Throwing Down the Water: Writings from the DRC

Why Generalists Matter

2012-01-22T06:26:00.003-05:00

It is both the irony and the saving grace of certain among the most beautiful places on earth that they are also so very far removed from those who might call them so.

We are above one of these places now, flying out in a little plane with Masaai-design-fabric covered seats and boxes of plumpy nut strapped along the floor in the back and I am thinking, This is What the Earth is Meant To Look Like; miles and miles of forested landscape, breaks for rivers and waterfalls, the depths of canyons barely visible between the green.

I think of all who live here and sustain it, and by all I do mean all (animal, mineral, vegetable) and not only those waves of humans flying in and out, some armed, some running from those with arms, that I hear of later. Later I will think of them in these terms and so as acronyms (groups and refugees) but for this moment I do not know any of the history and so I am still thinking of them, simply, and wholly, as Chain and Circle: food and life, the way the natural world works, far more insects and amphibians than mammals.

Yet, in spite of this division, this week I have seen more newborn human beings than ever before.

The Extremes of Life

The very beginning of life and the very end of life are not moments that the majority of us in the West see much of anymore. Whereas birth and death used to occur in the same houses as the ongoing-living, now dead bodies and newborns are nearly entirely removed from the usual thoroughfares, shuffled to the pervues of specialists.

Not so here. At one of our projects there are more than 600 births a month in the catche-ment area: more than 600 new people coming into the world, in just this one little corner of Congo. At any given point so many people are having children, or minding chidlren, or losing children, that it would be impossible to avoid interaction with the process. One mother we saw was on her 10th pregnancy (at age 38) and when I mentioned this astounding fact to a hospital nurse later, she said, "Oh, yes, well today we helped a woman deliver her 14th."

In the six months that I have been working with a medical organization my public health degree has catapaulted to a new degree of relevance. There are so many population level questions: questions of water and sanitation, the nature of epidemics and disease transmission, the possibility of gene mutations in vectors and in pathogens, how to assess behavior and how to extropolate from raw data the most effective line of inquiry.

It is not knowledge of treatment regimens that is needed to respond to these questions, but rather a global mindset that sees representation in symptomatic presentation, and opportunity in the OPD. What is required to answer these questions is the ability to step back from the details, squint, and see a pattern.

Transmission Between: Information and Pathogens

We think of vectors and pathogens particularly now because malaria is rising, accounting for more than 60% of all inpatient admissions at one hospital, and higher than 70% at another. And so we are asking ourselves, what is the reason? Is it at the level of household behavior (nets being used for garden covers and dresses instead of sleep-time barriers?)? Is it a matter of health-seeking behavior and access (who comes and can afford to come, who goes first to traditional healers so that when they do arrive they are so much more ill?)? Or is the problem complicated by more than this (insecticide or treatment drug resistance? environmental factors altering vector behavior?)?

So this is how the process happens: at one place someone remarks on a spike in illness and then the cranking chain of Asking Questions begins: first around the collective dinner table, then mentioned in a report, then picked up by some specialist, who may or may not then contact another specialist, and it is this collaboration that determines where it goes from there.

But what limits this process is specialization. A medic is usually not trained in epidemiology and so when cases of malnutrition are on the rise they may be able to chase the origin back to an outbreak of measles peaking 4-6 weeks ago, but as to where the epidemic goes from here, or where it came from and what transmission pathways are the most likely to peak again, this the medic probably does not know, nor have time to consider in the midst of individual treatment.

When we wish to answer the question why- in the midst of a global decline in the incidence of malaria - we are seeing a DRC-wide explosion in morbidity and mortality due to this disease, the question requires both a bird's eye view and also the collaboration of specialists, so that the medic noticing the peaks in cases speaks to the malaria specialist who calls in the entomologists and the epidemiologists and biostatisticians and all then bring their focused knowledge together.

But this collaboration is tricky. People forget to ask if someone else has already asked a certain question before. People forget to tell other people that they have. Humanitarian workers forget to talk to development workers, and vice versa. Both forget to speak to scientists. Politics and turf-wars get in the way of good sense and efficiency.

Which is why you need generalists, so that someone on the team is at least aware of the facts that are there to be aware of, and the resources available to each of the fields, and can argue for their sensible use.

Back to Center

It is both the irony and the saving grace of certain among the most beautiful places on earth that they are refuge to some of the most catastrophic of human affairs; ironic as the violence contrasts with the abundance of beauty, and lucky by way of the same contrast, that it is the division of these things that brings forth such a strong sense of injustice and empathy, and a desire to lesson the distance between the two extremes.

With the same centering impulse we must also pull in the extremes of specialism and generalism to intelligently ask, and answer, questions like: why are morbidity and mortality from malaria in DRC rising exponentially?

And why is it that in one of the most stunning countries on Earth, of those 600 children born in one little corner this past month nearly 120 die before they reach the age of 5?

It is not chance that dictates these life expectancies or disease patterns; it is the movement and decisions of human beings: decisions that we must all consider, and movements that we must all decide: will we step aside? Will we join?

Or will we bring the two corners together, as bedsheets are folded, and thus span the distance between specializations to neatly pack the questions and address the problems?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog, and in any of its associated articles, are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of any associated organizations or entities mentioned herein, unless otherwise mentioned.

Haiti, ki moun ou grangou? Today We Remember...

2012-01-12T06:11:00.004-05:00

A is for Absent

When I returned last January, the rubble and the trash and the mess were – as always – ubiquitous, but many of the most profound images of flattened stories and drunkenly-tilted shopping centers have condensed and crumbled into themselves. A few had been razed entirely - the church which split in half and was left with only an intact façade and a dusty alter is now in our memories alone; the image of a blue sky yawning so unexpectedly from the view at the doorway is just another thoroughfare for our spinning thoughts.

I should have been celebrating. Who would not be happy at the progress? Instead I was struck by the absence of these most tangible reminders.

When a colleague asked a few months ago how many people, exactly, died in the earthquake, he at first misunderstood me. “50,000?” he asked, appalled and silent. My heart broke at his face, imagining him imagining that. Fifty-thousand human beings, crushed to death.

But the original official number was nearly 300,000. A later report suggested that these numbers had been grossly exaggerated; that perhaps only 80-100,000 people had died.

Only.

As late as July last year I had friends who were seeing more skeletons pulled out of the remaining rubble every week. Eventually those who have not been found will simply remain; buried by nature.

In the streets of Port-au-Prince I often found myself looking around for reminders of those missing hundreds of thousands who died in the earthquake. But it is so hard to find them – they are not in the vibrant markets, nor the crammed tap-taps, nor the hours of sooty traffic jams.

The city is so populated – so overpopulated – with the living that there is no designated space for the dead. The mass graves and the memorial of 1,000 tiny black crosses are far away from our daily visuals – tucked in the barren hills outside of Port-au-Prince.

What is most noticeably absent to me now, two years later, are those sudden and sickening spaces that opened in the moments during and after the quake – those gaps of cracked concrete piercing the air above the rubble, those odd triangles that appeared between ceilings and filing cabinets or the cubby hole formed by one strong wall beneath four stories of weak ones. Pancakes over a bubble.

For those of us who were not here on the day of January 12, 2010, it was these dramatic visuals – the gaps where a few feet in either direction would have meant certain death - that brought home the enormity of the tragedy.

Who Wants To Be Reminded?

My colleague – new to this place – can now see only a dirty and bustling city around him. With all the gradual crumbling of those suspended forms, and the small progress that has been made to clear some collapsed buildings (the government claims that more than half of the rubble has been removed), there are so few visual images left to tell him – look! Look, here, for the graveyard that is all around you.

So part of me wishes them back. God help me. Wishes back these towering, leaning remnants of buildings caught between integrity and oblivion.

Of course, it is selfish; they are not wanted. People want to go back to their lives, forget about it. Who wants to see these things every day?

But their presence can explain in images what I cannot do justice to in words.

And I want my colleague to be struck speechless – as I was – by the significance of what he is walking through. I want him, and everyone coming to Haiti for the first time to continue the work of clearing and rebuilding, to really understand, like we did every day in those first months, the full significance of the tragedy that happened. Even while we were bustling to get services to the living, we were surrounded in those first few months by those sky-filled frames that edged the canvases of death. We were forced to remember, every moment of every day, those who were lost.

"We Are Still Here": Haiti's 99%

But of course what is more relevant now are those who remain: the 500,000 people still living in makeshift tent camps, or the more than half a million who have moved out (and to what? and to where? We have no idea if their absence is a good thing or just indicative of lesser evils).

January 12 2012 marks the second anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. Like many overwhelming tragedies, it is one that in a few short years we will no longer want to commemorate. Even this year I feel tired of reciting that date, and tired of the inclination to capitalize on a thing that many who live here would rather forget.

Even with the inconstant eye of the world rolled towards this half of Hispaniola for two years running, life for many continues to be little more, and sometimes less, than survival.

But this is not new. And it will not change soon. It is the sizzling in the wok of the unfair world.

What Needs to Change in 2012:

1) the implementation of development aid and investment that it is targeted, defined, streamlined and designed by, for and about the people receiving it.

2) the inadequate response of the international community to the (at best) questionable and (at worst) abusive role of the UN in Haiti. Absolute power corrupts - no one should be exempt from receiving a fair trial.

3) ongoing efforts to hold the Haitian government accountable to a constitutional and democratic process and transparency of the US government in its interests and role in Haitian economics and politics.

4) and finally, our attitude that these problems are entrenched, that no amount of aid will solve them, and that Haiti is somehow cursed. What is entrenched is a Western and Northern-centered aid model that vaccuum-packs paradigms and accepts gross inequality, even among staff of the same project. Why?

What is entrenched is a model that says one thing at the top ("investing in women is good business") and does something else at the bottom (non-comprehensive micro-finance programs that are too short in timeframes and neglect realities...who looks after the children? who plants the fields?)

Today as a New Beginning - why not?

All the articles about the anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti are pouring out today: where did the money go, how texting revolutionized the donation process, Haitian art since the earthquake, the expats who also died and the foundations in their name, the boy who got out of the rubble only to sink into cancer...the stories abound.

But what today's anniversary is really about is reminding us that the tragedy in Haiti was not the earthquake. The tragedy was the crumbling infrastructure and ongoing geo-political framework that leaves most work-a-day Haitians out of the picture.

Good people around the world are working to change this - truly, really change it - from the bottom up. Let us support that ancient Mayan prediction that 2012 is the end of the world; let it be the end of this world where we accept vast inequality between equal people, where we look on the planet as something to be run through and used up, rather than as an orchestra to be joined.

Haiti - ki moun ou grangou? It is a question we must ask about the entire world. If we love it, let us change it.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog, and in any of its associated articles, are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of any associated organizations or entities mentioned herein, unless otherwise mentioned.

An MSF Doctor in DRC: "To get to Lulimba..."

2012-01-09T13:31:00.000-05:00

"The hospital is situated on a low rise in lush grassland at the foot of Kivu's spare Mitumba mountain range. The beauty of the place belies the population's desperate healthcare needs. On my first day, I found a 14-month-old toddler in the paediatric ward who weighed 5kg. He is suffering from marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition with the typical pinched "old man's" face. He has to share a tattered bed with another sick child as there aren't enough cots. Sharing is dangerous as the malnourished child's immune system is unable to fight infections. Nurse Pierre and I are currently treating the TB, which likely underlies his malnutrition while starting a careful therapeutic feeding regime. Pierre, who has much experience with these cases, is optimistic."

Follow Chris Bird, a journalist-turned-MSF doctor in eastern DRC, as he writes about his work in rural Lulimba at The Guardian

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog, and in any of its associated articles, are exclusively those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of any associated organizations or entities mentioned herein, unless otherwise mentioned.

A New Year: Moving again!

2012-01-01T18:47:00.012-05:00

This is what usually happens when someone starts telling me about their blog:

Person: Hey! I have a blog! Go read it!

Me: Oh, yeah? Coool....

(Me, really thinking...:aaaggghhh...I think I am going to eviscerate like a sea cucumber*)

A sea cucumber, not eviscerated.

Maybe this is how you feel, too?

So Why Do I Keep Torturing You With THIS Blog?

Because:

for whatever weird, World-Order reason...

I am frequently in places where

I see things and
witness things and
hear about things

that are related

to what people elsewhere
do and buy,
and desire,
and to the change
that I believe they/we can effect,
if they/we try,

and so I feel
that I have an
obligation
to talk about this.

Possibility.
Suffering.
Hope.
The things that bring
Peace

Because,
it turns out that the regular news
that we watch
and magazines
that we read

generally

do not.

(they are static:
and who wants to mess with the
static(us) quo?)

Because
if we do not
talk about it,
and do something about it
I really believe - meaning no idealism -

that nobody else is going to.

Because,
we are the ones who are here.

So, hello.

Welcome.

Can we do something now?

A Lot of Times I Feel Like This

But Seeing As How It Is A New Year

I feel that it is time
to ignore that fact and
Keep Moving!

(Which is, I guess,
what we do anyway,
most of the time.)

So I am heading to Kivu.

Kivu Is

a region
of Eastern Congo
where many
Bad, Sad and Terrible
Things
have happened
and are
continuing
to happen.

(It is also the first name
of a really cool filmmaker
that you should check out)

Many experts on the region
consider it to be
in the throes
of the third world war.

I should admit that this scares me

Contrary, perhaps, to
what my friends and family,
and nice people at my father's church,
believe,

I am not very brave.

Yesterday, for example,
when a Dutchman in Amsterdam
(that's where I am)
started to explode a line
of red
firecrackers
in the middle of a crowded
street

I thought of Syria

And wanted to

Get
The
Hell
Out
Of
There.

Dude.

The Problem Is...

her...

and her...

and her....

When I think
about them,
and the things that are happening
to them,
I feel
like this...

And think that life,
is not very fair.

Although these days it feels as if I am about 86 and a half

the truth is that
I am not Very Old.

But I once had
a very cool
grandmother
who was, at that time,
rather
Up There
in Years
(though she did have
astonishing hair).

For some reason,
that has never been entirely clear,
she thought from Day 1 that I
was pretty much

The Bees' Knees.

And she told me this

Every
Single
Time
She
Could

After
a while
I started to think that I might
at least be related
to the phylum.

People and Situations Are Rather Complicated

But does that really
matter?

Since we have to just
start somewhere,
I think we should start

by believing in the beauty,
and limitless ability,
of our
deepest
potentialities.

It sounds complex.

But all it really means is that we choose
to not leave anyone, who needs someone,
alone.

It means that when we see someone
out in the storm
of life and suffering

We go and help them.

I Am No Heroine

and I am not very
sure of how to fix things.

and I do not know
the answers
to all of life's questions**

But it seems to me
that starting by believing
that we really
(really, really)
CAN

improve this world

is as good a place as any.

And for me this means that I must

go and witness
and testify
and try to do

What I can
Where I can
When I can

To see if
just maybe
we could build
a more beautiful World.

For her***...

and her....

and her...

and them, too...

And so that is why I am writing this blog

A strange and new
technology
that is really just
the modern way to say

Hello. Welcome.

Could we please,

go do something now?

"When we bear witness, when we become the situation — homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death — the right action arises by itself. We don’t have to worry about what to do. We don’t have to figure out solutions ahead of time. Peacemaking is the functioning of bearing witness. Once we listen with our entire body and mind, loving action arises.

Loving action is right action. It's as simple as giving a hand to someone who stumbles or picking up a child who has fallen on the floor. We take such direct, natural actions every day of our lives without considering them special.

And they're not special. Each is simply the best possible response to that situation in that moment."

—Bernie Glassman

Related reading
1) Books:

- Dancing in the Glory of Monsters by Jason Stearns
- King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild

2) Blogs:
- CongoSiasa by Jason Stearns

3) Posts from "Throwing Down the Water"
- Gender Equality In A Changing World
- On Complacency

Photo and drawing credits

1) sea cucumber anatomy: www.tolweb.org

All other drawings and photos are my own.

*definitely one of the coolest defense mechanisms of the animal kingdom. Also my standing internal reaction to things that disgust me; so, like, if you say something like, "My life goal before I am 30 is to make a million bucks," or, "Aren't all these African babies sooooo cuuuuuute???," this is what I am imagining doing...barfing my internal organs all over you.
** 42 seems like a good beginning
*** these are women from Haiti, not Congo, just to be clear... and they are also doing just fine in a lot of ways, also to be clear and to try to avoid the white angel savior stereotype thing...

Your Choices Matter, To People Here

2011-12-28T08:39:00.003-05:00

I am frequently asked by people what they can do to help Haiti, or Rwanda, or whichever country I am traveling to or living in at that time. For a long time I didn't know what to say; the problems are incredibly entrenched and complicated. The last thing people need is for you to show up unannounced and without a plan. The second to last thing they need is for you to show up announced and with a plan and without any experience. The first thing they think they need is money. Except sometimes the third to last thing they really need is money, because it creates dependence, because it eliminates initiative and because, when dumped into the jet stream of NGOs and development aid, it has a funny way of being absorbed like oil into sandstone, leaving only a thin slick and the memory of brief abundance behind.

The most effective projects I have seen are small, with personally invested leaders working directly with a community or with a few families. They:

1) are based on simple technologies (like radio or basic agricultural improvements like crop rotation or giving someone a sewing machine)

2) address a quantifiable problem that can be fixed with one intervention (like pulling teeth and repairing cataracts or rehydrating cholera patients on the edge of death)

3) minimize publicity (no t-shirts, no billboards announcing donors, no press releases, no promises of regular success stories - or at least the minimum of all of these) and maximize results

4) prioritize quality over quantity and are small, extremely targeted and in it for the long-term

5) are often run by people who feel accountable to a higher power and to a foundational set of values, and to the community at home who provided them with every penny of the money that they are using

6) are usually behind-the-scenes, thankless, under-paid and pretty much totally un-sexy.

If you are giving money: give it to the most direct source you can. Are you part of a church that supports a sister community in Guyana? Buy them a borehole. Eliminate the middle men. Do you have a neighbor whose aunt has built a school in Thailand? Sponsor the teacher fees; buy them uniforms. Take a year off from your teaching job (aka: you're qualified) and go teach them math. Did you just see a poster about a group selling jewelry and hand-made bags from Uganda next Sunday? Go and buy them. Get Christmas presents for your family. Keep the website address and pass it on to friends. Restructure your consuming.

Remember that your money can get sucked up like angel cake crumbs under a Hoover by the overhead structure of a large charity. If you are donating to an NGO, ask them to tell you what their "Overhead" percentage is. This is the money that goes towards running the machine that is their NGO, instead of towards the costs of programming that support people. 17% is too much. I want it under 10. And that's hard to find.

Do you not have any money? Look up the issues that affect that country and then look up the legislation in our country that affects those issues and lobby your representatives. Write letters. Call them.

I swear I grew up hearing this and thought it was a lot of BS - how does my letter to some person I don't even know matter at all? But I will never forget the Georgia state reps who looked so shocked to see our student group in graduate school lobbying for immigrant healthcare rights. One of them told us, "Nobody ever comes here to talk to us from the community. Especially not young people."

I think he would have supported almost anything we asked for, he was so happy just to see citizens engaging with their elected officials.

Buy FairTrade or Rainforest Alliance. It is small but it does make a difference. It is your consumer power. Coffee, tea, chocolate, honey, rice, sugar, bananas or other tropical fruits. Those are the common ones. And when you buy more directly from the supplier - either from your hometown farmer, or from the small-scale organization that embraces a value system and the idea of fair prices and actually knows their farmers and walks the land they farm, you are helping. A lot.

Write, Post, Blog, Tweet, Film, Speak. Anything. If you care about it enough you will convince other people to care about it, too. Have faith in your passion.

No High Heels, Please. The obvious note of caution: after the earthquake in Haiti (anniversary #2 is around the corner - Jan 12), Haiti received cargo ships full of donations in-kind. Including one infamous shipment of shoes that included loads of high heels. Which is nice. But not super useful. Please do not send in-kind donations (e.g. "things") unless there is a clear and agreed destination, and an analysis of cost that makes sense.

Developing countries need improved infrastructure, educational and economic opportunities, technological support for these opportunities, and highly targeted programs that address highly specific needs (e.g. creation of a supply chain for cheap sanitary pads that girls in the village can buy so they don't miss school and deal with more discrimination).

And they need the people who want to help them to listen to them and hear what it is they feel that they need, and not impose upon them their own solutions. Which is harder to do than it sounds.

We cannot rely on large-scale systems to take care of the people in our community who need help. The difference in today's world is that our 'community' is much larger than it used to be. And our responsibility, if we are people born to privilege, is much larger than it otherwise would be. And some extensions of our global community - e.g. the global South - need more support than others.

But the strength of accountability of people who know each other to each other is the same.

With your donations, aim to create the shortest chain possible between yourself and the other good people who are implementing and receiving. At best, you should be able to name them all.

If one first-world family adopted one third-world family and treated them like…family…imagine, after a generation, what a difference that would make to the entire world.

Everything is connected. Start anywhere. But make your choices count.

*Featured photos are from the Rebuild Globally workshop in Port-au-Prince. Visit www.rebuildglobally.org to see more photos of the sandals they are selling.

Photo credits: Emily Cavan

Manifesto: We Do, and Will, Occupy The World

2011-12-27T11:34:00.013-05:00

My cousin said, "They delayed the opening of Wall Street for half an hour."

"Wow", I said.

"And what, exactly, does that prove?" (cough, ahem), my step-dad said.

"What does it prove?" I said. It was a good question.

(I haven't even been following the news. Have been in the middle of DR Congo without access to any news for four months except an email from a friend and now this Christmas Eve conversation with my NY cousin and I turned around and said, my enthusiasm taking even me completely by surprise:)

"What does it prove?

It proves that individuals still have power.

It proves that the forgotten citizens of this country can break into this vacuum of corporate America that is sucking the soul from our country's ethical and moral and economic and community fabrics.

It proves that we - the little consumers, the brushed-aside opinions of human, and American, and democratic rights - still have a voice. An unschooled and embryonic voice, that has woken up.

It is something - democracy in action - that my generation has never experienced. We did not live through the 60s; it is new to us: this incredibly powerful force of the power of collective opinion.

It proves that if we want to change it: we can.

It proves that the chink in the siding of this Berlin Wall is that it is made of US; the 99%. It is a human construct, this wall. Made of each and every decision that each and every one of us makes every day.

It proves that there is no social contract without consent; that when the terms of the contract are being violated it is incumbent upon us to question the application for renewal. It proves that a government is granted power by its people.

And who are the people? We are, of course. And who should be setting the course of this country's onward voyage?

Not corporate America. Not corporations considered as individuals. Not consumer greed and unbounded capitalism.

But individual citizens. The people who ARE this country, and all of its potential, and all of its freedom, and the foundation of the beauty of its promised sanctuary."

Don't Talk About Politics!

Christmas Eve discussions are supposed to avoid things like politics and religion. But that is why families are given grown children: to push the envelopes. To help the family grow.

I consider this nation, and the world, as one big family. Right before dinner, in our's, we bowed our head to say grace. We joined hands, plugged in that shared electric circuit of the human chain, and my grandmother's voice spoke out:

"Dear Lord, thank you for bringing us safely together tonight. Thank you for all that you have done for us. We pray that we may follow your will in all that we do. We ask you to bless this food to our bodies, and to watch over and take care of all of our family members, wherever they are."

Wherever They Are

We flew over the lights of Cairo on the way home. I do not know why I knew it was Cairo - along the flight path and lit up like bio-dust, markers on a genome. I woke and searched for the flight map.

I was wrong actually. It was someplace south of Cairo, unidentified. But Egypt, certainly.

And all that is happening there. Birth of pharaohs. Pyramids. Women's revolution.

Wherever they are.

I am new to even hearing about this movement - this "Occupy" business. But from even my skeptical standpoint the ideas behind it have rung true to me as well. Perhaps I am just a perfectly positioned member of the target population. Perhaps, though, what we are seeing is one of those proverbial tipping points in history and I, much to my chagrin (not usually enthusiastic about jumping on bandwagons), am reading strong on the same meter that we are all registering.

To the detractors and skeptics

I am gainfully employed, and I believe I can say that I support the heart of this movement. There may also be plenty of unemployed middle/upper-class voices joining in the conversation, but this is no revolution of the spoiled masses.

Because it is a revolution; what I hear from the "Occupy" news is the same, in essence, of what I have been hearing the world over: that a revolution of the world order is needed, and is starting at all levels, among all frustrated peoples.

I would also bet money that those on either side of this argument - youthful idealists vs. Tea Partiers, if you will - have more in common than they'd like to think. I'd bet, in fact, that they are two ends of a long loop, circling around and within hand's reach of one another.

Here For the Duration

This is not something that will go away. The Occupy movement, and the Tea Party movement, and the Egyptian, Syrian, Tunisian, Bahraini and other uprisings of the Arab Spring and the as-yet-muffled but growing voices against the injustice of those living (squashed, stifled, oppressed) in developing nations, will not disappear.

Because such weighted inequality is unstable; if only in response to the laws of physics as we know them it will be righted, so that the greatest concentration flows to the least; that what is unbalanced will be re-centered; that nature, abhorring a vacuum, will fill it; that every action will elicit an equal, and opposite reaction; that an object in motion will continue in motion until it is acted upon by an external force.

We are that force. We are the reaction. We are the balancing redirection to fill the vacuum.

All the water has rushed out to sea. All the forces are gathering. We can rush to examine the glittered seabed revealed, or we can climb to the highest point and get ready to ride the tsunami wave that is coming, with the grace of seabirds, and the inherent determination of a nano particle: unseen and mysterious determinant of all of matter, and its destiny.

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come." ~ Victor Hugo

1) Telescoping of Reality: A Developing Problem

2) The Poverty With Which I Am Comfortable

2) Our Developing Choices: The Casey Anthony Trial

3) Even Crunchy People Win This War

4) Who Are We Developing in Development Aid?

The Brink of War and Wonder

2011-12-18T02:38:00.017-05:00

I have been living nearly entirely without the internet or international news since late September. As of two days ago, I re-entered the world of Access To.

For the most part we were very busy the last few months, and focused on such clear objectives - vaccination! treatment! - that the news that was the most relevant to us was merely about what related directly to reaching these objectives: disease burdens of the communities we were visiting, the accuracy (or in-) of population figures, the patterns of health-seeking behavior, the rainy season, the election results.

What, during this time, did I need to know of storms in the Phillipines? Arrests in Bahrain? This "Occupy" business on Wall Street? (and what is it, exactly, that is being occupied? what, exactly, is it being protested?

Frankly, two days has not been enough time to get that properly googled. I feel like my mother asking a young me what it meant to 'go out' with someone. Where do you go? she would say.).

It was, in fact, less odd to be so isolated from the world news than I expected it would be. We forgot, really, that we were meant to be concerned with events in other countries. Would think of it, occasionally, when we received on the same day, from two sources, the breaking news that Gaddafi had (either) been killed (!), or retaken Tripoli (!!). Something Big had happened. But what exactly that was took a good week to get straight and only by way of broken phone calls to families back in Europe and, all in all, after a week of being amused at our own ignorance of world events it really hardly seemed to matter any more what had actually happened, beyond satisfying our own curiosity.

Coming back to the news now, after months of not following it, is disconcerting. Not because, as I might have expected it to be, it is just the same old thing (the drugstore in your home town, holiday dinners, the hallways of your high school) but because, rather, it is somehow not.

Real tension seems to be higher. And it feels that everyone has the sense of being more implicated and more involved, if not, as I might wish, more accountable. It seems (though perhaps this is just my bias of pushing my own friends and families in this direction because of my career) as if more people are considering, suddenly, that all that is happening 'out' and 'over' there might be somehow relevant Here.

Because I consider myself to be a part (small) of this jet stream of voices that make up what we think of as the News, it has been particularly strange to be absent from it, present as neither receiver nor contributor.

To come back to it now I feel a slight sickness of guilt; that I have been somehow remiss. That I have let go, irresponsibly, of whatever hold I have had on that megaphone of amplification, whatever corner I have fought out on that shaky platform of the Voices that are Listened to, Sometimes...

But who is listening? Let me tell you that the people in the little villages where I have been living were not, by and large. They followed the search for Gaddafi each morning by radio. They tuned in to the progression of the election. They muttered and repeated rumors between themselves. They listened to football scores in September.

But otherwise they were going about their business of living without anyone paying very much attention to them at all and, frankly, without them paying very much attention to anybody else.

Not that they much could have, even if they wanted to. How would they get more news?

The short-wave radios they do not own? The cell phones that have no reception for weeks on end? The non-existent electricity to fire up the non-existent TV to reach however few and biased channels exist? Or how about from drivers and passengers on the buses that do not come because the roads are washed out completely and because no one wants to travel that direction and because sometimes there just are no roads? Because to travel on the river instead you would still need to pile hundreds into an overloaded hunk of rusty metal that breaks down or sinks more often than any sense of security would allow.

News is controlled. Sometimes quite specifically (by a country blocking all SMS messages during the elections, for example). Sometimes politically (self-censorship, bribing, threatening) or educationally through mass social pressure to be One Thing, and steer clear of all others.

And sometimes, indirectly, because the movement of people and goods and resources is also so controlled. Because if you neglect the infrastructure of a country and leave untold stretches of 10 km that take an hour to drive through in a 4x4 and create an investment environment that relies on cheap, and child, labor, and promote (or do nothing to stop) an environment that relies on the expendability of females to continue functioning (and not), then you also control what people know, or can know, or believe they have the right to know, or even wonder if perhaps it would be possible to one day know.

Having just spent four months in a country that has, during that same time, actually been quite a focus of the international news, I have found myself surprised once again at the discrepancy between what it feels like to be living in, present in and experiencing the on-the-ground-reality of a World Event, and the versions of that event that are propagated around the world by media and other groups responsible for shaping what those who are not involved directly think of as the Truth that happens.

In part, this discrepancy comes from the difference that if you are living in the country during the time, you must be one place only; whereas if you are merely reporting on that country you can gather and assimilate stories from many places and perspectives and, it is hoped, get to some truth slightly more objective.

And yet, what I saw in Haiti during the elections was that the same event, witnessed by journalists and then translated by media agencies from all different leanings, would be recast in whatever light suited them and (what can only be assumed to be) the money-making potential of the representation of that event among their respective audiences best.

What I saw in DRC was that at the same time that the government was trying to organize an election we were trying to organize a large-scale vaccination campaign, and though we were in physically and metaphorically different boats we were still on the same river, in the same villages, in the same sudden torrential downpours and window-deep in the same mud on roads that people in other places might call footpaths. And it was, for all of us, some damn hard work.

Which I never really saw mentioned in any of the articles criticizing the election process or calling into question the validity of the results.

That the country is on the brink of war (an opinion generally shared by the friends and family writing to our team, none of whom were actually in DRC) was true news to us. Is this what the Brink of War looks like? Having never been there as far as I know (counterfactual knowledge that it is), I cannot say.

But wouldn't it be good for the people living there to know about it? Or, perhaps, to be the ones telling the international community about it, rather than the other way around? Perhaps they are, and just weren't telling me. Though there was a nervousness among some that would have been serious anywhere, anytime.

On the way home we drove through mining camps, and through towns where men in military uniforms rose up like spectres in doorways and walked along the road in gun-toting groups, eyes following us as we passed. One man grinned and waved, a toddler grasping his other hand.

Safer, or not safer? I asked our Congolese colleague. How did this make people feel? Safer, he said. But which people? and from what threat? and for how long?

And does saf"er" have anything to do with "safe?"

These uniformed men squatting next to camp fires underneath the tall and thick-knuckled trees did not make me feel safe. When we got out to buy bread and grilled corn I was happy to get back in; did not even think of pulling out the camera, the way I had everywhere else.

A few hours later we passed a prison, or so we were told, a prison for those unlucky enough to be sentenced to death ("condamne..." condemned).

That is the prison, said the Congolese colleague (a chin thrust to a low wall and empty-looking barracks behind it). A moment later (here there was no chin movement, just eyes turning to the right and a sudden interruption of our conversation): The fields there, he said.

We looked at the fields. They were unremarkable. Thicket grass, brush.

That is where they do the killing, he tells us. Pragmatically.

French is sometimes more dramatic in its phrasing, when back translated to English. I think about this, and we pass a teenage boy in school uniform who kicks stones in the road as he walks, his eyes lowered, away from the fields.

The killing? my other colleague says.

But that isn't the question.

How? I ask, and he says, guns, and so I translate this for the one who asked about it with a silent pointer finger and upwards thumb in her direction. She looks at it, looks at me; I put my hand down.

We have reached, by chance at that moment, the space between the songs on the MP3 player. We hear only the sounds of us bumping along the road, bouncing into each other and the seats and the dashboard.

The next song comes on. It spreads into the silent gap. It talks about the inadequacy of the person singing it to make things better. About hopelessness, and hope. About the pain of the world.

I did not want to know that, my colleague says.

She does not entirely mean this. Or, does, but corrects herself, because she knows she needs to change the thing that she wants, to get the other thing that she wants: to help decrease the pain of the world. Increase hope. To make things better.

I did not know that, she repeats.

Yes. I say.

And so we see the bimodal graph of information.

Those with the least access to information are the ones left most implicated in the reality of the events themselves; those least implicated by personal involvement so often have the greatest access to the analysis of the events, and to that privileged standing of Being Informed, while being safely shuffled away to a place protected from the impact of the information, from the reality of the event.

I kept feeling so sure that it would be a phone call from a family member far, far away from our little town that would tell us who had won the elections, and what was happening as a result.

But the radio was fired up, the signal strong, the numbers being read out with near-agony inducing slowness and care. And then, with the word Katanga (where we lived, where we were sitting, where things would happen if they were going to happen, to us, to those around us), the signal cut.

And we were left to wonder, like blinded babies, what had happened. And to wait, like innocents, for someone to tell us, and to tell us, too, what it was meant to mean and how we were meant to respond and whether or not the country would now be, on the Brink of War.

In the meantime, we went to sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee. Because even on the brink, things like front porches, cups, coffee even, these things remain. With odd static and staying power; with strange loyalty.

Big Village

2011-12-14T10:11:00.016-05:00

This is no doubt neither the time nor the place to reflect on anything at all, having just arrived several hours ago back in the capital city of Katanga, after a two and a half day drive from Where We Were.

Which is why I feel the need to sit down and speak (write, reflect) already. Perhaps this is mere reaction, and should be filed away neatly; yet perhaps reaction is also the best thing to capture as soon as you can, to nail down some slip of the passing realities of transition.

We are no longer there - where we were - in the village that used to be (72 hours ago) the Big Village, in comparison to Where Else We Had Been.

After two and a half days driving we have passed many villages (appearing as they do out of the brush, thatch-roofed domes, popping up people waving hands); also rivers and streams (flooded, overflowing, us following a road that turned into river, indistinguishable, hooking up the cars more than once to haul another one out of the mud-bound sinkhole it had found, roads washed away by the edges, down the center: ravines and canals in the place of what is expected to be the road itself: the road to Lubumbashi). We crossed a pulsing river on an old metal ferry, guided by a tugboat and after that descended towards the south. Along this road (the first day) there were still rivers, lakes.

But as we drove the villages changed, from a land more flat to a land more hilly. From a land more sparse to that blossoming with trees; from a place where mango season has finally coughed out its last, to roads lined by trees heavy with reddening fruit.

We knew we were getting closer (to the city? To civilization? To a place of commerce, energy, connection...) when we saw the first electricity pole. Still hooked up only to a generator, still more than a day's drive away from the capital, but a pole! Electricity! At the same place there was a painted building, with red writing. At this, too, we exclaimed.

We stayed the first night at a priest's hotel. Or, rather, in the rooms they are preparing to one day be a hotel. Former military barracks, or so we understood. Tents popped up inside to keep mosquitoes away. Reed mattresses found. Sleeping bags. Milky water from a deep and spartan well.

The second day we passed to the other side, or so it felt.

There was first a mist-hung mountain, with a rocky road of 7km that wound about its edges. We waited at the bottom with men who ring the bell (one long piece of metal, suspended from a wooden frame) and listened for its sister to echo from the top, where other men also stand guard, waiting to hear the message of whether or not the cars could pass. They could not, the bell said. So we waited for the truck that was coming down our side, greeted them when they finally cantered from the hidden curve and then signaled our own debut. We climbed the rocky path, knocked our heads against the roof and wedged our feet into the floor and said at every moment, how beautiful! How beautiful! About the view. Green valleys and a spread of gorgeousness that from our height we could see like birds, imagining elephants below like ants. Primeval. Lion King Africa. All the kingdom: animal and vegetable and mineral...

At the top we met our brother convoy, traveling from and towards the opposite direction. There were jumps out of all the cars to slap the backs and shoulders of team members; grins and shouted greetings.

That is how it often goes around here; the only other vehicles we see belong to us and our organization. Otherwise a broken down truck, or a lumbering one topped with twenty people and covered in plastic sheeting. We see those sometimes. But normally there is little competition for the highways (highways!).

That was what was strange. Hitting the asphalt for the first time, only a few hours from the capital, and I felt my cheeks flush and my stomach gasp and my legs lift, weightless. Or so they felt. It was too smooth a ride, too straight a road, too oddly fast for me to adjust to in the quick space of time. I felt that we were in a spaceship and that my body was suddenly floating in the cab of the truck, so unassaulted as it was from the usual bumps and slams to which it has grown accustomed. It disturbed me. Made me ill inside, for some unexpected reason: thinking of all that asphalt, and paved roads, and sudden jumps in speed entail. Thinking about how we were transitioning back into something, and I didn't know what (even though I know) and I felt that even physically I was not ready.

The second night (last night) we stayed with Carmelite nuns. It is one of the best things about the Catholic church: that when you are far from anything at all, they are there. Coke and Catholic nuns, or priests. And with the idea of the church comes some idea of hospitality - that ultimate kindness of taking in strangers from the road (12 hours of driving, rainy season, the sun going down, no room at the inn...) and hosting them.

It was not the smoothest of conversations – us arriving with all the cars and people, all of the sudden, no announcement (how and to whom, anyway?), and saying, can we stay here? Please? We brought our own tents...will be gone by 6:00. No trouble at all.

But a solution was found. Desks in the classroom pushed aside, water from the well pumped into buckets, chlorinated water tossed over the latrine floor, and a bar of soap placed beside a plastic cup. We put up the tents, parked the cars in formation. Found a fancy restaurant with posters of Jesus, Riyanna, Brittany and Wayne Rooney and veiled women in front of Mecca, and sheafs from the Koran. All Served Here. Spicy sombe. Dry and crumbling ugali. Fish unrecognizable as such.

And 15 exhausted, full-bellied, happy people.

We sang a few chorused rounds of Christmas carols as we fell asleep. Voices piping up from the tented floor: Little Drummer Boy. Oh Holy Night. When a child is born. We tried to remember the lines to Good King Wencelus; couldn't; sang it anyway. I thought about how our voices would sound from outside, in the night quiet but for frogs croaking, and the smell of the pink wildflowers spread up the hillside, heads nodding between the blades of tall grasses.

I dreamt of climbing icy mountains: my eyes filled with the light, and the jagged sense of snow that had frozen and refrozen and could cut hands, or swallow legs to knees.

I dreamt of the blue cold box with the vaccines in the back of our truck: that it had popped open with all the bouncing and that one corner was bent back. It let out mountains, pillows, snowblowers of ice and flurries. It was connected to the sudden summit. Pandora. And though we were alone, in golden costume, a beautiful sorceress also climbed. She was unforgiving. I felt akin. When I turned (a full 360) I faced the summit. I was standing at an angle not 90, one that should otherwise have led to sudden death and tumbling. I felt all hot and cold at once: utterly singular, utterly lonely. Happy.

I saw the cold as what it was: a thing that could not hurt me.

I even knew that for all my flailing and scrambling through the fluffy nothingness of the snow and ice that went in and out of existence, even in the dream, that I did not need it: this thing that Would Not be Held. Refused.

Knew that I could climb it, still. Would reach it, still. Knew that the summit stretched towards a sky white and blinding and that in the blindness was a place that I knew; that knew me, too.

A home.

Announcements, and Return

2011-12-10T07:24:00.003-05:00

Finally it was announced!

Late afternoon and a sudden silence which was how I realized it was actually about to happen, in spite of all the previous false alarms.

The neighborhood oddly hushed for this time of day. Outside I saw them all clustered around the radio, under the grass-thatched patio, listening through the static.

Province by province, candidate by candidate, confusing series of numbers in French by confusing series of numbers...

I started to lose track. Until the signal cut, right before the Katanga results and everyone stood up and ran to find a better spot, in case that was the reason. Who has another radio?

All we had to do was wait.

The neighborhood exploded with cheering. A parade - hup, hup, hup! - poured down the road. No need to ask.

So our plans continue. Movement can begin again.

Still waiting...

2011-12-09T07:23:00.001-05:00

Morning rain and no real start. Waiting to see. The announcements delayed again, as we assumed they would be.

Some equation that dictates when this becomes more of a problem than just announcing, whether or not the answer is what half the population wants to hear, which by default it won't be.

Waiting, waiting: in the meantime do we vaccinate?

2011-12-07T07:21:00.001-05:00

Later morning and the teams have left and we are still waiting for the election results.

Some must have kept vigil last night, up until the half-way, witching hour, only to hear them say they would delay for another five hours, and then, at some point, decide it would be announced on the 8^th instead. Tomorrow.

So the teams went out as planned, though a slightly later start, and now we are calmer and fewer around the house, for which there is gratitude, to have some personal time, and also irritability, to have the boredom, in a country that is so poised, in a project that has been so busy so far.

And now we are all just waiting...

News Only For the Un-Affected

2011-12-05T07:03:00.004-05:00

I want to hear BBC.

Or France24

Because we are in the middle of it: the international news. Smack-dab in the middle and have no news other than what is happening in the street outside, or what we hear on the radio, or what little leaks into the exclamations of far-away parents and friends - 'Hear things are bad there!'

What things? we ask.

What there? What bad??

Perhaps I want BBC now, of all times, merely because I may be going back into it (that other world, of international news, of pundits, of reactions and reality TV shows) soon, and I feel the need to re-orient myself.

Or perhaps because the news of the world is now colliding with our news here: elections in Congo, results in the coming days and everyone (or perhaps not?) is focused on it and we don't even know anything. Sitting in the middle of it and can't get information. Classic weirdness. Same in Haiti. News only for those who are not affected, not for those in the middle of it and so we are even more like polar bears behind the glass: researchers watching, and forming conclusions, and the bears just going about their business: worried why everyone is staring at them.

But today is St. Nicholaus in Holland. A more important event for those among us than the election results which, so far are avoiding us, unlike the date: 5 December. Celebration! And although this town on the river is perhaps lacking in celebratory spirit, still the date is important to certain of those in our group, who are currently absent (out in the field but due home later today); which gives us a chance.

The doctor (not Dutch) suggests getting treats to put in shoes, writing a poem for them all, tucking that in there, too. For this is apparently how it is meant to happen, or we have been told.

Gingersnap cookies. A man with a long white beard who brings gifts for children. But it is completely different from Christmas. Christmas, says our Dutch friend, is about Jesus. With a glare. Of course.

We stand corrected.

So this is how we brought joy home. First took a walk outside, breathing fresh. Then gazed out in companionship at a lake that looked stormy, on a shore that was only windy, and calm.

Then we turned towards the shop, to complete our gifting expedition. And there, the exquisite pleasure of picking out tiny gifts: butterscotch candies, a cheap plastic mirror with a cheap paper photo, is it Holland? Switzerland? Japanese cherry blossom festival?, five marbles as a boy gift, a bottle of pink glycerine to soothe the feet, lollipops and packets of 8 biscuits with a creepy baby photo, stylized.

We counted out the franc amounts with the wrinkled grandmama; piles of 100 for each candies, adding the 300 here, the 250 there, calculating as we went, like sitting at the kitchen table after dinner and working through the homework with a patient relative. Old wooden countertop general store, her handing the squawking baby through the window to arms reaching from outside, from the light of the sunshine, where we, too, would shortly go. Surrounded by children, pockets weighed down by sweets, playing a role we do not even know, outside of that of Kindness, Consideration, Fun.

For my own birthday the team made a cake out of stroopwafels. Stuck a candle in the middle of the circle of circles. Bought me vanilla sugar powder and the last of the chocolate biscuits that are made in Lusaka (imagine traveling here from there, which is still next door, but a far door), that I so love, even though they look like dog treats.

For St. Nick we wrote a poem. About how far he had to come to find them, the Dutch among us, and how tired were his horses, and how rickety the boat that brought them here, down the Congo river. It was sweet, even to me. We got as much out of doing it - laughing at our terrible rhyming, at sneaking into rooms to leave the treats - as we hope they did out of receiving it.

In the midst of all the chaos, the scrambling early morning packing, the muddy clothes, the arguments and frustrations, yet still we enjoy this chance: to celebrate the gift of making much of something, and someone, merely for the external joy of it.

The Sounds That Make Up This Life

2011-11-30T07:01:00.002-05:00

Went around and tried to capture the sounds. Fill in the audio bits for the video.

Tried first to think, what are the sounds that make up this life?

The scrape of the toilet door against the cement; the way its metal shakes. The sound of a papyrus mat rattling when you move it. The metallic chink of the water filter lid on, off. The clug clug clug of jerrycans emptying. The dull thump of them bumping each other, how the sound is short when they are full and long when they are not. The gurgle of water from the tap into a bucket farther away than a ceramic sink would be.

The shift of charcoal at the base of a thin metal grill. The flash and quick sizzle of a match struck. The sputter of cheap candles as their flame hits water, gas, paraffin: material unknown. The shifting creak of the camping beds. The crack and smooth rip of opening an aluminum can for the first time. The loose plastic lid slip of the Nutella jar.

Cardboard boxes. Hard frozen ice packs – pop, pop, clank as they are thrown.

The chirp of bats from the rafters, the scuttle of the mice that live behind the toilet paper bin in the latrine: the scamper of their critter feet along the metal edge of the doorframe as you walk in, scare them, scare you.

The Names Are Beautiful

2011-11-28T07:31:00.000-05:00

Two weeks on the boat.

Heading first south along the Congo River, which here is known variously by its tributaries – the waters that pour in from elsewhere – or by the wide-spread basins that it forms, through which it travels as a deeper trench in the pan it must have forced and flooded and filled; in previous times.

The names are beautiful, of course (Kalombo, Kabindi, Inakibale. Buya-bwa-dalamba, Kadia, Mpungwe), and the distinctions between the nature of the waters (lake, canal, river, tributary, source) unclear to most but those who live on their shores. Or fish their flowing currents, or travel them frequently.

The river Lualaba is where we first descend, towards the south in the direction of Bukama. The second week we turn backwards (northwards, downriver, with the flow,), back through Lake Kisale, where we negotiate the vastness of a body of water that could be an ocean (from the shore, on stormy, waving, white-capped days at least).

In this place we follow the channel between the stakes (long papyrus stalks, bamboo reeds) stuck in the shallows of the mud on either side. This is how we find the river. We also see where the water changes, from picture-perfect stillness (and it is, in photos the clouds and the lake look the same...mirror images), to where it spins into a muddy surface scrim.

At least we think it is the river. On this wide, wide water, how would you know? Banks and shores spread out in the distance, barely see-able or know-able from the undersides of the clouds.

Fishermen in their canoes shout out to us, toss their arms in the direction we should go. Our captain doesn't listen. He is a non-listening captain. Captain Obama some call him, from his t-shirt only.

__

Five base camps and 18,000 children vaccinated. That means 18,000 syringes, too. 18,000 vaccination cards. Boxes of them inside of trunks of them, plus all the other supplies. 18,000 children means teams of up to twenty people at each site, ready to prepare the vaccines, register the names, direct the curious crowds, vaccinate, give each child a droplet of vitamin A, dip pinkies into dye to show the vaccination. It means men and women with megaphones, or simply voices when the megaphones don't come through, in canoes, in churches, strolling through villages...two to three days before. It means planning. And un-planning. It means making it up when you arrive, too. Going with it.

It means setting up and taking down eleven tents, camping cots, two water filters. And all the loading and unloading: days of hauling blue plastic insulated cold boxes from wooden boats and reed-choked banks into the relative shade of a grass-thatched room. Of corralling children to carry boxes of Plumpy Nut on their heads. Of monitoring the distribution so the littlest ones get the lightest boxes, so the life jackets go individually (though one could easily have carried five), so everyone can participate and feel a part of it.

Using children to load boats? The newest expat who joins us mid-week asks me, incredulous.

Today (Friday) it is 5:45am and we are meant to break down the camp, pay everyone, say no to taking the host's son back to school several villages away, distribute the vaccines to the teams, repack the ice packs, reload the boats and be on the river by 6:00am. By 8:00 we should be vaccinating. In another village. Another church. Everything set up and organized, calm and clear, hundreds of children through the line.

We are family, I say, adjusting the box on the closest child's head, watching him step carefully through the mud, judging from the wobble of his puffed out chest whether or not the load is too great. I am leaning forward without thinking about it, concentrating my neck muscles the same way he is concentrating his. Worried as I watch him, and the other five children I've just sent with similar loads, monitoring their progress. I answer the expat without thinking.

In my family children help, I say.

I have spoken without thinking. I think back, later, to what I have said, and find it good. Interesting. For now, though, I push past him to get the next item that needs to be carried through the potato fields, past the clusters of sugarcane, into the muddy shallows, where I will shortly descend, up to my knees and slipping on whatever is below; feeling my abdomen contract as I lift and swing to load whatever next needs loading. It is the most risky of weight-bearing maneuvers; that most graceful of dance. Dip, drop, swing, lift. The same way I'll swing my arm out to stop the children from getting too close to the pile of sharps boxes. And monitor the shove of the oldest ones, make sure the youngest ones are not shoved towards the crumbling bank of the riverside. Though of course they could swim. Play in it everyday.

But it is what we do: you help. I help. We get there together.

And I feel this, that we are family. At 5:45am, as I am unwrapping the cord that I had wrapped around trees to keep these same children at bay so that we could have five feet of air free, space to breathe, space to feel air against our skin, though still watched by hundreds of peeping eyes, chattering mouths, extended fingers towards us – look at that! At nothing but us sitting there, a thirty minute feet break.

We are family, broadly. And though I feel frequently annoyed by small things (by too much intimacy, by wanting privacy), I also feel frequent surges of protection, affection, love. Out here and exposed to the elements (weather only first among them), eating what there is to eat (ugali, fish, lengelenge, fried sweet potatoes) and plenty grateful for it each exhausted evening.

Family. Which is another way of saying, “We are in the same boat.” Which here is literally true, as well as figuratively, as well as metaphorically and spiritually.

Actually, though, there are two boats. So, really, we are in two boats. The first week we had to tie them together at one point because an engine broke, so then we were going at the same pace for a while, connected. But still two boats.

One we call The Fast Boat, which every time someone says it fills my head with images of a boat trying to put on lipstick and frilly short skirts. Absurdly small frilly skirts that would never fit a boat that size. (And how does a boat wear a skirt? And even if it does, what does that say about it, really?)

The other one we call Bateau Pole-Pole. Each hour on The Fast Boat gives you two to three on Bateau Pole-Pole. It really is pole-pole.

The first day back on the river I wanted to hum the theme to Gilligan's Island. Then I thought that would probably be considered bad luck, so I stop myself after a few bars. Still, there was something about our team that was in the same way colorful, adventurous, slightly absurd. Something in the way that we were heading out with what we thought we might need (Nutella and Nescafe prioritized at nearly the same level as the satellite radio backup batteries), to places we do not really know, both prepared with practical skills (we have two skippers and a wealth of medical knowledge) and utterly unprepared with practical skills (I have never learned how to weave a fishing net, or to spear a water-bound creature from the air, so that I, and others, can eat).

Two weeks on the boat. It sounds like the kind of adventure you would otherwise pay good money for. Safari. Adventure camp. And it is. Completely. Better than. Except that I am being asked if I would do it. Invited to do it.

And that is pretty much how I feel about the whole thing.

Grateful. Lucky. Calm. And small. Very small. And happy. And grateful. And lucky. And calm.

*On this trip I also had a video camera, and a still camera, and was asked to keep a journal, which I did, and then to share that material, which is currently being reviewed for its ability to convey...something? Or not convey something? All these lines, the envelopes to push, the lines to respect, no toes over...not sure of the criteria myself actually. Never am. Only grasping after beauty, truth, respect in ways that pretend those words mean the same thing everywhere...

This is why I have written so little about the trip on this blog. Propriety rights until we know more.

Right now it is assumed that all of this imagery and writing will be turned into something (commercial, website feature, promotional multimedia story of some kind or another), identity of said thing unknown and perhaps destined to remain only theoretical.

In the absence of that whole project going anywhere, I will share more of the 25 pages that I wrote. 25 pages!

When did I find the time?! Exhausted late-night scribbles in tents, forgetting feet hot and swollen in my need to try to get something – something of the awe, the difficulty, the beauty – on paper, or the moments of those end-day-sunset-on-the-river trips back to the base camp, leaning into my life jacket pillow precariously wedged against the roof pole of the boat, all the rest of the team asleep among the vaccine carriers like the Sleeping Beauty palace scene; fairy dust sprinkled and we all descend, collapse into the oblivion of dreaming.

Except this was real. Is real.

Until then...

Fairy Tales and Rain

2011-11-22T11:05:00.003-05:00

Rain. Rain. I think we actually had forgotten. It started around 3:00, I think, after the Something noise that was so loud today I cannot even remember it's nature, something recorded, a man's voice or was it a machine noise? With each new noise I think - my slumbered brain - no this, that, this is the most annoying noise so far.

But after that the rain began. So strongly that it terrified, and woke, and I listened to it pounding the tin roof and thought of all the phrases of romance - rain on a tin roof - and how they didn't know, the way of violence in it, too, how even as I lay there saying, you do not need to be afraid, this is not something of which to be afraid. Convince. Convince. Yet it terrified.

How the sound of screaming, or the sound of gunfire/crashing/consistent pounding of an energy directed in packets of such force, that no matter the source: this is the noise that terrifies. Upsets. The thunder I found ok. It made me part of it. Rumbling the entire house, shaking my bed, myself, we'll go down together.

I thought about the advantages of grass and reeds. And hoped that was true. Thought about the hill in Swaziland and how the rain on that reed roof fell padded, and muffled, comforting, and you dry underneath and sure of it. How grass absorbed the noise and took it in, the violence, and made it like the crash of waves on sand, all that force met without resistance, bending, opening, and so losing its very nature, comforted and convinced, a mother with a crying baby who redirects the energy and transforms. That is the difference. The tin resists. It holds together, hits back, will not submit or change. And so it is the anger implicit in the interaction that terrifies. How do I trust a protection (tin roof) that cannot understand that moving with the wind is how you are saved? That is the difference. I want angels of subtlety, grace. The wisdom to sometimes lean in the direction of the fall.

That the earthquakes continue. Little earthquakes all the time. Little tremors and trembling and even through the day I felt it. A moment's thought of dizziness; change of inner ear; measurements? Then laying down at night and a moment calm and then a tremor and watching the mosquito net wave and wobble like the papyrus mat shelf, swinging from the rafters, as if a stiff breeze had just picked up and gusted and me laying there, holding my breath to make sure it wasn't just me influencing these things.

As if breath was all that mattered.

Does it?

Not strong ones. Or that's what you would say, in lieu of thinking about the fact of the earth itself moving, of what it takes, deep down so many meters to shift the roots of grasses, to wave and wobble the things that are suspended, from beneath them. How about that.

How about it.

Like nighttime on a ship and you there hoping it stays only that way, a rhythm for sleeping, not an explosion for waking. Powdered air. That peculiar nausea when your head is hit so hard. These remembered thoughts from Haiti. My thoughts. Others' memories. All absorbed by staring hard enough at what a building looks like After.

Images I almost forget. The water pot shifts while Mama Cele is away at the market on a Sunday and when it does the coals send out pops of ash, burning, embers, except they appear to simply explode in air, not derived from the coals themselves or the brasero where the coals are piled but just a popping sound and magically the air around the leaning pot is filled with brilliant sparks that disappear as soon as they exist, as I stand watching with my coffee spoon paused against the tin cup and as the person next to me piles rice on his plate, unaware that something out of Cinderella is taking place right in front of our eyes. Cinderella.

I think of fairy tales a lot here. It is unclear why. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Thoughts of myth come alive. Striking colors. A place where fires are used again for cooking, and small huts huddle in forests, puffing smoke. A place with baby animals; waddling ducks.

So this is how I wonder right then - watching these sparks - why in our fairy tales we have turned pumpkins magical and so mice and talking pigs and cats and dogs and why in all this anthropomorphism we have never tapped the cooking pot with our wand of storytelling and asked it, too, to talk. I am caught all of a sudden watching magic in front of my eyes, and not understanding it, and thinking about Fantasia and broomsticks, and how we call it Magic just because the air is filled suddenly with something that appears without visual derivative. And what of wind? Why have we let that go? Where is It in our fairy tales?

In Innocence Love; In Pain the Edge of Grace

2011-11-09T11:19:00.001-05:00

Oh my god my heart just broke in half, just broke in half like that, out there underneath the mango tree. Was it the change in humidity? The rolling hormones that are peaking or troughing this week? Was it just the first taste of hot coffee the morning after drinking a bit of gin after weeks of sobriety? Was it the simple fact that I had just emptied my bladder and so there was a space below and my heart, mistaking its role, stepping in to fill the absence, just sank?

It broke in half. Talking to Marieta, who is the one I thought of as a friend, unreasonably and automatically, across the boundaries of her asking for a job and me there representing jobs, that evening these several weeks past. And this time I just thought, but what are you doing here? Here in this small village? And is this the life that will make you happy? And who among us could say one way or the other? And what does it have to do with me? Is my heart breaking for the lack, or for the fullness of your life? Or mine, comparatively? I could not say.

Or merely because I do not want between us these usual differences and separations, these economies of scale, these default differences in fate, I do not want them. I want her to have everything that I have. I want to see her children, too, having more than they need, having abundance and excess. I am tired of the injustice, even of the scale of difference, and here it seems to speak so loudly. A woman smart and ready, and where is she going? And yet not depressed, and not depressive, and what, what, what would make her happy and do I perhaps have absolutely nothing to do with it, regardless of the power of economy?

This is not a hand-out. That is the difference. You find those for whom it is some form of charity, and though I do not think I think that way, with her the fact of it not being charity is so raw. Charity. Ha. A woman far smarter than me, this privileged one. And plus, and more, how it gets so old these days, that we stand on soap boxes and name them Separate: Foreigner: National. How you are thinking but this, this is ridiculous, it is absurdity. Thinking that in general. And then you meet someone like this person whom you feel immediately is a friend, the natural kind, not forced. A true Friend. Girls together. So you think, you I so want to see expand, and grow, and be happy. Not less or more than others, only there it is. The way we know each other and hearts sing.

And to hear her news. Of the next step in career, of the relationship gossip, of the way your children only eat mashed bananas and sweet potatoes from the jar, of how the eldest came home crying from a hard day at school and was soothed in between your work at the table and the sound of your husband cooking spaghetti sauce in the kitchen and how you are considering a weekend in the mountains and just tried a recipe that you found in a box your mother left you and how you never thought you had any artistic talent but the instructor says she has never seen a tree drawn like that and have you ever considered pursuing a career, perhaps, as someone who draws trees?

And also the latest funny story from your day at work and the way you've been trying to learn to grow vegetables in your garden, and how you are worried about what it means that your father's hands have started to shake sometimes and how when you woke up this morning you thought you were on a ship, still dreaming, and going somewhere good and then even though the morning light coming through the window, and the hand of your husband on your stomach should have been disappointments, somehow, compared to that mythical ship, still how when the baby moved inside you felt that it was going to be ok, even though your father's hands were worse this time - did you mention? - and how somehow wherever you were going it would be good, and maybe true, whatever truths there were, and you were fine with this. This morning light. This way your life is. And here I would love you even more, the way our grandmother's do, to see that particular miracle of watching a young woman grow beautiful; a beautiful person grow wise.

And how I wish to see this, that between us could be this, so normal, and all these conversations. And the expansion and inclusion of one beautiful life into another. And watching us grow old together, women friends, and celebrating what is harmful, beautiful and sad, and knowing that we were together and would be kind no matter what. And that in innocence we would find love and in pain the edge of grace, and everything, everything, everything else. That we may live.

"That we may be serious. Deeply serious. Face to face. The closest we may come to innocence."

-Michael Leunig

Only Consequences, Or So They Say

2011-11-07T11:24:00.002-05:00

The nurse says she watched them unloading all the trucks yesterday. The dusty (very dusty, how do you even capture scales?), covered trucks and all the boxes battered from travel but still intact and full of things logistical and the stacks of plastic buckets, cups and piles of nutritional supplements. And she felt very happy, proud, to be sitting on a porch in this village, a hard five days drive from the capital, and being part of it - this organization, this project, this reality - and watching all these practical things unloaded by sweating, and rope armed, and enthusiastic men. For whom we mean jobs, too.

Mariette says people are very happy. Very happy that we are here. It is not just those we hire who are being helped, but all the market ladies and the vendors, all the small storekeepers and the man who cuts the trees into planks and 2x4's, and the young men who have driven motorcycles and also the ladies who carry water from the pump to us several times a day. It is everyone, she says, and what she means is the Economy. Nothing about us giving healthcare or medicines or working in the hospital. Not that the people would not be grateful when children were saved. But what do people need? Economic buying power. Independence. The ability to prioritize and make their own choices. The expansion of limited resources, and the idea of what the future might hold.

One mother changed religion. Got religion, lost it. All at once. She had been part of a 'resistant' church. I do not know what this entails, of what beliefs the opinions are derived, to which God prayers are sent, or appeals for protection. Only that in this work it is called this way, "a pocket of resistance," and for reasons unclear it means the people of these churches will not vaccinate their children or themselves, though treatment of an illness is accepted. Not Scientologists, or those other edgy religions we think of in the US, who go so far as to question the medicalized premise of our times. And here, too, nobody really understands, or even takes a moment to ask the question of whether or not they might be right. Right? It is a thing already known. Everything couched in medicalese and a worldview just as biased as anyone's. "Resistant" only a label as seen from one perspective, but who would admit that? The trouble with vaccines the same as with dictatorship, regardless of beliefs in worth or value; herd immunity brooks no dispute. s

But here this mother came, a child nearly dying, and received the treatment and the child is better now. While she was there the staff - not ours - went on about the example she, the mama, (it is always 'she,' when it comes to this blaming) had set. She herself had not been vaccinated, nor her children, and both of them were ill with measles and the one nearly dead (or was this the mother where the one was already dead? The sibling stories abound. Have two, keep one...when lucky) and didn't that just go to show?

Well it didn't, really, statistically speaking. Not half of those sick children had been vaccinated, "resistant" parents or not, but for whatever reason the reasoning worked, and so the mama dropped her church and became a Catholic. Last week.

We wonder if you can become a Catholic just like that, just overnight? Catholicism, of all the religions, seems like something that would take more time, and suffering, to enter into.

But these are just a few of them.

The consequences to our presence that are not written into any plan, or exploration. Not part of objectives. Not part of analyses. That I, at least, get caught up in, thinking of.

And whether ever labelled as good or bad, they simply bear consideration. An objective of Do No Harm, above all else, and so you must ask the questions: what is harm? And its opposite? What does it mean to "Do?, in fact" And our responsibilities and their boundaries? What is it that we are doing, directly, and what is it that what we are doing is doing, behind the gates or fences, around the corners from what we see?

Who do we leave here when we go?

An Active Congregation

2011-11-03T08:34:00.002-05:00

On the windowsill I will lay shells. One I gathered, a fractal curve, the other half a bivalve handed over by a child participating in the game of lean down and pick up. She got the theme. I will also place the leaves and flowers of the frangipani whose sap, I've only just learned, is terrible for the eyes; you must wash your hands strongly (Strongly!) Dripping white like milk...milk of the frangipani. It should be good for something, with a name like that.

The flowers smell like lemonade. One of my favorite flower scents. Close to the flowers of the magnolia, another scent I love, but only up close. From far away it overwhelms, as if of two natures, the one for intimacy, the one for exclusion.

Mapulele. Flowers.

Church a choice in the morning. When a Catholic nun you love is ill, it seems appropriate to go, to offer presence in the way that she would also choose. So went we did. Stained glass windows, a white-washed space of warehouse size. Tin roofs that must have cost a fortune. The choir and the altar boys in uniform, or matching outfits. The choir with their calabashes and a man who hit a zylophone for rhythm and for music. Two ladies dancing in the aisle to motivate the crowd. A big one. A white priest - Polish, we are told - in green cassock. Hard to know what thoughts to think. Everything in the language of Kiluba, and that makes sense.

An active congregation. A sub-priest - what are they called? - Congolese, and so is everyone else. Dancing round the altar, though the word does not make sense. A shuffling line rhythm of the altar boys: a one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, turn, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, turn: alternating angles: beautiful.

Really beautiful. That rhythm must be written elsewhere for the nature of how much it appeals. Clapping on the half beats. Something I would not hear and even with my years of dancing fight still, internal rhythm. Cannot quite bring my hands together fast enough each time. Clapping, swaying, but a subdued crowd still. You say 'singing!' and 'dancing!' and it sounds like Baptist, but this wasn't. Incense, proper, bells. A high pitched ai yai yaiiiiiiiiiiii held long, after each ring of that tradition. Strange for me, but why should it be so? A cry to heaven, to the heavens. We've done this for the ages over, past and onward. Oh, God, hear me.

The offering the best part. I never like the parading forward with the money but afterwards the best part, another parade, but this with baskets of food: cassava in all its fresh and soaked and pounded, floured forms. Now that was lovely.

A parade of food and singing, swaying, must also be a rhythm written basic for the way it felt; a sudden relief and sense of abundance, even though I was not hungry, even though it was not going to be given to my own body for its nourishment. Still, with the music, with the food, with the feeling of abundance we could all breathe in and sigh out, and breathe easier on the inhale.

A part of the community for the moment, and this is also good. To come where people go when they are not with you. To be reminded of your place. To be the worst dressed person in a crowd of hundreds.

To all be equal before eyes that you believe in sometimes, sometimes not, but whom the rest do and so you must acknowledge the power here. Which is why, I guess, the tears spring outwards at the offering. The concentration of intention, the power of desire, the fact that all are praying and all are asking and all are needing and in this triangle is a center of hope, and what we share. Something as fundamental as an empty stomach. As graceful and arcing as the pouring out of sound from throats that must say something: the making of a joyful noise.

With mangoes for dessert. And spaghetti as the ultimate surprise.

2011-10-31T09:52:00.001-05:00

On the walk yesterday morning I went to the river, to the lake shore, and found a full five minutes slightly hidden by the reeds, smelling like maple syrup, of all things. Pale greens. Fluttering of a small bird from reed clump to reed clump, their variable attractions indistinguishable to me. New light on water. Old light. The hand-dug canoes – called pirogues in French but the word feels better anyway, feels necessary to name this floating creation differently from the image of the Land's End fisherman – black dashes on the receding foreground.

By the river the women bathed, or carried laundry, or filled the plastic jerrycans with water neither saline nor sweet. From the reeds this far back, all that could be seen of them were clusters of forearms and swaying heads that rose above the tips of the green curtain, the necks and outlines of their bodies blurred by the embrace of a dawn sun.

Eventually found; it is the way. New bud girls, the chattering flock age, who skipped like a crush was close but did not hush the same way. Courage in gender alike. And a few small ones from the neighborhood who knew my name and called it with surprising accuracy, the middle part so usually lost in translation but someone here had got it right; and the others listened.

I am in love. With a white-washed room bare but for a camping cot and desk and chair. A mat of reeds cut into strips, the one for a hammock shelf suspended from the rafters, the other for sticks to frame the mosquito net. And two mis-matched fabric curtains, yellow and a green. And a single backpack suitcase that serves as well for storage.

With half buckets to shower every two days, or even each if you so desire, and with the bar of soap that smells like laundry.

With the same six cups and plates. And metal a delight.

With concrete floors called luxury.

With mangos for dessert. And spaghetti noodles as the ultimate surprise.

With all that is made re-fabricated and re-named, re-used and re-cycled, until by all agreements it returns to bits and pieces, and to its smallest divisible unit.

It is so much enough. How can I otherwise explain?

Extra, even.

All needs assuaged. And hope left room to grow, expand and breathe.

But the knowledge that we could have more is of course a pillow for anxiety: to muffle and to hush.

And still. Yet. Sometimes you need a holding hand to lean over the edge that very first time and feel that even you, small one...could jump.

It is not so far as you imagined.

How letting go you find yourself embraced by something greater; a chorus of agreement; a jet-stream of truth; that pulsing life within you and without.

All that you ever set out by the light of day to find, one pilgrim on the dusty path of groundless hope. The sun. The light. The shortness between the day and night and how darkness can no longer be named the enemy, because you are in it together, anyway, and cannot separate what frightens from what builds. A strange encounter. Surprising friend.

How you never knew you could reach the limit and then look over and see that the edge of the world was yet the beginning of another; how endless is your capacity: for love, for hope, for reaching past yourself.

For lifting up again, and wondering...

It must be this that they call faith?

At the Morning's Light

2011-10-27T23:17:00.001-05:00

The things I thought were this: that many siblings give you a stable base, give the pack a fighting chance, or the parents multiple hopes. That even with the greatest preparation and investment we send our children out to the world with so very little: a small hand-dug canoe, a daypack, the knowledge of another dawn, if they are lucky, the memory of the once-security of home like a quick dispersed fade slipping from behind them; illuminated trails of micro-organisms, who flash just once and strong. A beacon. A reminder. And then the dark.

Speaking of micro-organisms, one was with me for the weekend, sending me fleeing down the yard to the back corner pit toilet, every ten minutes from 3:00am to 8:00. Finding me asleep on my arms at the table in the yard, underneath the half moon and the mango tree, snatching shut eye between the cramps that sent me gasping and would wake me again later in the day, when it was the crying noise I made involuntarily that pulled me out of sleep, as much as the pain itself.

Another child died at the hospital. It was the one I was afraid had died the day before, of the two. The one that came in from an hour away and whom we went to visit after his arrival. Skin peeling everywhere, stomach distended like a balloon, the idea of breathing so impossible that he could not even cry when our doctor lifted him – could only just gasp like a fish out of water. Kind mother and father; both there at the hospital. They walked home with the body, at the morning's first light. Before we saw them.

You do begin to lose track. Was that number five, or six? Ten, twelve? Who is counting? Who is counted? And to see how people do. And why, when you rush about to save a life there is a hesitancy and confusion, at best, a refusal to participate, otherwise. A scraping hard reality. A heartbreak and clarity all at once. Squeezed; released. Pain, and glory, and a pathway through.

Must opposites always be the same?

Love. And Life.

Suffering.

Hope.

Companionship in solitude. Solace.

Here together.

If One of the Mamas

2011-10-26T08:53:00.002-05:00

If one of the mamas can come with the grasses that grow by the lake, we will then feed the rabbits who nibble at weeds in the yard. If one of the mamas could bring us the jerrycans full, we will pour them into our buckets for showers and drinking. We will sustain our bodies.

You can hear when the container is almost full by the way the sound echoes; it starts out a deep resonance and moves upward with the level of the water, until you know it is almost to the ledge – not by looking but by hearing. Why? Things we think of but do not think of. Back of our minds.

If someone could go to the market and buy our padlocks we will label them ONE and TWO and close the back storage room, and insert a small reed between the holes to shorten the gap, though the metal should provide security and in one sense does, it is the reed that pulls the leverage out, and closes the door.

If someone could bring us the vegetables that grow here. We see the leaves of manioc and eat them, twice a day, with relish, but hear of more. If someone could find us the small purple eggplants, the rumple-skinned tomatoes, the spring onions that appear on tables by the pharmacy on odd and sundry days, we will welcome them.

If one of the mamas could find the baby that cries all night and help or stop it. If one of the mamas could see about the noise that it is making, that we hear as part of a scrim of noises, then we will fall into a deeper sleep and may or may not know why, or think to thank her, or to consider her effort at the shushing, or the feeding, or the unknown dosages of comfort.

If one of the mamas could light the fire – we will need a fire – and stand by it with a metal plate or lid to wave the flames that catch, and help them grow. If one could pile up the charcoal brackets in such a way to find the perfect pattern, so that the flames will smolder well into the night. If someone could place onto the coals a pot of water to warm and to boil and then to pour it to the thermos. We will sustain our warmth.

If one of the mamas could walk to the lake with our clothing on top of her head, could lean down with the OMO and stand up with the clean and replace what was soiled with new. If one of the mamas could gather the reeds that grow by the lake and gather the mangos that crash through the trees, and gather the sombe from manioc fields and then bring them all to us.

If one could go by the graveyards.

If one could carry the mango stick and walk down the road, so that from behind the wall it appears that she carries giants that reach to the treetops; if one of the mamas.

Could sweep out the rat shit that gathers in corners in all of the rooms where we live and do not. If one could pour water and lean over sideways and straight-kneed and wash, with a cloth and two hands, the floors that we walk on with shoes that cover the lanes, and the toilets alike; if one of the mamas.

Could skip up the steps with the child inside and tell us the story of three. If one of the mamas could answer three months and the papas could hear that she said she is six, instead of the opposite, an equal exchange for those who know not, for who could be three with that belly?

Elephants Come Down to the Water

2011-10-25T14:35:00.002-05:00

October 13, 2011

We thought we heard a helicopter.

It took only 5-10 seconds before I moved - a helicopter?? incredulous - and walked outside to realize it was the boat motor we had left on shore, echoing out across the water in a strange and unexpected way. But imagine unexpected, to see an aircraft there.

Made me think of Vietnam, and war, which was the only reason I could justify, or think to expect, though strange.

Not even Capitalism, out this far.

Elephants come there. Hundreds is what the chief tells us, swinging a long arm towards the flat laying sugarcane, swamp land, outwards after the village. The village is organized and lined up, with houses made of papyrus screens wrapped around sticks dug in, and tied over frames at the top for roofs, some of them lined with plastic sheets, some of them not.

76 burned down in September. We assume it must have been from one of the fires they set to clear the land, keep away the animals, from the wind changing or the calculations going awry. Calculations unclear at any rate - are there any? And though it was the middle of the night, no one was killed, or burned. Something that, without explanation, appears to be a miracle. One of the many things like that.

Once, one of the elephants came down to the water. He wandered through the houses, while the people were sleeping (I imagine a full moon, the breathing silence of repose and crickets), then got confused and ran amok among the canoes - topsy turvy - and then back through the villages, where people had stumbled out of their houses (blinking eyes adjusting to the light) and saw him and were terrified. Not much protection, these houses, to a rampaging elephant. Once he had come the others followed, too, to see the new land, the new landscape. And so the people were afraid, for a while. But now, there seems to be peace. It seems that it has been a long time since this Once. But what is a long, or a short, or a past, or a more recent time is not, in these stories, immediately clear.

Where would the Story be, otherwise?

Blue eyes on this one. Straight hair in the corner. And the one girl there, willowing tall above the rest with that pretty set of the head forward, down pointed chin, dark bright eyes and skin. Rwandan? I only think of it in the back of my head first and it takes a while to come to the front and be properly recorded. That is the way of these perceptions, as your mind is engaged with the immediate foreground, and the rest of it free to wander through the patterns as an artist, sculptor, contractor picking out pieces that fit, interior design, and placing them into the forms that we call beautiful, or the colors and textures that we believe match best.

So this village has known visitors. Genetic diversity widespread among the age groups. A funny thing to note like that, stepping out into the canoe alongside our flat skiff, to get onto the shore, and the first thing you see is difference - this face among the rest - and think, ah, what of these others who have passed through, and left reminders? And how passing like that takes time - doesn't it? - to leave such a mark over these generations. And so in our background mind - our wandering mind - we start to fill them in, these ghost white people, or Ecuadorians (why this thought?) or some slight man from Asia. And only later do I think, wait, were they actually men? Would they have to be? The answer comes too packaged: they must be, leaving the children here! The thinking: That is How It Works.

But reality is strange permission. And truthfully, we do not know. Stories come out slowly. A week in town before we saw the Polish priest and only then did we realize the children had been less afraid, and so there is your proxy measure, but who would think it, who would know? We must re-learn the clues, and where they live, and what they wear.

It is a river village. Seeps into sight as we round a curve and you can't help but remember the novel images of Livingstone and Stanley. Not that there are heads on stakes. Aibo! What a thing to think, or say. This is not Africa like that.

Africa, and all of its uses for all of the people of the world, and here is one. The annals of the 'heart of darkness' permeating the reality of the experience as we live it. A strange overlap of which creates which in the first place.

We are skirting a thin slip of the Congo River, early in its genesis, and we motor through thickets of sugar cane, past little clearings where two or three families have cut it down and roped it together, to make a habitation out here, closer to the fish that they seine with nets that they weave. Little four-finger-sized fish, drying on mats. Long-eeled bottom feeders, wide-mouths, blackened on grills.

Of the places we are welcomed: of the living rooms, dirt yards (Swept: there is this difference), health clinic receptions, bamboo lean-tos, covered shaded spots now named as the Resting Place. Of these we speak.

Of the hand-dug canoes (where are the trees for these canoes?) lined up along the break in the reeds. Of the affirmation conversation and the noises that we make around the world to say: "Yes, continue. I hear you": that slow rise of the throat noise here: held low and questioned up: that ahing sound.

Of all the sounds like that. And how they blend.

So that the 'oh-ohs!' of Haiti are carried back to Africa in me from America, but how they do not seem to work that way - sliding out to the Caribbean but unable to back-translate - so that in spite of my oh, oh, oh! the boat still crashes into the island, dead slam! And we plough into each other and then straighten out hands and bags, and then the motor cuts and sputters. And nobody says it but everybody thinks it, in whatever language, the noise that means: oops.

And then I get the giggles.

Listening to the soundtrack of a useless motor pull (plop), scrape of the bucket against the bottom to bail the water (slosh), useless motor pull (plop), bucket scrape (slosh), and again, and again.

And I just can't help it. I bury my lips into my palms to try to hide the fact that within a minute I really cannot hide it any longer and am actually laughing completely, shoulders shaking, wiping tears from my eyes, but forever trying to hide it in deference to the realization that apparently not everyone on the trip thinks that this particular set of circumstances is, by nature, pretty hilarious, at least for this moment we are in.

That of all the 50 meters wide river expanse we could have gone through we headed straight to this dinky little patch of weeds. That though the captain could not see a thing of where he was going, he did not think to mention it as a Problem. That the nurse thinks this is a good time to tell a story about crocodiles, and did he mention hippos? That the way the captain starts to repair the leak is by poking the hole with the tip of his knife, which later does make sense, but at the time just sends me straight off the ledge of humor, into peals of laughter.

Of how the teeth click carries farther, and though it varies from cluck to push and pull (that vacuum sound), of how a sucked in mouth means angry, disapproval and displeasure.

Of yet of how women, everywhere, giggle into their hands when humor - even sadness - carries over.

The Call to Sunlight Hope, or Darkness

2011-10-25T07:02:00.002-05:00

October 10, 2011

On the ground beneath the mango tree are what look like small droplets of water in the sand. They are not, however. They belong to the toil of some insect - an ant or a termite. They are little mounds of balled up dirt surrounding small holes. Through their scattered domiciles snake sliding paths that we might call reptilian, if we knew. Or the trails of a stick drug by a child, if we didn't.

We bought papyrus mats, at 50 cents a pop. They line our floors and one has been placed underneath the table underneath the mango tree, which is a large and graceful one and must have been among the reasons for the compound where we live to have been so placed. On our second visit, or maybe third, a boy knocked down fruits with the mango stick, expertly hooking their stems and catching each as it fell. He handed these over and then took off his sandals and headed north, limbing over knobs and twists and ducking gently through the branches. He grew in height as he went, though his form was smaller. But the idea of him there grew bigger and bigger; that someone of his girth and capabilities might find himself so situated.

We have new friends. Two rabbits. One a grey and the other brown, and what do they eat? What do they drink? They have just been left here, or so it would seem, the way that animals associated with houses in Africa are and so when you wake the first morning or as you click on the flashlight and walk to your room the first night you are often surprised by some half-domesticated creature greeting you with bright and curious eyes. I find it good. That the small askers of the world come with the property; that one's abundance is assumed to be large enough to accommodate an extra handful of rice a day and that we are assumed to have the depth to realize that a vocalized call to sunlight, hope or darkness comes in many forms.

That they are beautiful.

Here are the notations:

Triplets. Gave birth to one by the lake but the other two were stuck inside, so she traveled here. The first baby died on the way and then she gave birth to the two others. There they are, in the health center, and mama rests. They cry like healthy babies.

A case with complications he says, but we didn't mean the money. And neither did he, the nurse, about this little one, under the mosquito net and what good will that do him? You remember the Somali child, vulture meal, seated alone in the sand. That one. Strider. Malnutrition but what a word - does not cover it. Little embryo face. IV into skull. Referred and called in to the hospital. And now we hope. A crazy thing?

Another baby malnourished. In her mother's arms, and also the brother with a face full of illness. She looks at me, this one, follows me with her eyes, all that moves, and I watch her, too. So skinny her eyes like a cat, and so small that you think of nothing but picking her up and placing her back in the womb, back in safety, somewhere warm and small and nourishing.

But you can see the spirit still, and that is what amazes. You can see it there, still alive, still watching, still talking to you silently.

And this is what we recognize. This is actually what we are trying to save.

Not this body, beautiful body, not the body. But that the birth opens the window to that other world - of souls, of spirits, of self, of embodiment - and we recognize this little bit of that sacred, this piece of home, the home we know and we desperately want to save it: this host of the woken moment.

The light of the moon feels like restoration.

It is a waxing gibbous, pushing into full in a day or two. When we arrived a month ago today the moon was at the same stage. This should not be a surprise to us but it is, the idea that we are now thinking in terms of the stage of the moon, and less the actual date.

What does an October calendar mean in central Africa? It means the end of a dry season, the dip into heat and rain. But it loses all association with our own baseline of autumn, apples, pumpkins, hay rides and snatches of brilliant color on the mountainside. We do write the date each day, at the tops of the notebook pages, but it feels more like a listing than anything related to a larger world. October 10, 2011: a label for things remembered and new memories but a label that has lost something of its utility in planning and structuring the world we are experiencing, which was much of its point in the first place.

Isn't that what Time does - gives us values to place on things, to make them linear and lined: First, Second, Almost, Now, Last, Finally?

How else could we make sense of it?

But perhaps it is mostly of a present utility, Time. A chronogram most useful for what happened yesterday, and last week, and for what we expect in the throwable, spittable future. But there is a movement beyond that (both fore and aft), where the memories continue flowing. Here the usefulness of linearity begins to shiver and break apart, metal fixtures failing in the earthquake - no give, no gain.

Here we find the repository of experience, from which we are meant to draw for our own intelligence and future action. And the repository is not subject to the rules of chronology. The repository is a fluid, limnic, transitioning thing.

Here is the world where all that we have seen, heard or felt, and all that has befallen us, and all that we have wished towards us or away from us are married and meet. Here we find the world of suggestions and possibilities, of all available patterns: the workshop of our mind, where the input is shelved and rolled into candied swirls of a chaotic system that still has rules. A place where matches are made of unexpected partners.

Patterns.

A line here. A shade there. A dash of living color.

Extolling the Authenticity of it All

2011-10-24T08:33:00.001-05:00

October 9 2011

Dreamt about arriving in a town like this: very far away. And finding truckloads of fancy white people, all wearing shiny things or thin and tearable materials, just so. All with fluffy hair, crosses? Bibles? They were promoting Coors Light, a bunch of them. Coors Light. Now I remember. Of all things. And we thought, where did you come from, all these truckloads of white people in such a place and why are you here and why are you here promoting such a ridiculous thing? But they did not seem to notice anything strange. Ran around extolling the authenticity of it all, snapping photos, cheerful and laughing as they piled in to go onto the next stop of the tour. We exhaled when they had left.

A woman walking and seen through the window. Us in that dirt-floored office, waiting for the official stamp, a glance out the metal framed window and her walking down the dirt lane, between the scrubby brush trees and adjusting a cloth around her waist, something on her head of course, the cloth a non-descript color but dusty something - greens, browns, blues, all blending in from the distance and the light and the reflection of the scene.

Scene. About movies and images and how so much of what we see we link now to how it looked in a film. Then for the first time I considered that they came here, or wherever, the crew. They came here and filmed. And that is why it looked that way.

Instead we have this tendency to see it from the other direction - as if this world was something created in the film and staged by the director and so what a shock to see it live, brought to life, represented so completely.

But silliness, this. The director just arrived to a world already made and took a picture. Arranged the plot, but pulled the extras from the area. The reality of the actors was no reflection of the skill of the production but merely of their actual reality. They look so genuinely like that because they are like that. And yet, the feedback loop.

You hear it really in the comments of the newcomers. Speaking of the purity of the place, and us disrupting it. Speaking of the 'theys' so often and you can hear it there, this subtle joy of the world that they see in front of their eyes reflecting the make-believe world they once read about or watched. Or that is how it feels. And we all do it, too, only hoping that we catch ourselves in time.

But what a thing: imaginary world come to life, and certainly that is wondrous. Inaccurate, a lie, deception...but who are we to question? Receptive audience, delighted traveler. Entertainment of a lifetime.

We Hope That It Does Not Sound Hackneyed

2011-10-22T10:48:00.002-05:00

October 7 2011

It would have been a surprise, that my association with the sound of bike bells would knit so neatly from one experience to the next. A gap of decades, surely, between childhood and now, and in that space a time filled with car horns, brake lights; the sound of a plane ascending. And then Amsterdam, with the lore of bicycles, and then a plane to Congo and here, too, all of a sudden, a bicycle bell becomes the sound most familiar to be heard approaching from behind. Da-ding, da-ding. Here, it means, "I have no brakes" and there it meant, "I'm not going to brake" but in either case, the information relevant, the action the same. Jump.

A sleep of rain on tin roofs. Thought to be gentle but here was lashing. A feeling of an island in a stormy sea. We saw it coming, lightning blazing our eyeballs from the direction of the lake. Winds kicking, clouds tumbling over one another, eager. A night lit well by the half moon.

A scan of the group this morning and there are already kids you see, people you see, who stop your glance. Live eyes. Compassionate face.

Mama Theresa, of all names, we love her. From the first moment I loved her. Know nothing more, did not even sit with her as the others did, to get the information, but later said, oh she can deliver my children, no problem, and we joked that I would have to move here now, to this village, to prepare for that eventuality. Or at least return, years later, in the fifth or sixth month, and ride it out just to have the knowledge that it would be those hands reaching for the first moment of the light, and that smile by my side and the first in the eyes of the child that arrived.

We kept joking on the way home - bellies full of sweet potatoes, trying to sip water that spills all over us and we don't mind - of how at the very least, this is a great story to be written, a great plot line! Except I pause and ask, but how do we avoid it being one of those annoying white-girl-in-Africa stories?

And we do not know. So the conversation gets stuck here, for the trouble is that that is what I am - what we are - white girls in Africa, so avoiding the category or the paradigm in our interpretation is unfortunately not possible. Storied (fictionalized) or no, told or no, this is still the one we are living.

We can only hope that it does not sound hackneyed. Hope that we bring to its conclusion and evolution a sense of Non-Entitlement, Greater Things, Equality and the genuine:

Way Things Are.

All, in fact, of our white girl notions: perfectly realized.

Greetings and Salutations: the light is rising

2011-10-20T08:38:00.002-05:00

September 29, 2011

A morning ritual, the rising dark. I think of it as rising, even as the dark decreases and the light increases - as if it is the darkness that has fallen onto the light and the light is only revealed as the darkness lifts. But this is not at all how it happens. You could otherwise easily speak of the rising light when the darkness comes each evening. Isn't it more the sun that is unusual? Out of place? Isn't it more that the darkness is the more fundamental, default state and it is the light that falls upon us, and descends, and only lifts off of the earth by the grace of the turning night?

The darkness rises and with it comes the night guard, to the water buckets that sit on the low porch wall outside our bedroom doors. He washes early, though for him it must seem late, after the hours of darkness and silence, or the noises of the fringe that only happen when the sun is abed.

Next the birds begin to move. The small ones make a sound like clacking, or strong pattering, with their wing beats as they drop and lift between the branches of the papaya tree. There are not many but they come regularly, picking at the mud yard after a bucket is thrown, searching for sustenance. Are the head dips random? Or only employed with the spotting of a likely morsel? What it would be to be in a bird mind.

The largest bird needs a name. This one - a character! He has just now entered the corner of the porch, by the open door to the living room/office and is hiding behind the two water filters, dipping down and up at me - perceived threat - and then popping his narrow head in the space between them to give me a look. He moves between tapping at the white plastic table in staccato punches with his beak, pecking at the electrical socket on the wall (could this explain his disposition?) and alternately hunching behind the table to hide and flaring up his wings to startle. This one. I greeted him politely when I rose. I said Greetings and Salutations and stood face to face for the 10 seconds I could manage but he is unnerving. When I turned to leave he followed me - followed me all the way over to the other side of the porch, where we now are together, me typing and on a chair in the yard, him pecking at the water filters and giving me an evil eye. But he seems to want the company. A strange, strange bird indeed.

The little ones arrive, too, when you're sitting here, giving you a questioning, curious look, twinned to that of a baby in a high chair, lying in a crib, gazing out at you from a bundle: wide-eyed. Their wings sound like someone fluttering their lips to entertain a child. That is what they sound like. Not clacking, not puttering, but something odd and unexpected for a little flock of birds dipping between the papaya trees.

After the birds, the outside neighborhood begins to wake. Roosters, babies crying for Papa and splashing in tubs, that medley of noises that seem forever associated with school children in the morning (yet what are these? I can think only of their voices - younger, but not so different to set them so apart as a category of noise? And their morning bumps and shuffling - nothing out of the general line? But perhaps it is merely the rhythm of these things that make them different from the older counterparts; it is a medley of youthful noises - quick shuffles, chattering, giggles, more bumping than necessarily necessary.

With the schoolchildren and the roosters, the others also begin to awake. There is morning bathing, which means morning filling up of half-buckets from the large buckets, which are right outside our doors. It is the sound of water splashing loud inside plastic that wakes the internal team, inside our compound.

Splashing water - a category nearly silent on the scale of noises in that other world (electronic, mechanical: what is a running sink compared to a beeping cell phone?) - is an unavoidable interruption to the sleeping mind. Because it sounds fresh? Because of the intensity of our need for it? Are we programmed to wake at the sound of water falling onto surfaces, in order that we can rush to get our fill? Or simply because we were once aquatic and so in the water that the idea of being outside of it at all still startles us into unreasonable and mesmerizing action?

By ten to seven the game is nearly up. Three-quarters of the team awake and moving, if still mostly hidden behind bedroom doors, or toilets, or at their ablutions in the cement-floored shower room.

Sweeping has begun. The mamas have arrived to carry out the dirty plates from last night's dinner table, put out the clean mugs for tea and coffee, put on the rice to boil for breakfast. They are hardly mamas, though they probably are, things starting early here, as they do. But it is merely the convention: Mama this, and Papa that. Like calling Brother, and Sister, in South Africa. An extension of the family. It is something I love, even with the inconvenience that arises from it - dust clouds in the passing.

Cold Coke and Roosters: Overlap

2011-10-19T09:43:00.001-05:00

Cold Coke and Roosters: Overlap

Luena has iced cola. After a fashion, we are awed. A week of thinking about cold things. You would not think it was long enough, but somehow, it was. The first sips and we stand there, sipping again, icy slush against our teeth, the liquid hard to suck out around it. Us not caring and just holding the plastic lip to ours and feeling it - this transfer of energy to make something cold, this discrepancy against our palate.

The waffles, too, a surprise. But nothing like the refrigerator. And here we begin to understand something of what our grandparents went through - out on the farm - those years when things began to change and the ice box meant more than just the place where you placed ice, and even that a novelty now and here, and so the word "isolated" takes on a different meaning, or maybe not.

Maybe it still means what it did: away, apart, you just cannot get there from here.

We use a gallon and a half of water to wash. That is approximate, of course, but I estimate with milk jugs in mind. A bucket plus some rubs of a bar of soap, plus a gallon and a half of water to wash. Plus the gallon or so we'd like to drink each day, if we can get our hands on it. And the cooking and cleaning, too, but that is also less - nothing running, everything transferred bucket to pot or pan.

The consumption of limited resources. You must think of it, how enormous is the discrepancy. You can find the statistics if you want, or you can come out here and look. Each person with their few outfits (I think of our farms and the farmers kids and their town clothes and farm clothes and it is similar, here, and used to be, in general). Each person using such minimums of water, eating such maximums of starches to fill and freshness to complement. Minimums of sustainment.

And Jesus washing feet.

These are the references that no longer resonate, until you come someplace with roads like powder and on a day that you do nothing, turn brown from them, and your feet begin to look like stones, potatoes, or other chameleon species and when you get home the first thing you think about is washing them, and scrubbing them, and recovering the subtleties of tendons moving underneath translucent skin.

To write about the specific. To not be sodden with detail. To describe without overburdening. To paint with a line just there, a shade just here: to suggest a form with license. To open creativity in the minds of the receivers, and in our own.

A broken gun on a circle sticker. What could it mean? It is the remains of the red and white, no guns allowed, reminder on the car. But in its evolution it has become this instead, by way of the conventions of our world: a statement that we support, or own, or carry with us in this vehicle, only firearms missing a crucial middle third. Why would such a statement be made? This car brakes for fruit and laminators. Or fresh beignets, yogurt, vegetables, pulses, delicious things to spread on bread, or packets of powdered water flavoring to cover the taste of chlorine. People put strange things on cars. Choose strange statements as holistic representations of their principles.

I forgot the earphones. The earphones, a box of resealable sandwich bags, an additional set of earplugs and another bottle of saline solution. So far, these are the items that worry me greatly and that would add a certain important quality to my life already. At the moment: earphones.

To create a sanctuary, an always difficult proposition: sanctuary.

But we must go further. Frustration is a first responder, with no response. Lack: a permanent state of being, or a state of mind.

There is a white rooster with a red plume and brown feathers that look like someone has poured mud on him and it has dripped in a pretty pattern. Pretty, he is. Country kitchen.

Roosters in Congo. Roosters in New Mexico, fighting. Roosters calling out the dawn of day - middle of the night, all over the world, causing us to grumble. But perhaps they are not confused, like we always say.

Maybe they are just trying to tell us that there is a day that has now arrived: somewhere. A day.

Maybe they are the translators of our world: wake up, wake up, wake up! They say.

The world overlaps.

Listen.

To Consider the Possibility That We Might Meet Fire

2011-10-16T23:31:00.000-05:00

What about how the movements look the same (and surely they do?) as generations ago?

Sweeping like that: the yard, mashing and pounding with the rounded stick, inside the carved wood bowl.

What about when the dust kicks up in front of us like a fog that has descended, or a terrible rain, and then the people pop out of it in dark, sliding forms, as if through veils?

And the women with baskets on their heads and kanga cloths round their waists. Or when the children run out into the road (we are barely driving, just rolling slowly) and the little girl's dress is flying with her lifted calf and the boy is caught reaching towards the ground - eyes towards us - to pick up what has fallen.

From a distance (infinitely short on rolling car wheels) it looks like films, like memories, like dream spaces where we know - and don't want to know - what to expect next. But what do we expect next? It terrifies.

It must be generations. 70 years? 80, 90, hundreds? The consistency of things.

I can see the bikes now - surely modern? - and the clothing, of course. All the t-shirts and pants and button-down shirts, all the Obama themes. Those are new. They would be. I wonder if the bricks were always fired so neatly. Or the houses always built so square. I wonder if the road had been there, 100 years past, and was it then a footpath, and was it then also that they had to build fires around the village to scare off the animals more than just occasionally - regularly - because the animals were closer, then. Though they are still close, next to the park as we are: or in the park. Upemba. A free safari.

We drive through fires. Fields blackened into scrub - low refuse, white dust, sticks straight and black that leave charcoal creosote against our pants and legs when we dive through them to find a private bush for a bathroom. Twice the fire was on the edge of the road itself, though a small thing, still. Twice we took a deep breath dive and felt the flames against our faces through the window and twice we thought back to the thought we had when packing, of the possibility of carrying the extra fuel on top of the car in yellow jerrycans and how the staff had stopped us and invited us to consider the possibility that we might meet fire.

What fire? The fire is always far away, isn't it? And they demure for a moment - us knowing, surely, the distance of a fire and us coming, as we did and do, from that very same 'far away' and so knowing the definition of the distance of a fire and also of 'far away' and so (surely?) how they must sum when put together and added to the list of things that harm, and how, and when. And the ultimate knowledge of the Right Thing To Do. That we must know. Don't we?

The right thing to do gets trickier and trickier.

The five year old died a few weeks back. We are shown his fresh grave, and the new cross. It was a complicated case, the nurse said and they tried to treat, did what they could. But he had all the complications: respiratory, fever, diarrhea. His brother, too, had died.

Two in one family. That is a hard and terrible thing. We say it like that, and he does, too, the nurse. A terrible thing, to lose two children in one family. Even one. Losing children.

A man in front carried the coffin on his bike, on the rack part, strapped down with rubber ties for the wheels hitting the rocks in the road. The road was just rocks, really. Part of the funeral procession. The coffin did not take up much room. It was a box of three feet, no more, coffin shaped (the old kind - like Dracula) - narrow top and bottom, squared off, and that wide space for the folded arms. A child, this one. A different one. We are miles down the road now - another village - and we pull the cars over for the people to pass and we stop our conversation while they do. No one is crying here, but later we see them - another family - and they will be wailing along the roadside, no coffin in sight, and someone said, A funeral, and someone said, How do you know? And they said, it must be - no one carrying anything for work, dressed well, a wailing along the side of the road, a whole family.

They asked us to come back in twenty minutes as they were finishing the paperwork. A maternal death, they said. This was the first village of the morning but it is another village now, a different morning. It is another funeral. How many in our short visit? This is not yet a week. We are losing track.

So we got in the car to go see the village chief while they completed the paper work and it was only once the plastic stools were arranged underneath the mango tree did someone ask Well what about the child? Was there a child? And we wondered - I mean, we assumed - surely they would have asked for help if help could be given? A space of uncomfortable time, thinking about it, and it turned out later that she had died at home, early that morning, with somebody attending but not qualified to deliver a child, and the baby was fine, perfectly healthy, and the mother had died of hemorrhaging. That was what had happened. So we said, Oh, to each other, That is what happened. And the child was fine? we said, and they said, Yes! Yes, the child is fine. And we said, Good, that is good. Because that was what we were wondering, earlier, underneath the mango tree.

The child is fine.

Later Sarah said My God. And I said My God. And between us was this idea that we didn't want to name but we did (because you have to, on this kind of a trip, don't you? So that the next time - because that is the thing, that there will certainly be one - another, next time - you will have thought of it, and planned): this idea that we might have decided to leave earlier in the morning (and why not? It happens often. Sunrise at 5:00) and could have decided it would be better to start with the rising sun, and would it have happened - could it have happened? - that we might have gotten there in time, as she lay there dying, only an hour's drive from a medical team that probably - maybe? Do we actually know this? Only God...- could have saved her?

Instead, at that time we were still in our camping cots, or only just woken to the fading morning stars and filling buckets for the shower from the plastic receptacles of cool river water. Or maybe at the actual exact moment we were dipping our white bread into dark coffee and smiling with sleep, and comfort, and our faces were lit up with the dusty rose rays of a rising sun.

But we did not go early. That is what happened. And even in her own village the mother had not reached the health center to where there were nurses, at the very least, and so we wonder, why would this have been? Why would she have given birth at home and then lay bleeding, and hemorrhaging...until death. Did it just happen too fast? Was there no one to go for help? Or no money for the treatment? Did she think that maybe it would stop, would just stop, if she could think at all through the exhaustion of the birthing, and of the bleeding. Did she see her child?

Actually, at the time, we do not wonder any of this. Or we begin to, but it is a very heavy thing to wonder, and so we wrap it carefully in tissue paper and we place it on the dashboard where we each of us will glance at it throughout the day, until the space of the evening, after dinner, when the light is low enough and the measures full enough and basic humanness enough in presence to ask again: why? And was there something more we could have done? In the space of silence we will consider. There are not answers. And when the light goes completely we will place the thoughts back in tissue paper, delicately, as you do with heaviness, and we will lay it down to start the pile that we know will only grow, from this point out.

At the time itself we visit the village chief and the school, church and football field (possible vaccination sites) and take photos of the hand-drawn map of the health center and then we shake everybody's hand two times and get into our car and leave. And then we drive to the next village where we do the same thing and then afterwards go to the market to buy some beignets and small plastic bags of salted peanuts that we can share around the car because by then we are getting hungry, because white bread and coffee is just not much to go on, really, from the morning.

It is only in the second to last village that the kids look bad. I am watching my notebook during the sensitive introductions and glancing around leg-level to start the visual review and then I see the knobbly knees and only then do I realize that actually the kids have looked pretty good, all things considered, most of this time. But I follow the knees and the legs and on these two boys they are looking like concentration camp victims. Surely there have been other cultural references throughout time but this is what I say, what my generation says, when we want to explain how terribly, terrifyingly thin someone is and when we want to show you the picture of the skin hanging loose along the bone, and of the fact that you can see the bones and their individual articulations, beneath the covering of the skin.

They are still smiling, shy, and hiding from me but edging closer. They are still mobile, these kids, which makes you wonder about the others. Survivor bias. The one girl has puffiness under her eyes and her, too, I put in the mental category of more than the usual malnourished.

When we come back together the impression is shared, that, for whatever reason, this village is worse than the others.

The poor part of town? Sarah says. But what a strange reference in these towns (to separate them richer or poorer) and why here, only 2 kilometers away from where it is, by this definition, not poor (when of course it is, still)? But then I guess the same could be said of many of our places, at home, too. Why the sudden change? What is so different from this block, to the next?

Water. The village with the speaking wives has it. Even driving through the place we had been struck by the difference, by the sense that that village had more life in it. And then we glanced over and saw the lake and we said, Water, at the same time and we said, This is the Difference.

But it is not the only difference. I remark on the places where the chief's wives come to the discussion, too, and where they are treated as equals or, at least, where they speak without invitation and offer opinions on their initiative. I say later, This is one of my proxy measures, and in response to the silence greeting, of literal-minded thinking, I say, Well, that's just it. I can't swear by it statistically, or point to any one study but that's it; there it is. Something known.

Care Is Taken For Them All

2011-10-16T23:16:00.000-05:00

It is hard to summarize. We are far. There are a few private generators and otherwise no refrigeration of any kind. We care about this because of the cold chain of a vaccine campaign. How do you keep the vaccine cold in a place this far away? Ice melts before it reaches here. On the backs of motorcycles, in insulated boxes; optimism.

The images are of the palms of hands. Children racing the car and giggling with the entertainment. Women shouting, Mamapuye! Hello. Welcome. Eyumoi! A female thank you in reply. Mamas, papas, children. You are welcome here! Hello!

It is not this way in other places.

It is hard to summarize. The village chief on a proper chair but us on chairs first: southern hospitality. His son with a wide grin and open manner, the two wives, we assume, and many children - but are they his? All the children of the village belong to the village, so it doesn't really matter, the particulars. Care is taken for them all.

The women are speaking here. An important detail. They stand on the side, but they ask questions and answer questions. When the talk turns to measles an older girl brings a boy to the youngest mama.

In between translations I observe the kids, the mamas, the other men and see suddenly that this child is covered head to foot with the rash. Relevant conversation. Bring him here? I ask and he is brought and surely this is measles? The first case for our team today but nothing new for the village. A disease I've only ever known in classic children's books - the Velvetine Rabbit? - but how hard is it to define, when it is what we are searching out and aiming for already? Puffy eyes, running nose, rash from head to foot. A simple case, I think, not complicated. He looks ok. A barebones assessment from a non-medic, but there you are. The most basic review. I move my hand over an arm and foot to show the nurse, and here think about that small notation on my own vaccine card - MMR and MMR II - and hope, vaguely, that it did the job it was meant to do. First time to know so clearly that you are testing a theoretical formula. Here is the measles. Here I am. Membranes, T-cells, IgA, sweet antigens and antibodies and all the permutations of your kind: to the starting line. 1.2.3. Go.

We shower together, me and some of the other women, to save on time for a large group rotating. The shower space is large as a walk-in freezer but open, too, just above shoulder height with a straw/grass roof and a concrete floor and a scooped out bit into the wall, to flow the water outwards, or under into some pit. At the end of the day with the sun descending we go in - dusted and grimed with the dirt of the road, the dust of sweat dried - we bring a shared blue bucket and two plastic mugs and drape our clothes over the wall. Girls bathing together. When did we forget to do this? It is such a time, on the shore of the river, behind the bamboo walls, down in the lake thigh high, even in the old cold bathrooms with ceilings but only buckets hauled from the well. It is a time for the day's review, for confidences, for laughter and amazement.

We do not even know what we have agreed to miss in this closed society of ours, where showers are for private moments and we do not share shampoo.

We sleep outside. It was collective, or majority, after the sighting of the bats that dropped onto the floor next to the beds and crawled, as they do, on the tips of wings. Ach. They are just rodents: flying rodents, says the nurse. What an idea. The smell inside is of ammonia and dusty poop, or so we assume. The woven ceiling crumbling and falling in towards our cots and mosquito nets. You do not want to know what is in those sagging parts, says the medic, but we do. Bat shit.

A starry night in rural Congo.

You can ask for more, but why? Particularly when you have the contrast of knowing where you could be otherwise: inside air conditioned stillness, the dull roar of traffic, the glare of street lights and headlights through the window shades; neon red of an alarm clock, the hum of the refrigerator and static background of TV, computer sleeping, lamps shut off but buzzing, electrical circuits in the walls.

It is this that makes me leave. This that makes me come here. This that I so love, and find it hard to summarize.

Drums and Floating Villages; how do you say?

2011-10-11T11:15:00.000-05:00

The drums start at 5am. But distant. Perhaps because I am wearing ear plugs and a scarf wrapped tightly around my eyes and head to block out light do they sound distant, and distant sounds good. A real wake up chorus, and I love it; traveling upwards to awareness of the day this way, the dawning sun through hazy air, the brushed stirring in the yard of people waking, small splashes of water into buckets for the bathing.

We are miles away, and miles in. Two day's drive from Lubumbashi and a night at a small hotel, then a full day drive over roads that made the first ones look good (imagine off-roading, Jeep Jamboreeing), driving over grass and ruts and bridges made out of railway ties stretched over deep stream beds (dry now but not for long). Finally arriving in a village that only the past day's driving could have made look this large; it will be our base, for the week.

House is full of bats but is concrete with a metal roof, metal grills over the windows, concrete floors, brick walkways in the yard for when the rains begin and the dirt turns into mud: luxury. A raised toilet and open shower combo; a fence of leaning bamboo sticks with holes by animals, perfect for small children to peep in, and a wider gap as well for the neighbors who come to collect water from the well in the yard: brick-lined cylinder, milky puddle at the bottom except for when it is clear: no telling what determines what.

Three hours in the car the next morning to the farthest of the villages and then a backtracking of seeing health centers, meeting with village chiefs. The lake is close, so fishing the economy, and talk of a whole floating community out there on the water. On the water? I ask, or by the water? Prepositions. But 'on' is what they mean. It's what they said, isn't it, in the first place?

They build their homes there, the floating population, on floating islands that are not islands, but made out of bamboo. I do not know the word for "raft" in French. We struggle but the concept transfers: it is not my French that makes it strange, but the thing itself. This subtlety not always easy to distinguish.

This is real learning. Pointing to the bucket thingamagig and tiring of saying, this thing, that thing, what is it? Seau. To the water pump, described constantly as a 'source d'eau' but you know there is another name because 'source' also means 'spring' so that isn't accurate to use all the time. Puisse d'eau. Puisse for short; pompe. Who cares about the spelling, just get it right enough in pronunciation, just get it useful.

How do you say.

This is a phrase that you say, all the time. How do you say... in French, in Swahili, in Kilumba..which is not the same language as Chiluba, which you might have guessed already (the sounds being different at the beginning, obviously, and perhaps logically) if you hadn't already lived in neighboring Rwanda where 'Kigali' and 'Chigali' get confused all the time, only among foreigners, who can't pronounce the "hch" as it should be.

But the languages are different actually. Different enough that colleagues from Lubumbashi or elsewhere are speaking French, even between each other, to communicate, and substituting Swahili on occasion. Hard to tell how the level of understanding varies. Hard to tell, but people do get by.

I hear words I know without knowing from where I know them. Nyama. Inyama. Meat. When I practiced my pocket Swahili in the car a weird thing happened. Holding my hands over the Swahili words and quizzing myself with the English I was saying Vuka instead of Ona - to look for, to see. In searching for the new I found the old: Zulu still securely in place; in place where I was sure it had left already but there it was - the closest offering to the requested pattern that my brain could provide, thinking: right context, closest pattern of pronunciation, same taste of the lingual river on the tongue. Nyama. Inyama. Meat. Dawa. Muti. Medicine. Ukaona. Uyabona. Ngapi. Umngani. Mzuri. Injani. Ninzuri, ninaweza. Ni meza. Meza. Mesa. Table. How does the river reach that far? From Swahili and Kinyarwanda, to Spanish, through Portuguese? Beautiful. Rolling. Lovely. Rivers and hills, mountains and passes between them; valleys, heights. To be a linguist.

How Can You Live Without TV?

2011-09-14T01:21:00.009-05:00

Electricity does not exist in any meaningful way. Nor roads. Which means that instead of calling the head doctor on a cell phone or, snakes alive, sending him an email that we expect him to ever read, or even contacting him by some more ancient method (radio for example) we are left to send a messenger who must travel for several days and nighttimes, without a map, or clear destination, or much foreknowledge at all.

There are rivers, so we think there are fish. There have been reports of disease, so we assume some fidelity of reality to the data. Beyond that, what do we know?

Little.

And this I find ironic. All we ever talk about is how isolated these places, and people, are. They cannot even access the most basics of the outside world: modern medicine. Plastics. Bleach. Fruit and vegetables: out of season. What do they hear of the News? A bomb could strike London and they would never know.

But what do we know of where they live? Fish and lakes? A pittance.

A fence keeps out, and also keeps in; it is by-directional. Who is to say who is more privileged, and who more isolated? They are isolated from us; I am isolated from them. Buffer.

I am guessing they know more about my life than I know of theirs: from the rare television powered by the car battery, from the errant ray of radio BBC, from the bright imported goods (synthetics, plastics) that make it beyond all odds to this, their unimagined 'final' destination.

So here we go, our tiny team, to find out something. And our something, already, is agendaed: more about data, and health, and the measures that we apply to our own world of morbidity and mortality – and less, at least at the beginning, of what comprises what they know: of how you say hello, of who can meet eyes with whom, of the stories about the sky and ground and what happens in between and how the life that exists is sustained and by what means and with which costs, to whom? And what is worth what, and why.

We stand in contrast, always. I am here. You are there. You are looking out at me, from your inside. Because I know only one world then I must insist: it is you who are locked in and me who is free-flying, and in control, and independent, and advanced.

Why?

If my News is irrelevant to you, then is it News? It is the news of another world and another place. It is a kindness to care, not an obligation.

I want to know their News. Out of a sense of urgency, and connection. Out of this dawning realization that I have been as isolated as the most: life in the darkest, farthest reach of space and time.

We are all our own revolving universes, busily naming the Center as that where we stand, or that which we can see most easily from our own perspective. Busily naming the Other as those who are not us.

Fish and lakes. A pittance. Or a wealth, depending on your placement.

Art in Person is So Much Better

2011-09-09T08:03:00.012-05:00

We are passing trees that are waving in what I assume is the wind of Northern Europe. There are turbines; these move, too. Each time we pull into a station there is the smell of burning rubber (rubber? metal? something mechanical and chemical). Nauseating. But other than that, the train is comfortable. European. Still a novelty in an American mind.

Sitting here, thoughts are exploded into diamond dust by a passing train. A thing that never misses terrifying me. Can't get used to the sudden slam, of wind, of new, of 'maybe it will hit this time'? No trust for rails or spaces.

Going back to Amsterdam and looking forward to it. Have missed it, actually. A strange emotion. Don't know what I missed about it or how, after staying somewhere little over a week I can now be actually missing it, so immediately. Perhaps I missed the cold and constant rain? A strange idea but maybe; it is like the sea: unpredictable. That, I like.

And of Berlin? Art gallery and museum guards were the worst of it. Yelled at for everything from removing my button-down shirt (there was still one remaining), to leaning against a wall, to wearing my backpack on both shoulders (all arguments in the line of "it is a backpack" got me no where). Pushed all my buttons. Drove me crazy. All Buddhist thinking and meditative lessons pulverized on the spot. Well, perhaps not all, but little left to show for it in the moment.

In Amsterdam last week, Van Gogh a disappointment. Now there was a surprise. Seems like he was a nice guy (and I don't think I knew that, actually– just the ear and all, stupid thing to celebrate, really. It's an ear – is it that big of a deal? Things happen).

But honestly, those paintings. There are a few that stand out as interesting, a few you think, well, fine, not bad. But overall? Kept on jumping my hopes with the subsequent ones, only to realize they were actually the original version of paintings that he later tried to imitate. So there was the original one - awesome, genius, impressive - and then there was his - nice Van Gogh - and really, let's be honest, they were sweet...impulsive...and kind of no good. Maybe good for personal therapy and maybe to brighten the room (the sunflowers were a good idea, for example) and maybe to adjust your perspective, like an activity, like a game (the stretched bed and room, for example) but nothing defined or finished or, really, with noticeable genius.

Strange how in photos I might have thought otherwise. Always loved the idea of his wild texture but up close, perhaps like me, it loses interest. Just some blobs of paint from a searching mind.

The German expressionists though, another story. Who knew? That Max character always drove me nuts in class and still did, in the museum. Came upon him and reacted without even seeing the name; the one with all the bodies. Ach. Makes my eyeballs hurt.

But some of the bigger ones – "birth" and "death" - now they had something. Weirdness but weirdness with a point. Strange and upsetting. Required me to turn my head and look that way, as if at some point he had taken the entire painting, flipped it, and started again upside down. I liked that. Confusing. Tricky bugger.

They are such distorted reality. Poor people figures stretched all over. Colors slapped together. Big black lines. Shouldn't (?) love them but I did, many. They provoke. Contain emotion. Demand an answer. Express, as it were, the pulse of blood and fiber. Not pretty but alive; not refined but bold.

They're far uglier in photos; far more swallowable in person. This I like. Don't want them on my walls - it would be entirely too much to look at each day - but I imagine how I could have made them myself and then tossed them into a corner, professing an intelligent understanding that they were, of course, rather shitty, but secretly returning to them over the months to glance again at what I thought they might contain, if you just let them hit you first instead of contemplating on the subtleties; if you just let them be uncomfortable in the space beside your eyes: periphery.

Getting on a plane tomorrow. Tomorrow?! Should keep track of these things better. But then you realize, what's the real care of it? Today, tomorrow, you'll find a way to the other side; isn't even your responsibility, the belt moves without you and you are just there scrambling or settling to enjoy the view, and the ride.

Northern Europe, Western Germany, fallow fields and silver-edged leaves – always, or just heading into winter? Flatness, crows, harvested wheat-like bundles, red-roofs, long lanes with double-matched trees, trees like how we used to draw them when we were little (shapely clumps on branching arches), and also the way they are carved out of plastic or molded out of wood to grace toy train platforms.

Ridiculous Egyptologists.

Statues of Nefertiti that, even now, thousands (!) of years past her time make us stop and gape at the beauty of her facial lines, magnetize our eyes towards her profile and think how, until this moment, we did not even begin to understand the definition of gorgeousness.

But our reactions are insufficient for an art historian (notice, no "e" on the end of that word).

The placard reads, in sum, “Here we see how they moved past representing ideal beauty; here we see the lines below the eyes (we do?) and the sagging breasts (sagging? Really?) and the plump thighs (barely rounded) and the neck that is just a little too thin and stretches forward (and here we think of turkeys and baked roasts on the dinner table) and makes the shoulders appear as if they are slumped (so what if they are) and so, we determine, that this statue probably represents Nefertiti as she (a shocker) really was."

A mother of at least six children. A notable revolutionary in art. A commoner raised to royalty, one of the foremost remembered queens married to a man with surprisingly sensitive eyes in his own profile, and a fair bit more sophisticated in her understanding of the human form than you, placard-writing Egyptologists - the individual ones who have written these particular placards, I am more and more convinced in each room at the New National Gallery, could not have been women themselves. I cannot imagine a woman looking at those sculptures and writing those things. I cannot imagine us seeing those things.

Yes, we might have acknowledged the impressive move in Egyptian art from the ideal, abstract, smoothed-over, non-indvidual to the moment of celebrating the particularities of the actual human being in front of you.

But of Nefertiti and her "wrinkles" and her "plumped" form, we would have said, my god, "Finally, the Egyptian sculptors found where the actual beauty had been hiding all this time: in the molding of the human form by experience over time, by environmental interaction, by the pressures of the universe, the womb and the atmosphere. Here, we see their best, and inadequate, representation of Nefertiti – we can only praise them for trying, only condemn them for their own artistic limitations – but here she is, very slightly: alive."

Tall cornfields. Train sudden stop. August? Corn still tassling? But it is September already. A summer passed. Houses with skylights and solar panels. Grey birds with white bands on their wings, and dark gray tips. Cows laying down.

Here is the train station where I exited before, accidentally, on the way to Berlin. An embarrassment, and a story I should perhaps try to hide, but really it has already spread too far (my friend's office mates now duly convinced of bumbling American stereotypes...sorry, fellow Americans. I do try.) and because, caught in the truth, there are plenty of moments when I would much rather deal with the chaos of a developing country "bus stop" than with the truly foreign idea of an organized, predictable public transportation system.

But I was caught off-guard by letters at the end of the sign on the platform. They looked like the letters on my ticket. Or, at least, looked enough like the letters on my ticket in the moment when I'd just been nudged awake by the slow-down braking of the train and when some stranger who looked reputable enough said, “This? Yes, Berlin,” nicely enough to make me actually stumble up and jump off, with my bags and my confusion.

A phrase ("This? Yes, Berlin."), by the way, which you could take to mean that this station, itself, is Berlin which is not (as you might later realize) what she, or even the next person you ask, actually meant by the words, “This? Yes, Berlin.”

In fact, had you asked in another way that actually worked they would have told you, “Berlin? That's another three hours by train at least. This is just Ostnabruk; a very small town. This is not Berlin.”

(In fact, it is really, really, not Berlin, if that kind of thing can be quantified in degrees. Ask a German.)

And so here we have the most recent example of a common traveling lesson:

That words like, “This?” and “Yes” and “Road?” may sound the same but are actually, as we like to say in French, faux amis. They do not always mean what you think they mean. So that even when you ask someone, “Excuse me, is there a road from here to there?” and they say, “Yes, there is a road,” you should take that statement with a healthy dose of the ambiguity that it most certainly contains, roads being subject – as all things man and other-made – to the whims of environment and words – as most concepts – to the whims of intention, to the limits of diction and to the more important things that are nearly always left unsaid.

It is of little comfort that the information we functionally need may not be available in the questions we ask, or in the answers on offer at the answer buffet. But here is the truth. When you get off the train at a tiny station that does not in any way resemble what you have come to think of as the concepts “Berlin,” or “large capital European city,” the likelihood is that, even if people tell you, “Yes, this is Berlin,” you should probably trust your gut that is telling you, “Sister, no it isn't. Get back on the train.”

Then again, sometimes the concepts that you have developed in your own, limited mind and experience have been based on unqualified assertions and insufficient information and for those situations (of which there are many and various), we most regrettably cannot be of any further assistance.

Because it is a scientific art. Try, until you fail, and then leap, until you fall and then swim, until you sink, and just keep continuing in that fashion as long as you are able to: with or without assistance, words, questions, roads, trains or any other such imperfect bearers of reality as we believe we have at some point in the past, currently do, or will at some point in the future, understand.

Art, in science and in other interpretations, is simply So Much Better in person.

Where Graffiti Rules: Beer, Brown Bread and A New World Order

2011-09-08T14:38:00.021-05:00

In the absence of external chaos, out comes the internal. Now it gets personal. Of what do you write when the world is so organized? So clean? So standardized and accessible? So systematized?

Here in the developed world, my mind spins. My writing wheels churn in the sand of sameness and subtlety. We are so comfortable. Things work.

So I think of what doesn't. Or of what disrupts the patterns. Or of what threatens to interrupt the spinning.

And that is the inside. So messy and organic and spontaneous and generative and new. So leaping non-linear.

Outside, there is the noise of mechanics and technology. Electricity, machines, clanking movements, whirring mechanical sounds. There is a suspicious sameness. There is assured assurance and I find it driving me assuredly crazy with it's calm reactions to uncalm stimuli.

I am now in Berlin, where graffiti rules and makes safe areas feel edgy and edgy safe.

We went to the Mauer (“Wall”) park the first and saw more strange flea markets than I've ever seen, more different outfits, people expressions, colored tights, floppy new shoes, a beautiful faced man with a penny-sized circle tattooed between his eyes and a crescent moon over his left cheek bone.

An amphitheater arena with red-coated performers and an audience packed for a circus' dream. No elephants. An announcer's box. People swinging on their hair-clip swings staggered at the top of the rise, where the wall rose out of the grass, shorter than you'd expect, decorated with the expressions of individual response.

Was that already the case before the wall came down? Or just after that release, that catharsis?

Berlin is hard to describe. Ex-soviet – a word, a place, a time, a culture – juxtaposed, relaxed and counter-cultural, as if it is being collectively run from behind scenes that are transparent yet unimportant. Accepting but without the disapproval that demands the word. Separated still? Somewhere?

Dark with light like underneath the water.

It seems like people are still trying here: self-created beaches along the river, old telephone booths filled with books and open to exchange, all the random art (spools of film on chains for a necklace, suitcases full of old family photographs) at the flea market, jazz bands from America popped up in the main square but off of it, still.

Ok. So I have come to Berlin because:

1) at some point in recent history I befriended someone who claims this as her home, before and now, and is spontaneous enough to say yes when I asked and

2) a random moment collided with another random moment and I bought a ticket online with a card that still worked in spite of the lack of chip and pin and

3) when I was little we read about the words Reich and Meister and Herr and Frau and Concentration Camp and were told many things about how these were bad and we were good, even down to the name of Ally, which sounds like one, but depends on who you ask and

4) I was obsessed with the story of Anne, who actually hid in Amsterdam, where I've just been but whose unknown origin and ending – if we believe these to be the same – were here, or at least in the confines of this nation state and

5) one childhood birthday, though I'm sure at the time I had little if any awareness of it happening, the wall that has come to represent so much in terms of freedom and division and capitalism and world order and which language is preferable to speak at the US State Department, was toppled in a general alliance of those guarded and guarding and

6) I was jealous back in 2009 (or was it 8? the years already become so fluid) when my then-boyfriend came here in the winter when I was in perpetual Equatorial summer and here there was snow, and free thinking, it seemed, and ex-Soviet-looking apartment buildings that looked much more romantic in films then it turns out they do when you are in the streets below them, recognizing them, and blocked from the sun like a cave creature and

7) of the stories of beer and brown bread and waffle pastries, which I now actually think belong to the Dutch, where I've just been, and sweet blond girls who honey the harsh syllables and who may have been – though all dark haired gypsy photos to the contrary – my ancestors at some ancient point, before grandmom's mom and pop got on the boat, with her in their bellies and intentions and coal in the fibers of their homespun jackets, but were they? It's easy to embellish what we do not know.

The map is a lost cause. Where is the center? I have the ring idea down but none of the specifics and the paper I'm using looks now like an antique, torn at nearly all the seams, folded backwards too many times. Finally wandered into a green park, which is really where I want to be, the country of the city. I'm a green, outside girl at heart, though I keep submitting to convincing otherwise, for stilted, shadowed but not always unhappy periods of time.

People climbing on the rocks in Tiergarten and a complicated explanation about their origins (the rocks, not people). I like that: the climbing, the rocks, the people. The interaction and the love of many things that it implies.

Visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews* of Europe: 2,711 flat concrete slabs, some taller than the rest. And so little explanation of what you are seeing that it is frankly a bit creepy. Only begun in 1990 (and only finished in 2004), and no earlier, and I registered surprise.

What took so long? But I guess there was more going on in Berlin up to that point than our fluffy history books did not explore (like Apartheid, like Rwanda, like so many other current set-ups they thought better to leave alone, while we were actually living them).

The one sign at the memorial said: don't climb or run or jump from one stele to the next.

Then why make them flat, I wondered? Just as we arrived a whole group of 9 and 10 year olds was running, and jumping and climbing all over the place. It bothered me at first but then I thought, you can't very well set out 2,711 surfaces within easy interactive reach and demand something else.

We want to touch our environment, push it, pull it, lean on it, see if it will move or bend on our command. It is a good instinct. It is curiosity, it is a question answered, it is the movement of a controversial, non-conformative response.

And isn't that what you want, as a memorial to that systematic brainwashing? Don't you want interaction, demanding answers? Don't you want the crowd to try to move the graves and realize that you can't, that that is all the point right there? So the visual effect was good, but the forethought a bit stupid. Even I wanted to run on top and jump from one to another, if I didn't know better, if I didn't understand the intended symbolism.

We try to add the color where it ought to be. So should art. So should the memorial, if it goes that way. It is the point of us who are still alive.

Even understanding, a part of me still wanted to run and jump on those stones. It was the part that still wanted to bring life back into the death so heavy in those stones, in those symbols, in those memorials to a tragedy so enormous the very thought of it threatened to sink us walking through its reminders.

I wanted to toss something colorful upon them. I wanted to yell, or to sing, or to dance. I wanted color. I wanted life. I wanted to show that of the death that was achieved it is still the life that is calling and has survived. Isn't this what we do, those of us who are still alive? Isn't that how we memorialize those we love - by trying, somehow, to bring the color back?

Why else do we place flowers on graves?

* There is a lot more to be said about this memorial and the museum underneath that I did not realize was there until later. Wikipedia at least starts the discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe

Encaged, Enclosed; Protected, Patronized

2011-08-31T13:12:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I went to the zoo*. In retrospect, it was an odd choice, but at the time I thought, "Animals? I love animals!"

Simple thinking leads to complicated situations.

An recent example - from a book I am reading in preparation for my departure - is a case in point: in 1897 at the Brussels World Fair more than a million visitors attended a particularly fascinating exhibition, on the Congo.

Among many artifacts, tapestries and a Maxim gun on display was also a living tableau: 267 men, women and children, imported directly from Congo for this very purpose and "installed in three specially constructed villages: a river village, a forest village, and a 'civilized' village."

After their society debut, the group was returned to Africa. No further record exists of their fate.

Attitudes were hardly better a decade later. In 1906, "Ota Benga, a Pygmy from Congo...was displayed in the monkey house of the New York's Bronx Zoo in September...An orangutan shared his space. Visitors ogled his teeth - filed, newspapers hinted, for devouring human flesh. To further this impression, zookeepers left a few bones scattered on the floor around him... A delegation of black ministers finally rescued Ota Benga...he remained in the United States and committed suicide ten years later."

These images - from Adam Hoschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" (an amazing book and worth a read even if you aren't at all interested in Africa, King Leopold, Congo or ghosts) - were heavy in my mind as I stepped through the gate of the Amsterdam zoo. Perhaps it was coincidence.

Or perhaps, as we pursue truth and enlightenment in any form, we find it in every form. Perhaps this is why the search for knowledge seems so very dangerous: it is. To the preservation

of the world as we know it, it is fear embodied; it is danger crystalized, and edible. It is digestible change.

But I digress. We were at the zoo, in Amsterdam, in 2011.

First were the primates. A flock of school kids lined the enclosure, pencils and sketchbooks in hand, doodling the swinging and sitting and jumping and laying. I peered over shoulders. One girl had done particularly well: there in graphite was a(n) (e)motion captured.

Next were the reptiles. Two Aldabra tortoises in a glass room, and a placard describing their habitats, and habits, but saying nothing of their longevity. Did you know they are among the longest living animals on earth? That "some individual Aldabra giant tortoises are thought to be over 200 years of age, but...it is difficult to verify because they tend to outlive their human observers?" For ten minutes I watched the first tortoise try to scrape his shell up and over the edge of a cement pool. From underneath the glow of an orange heat lamp the second tortoise watched me, watching them.

Shouting children and harried parents rushed by.

Next was a sweet, slim creature, furry with a wet nose, whose name I can't recall but had read somewhere, in books about India, or Africa. She ran back and forth in her cage with seemingly senseless movement, barely glancing when I crouched down next to her and put my nose against the mesh, inches away. She finally changed direction, sank down and then leapt up again and ran from corner to corner, her movements only the more random from my interference, my presence no obvious comfort...of course.

The lungfish, of all creatures, was the only one who seemed to know I was there. I leveled my face to the tank and he stilled his motions and sank down in the water until we were at eye level, nose to nose through the glass. We stayed that way for a minute or longer, just the two of us, in a quiet gap in the crowds. I watched the movements on his strangely pale skin and looked into the small red beads that were his eyes; I think he watched me, too. Then a new group descended, tapping on the glass and he stirred and floated up to investigate the noise and I wondered, who was watching?

Who was conscious? Who was sentient? Maybe it was merely that he was recently trapped and still new to the world of cages, not yet inured? Maybe all we were to him was an entertaining alteration in the light, and in the darkness.

Like many of my posts on this blog, I spent a while thinking about whether or not to publish this one.

Is it fair (acceptable/polite/socially relevant/ meaningful/politically correct), I asked myself, for me to compare the capture, enslavement and probably torture of so many human beings so long ago, their subsequent display (like "animals" as we say) at a World Fair, and the display of "animals" at the Amsterdam Zoo today?

The question is: well, is it?

Who are animals? Aren't we all? Plant, animal, vegetable, mineral. The categories are neatly drawn.

Before this week I couldn't tell you the last time I visited a zoo. But a few months back I happened to be visiting a college campus in Virginia that was hosting the circus - Barnum and Bailey's, I believe, though it doesn't really matter for the point of the story.

As we were crossing the street to head back to our car a police officer held up a polite hand and halted our group. Around the corner came the parade, down the sidewalk, past the just-mown lawn and landscaped garden beds and over the hot asphalt in line with the neat white hatches of the crosswalk: first, the elephants holding on to each other's tails with their trunks and sporting velvet throws and golden crowns, then tigers - prone in their cages.

The procession of trainers and handlers and caged circus animals took no more than seven minutes. And in that seven minutes my entire thought process about circuses and caged animals - admittedly a process that had not recently been examined - changed. I said, out-loud and immediately and to no one in particular, "This is wrong." Like many of my spontaneous outbursts, it provoked no reaction from my family. We were all enjoying the beauty of the hides and rippling muscles, old eyes and deep gazes sauntering and spread out before us. On the asphalt. Of a parking lot in Northern Virginia. Heading towards a huge convocation center - air-conditioned - for display.

It was wrong.

And walking through the gates of the Amsterdam Zoo, coming upon the first creatures walled and settled in their sandy enclosure, observing the humans all on the outside, all in control, all pointing and maneuvering and using these other creatures to our own ends I thought, once again and immediately, This Is Wrong.

A wedding was taking place that day. The bride and groom were ushered between the outdoor displays so that their photo could be taken in front of the elephants here (baby elephant wobbling over a blown-up ball) and the pond of swans floating under the bridge and the scrambling pyramid of primates in the center. I wanted to think, "What a fun idea for a wedding."

Instead I thought, how can we do this to our fellow beings? Instead, I thought about those 267 men, women and kids from Congo and how they were put on display in Brussels in the year my great-grandmother turned 6 and posted behind a sign that implored visitors not to toss out any sweets or candies, saying, "The Natives are fed regularly at mealtimes."

I know about the arguments for zoos. If we don't ever see the beauty of these animals then how will we know that we want to take care of them, and their environment? If these animals are going extinct, then isn't it incumbent upon us to save them - by taking members of their species and providing safe habitat where they can breed, and preserve their unique genetic imprint? Zoos are a predictable, safe and kind place for animals; unlike the chaotic world of nature.

I know.

But we are not from a safe, predictable and kind place - any of us who are of this earth. We are from the chaos of nature.

And with these arguments, we are missing the point.

I want to see the beauty of animals - in their natural habitat. I want them to be safe (from us) and to be able to breed and propagate their species in the balancing confines of a balanced world but WE are the ones who are making that world so very imbalanced.

There are many arguments about the hierarchy of species. Most end (or begin) with us, human beings, as the ultimate achievement, the dominating perfection, the most intelligent and capable and wise and good and benevolent creature. These are the same arguments that have always been used - both inter-specieally and intra-specieally.

It is because of the obviousness of our continued stupidity that I am not convinced.

Why do we look at each other - person to person, glancing eyes to eyes? What happens between us when the eyes of two strangers meet, and lock, and search? What is being exchanged?

There are centuries of answers, but I am waiting to be disproved that what passes between us - human beings, sentient, aware, conscious beings - is not the very same thing that passes between us - human beings - and them - our fellow animal creatures.

In fact, while I am on the path of socially-ostracizable opinions, let me go ahead and say that I remain persuaded that we are all communicating - plant, animal, vegetable, mineral - and that we - a terrible thought, considering how our own species has handled the responsibility - are mere ins and outs of one another; mere snakes eating our own tail; mere extraneous limbs of the same organism; mere leaves to branches to roots to flowering buds to spores to the fallen fruit rotting in our own shade; mere quanta of light transformed to quanta of light and expressed individually only in the viewing.

We have come here for a reason. Much as I wish to condemn the inhuman acts of humanity (isn't that an interesting choice of phrase?), they were acts committed by humanity so they are, in fact, human. Which means: we are of, and from, and attached to this, our beautiful Earth.

Which means that what we have done, and do, we must own as our Own. And being that it is our Own and it is we who are of and from it, then it is we who must change it.

Is our enslavement, at worst, and our "protection," at best, of other animal species the same thing as what we have done and do to our own species? There is of course a natural strangeness to the idea that we would do something like that to those who are, indeed, so exactly similar to us. So, perhaps, no.

But if the differences between humans from different continents and gene pools are insignificant, I am scarcely convinced that the differences between humans and other animals are so grand. I cannot come up with a reason that creatures who experience pain, suffering, need, joy, sympathy, empathy and curiosity are categorized so differently from one another. I think it is an assumption that we need to question, with rather a good deal of ferocious curiosity ourselves.

I have news for you. The stag bells, water snows, summer has gone. Wind high and cold, the sun low, short its course, the sea running high.

Deep red the bracken, its shape lost, the wild goose has raised its accustomed cry. Cold has seized the birds wings, season of ice:

this is my news.

*I am still in Amsterdam. Plane ticket in hand, a few hours before departure, we went for our final briefing over a detailed map of Congo and were told (among other very relevant things) to unpack, revise and check back into the hotel. Things changed. We'll leave next week instead. In the meantime, how about those museums?

With all the cheese, beer and cheap bike rentals at my disposal, I should be fine with that change in plans. Instead, I'm jumpy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

What We Pack; What We Carry

2011-08-28T01:35:00.009-05:00

I find myself silent in Amsterdam.

In part because it is such a quiet city. With vehicles discouraged, the space of noise expands around us. A million bicycles startle the tourists, unaccustomed as we are to their terrifying fly-bys of silent two-wheelers.

But the bicycles also leave room: for human voices, for overhearing the conversations of strangers on a busy city street, or the gentle discussion of two passing cyclists, or a child's plea to a parent. We hear these things normally only at very close range, or in the privacy of a muffled home that is otherwise sealed off from the world - a world which we assume to be, by definition, a noisy, squabbling cacophony.

But was it, always?

Here, there is a human environment: Pisa-leaning buildings at human scale, curving streets and alleys at human scale, noise launched and expanded in a human space, dominated by our self-generated decibels, instead of those of the machine.

We hear the Human Voice in this city. It is something I was not aware of having lost. In deference to the loud world, the human voice – no competition to the decibels of progress – has taken on the nature of silence. What is it, compared to the din of a world at work? How can such a small thing, such a quiet thing, count?

Overwhelmed by the clamor of aural assault, it is a voice of which we have despaired; it is a noise that we have tired of straining to hear, forgetting somewhere along the way that it is perhaps the only noise, of all the noises, that matters at all.

For what do we live our lives? For whom? To which voice and what noise, will we respond?

In the end, we are a continuency of a given point in time. We are a possibility collapsed, and expanded, and collapsed again on a single moment of truth, or of potential, or of harm.

We are what we practice, and we are given perhaps to practicing merely (and only, and always) what we are.

In the rain of Amsterdam. In the August of the earthquake, and the NY hurricane. At the level of the human voice. In the year of choice.

What measures do we use?

Yesterday, what made me smile: two flustered pigeons alighting suddenly, flapping inches from my face and me gasping like a child, wide-eyed and innocent in front of a stranger's camera lens, thrilled, grinning; a little girl in pink pants riding on the handlebars of her father's bike, sticking her legs straight into the wind, golden curls waving; two cyclists plowing through puddles and sheets of rain, umbrella blown backwards and rain jackets flapping and them giggling madly at the absurdity of the moment and me on the corner, as soaked as them, laughing, too.

It is a moment of transition for me, and this blog and its audience. I normally write about human rights, development aid, Haiti. Or, at least, these are the measures that I use to guide my writing and to justify my meandering thoughts.

Not knowing my new parameters, I have mistakenly been silent, though what I want to say is – as always – not actually about MSF, or the technical aspects of defending human rights, or of development aid, or about Haiti, though I love and miss it.

What I want to say is about what it has always been about: about how we are such perfect imperfections stumbling so blindly through a world of breathtaking beauty, and of heart-stopping tragedy.

It is about how our perception is our reality; about how we believe we are passive but we are actually active, every day and each moment; about how we are creating our world around us as we go; about how we spend so much time worrying about so little and so little time working on so much; about how the infinite is contained in the tiniest moment; about how it is our voices, our own voices internally and communally, that should guide us.

About how we do not even know what it is we might be losing with the world we are choosing, and how we have become accustomed to ignoring the things that are actually the most important to this, our human life.

I leave tomorrow for the DRC.

Carrying: 3 pairs of pants, 7 shirts, 9 pairs of underwear, a woven scarf, a dress, hiking boots and three pairs of socks, Keen sandals and flip-flops, a sundry assortment of toiletries, a small statue of the Buddha, the information CD, a copy of “King Leopold's Ghost,” a thin green prayer book, my camera and my laptop, my fleece and my rain jacket and space for the bag of chocolates (a social obligation for the region) that I will buy in some Dutch shop before I go.

It seems like a lot to bring.

A new friend who is leaving for Haiti next week asked me over the phone yesterday what, of my luggage, I had been especially grateful to have while I was there. I knew she intended the question the way I responded – a bathing suit, a roll of toilet paper, sturdy shoes – but all I could think of in my head were the things that do not fit well into a suitcase:

Love. Gratitude. Patience. Humility.

More kindness than you think you need or know you have.

The ability to sing. The willingness to pray.

The capacity to hold hands and hug people who are dirty and do not smell good and to see past it to what matters, the remembrance that you are small, the understanding that you are infinite, the generosity of spirit to unhinge fear and unbridle self-preservation, to let free the apprehension, to release the anxiety and to shout from the rooftops: safe harbor! Safe harbor! for the ships of possibilities that are, even now, on their way to find you, through the darkness of the night, past the crushing of the rocky shoals, out in the unclaimed waters.

It sounds like the weight of the world.

But it is a weight inverse to its absorption: the more of it you carry, the more it carries you.

Training in Amsterdam

2011-08-20T08:35:00.007-05:00

I am currently in Amsterdam, training with Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) to begin working as a logistician in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; I will be departing within the next week.

In late August of 2011, the raucous summertime of the American south does not extend to the canals of Amsterdam.

In Amsterdam, the chill of fall has already begun to swirl the air, and the flaps of our unsuitable cotton shirts, and the winds are already twirling the feathers of the ducks that flutter and nap on old tarpaulins stretched over boats lining each canal.

Whose boats are these? Beside the floating houses (modern architecture and chic furniture for European sensibilities), the little skiffs are a mostly sorry affair: paint flaking or entirely exfoliated by time and water, leaf smattered, one boat half sunk into the water and so a favorite of the fowl, who paddle so much more easily to the shelter of its roughened boards.

It is a contrast, Amsterdam, to wherever we are going. We know this, the 40 odd gathered, without being explicitly told; perhaps it is a part of why we are qualified to be here. It is more of a contrast, Amsterdam, than would be New York city, I think, where I have just been, or, certainly, my small Virginian hometown.

More of a contrast than the flat soy fields of Tidewater, where we have a family home that juts into a shallow cove of the Chesapeake bay: seasonal jellyfish, tempermental sandbar and crab-pot, chicken-neck dock included. Heat, humidity and moldy walls included. Small town teenage pregnancy included. Cheap thrift stores and expensive restaurants included.

Seen through socio-economics, the world takes on hues of similarity, limiting the color scheme to two or so shades and tumbling us likewise: into grayness, or into light. The cities are alike, the country is alike, and the small villages of the world flow into one another – prejudices, isolation, suspicions, protection of community, mothers.

We are a group both anticipated and unexpected: largely European but with more global southern colleagues than I expected, one token American and one token Australian, ages from the mid-20s to the late-50s, but overall young.

It is one of the more relevant questions here: who agrees to such an assignment? Or such a salary (“in the spirit of volunteerism”).

Who agrees to be sent to Nowhere's nowhere, to be an ambassador of small kindnesses in a cyclone of aid, corruption, or war?

You must be crazy, of course, a little bit. You must be a wee idealistic. You must be reaching for something just a little higher, a little beyond the grasp, a little skyward and bright-burning-sun blocked. You must be committed to things that are not necessarily named. You must be the kind of person who leans over towering edges and wonders, far beyond the usual moment, what it would be like to fall.

We are going to Asia, Africa, the Pacific and Central Asia. The official language is English, but many of us were hired for our French. We are speaking English here, and after 8 hours of errands and 7 hours of training yesterday I was duly fatigued. But at least half of my colleagues are also doing this training in a language less intuitive; they must be exhausted.

To anticipate a realm of danger and disaster is to design your mind for stress. It is perhaps a mistake. It is perhaps more crucial that we design our minds for humanity and for empathy; for reminders of our principles.

I do not know what other people are doing in their heads while they listen to these lectures but for me, I am rolling a running tape, reminding myself of my personal commitments, my spiritual beliefs, the dedications that I have previously pledged: not for my job, but for my life.

Fear comes from our investment and attachment to belief in a separable self. Courage, from believing in something beyond the lines of person, of identity and of the human timeframe.

These are brave people in our group. Brave people in the photos of refugee camps and epidemics. Brave people. And I am not one to shower the term lightly on the crowd.

For whatever it is worth, it is good to be part of a group that believes that all human beings have certain inalienable and fundamental rights, and that the failure of a state, the explosion of armed conflict and international political-incorrectness are not excuses for their dismissal, nor for their lack. They are reasons; but they are not explanations. It is good to be somewhere where saying, "We must do it because it is the right thing to do," is often enough motivation for a team. It is good to simply know that there are these other people in the world, and that they also are trying to make it better.

A Grand Move

2011-08-20T01:19:00.005-05:00

Haiti has entered my heart in a way that surprises even me. I have been home, in the US, for more than a month - for interviews and family business - and yet my breath catches with every mention of the country.

I call my friends weekly and check the news daily. I see NGO promotional photos with wide-eyed babies, and know immediately that they are Haitian. I recognize the steel drum art in the homes of friends and want to tell people about the artists in Croix-des-bouquets and how it is incredible that Haiti, after enduring so much, still pours itself into creation. I miss the place. I care about it deeply.

Which is why my news is bittersweet.

I have been hired by Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) to start a new job: as a logistician for a large-scale measles vaccine campaign in the rural Democratic Republic of Congo for the next 6-12 months. It is thrilling to start working for an organization with such a revolutionary and principled reputation; it is intimidating and terrifying; it is so worth it.

I have not yet sorted out the details of how I will be writing about this experience. There are security considerations that take precedence. But there are also advocacy principles that are loud and clear. The discussions with headquarters are still to come, and I will let you know the outcome.

As I embark on this new journey, Haiti is still in my mind and heart; my location will change but I hope the scope of my advocacy will not.

In the meantime, please continue following; I will be posting.

The Poverty With Which I Am Comfortable

2011-08-10T10:15:00.016-05:00

Sweat poured from his face and turned his red shirt magenta. Was it the heat? Or him coming off a steep high? Was it fear?

The man bent toward me, dusty plastic bags shifting against his back, a few sweat droplets falling to the floor, turning the dirt from his flapping shoes into a few muddy spots on the tile. He extended a dripping palm and lifted his eyes from the level of his tucked chin. “Please, ma'am...?”

I shook my head.

The Greyhound bus station was proving to be everything that the lore of Greyhound is supposed to be. The first conversation I heard when I sat down on the bench went like this:

Man, looking at Woman's shirt: “How 'bout that? Music Festival 2008.”

Woman: “I was pregnant in 2008.”

Man: “I was in jail in 2008.”

Woman: “Well, I was in county in 2009.”

Man: “Well, aren't we just horrible people!”

Woman from across the room: “Sherry, get ya ass over here! The bus gonna leave ya ass!”

Man to Woman #1, smiling to me: “Yeah, I gave that girl your seat 'cause she was so cute.”

Me: polite middle class white girl smile

Man: “Just kiddin.' I'm just kiddin'”

Man answering phone: “Hey Chuck! Yeah, I'm on a bus right now to Boston, Massachussetts. I'm gonna live up there for a while to work. Gotta go where the work is, you know? Yeah. Well, I'm part Mexican so they can help me out, my Mexican brothers. Figure I'll go to truck driver school. How's the wife? How's your kid? Shacking up? Ah, he's definitely shacking up. You're gonna be a grandpa soon! Alright, see ya later, Pops.”

This is verbatim. I scribbled it down in shorthand, feeling like it was important. And also feeling ashamed.

By this point the man in the red shirt had made his way around the room, bending over to my neighbor (“Sorry, man, I just don't got it right now.”) and then to a middle-aged black lady, who just shook her head. Nobody gave him money. He shuffled past me with his bags. I didn't turn around to see where he went, or what became of him.

The Greyhound bus station is a weird world. This is probably true no matter who you are.

But I think it is even more true for someone like me - middle-class, white, more rural than urban, rich enough to afford a car - or at least know enough people who do -, international traveler accustomed to airports, speaker of a language other than English (by way of schooling, not birth), person who frequents coffee shops, person whose starting salary was nearly four times greater than the national poverty threshold for 1 ($10,890).

Person who could barely imagine how I would get by on $10,890 a year.

I do not regularly overhear conversations between my neighbors about the time they've spent in jail. If I had not done volunteer work in "social justice" I would not know anyone has been in jail.

This is just not something we (sarcasm intended) do.

I also do not know anyone personally (outside of my "work" experiences) who is or has been homeless. I know plenty of people who have been on food stamps. I know plenty of people who have relied on family and friends to get them through the times when the rent money just wasn't there.

But homeless? On the street? Begging for money from strangers? In America?

Nope.

Because I don't really do poverty in America. Of course I've volunteered with people who were "poor": food pantries, clean needle programs, condom distributions for sex workers, free clinics, distributing the day-old leftovers from Pannera's on the back streets of Atlanta.

Yep, I was there. One more cute white girl pulling up in her beat-up Subaru wagon, hauling the pastries.

No, poverty in America is terrifying. It comes far too close to home. It comes far too close to that no-go conversation zone for Americans (or at least, white Americans): RACE.

It comes far too close to the greatest social divider in the States: CLASS.

It edges right up against my own prejudices, my own fears, my own intellectual and educational snobbery and shoves its fist into my comfortable family norms: hard-work and education will get you somewhere, you may not have money but you can have dignity, your pockets may be empty but if you are of good character you can still hold your head high, just because you aren't rolling in dough doesn't mean you're less than anyone (as long as you don't get pregnant before marriage, as long as you dress modestly, as long as you answer politely, as long as your children say please and thank you, as long as you are known for upholding civic duties, as long as your front lawn is clean, as long as you conjugate your verbs correctly, as long as you match your subjects and don't end sentences in prepositions, as long as you maintain good taste for heaven's sake!...).

So I decided to do poverty in developing countries instead. It's easy. At first. The cause is so moving, the people so "dignified" and "deserving," so "resilient." And so grateful. Did I mention that?

Sunday a week ago I was driving through DC with a friend of mine. We pulled to a red light. We were cracking up about something, belting out improvised lyrics to a song by the Wailing Jennys. I had my feet stuck up on the dashboard and my arm out to get some sun.

As we waited a man came into the view on the sidewalk, walking past us. He was pushing a grocery cart. The song ended and there was suddenly enough silence to hear our engine rumbling and the creak of his cart wheels as they wobbled along the concrete. The man was wearing a clean yellow shirt and too-big pants cinched neatly with a belt.

He had adjusted a tarp to cover his carp. He had folded it just so, to fit the size of the cart. He had tucked the tarp in at all four corners.

As he walked, the man twitched involuntarily and each twitch of his right shoulder would jerk his shirt above his belt, messing it up. After each twitch, the man brought his left hand over and adjusted the shirt, smoothing it back in place. So this is how he walked: twitch, adjust and smooth; twitch, adjust and smooth. Sometimes, instead, he just rested his hand on his hip to hold the shirt in place, upholding appearances.

His few hairs were brushed.

He had shaved.

What I complain about most and insist upon most is that if people (and here I mean, my fellow Americans, and my fellow privileged few) were to actually see the people of the world who are living in utter poverty, whose lives are ruined by the sequelae of our capitalist insistency, who are in these awful circumstances, who are oppressed and persecuted in ways you just can't excuse, then they wouldn't. I truly believe that the majority of people would not be able to stomach the heartache and suffering and would be willing - happy - to change their lives to prevent it, if they could see these people...really, truly, see them.

The only trouble is, they just live so far away.

Right?

As if no one is oppressed in this country. As if no one here lives in poverty, or lives with a life shattered by the sequelae of our capitalist insistency. As if there are not people here persecuted in ways that I cannot excuse. As if they are less "dignified," less "deserving," less "resilient."

There is a center in my hometown that serves the homeless and the "poor." It is a brilliant design - church run and community centered, family-oriented, bright and cheerful, locally funded, locally staffed. I sing their praises often and contribute to their fundraisers. I bought their Christmas CD last year. I smile every time I drive by their center.

I have never been there. The truth is that it kind of scares me. What will I see? Who will I find? What will I not be able to excuse? How will I be forced to change my comfortable understanding of my safe place, my sweet hometown, the refuge to which I return after traveling the troubles of the world?

A few years back I volunteered with the refugee resettlement center in my town. I visited a Russian/Uzbek/Khazak family several times a week and brought children's books to teach them English vocabulary. I drove them to Wal-mart to fill out job applications. I drank a lot of tea and learned the Turkish words for "refrigerator" and "thank-you." I learned how impossible it is to navigate the most basic systems of our city if you do not speak English and have not grown up in American culture (the Wal-Mart job application required that the applicant enter his/her high school mascot for one of the password questions).

I learned that my own home is no exception to the world of inequality, racism and poverty. None of our homes or hometowns is exempt from these forces. We just happen to live in a society where many of us can jetstream ourselves and block off most of our knowledge of "the other."

We, among those monied, can choose our neighborhood (and so, to a great degree, our neighbors), our church, our grocery stores, our gas stations, our workplace, our driving routes (because we drive), our vacation spots, our news sources, our restaurants, even the friends of our kids (though here there is a slight window of chance), our music, our coffee shops, our own friends.

By choosing "foreign" poverty I surely never thought I was trying to run away from my own.

If I thought about it at all I probably figured I was just going to the places of greatest need. Surely a single mother in Rwanda or a homeless man in Haiti is more desperately poor than the same in Richmond, VA or in Washington, DC? Right? Maybe that is how I viewed things ten years ago. But now I have to question that assumption.

On a community forum for our small town I just read a post yesterday, "Single mom of 2 needs room/apt in exchange for any kind of work: would accept any living situation as long as you don't mind us there, even if it's just one room. Would be willing to do farm work, manual labor, gardening, housekeeping, pet chores, childcare, elder care, or anything similar. I am a fast learner and don't balk at any kind of work."

Life is hard everywhere. Human suffering is profound and strenuous, it is isolating, it is considered shameful, it is a vast unknowable terrifying darkness. It is something we will all go through at some point or another. It is not limited to geography, nor to country, nor to class, nor to race.

You do not have to travel abroad to help those who are suffering. Far from it.

It is just so much more comfortable to think about the poverty that is far away from us, the poverty that cannot touch our lives without our consent, the poverty of those who speak a language we do not understand so that we can choose what we hear, the poverty of those whose only puzzled response can be a smile, so that we can take home the belief that we have helped them, so that we can sleep sweetly with our pride, so that we can go to bed calculating our charitable donations and knowing that we have made a difference.

While down the road the single mother is eyeing that community center for the homeless and thinking, my god, how far have I descended? how far will I go? do I really have to enter that nameless land? that place where no one will want to know me, where no one will want to acknowledge me, where my own neighbors will truly wish for me to just stay out of sight, just so they can feel a bit more comfortable, with their version of poverty?

Thank God I took that Greyhound bus. Because it is only this - our choosing to place ourselves outside of our comfort zone, our being courageous enough to invite the terrible discomfort of self-reflection, our volunteering to go into our own HOME and take stock - that will change this world.

I am going to visit the community center, scared or not.

Of what am I afraid? That I might see a poverty with which I am not comfortable. That I might be morally forced to acknowledge that the poverty with which I have been comfortable is not enough. That we, too, own our share of injustices.

That, professional work aside, at home, perhaps it is I who am part of the problem.

I'll tell you how it goes.

Oh, The Lonesome Wind and Rain

2011-08-07T12:40:00.019-05:00

Hurricane Emily did not devastate Haiti. One feels a certain responsibility for namesakes and this one was getting mental lectures from me as soon as I saw the official name list for 2011.

"Looks like Emily will bypass Haiti!" said a cheerful US weather reporter, "All they'll get are some heavy winds and rain. They really dodged a bullet here!"

But oh, the lonesome wind and rain; it is they who are the banshees of this half of Hispaniola.

When it rains in Port-au-Prince

The water flows from the highest hill (the upscale Petion-ville and its residential peaks) down to the paths of least resistance, the base of the city, pooling in the flatlands of Cite Soleil, Martissant and the port road, where the city's poorest spread their markets and tin-roofed hovels.

The drainage canals also end here and so it is here that you will find solid rivers, packed ten or twelve feet deep with garbage and human waste, collecting at gravity's end, so thickly stuffed that a child can walk across the top with no more consequence than setting the gelatinous substrate pulsing, and the river of waste rolling like the top of a Jello mold, not quite set.

What do we see in these "rivers?"

Styrofoam take-away containers, first and foremost. They are the lightest, so they rise to the top. They are also the dominant form of container used by all street vendors plying rice and beans and fried plantains with picklies.

Styrofoam is almost like Haiti’s national flower.

Without the rains to wash the trash out to sea I imagine that the city would quickly be covered to the rooftops with Styrofoam take-away containers; they would cover the island like a McDonald's ball pit and muffle any life that once deigned to cry from below.

But the slums are not the end of the water’s journey. After a half-hour’s rain storm, sludge-brown streams will flood the roads and inundate markets and houses at least a foot deep, often more. Roads turn into rivers, floating cars along up to their wheel hubs, threatening to extinguish headlights, and sucking those limping or fatally injured into their mire.

School children caught in the deluge navigate their way, thigh and waist deep, by the walls of store fronts. The unlucky ones – and these are frequent – stumble into one of the few open storm drains or other frequent holes in the pavement and fall to their armpits.

More than one leg has been broken in this way.

Let it be understood: this doomsday picture is no anomaly. It rains, nightly, a third or more of the twelve months of the year in Port-au-Prince. More, with an active hurricane season. And each time – yes, each time – the rains flood the city and turn roads into rivers and rivers into torrents.

But such small things change the flow: a chunk of cement no bigger than a textbook, an outcrop of tree trunk, a wayward curb, a child's foot placed just so: perpendicular, angled, contrary.

Hurricane Emily mostly missed Haiti. But the usual rains of this season will not because they are part of the usual cycle of nature. And as it was with the earthquake, it will not be their nature killing people but the lack of appropriate accommodations, building codes and preparation that kill people.

Aren't things better down there now?

More than half a million people are still living in tents in Haiti.

Who wants to remember it? The earthquake was ages ago now. The world has moved on. Even I initially forgot to mention the earthquake in a profile about Haiti that I wrote a few months ago for the New Internationalist. The editor was rather astonished. Who can claim to know something about Haiti and yet forget the earthquake?

"Well," I said, with friends concurring, later that day, "someone who lives here."

Because the earthquake of 2010, at this point, is no longer the problem.

The problem is that there was never adequate infrastructure for the millions of people who live in Port-au-Prince, or elsewhere. The problem is that the government - even the new government - has not been able to provide its half of the social contract. The problem is that the haves live high up in the city, away from the mosquitoes and oppressive heat and flooding neighborhoods and land-sliding hillsides.

The problem is that even in Haiti no one wants to deal with those half a million people still living in tents. Or the the other half a million plus who have moved out to circumstances no better. At this point, most of the people who have the money, the land and the power, just want to "clean up."

They, like the rest of the world, do not want to look at the unpleasant sights of the people and the tent camps that are the remaining measures of how it was not our billions of dollars of aid that failed Haitians in the year after the earthquake, but the fact that our systems - and here I am speaking not only of the system of governance in Haiti, but also of the system of international aid that cannot get around that governance, and also of the system of the production and dissemination of media that demands sensationalism and grows quickly weary of substance - have failed Haitians and are continuing to fail the other disenfranchised peoples of the world.

Hurricane Emily may have missed Haiti but the lack of adequate infrastructure, governance and continued international attention will not.

While we are breathing out our sighs of relief, let us also breath in a renewed commitment to true investment, true "clean up," and true help for the people in Haiti and elsewhere.

While we are switching the weather channel, a lot of people are wading through puddles somewhere, and hoping someone out there is paying attention to more than just the latest swirl of "depression", tropical or other.

"Basket weaving is not a global poverty solution" SID 2011 World Congress

2011-08-03T07:33:00.031-05:00

"You cannot say (to the developing countries): 'Oops, slow down! Eat less chicken!

You, Chinese, only eat rice now. And you, Africans, stick with cassava.'

Hell, no! For the past 20 years you have told them that if they democratize and develop then they can have what you have.

They want meat – good meat! They want a Mercedes! ...our children are not as docile as us; they are more informed. ”

- Kandeh K. Yumkella, Director-General, UN Industrial Development Organization

SID 2011 World Congress "Common denominators:"

1) There is no longer (if ever there was) one unique development aid model

2) The need for “local ownership” (which must be defined with care) in whatever model is chosen

3) That democracy (with case-by-case modifications) and democratic processes contribute to successful long-term outcomes

4) That leadership matters and that leadership spearheaded by strong institutions brings particularly stable advantages

5) The shift in the use of technologies and the implications for development, demographics, democracies, dictators...among other things

6) That private sector collaboration is a must

7) The role of politics (that economic growth cannot take the place of public choice or a democratic process; that more developed nations sometimes must take strong political decisions to change the way they are using scarce resources)

I would also add:

8) The economic shifts constraining traditional donor countries and turning recipient countries into donors, and lower-income countries into middle-income countries.

9) The widespread demographic changes around the world: noting particularly the “youth bulge”

10) The importance of inclusivity: that the exclusion of any demographic - be it women as a class, lower castes, ethnic groups, people with different sexual orientation, groups labelled as "terrorists" who have widespread local support, religious groups, or other - detracts from successful development and sabotages whatever progress is made.

____________

Jan Pronk also discussed the role of economic development in leading to social and political development. But he issued a word of caution: "As an economist I know that there are limits to the possibilities of growth...and that we are heading for physical scarceness....Not everything can be done by the private sector. There are some things that must be done which will not bring a profit."

Pronk also made a brave observation. "Economics is important but there are limits. Economics cannot take the role of public choice decisions in a democratic process. This is (for) politics...(this) may require that Northern democracies take the decision to step backwards and to not continue growing further as fast as possible, (to) change the use of scarce resources. This is a difficult political decision."

Difficult, indeed.

Lessons from the 2011 Congress

What I took from the SID 2011 Congress were a few things. First, and foremost, that there are many intelligent, dedicated and brave people already working in this field. Second, that we need more of them but third, and more importantly, that we need a systemic change to increase the courage of our choices in the face of political opposition and fourth, that we need a paradigm shift.

It has been the global north dominating the agenda of development aid since the beginning. Many people spoke about the fact that this is currently changing - speakers quoted meetings between foreign governments and the World Bank or UN, with governments drawing clear boundaries and game-plans. A lot of people are starting to pay lip service to the idea that developing (for what that term is even worth anymore) and developed countries are now on more equal footing, and should be considered as such.

But the reality has not quite caught up to the rhetoric. Or should I say, the actions have not caught up to the attitudes, and most of the attitudes are still surface deep. People working in the field of development and humanitarian assistance see first-hand the need for real collaboration. We usually don't need to convince them. But people funding the taxes that go into the coffers for development don't. And so what is needed is something larger than a few good mottos ("Nothing about them without them") and a few good intentions. What is needed is a real paradigm shift.

The Agenda of Development is the Agenda of Our World

Oscar de Rojas, Director of South-South News reminded us on Saturday that "we still live in a world that is structured around the concept of the Nation-State. That hasn't gone away and won't go away for a while." The question, he said, is related to the formation of the Group of 20 (G20). "Nobody elected them. They are self-appointed. Who chose these 20 countries to run the world?" The question is, "What is the best system of governance for the world for the 21st century? Our global problems need global solutions."

Yiping Zhou, Director of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation, UNDP, spoke last. "The existing development architecture has not worked. We need a new, inclusive, international architecture. We need validity for your taxpayers to pay for something that is happening in another country....we have to get away from trying to improve or modify or repair a system that is unfixable."

Dr. Yumkella reminded us that we also need a new industrial revolution to spur the economies of the developing world.

I think some of these sentiments. I like especially the idea that the Nation-State is becoming more and more defunct as an effective system of international stewardship.

What I do not like is the continued emphasis on the economic development of the developing world. I look around our "developed" world and think, yes, we have amazing technologies. Yes, we have dramatically increased our lifespan.

But is this the model I want to pass on to whomever we are trying to raise from the trenches? A stalwart belief in limitless growth in spite of the reality of scare resources? a value system rooted in greed? a world where the 20 million people in New York consume more energy than 870 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa? A world where the costs of my comfortable, commercialized, capitalist life include the rape of women in Congo, the suicide bombing of weddings in Iraq, the beheadings of villagers in Mexico, the deluging of farmers in India, the stifling of hope in Haiti, the telescoping of realities for some 90% of the rest of the world so that I may live in comfort and in ease?

No.

This is not the world I want to live in. And this is not the model I want to promote.

Redefining Who Is Developed, and How

As we negotiate our new agenda for development aid I think we must have a more comprehensive discussion about the agenda of the entire world in which we live.

The so-called "development" agenda has always been discussed in terms of how to change, improve, develop, grow, transition, transform developing countries and economies.

But never how to transform, change, improve and transition developed countries.

In development aid, we are still acting like poverty and human oppression is a problem of the global south. We, in the so-called 'developed' world are still refusing to acknowledge our own role in the worldwide equation of human-made suffering. We are like a dog, biting its own tail and wondering why the tail won't budge. We are strangling our own neck with our own hands and screaming for help.

We are being greedy. And we are being stupid. And if we think we can get out alive, we are wrong.

I was trained originally as a biologist, and the tenets of biology and other natural systems are a great comfort to me when my head feels like exploding from the nonsense of daily living.

The principle of homeostasis means that a system will always reorient itself to a balanced state. This is why we sweat, to cool ourselves down. It is why excess water flows to where there is no water. It is why populations burst and decline in response to the availability of the food supply. It is why the common cold does not kill us and it is why the Navajo pray, not to overcome the droughts or the floods or other natural "disasters," but rather, that they might be in harmony with the state of their environment.

It is a strategy of survival.

Our world is wildly out of balance. We talk about "sustainability" but sustaining something means artificially arresting the process of change; it means stifling re-balancing; it means insisting on one design regardless of an environment that might demand something else.

I do not want to see sustainability in our development programs. And I do not want to see local ownership in our development models.

I want to see us seize a real sense of global ownership, where we acknowledge that we are so interconnected that even using the subject "we" is a falsehood. It should be the plurality of "I," instead, an idea for which we have no word.

I want to see a system that is not "sustained" but is rather in harmony with its environment. One that can change dynamically when called for. One that is not predicated on the requirement that a small contingent of our world - the "developed," the global north, the Western powers - maintain their non-sustainable, non-homeostatic lifestyles at the detriment of the masses.

As Andree Simon, Director of Women for Women International, said of their sponsorship program, "Once you are "responsible" for someone around the world, and know her name and how many children she has and you worry about whether she will be raped each time she goes to collect water, you regain that sense of responsibility. We are creating a new activist with every sponsorship."

In other words, it is personal.

This is the philosophy I believe we must adopt: the feeling that we are all personally responsible for each other.

As Dr. Yumkella said, "You cannot have a poverty solution that is only rural basket weaving."

Indeed, you cannot.

In my view, it is high time that we in the developed worlds stop acting as if we have reached the pinnacle of development and start realizing that we are all developing and we are all changing and that it is us - all of us, in our daily living, daily choices, and responsibilities to others - who have the power to change HOW we are developing, and HOW we are changing and HOW we want to see the stewardship of our world as we launch the 21st century.

Here is our call to action. It is up to us to hear it, and respond.

"How Do We Change This Ridiculous World?" SID World Congress: Day 2, Part II

2011-07-30T15:33:00.011-05:00

“We are not trying to prevent conflict; conflict is inevitable. We are trying to prevent the use of violence to resolve conflict. We are trying to create a culture of peace that is not merely the absence of violence.”

Jacqueline Pitanguy

They started by explaining that the women had rights. This was new. It was not just: You have the right to vote. Not only: You have the right to report a crime and receive a fair trial. Not merely: You have the right to live in peace and not be the subject of violence.

But also: You have the right (theoretically) to speak. You have the right to an opinion. You have the right to be listened to, and to be heard.

It made me wonder, in this discussion by Andree Simon of Women to Women International working with the women of Congo, what is it that, in fact, defines our rights? Where do we learn which rights we do “have”? And what does it mean to “have” them. What is the reality of these so-called “inalienable” rights if in our experience and if in our reality, they are in fact consistently subject to violation? And not just subject, but specifically targeted?

What is the nature of this “possession” in a land of total disenfranchisement?

I am often moved by influential speakers, but I am rarely brought to actual tears. Certainly not when I am supposed to be maintaining some sort of professional front and certainly not when I am sitting in the front row with nowhere to squirrel myself and my blurred eyes away.

But when Andree Simon started talking about the women of Congo, something happened near my heart and near my eyelids and I suddenly found it very difficult to read the notes I was frantically scribbling on my pad of paper. And in the moment I allowed myself to glance up at the speakers, I saw in Andree's eyes something that echoed my own.

In a room full of women - particularly a room full of women who represent significant resources in education, self-confidence and the contributing variables to actual power – there is very little persuasion that must happen to discuss what, in the world, is wrong. There is not much political correctness. There is even less pandering to the polite norms of any particular culture or religion.

In a room full of women, the shared experience of being a woman IS your culture. It IS your religion. It IS your politics.

A Panel of Women, in a Room of Women, Talking About Women: what equality?

Today again I was struck that the session that included the word “Women” in the title was attended, in vast majority, by women. Of course this is no intrinsically damnable fact. It is natural that we gravitate towards those qualities that we share. But what is unfortunate about this truth is that the dynamism of being in an audience of women, and listening to a panel entirely of women, is not something that can be shared by more people.

What strikes me on these panels is that when it is only, or predominately, women in the audience, none of the women on the panel have to spend (or waste) time talking about why their concerns and the concerns of women as a class, matter. Instead, they just go straight to the actual problem. Instead, they move forward as fluidly as one does when in an atmosphere of shared paradigm.

They speak of compassion, case by case justice, the intuitive rightness of things and wrongness of others, the investment in children and education and the emotional as well as the physical parameters of what real safety is. They do this in the way that most panels (by default comprised of a mixture of genders at least and nearly never comprised of only women, since then it would have to be a “women's” panel, like a movie with all black people has to be a “black” movie but a movie with all white people is supposed to be for everybody) speak about things like the necessity of warfare, the requirement of punishment, absolutism, criminals as a class instead of humans who have gone astray, and “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” to use a Michael Gerson term.

Mahnaz Afkhami, founder and President of Women's Learning Partnership for Rights, Development and Peace, launched straight into asking, “How do we change this ridiculous system across the world?”

She really said the word: “ridiculous,” which it is – this dumb system we have across the world – but which you really just aren't supposed to say, in spite of all of us knowing it. Ms. Afkhami asked, “When we have all the capabilities that we do – to feed the world, to cure disease – then look at what we are doing. Instead of solving these problems, we are increasing the gaps. Why? Because the ways in which we are making the decisions and the people who are making them are the wrong ways and the wrong people. We need to change the fundamental structure of human relations.”

Where Do We Get the Power in Empowerment?

Early in the presentation, Aruna Uprety, Founder of Rural Health and Education, put up a slide of armed women insurgents in Nepal a few years back. The insurgency in Nepal changed everything while it was happening, Ms. Uprety told us. “Once (the women) had the power to shoot people, they had The Power.”

But is this the power we want?

“Development” editor Wendy Harcourt asked this very question. Should we feel great that women in Nepal are more empowered now because...they have guns? Is that what we've been working towards?

Aruna responded with honesty. The majority of women with guns were from the rural areas, she said. They had been victimized. They had been “violated,” that word I hate but that is used so often in other countries, as if it is a euphemism for the word “rape” instead of an even stranger perversion of the idea of crossed boundaries.

The rural women had experienced far more trauma Ms. Uprety said, and so the Maoists who armed them took advantage of this fact. They gave them guns and told them, “No one can rape you if you have a gun.”

And so the women were happy.

And so the women, they say, were empowered.

But while we are trying to create a culture of peace that is more than the absence of violence we are also trying to create a culture of empowerment that is more than just a reaction to violence.

Today's panel on "Women, Peace, and Security and Prospects for a Sustainable Future," turned into far more than that. It turned into a room full of sisters (and a few brothers), and mothers and grandmothers and aunts and cousins; it turned into a room full of people who believed in the same foundation and who wanted the same ultimate thing: not, as the saying goes, any favors for their sex. Who needs them?

But merely for our brethren
to take their feet
from off our necks

And let us get on with our business of creating peace, empowerment and safety for all of the world.

"The Only Woman In the Room Was the Interpreter" SID World Congress: Day 2, Part I

2011-07-30T12:50:00.017-05:00

Tessie San Martin, Donald Steinberg, Rick Barton

What Donald Steinberg, Deputy Administrator of USAID, learned during his work in Angola was that, “any peace agreement that calls itself 'gender-neutral' is, by definition, discriminatory against women.”

What Donald Steinberg learned in Angola, was that their proud disarmament agreement sent home legions of men who had been absent from villages for 20 years and left women, who had moved into positions of empowerment in the absence of the usual social hierarchy, with a new “rash of domestic violence” with which to contend.

At his meeting to finalize the terms of the peace accords, Mr. Steinberg and about 40 other men decided to clear all the roads of landmines to prod the economy and make travel safer. The only woman in the room was the Russian Ambassador's interpreter.

What Mr. Steinberg and his colleagues realized later – and too late – was that “If we had had a woman at the table, she would have pointed out that we didn't clear the fields (of landmines), the water sources, the woods. So the women went out to till the fields and to collect water and they were getting their legs blown off left and right. Then when we tried to tell the women's groups, look, you're empowered now, come contribute to the process, they told us, “this peace agreement was never about us. It was about the men with guns. It wasn't about us at all.”

The end of the formal conflict “had brought about a new, more insidious form of violence against women.”

Local Ownership and Women in Conflict

This morning's plenary session at the SID World Congress was entitled “Discussion on the Nexus between Conflict and Development.” It started off with a usual enough question: can you actually work on development during an active conflict? Or is peace a pre-requisite to development work?

This question was not really answered. Instead, the discussion quickly morphed into two major issues:

1) local ownership - over processes and institutions and agendas
2) women in conflict and how they are disproportionately affected and disproportionately under-represented in the resolutions of conflict (“if you are not even at the start of the race, then the race is going to be designed differently and you are automatically going to be disadvantaged.” Ambassador Rick Barton)

In terms of the issue of women in conflict, the all-male panelists (the moderator was a woman – Tessie San Martin, of Plan USA) spoke eloquently and passionately. Mr. Steinberg talked about the many and diverse initiatives of USAID to institutionalize gender norms and gender sensitivity in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs. He said the issue of women in conflict was “a sweet spot” in his heart, but may have meant, “a sore spot.” Sweetness makes you want to rest and relax; soreness makes you uncomfortable enough to get up and keep moving.

Dalia Ziada, Cairo Director of the American Islamic Congress
What was not discussed by any of the panelists but would fit in well was a point made by economist Caren Grown in yesterday's session on Gender Equality. Ms. Grown pointed out that “we don't want to encourage a certain budget percentage to be spent 'on women.' We want to look at our expenditures and ask, do these expenditures and programs serve women and girls in the same way that they serve men and boys? Or do they increase the amount of unpaid work for women? Do they increase or decrease the burden on women and girls to the same degree that they do for men and boys?”

The Disconnect

There is a disconnect that I have been seeing these past two days. At this conference, we are listening to the top-level administrators and elected and nominated officials speak about critical development issues. For the most part, they are speaking with informed, intelligent voices and they are talking about things like "local ownership" by saying, "I want to start off by talking about something that we have done badly: local ownership. From the outset, we are not doing as good a job at hearing local voices or getting adequate data."

This is true. Anyone who has worked in the field or, hopefully, anyone working in development aid or anywhere near it, gets that this is a major problem. But what happens then?

What happens is that there are parallel tracks of speech and action. On the speech side, there is a lot of lip-service to things like "local ownership," "sustainability," "community involvement," and other development buzzwords. And on the action side, there are gender codes of conducts and anti-trafficking policies drafted and passed, there is the World Bank opening up 7,000 data sets from the past 50 years for free access online, there are programs in India to role-play with adolescents and change gender norms, there are inter-governmental meetings to open up trade and increase private investment in emerging economies, there is the chairman of the CAF Development Bank of Latin America who has had more meetings in China than in New York in the past three years, there is Ambassador Barton saying that we should emphasize local solutions, in collaboration with the locals, themselves.

All of this sounds great, right?

But then during the question and answer session this morning a man stood up and said, in sum, “Hey, if you are so invested in local ownership, then how do you deal with issues like 'burn rates,' that essentially force organizations to rush around and spend all of their money in the last quarter so that they will be awarded the same amount the next time around? How do you deal with the administrative burdens of compliance oversight that take up massive amounts of overhead and time that could otherwise be spent implementing programs?”

How, a former senator from Columbia wanted to know, are we going to deal with the drug trade in Latin America and the fact that many high-level people have publicly stated that the US policy on drug control has been a failure?

How, I want to know, do we expect to increase things like local ownership, sustainability and community involvement when the people we send to implement our programs in all of these developing countries spend most of their days in air-conditioned, highly-secured compounds and then drive home each night (in air-conditioned cars) to air-conditioned, highly-secured houses, with housekeepers who do all the shopping and with salaries that are grotesquely far from the salaries of all the local staff?

How, as Ambassador Barton pointed out, can we have 100 “successful” projects (because if you read any newsletter or quarterly report from these development projects, they are sure to tell you how “successful” everything is) and one colossal failure? If you build a shiny new school yet can afford only one paid teacher and have a village full of children that cannot walk to the school without fear of ambush, then you have not succeeded.

Or, as Ambassador Barton put it, “if you think you are going on vacation in California and somehow end up in Belgium, then something went wrong. The fact that you made all that effort to get on the plane doesn't matter.”

What is the gap and why does it matter?

Listening to all of these people in very important and influential positions, I feel inspired and I feel happy to hear them echoing my own sentiments about development. I see them moved by the “right” things, and that moves me.

But what I see out in the field is not the same thing. What I see are congressional visits where 25 people fly into Haiti at 11:00am, rush around in armored vehicles with military escorts to three projects, snap photos with directors and speak to NO local people and then are back in a plane by 3:00pm and back in their DC beds by 8:00pm.

This is NOT appropriate development. This is NOT an appropriate use of tax-payers' money. And this is NOT leading us towards local ownership or sustainability of anything other than our own messed-up system or, what a laugh, community involvement.

I have been surprised by the passion and sense of what I have heard at the conference the past two days. But what is surprising me most is, if that is how these leaders of the development aid agenda really feel, then why don't I see that at the level of the field?

There is a gap here, between what change-makers are saying and, possibly, what they are trying to do, and what is actually being done in the world of development aid.

I think this gap is largely structural. And I think this gap is political, and hypocritical. And I think this gap is due to us not actually wanting to take a truly honest look at what real change requires – which is the focus being on something other than profit.

During yesterday's afternoon session we heard about the work of Barbara Ward. Sir Richard Jolly quoted her words, which I will have summarize in essence, since I cannot find the actual quotation. She said that the solutions to living together in a sustainable, respectful way are to be found at the domestic level. It is in many of our own homes that we have already solved these problems of impulsive anger, arbitrary violence and selfishness.

It is true that the solutions to worldwide poverty, suffering, preventable deaths and disease are somewhat complicated. But they are not that complicated.

What is complicated is trying to say one thing and do another. What is complicated is insisting that our objectives are altruistic and selfless while arranging our system in a profiteering and selfish manner that benefits the haves and sabotages all efforts to help the have-nots. What is complicated is arranging security for tens of thousands of aid workers because we don't want to admit that we only need security when we do not have community, that if we lived in and with and in harmony with the communities where we work, we would have no need for bodyguards or armored cars or compounds protected by men with sawed-off shotguns.

What is complicated is when what we think, and what we say, and what we do are not aligned.

If this is how we choose to continue to implement development aid, than no number of eloquent speeches by important people are going to keep it from being like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic on the fateful night of April 15, 1912.

We are at that night, we are in that window of opportunity and I what I want to see are the words that I am hearing this weekend actually applied to the reality of the field. What I want to see is the implementation of the policy that Donald Steinberg quoted as the leading phrase at USAID (so far limited to "women's issues"):

“Nothing about them, without them.”

A Haitian friend in Port-au-Prince

Gender Equality in a Changing World; SID World Congress: Day 1 Part II:

2011-07-29T17:29:00.006-05:00

The odd thing about being a woman is how often it gets pointed out to you, particularly in ways that are meant to remind you that you are being respected, or kindly thought of, or showered with allowances. One's womanhood, in proper contexts of course, is generally pointed out with a bevy of sentences and key words that make it clear that all this effort of politeness and resource is an attempt to make up for that most difficult of facts: that you are, by right of birth and by grace of society and by the shame of reality, a woman.

Which is why discussions about “Women,” as a defined category and constituency, always make me a bit fidgety.

Sarah Degnan Kambou, Caren Grown, Rawwida Baksh, Shobha Raghuram
However, it was a true pleasure listening to the speakers this afternoon. Moderated by Shobha Raghuram, Rawwida Baksh, Caren Grown and Sarah Degnan Kambou spoke to a group of about 55 women (and a stalwart 7 men) on “Gender Equality in a Changing World.” Ms. Baksh started the discussion with a summary of a report by the Casablana Group and Ms. Grown followed with her perspective as a feminist economist. Ms. Kambou introduced lessons from the implementer's perspective and then various questions were entertained.

What came out of the discussion were several points. First, that in order for women's voices and perspectives to be heard, it is the current dominant belief and policy of women's rights organizations that the winning phrase is: “investing in women is smart economics.”

Second, that there is not an infallible correlation between women who are educated and women making choices that support other women. The prime example was feticide in India and the issue of the “missing” girls of the world, as mothers self-select abortion of girl children in preference for boys. Ms. Baksh pointed out that one study showed the highest rates of this happening among the richest provinces and for the most educated women in India. Why? Because education does not, by default, equal a transfer of real power. Because there is more to the saving of a child than its rights alone; there are also the considerations of family, and of context and of the social exclusion or inclusion of the mother.

Another point arose about the presence of fathers in delivery rooms. In Chile, a policy change requires that a male partner or a person of the woman's choice be present during the birth of a child; fathers attending the birth of their children rose from 20-50%. In Mexico, public hospitals still forbid a father to be present at a delivery. No explanation was offered today, but the result is that at the birth of their children, fathers are anywhere but in the room experiencing that first gasp of air.

What does all of this mean? How do we feel about it, as public health and development practitioners? As women, ourselves?

Firstly, I feel pretty reactive to the idea that the leading motto of the World Bank, in terms of “women's issues,” is that “investing in women is smart economics.” At least one other participant in the room today brought up the same point: that, fine, we understand the economic case but what about the rights case? Caren Grown responded, from a long-time activist's perspective, that what activists have found is the economic case, “helps lawmakers visualize” the problems, and be more responsive to making policies that change them.

Maybe so. Ok, definitely so. This is age-old wisdom from elementary school onwards- show us the data, show us the quantitative example and that proves your point and convinces the wayward and makes you right and means that we can base our decisions on the information instead of something arbitrary, like what is “right” or “wrong” or what just feels “right” or “wrong.”

So the scientific method of observation and experiments and collecting data and designing further experiments based solely on that data – well, it has a lot to offer.

But it also misses an enormous ocean of information, and it misses piles of opportunities.

The trouble with arguing that “investing in women is smart economics” is that it fits, in my view, straight into a patriarchal, capitalistic viewpoint. By disaggregating our data by sex and tagging gender norms and codes of conduct onto our proposals and policies, are we not just feeding into the system that is already the problem?

I understand that this is a basic feminist debate, far better articulated by other thinkers before my time and currently.

But I remain unconvinced that the discussion in development about women, should be a discussion about WOMEN. When we talk about gender-based violence, I think, well, what if we started investing our monies and energy into programs that decrease ALL violence. It doesn't make me feel better thinking about a man who used to hit his wife, but is 'reformed,' now continuing to hit his neighbor. Any violence violates principles of the sacred.

I share many things with my fellow women, and I am among the first to leap to the defense of a woman in any context, understanding that between us there is some bond, unexplainable and indefinable and riotously colorful and moving. But the thing that I find links us, more than anything else, is the disrespect we have received through the world system into which we were born. Do I want to change that system? YES. But I want to change it. Really, actually change it. I don't just want to accommodate our belief system and way of viewing the world to its parameters.

Of course, there is a short term and there is a long-term and I am not the first to want the long-term to hurry up and get here. But I think this issue deserves serious consideration; how much do we adapt our - if there is such a thing as "our" for all women of the world...and I think, to some degree, there is - paradigm and foundational reality, and the lessons afforded us by our female abilities and perspectives, to a paradigm that is the one that does not acknowledge them?

Madame Raghuram said it best, I think. She said, living as a woman in places where rights are not respected, is "like living a low-level, intense civil war," and that the challenges to women to participate in democracy begin, as feticide shows us, even before birth.

So, where do we start? Of course we start with women. Of course we value the slow shift in paradigm that includes the gender key words and codes of conduct in policies. Of course we hold panel discussions with accomplished, intelligent, perceptive women: if for no other reason than to inspire the rest of us to keep on going, until the day when we no longer have to point out, and label ourselves as Women, but can rest easy...as Human.

Wendy Harcourt, Shobha Raghuram, Rawwida Baksh

Who Is Setting the Development Agenda? SID Congress: Day 1, Part 1

2011-07-29T12:07:00.011-05:00

Robert Zoellick and Michael Gerson
I have to admit that when I think about people like Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, or Gayle Smith, Special Assistant to President Obama, it calls to mind the interview I once read by a BBC reporter with a badger expert from the UK. The reporter asked, “Mr. Badger Expert, can you tell us exactly how much do we know about the life of a badger underground?” To which the badger expert held up a blank sheet of paper and said, “Well, Ms. BBC Reporter, about this much.”

The frank truth of the matter is that I do not know much about the individuals who are leading the policy discussions at the very top of the development and humanitarian aid food chain. Their names pop up in articles, their faces grace Time magazine or C-span flip-throughs, I see their copied signature on petition letters and perhaps read their introduction on important studies. But of them, personally? Of their belief systems and backgrounds and management styles and whether or not they have a sweet spot in their heart for mango chutney or Cherry Garcia ice cream? I know nothing.

I was surprised by the intelligence and subtlety offered in many of this morning's speeches. I was surprised when a man from Senegal took the microphone to ask Gayle Smith a question, introduced himself and was remembered by her from their work together 20 years earlier. I wondered how many of my colleagues I will be able to remember by name 20 years from now. I was surprised that Robert Zoellick looked and sat as comfortably with Michael Gerson as a stranger whose morning paper I might glance over at in a coffee shop.

Setting the SID Agenda

This morning's discussion touched on many issues; among them were these:

1) What is the worth of the US investment in the rest of the world? How will the financial crisis affect aid?

2) Why does Chinese aid to Africa make the West so nervous and isn't it time for Africa to be allowed to choose her own friends?

3) What role do governance and leadership play in the success of aid?

4) How do we deal with the legions of unemployed and underutilized youth of the world?

5) What is a new model of development that will take the roles of middle income countries – now both recipients and donors – and non-traditional donors into account?

6) How do we drive policy with evidence of impact and still negotiate the pulls of political constituencies?

7) What will the next round of development goals look like and how do we correct for the lack of economic focus of the Millenium Development Goals?

8) Is “growth” without guidance or goal truly our objective? What about “inclusive” growth?

9) Is food security the highest priority for institutions like the World Bank and how do you create long-term food security unless you are investing in infrastructure and supply chain development and also in governance and in robust economies?

10) Where are the women of the world in these discussions and why is it that the issue of where they are and how they contribute still comes in at the very end, almost as a tag-on? (there was a hurried scribbling of notes by all the women in my view at this one, and a firm clapping at the end that was definitely out of the normal Audience Clapping Order)

11) Who gets to set the agenda next? North vs. south. Developed vs. middle income vs. developing? Urban vs. rural? Democratic vs. communist or socialist?

There are always things that you are allowed and not allowed to say in public and on-the-record discussions about development aid. For example, one must speak with passion (details are not required) about the sustainability of all things (how long exactly, I always immediately wonder, is 'sustainable?') The speakers this morning held up that standard. Everything was about sustainability.

But some of the speakers did other things that surprised me. They asked if we “would prefer a sheep leading lions or a lion leading sheep” and then acknowledged that they themselves weren't certain. They paused between answers by the speakers and asked colleagues in the audience to add their two cents. Rebeca Grynspan, Associate Administrator of UNDP and Under-Secretary-General of the UN, ended her entire speech by asking us to remember one thing, that while we were here talking about development we not forget the people of Somalia and not forget that “the short and the long-term begin at the same time.”

I liked that.

What Still Needs to be Addressed

What I would also like would be to hear honest discussions in the next panels and break-out sessions about the following:

1) how do we control for the tendency of NGOs and development institutions to replace governments – either by direct intervention outside of social and political structures, or by offering so much money that the entire agenda of local institutions and communities is hijacked, or by overwhelming bureacratic capacities and strong-arming the agenda of their own government, or by inflating the economy in very specific ways that are not market-derived or market-responsive?

2) What about the fact that the majority of us are making so much money in this field of development and humanitarian assistance? How do we square the incentive of greed with the moral high-tones of the development agenda?

3) What arguments will convince those who are unconvinced that it is our absolute connectivity as a world that demands our attention to matters of development and human rights, and not some extraneous do-gooder impulse, and not even our desire to increase national security and decrease threats?

4) If food security is our priority then what about our own role – and now I am speaking of the US – in maintaining conditions that erode the food security of the developing world to enable profiteering in the developed world?

5) Speaking of which, while we are on the topic of equality, can we ask how is it that we can expect to promote economic or gender equality in these developing countries if we are not willing to look at global equality between all countries?

This morning's discussions at the Congress reminded me of something important. When I think of the institutions and governments that are leading the agenda of development aid, I usually think of trudging, immutable behemoths. I think of maddening bureaucracy and stifling political correctness. I think of inflated staffs and money that could be spent helping people directly.

What I usually forget to think about is that many of the individuals who are leading these institutions and governments are incredibly thoughtful and dedicated people, who are actually trying to help those folks affected by their policies to get somewhere positive. Out in the notorious 'field,' they often seem so locked away in their SUV towers that I dismiss out of hand the idea that they might be waking up each morning just as I do – committed, galvanized.

So, Who Is Setting the Agenda?

In this context of development aid, we spend a lot of time talking about who should be setting the agenda for aid but we spend less time actually realizing that it is we - yes, we leaders of the institutions and governments; yes, we audience members who work in development; yes, media who cover human rights issues and civil strife; yes, colleagues from developing and developed countries - who are the ones setting the agenda every single day.

If the World Congress is a microcosm of world development, then what are we seeing so far? We are seeing more than 1,100 participants from over 23 countries, with speakers from all over the world. We are seeing heads of state in the same room with interns. We have a forum to connect public and private and NGO actors. And we are seeing an atmosphere of education and discussion, which is great.

What we have the opportunity to also see is when do people clap out of order (at the mention of women playing an equal role), what is the tone of the questions (demanding: education and science are critical; frustrated: critical of the divide between the agenda-setting institutions and those enacting the programs at the field level) and when do people laugh (at the mention that since the dissolution of the 2nd world, we should at least promote the 3rd a step).

The people who are setting the agenda for development aid are the people, and types of people, who are present at the Congress this weekend. It is us - government employees, aid workers, health workers, interns and volunteers, heads of state, leaders of the banks of the world, special assistants to presidents - who set the agenda each day, when we wake up with certain sets of beliefs and working under certain assumptions.

This Congress is important to remind us of that fact, but it is also an important time to remember that there is no other big force out there that is going to swoop in and put on the final seal of approval on a development agenda. And there is no graceful panacea that will alleviate the catalysts of human suffering.

It is just us, those of us who are asking the questions and waking up each morning remembering that the short and long-term begin at the same time. And that that time, because there is simply no time better, is now.

SID World Congress: On your mark, get set... ;)

2011-07-28T17:26:00.006-05:00

The SID World Congress starts tomorrow! In addition to all of the plenary and keynote sessions, I will be attending the following break-out sessions and blogging about them accordingly. If you will NOT be attending the Congress but have some questions for these speakers, let me know and I will see what I can do.

If you WILL be attending, and are interested in speaking with me for a few moments after these sessions and sharing your or your organization's or company's perspective, please let me know - either through this forum or in person.

Day 1: Gender Equality in a Changing World

Speakers:
Shobha Raghuram (Moderator), Former Director, India Regional Office ‐ Bangalore, India, Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries (Hivos)
Rawwida Baksh, Program Leader, Women’s Rights and Citizenship, International Development Research Center
Caren Grown, Senior Gender Advisor, Bureau of Policy Planning and Learning, USAID
Sarah Degnan Kambou, President, International Center for Research on Women

Day 2: a) New Approaches and Tools for Engaging Citizens in Development Choices: Lessons from Youthful Rebellions

Speakers:
Arthur Muliro (Moderator), Deputy Managing Director, Society for International Development
Gregory R. Niblett, Executive Vice President and COO, FHI Development 360 LLC
Charles Onyango‐Obbo, Executive Editor, Africa and Digital Media Division, Nation Media Group
William S. Reese, President and CEO, International Youth Foundation
Dalia Ziada, Director, North Africa Bureau, American Islamic Congress

b) Women, Peace, and Security and Prospects for a Sustainable Future

Speakers:

Jacqueline Pitanguy (Moderator), Vice President, Society for International Development; Director, Cidadania, Estudo, Pesquisa, Informação e Ação (CEPIA), Rio de Janeiro
Mahnaz Afkhami, Founder and President, Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace
Andrée Simon, President and COO, Women for Women International
Aruna Uprety, Founder, Rural Health and Education Service; Partner, American Himalayan Foundations’ STOP Girl Trafficking Program

The Entire World and Everybody

2011-07-28T15:36:00.006-05:00

You never want to be that person on the plane who seems unable to take the "I'm traveling for business and do this about 5 times a week and really don't want to talk about your Themed House with the Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe bedrooms and your terrier's latest wart" attitude hint from your seat neighbor, but sometimes, the situation calls for it.

Or, at least, sometimes you sit next to a nice British guy who happens to have been born in Zimbabwe (all white family now duly dispersed to far corners of the world) and seems willing enough to tell you that he has a photograph of his grandmother standing on the front porch of the family homestead, resting an Uzzi on her shoulder (“and that's just a little unexpected for a British guy”...Compared to us gun-ophile Americans, I wonder?) and is now transporting his family dog, Luna, across the American continent and - temperatures permitting – across the broad expanse of the Atlantic, and who makes you laugh so loudly telling you about his youngest daughter playing on strangers' laptops on planes that you are afraid the flight attendant will strut over and tell you to pipe down already.

And, mostly, you don't expect that when you attend a dusty hot feast day dance at a New Mexican Peublo you will end up in a forty minute conversation with a woman whose family runs a cattle ranch and owns 200 horses and who stumbles - almost without meaning to, you can see - into telling you that this is the first jewelery show she has done since the night two months ago when her niece's husband drank too much to celebrate the niece's promotion at work that morning and crashed the car carrying their 6 and 4 year old in the backseat and woke to a hospital room, where above him was the son in critical condition and below him was the daughter, in the morgue.

It isn't that you wake up in the morning knowing that in the terminal that afternoon you'll be allowed to hold the two month old baby of a Ghanain nurse while she runs up to grab a pizza for her hungry three year old and then chat about how, had she been back in Ghana two months ago she firmly believes that any midwife would have been able to turn the baby instead of just pulling out the surgical knife and pumping in the drugs.

So it is a surprise, somehow, when you take leave of the British guy with a stranger's polite smile, suddenly amazed that that is, in fact, what you are to each other, and then when you are given the phone number of the woman with the ranch who tells you that you are welcome to visit the pueblo anytime as her guest – an honor and an unusual outcome that later makes your friend say, 'wow,' in a way that indicates that it really doesn't happen all of the time. And what a tender kindness when you find yourself embracing the Ghanain nurse and hand-cupping the cheeks of her two sons as you both part ways for your planes, a mere hour or so after the eldest ran his stroller into your foot and you pretended that the planes on the carpet were real to keep him distracted for a minute, seeing how tired his mother must be, and how hungry was the baby who was crying with that unmistakable insistence that crosses all lines of culture, of countries and of acquaintance.

How real are these lines? The ones that tell us who is stranger versus who is friend, or the lines that offer up or relieve our obligations to each other? How solid is a line that distinguishes who we have to care about when the slightest thing – a stroller bump against your toe in an airport lobby, leaning down to pat a stranger's dog, an uninvited tear falling in response to a story of tragedy – evaporate even the idea of this line that separates us: stranger from acquaintance, those for whom we are responsible and those for whom we think we are not, and leave us with those people in our minds and thoughts and leave us later sending up a silent call to the powers that be to escort them safely and well into the nights and into the days.

As a child, I would say bedtime prayers with my parents each night. We began by asking for blessings for our family members but as soon as I was invited to say the prayer independently, it morphed, and became a prayer for “the entire world and everybody.” Each night I ended with a conversational tag, to God himself, saying “and I hope you are okay, too.” It took years to understand why this made my dad laugh.

My grandfather used to tell me that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. Of course, there are also all of the jerks you haven't met yet and all of the ignorant people espousing all sorts of unconscionable prejudices that you haven't met yet and yes, maybe we'd rather these sorts remain “strangers.” But the point is far more about all of the “humans” we haven't met yet and how we should always assume, upon passing a “stranger” that within the space of a moment, they could easily become a friend.

At the very least, within the glance of an eye or the slight misstep of a foot, they can take on a face, a voice and a history that will make it difficult to not see them as the member of this, our human family, that they are. And though this fact makes for a good deal of inconvenience (no more tailgating, for example, or self-righteous snapping at the car rental lady), I am wondering more and more why we ever wait for these correcting sorts of moments when it is so clearly up to us to create them, to recognize them and, here's hoping, to act on them.