and it may help me to think through stuff.

If this makes you jealous or makes you wonder what it is like, get the hell out of your cube and do it. Can’t means won’t. The world is not a scary place – it is just full of people trying to get by, and the thousands of ways they find to do so.