Four Things

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

A False Balance - New York Times

Just read this.

Foreign Aid Shell Game

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'

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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.