Erika & Petra Around the World

Happy Holidays 2011!

2011-12-31T22:02:00.004-05:00

The year opens: a hot day in a dusty, apocalyptic valley of crushed homes and rubble. But on the hillside, one of our heroines is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions. It is January, and Petra is in Haiti…

Petra spent the first three weeks of the year working with Explorers Sans Frontiers (ESF), an NGO that provides mobile medical clinics to people in Port-Au Prince tent cities. Petra reviewed ESF’s activities and recommended ways to improve their efficacy, looked at how ESF works with partners, and helped out in the clinics. Many aspects of daily life were difficult, but she loved the heat and the sounds and smells of the camp waking up in the morning. She also became fast friends with her ten-year-old host Reggie, spending many hours in the sun learning Creole and playing tic-tac-toe.

REGGIE: Ah! Reggie a gagner!
PETRA: Oui, magnifique! Reggie a gagner perfectment: Formidable. Tu as gagne mon coeur aussi.

Meanwhile, in a dark, wet, ancient, brick alleyway thousands of miles away, our other heroine shivers in the cold while contemplating the beauty of a solitary Christmas tree backlit against a medieval cathedral. It is still January, and Erika is at the other end of the global experience spectrum…

Erika spent a delightful Christmas and New Years enjoying the beautiful architecture and cuisine of Italy with her sister Lisa and their mom Lilli. The three of them hiked in the Cinque Terra, one of Erika and Petra’s favorite places on earth; explored the city of Siena – where Lisa now lives – from top to bottom; and had a revelrous New Years in Venice.

LISA: Each neighborhood in Siena has a distinctive identity and history, and they’re very competitive. Each is represented by a proud animal symbol: dragon, rhinoceros, porcupine, lion, caterpillar, seashell …
ERIKA:… Seriously? That must be a fierce caterpillar! What neighborhood are we in now? Ma, check the map?
LILLI: Um…snail. But it looks like a very fierce and proud snail… I wouldn’t want to mess with that snail.

Back in New York: Having sailed through the fall semester, Petra decides to tempt the academic fates by signing up for five spring courses. Erika works in academic administration with various charter schools in Harlem and the Upper West Side…

ERIKA: Hey sweetie! Want to meet me for a coffee in Little Senegal after work today?
PETRA: I want to but I have to study for my economics exam! What did you do at work today?
ERIKA: Created endless databases: Excel and I have become one. But didn’t you just take your economics exam?
PETRA: No, that was for my OTHER economics course. I’ll see you… come summertime?

Summer finds our heroines separated by thousands of miles of ocean. They strive to contribute their skills and enthusiasm to solve the world’s toughest problems, from southern Africa to Central America …

Over the summer, Petra went to Zambia as the leader of a research team gathering and analyzing local client quality- of-life information for global microfinance organization FINCA. She loved it: though based in capital city Lusaka, it was her job to spend most of her time traveling around Zambia with a fantastic team of co workers, interviewing more than 400 financially-insecure people about their lives and businesses. She managed to squeeze in a wildlife safari in South Luangwa National Park and two trips to the stunning Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwean border: in the process, she fell in love with warthogs and almost learned to cook nshima. Petra still misses the call of the muezzin in the morning, and looks forward to exploring more of the beautiful continent.

Erika spent three months interning in Costa Rica with CIRENAS, a new environmental education and conservation non- profit located on a pristine peninsula in Western Costa Rica, surrounded by thousands of acres of protected rainforest and coastal ecosystem. To say it was “remote” is an understatement. CIRENAS is off the grid, and getting to the nearest town requires fording two rivers and a many-miles trek on dirt roads through the jungle: horses are frequently the preferred means of transport. Erika absolutely loved it, and is pleased with the contributions she was able to make to CIRENAS’ education programs and developing organizational structures. She misses the quiet, the warm Pacific Ocean, the natural beauty, the fun of learning a new habitat, and especially the friends she made there. She does not miss being surprised by giant hot-purple crabs crawling out the shower drain.

Our heroines are joyfully reunited for Autumn in New York, where they settle in for their second year (the first time in four years that they’ve been somewhere for a second year!)...

Petra’s fall at Columbia was busy and productive: Her favorite courses are Advanced Statistics, Research Design, and Water and Sanitation in Complex Emergencies. The time has gone faster than she would have imagined possible, but she’s learned a ton and is confidently looking forward to reentering the professional field in a few months’. Actually, she’s already working part-time at the Earth Institute (a Columbia think-tank) working on monitoring and evaluation approaches for oral health in the Millennium Village project. It’s exactly the= kind of work she was hoping to do upon graduation, and so is super-psyched to be getting started already.

Erika started school again herself this fall, jumping back in with enthusiasm and dedication. She’s started pursuing a MA in Nonprofit Management at The New School, which she has been surprised to find is even more progressive and action-oriented than Smith. Erika has also been surprised to discover that she’s very good at Financial Management as well as Statistics; she, of course, is the only one surprised by this. She loves her fellow classmates and has been delighted to make several awesome new friends: it’s convenient for socializing that the school has hand-selected such an inspiring group of radical change-makers as her school peers.

Other highlights of the year included playing in the snowy aftermath of last January’s NYC and CT blizzards, visiting Erika’s brother Reed, sister-in-law Sue, and their boys in Maine, learning some great new soup recipes, spending time with Petra’s parents on the coast of Maine, celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary soon after New York State legally recognized same-sex marriage, cleaning up a friend’s garden, volunteering at a community garden in Brooklyn, visiting Erika’s mom and attending the Hebron Harvest Fair, seeing Erika’s extended family and celebrating despite the snow at her cousin Corban’s October wedding, a warm and delicious and relaxing Thanksgiving at Petra’s parents’ home, and the joyful hectic visits of many friends who came through the city.

STAY TUNED FOR THE SEQUEL: HOLIDAY LETTER 2012 – THE CHEER CHARGES BACK!

Next year promises more excitements: Petra is off to Haiti again in January to consult with World Vision Haiti as part of her work at Columbia. May, when Petra will be graduating and starting full-time work (job offers gladly accepted!), is coming faster than the speed of light. Erika’s eager to start her new courses for the spring, and is considering finding a part-time position to expand the breadth of her non-profit experience. But for now, it’s a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets: who knows what the future will really hold? Until next year… [Fade to black]

P.S. We hope you enjoy the picture on this year’s card. If you will allow us a moment of sincerity (to borrow from John Stewart), our idea was to playfully raise questions about the commercialization of Christmas: hence, the image of us facing down the Wall Street Bull bedecked with reindeer antlers as it has apparently rampaged through Christmas. The various festivals that combined to form the modern winter holidays are celebrations of birth, hope, redemption, renewal, peace, family, and love. We’d like to focus on those values at this time of year (and all year long), rather than let capitalism and materialism charge through our holy days.

The imagery also references the “Occupy” movements that have captivated the country. Being in NYC, we are very aware of the movement’s presence: protestors occupied a building at Erika’s school, friends have participated regularly to the point of arrest, and we have visited the encampments several times. We strongly support many of the movement’s central themes, including a drastic redistribution of wealth. And we feel incredibly blessed to live in a country that (at least usually) makes space for free speech, productive dissention, and change. We hope that the radically progressive movement can survive being judged by its worst members, and can someday effect real change, making America a more equitable and fair society.

If this is America, where is my home?

2011-07-25T17:06:00.002-04:00

I’m back on US soil. Suddenly I am surrounded by rudeness, impatience, judgement, disapproval, selfishness, obesity, poor parenting, intolerance, stress. Everyone criticizing everyone and everything else: assessing and sneering and glaring and rolling their eyes and huffing and muttering and shifting impatiently and making snide comments. The weather is horrible, that guy can’t drive, what was she thinking with those shoes, don’t sit there, you’re a freak, what a loser, omg I can ‘t see the tv, shut up, because I said so.

And that’s just the people physically present. Let us not forget the messages coming from the TVs, which btw are absolutely everywhere. I have learned: My hair is not silky enough. I need a better tan and a bigger TV with lots of channels. Coke; no, Pepsi; no, Coke; no, Pepsi. I should let ‘my man’ have fun this summer while I enjoy special time with the kids, at whom I will bemusedly shake my head. I am fat, and should get fit (process unspecified, seemingly involving hanging out laughing at cafes with girlfriends). I should get plastic surgery: specifically, a nose job, face lift, and botox, which are no big deal. I should go blonde(r). I should drink more, and shop at J.C. Penny, where I can create my own new individual look, which should center on floral cocktail dresses, which will make me more confident. My car should be bigger and a stick shift and I should drive it too fast, which will constitute an appreciation of fine motor craftsmanship and a fulfillment of satisfying living. I should redecorate my home in shades of green, and cook meals inspired by Nuevo-British cuisine, plus cupcakes.

In all seriousness, it’s left an absolute pit in my stomach to re-enter this world of criticism and disparagement. I know there are nice people in this country, and people who are confident and who love themselves and others just the way they are and/or for more meaningful reasons than the above. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are constantly, constantly, being told we’re not good enough. It’s only having been away from it that allows me to see the pressure and realize how it makes me feel.

Some smaller things that are taking some getting used to: warm showers. The horrifying first thing that came to mind when the warm water poured over me was that I was showering in a stream of pee (urine being the only warm liquid I had encountered in months). Even that aside, it was a rather disgusting feeling. Also: artificial sweeteners and corn syrup. They taste horrible. I had become so entirely spoiled by everything being sweetened by sugar, usually raw. Food options: all I can see is processed, sugary, fattening, and/or artificial. I long for the whole, fresh, local foods that are typical in Costa Rica, and fear I will not be able to maintain the level of fitness and digestive happiness I have effortlessly attained over the summer. Noise pollution: there are sounds of engines and machinery everywhere! And I’ve commented on this previously on this blog, but I am struck once again: American public bathrooms smell horrible, and there is the reek of man-pee throughout nearly all public spaces (like sidewalks). This is not acceptable or normal! It doesn’t have to be this way!

Now, if I were being a good make-everyone-else-happy-and-comfortable American woman, I would try to balance this blog post out with a nice palatable conclusion featuring some of the things I have enjoyed about being back home.* But I don’t want to make these truly unacceptable things above softened in any way. It’s not ok. I don’t like this culture and how it makes me feel. I’m not glad to be in this country. It leaves me with the feeling of wanting to go home. But this is supposed to be my home. And that makes me very, very sad.

*Family, potable water from the taps, air conditioning, dryers, wifi, wine.

San Jose the city

2011-07-22T17:02:00.001-04:00

I had visited San Jose, the capital and principal city of Costa Rica, once before, on the occasion of a Tica college friend’s wedding. Memories of grime, mistrust, and exhaust gave me no reason to ever think I’d return. But though I’d assiduously avoided it during my journey towards the peninsula, I found myself this time wanting to give The City a chance to redeem itself, and so stayed there for two days on my way back home.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I enjoyed San Jose this time around. Located in the bowl-like Central Valley, ringed steeply by volcanoes, the city is steeped in the stew of its own smog and effluvia. Narrow, unmarked, paved streets divide rows of 1-3 story buildings. Architectural styles range from the basic universal shack to modern 1960s hilarities to imitations of Spanish colonial forms almost cartoonized in their simplification. Construction materials are dominated by corrugated tin and cement blocks, with colors of rust and bold solid paints dulling the eye. Steep hills and deeply-cut drainage ditches make traversing the narrow sidewalks somewhat treacherous. Crime is high, necessitating not only constant vigilance on the part of pedestrians, but also prompting window bars and fences and barbed wire everywhere, making street scenes look like long narrow prison yards.

The city is much cooler than the coasts, which is pleasant, but its urban density and modern economy strip away almost everything I enjoyed about the culture elsewhere in the country. A third of the country’s population lives in this dense metropolitan area. Shopping malls, chain stores, business suits, fast cars, and general bustle have taken over. I am somewhat resigned to this as a necessity, though, along the lines of the cultural scapegoat: San Jose’s commerce, industry, universities, transporation hubs, etc., allow the placidity of the rest of the country to remain unaltered while providing the influx of resources that permit the country to thrive above the poverty level. It’s as if they have condensed and quarantined all of the less pleasant aspects of modernity to this valley.

The city sadly lacks the cultural institutions and opportunities that usually balance out urban frustrations. There are museums, but they are very small and sad (with the exception of the gorgeous underground Museum of Gold). There are very few music or performance venues. The visual arts are largely unrepresented. The food is repetitive and stale. There are stores, but they are uninteresting and usually are chains. And the people are similarly dull.

Overall, San Jose manages to be simultaneously boring and stressful. I think next time, I’ll return to avoiding the city again.

Santa Teresa, the closest town

2011-07-05T17:01:00.002-04:00

Driving away from the ranch on the road to the south, one drives on the dirt roads (1.5 cars wide) for 20+ minutes, crossing through three streams and an often-dicey river, before coming to the tiny town of Manzanillo, population maybe 150 (a total guess), which features a partial bridge that may or may not ever be completed, a colorful and very simple public school and playing field, a small empty chapel, a poorly-supplied and overpriced small one-room grocery store, two small restaurants that are always (permanently?) closed, and a popular outdoor family bar/convenience store/restaurant where the road turns at the beach. While we drive through the village often, and occasionally resupply there, and have friends there, the town is really too small to be of any further note.

However, there is another town, a wonderful town, a town I visited at all available opportunities: after another 15+ minutes driving up and down some really pitted, washed-out, nerve-wracking, bone-rattling hills, the dirt road turns to again parallel the beach (but set in about 150 m) and you begin to see signs for hotels alongside the road. You are entering Santa Teresa, a chill tourist town of about 3000 residents.

Physically, Santa Teresa is one dusty dirt road, bordered by a turn on one end and a crossroad on the other, with a few dozen very small businesses, hotels, and homes scattered along its 3.5 mile length. The perfect beach stretches its length to the west, while a steep jungley hill ridge bounds the east about 1/10 mile inland.
The residents are largely dedicated to surfing and yoga. The beach along this small stretch of coast is rated by most of those in the know as the best surfing anywhere in Central and South America, and warm (water temps in the 90s!) azure steady curling 10’ waves do their best to live up to this claim. The yoga instructors and gorgeous open dojos are everywhere and are about 20 times better than any I’ve ever seen.

As you can imagine, with these lifestyles, all the long-term residents are distractingly beautiful: not an ounce of fat on their fit athletic bodies, very tan, casual long hair, tattooed, with minimal clothing (shirtless men in board shorts, women in bathing suits/yoga clothes). The demographics are generally young, ‘white’ to medium-brown skin, with varied national origins ranging from Ticas/Ticos relocating from San Jose to Argentines, Israelis, Americans, and the occasional European. I have not yet seen any people evidently of Asian or African descent.

These lovely people become no less lovely upon acquaintance. Everyone is surprisingly friendly, kind, and welcoming. It is the custom for even complete strangers to give a friendly smile, wave, and “buenas” upon passing. Friends are greeted with a kiss on the right cheek (unless between men, in which case a handshake/hug usually does the trick). Everyone checks in on one another and, if someone needs a hand, any passing stranger will do their best to help, be it giving a lift down the road, offering advice, giving your car a push or tow, you name it, because (as they will point out) you never know when you will be the one who needs the help, so offer it when you can.

Topics of conversation and general interest, as well as the morals and politics and priorities of most residents, align blissfully well with my own: wildlife and local plant identification and uses, local small-scale agriculture, sustainable infrastructure, experiential education, family, fitness, delicious healthy foods, life stories, ghost stories, myths. Most people work short, early days so they have half the afternoon and all evening to spend time with their loved ones and on their favorite activities: family and time is indisputably more important than money. And, unsurprisingly, people in this tiny region live longer than almost anywhere else, officially having more centenarians than all but 4 equivalent communities in the world.

Speaking of food: I already previously talked about the typical Costa Rican foods, but thanks to the international and health-conscious residents, Santa Teresa has a distinctly different cuisine culture than its surrounds. Smoothies are de rigueur. Salads and veggie sandwiches proliferate. Fresh pastas are made by Italians, pastries and expresso beverages made by Belgians, falafel made by Israelis, Thai fusion and sushi by ex-Asian-expats. Raw is very popular, organic is valued, local is the standard, homemade is assumed. The quality of ingredients and preparation is extremely high, even by NYC dining standards. Prices vary, and while less than American, prices aren’t cheap, but are well worth it.

But sadly, the town isn’t paradise, despite REALLY seeming that way at first. The main problem that Santa Teresa and its neighboring towns face is access to fresh water. The tiny town to the south, Mal Pais, gets some of its municipal water from a pipe that draws from the clear streams of the Cabo Blanco Nature Reserve, but though a similar plan is in the works for Santa Teresa to draw via an aqueduct from the Ario river (on the CIRENAS/Grew family property), there is not yet any municipal fresh water. A very few properties have wells, but these struggle to keep up with demand even during the rainy season, and go dry during half the year. Almost all residences and businesses, including the many hotels, buy their water and have it delivered by trucks. This water is transferred to private plastic cisterns, usually elevated for gravity-fed plumbing. The water is expensive, the transportation of it is energy-wasteful, and trucking in water for a fast-growing population is inherently unsustainable. It made me very grateful for the reliable (though non-potable) wells on the CIRENAS property, and for growing up with such proliferate fresh water all around all the time. Naturally reliable potable water is one of the biggest deal-breakers for any place I would want to live long-term.

Especially when you add the fact that the water trucks sometimes can’t make it to town because the roads are so bad. The municipalities do attempt road repairs and maintenance, but they struggle against massive erosion. The roads in the region are soft dirt, and it rains a LOT. They tried paving sections, but the pavement undercut and broke and eroded just as quickly as dirt, but with the added problems of having deeper cuts from faster-moving water and left-behind messy heavy sharp rubble. (I secretly love that the best engineering for the area is the most ancient: banked dirt roads with interlocked stone embankments, just like 6000 years ago.) Resultantly, the roads are narrow, deeply pitted, with proliferate and devastating potholes, deep standing puddles and washouts, and multiple river crossings unassisted by bridges. The average driving speed, even with a swanky 4WD truck with good suspension, is about 25kph/15mph. All driving times given at the beginning of this post are what it would take to drive given the optimal conditions available at this time of year. As the streams and rivers are often hugely swollen, the roads slippery or washed out or covered by landslides, the tides high, etc., the time to drive to town can regularly be stretched to 4 times as long, or often (weekly or so) become entirely impossible.

As you can imagine, this has other negative repercussions for the town and region, notable among them difficult access to emergency medical care. Though there is a competent tiny first-aid clinic in town, anyone needing anticipated medical care, such as childbirth, makes sure to stay near the larger clinic in Cobano or, much preferably, visit relatives in San Jose: Anyone needing emergency medical care, such as from a car accident, is airlifted to San Jose, only a 20 min flight away, but very expensive to access by air.

And that’s not all. There is also a very limited selection of groceries and other staple goods available for purchase in town. The quality of public education is poor: most students only receive 2.5 hours of instruction a day in highly under-resourced, understaffed rooms, and most only stay through the 6th grade. Private school options in the area are expensive, limited, and far too laissez faire even for my Montessori-loving tastes. Out of respect for the squeamishness of my American audience I won’t discuss the problems of sewage. And there is a fast and dangerous drug scene evident throughout the town, with the expected accompanying petty theft and personal safety concerns.

And yet… I love it here. Partially because of the simplicity of life. Partially because of the friends I have made who live in town, notably my co-worker Annette and her boyfriend Adam. Partially because of the food, and of course the gorgeous tropical-beach scenery. But more than anything, because of that ineffable sense of rightness, comfort, unthinking soul-relaxation, fluidity, and peace that accompany a feeling of being in a place in which one feels at home.

(Some of these pictures aren't mine: I didn't take many pictures of town, so I "borrowed" some from elsewhere on the web.)

Tico Fare

2011-07-01T16:59:00.001-04:00

As it is almost dinner time, let me tell you of the local Costa Rican food. It is delicious, simple, bland, fresh, nutritious, and healthy.

The mainstays of Tico diet are the Three Sisters (corn, squash, and beans) plus rice, and the occasional chicken, fish, or pork. The corn is most often served in the form of tortillas made by hand with masa (finely ground white corn flour) and water, dry pan-fried on very high heat: my skills at this are improving but not yet great. The local common squash, chayote, is green, the size of two fists, looks like it has puckered lips, and can be eaten raw or, more frequently, diced into tiny cubes and sautéed with oil, salt, and pepper. The beans are red or black, black being favored. As they come dried in large quantities, the beans take hours to slowly cook: to conserve gas in the cylinders that fuel the stoves, they are often cooked on a grill over a fire of scrap driftwood.

These common items are often combined for lunch or dinner in a plato tipico (typical plate) or casado. On such a plate, you would be served, in separate piles, a pile of white rice, a pile of sautéed squash, possibly a few strips of your choice of meat, a few slices of creamy fresh avocados, a plain salad of chopped white cabbage and tomato with lime juice, and a few pieces of super-sweet cooked plantanos (like bananas). For breakfast, one might enjoy the simpler blander gallo pinto, which is rice and black beans mixed together with a small amount of onions, garlic, cilantro, and possible tomatoes and lime juice and cilantro: an egg on top is optional.

Local dairy products are centrally processed (i.e. all go to one big processing/packaging facility before redistribution) but remain fresh and flavorful: fresh milk and butter are available in most stores where refrigeration is available. Here we are lucky to have a local friend, Zu, who makes a variety of delicious plain and fruit yoghurts of which we order massive amounts of each week. The local cheese is a very tasty firm fresh white cheese somewhat similar to mozzarella or Greek farmer’s cheese, but with a slightly stronger musk/whey flavor, and saltier: I wish I could eat it endlessly, but one slice usually fills me up.

A very local specialty is cerviche, which has the consistency of salsa but is made mostly of fish. The fresh local fish is usually red snapper, caught right off the beaches here by local fishermen in small motorized wooden boats. To make cerviche, the raw flesh of the fish is diced and put into a large dish (usually a bucket). The meat is smothered in the highly acidic, highly flavorful juice of the local small limes (confusingly called limons), and left to sit for about 10 minutes. Even in this short time, the acid actually cooks the meat, so it is palatable and chewy. To the stew of fish and lime juice is then added a little bit of finely diced onion, garlic, cilantro, and a healthy slug of ginger ale or 7-Up. This whole mess is served in a shallow glass dish like a gravy boat, surrounded by salty deep-fried plantanos chips and/or saltine-like crackers. Optional small side dishes are guacamole and refried black beans. I could eat this meal every day and die happy: it feels great in the belly, is very nutritious, and is super local, and the main dish is raw!

Let me not neglect the beverages. As is appropriate in a tropical, equatorial place, people value their liquid refreshments. We were lucky enough to have one of the ranch’s cowboys, Rodolfo, bring us sacks full of wild fresh limes every week, and granulated sticky raw brown sugar was de rigeur, so we practically bathed in some of the most flavorful fresh limeaid imaginable. Anyone with a blender (or sieve and a lot of patience and strength) could enjoy the juices of the many fresh fruits of the area, especially papaya, pineapple, mango, and guava and cas in season. Even more patience and strength could yield you the Costa Rican answer to horchata, a creamy, cinnamon rice-milk liquid treat that actually made me moan with greedy deliciousness. And hailing from the Caribbean coast, agua dulce requires the most effort of all, starting with the tar-like scrapings of the molds used in sugar processing, boiling in water for hours or days, adding copious amounts of pulverized fresh ginger root and limes, and guzzled in belly-aching paroxysm of its sweet spicy intensity.

Costa Rica’s most famous beverage is of course its coffee, and deservedly so. As you food history buffs of course know, coffee is not native to Central America, but damn does it grow well there: it’s as if the plants were just waiting for transportation to the high fertile misty volcanic slopes of the continental ridge to fulfill their potential. This is abetted by the simple chorreador, the Costa Rican coffee maker which is essentially a flannel sock that you hang above your mug or carafe, fill with grounds, and pour hot water through. The resulting brew is dark, rich, feels creamy on the tongue, has absolutely no bitterness, and truly needs no milk or sugar. Even in world-class award-winning cafes in the major cities of the world, I have never had a cup that even comes close to the coffee we could make on a camp stove here.

And of course, cervesa. Costa Rica’s beer is better known for its graphic design than flavor, with Imperial’s yellow and black phoenix blazoning the kitsch of many a tourist. Its flavor can more than hold its own to the claims of its packaging, though. There are really only two beers available in the country, both locally made by the same company: the aforementioned Imperial, and the simpler Pilsen. Both are light and lemony, with Pilsen being ever-so-slightly hoppier and Imperial a little smoother. While they are refreshing on their own at any time, they are often served as a michelada in a glass with a full lime’s juice squeezed in and copious salt on the edge. At the end of a hot sweaty day, this influx of cool acidy salt is like a blessing to the system, like alcoholic Gatorade. Other alchoholic options include guaro (sugarcane moonshine liquor) and the remarkably good Flor de Caña rums made in Nicaragua, but I rarely partook of these potencies.

Now I have made myself thoroughly hungry and thirsty.

Humidity

2011-06-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

I am ten degrees above the equator, in a jungle, with salt spray from the surf waves mingling with the vapor rising from rotting and prolific enormous plants. It is now well into the rainy season. Clockwork downpours greet us at 11 am, sunset (6 pm), and 2 am, with occasional additional rain at mid-afternoon. This rain is the rain of the tropics, of myth, not the mere sprinkles we get in New England. Picture the hardest cats-and-dogs downpour you have ever seen. You cannot imagine it raining harder than that memory. Now imagine the entire sky as God’s showerhead, and She turns up the water: the entire sky is now the end of an effusive garden hose: you grin for a few minutes at the exuberance of the water’s profusion: She turns it up (just like with a handle, one second on one rain setting, then a surge and three seconds later a whole new type of rain): the entire expanse of the sky is now a firehose, a continually upended bucket: exhileration turns to worry: Will the tin roof withstand the beating, the weight of the water? Will the hillside on which this building sits wash away? The waves’ volume increases with the storm. Conversation becomes difficult. Roads do wash away, prehistoric trees become undermined and fall, solid columns of water establish themselves from the gutters. When the sun reappears, the world is revealed to be Wet, and there is only a brief window of pleasant rain-cooled air before the mist-making heating begins, and the world is humid.

I mean Humid. Try putting a blanket over yourself like a little tent, and breathe out, and breathe out again, until it is suffocating and sweat beads your lip and your temples and the air seems to slide liquid down your throat. Then make that air an almost physical presence over all your skin, even under your clothes. Make your clothes, all of them, bra and underwear and shirt and pants, warm and fully wet with sweat. Make that sweat slowly trickle down your spine, pool in your bellybutton, dribble into your eyes. Stand in a steamy room after a shower, and dry off with a damp towel, and before you’ve finished drying feel the sweat pinprickle emerging on your skin again, so you are never dry. Make the steamy air tactile so you feel covered in lotion, breathed on by a close animal, covered in a film of plastic or wet hot felt. The air smells of plant, of mud, of sweet flowers (frangipani/ plumeria/ something akin to Japanese witchhazel), cut papaya, mown lawn, mulch and rot, of candle wax and varnish and compost, of salt and green and sap. Now actually cover your skin with greasy suntan lotion and oily bug spray, so the sweat struggles to ooze out, and when it does it tickles in its slide down your greasy skin.

To sleep, you lie as naked as possible on sheets that are damper than your skin and cooler, wet from the air of the day. The coolness of the wet sheets is soothing but cloying, and soon turns to mildew and must. The air around your bed feels like a blanket, like a soft silk blanket laying perfectly draped on every part of your exposed skin. The feeling of slight weight on every pore induces the slightest amount of vertigo, not just with up and down but with inside and outside of your body; all of you feels like a mucus membrane, your skin feels like your mouth, the air in your lungs moist from your mouth feels like the air on your hand, the air on your thighs feels like it may be exhaling from between your legs, all over as if there is a bed partner hovering attentively inches above your body.

I enjoyed this description in the book I’m currently reading (Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, pg 4) of the heat of another tropical monsoon place: “The next thing I noticed was the heat. I stood in airport queues, not five minutes from the conditioned air of the plane, and my clothes clung to sudden sweat. My heart thumped under the command of the new climate. Each breath was an angry little victory. I came to know that it never stops, the jungle sweat, because the heat that makes it, night and day, is a wet heat. The choking humidity makes amphibians of us all, breathing water in air; you learn to live with it, and you learn to like it, or you leave.”

The humidity of the hot tropics is unsettling, intimate, tactile, and to me, familiar.

Why I like being not-in-the-city

2011-06-17T07:41:00.001-04:00

I consciously choose to entitle this post “Why I like being not-in-the-city” rather than “Why I like not being in the city”, because the later, while more grammatically typical, is indicative of precisely of what I despair: not-being, in the city: a state of nonexistence (in a deadening nullifying way rather than a bodhi way) coming from being surrounded by so much frission, so many stresses, so much unhealthiness, so many forces negating all that is me, that the self retreats, retreats, retreats until it is hardly recognizably there: not-being, in the city. And, rather, when I am not-in-the-city, I swiftly emerge into myself: being.

I have lived in big cities (Boston, Melbourne, Bangkok, New York) since graduating college. I have never wanted to live in any city, but the job/transportation/social opportunities they present have lured me in during each move, and my wife is both charismatically convincing and a city girl, so I haven’t stood a chance. I also do truly enjoy the short commutes, the ability to walk or bike everywhere, the lack of gas money and car maintenance, the compact and efficient living, the diversity of people and food, the access to and profusion of cultural and musical events, and the vantage point on the grit of the human experiment. But it is like poking something dead with a stick, or watching a film, or acting in a play, or picking a scab: while interesting and satisfying for a short time, at some point shortly you have to stop and walk away and resume more meaningfully and completely living.

Then I return home. I feel a homecoming when I step into a green place, when I breathe deep not only to fill my lungs but to taste the sweet liquid pungency of the air, even if the greens are from plants unknown to me and the smells are new and mysterious. My chest expands, my shoulders press back, I stand taller and more firmly, more loose in my knees and more agile. My eyes open wider, my jaw unclenches, and my neck becomes exercised and stretched as I gaze around at many angles, down to my feet and around to my surroundings and up at the lofty heights and above to the skies. I become less hungry, need less sleep, sleep more deeply. My body/mind has more positive challenges expected of it (scaling steep little hills, not-slipping on slick mud, gazing into sun-glinting water, being aware of the wind and clouds, remembering the earlier rain, being aware of the critters and our appropriate relations to them, from awe to run-away) rather than being rattled with repeated identical steps on concrete, gazing always at eye level. Instead of shutting everything out, I become open, soaking it all in, feeling immersed and imbued and saturated, filled up, satiated.

The cabinets of my interests open their doors when I am not-in-the-city (and I say not-in-the-city rather than “in the country” or “in nature” because the city is the aberration, the object, while that which is not-city is to vast and pervasive, the context in which all things exist, that we cannot responsibly designate it as a place). My experiences burnish their accolades, my skills tools sharpen their edges, my memories dust themselves off for contemplation. I become relevant. I become respected, respectable, rather than out of place and an oddity misunderstood. When not in the city, I feel complete and proud, smiling, relaxed. (I dread my departure.)

"Where I live as myself is to others a wilderness. But to me it is home." -Ursula Le Guinn

safe and sound in the jungle in Costa Rica

2011-05-31T18:19:00.003-04:00

A week ago (time flies!) I arrived safely at the ranch lodge of CIRENAS, the organization with which I am interning this summer. I’m nearish to Santa Teresa on the southwest coast of the Nicoya Peninsula. The property, located right on the beach and surrounded by vast jungle conservation and farm lands, is absolutely stunning. From the front porch of the building in which I am staying, as well as from the window above my bed, you can see the surfers’-dream waves roar onto the smooth dark-sand beach, framed by coconut and banana palms. Plumeria and mango trees and many others I don’t know, tall and dense and green, crowd the edges of the lawn. Howler monkeys do their howling thing from the trees all around us and provide inspiring models of napping laziness. Harlequin crabs, hilarious in their pink garb and dancer’s stance, scuttle everywhere (including in the shower, trash cans, and other places they’re not supposed to be).

The weather is very hot and humid. I wilted and sweated buckets the first few days, but am beginning to adjust. Fairly regular thunderstorms and breezes clear out the air at least once a day, and I am well-provisioned with a wardrobe of appropriately thin, wicking, non-molding clothes (thanks, Ma!), so it is bearable. Worst is sweating right after showering, so you can’t ever quite feel clean. I do find myself dreaming of cool misty winds.

The property is very remote. And by very remote I mean miles from the nearest “town” (i.e. dusty road with electricity and a few small shops), down endless dirt “roads” (and by roads I mean pitted dirt tracks like fire roads or trails) that don’t bother with bridges, so almost every stream and river must be forded (i.e. driven through to get across). The rainy season started a few weeks ago, and already the roads are eroding and undercutting at an alarming rate and the rivers are swelling past what is fordable, limiting our inland access. Luckily the organization’s truck can drive along the beach at low tide, so even when the roads and rivers become impassable, we won’t be cut off. I’m hoping to get a cell phone this weekend, which will make me slightly more communicative, but we only have internet access when we go to town, so don’t expect to hear from me often.

Naturally for such a remote property, the CIRENAS buildings are entirely off the grid, producing their own electricity by solar panels, pumping their own water from their own wells, treating their own sewage, growing a fair bit of their own food, composting the majority of their food trash, etc. This makes the lodgings themselves a model for environmental education, the main mission of the organization. Though they are quite lovely as is, one of the projects I will help with is to make the lodgings a little more comfortable for the average American guest by doing such things as adding screens to the windows, getting soap dishes (i.e. finding soap-dish-shaped shells), making lanterns to use instead of open candles, and the like, all in keeping with their self-sustaining model.

Despite the stunning setting, the people here are the real highlight so far. Caroline, my main contact here and supervisor, runs the place with her husband Tucker: Caroline is of English and American descent, though she was born and raised in Costa Rica, while Tucker is a New Hampshire man through and though. Their assistant, Annette, comes by almost every day to help lead the workshops: she is 100% Costa Rican, and highly educated in environmental sciences. They are all absolutely lovely, kind and calm and competent and hard-working. As Tucker has been traveling the last few days, I’ve been especially getting to know Caroline, in that condensed way that living and working with someone 24/7 in a remote area can do: shopping together and cooking for one another and coming up with meal plans, sharing a bedroom (temporarily), staying up late talking, working quietly side by side on our computers, stress from bugs (which are eating us alive) and corresponding lack of sleep, trying to manage 14 college students together, breaking into their truck together when the keys got locked in, tensely judging whether the swollen river was indeed fordable, determining if their sweet dog Kia injured herself when she fell from the truck (she’s fine), enjoying a quiet hour away and splitting our meals at a surprisingly nice air-conditioned café in the nearest town, and a million other things that I’ve never done with friends I’ve known for ten times as long. It is a strange intimacy, and one that would fail either in its professional or personal dimensions with 98% of the people in the world who are less lovely than these kind folks. I hope the amiable easy relationships between us continues to function throughout the summer.

A group was visiting this past week from the University of Georgia, biology students, and I joined them on a number of their activities to better learn about the CIRENAS programs. Highlights included a very long nature walk led by Annette through the beach and jungle parts of the property, kayaking in the mangrove swamp, surfing (this area is a surfer’s paradise), clearing the beach of trash, meeting with an elder of the community to learn about the area’s history, and attending a cooking class featuring two local dishes (a raw fish salsa and plantain chips). I didn’t join them on the horseback riding this time around, but look forward to riding the property with Caroline at some point (as she knows it best and has the best horsemanship).

After having observed the program and helped out with bits and pieces throughout the week, I’m now just starting to contribute to the managerial/administrative functions that I came down here to do. I created a course evaluation form and compiled the results from this first group. I created a database of alumni of the programs. I also created and began to fill out a biodiversity catalogue of all of the plants and animals spotted on the property: this will hopefully have educational, environmental, and managerial uses.

I am thoroughly enjoying being in a developing country again. I love the slower pace of life, the time people take to talk with one another, the simplicity of the services. I love how closely people live to nature. I love the green or beachy smells unmitigated by asphault or exhaust. I love how quiet it is, or rather that the racket is one of cicadas and toads and monkeys and waves and rain rather than engines and electronics and voices and radios and hammers. I love smelling brush and trash piles smouldering (which I know is weird, but it’s become a comforting smell). I love that the concerns here center on weather and other important things, rather than fashion or other human judgements. And speaking of, I will now sign off of the computer and get back to appreciating my surroundings.

(If you want captions for these photos, see the Facebook version of the album.)

summers abroad: Zambia and Costa Rica

2011-05-22T23:05:00.011-04:00

Petra and I are going abroad this summer for internships. We've worked for months to arrange these opportunities, but they've only become solidified very recently. I'm leaving on Wednesday, and Petra's leaving in a week. Many of you are asking: Where the heck are you going, and what they heck is it you'll be doing? Good questions!

Where Erika is going: Costa Rica. More specifically, the very rural ranch lodge at the Caletas-Ario Nature Reserve near Playa Ario on the Nicoya Peninsula on the western coast of the Central American peninsula. The property ranges from the dry plains to jungley forests to mangrove swamps to the beach, has myriad wildlife like monkeys and parrots and sloths and bats, and has very limited electricity and other modern amenities. Photo of the property above.

With whom: CIRENAS, Centro de Investigacion de Recursos Naturales y Sociales. The organization is a few years old, and is focused on making the best use of the plot of land which they donated to begin the large wildlife refuge. They have hosted a number of groups of academic researchers as well as American high school students who want to learn more about Costa Rica. CIRENAS is dedicated to protecting the land and using it as an environmental teaching tool. The Grew family, the driving force behind the preserve, seem utterly delightful and deeply in love with the land, and I truly look forward to working with them.

What Erika will be doing: Environmental Education NGO management consulting. More specifically, helping organize and make more efficient the administrative and managerial functions of a thriving new NGO, hoping to achieve things like an organizational chart, codified job descriptions, improved organizational communications logistics and website, a fundraising plan, etc.

****
Where Petra is going: Zambia, in the center of Africa. More specifically, she will be based in the modern fairly-developed capital city Lusaka (depicted above), and will travel to other districts where her host organization is currently running programs. She’ll be surrounded by quintessentially-African contemporary urban and traditional rural scenery, gorgeous fabrics, safari-worthy wildlife and the incomparable Victoria Falls.

With whom: FINCA. Founded in 1984, FINCA International is a recognized leader in microfinance and the pioneer of the village banking methodology. Microfinance is a sector within international development that provides financial services to disempowered people, usually women, who don’t have access to traditional financial tools and institutions. FINCA currently operates a network of 20 country programs in Latin America, Eurasia, the Greater Middle East and Africa, serving hundreds of thousands of clients.

What Petra will be doing: Microfinance program monitoring and evaluation. Prior to her work in the field, Petra will attend one week of training in Washington, D.C. Together with two local staff, she will spend 10 weeks conducting research and client interviews in Zambia. She will analyze the response data to determine poverty levels, program impact, and why clients join, remain with or exit the program. She will then present her findings to local management and produce a written report.

****

Yes, we're going to different places, and yes we'll miss each other terribly and will eagerly count down the minutes til we can be together again, but we wanted to be able to do what was best for each of us professionally, and it's only two months, so we can deal.

We'll do our best to post stories and pictures here, but no promises on frequency, since we'll both be somewhat disconnected from communications infrastructure. So don't worry if you don't hear from us. We promise full updates upon our return. Hope you all enjoy your summers!

sublet our NYC apartment!

2011-05-22T15:42:00.002-04:00

Sublet our spacious furnished $1550/month 2-bedroom NYC apartment for the summer!

My wife and I will be abroad for June and July, and are looking for a responsible, tidy person/people to stay in our apartment for those two months, from June 1 to July 31. If you need, we might be amenable to starting as early as May 29th and/or extending through the first week of August.

Our apartment is at West 107th and Central Park West, just seconds to Central Park. It is a three minute walk to the 110th St B/C subway stop, a seven minute walk to the 110th St 1-line subway stop, a ten minute walk to the Columbia campus, and just minutes to groceries, gyms, laundromats, and other necessary amenities, as well as just minutes to perks like the famous Hungarian Pastry Shop and other cafes, bars, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It’s a quiet, safe residential block in a homey, active neighborhood.

The apartment has windows in each room, a fire escape we use as a tiny balcony, and a lot of light, fresh breezes, and quietness. It has two bedrooms, one of which is set up fully as a bedroom with a double-sized bed, the other of which is set up mostly as a study but which does have a very comfortable twin-sized futon bed. There is also a living/dining room with a twin-sized couch and dining table that can comfortably sit six. There is a small kitchen with big sink, 4-burner stove and oven, microwave, toaster oven, full-sized fridge, and a full complement of nice dishes and cutlery, pots, pans, and anything else a good cook might want to use. The bathroom is small, in NYC fashion, but quite useable: shower, tub, toilet, sink, etc all in good working order, with lovely hot water pressure. There’s a friendly live-in superintendent in the building who is very responsive to any maintenance needs. We also have our own reliable high-speed wireless internet. Children are welcome. GLBTQ folks and people of all races, ethnicities, religions, etc. are welcomed. Sadly, no pets allowed. We currently have no pets so folks with allergies would be comfortable here, and we also don’t have any bedbugs, roaches, or any other nasties. A maximum of two people can live here.

So what’s the catch, you might ask, since this price is a steal for this size and location? Nothing much, and nothing bad. The place was unlovely when we moved in, but we’ve put in a lot of work making it quite pretty now. The linoleum tiles on the floors have a few cracked places, but is just an aesthetic concern you’ll hardly notice. When you bake something in the oven, you have to use the exhaust fan or else the smoke detector beeps. There’s not a lot of counter space. We have two bikes hung on the wall in the big bedroom (and you’re welcome to keep yours there too). The tub needs to be re-grouted, but works fine. There is not laundry in the building, nor a doorman or elevator, though it’s quite safe and secure. It’s a fourth floor walk-up. Other than that, it’s perfect by anyone’s standards.

The apartment would be best for a couple, and could also work for two separate tenants. Our neighbors include lots of families with small children, so we’re looking for people who aren’t loud night-owls or big partiers. We’re also obviously looking for people who are responsible, won’t trash our stuff, and will keep the place clean. We will need to interview any potential subletters, and have you sign an official subletting agreement. We will need the entire summer’s rent and utilities up front: the cost for the two months will be 3290: (1550 for rent, times two) plus (55 for electricity, times two) plus (40 for internet, times two). Any additional weeks at the beginning or end would be the same rate, pro-rated per day. Photos of the apartment are available at https://picasaweb.google.com/photoprince/PicsOf107thNYCAptForSublet?feat=directlink.

If you would like to view the apartment, please call Petra at 781-472-9293 or email her at petra.aldrich@gmail.com. We are available most days at most times from early morning through early evening. We will need to have a 100% commitment by May 29th at the absolute latest.

Living in the present

2011-04-20T21:30:00.004-04:00

It seems that 93% of what Petra and I spend our time doing these days is planning for the future: Petra, through her studies and networking that are preparing her for her future career; myself, with my job search and recent grad school applications and soon with my own studies as well; and together continuing to try to prepare for our most treasured but hard-to-attain long-term hopes like starting a family and making a home somewhere. It's often hard to give ourselves permission to live in the moment we're in.

This past Saturday (thanks to some hard work planning ahead of time) I took some time off from my own life and helped lead a cleanup of a community garden in Brooklyn. The effort was part of Hands On New York Day, run by New York Cares (an excellent organization with whom I regularly volunteer, the NYC branch of the same org we went to New Orleans with). There were about 85 of us at the garden raking, painting picnic tables, fixing the greenhouse, and the like. As a leader there I didn't spend much time on any one task, but cruised around making sure everyone knew what they were doing, had what they needed, and that the work went smoothly and as intended.

This gave me the fun opportunity to meet just about everyone there: groups included a dozen sorority girls who were keen on tackling the dirtiest and heaviest jobs around while wildly gossiping, and a score of middle-management from an insurance actuarial firm who (reassuringly) worked methodically and with great care at all their tasks, from picking up sticks to weeding. Contrary to "community organizing" stereotypes, the vast majority of volunteers were black, not wealthy, and seemingly conservative: this has consistently been my experience at events like this. It was a delight to work with people who were such good workers and were so dedicated to helping others, and made me wish more white people, wealthy people, and liberals in this community were better at putting their whole selves where their mouths are (no offense to the exceptions to that statement).

I enjoyed a respite from responsibilities for a nice chunk of time when I decided (perhaps selfishly) that what most needed doing was keeping a lonely volunteer company: and so I found myself sitting on an upturned bucket with a truly delightful high-school freshman from New Jersey, sifting compost through some old window screens, commenting on everything from the squeamishness of men regarding worms and the glory of bowling and black and white photography to the degradation of Bella's character throughout the Twilight series. My hands smelled like life as I picked apart a soft dry twig, listening to the chickens warble and coo and the cool rain trickle from the leaves down onto the backs of my hands, the ground soft and rotting beneath my feet. My happiness in that moment, amidst the living fecundity and the bustle of selfless cooperative activity was like fertilizer to my heart, as well as a nourishing reminder of why I continue to commit myself to grassroots NGO work. And that, with herbs and chickens and the good kind of dirt, New York isn't always such a bad place to live.

Erika's future grad school: why and more specifically what

2011-04-04T22:06:00.003-04:00

Part 3 of 3

(Recap: After being tempted by both NYU and The New School, I decided this weekend that The New School program was the one for me. My reasoning against NYU is in Part 1, below, and my reasoning for the New School is in Part 2, also below. Here I'll address the questions, why are you doing this? and what is this program you're signing up for anyways?)

So why am I going back to school again? Let me simplify things by quoting from the essay I submitted as part of my application to the school:

My work last year at the UNHCR Bangkok Refugee Center inspired me to apply to Milano. The effects of the refugee center’s poor management were immediately apparent. I observed that children defecated in alleys and peed against walls because of the lack of toilets, insect swarms in the classrooms were so pervasive that they crunched under our feet as we walked, and filthy water regularly flooded into the classrooms during the rainy season. I soon also learned that the Center’s staff vastly mismanaged the limited human and physical resources, some embezzled funds and resources, and a few even abused the children. Clearly, immediate changes were necessary, and as no one else was taking responsibility for fixing these problems, I stepped forward to lead what change I could.

With the help of great teams of volunteers that I recruited, the classroom buildings and common areas were almost entirely renovated by the time I left Thailand nine months later. However, I struggled with solving the larger problems of mismanaged resources, embezzlement, and abuse. My disempowered position at the Center (i.e. volunteer English teacher), combined with my lack of training, tools and resources limited my progress in addressing these serious issues.

Because of this experience, and because of witnessing less dramatic but pervasive experiences of management challenges in my prior non-profit work, I reached a threefold conclusion: 1) Good management of non-profit organizations serving vulnerable populations is critical to protecting the most basic needs and rights of their constituencies; 2) If I want to see good management in these organizations, I need to be able to lead as a manager myself; and 3) I need to acquire a specific set of skills and information beyond my current education and expertise in order to succeed in that management role.

The professional positions to which I aspire include management of international development and service projects like the refugee center. I want to be able to oversee many aspects of an organization: to efficiently direct the physical and human resources, to raise funds, and to increase public interest in the organization. I also see myself more broadly assessing their mission, goals, and leadership, and redirecting them as appropriate toward a more sustainable future.

I will build towards these upper-level management positions via more immediately accessible programmatic and departmental management posts. The organizations for which I will work could be small start-up NGOs (founded by myself or by another), organizations in distress (like the refugee center), or established organizations in need of a new vision. My preferred organizations will be those assisting underserved people in developing countries, as I consider it a moral imperative to serve those most in need.

I want to tackle some of the hardest management challenges in some of the most difficult areas of the Earth. To do so I need the excellent and diverse instruction, faculty, and experiential opportunities available at Milano. In addition to the delightfully warm community and shared social justice values I observed during the Dec. 9th open house, a number of practical factors draw me to your program. The multi-disciplinary nature of the available instruction is in line with what I seek: my future managerial positions will require me to be a generalist of sorts, handling finance and HR policy with equal aplomb. That Milano faculty are practitioners, and that many Milano student projects serve actual clients, will give me invaluable insight into and experience with different organizations. I also look forward to benefiting from the global coursework content, the insights gained through the international work of faculty and my fellow students, and gaining experience in a new geographic region through my capstone project.

And what is this program I’ve signed up for? First off, The New School isn't new at all, having been founded in 1919. They've kept their name to continue their commitment to innovative, cutting-edge intellectual thought, and to continue inspiring relevance in the current age. But what about my specific program? Let me quote directly from one of their handouts:

“Established in 1979, the Nonprofit Management Program at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy was among the first academic programs in the United States to focus on nonprofit organizations. [There are 800 grad students across all 3 of Milano’s programs (international, management, policy). Classes are kept purposefully small at 18-25 students, never larger.] The Master of Science in Nonprofit Management curriculum consists of …a 42-credit degree program, [including required courses and electives]. The course of study at Milano includes both foundational and specialized nonprofit management courses. …"

I think you’ll see how their program exactly fits the bill for me to learn the skills I seek. “The following two-year plan of study is typical for full-time students in the Nonprofit Management Program.…

Fall (First Year)
--Making a Difference: Global, Organizational, and Individual Perspectives on Social Change
--Quantitative Methods
--Theory and Practice of Nonprofit Management
--Specialization/Elective Course
Spring (First Year)
--Economics for Management & Public Policy
--Fundraising and Development
--Specialization/Elective Course
--Preparation for summer internship
Summer: Internship
Fall (Second Year)
--Financial Management in Nonprofit Organizations
--Management and Organizational Behavior
--2 Specialization/Elective Courses
Spring (Second Year)
--Advanced Seminar in Nonprofit Management
--2 Specialization/Elective Courses
--Work on final consulting project

Some examples of electives that catch my eye include: Community Development, Creating Effective Multicultural Organizations, Education and International Development, Foundations of Organizational Change, Human Resources for Managers, Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship, Leadership Perspectives and Practice, NGOs and International Development, Organizational Assessment & Diagnosis, Poverty and Social Policy, Strategic Management for a Changing World, Sustainability Perspectives and Practice.

Other classes I don’t think I’ll be taking but am glad to see offered include: Advocacy in Government Relations, Arts and Cultural Marketing, Black Social Movements, Climate Change, Corporate Social Responsibility, Racial Economic Disparities, etc.

And these are, of course, only the classes directly offered by Milano. I already have my eye on the free language courses (Spanish and Swahili, here I come!) as well as the entire Parsons curricula, especially Documentary Filmmaking! (And no, documentaries and Spanish/Swahili are not frivolous, call me if you can’t figure this out and want an explanation on how incredibly and vitally relevant they are to the work I hope to do.) I just wish that I had an extra two years into which I could fit all these wonderful classes…

I already look forward to stepping out as an alumn of this program, packed to the gills with practical knowledge and experience and contacts, ready to continue saving the world, but from a more educated and powerful vantage point, to be all the more effective in the work I do.

On being courted by schools: Considering The New School

2011-04-04T20:59:00.007-04:00

Part 2 of 3

(To recap: I was admitted to both grad schools to which I’d applied, and attended both Admitted Students Days to decide between them. It was an enlightening comparison. NYU’s was the first day: see the preceding post for its review. I know this post is very long, but it's main audience is my family.)

Though my bias was initially for The New School, I showed up Saturday morning ready to be disappointed, keenly on the lookout for problems and concerns that would steer me away from their program.

I was humored to note that the building was on a corner some friends and I had recently visited as part of a lesbian history walking tour of Greenwich Village: on this block (separately) lived my heroes Willa Cather and Murray Hall. I tried not to read anything auspicious into this.

I stepped into a small, innovative building dominated by light natural wood and wall-to-wall windows showing the brick sidewalk and its very Village pedestrians on one side and whimsical tree-filled courtyard on the other. The space in which we initially gathered was a school-run café, with a small selection of fresh bagels, mango slices and fresh blueberries, granola, lime-aid, and organic fair trade coffee. I diligently tried to ignore the pangs of love my heart emitted because of this perfect spread.

My fellow accepted-student attendees were a small (50?) crowd of people of mixed ages, more on the young adult end but including visible representation of people through late middle age. The group was actually racially diverse, including lots of Latinos. I later learned that 22 countries were represented there: given the small total number of students, that’s a pretty high percentage! I immediately felt more relaxed here, if only because of the attire. At NYU, it was business suits and dressing to impress. At the New School most people wore jeans and t-shirts. The staff and faculty present (of which there were many) were casual, friendly, and happy looking, emitting kindness and enthusiasm. They had a hilarious logistical problem: that too many current students and alums had showed up to speak on the panel, because so many people wanted the opportunity to praise the New School and encourage us to attend.

As we introduced ourselves (which we actually had the opportunity to do here, unlike at NYU), the interests/professions of fellow students in Management program kept prodding me with glee: the first handful of people introduced themselves as engaged in women’s studies, feminist theory, gender, abortion access, education, ESL, mentorship, fine art, already running a nonprofit, film, media, prisoner services, food and nutrition i.e. feeding the poor, grassroots environmental organizing. (I stopped writing further interests down because I realized they would continue to each be exciting.) The goal of more than one other student is the same as my own: “I want to be in a high-level management position in a development organization.” After I introduced myself, the dean quipped, “Wow, you’re really in the right place.” Yes, yes, and yes! These are my people.

This was corroborated by a current student, a tiny Asian woman, who spoke late in the day: “Usually people are afraid of public speaking, but do you notice how relaxed we [current students] all are? How passionate? Even though I’m just a bitty woman and I’m holding this scary heavy phallic thing [i.e. microphone] in my hand up to my mouth, I’m not afraid to speak, not afraid at all!” And then following this delightful statement, a man sitting next to me rolled his eyes and put on a distasteful face protesting her ‘phallic’ comment and looked around for corroboration of his small-mindedness, and two other women sitting nearby gave him such immediate and strong stern looks of don’t-even-go-there feminist protectiveness, causing him to retract his expression before I could even compose my own protective face! :)

But I get ahead of myself: We started off the organized events of the day with a student-led tour of the facilities. Though the guides were just flying by the seat of their pants, leading to some humorous backtracking and a lack of necessary keys in a few instances, it was great to have unmediated time to grill current students about what life at the school was actually like, an opportunity which we all took full advantage of. The guides must have felt like they got the ninth degree, but their unflagging enthusiasm and honesty was very encouraging.

It was, of course, also great to have the opportunity to see the actual classrooms, computer labs, library, study spaces, etc. that we would be using. This tour was a nicety NYU had not bothered with, or which was perhaps not possible because the amenities there are so spread out. Most of my time at The New School will be spent in two adjoined buildings, a convenience I greatly appreciate.

As for the facilities themselves: they were small but great, actually fun. Thank you, Parsons students, for creating such innovative creative spaces. Throughout what would have otherwise been an unremarkable institutional building, there were unexpected open spaces, a plethora of light, whimsical interior design, bold colorful murals, many surprising and challenging sculptures, practical unique benches, random social/activist installations, and very efficient use of space. It felt like we’ll be studying in a modern art museum, but more relaxed. And speaking of, we apparently get free MOMA access for life. (Cue angelic choir, and slight concerns for my productivity: I know where I’ll be doing my reading!)

Throughout the building they have composting bins, actually diligent recycling bins, waterbottle refilling stations, and the like. The faculty offices are cluttered and seem well-used, giving me high hopes for being able to regularly find them there. The library is small but precise, and we will ironically have full use of all NYU facilities including their extensive libraries: NYU will even deliver requested books to The New School for us. “Their resources are our resources.” The computer labs are extensive and gorgeous, with monitors, scanners, and equipment suited to a fine arts program.

And speaking of equipment (this is the point at which my heart truly gave out any resistance and began to swoon), we get free priority use of professional-quality high-res still and video cameras, access to classes on documentary filmmaking, and all other Parsons resources. !!!! <3 <3

To top it off, we get free access to all New School language classes, no tuition needed. So the two things I was hoping to do outside of school over the next two years, namely learn how to do filmmaking and learn Spanish, are supported and encouraged in Milano’s program.

But I get ahead of myself again. (This is a good sign.) After the tour, we gathered in a space that reminded me quite a bit of the sanctuary of my childhood church (UUS:E) for the usual speechifying. The Dean won me over right off by apologizing that we’d left the breakfast spread behind in the previous room, saying: “Sorry we don’t have someone plying you with coffee and sweet rolls, but if you want that, it’s right downstairs, you can figure out how to get it yourself: now that’s empowered social change!” Especially on the heels of the NYU students of the day before, who had needed to be served, this struck quite a bell.

And then to the meat of the program: while I thought that NYU wasn’t asking the right questions in trying to make us “employable”, I think The New School responds perfectly to what has motivated me to pursue this degree, and what I hope to get out of it: “We want to honor that intrinsic value that you’ve placed on your development and what role you can place on society.” “We want to help you along on the road to make the change you want to see in the world.” “Personal development so you can better serve.” “Adding value to communities” “Implicitly social-justice values-centered work.” “What’s most important is that you are an engaged, informed, effective citizen, who knows how to effectively stand up and speak up, to actually enact change when it is needed.” “Making a difference in messy, difficult situations: in the real world.” “Setting a foundation for you to be able to learn further on your own in the unexpected and unprecedented situations in which you will find yourself.” Yes! I thought. By starting from this spot-on premise, I can build the education I seek! And, delightfully, unlike NYU starting with the expectation of selling out, “There is no reason you can’t seek personal satisfaction in all you do.”

One of the main programmatic features I was most interested in is relevant international and domestic work experience. While I knew this was part of the program, I hadn’t realized to what an extent it was available and in fact required. The students collectively do more than 200 client-based projects a year, with each student completing a consulting project for almost every class, and more over the summer. By the time I graduate, I’ll have a full resume of completed real-world consulting projects with NGOs and governmental agencies ranging from the UN and NYC councils to tiny startups in the jungles abroad.

While at NYU, independent international projects were tensely tolerated, such projects are encouraged at The New School. “A tremendous amount of students do their projects and work abroad.” And it’s not just ignorant poverty-tourist token projects. An example project cited by the Dean: “In the Amazon, managing a polluted river that stinks.” Another example project: “Organizing and building a floating barge swimming pool for Harlem.” Current student: “My pet project is slum rebuilding and mapping. I’ve helped rebuild slums on three continents already.” Another current student: “My current project is actualizing rural electrification in Brazil.”

Like NYU, the New School has an international summer program, which they call the International Field Program. It is much more rigorous than NYU’s program, lasting two months or more, and going to a much wider range of locations abroad. They require you to attend a course all semester before you go that teaches about the country and its language, as well as relevant skills you will need for succeeding in your work there such as data gathering, etc. When in the overseas locale, students participate in real projects with local partner organizations, and delve much further afield in their research and work. It sounds like a deeply rigorous and rewarding experience, and I can hardly wait.

Similarly, The New School fully supports students doing their final thesis-equivalent project on or in an international setting: “As long as there’s skype or a phone, we can make it work and support you in your work there.” This made me confident I could purse the kind of research and work that brings me to this field of study in the first place.

Of course, their curriculum reflects this support of international issues, with excellent classes across the spectrum of international NGO concerns. Milano also has excellent curricular resources on environmental issues (unlike NYU) thanks to having a parallel environmental studies and environmental management program. Throughout the New School they offer 40 courses per year on water alone. (Ma, I though you would like that.)

It turns out the folks at the New School really actually know what development work abroad is all about, in a way even most people working "in the field" don't understand: From an international student: “At the New School it doesn’t assume Western values, it doesn’t assume an outsider’s view, it focuses on community development and that you might be from that community, and engages that community. It’s not about foreigners coming in from outside and ‘developing’ someplace and then leaving. Though we teach how to do that well, too.” This kind of insight is so refreshing and exciting, and you have no idea how rare it is to have these dynamics acknowledged.

And her comment hints at the famed New School intellectual diversity in classroom discussions. Other current students commented on this: “I can push back in class, and people are open to hearing it.” And even, “I feel free even in an econ class to question the effects of capitalism… not to just accept the market system because it’s so pervasive.” You have no idea how glad I was to hear that I wouldn’t be the only one going against the grain, and that in fact I could learn from other students and faculty who share these same thoughts and values.

Students at the New School really actually seem to learn from one another. That comment in the paragraph above from the international student speaker, “Though we teach how to do that well, too” note how she says “we teach” though she is the student, not the teacher. Everyone listened to everyone else, and referred to one another’s expertises. At one point a professor directed a new student to the two students on the panel who could help her register her NGO in Canada, and twice I saw faculty turn to students for information to complete an answer to a question. Not that the faculty are passive participants in our education. They see themselves not only as teachers but “We’re your cheerleaders, your councilors, your guides.” At one point student quipped: “The faculty bedazzles me.” A member of the faculty responded, joking: “I don’t know about being bedazzling, but I know I am humbled by the students. I hope I can get recommendation letters from them in the future.” The personal respect and breadth of human resources evinced by the sum of the talented faculty and inspiring student body is very exciting.

Ok, I’m getting really tired, so I’m going to stop trying to make perfect paragraphs out of everything and just list off other key observations.

The New School teaches fundraising, philanthropy! NYU doesn’t. This is a very important thing to learn, so for this reason alone I should attend The New School.

“The freedom to chart my own course of study.” "Encouraging unorthodox courses of study. The school says “Yes”, “Why not”, “Let’s make this work,” rarely “impossible.”"

Almost everyone there works part-time while doing school. Working part-time and school full-time is best. Lots and lots of people work for the school, and everyone said the school makes it very easy to find part-time work you enjoy. Also, at NYU you can’t do a project at the place you work. At Milano you can: this just makes sense. They fully support and respect people having lives outside of school. And, every single other concern I mentioned in my write-up about NYU, like supporting female leadership and having a queer community and working with the kinds of organizations I one day hope to run? Not a concern here.

As for fun things outside of class, “There are lots of opportunities to go to events not related to poverty or genocide or other depressing things that we all get immersed in.” They offer free yoga, pilates, and zumba, plus frequent subsidized outings incl. hiking, whitewater rafting, rock climbing, etc. The leaders of the recreation department were inspiring (I’m using that word a lot, aren’t I?) in their attitude of support and getting people to try new things, and finding recreations that are a good match for people’s skills and stretching their boundaries and learning new things.

And then came the hilarious part where it turns out I’m signing on to the arch-rival school to Petra’s school. There were two current students there who had transferred from Columbia University: One had been “missing that sense of community with students and connection with faculty, and my heart of social organizing ached, and I love that The New School is a bastion of liberalism.” From the other student: “There’s a certain school, I won’t name it, it’s above 96th St and below 125th St., and its students are all really, you know… smart… We’re better than them. They know the theory, we know the practice.”

And from another student: “I wanted to look around a class and say not that these students are really smart and not have anything else to say about them, but that these students are Cool with a capital C, I’d want to work with them, hire them, passion oozes from them. If I were in a back-alley brawl, I’d want New School students on my side.”

“That school up north on this island [i.e. Columbia], they’ll be in the offices. We’ll be doing good work in the slums. Where do you want to be? Comfy, or effective?”

Petra corroborated many of their frustrations, though of course she rightly wants me to point out that Columbia is an excellent school, which it is, with impassioned, talented, practically-minded students, some of whom are willing to get their hands dirty (and of course in my opinion, of this most excellent group she is the most awesome and most potentially-effective and certainly the prettiest).

So, by the end of the day (a very reasonable 2:15 pm), I was totally and completely sold. Not only did they have all the basics I’d require (academic excellence, good facilities, classes giving me the exact skills I’ll need, opportunities to apply these skills abroad, and a network of people in the fields in which I hope to work), they have everything I’d want in any community with whom I’d spend my time: They share my values, my interests, they inspire me, and I felt at home.

Oh, yeah, and by the way? They're offering me a s*@#-ton of money. It will be quite affordable to attend. I was holding off on even thinking about this factor, because I really wanted to choose the program that's right for me regardless of cost, but really? It's like icing on top of an already delicious cake.

(P.S. Now, I know I haven't talked at length about the curriculum or faculty of either program, but that's not because I'm not considering these essential factors in my decision: it's because they're largely comparable between the two schools: both equally excellent and high-caliber and experienced. I'll talk more about just what is contained in The New School's program that I'm signing up for in a following post.)

On being courted by schools: Considering NYU

2011-04-04T13:01:00.004-04:00

Part 1 of 3

I spent the last two days being courted. As I mentioned earlier, the two schools I applied to, NYU and The New School, both admitted me, so I had to decide which program to attend. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, and were pulling out all the stops to convince the pool of us admitted students that we should sign on the dotted line for them: this was done by hosting Admitted Students days, NYU on Friday and The New School on Saturday. By the end of the two days, because of the content of their presentations, I was absolutely sure which is the right school for me. I think you’ll see why…

In the interests of space I will upload my reflections on the second school as a separate post. I know this is more information that most of you will be interested in: the main audience for this and the following two posts is my family. Note, all quotes quoted henceforth are my best attempt at the actual words said, I was jotting things down all day.
____________________________________________________
Though my initial bias was against NYU, I showed up bright and early with a smile on my face, my sharpest clothes on, and an open mind and heart, willing to be convinced that this was the school for me.

That the day they chose to host their program was on a Friday, necessitating us all to take a day off work or miss a day of school, was a point against them right off the bat. The day’s programming also ran from 9 am to 9 pm, which is just ridiculous. This initial impression, that the program is not considerate of students’ lives outside of NYU, was corroborated throughout the day.

I entered the huge building through a marble lobby, spaceship security gates, and uniformed guard, up shining brassy elevators, was given my slick printed nametag, and entered a huge ballroom with gigantic windows offering an absolutely stunning and unprecedented view across Washington Park, through the Arch, up 5th Ave, and past the Empire State Building, made especially gorgeous and dramatic by the swirling low clouds that shrouded the tops of the buildings. Yup, I was impressed. Part of me likes sitting in the lap of luxury, and this was unequivocally that.

Sadly, no one in the room but me seemed to notice or appreciate the view. The room was populated by a subdued crowd of about 250 mostly-white young adults in business attire, suits and ties and pencil skirts and heels all on their normatively-gendered bodies. People were politely provisioning themselves from the extensive mundane spread of sticky carbs and caffeine and sitting down at their assigned, numbered tables. When I commented on the view to a few, they looked and said, “Yes, it’s raining, this weather sucks” or “Whatever, I’m from New York, this isn’t anything special.” Unpleasant and disappointing, but perhaps I’d just encountered some bad apples, or they needed their coffee. After all, it was early.

The nametags they had given us had strings that were much too long except for the largest of us, so the tags rested on our bellies or hips, below the edges of the tables at which we sat, largely negating their usefulness and leading to lots of inappropriate staring to decipher a name. So I immediately tied the string on mine shorter, making it rest much higher and be easily readable. Everyone was flummoxed by this, and no one followed suit. I began to have serious doubts about my potentially-fellow students.

My scattered notes for the next hour of presentations read: Big. Very New York. Leadership. A push towards leadership. Asking tough questions, being tough. Lots of economists, health care. Power: Power over… Power for… Power with…. Almost all students are younger than me, have less experience. Think tanks as internships. Amartya Sen is coming to speak next week. (Ok, so those last two were good. That’s the kind of thing that gives me pause to consider. But the preceding comments are rather souring.)

Student panel participants: NYU isn’t a good fit for people who lack ambition, who are timid, who can’t handle being competitive, who don’t like people, who aren’t good at listening, who don’t like working in teams, who are afraid of hard work, who are disorganized, who don’t like New York. “If you’re like that, don’t come here, please, you’ll make our team work unpleasant and frustrating.” (Rather harsh, unfriendly, and unnecessarily critical, despite the obvious virtues of listening and hard work and the like.)

A very informative and useful financial aid session yielded some interesting info in addition to the usual Stafford loans and work study: They offer $5000 funding for unpaid internships over the summer between years of study. The funding isn’t guaranteed, I’d have to apply for it, but 50 students get it every summer, and I think I’d be a strong candidate. And they have funding to help pay for international travel for school projects. And they negotiate to get our clients to help pay for our project expenses. (This is unusual compared to other programs, and a very tempting perk.)

I was offered a small merit-based scholarship, so asked about the likelihood of continued scholarships. I was told a GPA of 3.6 is necessary to maintain the grant semester by semester. This isn’t a problem for me, as 3.6 is well within my usual GPA range. However, I was saddened by their rationale behind the 3.6 cutoff: it’s the average GPA throughout the program, meaning that the faculty grades lightly. (I’d rather they have higher expectations, grade more harshly, challenge us to do better.)

Definitely my favorite temptation of the day rested in the international summer programs. The school offers 2-3 week programs at three different times during the summer in locations such as Cape Town, South Africa; Accra, Ghana; and Shanghai, China, combining intensive class study on a particular topic relevant to the location (i.e. environmental management, food security, and urban planning respectively) with organized housing, sight-seeing, and observation of a local organization’s work. I liked the particular locations (all of interest to me), I liked how well-structured the time is, and the topics were of great interest. I hesitated over the hint of poverty tourism, but understood their desire to keep us safe. But most of all, I love the intensive class format, it being my favorite way to learn: if I could do my whole degree through a series of intensive programs of a few weeks each, I’d do so. And then I learned the best thing about the international summer classes: they can be done by people attending other schools, though they’re a bit pricey. :)

Then the real turning-point in my decision-making process, during a panel with faculty from the program. One spoke on the financial challenges states face regarding pension plans. One spoke on the statistics of the racial divide in subsidized housing compared to their surrounding communities. And the last spoke with refreshing frankness on social entrepreneurship, articulating an attitude I had begun to glean held importance in the program: Their main interest is to make graduates well-prepared for the workplace. They’re most concerned with putting onto my resume what’s going to get me a job. But is “what’s going to get me a job” the right question to be asking? It was all very, very in-the-box thinking. They were very critical of the idea of social entrepreneurship, of people setting out on their own, of people working outside of traditional, pre-existing workplaces and organizational structures. They advocated for people working within well-designed organizations. “It’s not about the lone individual: it’s not about individuals at all. You have to be willing to give up control of your projects, of your dreams, to get them done.” Um, no thanks. I do not want to go to grad school to learn how to settle, how to plan from the get-go to compromise my control and my ideas. And, after talking at such length about the failures of existing structures and organizations and programs, why say I have to work within these broken systems? And who is to say that I have to come in at the bottom, give up my control and ideas? Who is to say I can’t run those organizations or start my own and maintain control? I fully understand the arguments for existing institutions and against common problems of startup social entrepreneurship, i.e. redundancies and incompetencies, but that’s just badly done/ignorant entrepreneurship, not all of it. And their whole attitude smacked hugely of anti-grassroots, anti-community organizing, and pro-institutionalism: that’s not how I want to learn or do my work. Probably not the place for me.

At this point, I started a list of questions I really wanted to get answered: Is there discussion of and support for female leadership, addressing and helping solve the challenges women working in this field encounter? Is there a queer community here, and does it include women? Do queer people, queer ideas, queer relationships get respect and support here? Do we have opportunities to work with small organizations, not just megaliths like the World Bank? (I was unable to get answers to these questions over the next 5 hours, in effect answering them for me.)

At the late-afternoon faculty mixer, the faculty all arrived quite late (30 min+) and wanted instead to meet with small groups of people in their offices instead of in the larger gathering rooms. None of the prospective students stepped forward to open the wine bottles or started eating the array food, though they were all talking of how good it looked. When I stepped forward and opened a red and white wine and started pouring for everyone, hamming up the hostess role, everyone relaxed a bit, but seriously? They needed someone to pour for them? It turned out to be very very hard to get to speak with faculty because there were so few of them and so many students, which proved the reputation of their inaccessibility. I did eventually get to speak with the delightful John Gershman, the advisor of a friend of mine who recently completed the program, with whom I definitely hope to speak again in the future, a nice end to a baffling day.

In conclusion, I came away thinking while I could do the NYU program, and could get a lot out of it, it wouldn’t be teaching the kind of business I want to do in the world, and I wouldn’t necessarily enjoy it very much.

I got into both grad schools!

2011-03-24T08:07:00.002-04:00

Hi y'all! Great news! I got into both grad schools I applied to: The New School's Milano School for Management, and NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. I have two weeks to decide between them, and it's going to be tough.

The New School's program would be a Master of Science in Nonprofit Management. The school and program have a lot going for them: I really clicked with the people there; it's a very social-justice-rooted program; it's specifically designed to help people do exactly what I want to do (run nonprofits); and perhaps most importantly, they're offering me quite a lot of money. However, no one's ever heard of them, and as a newer program they don't have the kind of institutional and alumni clout as other programs.

NYU's program would be a Master of Public Administration in Public and Nonprofit Management and Policy. They also have a lot going for them: They've got serious clout, funding, good repute, and mighty alumni. However, I didn't feel welcomed or inspired there, and they're offering me a smaller amount of money. I'm giving them another shot to convince me at the admitted students open house next week.

As you can see, I have a strong initial preference. But to go with my heart (I like them, they are nice!) or what seems to be a more responsible long-term institutional connection (they are powerful, they can help me be powerful too)?

leads for summer internships?

2011-03-05T09:57:00.005-05:00

I am hoping to do an internship this summer in Africa, and am wondering if you have any leads or contacts you could recommend to me. Specifically:

WHO: Me, Petra Aldrich. For those of you who don't know me, I am a current Masters candidate at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs in the Economic and Political Development department, specializing in Management. I have previous experience working in anti-human-trafficking in Thailand for one year for World Vision. I have interned this winter in Haiti with Explorers Sans Frontiers, a small Philladelphia-based NGO serving medical needs in Port-Au-Prince tent cities. I have further previous experience in NGO corporate and donor relations, volunteer management, and program management. A short version of my resume/CV is here: feel free to contact me for more information.

WHO ELSE: a mid-range to large international NGO like Oxfam, IRC, CARE, UN, Save the Children, or smaller but equally awesome ones I might not have heard of. I'd prefer organizations that directly serve the basic needs of impoverished communities.

WHAT: an internship, doing productive work in
a) program design, or monitoring and evaluation, or
b) any other aspects of development project implementation and management.

I'm more interested in programs addressing:
-refugee needs,
-gender issues,
-anti-human-trafficking,
-community health, and
-children,
and less interested in:
-medical clinics,
-agriculture,
-wildlife/environment,
-education,
-legal, and
-finance assistance programs.

WHEN: This summer, between late May and the end of August, but perhaps not the entirety of that time.

WHERE: somewhere in English- or French-speaking Africa, preferably these countries which have a theoretical higher tolerance for lesbians:
-Rwanda (a top choice)
-Madagascar (a top choice)
-South Africa (a top choice)
-Zimbabwe
-Zambia
-Kenya (but not Nairobi)
-Swaziland
-Seychelles
-Central African Republic
-Togo
-Burkina Faso
-Benin
-Gabon

Thanks for any leads or other help that you can offer in making my summer a productive one!

-Petra Aldrich

Haiti: Radio interview, slideshow, song

2011-02-23T15:02:00.004-05:00

Here's a recent radio interview I did about my work in Haiti, accompanied by a slideshow of relevant pictures from my trip. The video is split into to parts, so it could be more easily uploaded, so be sure to watch both parts. The end of the second part has a great song sung by kids in one of the tent cities. Enjoy!

Haiti: My Work

2011-01-24T17:47:00.002-05:00

I went to Haiti to intern with a Philadelphia-based non-profit called Explorers Sans Frontiers (ESF). Shonta, my boss, founded ESF about three years ago and the organization has been growing ever since. ESF brings teams of American students and professionals to underserved parts of the developing world. The programs integrate humanitarian service and cross-cultural education. Specific activities and the particular mix of service and exploration vary depending on the country and length of the trip. The main thing ESF does in Haiti is run medical clinics in underserved neighborhoods in Port-Au-Prince.

My title was Intern for Collaboration and Program Monitoring and Evaluation, and my primary responsibility was to help ESF develop collaborative partnerships with other NGOs. Additionally, I identified opportunities to begin monitoring and evaluating the impact of ESF’s work.

Since I arrived in Haiti midway through an ESF trip, I spent the first several days assisting the medical team and observing the implementation of ESF’s program from an impact assessment perspective. From then until I left Haiti, I spent my time visiting various organizations in Port-Au-Prince to interview their staff and observe their programs. Having absorbed as much information as possible, I created a report identifying potential partnership opportunities.

A typical day would begin with breakfast and internet time (if the electricity was up) while I waited for my colleagues to arrive. Rousevelt and Anderson are college students and ESF staff. They’re brothers, best friends, study-buddies, and completely inseparable. “The boys,” were my constant companions.

After they picked me up, the three of us would head out. Our day’s activities might include meeting with the director of an orphanage, visiting a mobile clinic one of our partner agencies was running, or attending a briefing on the Cholera outbreak at the Ministry of Public Health and Population. Because the communications infrastructure is unreliable, the professional culture prioritizes face to face meetings. Because it takes so long to get from one place to another, our daily agenda was of necessity quite short. Accomplishing two things in a day was productive. Three was outstanding.

After the boys escorted me home at the end of the day, I’d generally eat dinner, check email (if the electricity was up), and plan for the following day before going to bed.

Haiti: Port-Au-Prince and Pétionville

2011-01-24T17:45:00.001-05:00

Like LA, its first world sister in poor air quality, Port-Au-Prince sits at the bottom of a half-bowl formed by mountains in close proximity to the sea. The city feels bigger than it is because it takes so long to get from one place to another (awful roads combined with dense and unruly traffic). Chickens and goats wander everywhere and are especially thick in the residential neighborhoods. Both are used mainly for meat.

Port-Au-Prince is a bizarre combination of visual monotony and shocking contrast. Everywhere you see collapsed houses and piles of rubble that have not been touched since the earthquake. Next to such a house, you may very well see a newly re-built mansion. Next to either, a shack constructed of tarps and tin that houses five people. The discontinuity almost becomes monotonous. Until your eyes adjust and you learn how to look, every street looks the same. This is doubly true in residential areas with no houses, collapsed or otherwise: just street after street, dusty and rocky, lined with Shelter-Boxes and tents and endless endless tarps.* For me, at least, three weeks was barely long enough to start to remember particular locations. Even then my mental map is little more than a series of street corners I’ve somehow learned to identify; a particular row of tents next to a curved white concrete wall, a place that sells tires wrapped in strips of shiny Mylar paper, a fork in the road just before it becomes paved.

Inland from Port-Au-Prince on the foothill slopes of the mountains sits the wealthier suburb known as Pétionville. I first went to Pétionville on my third day in Haiti, up until which point I’d seen only tent cities. The incredible contrast was disorienting. Though it’s obvious that Pétionville is in a developing country, it is in much better shape than Port-Au-Prince. There are fully paved roads with working traffic signals, prosperous markets, even luxury stores and an American style supermarket complete with Pepperidge Farm cookies. There are also a lot of walled mansions on quiet, tree-lined streets. This is where the majority of Haiti’s elite live. Because its infrastructure is so much better, it’s also where most of the international NGOs have their offices.

Roughly half the vehicles that clog the streets are tap-taps (see “where I stayed”), very beat up private vehicles, or larger busses nicknamed “Obamas” because they appeared in Port-Au-Prince around the same time President Obama was sworn into office. A staggering number of white four-wheel drives sporting various NGO logo comprise the rest of the traffic. I started keeping lists of NGOs whose logos I spotted in Haiti, and whether I saw them on a truck, on a building, or on a tarp or a tent. Though all three lists are too long to transcribe, I saw all the names you’d expect to see,** plus a few surprises: I was delighted to see Islamic Relief Services and the Tai Chi Federation of Taiwan, and I also saw donations of supplies from Rotary International and a number of different governments. And then, of course, there’s the UN. The UN in its various incarnations probably has as many vehicles in Port-Au-Prince and Pétionville as all the international NGOs combined. In my goofier moments I imagined creating a bingo board with all the NGO and UN agency acronyms. I could send it down with future volunteers: when you see the logo you check it off, and whoever gets five in a row wins. Given that the winners in this agency fun-fest are supposed to be the Haitian people, however, Bingo is a bit tacky.

*After a while you can start to identify the donating organization by the color of the tarp: light royal blue is Samaritans’ Purse, gray with darker gray stripes is USAID, and tan tents are from the Brasilian Civil Defense, while cerulean blue tents are from the People’s Republic of China. The rest are mostly plain gray and dusty white at this point, regardless of logo.

**Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, World Vision, Save The Children, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, PLAN, AmeriCares, and a host of smaller organizations

Haiti: Tent Cities

2011-01-24T17:44:00.000-05:00

The tent cities are everywhere. They crowd into any accessible open space: fields, nature strips, public parks, anywhere. There’s a large park by a cathedral in the center of wealthy Pétionville, and the tent city that now crowds every inch of it emphasizes all the more plainly the chasm between Haiti’s rich and poor. The center of downtown Port-Au-Prince had many of the older and lovelier buildings in the city, including some stately public buildings like the now famously crumbled Presidential Palace and the national museum. These last two especially are ringed with broad avenues, spreading parks, and several large circular intersections with monuments in the middle (think of l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris). The parks and gardens used to be well tended and green, with lush trees and flowers and flowing fountains. Rousevelt told me it used to be the most beautiful place in Haiti.

Now, of course, the parks and plazas are a crowded labyrinth of tents and shanty-shacks, and the trees are watered by wash water. Some flowers still bloom, but generally other smells overwhelm their fragrance: smoke from cooking fires, food being prepared, exhaust, unwashed bodies, garbage, and sewage. The fountains are dry. Water flows instead from a row of taps springing from the occasional Oxfam or Red Cross water tank system, where people us wash themselves, their clothes, their dishes, and anything else. One child I saw had covered himself with soap and was sliding around on his belly on the wet pavement, having a ball. The NGO-built latrines are unmistakable. They come in banks of four or five, all in a row, identical and probably inadequate. The camp president guided us through this tent city, which is a very good thing: The boys and I would definitely have gotten lost on our own.

The shanties have their own kind of beauty, or at least visual interest. The collage of chicken wire and faded paint on wood with corrugated metal and lace curtains is strangely compelling. Residents make concerted home improvement efforts even to their tarps and tents. They scallop the edges of the plastic sheeting that forms their roof and cut elaborate and decorative window shapes into the walls of their tents. These window shapes are inspired by the wrought iron windows and gates that are so much a part of Haitian architecture.

I stayed for nearly two weeks in my own tent, in the yard of a house that is surrounded by two tent cities (see “where I stayed”). The sense of community seemed very strong in this neighborhood, perhaps because people live in such close proximity to one another. Of course I was homesick, but even as a foreigner I wasn’t exactly lonely. I was always aware of the people around me, and could usually tell what they were doing. It’s quite a contrast to the private isolation in which most New Yorkers live: I can’t imagine these neighbors not knowing one another. The structures are so open that all sounds carry easily: if a church is holding services, everyone in the neighborhood can (and often does) sing along with the hymns. Even in the relative privacy of my tent, my senses were full of the sounds and smells of people living. I woke at sunrise to the sound of roosters, footsteps on gravel, and other sounds of people waking up and moving around. I heard pots being lifted and set down, and people’s voices as they greeted each other.

The camp was busy but quiet in the mid-to-late afternoon. The sounds of hammering, chickens making a ruckus, and kids shouting sifted through a continual murmur of voices. I would hear someone dumping out the wash water and a diesel engine roaring on the other side of the small valley, it’s sound strangely muted by the distance (I could usually hear its suspension, too, and even its cargo bouncing around in the back). The ground is packed so hard it’s like clay, and it’s full of rocks. Everything is the color of light yellowy taupe and cement, and gray and blue from the tarps. There’s dust everywhere, and a purplish-gray haze of dust, smoke, and air pollution over everything. People seem to eat two meals a day (one in the morning, and one in the late afternoon), and I could smell chicken cooking in preparation. Behind the food smells, the air would be thick with the smell of open fires in every household burning whatever is at hand.

Haiti: The Caribbean International Highway

2011-01-24T17:40:00.009-05:00

Over the course of my trip to Port-Au-Prince, four different people approached me to ask if I’d heard about the Caribbean International Highway, an underwater highway theoretically currently being constructed between the US and Haiti. That’s right, an underwater highway between the US and Haiti. By way of Cuba, in fact.

Let me be clear: THERE IS NO HIGHWAY. It is a hoax, fiction, not real. There never has been, and never will be, an long underwater highway like this, here or any other place. It would be impossible, because it would be extremely difficult to build, and be far more expensive than it would be worth.

The fact that this idea is so absurd as to be stupidly ridiculous is not the point of the story. Nor are the numerous responses I made explaining the (blindingly obvious!) fact that the Caribbean International Highway is a fiction: an internet hoax someone invented to drive traffic to his/her blog. What struck me was how ready Haitian people were to believe this story – even intelligent, fairly educated, reasonably worldly Haitian people. And what their credulity implies.

The first conclusion is obvious and not particularly interesting: most Haitian people are poorly equipped consumers of internet information. This is not a judgment; it’s an acknowledgement that finding, evaluating, and especially filtering information from electronic sources is a skill which, unsurprisingly, most Haitian people have not developed. Even those with regular internet access didn’t usually have the contextual understanding to appreciate the substantive difference between The New York Times website and the dozens of junk “news” sites that populate the web. I look at the picture below and laugh, because I see immediately that I’m looking at a regional map that someone pulled from a google image search and drew some colored lines on using some program not much more sophisticated than Microsoft Paint. In contrast, the Haitian people who approached me saw this picture as proof that the plan was underway.

For the people who approached me about the highway, the utter absence of any mention of the project in any reputable news source was meaningless. Usually this was for the reasons discussed above. For those better able to evaluate the credibility of different news sources, however, the silence in the mainstream media was simply evidence that “they” were keeping the project secret for some nefarious purpose. This brings me to a second and altogether sadder conclusion: Haitian people are very accustomed to secretive and often foreign powers making plans and decisions that change Haiti in ways that they themselves cannot control or influence. The combined effects of the many upheavals in Haiti’s history have made the idea of a secret underwater highway all too believable.

Moving forward, we can learn from the problems of their credulity: First, it is further proof of the need for increased opportunities for education in Haiti, and the need for computer skills and critical thinking skills to be part of that education. Second, the world needs to stop making actual nefarious plans that scapegoat the Haitian people, so that perhaps they can learn to trust us.

**P.S. After having posted this entry, I was surprised to find that traffic to our blog, via this entry, significantly increased. There are even more people than I would have expected looking for information on this!

Haiti: My Best Friend Reggie

2011-01-20T12:55:00.001-05:00

Without a doubt, the best part of my Haiti trip was meeting my new friend, Ysemaille’s ten-year-old son Reggie. Reggie is the sweetest child imaginable, and smart and thoughtful too. Once when we were riding in the truck together, he noticed me squinting to read my cell phone screen in the glare of the direct sunlight. Without any prompting or fuss, he carefully cupped his hands around the screen so I could see it clearly. How many adults would be so considerate?

Reggie got a Checkers and Tic-Tac-Toe game for Christmas. Checkers is a bit too abstract for him just yet, but he took to Tic-Tac-Toe like a fish to water. We played for hours. Reggie speaks Creole, understands French, and speaks a bit of French unless he’s feeling shy. I speak French and understand (some) Creole. We communicated in a combination of the two languages. The only word of either that you really need to understand the following dialogue is “gagner,” which is the verb “to win:”

Petra (placing my second white piece on the tic-tac-toe board): Mets les trois pieces en ligne: ca fait gagner.
Reggie (putting a black piece in the left corner, blocking my two white pieces): Voila, Reggie blocke, Reggie a gagner?
Petra (placing another white piece in what I have correctly assessed as a futile attempt put three pieces in a line and win the game): Pas encore, mais…
Reggie (putting down a third piece): Ah! Reggie a gagner!
Petra (tickle-tackling Reggie with cuddles, reducing him to delighted giggles): Oui, magnifique! Reggie a gagner perfectment: Formidable. Tu as gagne mon coeur aussi.

Tic-Tac-Toe was only one of the activities we did together, though. We played on the computer when the internet was up, typing out our addresses and sending emails to the USA. He’s fascinated by addresess. Another day I gave him a tour of my tent, and he helped me make my bed. He especially liked my pillow, which I do have to admit is quite nice. Later I asked him to comb my hair (of course, everyone is fascinated by my hair), which he did so gently I was amazed. Then he went to get the hair oil from the bedroom, to comb it through mine as his dad does through his (I thanked him and explained that white people don’t usually use hair oil).

The day we took his stepmom to the airport, he couldn’t believe I wasn’t going too. The whole way to the airport, he kept asking me, “Aux Etates-Unis?” which means “to the United States?” and was his abbreviated way of asking me if I was going home. I told him no, I’m staying with you for a while longer. On receiving this answer he would assume I’d misunderstood the question, wait long enough to be polite, and repeat it.

Perhaps my favorite day with Reggie was the day we drew pictures of our houses: first his own, then mine. We carefully chose the colors and noted all important elements: door, window, porch, chairs, lamp, hill, and sky. As we drew he exclaimed “quell belle maison!” which is “what a beautiful house!” His delight and pride in his house (and his drawing) truly touched my heart. Seeing where Reggie lives, most people in the US would barely see a house much less a beautiful house. But Reggie’s pride is understandable, as his house is undoubtedly the nicest in the neighborhood. We taped our beautiful drawings up around the beautiful house, and sat down for another game of Tic-Tac-Toe.

Haiti: Where I Stayed

2011-01-20T12:07:00.003-05:00

My First Home in Haiti: My tent pitched in Ysmaille’s back yard. Ysmaille’s house is four rooms: bedroom, kitchen, livingroom, and bathroom (though since the refrigerator and stove are in the livingroom while the desk, computer, phones, internet etc are in the kitchen, the lines are a bit blurred). It’s built of cement with a tin roof, and the interior floors are tiled. The bathroom has all the fixtures you’d recognize, but there’s no water to the taps (see “water” below).

Residents: Ysmaille sleeps in the bedroom. His son Reggie and part-time domestic helper Flatude sleep on mats in the livingroom, which they put away each morning and retrieve each evening when they’re ready to go to bed. The first time I saw Reggie grow sleepy, get out his mat and blankets, and put himself to bed in the middle of the kitchen – all lights on, music still going, people up and about – I was floored. Roudy, Ysmaille’s friend and colleague, sleeps in a tent in the yard. Our tents were right next to one another and I grew very accustomed to the sounds of Roudy’s snores. He snores continually and very loudly. While this initially drove me crazy, I eventually came to find it comforting. Haiti was a stressful and scary place to be, but if Roudy was snoring, than he was sleeping, and that meant things were calm and ok.

My ‘room’: My tent, pitched in the dirt yard behind the house, was wonderful, my oasis in the chaos. Erika and Lilli set me up with the best available camping bedding before I went down, so I was very comfortable with my compact pillow and sheets and mattress. I understand that the guys at EMS enjoyed the challenge of identifying the ideal air mattress to recommend for someone who would be sleeping on rubble for a fairly extended period. They did an excellent job. I enjoyed being undisturbed by mosquitoes thanks to my net windows, plus the cool fresh air and the amazing gorgeous proliferation of stars on view in a place where there is no electricity to speak of.

Neighborhood: Ysmaille’s house is in a neighborhood called Delmas 75. It’s a fairly remote residential neighborhood about 20 minutes walk from the bus station.* The neighborhood boasts few actual remaining houses, and Ysmaille’s house is pretty well surrounded by two tent cities. It’s a hilly area, very dry, dominated by dirt roads, half-standing walls, rubble piles, and occasional dusty plantlife.

Electricity: This area has very little city electricity, and only a handful of the surrounding houses and tents have electricity. Between Ysmaille’s two generators, we generally had electricity for the few hours between sundown and when everyone went to bed. During this time, I could generally get on the internet for a bit as well. Having internet at home in Haiti is very rare. Ysmaille is the only person I met who has it.

Water: Ysmaille’s house is further distinguished in the neighborhood by the fact that he has his own water tank. The tank is a massive cement box to the left of the house, making the top level with the ground floor of the house: the top of the tank doubles as a spacious patio. Every few weeks, the water truck comes and fills up the tank.

Having water is not the same as having plumbing, however: as I mentioned above, there’s no water to the taps. We draw water from the tank in a bucket, fill up bigger buckets, and carry them into the bathroom for use. A shower means standing in the tub pouring water over yourself. To flush the toilet, you pour water in the bowl. You get the idea. Needless to say, all the water is room-temperature to cold. If you’re showering in the heat of mid-day, that’s fabulous. In chilly mornings it’s a bit rough.

Of course, the water in the tank is not potable. It’s only for washing. All water in Haiti, drinking water included, is privatized and must be purchased. Ysmaille keeps drinking water in the kitchen.

Home Number Two: A different tent set up on the second floor of a school and community center run by the Haitian American Caucus (HAC). I stayed here for a few days because I was shadowing the HAC director (see “My Work”), and the HAC place is too far from Ysmaille’s house for day-trips: to be there in the morning, I really needed to wake up there. Since HAC is set up to house and feed volunteers from overseas, this worked out very well.

Neighborhood: HAC is in a neighborhood called Croix-de-Bouquets, across the river from the rest of Port-Au-Prince and much more rural. Criox-de-Bouquets is also famous for being Wyclef Jean's (formerly of The Fugees) home town. Croix-de-Bouquets was possibly my favorite place in Haiti: the building is surrounded by mango trees and flowering jasmine that smells amazing. It’s quiet all the time, and there’s an absolutely gorgeous pasture out back. The stars at night are among the most beautiful I’ve seen.

Electricity: similar to at Ysmailles, except there’s no city electricity in the neighborhood. Since the HAC generator is rather unreliable, we made much more use of flashlights. No internet access here.

Water: The HAC facility has a water tank and indoor plumbing. The bathroom was bare cement, with a large window open to the outside, but there was (cold) water to the taps. Drinking water in the kitchen.

Home Number Three: A bed and breakfast called Maison Blanche in Delmas 75 near Ysmaille’s house but much closer to the bus station.* Moving here cut 20 minutes off each end of my travel time each day. Electricity and internet access were much more reliable here, though both cut out about once a day or so. My private bathroom had not only plumbing but occasional warm water to the shower. In fact, my very last shower in Haiti was actually hot.

From here, I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

* Of course, “bus station” in this context means “that intersection where the busses stop.” And the “bus” is actually a tap-tap, which is like a pick-up truck with a top and two benches welded onto the bed. They’re generally elaborately and colorfully decorated with images and phrases drawn with equal vigor from Christianity and secular pop culture: the Virgin Mary and Michael Jackson framed by the words “Grace a Dieux” (Grace/Thanks to God). This photo is not mine, it is Irene Prewitt’s and comes from her blog.

Haiti: Arrival

2011-01-18T09:09:00.002-05:00

Even from the air, the earthquake's devastation is evident. As my plane curved low from over the sea toward Toussaint Louverture International Airport in North-Central Port-Au-Prince, I noticed collections of structures that were clearly neighborhoods but just looked wrong: their coloring, that bleached warm taupe of dusty concrete, was too uniform; the lines of both buildings and streets too random and soft. There were few crisp rooflines topped with rust-colored tin or corrugated iron, and too few trees.

My sense of discomfiture grew as we landed, and I sank into a city shaped and stamped by confusingly intermixed influences of earthquake devastation and endemic poverty. I saw the cracked edges and faded paint on the runways. A few containers and trailers lie seemingly at random on the grassy stretches between the runways: are they homes? Offices? The Air-Traffic-Control tower? No way to know. Off to the side, on an overgrown field close to the wall that encloses the airport, a scattering of 757s squat at odd angles, abandoned and dark, their parent companies presumably defunct. Depressing at best, disconcerting the more I thought about it.

We deplaned into the old airport terminal, which is no longer in use. My companions, a pair of teenagers coming home for the holidays, assured me that the other terminal was better, but I’d yet to see it and it was eerie to walk down dark hallways past dark and empty offices whose windows (some splintered or reinforced with utility tape) showed faded logos for American Airlines, Air Canada, and other companies. If I believed in omens, which of course I don’t, then wandering through a cracked ghost-airport of commercial failure would have filled me with a sense of foreboding, which of course it didn’t.

Helpfully, all signage in the new airport building is trilingual, as had been the airline safety videos and cabin announcements on the flight over: French, English, and Creole/Kreyol. As soon as I had stepped onto the plane in Florida, I had been immersed in a wash of these three languages, often spoken intertwined. Obviously the English stood out for me, but my years of language study finally paid off in my ability to navigate the French language environment with equal ease. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could also glean a lot meaning from the Creole using my French. I felt on strong linguistic ground.

My boss Shonta, who I had met in the US, greeted me at the other side of customs and immigration. I realized immediately that Shonta knows by first name everybody at the airport, from the officer who stamped my passport to the security guards who let her in to meet me in the first place to the porter whom she indicated I should let carry my bag. She moves through the airport scattering smiles, greetings, and jokes. This how she gets things done. If you know me, you’ll know why we get along: I have the same style, using charm to navigate pesky institutional structures. Very effective outside the US. When I am home, I occasionally miss being able to wield this power, so it was nice to be back in my element again.

We left the terminal, dodging and weaving through a throng of porters, touts, and chauffeurs to reach Shonta’s truck, a rare rugged, dented, much-loved workhorse of a four-wheel drive. The interior of the door can no longer remember a time when it was upholstered, there are no signs of seatbelts, and we’ll leave the rest unsaid. The thing about unsafe vehicles is that they get exponentially less safe the faster they go. Despite its quirks, the truck is mechanically sound and very sturdy: ideal for narrow, uneven, pothole- and rubble-ridden roads on which you can rarely break 15 miles per hour. We wove sluggishly through the dusty streets, arriving after 40 minutes or so at the house of Ysmaille, Shonta’s fiancé, where I stayed for the first week and a half.

Italy: Day 12: Last day, Pisa

2011-01-04T17:27:00.004-05:00

My mother and sister wandered up into the hills above our guest house to further admire the views while I finished and submitted my grad school essays. Then we ate another scrumptious train food court meal (fresh tuna and cured meat sandwiches), hopped on another train, again admired the stunning Apennines and the piles of marble mined from them that lined the tracks, and pulled into Pisa not long after.

Pisa was not at all what I expected. Its streets were calm, well-lived-in, with more posh clothing and food shops than tourist traps. Though an incredibly ancient city, its buildings were low and spanned a wide range of ages. Its frontage along the river Arno was smooth and utilitarian and colorful, a pleasant change from Florence and the like. Its population was surprisingly diverse, with noticeable vibrant minorities of people of Asian and African descent. And most delightfully, its tower and accompanying buildings were not the tacky trollops I anticipated, but were stark and arresting in their elegance and simplicity.

The iconic leaning tower is in fact a bell-tower for the cathedral that anchors the spacious Piazza dei Miracoli. The brilliantly green grassy field holds only four buildings: the aforementioned tower and duomo, plus a baptistery and a graveyard structure. The openness of the public space is unique in Italy, where most equivalent buildings are situated crammed amongst the bustle of unrelated structures. The buildings are spare and elegant, featuring the blindingly white marble and smooth lines of their construction rather than much fuss and ornament. The architects’ and city planners’ forward thinking is all the more remarkable when you consider that they designed this space and its buildings around the year 1000. The interior of the unassuming Baptistery is particularly striking, echoing the best of Roman architecture with graceful arches reaching up to an ambitiously high dome. Perhaps most unique, the cemetery building is designed to be a church of the dead, shaped in a cathedral’s cross but with the center nave roofless and open to the heavens.

Climbing the tower was a strange experience. Remember, of course, that it is leaning. Now think about what a spiral staircase tilted at an angle would be like to walk up and down on. Now make there be no handrail, and make the steps very very worn slippery marble. It was more of a challenge than I had anticipated, but the views from the top across the roofs of the ancient city to the dramatic mountains encircling was well worth the drunken funhouse experience of the stairs.

Our accomodations in Pisa, excellently located by my sister, were in the simple but comfortable Pensione Helvetica, a large and very clean hotel that was inexpensive at 20 Euro per person per night. I was humored to find it was run by a Thai family, and enjoyed their Thai-style courtyard garden (read proliferate potted plants and decorative duckweed with random laundry and trampoline and hand-welded decorative fence). I’d highly recommend it to anyone staying briefly in Pisa.

We dined at a restaurant overlooking the leaning tower that, though catering to the tourist set, was deservedly Lisa-Approved. From their vast menu we enjoyed a sampler of Tuscan bruschettas (mystery pate, lard) that were much tastier than you’d think, as well as a rich dish of gnocchi and fresh crab meat, a serving of roast pork, and my personal favorite, a massive pile of simple sautéed chard-like greens, accompanied by the required local Chianti.

My mother and my flight back to the US left at 7 am the next morning, so we called it an early evening and awoke at a stupidly early hour to get to the airport, only to find the counters not yet open. Once we were able to check in, we were hustled through a surprisingly out-of-date airport experience, with minimal security, tiny spartan waiting accommodations, and a bus across the tarmac to the plane, which we boarded by climbing the stairs to the side. It was more like the Cambodian airports than any developed-country airports I’ve visited.

Which brings me to a concluding observation about Italy: Though it’s a fairly prosperous western European country, it remains in many ways surprisingly undeveloped. Its infrastructure, its politics, and the lifestyles of its inhabitants have remained much less changed by modern life than its neighbors. The new structures built are much like the very old structures, without many “improvements”. The electricity and potable water is haphazard, though fairly reliable. Family, food, drink, church, and public events (including sports) are the priorities, rather than maximizing profits, consumerism, materialism, individualism. In general, it reminded me more of Thailand than America. And in many ways, I felt more at home in this throwback context than my comfortable apartment in NYC.

Italy: Day 10-11: Cinque Terre

2011-01-02T13:52:00.002-05:00

New Years Day we arrived by train from Venice at Vernazza, one of the five towns that comprises the Cinque Terre (Five Earths). This tiny region along the northwestern Italian coast, about halfway between Pisa and Genova, is one of my favorite places ever, exceptional even in Italy in its loveliness and charm and antiquity. It has gained the world’s highest designation for uniquely wonderful places, being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Even the famously-hard-to-please New York Times has called its “intense beauty, great cuisine and amazing aromas” “almost unfair”.

Steep folded hills of rugged grey rock dive into the bright azure sea. Giant aloe plants and tawny grasses tower taller than your head while scrubby pitchy trees twist and stunt in the salty wind. Unseen beneath the colorful water, rare corals bloom. The elements share in the intensity: sun coats the hillsides thickly and bleaches everything, wind tears tiles off of the roofs, and the wash of rains sweep stones down to the sea. Everything seems to cling, perched on the edge of falling into the glorious water.

In four of the steepest folds and prominences sit the tiny villages of Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, and just north on a rare beach sits the slightly-larger Monterosso al Mare. A few additional clusters of buildings form even smaller villages, monasteries, and farms high up on the ridges of the mountains. The spare, blockly buildings are exactly the color of sunsets, peachy pinks, oranges, creams, and blues, all with slashes of deep green shutters.

The steepness of the terrain and sheer-cliff waterfronts have kept these villages and farms relatively inaccessible: only a few outliers can be reached by automobile, with the footpaths, the tiny ferry boats, and the relatively-new regional train that burrows through the impeding mountains still the only ways of getting to most of the area. Everything is stairs, as there’s not a piece of flat ground to be found. Instead of streets, there are stairways. Instead of trails, there are stone and earth stairs cut laboriously into the steepness. Instead of fields, the hillsides are turned into giant’s stairs of terraces.

Being so inaccessible, and until very recently having no other real alternatives for commerce, the villages and people of the Cinque Terre are generally much as they have been the thousands of years these unlikely cliffs have been inhabited. Fishermen go out in tiny wooden boats and bring in cuttlefish, octopus, sea bream. Farmers terrace the hillsides for their grape vines, olive trees, and lemons. A very few shops in each village sell staples brought in from outside, while the local eateries mainly serve up the fish and wines of their neighbors, as well as flat pan breads drenched with the delicious local oil. The boats are simple and utilitarian, and houses are very simple stone and plaster, literally built one on top of the other, perched on the few pieces of hillside that can support them.

It’s changed noticeably from my last visit, though. I felt conflicted. I was glad for the noticeable capital-D Development improving some aspects of the quality of life of the formerly-poor residents: in our previous visit, many houses and fields had been in disrepair, fresh water had been somewhat precious, electricity unreliable, and ambulance services to outside the towns a daunting challenge. These had all been vastly improved thanks to the tourist and UNESCO dollars.

But I found it saddening and ironic that the tourist and UNESCO appreciation of the antique culture and unique landscape were swiftly eroding exactly what they came to enjoy, sometimes literally. Twenty times the number of tourists prowled the streets. English was prevalent on signs. Educational displays on public walkways told of the history of the region, showing black-and-white photos of the old culture Petra and I had seen in person just seven years ago, while the townsfolk walked by in Adidas. Metal nets held together some of the more volatile hillsides while hand rails and paving smoothed large sections of the popular seaside walkway, but landslides still swept away swaths of the coast. It made me wonder how much longer what I enjoyed would remain.

The train from Venice was smooth as butter, and the one between Pisa and La Spezia had allowed us stunning views of the Apennines towering in their spikey marble and snow-covered fierceness 15,000 feet above the tracks. I stared at the tails of snow dust blown from their peaks by the high-altitude winds, the giant scars of millennia of quarrying their finest marbles, and the improbable hilltop towns and fortifications in their foothills until my eyes ached.

By the time we emerged into the Cinque Terre blinking into the sun from the regional train, which had clacked its way through the long black tunnels so laboriously bored along the coast up from La Spezia, I was absolutely ill with sunshine and shadows and the swaying of the trains, as well as dehydrated and very very hungry. In a painful vertiginous haze I managed to make it up the 101 stairs from the train station to our rooms, stomach a quick piece of focaccia from the street below, and blink stupidly for a moment at the meltingly pink sunset light on the rooftops and fields before the inevitable migraine incapacitated me.

Our tiny guest house was comfortable, really just spare bedrooms and a tacked-on toilet in the house of a resident family. As there isn’t space or foundation to build anything resembling a hotel, hosts and visitors make do with the buildings and rooms already there. Ours were clean and private, though. And unlike most, they boasted an absolutely unbeatable view (thanks to the height afforded by the aforementioned 101 steps it took to reach the door) looking over the town, down the coast, across the castle, up to the tower, and onto the terraced fields across and above. Even without the headache, my head wheeled from turning around and looking up and down, trying to take it all in.

By the next morning I felt revived, though as weak and ravenous as I always am after a migraine bout. We found breakfast at the Blue Marlin, humorously a Hemingway and hard-rock themed café that was the only place in town open at the according-to-them-ungodly-early hour of 9am. In their defense, the sun had not yet crested the steep hillside, so I could understand their late definition of “morning”. I had hot-from-the-oven chewy and sweet ricotta cake that was among the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten, and thick myrtle-berry yoghurt. Lisa had a piece of rice quiche, and my mother enjoyed a hot spinach and ricotta pastry.

Then we walked. First we were off to Riomaggiore for a quick look around, then we walked to Manarola via the Via de Amor section of the trail (it’s views are especially romantic). There’s a fairly recent Italian fad of lovers locking a padlock onto something at a romantic spot, preferably with water nearby, and throwing away the key (inspired by a scene in a 2003 movie). Resultantly, the fences on is section of the trail are smothered in padlocks, lending an unusual but whimsical visual element to the walk.

Once in Manarola, we lunched at the breakwater quay on more foccaccia-like things, all regional specialties: Farinata is a savoury and crunchy pancake made from a base of chick-pea flour, which we ate with a gooey local cheese Lisa rightly described as the love-child between brie and fresh mozzarella. Castagnaccio is a pasty chestnut flour cake with pinenuts and raisins, very filling and naturally sweet from the nut flour. And a stuffed spinach pastry too.

We had intended to walk onward from there, but landslides had taken out a chunk of the trail, so we hopped on the local train to Monterosso, the northernmost town of the five. From there we walked up a steep and crumbly path about a mile to the bluff that protects and demarks the little region, allowing us to look back along the entire coast. At the top we found the ruins of an old church, fortifications from WWII, and a bevy of paragliders, whom I envied for their ability to swoop and fly. If I ever decide to take up a recklessly expensive hobby, paragliding would definitely be a top contender. Another fascinating aspect of the view from the top of the bluff was that the clouds and sun and sea conspired to blur the horizon so that it looked as if the sky turned into the sea: very distracting, very disorienting, very lovely.

Despite that the sun was beginning to set, after consulting with some returning hikers, we decided to walk from there back to our town, a mere five valleys away along the path that was, as you’ll recall, closed because of landslides. The path was quite dodgy in parts: there was a good reason it was closed. The ground was saturated with all the recent rain, and as you’ll recall it goes along very steep terraced cliff-hills. At most parts, when it wasn’t actually stairs, it was an unprotected 10-inch-wide dirt ledge with a sheer drop to the next terrace or farther. At one point the path crumbled beneath my foot and I almost went down with the shower of pebbles, but I caught myself. Also, it was very dark, and my night vision these days is worthless.

However, the walk and views were well worth the danger, as it is among the most gorgeous sections of trail on the planet. Ancient olive groves, terraced vineyards, stone walls and embankments, tiny arched footbridges, crumbling farm sheds, giant and prolific plants, steep rushing streams, and a general sense of an ancient relationship between humans and the earth. Petra calls it her Garden of Eden, and it certainly does have a mythical, idyllic sense to it. I’d risk more than nighttime falls off of cliffs to see it again.

After returning safely to Vernazza just as it was truly becoming pitch black, I grabbed some more fresh foccaccia (delicious though it is, I’m getting a bit sick of it) and cozied up with my grad school applications and about twelve blankets (remember what I said about my opinion of Italian heating?) while Lisa and Ma had another delicious many-hours-long dinner. Then sleep.

Haiti: Tout a Jesu Depot #2

2011-01-01T17:48:00.001-05:00

I read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees years ago, and not much of the book remains with me except a general memory of enjoyment and affection, a few plot and character points, and the fact that one character named his mechanic business “Jesus is Lord Used Tires.” I’ve always considered it a playful and creative minor plot point.

When I noticed a convenience store called “Tout a Jesu Depot #2,” I was delighted to find a real life business with (what I thought of as) a similarly quirky a name. As time went on, however, I noticed that “Everything for Jesus Depot #2,” is in fact a fairly tame name for a Port-Au-Prince business. I have no idea if Kingsolver was thinking of Haiti, but I have no doubt she would appreciate the local nomenclature.

Some of the highlights [with rough translation] include:
• Notre Dame de Perpetual Secors Dry Cleaning: Presse Immediate [Our Lady of Perpetual Help Dry Cleaning: Ironing Immediately (?)]
• Dieu qui Dirrige Pharmacie [God who Guides Pharmacy]
• Christ Capable Matériel Construction [Capable Christ Construction Supplies]
• Pere Eternal Lotto [Eternal Father Lottery]
• Chere Maitre Auto Ecole [Dear Lord Automotive School]
• Force Divine Dry Cleaning [Divine Force Dry Cleaning]
• Faveur de Dieu Boutique Bourgeoise [God’s Favor Bourgeois Boutique]
• Christe Vivant Shop Soudrire [Christ Lives General Store]
• Coeur Immaculaee Supermarchet [Immaculate Heart Supermarket]
• Puissance de Dieu Car Wash Rom.8:1.31 Auto Parts Bar Resto [Power of God Car Wash Romans.8:1.31 Auto Parts, Bar, and Restaurant]
• Le Sang de Jesu Chambre Froid et Glaces [The Blood of Jesus Refrigeration and Ice]

Italy Days 9-10: New Year’s Eve

2010-12-31T16:12:00.005-05:00

In the morning, my mother and sister finally were successful in their attempt to visit the Doge's palace, greatly enjoying the original horse sculptures and the views over San Marco, and being appropriately depressed by the prisons across the bridge of sighs.

But we spent most of New Year’s Eve on Murano. As you probably know, Venice is built on islands, most of which have been built upon so much that they meld together. A few notable outliers remain, though, one of which is this famed glass-making island, historically kept apart because of the fire hazards of its industry. It was neat to be away from the main island, to get a sense of Venice being amidst a lagoon, and to see some of the fishing culture that still abounds.

After a quick boat ride over, passing the cemetery island, we stepped off onto an unassuming brick quay and into a world of glass consumerism. The wall shrines had glass Madonnas, the window boxes had glass flowers, the piazzas had glass statues, the churches had glass baptismal fonts. I’m sure most of you have seen Murano or Murano-styled glass objects before (knowingly or unknowingly), and we’d certainly been seeing them hawked around the city since arriving. While clunky glass animals, ugly girlish jewelry, and obvious Chinese rip-offs abounded even on the island itself, it was fairly easy after a bit of adjustment to start to pick out the real quality items from amidst the schlock. The colors bloomed, the twists of abstract objects intrigued with whimsy, the delicacy and exactness of the details astounded my understanding of the craft. A number of small shops had the artists worktables in a corner of the shop, allowing us a glimpse of their handiwork in action. The project that most intrigued me was watching one man hand-blow a series of hollow matched glass beads for a necklace. We also enjoyed putting the contemporary items in historical context by visiting the small but thorough museum of glass at the center of the island. We managed to return to the main islands of Venice without having bought too many trinkets.

We dined at a restaurant recommended by the Lonely Planet, which humorously had an “American” décor theme though thankfully a thoroughly Italian menu. The pizza was mouth-watering, chewy and moist with fresh ricotta, fresh mozzarella, and roasted zucchini. Our second course was a satisfying artichoke risotto and a tender steak sliced over arugula greens. I enjoyed watching the table of oh-so-hip young Venetians behind us tuck into their four-course meal with joy and vim: I like participating in a culture that includes no guilt or body hang-ups for women dining.

As it was New Years Eve, the day had really just begun. Venice is famously a party city, and as soon as the sun went down the celebrations began. Much to my mother’s fright, one of the main forms of public exuberance turned out to be randomly setting off extremely loud firecrackers in the middle of crowded streets. And I mean really, really really ear-ringingly loud with a big flash, dropped surreptitiously right into packed throngs, making people have to scream and run away from it as soon as its initial smoke and fizzle were noticed. It’s a wonder nobody lost an eye, and I’d hate to imagine what the experience would be like for survivors of war.

Not that it was all terrible. Lisa and I left our cowed mother at the hotel and set off for Piazza San Marco (like Venice’s Times Square for the night). In a move that would absolutely never happen in the US, the evening’s party planners, knowing how to please a crowd, were handing out free bottles of bubbly to absolutely everyone there. Though claiming our bottles meant braving a lung-compressing mob of fellow revelers in the densest part of the piazza, my sister and I both successfully snagged a Bellini Canella each, though they sadly only had the peach flavor left by the time we got up to the table. We then put our crowd-threading skills further to the test and wended our way to an absolutely prime fireworks-watching spot right on the edge of the waterfront.

The fireworks themselves were quite pretty, with a dominant theme of white and fizzley. A nice effect was achieved by mirroring each display, with two of every firework going off next to each other. The show seemed more interested in ornament than American-style bravado, lending quite a different feel to it from the fireworks to which I am accustomed. I was also unused to fireworks being set off quite so close to the crowd, and at such a low angle to the ground/water: many arched out like a fan, causing large chunks of burning matter to fizzle fiercely into the water despite many boats dotting the lagoon.

Thankfully, the finale overcame the show’s relative reserve and was appropriately overwhelming. High on the spirit of the crowd, the splash and drama of the fireworks, the moment of the new year, and those bottles of Bellini, Lisa and I decided to race home, as we knew that the tiny walkways and bridges would quickly become impassable from the dispersing throngs. As the last firework fizzled, we took off ducking and speeding through the tight maze, successfully avoiding being blown up by additional random crowd fireworks, dodging into the neighborhood northeast of the piazza, across the Rialto bridge, and successfully to our street, where we were temporarily waylaid by our succumbing to the temptation of one of the ubiquitous vim brule/mulled wine carts (Can we please, pleaes have these at home?).

We proudly brought our mother her own cup of hot spicy wine, sure that she would be sitting huddled terrified by all the explosions, but were astounded to find her sleeping like a baby despite the frequent booms of what sounded like cannons exploding right below our window. I was sure that, given the excitement and the noise, I, too, would never sleep, but apparently was out before my head even hit the pillow.

The next morning (Italy Day 10) we were disappointed to find that no water busses would be stopping at our dock given the holiday, leaving us to have to drag our bags halfway across the city via the aforementioned narrow walkways and bridges, up and down countless steps, and in the process helping a nice lost young German man find his way. Then onto another fast posh train barreling towards one of my favorite places on earth…

Italy Day 8: Venice and Opera

2010-12-30T14:53:00.004-05:00

We woke up in Venice! We could see a tiny bit of the grand canal from one of our windows in our hotel. However, it was ever so slightly smelly when we opened the window as there was a fish market outside, with lots of dying sea life, which made me sad but which Lisa and Ma enjoyed photographing. I should really be a vegetarian again.

While Ma and Lisa went off to go to old churches and palaces that I was uninterested in, I stayed in the hotel to hone my grad school application essays, with nominal success. Then I realized I was supposed to rendezvous with them in like ten minutes at a place quite a ways across the city, prompting an amazing feat of speed map-reading-while-walking. I made it just a few minutes late having gotten only slightly lost. This is really quite impressive, as Venice is quite hazardous to walk through, what with sudden drops into pits of oily water and sharp turns in the 3 ft. wide streets and walls that rise up from nowhere and forehead-bashing arches and unexpected steps and rollercoaster multitudinous bridges, plus all the tourists clogging the walkways. And have you ever seen a map of Venice? It’s like a meth-hopped ant farm got together with a fragmented early DOS maze program. Getting lost is practically a sport there.

We lunched at the Osteria Cravat on a sumptuous spread of Venetian specialties, including a platter of local seafoods, cuttlefish served in its ink over polenta, and fresh spaghetti with a sauce of mashed anchovies and caramelized onions, all with a light and lemony local white wine. Then at a café next to Il Frari (a famous church) we had amazingly delicious coffee, the best yet on the trip by far.

The afternoon was spent gazing at art in churches and the Gallerie de Academia, Venice’s main art museum. The Gallerie boasts a large collection of medieval and renaissance art, which Lisa and my mom appreciated for their art-historical significance and I appreciated for their proliferation of funny grumpy-looking dudes and skeletons and historical scenes of the city and pretty ladies and sparkly bits. Not that I’m unerudite myself, but I can appreciate the art on multiple levels, the simplistic and crass being one of them and that which is most accessible when cold and tired and speed-walking through the cavernous museum. The pieces I most appreciated on a sophisticated level were the architectural renderings of Venetian buildings in the huge paintings by one particular artist (whom Lisa will hopefully remember the name) who not only actually understood perspective but also really gave a good sense of the unique spaces made by the combination of walkways, piazzas, and canals.

As dusk faded, after fortifying ourselves with fresh strudels and pudding-like hot chocolate, we ventured on to what was one of the real highlights of the trip. Thanks to some excellent research and ticket-finding on the part of my sister, we were able to attend a concert at the opera house Teatro La Fenice, one of the most famous theaters in Europe. The current structure is a completely new reproduction of the 18th-C theater, the original having burned to the ground in 1996. The combination of modern acoustical sense with the faithfully-traditional design and décor made for a visually and aurally sumptuous, grand, and intimate performance space, perfect for the musical selections of the evening. It’s a relatively small theater, with only 900 seats, which meant that there was no need for amplification, greatly improving the experience.

Our seats were “listening-only”, i.e. we couldn’t see the stage, seated in the back of an upper box. However, as I quickly learned, despite its grandeur the theater has a very long history of casual audiences, with people standing and leaning out and chatting throughout the performance, which meant we could stand at will and peer down onto the stage.

The concert, directed by Daniel Harding and purposefully devoted to melodrama, bravely began with what is usually reserved for a finale, Dvořák’s 9th symphony in its entirety. I am deeply familiar with the piece, having not only listened to it endlessly, but having performed it more than once (I play French horn). I was prepared to be complacent and dully appreciative, having previously heard it performed by some of the world’s greatest symphonies, anticipating reserving my enthusiasm for the operatic second half. But... but it was magnificent.

A warmth crept up the back of my neck, like fear, as I heard the absolute perfection of their performance. My sister, mother, and I glanced at each other in escalating shock and glee, confirming with one another that we were really hearing the glory we felt we were hearing. The horns were particularly exquisite, and actually made me weep a little with their perfect balance of bombast and yearning and the effortlessness with which they soared the heralding phrases. The Largo section actually broke a woman’s heart (she had a heart attack, and had to be removed from the theater: we were told she was likely going to be fine). I can say without reservation that it was not only the best performance of the piece I have ever heard, it is the best performance I will EVER hear, as it would not be possible to improve upon it.

You’d think that anything following that act would be a disappointment, but of course Venice is the capital city of opera, and Teatro La Fenice its palace, and this concert the annual highlight, so the singing was as good as it gets. Many of the selections were from operas originally written specifically for performance in La Fenice, which didn’t hurt, and all three of the performers (soprano, tenor, and baritone, whose names I will have to add later) were the best of what Italy had to offer. The baritone was a natural comedian as well as a superb vocalist, while the tenor was earnest and romantic. The soprano, of course, stole the show, as she is meant to: her wide dynamic range, pure tone, and nuanced vibrato reminded me of the heights vocal training combined with extreme talent can achieve. Her rendition of O Mio Babbino Caro brought the over-played selection back to relevance, and the toast from La Traviatta had the audience twitching to dance. She was also perfectly Italian, with big hair and dark eyes, natural assets that were fittingly distracting in her strapless gown, and a stage presence that made the deep stage look small and her fellow performers insignificant. There’s a reason “diva” is so closely related to the word for a divine being.

Italy Day 7: Travel to Venice

2010-12-29T12:10:00.002-05:00

Before we set off to Venice, we visited the weekly Wednesday market that surrounds the Medici fort in Siena. Crowded tented stalls filled with all of the cheap clothes, practical home goods, and fresh foods it is otherwise impossible to find in the posh city seemed to attract the majority of the city’s populace. Mother became overwhelmed by the press of people, but I delighted in the hubbub and the tantalizing produce and breads.

We made our way first to Florence by bus, which made us all rather seasick with its hell-bent speed and swaying, despite the stunning Tuscan countryside scenery. It’s a good thing Ma didn’t notice the two car wrecks we passed, whose drivers had gone off the edge of the narrow steep roads, or she would have been even more nervous.

While awaiting our train at the Florence station, we enjoyed the offerings of the train station food court, which in typical Italian fashion did not stint on its lavishness. Our meal (at a freaking food court, mind you) consisted of flavorful roasted pork with potatoes and garlic, a saucy beef with mushrooms, a tender and cheesy roasted vegetable lasagna, and mounds of sautéed spinach. Our meal could have been much more lavish, but we were trying to restrain ourselves. If we only had food courts like that at home, travel and shopping would be so much better.

The train to Venice was posh and fast, truly travel in the lap of luxury. In a matter of short hours we arrived in Venice across the causeway tracks, timed perfectly to be just like Katherine Hepburn in Summertime, even with the same seats.

The evening light perfect in that way unique to Venice, echoed somewhat only, in my experience, in Paris and Banares: the light seems heavy, so saturated with honeyed yellows and rosy pinks that it almost drips on the surfaces and sticks to them longer than it should, turning white marbles to glow with interior warmth and making colored painted walls almost 4-dimensional, you can almost feel the atoms buzzing.

It being her first visit to Venice, Mother was suitably stunned upon stepping out of the train station onto its plaza along the edge of the grand canal. The slosh of the waves, the background stench of seaweed and salt mud, the hurried boats and palatial architecture all put on a good show. We hustled ourselves onto a vaparetto (canal bus boat), which conveniently dropped us a block from our pensione (hotel) at the Rialto Markets.

After depositing our bags we walked to San Marco to fully situate our minds in the heart of Venice. While the piazza was disappointingly smothered in scaffolding, construction shields, and stages erected for the holiday festivities, the main buildings held their own, including the domes of the Doge’s palace and the glittery gilded excess of the interior of the basilica. I think it wins for sparkeliest church, which is saying something.

So, about our hotel, Pensione Guerrato. It was built in 1288. As a hostel for crusaders. For real. Crusaders. 1288. Commence politically-incorrect swashbuckling romantic quest daydreams. The interiors had been sadly updated in the baroque period and again in the 1950s, leaving little of the medieval décor other than the wooden beams and worn stone steps. The Murano glass chandeliers and silk/gilt headboards and antique furniture and heat!!! and American-style bathroom were all quite lovely and much appreciated, though. We enjoyed spoiling ourselves, and slept gloriously.

Italy Day 6: the rest of Siena

2010-12-28T11:07:00.003-05:00

As it was our last day in Siena, Lisa brought us to the remaining must-see places on her list. Tops was visiting the interior of Palazzo Publico, the building on the edge of Il Campo square that hosts the iconic square tower of the city. Though technically just the city hall, and functioning still as such, it is gorgeously decorated with mosaics and notable frescos. It’s a veritable visual and historical feast in there, all colorful and sparkley, totally belying the plain brick exterior. I most enjoyed getting a glimpse into what life in medieval Siena looked like, as seen in the detailed and ornate frescos on good and bad government. The city looked surprisingly the same architecturally, but in ye olden days it apparently had more serfs, capes, and ladies dancing, and fewer coffee shops: about what I would have expected. Plus the sin in the “bad government” fresco was funny.

We had lunch at Lisa’s local deli, but don’t let that make you think it was simple fare. These Italians, they really really take their lunches seriously, taking 2 hours off every day for a multi-course meal, even if just at the deli. We started with five tiny bruschetta with, respectively, smoked cheese, hot pepper goo, pesto, olive oil, and stewed red cabbage; more ribolita (Tuscan bread soup); Tuscan bean soup; of course more Chianti; and a plate of grilled meats incl. a breaded chicken cutlet, a lamb? meatloaf with interesting spices, and a pork? meatloaf with tomato sauce. It was all meltingly scrumptious. And of course we finished with tiny, intense coffees.

Next on to the Panaramio, the intriguing tall arch initially built to be the front façade of the Duomo cathedral. The current cathedral is what was intended to be the transept of a much larger structure. When the plague and then the Florentines brought low the city in the mid-1300s, construction permanently halted, leaving some glorious columns and arches surrounding an open space that is now a parking lot of sorts. You can still climb up the tiny stairwell within the wall of the intended façade, though, and walk out somewhat dangerously along the top two arches for some of the best views of the city and surrounding countryside. Which we did, somewhat to my mother’s horror. And the sunlight and rooftops and bricks and hills were beautiful.

Across the plaza from the Panoramio is the imposing structure brick structure of Santa Maria Della Scala. The heart of the building was built around 850 CE and functioned as a hostel for pilgrims, an orphanage, and a hospital until the mid-1900s, expanding all the while into its current airy warren. The city is still trying to settle on a use for this huge space, which boasts not only enormous historical significance and antiquity even for Italy, gem box chapels and truly unique well-preserved frescos, and echoey plain former ward rooms, but also enormous maintenance and heating bills. It’s currently serving as a museum, holding the collections of other city art establishments. I especially enjoyed seeing the frescos of medieval medical practices in all their gory glory, and appreciating the perfect evening light coming through the ancient windows.

Dinner was another feast, this time featuring crepes filled with paste made from boiled salted codfish. Lisa had raved about it so much I was sure the real thing couldn’t stand up to her praise, especially since it sounded so icky, but indeed I wished I could have eaten six more.

Italy Day 5: Day of Rest

2010-12-27T05:19:00.002-05:00

Today was a day to recover and catch up from the previous busy days. After sleeping in, I caught up writing these blog posts, sorting through pictures, and working on my grad school application essays while Lisa went to the bank and did other such errands, and Ma tagged along with her. They also went to visit some goats.

We met up with Miriam, Lisa’s boss, at Osteria El Gato, a small restaurant near their school. We ate more delicious food, in the many-hours-long multi-course-with-wine Italian lunch tradition. Miriam is wonderful, warm and intelligent and high-spirited: I wished we could have lunched for even longer to enjoy her company more. Some of our truly lively topics of conversation over the meal included her family’s history (fascinating romantic saga), the effect of facism and WWII on Italy, goats, the insulating techniques of potato barns, and her parent’s pellet furnace. (If you know me, you can see why I liked her.)

After lunch we went with Lisa to her office, where she did some work and arranged for our onward train tickets, I did more photo editing, Ma read a book on the history of the city, and we were able to chat online with Petra in Haiti. On our way home we wandered into some of the kitschy tourist shops, featuring wares such as silk scarves with the neighborhood crests, painted ceramic plates, painted ceramic everything-under-the-sun, highly decorative paper goods, and various tacky crap. We fortified ourselves with an appetizer of pizza slices, then went grocery shopping, trudged back to the apartment for dinner (gnocchi with amazing mystery sauce and sautéed brussel sprouts with pistachio pudding for dessert), and an early night to bed.

Photos from this day are by my mother: you can see where I get some of my photographic habits from! :)

Italy Day 4: Day after Christmas

2010-12-26T05:14:00.003-05:00

We finally awoke to sunshine! The apartment and the city out the window were practically unrecognizable from the gloom to which we had become accustomed. The golden glow beckoned us such that we wolfed down our breakfast (scrambled eggs with bursting sautéed cherry tomatoes and grated fresh parmesan cheese and whole-grain toast with local cherry jam) so we could rush outside before the clouds returned.

It was another day of mostly just wandering around the city again. The views we could catch out over the Tuscan countryside were all the more arresting, much greener greens even than before, and the stucco and terra cotta houses practically glowed in the sunshine. Our first stop of the day was the Medici fortress on the outskirts of town, built essentially as bragging rights after the final decisive victory of Florence over Siena. It is large and brick and empty and in very good repair, now essentially a walled public park with great views from the high walls back onto the old city and surrounds.

Of course it was snack time next, so off to Nanini’s coffee shop for a rice pastry, which we dutifully ate sitting in the sun in Il Campo (the main plaza) like good tourists. Our next stop, a farm in a green valley within the old city walls, was sadly closed, so no Italian mountain goats for us.

Instead we briskly strode through the Torre contrada / ghetto neighborhood toward the church of S. Clemente in S. Maria del Servi from which Lisa promised great views. Of course, as soon as we got there, the sun disappeared. So we just enjoyed the church itself, which was more effectively decorated and seemed more cozy than the other giant churches of the city. This one had a great mosaic over an exterior side door in which the skin of all the figures had turned green, probably something to do with the ancient paint’s pigments. Inside were two remarkably well-preserved mummies of 1300s saints, one of which looked disturbingly like me, and some very famous frescoes by the Lorenzetti brothers, which we ignored.

Lisa took us next to the grounds of the former city psychiatric hospital, now part of the University, and the nearby Porto Romana (Roman gate), very well-preserved with its whole gatehouse and gate tower and everything still intact. It was funny to see cars zooming through the gatehouse, since the road still enters the city there. Sitting in an arrow slit nook, we took a quick repast of Lisa’s favorite Italian beverage, a packaged iced tea with lemon and rosewater added.

Then commenced an endless nearly-futile search for open restaurant. During our search we kept our spirits up by going via the alley of potted plants of the day before, admiring the whimsical figures topping the hundreds of iron horse securing rings along the streets, and noting the dangerous toilet balconies mounted on the outside of the high walls. Unfortunately, all the swift walking from today and the past few days has brought about shinsplints in my legs, so I was miserably hobbling along the later streets.

After searching through about five neighborhoods we finally found an open restaurant, which was really quite delightful entirely in addition to it being warm, having chairs, and having food. Our table was in a very low arched brick nook that was either an old wine cellar or tunnel or oven or just a room for really small people. We ate more delicious food.

After checking email etc at Lisa’s freezing cold office, we felt justified in further indulging with intense hot chocolate, mine with milk and Lisa’s without milk, from a specialty sorbet-and-chocolate shop called Grom. My mother insanely got sorbet (it was freezing out!), a delicious Mandarin orange flavor.

Then on to the Teatro Dei Rozzi for an early-evening concert featuring the Unione Corale Senese (the Sienese Choralle), soprano Cristina Ferri and tenor Altero Mensi, and directed by Francesca Lazzeroni (who also sang a few of the soprano solos). The theater itself was interesting, small and set up in a very old mostly-circular terraced style. I’d call it over-decorated, though Ma says it was tasteful and appropriate for what it is, and Lisa says there’s no such thing as over-decorated, especially since they were singing Madame Butterfly. We got to sit in a box seat, since it was a free concert with open seating and we were near the front of the line: I felt very posh. The program was like Italian Opera’s Greatest Hits, with short selections from Verdi, Verdi, Donizetti, Verdi, Verdi, Cajkovskij, Puccini, Puccini, Puccini, (intermission), Puccini, Puccini, Puccini, Leoncavallo, Mascagni, Mascagni, and an unbilled encore sing-along. The crowd seemed to know all the pieces by heart, though only a few sounded vaguely familiar to me. The soloists were very, very, very stereotypically Italian: confident, highly dramatic, strident, loud, endearing, and quite talented. The youngish Ms. Ferri was lovely enough with her honest delight in her own performance and perfectly tailored modern gauzy dress to mostly excuse her over-use of vibrato, while Mr. Mensi was as sweet and dignified as his white hair and paunch would lead one to suspect. We walked/hobbled home singing the main melodic phrase of the last piece.

Dinner back at the apartment was leftovers of the previous meals plus more almond cookies, and more pecarino cheese with honey drizzled over it, and a Kinder egg (with purple bouncy toy). The three of us cozied up on the couch and sang all the Christmas carols we could think of, occasionally sung in the mode of monkeys and/or fish, which made me laugh so hard I had real trouble breathing. The later songs I accompanied on guitar, making my fingers ask what I was doing to them (as I haven’t played in years). Then sleep.

Italy Day 3: Christmas Day

2010-12-25T14:21:00.003-05:00

We awoke on Christmas morning to another rainy day. Rather than lounge about in our pjs, we hustled off to the crypt of the other giant cathedral-ish building in town, the Basilica of St. Dominico, built in 1226. This church has always seemed to me very threatening and dangerous and vaguely unpleasant, perhaps because its gargantuan brick hulk squats precariously on a sandstone bluff on the edge of the old city; perhaps because of its unsurpassed collection of atrocious art, from simultaneously insipid and violent pastel frescos to horrid and yet engaging dark modern stained glass to positively treacherous sharp cast metal doors; perhaps because of the sad state of disrepair of the nave; or perhaps because of the displayed thumb and shrunken head of the local insane St. Catherine. Yeah, it’s probably the head.

Compared to the nave, the 1300s crypt where the Christmas morning service was held, locally called “the Church Down Under”, was positively cozy. Even the locals don’t want to go to mass in the giant, cold and freaky church above. We only stayed for the first bit of the mass, driven out by the combination of the cold, the shockingly out-of-tune organ, and my losing battle with not snickering at the sermon, which featured the phrases “pico Jesu bambino” (little baby Jesus) and “nostro piccolo dio” (our tiny God) and the like so often that Talladega Nights was too much in the forefront of my mind. And, in case you didn’t know, we’re not Catholic anyways, so all these services were getting to me.

As an alternative to worship, we visited another ancient fountain (of which Lisa has an inexhaustible knowledge) which all amaze me with their proof of the continued functionality of the ancient underground aqueduct mazes. And of course we took a ridiculously circuitous route back to the apartment that just had to necessitate the use of the outdoor escalators (the hill was so steep even the Sienese didn’t want to walk up it) and through some unmodernized neighborhoods. To my family’s chagrin, I became temporarily obsessed with staring at doorknobs and the intersections of the ‘ground’ and doorframes. We did eventually make it home for lunch (pasta with tomato and hare ragut, and grilled zucchini).

With bellies full, we admired (or rather, lovingly snickered at) the ‘glorious’ Christmas tree Lisa had so nicely put together from the dollar store, and enjoyed opening our presents to one another: a chocolate each (notably, Kinder eggs) with bonus bookmarks for me and Ma, and a shared package of coconut candies. Of course, our main present to all of us was getting to spend our Christmas together, which we greatly appreciated with extra hugs.

After praising the superiority of European confections and with bellies even more full, we took a constitutional in the drizzle. In keeping with the day, we went to another ancient fountain (ironically called the Fonte Nuova, which was under repair), a plain neighborhood church (Oratorio di S. Rocco, which was closed), an ornate neighborhood church (the baroque white-marble-facaded S. Maria di Provenzano, which was also closed), and the Basilica di St. Francesco (which was open!). This church, like the morning’s, was huge and empty and sadly unlovely and in declining repair, but less threateningly so. Its great claim to fame is a miracle of a box of 400-year-old not-rotten communion crackers (I do not jest). It had less horrible art but also less lighting than S. Domenico’s, and was painted to look stripey like the Duomo.

Our intrepid guide (Lisa) brought us from there on a steep and circuitous route through some then-as-yet-unexplored-by-us neighborhoods and over to a particularly odd alley/street in the southeastern section of the city, Via Degli Orefici, with especially narrow twistiness, a proliferation of potted plants, original terra cotta drain pipes, and a dead end.

We, notably I, required fueling before returning home, and so stopped off at the vaguely-American bookstore-cum-coffee shop to rest our feet and consume not only the required cappuccinos but also a tart thing with mulberries and red currants on it. Rejuvenated, we made it back across the city to enjoy another lovely meal by Chef Lisa, this time grilled radicchio with ribolita (Tuscan bread soup, i.e. bean soup with a lot of stale bread turned to mush in it, much much tastier than you’d think). A lazy evening watching a documentary on the city’s famous annual horse race, then sleep.

Haiti: Wedding

2010-12-24T16:13:00.001-05:00

Two days before Christmas Eve, I attended a wedding. The bride is the head nurse at Fondasa Haiti, one of ESF’s partner agencies.

The wedding was in almost all regards exactly like a standard American Christian wedding. Even the beauty parlor where we went beforehand to so my boss could have her hair straightened and curled was eerily similar to any Black American beauty salon in the States (I suspected, she confirmed). There were, however, a few striking cultural differences. First, I was surprised by the timing. The invitation said 4:00. Though we were running late and arrived at 4:20, we were the first guests. More striking than that, the lack of guests did not stop the ceremony from beginning about five minutes later when the limousine carrying the bridal party arrived: the music started, and the bridesmaids paced down the aisle of the virtually empty church! The guests arrived over the course of the next hour or so, such that the ceremony concluded to a full house. I assume it’s to make up for the lack of initial audience that the reception began with a complete repetition of the wedding procession.

Second, people not only took pictures throughout the ceremony, but in fact got up out of their seats to crowd around the happy couple at the front of the church, snapping close-ups of them saying their vows, exchanging rings, etc. At times the participants were completely obscured by the profusion of waving cameras and mobile phones. Their special moment is very well documented indeed.

It was a lovely wedding. Selfishly, I enjoyed having an excuse to wear something other than scrubs. I also appreciated the opportunity that the wedding afforded to reflect on the kind of arresting juxtapositions that you only find in circumstances such as those in Port-Au-Prince today:

• The experience of being all dressed up in dainty gold high-heeled sandals and a silk sundress, picking my way over concrete rubble to climb into a dented and much-abused four-wheel drive;

• The image of the somewhat worse-for-wear limousine crawling through the crowded and narrow third-world street, and coming to a stop in front of the church opposite the sagging, folded concrete slabs of a house that remains as it was when it collapsed in the earthquake almost exactly a year ago;

• The view of a teenage boy and his kid sister, dressed respectively in an immaculate formal suite and a pristine white first-communion dress complete with white floral headdress and veil, stepping carefully around the muddy drainage ditch in the otherwise dusty road, making their way past piles of rubble and a herd of smelly marauding goats;

The reception was held in a nice hotel in a wealthier residential neighborhood. The houses were large, with gardens and green trees, and surrounded by high cement walls with iron gates. Despite the fact that most of the houses in this neighborhood appeared intact, the vast majority of them seemed uninhabited. The darkened windows by themselves didn’t necessarily imply an empty house, since here even large and fancy houses usually lack electricity. A stronger clue was the presence of tents in the front yard, the driveway, or the street in front of the gate. Buildings that look sound are not necessarily so, and my colleagues tell me of people with sound houses who are nevertheless too scared and traumatized to live in them.

(Apologies, these pictures are not up to our usual standard: the next batch will be better)

Italy Day 2: Christmas Eve

2010-12-24T13:49:00.002-05:00

We started the day on a decadent note by having half a Panettone for breakfast. If you are not familiar with the traditional Italian puffy Christmas fruit cake and its bulbous boxes, picture a squat cylinder with an orb top for the shape, the color of caramel or dark toast. Its consistency is a combination of slightly stale Italian bread and a croissant, airy and fun to pull apart with the fingers but not very layered. Its flavor is dominated by the scattered embedded pieces of citron (candied orange, lemon, and lime peel).

Rather than visit many tourist destinations, we made the city itself our destination of the day, wandering the streets and looking at the streets themselves and the walls surrounding them. Siena is incredibly old, settled at least as far back as the Etruscans of 700 BC (i.e. pre-Roman), with bits of their stonemasonry still in evidence. Most of the existing buildings are from more around the 12-1300s, with some 1500s thrown in. Because Florence dominated economically and politically from 1348 on (thanks to Siena being decimated by the plague and being hopeless in battle), Siena, like York in England, didn’t have the money to keep up with the architectural times, and therefore remains an unsurpassed time capsule of medieval architecture.

Perched on a small series of hill ridges creased with steep valleys, tiny Siena (dense population steady at 60,000 for the last 1000 years) is dominated by brick and stone just the color your Crayola upbringing would suggest. Its antiquity and the extremely steep topography thwarts any relation to modern city planning, tending more towards a street map like a bowl of spaghetti or the efforts of a drunk maze designer. The streets have about three possible widths: barely wide enough to squeeze two Fiats past each other (which they drive buses down), barely wide enough for one Fiat and a Vespa to share, or too narrow or steep for any Fiats and therefore devolving into a staircase. To say this city isn’t accessible to the physically handicapped is a gross understatement. I particularly enjoyed the errant angles and slopes of the streets, and the frequency with which the buildings on either side of the street actually touched at the top or leaned into one another with narrow arches, creating frames for the views beyond.

My mother and I particularly enjoyed the walls of the buildings (as well as the old city walls) because of the way they had been patched up and had windows and doors added and filled in and reinforced and painted and broken etc. so many times over their existences. It brought strongly to mind the philosophical question of identity and physical continuity, i.e. if over time you replace all the parts of a thing, is it still the same thing as the original thing? Any answer would still have these walls being genuinely old, though, since most of the repairs etc were themselves ancient.

We covered a fair bit of the city in our wanderings, made easier by my sister’s familiarity with its layout, allowing us to stride blindly after her. When Petra and I visited Siena briefly years ago, we spent most of our time lost and consulting our map. This time, we saw the Piazza Gramsci at which we arrived and the Porta Camollia near which we are staying, the gargantuan and useless Medici fort, the length of the Via Di Camollia/Montanni/di Sopra/di Citta (as if the map weren’t confusing enough, the streets change names every few blocks), the grand Il Campo plaza (generally agreed to be the best plaza in all of Italy and recognizable from such recent films as James Bond Quantum of Solace and the red cloak scene from that Twilight movie), some of the ancient Jewish ghetto, the environs of the University, the oldest spot in the city (Castel Vecchio which is more like a courtyard with a garden-shack of a stone tower), and every tiny slanting street in between.

My sister Lisa made sure to treat us to coffees at a tiny local café as soon as possible. We all had café macchiato, which was just as strong and tiny and generally Italian as one could wish. Ma didn’t like it at all, made amazingly funny distressed faces, and had a hard time finishing her thimbleful. As she is of the coffee sipping school, I think she rather generally missed the point of it. We will make a second attempt to encourage her Italian coffee appreciation another day.

It was a good day for coffee as it was very rainy at first and remained grey and drizzly rest of the day, though not too cold. Outside stayed a fairly consistent 48 degrees all day. Thanks to the rain, the matte light and shiny streets and profusion of umbrellas made for some great photographic conditions.

We of course took lots of pictures: as we only brought the one camera between us, Ma and I had a back-and-forth photo commentary going all day, improving upon one another’s compositions. It’s a very challenging city to photograph in, though. The composition itself is difficult, not only because of the mental overload of such a visually rich environment, but since the views are very narrow and cropped, it’s nearly always hard to either get far enough away or close enough to whatever the focal point of the frame is. More difficult is the lighting, which has extremes of dark and light in almost every possible frame. A majority of the images we snapped this first day didn’t turn out as we had hoped.

Over lunch we enjoyed a truly grand sweeping vista south from the edge of the old city’s mesa. I certainly didn’t expect turning left from a cramped street through a stone doorway past the University would lead us to a wide green field with olive trees and benches, a modern park built above a recent parking garage but in keeping with what would have been the grounds of an old nunnery. Our food was tasty crunchy hot two-euro things called ciacino like pizza ham and cheese sandwiches.

As a bit of a rest, we visited Lisa’s school. Lisa is working with the head of the Siena School of Liberal Arts and the Getty family to found a new art school, called the Siena Art Institute. They will have art classes as well as artists in residence, workshops, community programs, and more. It will all very high-caliber stuff with a decidedly international bent: English will be the main language of the Institute. They already have lovely premises in an airy, light-filled building near the cathedral in one of the highest and oldest parts of the city. Many of the rooftop and vista pictures you’ll see are from their windows.

To increase the day’s surreal quotient, Babo Natale (i.e. Santa) arrived in one of the city’s ancient plazas via a covered wagon drawn by some pint-sized wet and shaggy draft horses. A ragtag band dressed in Santa-inspired garb played carols lugubriously while children pranced and Santa was much photographed with the tykes and handed out plastic crap toys. The adults all delighted in doffing sparkly red caps, even bedecking the ever-patient horses. Then it was clearly time for more coffee. Ma had tea this time. I had a nearly-perfect cappuccino.

Dinner this night was back at the apartment, light nibbles perched around the tiny flowery kitchen table. Lisa whipped up a delectable appetizer of fresh organic ricotta drizzled with local fresh-pressed olive oil and salt and ground black pepper. Then bread (one puffy and one cracker-like with rosemary) with cheese (soft and hard pecorino) with a chestnut honey and a tomato and pumpkin flower tapenade, accompanied by a local adventurously-non-chianti red from the local Monte Chiaro. For dessert we munched on some hard biscuits (i.e. cookies, related to British digestives, vaguely like graham crackers) called Grancereale, in four varieties: original, crunchy, fruited, and chocolate. My favorites were the crunchy, which lived up to its name and was very buttery, and the chocolate, which was actually rather nutty.

But no, that was not the end of the day, not with my sister at the helm. She sings regularly with a local chorus, which was performing as the choir at the Christmas Eve mass at San Giuseppe’s, the Church of the Onda (i.e. Wave) Contrada, now tucked amongst other brick rambles on a hillside on the south edge of the old city. As they needed more altos, I joined as a ringer with no rehearsal, which was fine because they were very haphazard themselves and it was all Christmas music anyways. I was excited to get to enter the church by an iron-gated courtyard and barred side door rather than the public front door entrance. After making my way up a very worn steep stone staircase about as wide as my hips and high as my shoulders and thanking my blessed stars I wasn’t proportioned like the average American, I joined the cantada in the organ loft, a frighteningly creaky ancient wooden balcony about the size of two twin beds on which about twenty people and the ancient organ were crammed. It gave us a great view from which to see the colorful ornate gilded and frescoed nave and apse of the small sanctuary, and to watch the congregation freely ignore the priest’s long, dynamic, rambling sermon (in Italian so I couldn’t understand a word). Dolphins, light blue, and clouds, and gold were the dominant decorative features, and “bellissimo” was the most common recognizable word. We sang admirably. They gave us each a darling clutch bouquet with pink roses and fluffy greens and a sparkly silver thing in thanks: my inner six-year-old-girl/diva was thrilled.

Though it was already past 11pm, we all trekked from there up to the city’s cathedral, Il Duomo, an old ornate stripey stone thing from the 1200s plunked on a plaza high on one of the hilltops. For the holidays they had uncovered some of the delicate floor murals, which was a treat, and had created not only a giant crèche of incredible levels of tackiness, but had a veritable forest/mountain of poinsettias adding some color to the general zebra/op art/moiré décor. Ma and Lisa stayed for the cultural experience of the endless midnight mass, but I bowed out in favor of sleep.

Italy Day 1: Arrival in Siena

2010-12-23T20:47:00.001-05:00

Just to confuse you all, while Petra is currently in Haiti, I (Erika) am in Italy visiting my sister Lisa.

After a 2-day delay thanks to snow storms in Europe, and a rather yucky long flight on an old Delta plane with inedible food and unwatchable movie screens, my mother and I flew into Rome. We made a swift and heroic trip across Rome on public transit, successfully purchased tickets and found the right track twice, and proudly took a bus from the Rome station to Siena.

This of course meant we got to drive through the Tuscan countryside. Notable sites included hilltop and cliff-clinging towns, green green harvested fields, lots of rain, sheep, umbrella trees and tall pointy trees, crumbly stone and brick buildings, geometric vineyards, and very rolling hills.

By mid-afternoon we had arrived safely in the center of Siena, where my twin sister Lisa greeted us. We spent the rest of the afternoon dragging our bags up and down the very steep hills of the city, first to Lisa’s apartment, which was modern and moldy and cold, then to Lisa’s friend’s apartment. We are staying at her friend’s place since he’s away visiting relatives, and because his place is clean and warmer and more spacious, has a view from the back garden directly onto the old city walls, and is conveniently right by the Porto Camomille, one of the main gates of the old city.

Warmer is a relative term, though: I am so unimpressed by Italian building standards, tending as they do towards making houses as miserably cold and damp and unheatable as possible, with incredibly high ceilings and huge plate windows and damp plaster walls and solid marble floors. It is consistently colder inside than out. I suppose that’s nice in the summer, but not now. I am incurably cold.

As we were too wiped by travel to cook, we had dinner at a family-style restaurant Lisa frequents, named Fonte Giusta. We ate some truly amazing food. And then off to blissful, long-awaited sleep.

hello from Haiti

2010-12-23T19:26:00.001-05:00

It’s the end of my fifth day in Haiti, and so far everything is going well. I spent the first full day working in the pharmacy end of a mobile clinic in Cinnieas, a tent city of 18,000 in the suburbs of Port-Au-Prince. Beyond a variety of coughs, colds, psycho-social conditions related to stress and trauma, and the ever-present malnutrition, the main ailments are worms, vaginal yeast infections, and UTIs. Given the atrocious sanitation infrastructure, this is hardly surprising. We treated about 200 people and went through what felt like pounds of amoxicillin, mebendazole, and anti-fungal creams. It’s wonderful to make such a direct and immediate positive impact on people. At the same time, it’s infuriating that so many people are suffering unecessarily from conditions that are so easy not only to treat, but to prevent.

The second day, I spent a lot of time in a four-wheel drive truck bouncing from one end of the city to the other attending meetings and collecting a donation of medicines from Americares at their airport warehouse. The remaining days have been variations on the first two. The traffic combined with the poor roads exponentially increases the amount of time it takes to run simple errands, as do breakdowns in infrastructure (Gas, for example, are in short supply: it took visiting 12 or 13 gas stations over two days to find a place to fill the truck!). Consequently, we get up at 5:30-6:00 AM every day in order to allow enough time for mishaps and delays. I am keeping my journal consistently, but each day is a bit incomplete because I've fallen asleep with pencil in hand every night so far!

Haiti is a beautiful country. I love the weather, and the stars at night are absolutely clear and lovely. The food is excellent: lots of rice and beans and thick stews of meat and vegetables. The people have been nothing but lovely, warm, and generous. I'm having an intense experience, but so far it's good. Tomorrow we will throw a Christmas party for the orphans in nearby Camp Toto, with food, singing, games, and a few gifts: namely, blankets for the cool nights. From the tent city next door, I can hear strands of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing," in Creole.

My internet connection is to slow to upload photos, but I will start posting as soon as I return. In the meantime, my Facebook profile has a link to a friend’s album. He has just returned from working here in Haiti with ESF, and we overlapped for a few days. More photos coming soon.

Petra's going to Haiti!

2010-12-18T20:07:00.005-05:00

Exciting news! I (Petra) will be volunteering in Haiti over the holidays with Explorers Sans Frontiers. I’m excited both about the good work I’ll be able to help do, and with what an amazing opportunity this internship provides for me.

Starting tomorrow, the work I’ll be doing in Port Au Prince will be twofold: Firstly, I’ll be assisting at a mobile medical clinic, observing and acting as an extra set of hands. The health concerns are huge, and they need all the help they can get to assist and educate the populace. I’m grateful to be able to help people in such immediate need. Secondly, I’ll be serving as an institutional consultant, applying my experiences from World Vision to streamline their administrative practices and help set up an office base to help make their work more efficient and effective. As a small and new organization, I hope that my input will make a big difference for ESF and, through them, for Haitian people into the future.

This is such a great opportunity for me for a number of reasons: in order to advance my international affairs career, experience in multiple regions is a huge bonus, as is multiple language environments. My previous experience has been in the development side of international work, so having experience with the disaster relief / humanitarian aid / medical side of things will be invaluable. The very small grassroots structure of ESF is a useful organizational contrast to the enormity of World Vision. And in the interests of being closer to most of my family and friends, I’m exploring working in the closest place to the US where great need (i.e. abject poverty) exists.

It should be quite the adventure. I’m somewhat daunted and very much excited. Check back here starting Dec. 20th or so for updates from the road, though if you don't hear from me don't worry: I'll be very busy. I'll tell you all about it as soon as I can.

Happy Holidays 2010!

2010-12-08T13:12:00.005-05:00

I think it’s been about three years since our last holiday letter, so we have a bit of ground to cover! If I recall correctly, we left of at Christmas 2007, having just returned from volunteering in New Orleans for the fall.

First thing in 2008, we moved to Melbourne, Australia. Erika attended the University of Melbourne for a postgraduate degree in Philosophy, focusing on environmental ethics. She loved her job there, teaching and tutoring students in the Philosophy of Biology. Petra worked for World Vision Australia, a Christian international development and humanitarian aid organization, and not only loved her work but made some great friends amongst her colleagues.

We both enjoyed being near Petra’s Aussie relatives, and spent most of our social time with cousins. We had fun taking short trips to the Dandenong mountain ranges east of the city with their towering mountain ash trees and giant fern trees and elusive lyre birds; the Great Ocean Road southeast of the city with its tiny fishing towns and glorious cliffs; a big trip up north to Queensland with Petra’s parents where we basked in the tropical splendor and snorkeled amazedly amidst the teeming life of the Great Barrier Reef; and a few beautiful weeks in New Zealand where Erika’s sister and mom met us for hiking. The wonderful people around us in Oz, the fascinating and beautiful natural world of Australia, the amazingly humane standards of living there, and its mild weather combined to make a truly great year. We look forward to returning to Australia in a few years’ time.

Through her work at World Vision, Petra was offered a position dually with World Vision Thailand and the Australian version of the Peace Corps. So, first thing in 2009, we moved to Bangkok. Petra’s job was in Anti-human-trafficking: she mainly led workshops training staff in the small local offices around rural Thailand and Cambodia about how to integrate anti-trafficking goals into their existing programs. As part of this work, she not only learned Thai very well and got to travel around the Mekong region regularly, but also fell in love with Monitoring and Evaluation, the nerdy quality assurance side of NGO management. Human trafficking is of course a heartbreaking problem, and Petra struggled to keep her optimism in the face of the extremes of human suffering.

Erika spent the year volunteering as a children’s and adult’s English and Music teacher at a UNHCR refugee center in the center of Bankgok. The refugees came from not only Thailand’s neighboring countries, but also places of strife like Somalia, the Congo, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Iraq. The cultural, religious, and linguistic mishmash combined with their broad span of life histories (subsistence farmers to elite politicians) made the center the most truly diverse community we had ever experienced. This diversity, while usually delightful, often made teaching a challenge. Additionally, the center was under-resourced and went through a number of major staff changes throughout the year, leading to significant management and oversight gaps. With the help of Petra, ex-patriot friends, and volunteers from the refugee community, Erika took on a number of extra satisfying projects, including renovating, cleaning, and painting the derelict classrooms and public spaces of the center.

Living in Thailand was generally fascinating, surprising, and tiring. We loved the food (Petra LOVED the fruit, Erika the curries and soups), the architecture, the Buddhist animist religious environment, the playfulness of the Thai people, and the many dear friends we made. In addition to Petra’s regular work trips, we also vacationed in Chiang Mai, an ancient walled city in the northern mountains, where we meditated in temples, participated in the annual water festival, enjoyed the Hmong handicrafts, mountain-biked, rode elephants, and went rafting; in the islands in the Gulf of Thailand, where we slept in hammocks strung between trees on the beach, ate lots of spicy fish, and where Erika fell dangerously in love with scuba diving; in the Siam Reap area of Cambodia, where we gloried in the Ankor Wat temples and pretended to be Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider, laughed at monkeys, and chatted with the children; and in Bangkok itself, where we shopped in the markets, explored the rivers and canals, admired the palaces and temples, and retreated to the underdeveloped neighborhoods of leafy banana forests and stilt-houses. Of course, we miss all of this now.

It wasn’t all glorious, though. It was really, really sweatily hot all the time (which Petra loved). Our workplaces and the violent political turmoil tested our mettle and morals. We both became ill on a very regular basis, from bad food, bad water, and insect-borne illnesses. Having to grapple against extortion and corruption daily became infuriating. The crowdedness and pollution and infrastructural danger (bare wires, kamikaze buses, etc.) of Bangkok were often very uncomfortable, as was missing our favorite foods (dairy products, bread, etc.). And of course we missed our friends and family from the US and Australia.

A convergence of Petra’s contract ending and her desiring to try for her Masters as well as an especially violent attempted coup in Bangkok led us to move back to the USA in the spring of this year. For the spring and summer, we bounced around visiting family and friends while Petra finished her grad school applications, studied up on Economics and math, and Erika temped and applied for jobs. We got outside a bit for canoeing and hikes and the like, but not nearly as much as we'd wish.

In August we moved into our new apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, and soon thereafter Petra started her Masters in International Affairs at Columbia University. Since then, Petra’s been studying like crazy, while Erika’s continued temping and applying for jobs. (If you know of any great jobs in international human rights or environmental NGOs in NYC, let Erika know!)

We've enjoyed having a number of visitors this fall, especially the long stay of Petra's cousin Matt from Australia, whom we wished would never leave. Let us know if any of you are planning on being in the city, we'd love to see you!

In a few weeks’ time, over the holidays, Petra will be volunteering in Haiti, while Erika will visit her twin sister’s new home in Italy. More information on these trips will be available on this blog as we travel.

We hope you and yours are well. Wishing you all the blessings of the season.
-Erika and Petra

I have a few blog posts to catch up on…

2010-05-24T20:58:00.013-04:00

The past few months have been extrodinarily busy and intense even by our rather extreme standards, and writing is one of the commitments I have had to de-prioritize. I'd love to write more about my travel within Thailand and my experience of the escalating political unrest, the emotional and logistical roller coaster of my last two weeks, the precious interval reconnecting with my wonderful Aussie family, and finally my return to the States and everything that entails: culture shock, life decisions, and all the crisscrossing and travel within the US that we’ve been able to squeeze in to the past two months visiting family and friends (we’re traveling now while we can. Once we start full-time study and work again, we won’t be able to do this for a while). I would like to write a bit more about my work in anti-human trafficking Thailand. I'll post-date these writings to match the blog's chronology, so look back to find them.

I’ll do my best to keep things organized during this series of retroactive posts. In the hopes of eliminating confusion, I offer the following rough chart:
Month Erika Petra
January Bangkok & Boston Bangkok
February Boston & Connecticut (CT) Bangkok & Melbourne
March Boston & CT Melbourne & Boston
April Boston, Amish country, Chicago, NYC, Washington DC, & CT
May Boston, New Hampshire, Maine, & Erika went to Chicago again

Without further ado, I submit the first installment of Petra’s 2010 Blog Catch-up Extravaganza. (Ayuthaya, Nov 2010) Enjoy!

New York, here we come!

2010-04-19T17:56:00.003-04:00

Hi everyone! I have all sorts of exciting things to share with you from my last month in Thailand, my weeks in Australia, and my experience coming home to the USA, but that will all have to wait, because I have BIG NEWS to share!

We're moving to NEW YORK CITY!

I've accepted a place at Columbia University to get an MA in International Affairs. It promises to open all the doors I want opened, and should set me up perfectly for my professional future. I'm thrilled! (Can-can dancing around the kitchen to Sinatra's "NY NY" with a glass of proseco in my hand.)

leafing spring

2010-04-11T19:43:00.000-04:00

Yes, we are alive. Yes, we are doing things. Specifically, we are figuring out our lives, and traveling around the country while doing so (with reason). More on all that soon.

In the small-scale, I took a walk by the Concord River this afternoon, and was delighted by the appearance of leaves. Photographic evidence, including an ode to a skunk-cabbage:

thank goodness I brought my plastic shoes to Melbourne

2010-03-06T01:32:00.012-05:00

Early this week I got a suntan on my arms walking ten minutes to the post office on a cloudy day. You can therefore imagine my surprise when the heavens abruptly opened up today and a ridiculous freak storm of hail and rain flooded all of downtown and brought much of the state of Victoria to a standstill. We're talking serious hail here: most of the hail stones where I was were at least 12 millimeters, and some places saw hail the size of golf balls. This is not quite what one expects from a region currently experiencing its seventh year of drought.

I was in the center of the city when the hail started to fall. I quickly elected to stay put through the worst of the storm (not a tough call to make), boisterously congregating with my fellow shoppers amongst the stationary, souvenir T-shirts, and other odds and ends. The streets flooded. Rubbish bins and milk crates sailed down from Little Bourke street, turning right on Elizabeth and floating smoothly down towards Flinders Street Station. Every shop awning up and down the street began to leak (they're intended mostly to shelter from sunlight).

I found out later that the storm caused a disproportionately significant degree of damage given it's short duration. Hail stones smashed windows and damaged roofs throughout the region, and a number of people were injured when they couldn't get under cover.

Fortunately for me and those I was caught out with, people in our area nothing worse than mild discomfort and chill from literally wading through ice water. There's nothing like a bizzar, widespread, and disruptive but generally harmless shared experience to bring strangers together, and for us the rainstorm and its aftermath were consequently quite fun. Everyone had their phones and cameras out. We took pictures of each other and the half-submurged post boxes, exclaimed as the water level topped the bumper of the poor little Fiat just in front of us, and observed repeatedly how unusual this was for Melbourne.

I do hope the rain keeps up a bit, as Melbourne's water storages are currently at 34.6% of capacity. Much as I appreciate the rain, however, I think I personally will choose to stay out of it.

rebirth and recovery

2010-03-05T16:20:00.003-05:00

My mother had a seemingly-successful foot surgery yesterday, and I'm home in CT to help care for her over the next week.

In walking around her yard this afternoon, I spotted some encouraging signs of spring emerging.

It seems fitting to have the world regrowing while her bones are re-knitting.

the cold

2010-02-16T17:01:00.008-05:00

Many of you have asked how I am dealing with the cold. It certainly is a big adjustment: Australia was much warmer and drier than New England, and Thailand was a humid 90 degrees every day, 85 degrees every night. I became accustomed to dripping sweat, living in a uniform of flip flops, loose shorts, thin t-shirt, sun hat: at home, often just a bathing suit, to better deal with the heat, and to easier jump in and out of our pool. I never loved the heat, but I became comfortable enough in it's wet melting ease.

I came home to cold cold, 0 degrees F (18 C), cold even by Yankee standards. I have delighted in getting at least the end taste of my beloved Winter, but my body has been blatantly slower to adjust than my tastes.

I noticed first and foremost that the cold has made me very aware of my teeth: they feel harder, more brittle, and each of their flaws are made tactile in the cold air. I imagine they are more white, scoured by the cold and gleaming with the pain of the cold.

I am also very aware of my air passages, down to every branching bronchi of my lungs. They, too, feel purified by the cold air, which feels more like liquid than gas and requires sipping. I am limited by how painful the air is in my lungs: I cannot run, and regret a gasp or deep laugh outside.

My eyes feel delicate in the cold, as if the eyelids are made more thin, the lashes more heavy, the liquid in my eyes thicker. My eyes are tired from squinting to keep out the snowflakes, to keep out the white glare of the sun's reflection on the snow. Salty wind-whipped tears trickle out into the New England crowfeet I am developing.

The cold air is dry, desert dry, which ages my skin, making the skin of my hands look and feel like the skin of my mother's hands. My lips become smooth with dryness, and then harsh and rough and a beautiful pink with chapping, then my lips break open like an overripe peach and bleed, the blood soaked up by the parched skin over which it seeps. Chap stick makes no difference: I consider seeking out bear grease.

The heat that keeps away the cold is also uncomfortable: the oven of radiator-baked old wooden houses, the harsh blasts of warm air from doors when opened, the withering wafts from forced-air heating systems. And the exhausting sweat that comes from too many blankets on the bed, not getting your coat off soon enough inside, or the flush from a cup of hot tea.

But the cold is well worth it.

The cold allows for snow, gorgeous quieting heavy blessing of thick white. Today was a snow-globe, a vertigo of fluffy spinning flakes sticking perfectly to the branches and lampposts and making clean and simpler all vistas. Now at twilight, the snow and dusk conspire to negate background, highlight foreground, and wash the world in vibrant glowing shades of light blue. I saw even businessmen transfixed and commenting to strangers on the beauty of the snow today. I appreciate the cold for delicately holding this beauty.

And the cold keeps everyone inside, the animals asleep, the woods open and dormant. I walked with a friend through some rural forest in Rhode Island on Sunday. It was deeply silent except for the surf-roar wind in the uppermost branches: no other people out, no cars, no birdsong, no squirrel chitter, no footsteps (all muffled in the snow), no leaf scuffing or stick cracking, no sound. This pure redemptive quiet was like balm to my overstimulated mind. I appreciate the cold for holding things still and private.

On a mundane level, I enjoy being in the cold because I like coats, hats, and jeans, and I get to wear them again. I enjoy feeling enveloped, bundled, held together, hidden. I enjoy succumbing and entrusting myself to a soft warm bed, burrowing down into cuddly folds of flannel, shivering with delight at the sudden relaxation of my body as it becomes warm. I enjoy the pore-opening brain-melting bliss of a steamy shower. I enjoy being enfolded in a long hug, reveling in the warmth of a friend. These are not things which one can enjoy in a hot climate. And these are all things that make me feel safe, relaxed, loved, and at home. So it seems that home must be someplace cold, at least part of the time.

Bonus slide show: the morning after aforementioned snowstorm, blue blue sky!

palate of a Massachusetts February

2010-02-13T16:15:00.002-05:00

I’m sitting looking out the window of the train on the Fitchburg/South Acton line, retracing in reverse the path of the famed Minutemen, the ride of Paul Revere, from Concord through Lincoln and Bedford in to Cambridge and then Boston.

Rolling by me are the colors of the landscape of my home at its most dormant: flat, muted, though not pastel. Predominately grey, though myriad greys. The flat grey sky, only blue in the imagination or when seen in the reflection of the unruffled, frigid water. The grey of tree trunks, not brown, but purples and ash and charcoal and slate, all the color of dead wood, faded weathered timber. The smooth kahki of mown fields with whorls of low hedgerows like tousled salty hair in sleep. Dried grasses the color of my skin. Frozen, bedraggled white pines not white in color but matte dark green. The white snow, grey now on some of its edges, grey from translucence or grime, the white snow marking out paths of footprints or whole slicing paths through the woods, only remaining where it was compressed, the rest now melted to leave these maps of travel. The shrivelled oak leaves, a strangely luminous peachy tan, still on some branches despite all the months of winter winds. Spindly maroon and violet shrub stalks. Tiny, unnoticeable red berries. Washed-out light sage green lichens and emerald mosses on impenetrably grey rock, mottled tan rock, unassuming sienna rock, dull pinkish rock. Through it all, the flat light of the invisible grey-white sun, and the invisible but ever-frigid wind. As it is now, a very restrained, understated, conservative, brittle landscape.

Later, as we come into the city, a new grey: the grim concrete, the faded pavement. And new colors, mostly muted pink brick, ferrous weeping rust, weakly putty-colored houses. Repetitive new construction making me want again and again to research new synonyms for “taupe”. Faded yellow caution and construction, sometimes old crayon blue instead. Lethargic blacks and browns of drooping fences and trash cans, pine green utility boxes supposed to fade into the landscape but the landscape is asphault and grey. Occasional glints of silvered metal. Even the graffitis and litter and cars stay within this palate.

A fitting and restful palate for my quietude, my hermitage, my exhaustion and fragility of cultural adjustment.

(P.S. I'm literally writing this while riding on the train. Thank you, MBTA, for your free commuter-rail wireless internet access! The wonders of modern technology never cease to amaze me.)

i heart Massachusetts

2010-02-08T05:37:00.000-05:00

I am finally back home in Massachusetts.

Some of you have questioned our definition of home, our unfailing grasp on Massachusetts as our lode and goal. Those of you who have come to know us abroad know us as having our home in each new city: Melbourne, Bangkok, even New Orleans. It's true we're able to make a comfortable household, make friends, enjoy the surroundings, celebrate holidays, go about our lives everywhere we've been. We create all the trappings of a home wherever we go.

And each place has a claim on us: New Orleans as a place where we enjoyed purpose, great food and music, grew into our adults selves more fully, realized our talents more, made friendships grounded in sweat and ideals. Melbourne as the place of Petra's matrilineal ancestry, where she enjoyed being part of a vast and loving and very like-her extended family, where I enjoyed academic success and the beginnings of a promising career and met a deeply inspiring mentor, and where we both made good friends and explored the gorgeous bush and coast of the wilds of Australia. Bangkok as a place of priorities thrown into harsh contrast, of serving great needs and powerfully living out our ideals, as well as being socially appreciated in a way that has spoiled us.

So why return to the US? Three main reasons: our closest family and friends are here and we miss them. American grad schools are unparalleled, and we want to be able to advance our careers which requires further schooling for each of us. And we are thinking of starting a family, and would like to do so in the place we consider our home.

But why, out of the whole country, Massachusetts? Well, first of all, though it's a little-known fact, it is the state in which we were both born and spent our formative years (P in Eastern and E in Western MA). There's something to be said for returning to the lands of one's birth, and to the strength of early geographic imprinting.

Pragmatically, Massachusetts is the state where we have our bank accounts and drivers' licences, where we file taxes, where our infrastructure currently exists. And it's the state in which our possessions currently reside. It's also the state in which we have job networks, can easily step into work with former employers, and be aware enough of the community institutions to effectively navigate future job searches. As we return with empty pockets into a difficult economy, this is no small consideration.

Massachusetts is the state in which we were married, one of the few states in which our marriage is recognized, one of the few in which we could legally and practically create the family we hope for, one of the few in which we feel that our relationship and rights and selves are safe and supported. These are not matters which we are willing to concede.

It's also the state that loves us the most. While it's not as if "home is where thy blog-readers are", the map below is one example showing that the people who care about us, follow our lives, support us, overwhelmingly (though not exclusively) live in Massachusetts. We have a wealth of friends and networks here.

Perhaps most importantly, it's the place where we feel most at home. The places where I can feel most myself are almost all in Massachusetts; I do not need to explain myself here, I do not need to hold myself back here, I am understood here. The friends who are the family of our hearts who know us completely and love us without reservation and greet us by enveloping us and holding us and holding us and who are with us even when they let us go are here, where so much of our love abides and where our hearts can rest. I don't need a map or even to be awake to navigate here. I can cook the foods. I know the plants, the weather, I could survive in the wilderness here. I know the politics, the teams, the social cues, the context, the holidays, the ways it could be improved, the counterculture, the dangers. I can be confident here. The faith here resonates with me, the heroes inspire me, the history is relevant to me. It smells right. It is my default dreamscape. In all ways that matter, it is home.

It is quite likely that we will move to another state for Petra's grad school (she's applied in Boston, NYC, and DC), but our plan is to return to Massachusetts when we have the chance to put down our roots for good. This doesn't mean we won't live elsewhere at various times: We fully hope to live in Melbourne again at some point in the future, probably after we've had children, so they can know that part of their family and history. And if Petra's work takes us afield again, and/or if we adopt from abroad, we'll probably live in some other country for a time, so perhaps another place will also in part become home. Connecticut, as the state in which I was largely raised, will of course also always have a place in my heart, as will the the mountains of NH/ME and the homes of my family. Other places may provide us with challenges that would help us grow. But Massachusetts really feels like our very own home. And it's good to be home.

Erika back in the USA for good!

2010-01-30T04:58:00.003-05:00

I am finally, finally home for good! I traveled for 28 hrs, Bangkok to Tokyo, Tokyo to Detroit, Detroit to Boston. I'm currently staying at my mom's house in CT, and next week will be going up to the Boston area.

I've so far done remarkably well with the adjustment back to the US: was alert and pleasant upon debarkation, have palated American food with aplomb, awoke and slept at acceptably normal times yesterday, have been wearing a socially-acceptable number of layers of clothes despite the cold (it is currently 0 F/-18 C), and even weathered a trip to the mall without any resulting culture-shock.

My mind is in some ways still in Thai mode: My first assumption without surprise was that the hulking grey object in the field we drove by was an elephant, not a tractor. I think the streets look remarkably empty, the landscape bare and uncrowded, the buildings very spread-out. I have been continually tickled by the excellent English of everyone I've interacted with, and by their unobsequious manners. I am delighting in the digestibility and sweetness of the tap water, and have not yet begun to take that for granted.

While I'm sure the glow will soon wear off, I'm reveling in being in such a familiar environment, in such a place of beauty (bright full moon hanging in the branches of a silhouetted tall bare drooping elm with hundreds of winging grackles black-flitting across the sky in a gothic panorama -- white snow reflecting the blacklight indigo glow of the winter dawn -- forest-scape in high contrast with delicate snow outlining every branch -- snowglobe skies with vertiginous swirls), surrounded by Americans.

My plan for the next few months is to couch-surf in the Boston area (Have a spare couch or bed? Want me to visit for a few days? Let me know!) while temping, preparing for the GMAT, working on my applications for MBA programs in non-profit management, and waiting to hear the responses from Petra's grad school applications to see in which east-coast US city we will be living come September. Petra returns to the US mid-March. Should be a busy but fun next few months!

ท่าอากาศยานสุวรรณภูมิ at 3 AM: Erika is off to Boston!

2010-01-28T07:20:00.005-05:00

The first alarm went off at 2:30 AM. Shockingly, the sound actually managed to penetrate the depths of our slumber sufficiently for me to realize that A) something was beeping, and B) that meant something.

Alarms two and three went off at 2:33 and 2:35 respectively. At five of three I called the guard to let him know we were going out (he lets the guard dog roam the property in the latest hours), and by five past three we were off to the airport. The easy availability of taxis in Bangkok at three in the morning implies worrisome things to me about the health of its residents sleep cycles. We needed two taxis to transport ourselves along with Erika’s luggage (taxi 1: Erika, her bicycle, and carry-on luggage; taxi 2: me and her two suitcases). Within thirty seconds of stepping out of the gate, two taxis had pulled up and we were loading bags.

Speaking of luggage, I must say that the packing was remarkably smooth. As Erika put it when her bags weighed up perfectly on the first try, “isn’t it amazingly lucky how our lives fit into two suitcases each, with each suitcase weighing exactly 22 kilograms and measuring a total of 137 centimeters? Oh wait, that’s not luck, is it?” No, not luck. At this point, we’re quite good at packing for international flights.

Our taxi drivers raced each other to the airport. Mine spent the ride enthusiastically quizzing me about my life in Thailand (I’m from Surat Thani! Have you been there? How come you speak Thai so well?) and how it compared to life in America (you like Thailand, right? Thailand is better. More fun. You should stay and live in Thailand. Because you can speak Thai already!). Erika’s driver averaged 130 kph and made a good effort to teach her car words and phrases in Thai. Apparently his pantomime and demonstration were effective but a bit hair raising (this is “door ajar!” say “door ajar!” here is a “speed bump.” Say “speed bump!” Oh, this is how to say “flat tire!”).

3:30 AM is an interesting time to be at the Bangkok airport. It’s less crowded than usual, and most of the lines are short. People sleep peacefully on benches and chairs throughout the terminal. We saw a group of people who were almost definitely refugees flying out for resettlement in the US. They were about 25 people in number and mostly parents with children. All of them wore brand new clothes and shoes (new sneakers with soles a truly blinding white). Their luggage also looked new, and they had very little of it. Their excitement was palpable, as was their lack of familiarity with airport procedures. What really tipped me off, though, was that they were accompanied by a lady from the International Organization for Migration (IOM). She was handling all their interactions with the airline representatives and generally shepherding them through the process. After so many heartbreaking experiences with refugees in Thailand, it was really nice to see what appeared to be the start of a happy ending. I am a bit worried, though, as they seemed to be heading for a flight that goes through Tokyo to Detroit. If so I really really hope they’re only going to Detroit to transfer to another connecting flight. Surely no one in his or her right mind would resettle anyone in Detroit in this economic climate.

I stayed at Suvarnabhumi* airport to see her through security before heading home. I will be in Bangkok until the end of February. From 28 February to 15 March, I’ll be in Melbourne visiting friends and family (so excited!!). After that, I will follow Erika to Boston! The duration of our stay in Boston and our subsequent destination is dependent on the capricious whims of the graduate school admissions process.

*Can someone who understands transliteration please explain to me how in the world ท่าอากาศยานสุวรรณภูมิ (pronounced “Su-Wanna-Poom”) comes to acquire the English spelling “Suvarnabuhmi?”

last night on the town in bangkok for erika

2010-01-26T10:19:00.003-05:00

In case you missed the news, I (Erika) am leaving Bangkok soon (Thursday!) to go back to the US. For my send-off I had a few of my closest friends from here in Bangkok over to our favorite lounge in the city, Tuba Bar, which is conveniently right across the street from our apartment. It's a funky place with retro American decor, many semi-tasteful pictures of historic scantily clad ladies (like WWII era pinups), cheesy English-language music, delicious Italian food with lots of cheese, truly artful cocktails, and a plethora of well-appointed couches and easy chairs. Expensive by Bangkok standards, but a real treat for those nights we have wanted an oasis. Our dear friends Maria, Milena, and Kwang, as well as Kwang's sweet boyfriend, spent a really great evening with us in a cluster of said couches, feeding on cheese and sipping at cocktails, discussing theology and art and ghosts, and laughing. I'll truly miss these lovely ladies, and feel blessed to have been able to meet each of them. While we've gotten very good at goodbyes, it doesn't make leaving behind good friends any easier.

last visit to the refugee center

2010-01-26T04:37:00.002-05:00

I stopped by the Bangkok Refugee Center (where I have worked this past year) for the last time today, to say goodbye to my friends there and to finish up the mural we had started months ago. It was great to see some of my students again (those who are not imprisoned), and I got the great news that a good friend of mine there will be relocated to the US, probably Indiana, by next week! Lots of new faces at the center, too, as more refugees continue to pour in, especially from Pakistan. Everyone was very touchingly sad to see me go, and had many kind words that I'll remember for a long time. Altogether a fun but heart-wrenching day.

under the sea again

2010-01-25T18:46:00.003-05:00

Trying to fulfill my promises to myself before leaving Thailand, I finally went scuba diving again (you might recall I learned in April) , again on Koh Tao, taking an underwater photography class and fulfilling my Advanced Open Water certifications to boot. My instructor, a Brit my age named Liz, was absolutely fantastic in every way, and having her smiling, competent presence made me able to relax and enjoy the diving much more than last time.

I took six dives and did hours of bookwork and quizzes preparing for them: a deep dive (to 100 ft below the surface, where we all started acting a bit harmlessly loopy from nitrogen narcosis), an underwater naturalist dive (like birding but with fish), an underwater navigation dive (I was the only one in my class who could successfully simultaneously swim, read a compass, and follow a map: thank you, parents!), two night dives (spooky and with nocturnal sea-life and phosphorescence), and the glorious underwater photography dive. What was great is that I was able to learn photo-relevant skills on all the other dives, too, and carry the camera on two of them.

As it turns out, underwater photography is a very athletically challenging endeavor: you try to line up to take a shot, and like in space you drift away or float upside-down, or a swell sloshes you up onto the spiny urchin you're trying to depict, or you go deeper/shallower than you should in trying to get a good angle, or a shark comes along... (Yes, we saw four big sharks, black tipped reef sharks, three during our deep dive and one frighteningly coming out of the darkness on a night dive. They ignored us, as they usually do.) These photo difficulties were compounded by the fact that the camera I rented wasn't very good, and as usual I was distracted by the newness of the whole underwater vista and the physicality of diving. Hopefully I'll get to try again in the future, and will be better able to capture the riot of color, movement, strangely evolved creatures, and the fun of it all. As it is, you can enjoy these greenish grainy shots for the sincere attempt that they are.

P.S. I'll soon be adding new photos the island from this trip to the original folder here.

grad school applications

2010-01-25T18:29:00.004-05:00

I'm hoping to go to grad school this fall (Sept 2010) so I can advance in this work I've been doing. What the programs call this work varies by the school: International Development, International Relations, Humanitarian and Development Policy, etc. All the schools I've applied to are on the East coast of the US, so hopefully we won't be too far from home.

For months, I've been researching programs, filling out forms, requesting letters of recommendation, writing myriad essays, and preparing for and taking the GRE. Erika has been a sainted help the whole time, making me do this work when I just want to curl up on the couch with my book, helping me weigh the merits and faults of each program, helping me navigate the complicated online application systems, double-checking my forms, giving me regular astoundingly effective pep talks and invariably helpful advice, helping me bounce around ideas and focus my topics for the slightly-different essays required by each school, drilling vocab and math skills for days, and generally keeping me kind, motivated, and effective. All but one of the applications were submitted on Jan. 15 (the one is due in Feb), and I took the GRE last week. While I conceivably could have done it without her, I wouldn't have been nearly as sane a person in the process. Deities bless good partners!

While we now have to wait months to hear back from the schools to see where I get in, I had the gratification of getting my GRE scores instantaneously, and I did very very well, much better than I expected, shockingly with a slightly better math score than verbal! Maybe this crazy grad school dream will work out after all. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

cambodia for new years

2010-01-11T21:41:00.003-05:00

Note: I know there are too many photos, sorry, I just don't have time to sort through them all. And as always, there are captions for each photo if you click on it.

As I needed a new visa anyways, and Petra was no fun working away on grad school applications, I took myself over to Siem Reap, Cambodia (famous for the Ankor Wat temple and for being where they filmed Tomb Raider) for New Years. I've actually been before, but haven't yet finished sorting through my photos from my previous trip, so you have that to look forward to. :)

This time I just took it easy. I flew, thanks to a super cheap flight, and despite the airport wait it made all the difference to arrive unhassled and awake.

I like the Siem Reap area. A lot. It's quiet, with lots of trees, great food that's not too spicy (incl. creamy ice cream and chocolate and bread and wine and all sorts of other things not available in Thailand), there are English-language bookstores (even though most of the books are photocopies), it's easy to get around (just hire a private driver!), it smells good (because of aforementioned trees), the people are kind and fun (lots less power tripping than here in Thailand), they use $USD for their currency so no conversions ever need enter my mind, and the passtimes are ones I enjoy. And it's very very beautiful.

I was there for four days, and spent about a third my time reading while cozy in my airy hotel room, another good bit of each day eating, and then about half the day on some small adventure. Since I visited most of the temples last time I was here, I got to see what else there was in the area. My favorite things was just driving around in my hired tuk-tuk (rickshaw, like a covered chariot with a seat pulled behind a motorcycle).

I took a hike up a mountain about an hour and a half's drive outside the city. The mountain is famed because the river that flows along its top had its bedrock carved with thousands of linga (stylized penises) and other religious figures more than a thousand years ago. The carvings are still there, and are still in remarkably lovely condition. The whole area, sadly, is still littered with land mines, but it's ok so long as you stick to the well-trodden paths. A bit unnerving, though.

Fittingly, I visited the Land Mine Museum on the way back that day. It's a very small museum, set up to educate visitors about Cambodia's rampant land mine and unexploded ordinance (undetonated bombs) problem. The (luckier) victims are in readily apparent evidence everywhere you go in the country: people are regularly missing limbs, ears, eyes, and have various shockingly disfiguring scars. Having seen some of the jungle and thick brush, I can understand how difficult the de-mining process is. And from the example minefield at the museum, I was surprised to learn how MANY mines are typically in such a field. They're, like, every 18 inches! I was also sad to learn that the US is still producing landmines, and that the majority of the mines in Cambodia are originally from the US. Boy, do we have a lot to answer for. I think the US government should not only stop making these horrible devices, but pay for the de-mining of all areas where our mines still rest.

On a somewhat lighter note, the next day I took a boat ride around part of the Tonle Sap lake which makes up a large part of central Cambodia. A distinct ethnic minority has arisen in Cambodia in the insular people who live their whole lives on the water: getting around in tiny boats, and living on houses canted up on 2-storey stilts. The journey of getting out to the lake was an adventure itself (rickshaw to motorcycle to dirtbike to fisherman's boat to dugout canoe, all driven by teenagers, accentuated by a lot of adrenaline and prayers...) but well worth it, as it is a culture I find fascinating and engaging. I just toodled around the village in various boats, watching the daily lives of the fishing and agriculture (they have floating farms with plants and animals), the kids at play and at school, the new decorations on the temple, took a jaunt through the flooded forest that is their backyard, and enjoyed a delicious meal of stir-fried ramen in, naturally, a floating restaurant. I was amazed, as always in Cambodia, at the complete lack of supervision of the children, and the incredible ability of the kids to do what I think of as difficult adult tasks (such as rowing a canoe and killing a chicken simultaneously -- 2 year olds can do this!).

And I visited the orphanage that was a short walk up the road from my hostel three times during my visit: the first time out of curiosity, the second time to teach them an English lesson (at their request), and the third time just to play with them some more. It was shockingly poorly run: It worried me to no end that I was allowed to just wander in and play with the kids unsupervised, no protection for them at all. And their facilities are sadly lacking. There were kids of all ages, from 5 to 17, more boys than girls. A number were landmine victims, and all had obviously faced trauma to end up at the orphanage. That said, they were a remarkably happy and comfortable group of kids, so at least their emotional needs are being met. Though they were blessedly wary of me at first, they warmed up pretty quickly, and by the end of my visit they were literally hanging all over me, not letting me go, looking up at me with big eyes, saying "I love you! You no go!". Very, very hard to not just take a few of them home. (Sadly, adoptions from Cambodia are not currently allowed because of the prevalence of child trafficking. If they were allowed, a certain fierce 6-year old girl and 1-legged boy would have a nice future ahead of them.)

If we ever have to move back to the Mekong region again, I sure hope it's to Cambodia.

fun with new camera!

2009-12-30T22:46:00.002-05:00

Hi everyone, I'm not dead, just in the midst of grad school applications. I promise I'll return to the world of the communicative as of Jan 20th or so.

This morning Erika insisted I get some exercise and I took the excuse to play with my new Christmas present from her, a waterproof camera. Taking pictures under water is much harder than you'd think! Below are our attempts at using some of the different settings, etc., with varying success. You can look forward to increasing aptitude at underwater photography in the future.

Christmas in Thailand: Palatial celebrations

2009-12-30T04:22:00.003-05:00

Christmas was, unsurprisingly, not very Christmassy here in Thailand, with 90 degree weather and golden sun and flowers blooming everywhere. We tried, though: fake tree, holiday party at our house, paper snowflakes, presents, carols on the ipod, eggnog in the fridge (which took some doing, let me tell you!), Christmas eve with friends, Christmas dinner with the neighbors.

Christmas day itself dawned hot and smoggy. Petra and I enjoyed pancakes while tearing into our small stash of loot, and then took an intermission to let our bodies void said pancakes (turns out the milk was bad). This sadly made us miss the visiting hours at the detention center where my students are being held, so their presents remain undelivered. Instead, once we were back on our feet, we decided to visit the Grand Palace of Thailand, since we had shockingly not made it over there yet.

The Grand Palace is right in the middle of the older part of Bangkok, on the other side of the city, about an hour total of walking, boat trip, and taxi. We hadn't been before because there's a steep ($10) entrance fee, and they require very conservative clothing to enter. But with the mindset for a Christmas treat, and with pre-planned wardrobes, we were good to go.

It was rather big, very sparkley, very crammed with buildings, lots of which had pointy bits on top. There were hundreds of other visitors, but there was enough space that it never felt overcrowded. Orange-robed monks wandered through regularly. Petra especially enjoyed the murals that covered the inside of all of the outer walls. I especially enjoyed the frogs in the decorative ponds.

Not your average Christmas, but it'll do.

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-26T00:38:00.002-05:00

Hi all,

Happy Holidays from Thailand!

Petra and I are well, though rather hotter than we're accustomed to being this time of year. Thinking of you all often, and looking forward to seeing you next year. Hope you're well!

All the blessings of the season,
Erika and Petra

imprisoned students

2009-12-23T07:07:00.002-05:00

I can’t really go into the details or context or much of anything here, but suffice it to say that many (100+) of my students (who, you’ll remember, are refugees) have been imprisoned the last few months for purely political reasons through no fault of their own. It’s bad, really really bad: kids without their parents, little little kids locked up, open cell blocks with more than a hundred per room, real lawbreakers in there with them, really horrid unsanitary conditions, not enough and bad food and water, and a lot more I can’t say.

When I got the news about their abduction (from their beds before dawn, I refuse to even sanctify it with the term ‘arrest’) I was still in the US, and I have never, ever, ever been angrier and more scared in my whole life. I shook for hours. They took my kids and my friends. Not ok. Made me really challenge my pacifist morals.

I got to visit them in the jail today. It’s right in the middle of the city, surrounded by charming apartments and tea shops and clothing stores. It takes standing in three different lines for more than an hour, filling out various forms, surrendering your passport, etc., to get into the courtyard of the prison. There are two chain-link fences dividing the courtyard in half, three feet apart from each other. Detainees stand on one side, then the three foot gap which the guards patrol, and then visitors. We shout back and forth to one another across the gap, and hand items to the guards to pass over, if they deign to do so. The good part was that all the detainees who had visitors get to mill around on their gated side of the courtyard together, so we planned it so a bunch of us visited various members of the same family at the same time, so they all got to see each other. They were so happy to see one another, though sometimes so sad to look around the gathered crowd and not find the faces they were seeking.

The bad part was… well, everything else. Seeing these people who I’ve taught and come to love, little kids, teenagers, and adults alike, being treated like criminals, when they’re just being used as a (cutting myself off so I don’t get thrown in there with them). The smell, which if you’ve never smelled diseased rotted human faeces there’s no point in explaining. The humiliation of all involved except those who should be humiliated (i.e. those responsible): us on the outside for being made to go through ridiculous powertripping steps with four levels of guards and paperwork, for not being able to do enough, for not ever bringing enough, for being able to summon these people from their cells at our whim, for not knowing what to say (what can you say?): them for being so oppressed, for being summoned, for being on display and having their reunions observed, for being less clean than they would like for their dignity (though I was impressed at how well they were keeping themselves, they have such self-respect, it’s inspiring), for not being able to speak English well enough (though lord knows I don’t care, they are my English students, so they sortof think I’m always judging their language skills), for not knowing what to say (what can they say?). The boy I was visiting, a 16-yr-old Sri Lankan, just cried the whole time, though he was clearly really glad to see me.

I brought two big bags of necessities for them, focusing on water, protein and calories (peanut butter, crackers, dried fish, etc.), soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, etc. Everything I could carry. Petra and I are going back on Christmas day, so they get to breathe some comparatively fresh air and see their family members on Christmas (though only some of them are Christian, it’s a special day for many). I’m trying to think of things I can bring them as presents that they can use to pass the time, since they’re so so bored. Books are out, since most can’t read well enough. Cards and other games you can bet on aren’t allowed. All other logical prison rules apply. I’m thinking maybe a harmonica? Markers and paper? Any ideas?

koh samet: thailand's not so bad after all

2009-12-11T06:49:00.004-05:00

To ease my transition back to Thailand, Petra wisely wisked me away the morning after I arrived for a three-day holiday on Koh Samet, an island in the Gulf of Thailand accessible by a 3-hour bus ride and short ferry trip. The island was warm and sunny and gorgeous, with white sand beaches and bath-warm water and delicious food. We stayed in a tree house that hung out over the water. Well, really, just look at the pictures. :) Yeah, I guess this country isn't so bad...

erika back in Bangkok

2009-12-03T22:58:00.002-05:00

After 24 hours on planes and another handful in airports, I’ve arrived safely back in this mess of an adopted city, Krung Thep, a.k.a. Bangkok. Petra met me at the airport even though it was midnight, and is was wonderful to see her. I love my wife. :)

As I stepped out of the airport, I was struck by the smell of the city, to which I had become so accustomed while living here that I hadn't smelled it in ages. My first thought was, "Smells like the third world." My attempt at specifying that smell will be necessarily inadequate, but it has components of: smoke (burning paper, rubber, wet things like leaves, meat, charcoal), wet rotting things, heat, sewage, curry, diesel exhaust, wet dog, green plants, banannas, sweat. And the funny thing? It smelled really good to me, brought a smile to my face. I've become quite at home here in the developing world. Who would have thought?

erika in the USA: thanksgiving and reunions

2009-12-03T22:57:00.001-05:00

My last week in the US this trip found me at my Mother’s house for Thanksgiving. My sister Lisa flew out from Chicago to join us, and as we all had colds we were quite contented to have a mellow celebration with just the three of us. My mom and I cooked the meal (turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, gravy, homemade bread, fresh pumpkin pie) while Lisa worked on a school report, and we shared our gratitude for being able to be with family, for the bounty of good food, for our health, and for all the other blessings we have. I was personally especially grateful for the creamed spinach.

The day after Thanksgiving, Lisa and I went to our 10-year high school reunion. The women were much the same as the girls they had been, same personalities and cliques, but with better haircuts. The men were remarkable improvements upon their younger selves: they were taller, more handsome, more friendly and articulate, better dressed, better dancers, and more worldly. There were of course exceptions to these pleasantries, but it was on the whole a much more enjoyable evening than I would have expected, chatting with guys most of whom I had never really spoken to before in my life. Remarkable from a school as small as mine (graduating class of 150, of whom about 100 were at the reunion). Almost all are still locals. One guy is a professional boxer, another is shockingly getting his PhD in environmental studies, lots of them have or soon will marry some of the prettier girls in our class. I got the prize (a glass jar engraved with the names of everyone in our class) for coming the furthest, though few people believed I actually live in Thailand.

The rest of the weekend was spent with my mom, sister, and I further catching up with other high school friends (hi Josh!), playing Cranium with our mom (she creamed us), helping cousins of ours choose and cart away things from our grandfather’s estate, taking naps, running errands, and generally being a normal family. I can’t tell you how nice that was.

erika in the USA: Northampton

2009-12-03T22:56:00.000-05:00

The second-to-last stop on my American adventure was out to my birthplace and the stomping-grounds of my old alma mater, the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. It is such an exceptionally lovely part of the world, with some of everything good: trees, fields, wooden houses, rivers and streams and lakes, small mountains, small roads, public transportation, an expectation of intelligence and progressive thought, interesting children, quality restaurants, a profusion of live music and indie film, and good friends. I have to wonder how much of my appreciation is based on early imprinting and the later glow of college, how much it really as wonderful as I think it is, and how much my expectations are merely shaped by comparison to it.

One thing is for certain, though: Northampton has changed. It’s posher, more mature, with fewer literally dirty people and culturally appropriated painfully mystic establishments, and instead more actually worldly and sophisticated vibes, all while remaining accessibly inexpensive. It is as if Northampton has grown up alongside me. I wasn’t expecting to still like it as much as I used to, but I do!

Oldies: chocolate covered gummy bears from Sweeties, hot cocoa from that place in Thornes, the sale racks at the clothes boutiques, charming and quirky home décor and gifts from all the shops on Main St, smoothies from the Haymarket, the bizarre temptations from Acme Surplus, deals and steals from Deals and Steals, and of course people-watching all the hotties and yuppies.

Newbies: a great independent food-coop that can easily rival Whole Foods, a new dinner menu and fancy dining setup in the basement of the Haymarket, less awful fashion, a fancy cooking supply store, Urban Outfitters (I know!), and, delightfully and surprisingly, some people of color! :)

My enjoyment of the valley was of course greatly accentuated by the good company of my friends there. I stayed with college pals Toby and Cmoore and their happy menagerie in their new house outside of town. I immediately wanted to till up their garden bed for the spring, build them stairs down to the creek, help them choose shrubbery, etc., but had to resist as I was only there briefly. I do so love housework, though…

My dervish of a visit also included stopping in to see some of my former professors: a truly delightful afternoon with Lindsay, a friend of Petra’s from high school; we visited the Eric Carle Musuem of picturebook art (yes, the art of illustrated children’s books), and participated in their crafts room, in which I created an undersea masterpiece of watercolour and collage. Also on the schedule was dinner and a star-gazing walk with my high school friend Lauren and her boyfriend Thomas who was visiting from France (yes, he’s dreamy); a great relaxing night at friends-of--friends’ Maggie and Pete’s house, where we baked homemade pizzas in their wood stove, sampled Pete’s homemade hard cider, played with endearing toddlers, and played board games; and taking in a play at Hartford Stage, “Mistakes Were Made”.

อาณาจักรอยุธยา Ayutthaya

2009-11-20T22:34:00.000-05:00

*retroactive post: Petra is catching up*

My one and only trip to Ayutthaya (pronounced: eye-YOU-tee-yah) perfectly illustrates the unfortunate truth that significant sightseeing destinations are less likely to be visited by locals – even temporary ones – than by tourists breezing through a country in one or two weeks. Given its proximity to Bangkok I should have been able to explore it much more thoroughly than ended up being the case.

Located only three hours from Bangkok by train, Ayutthaya is the old capital city of what is now Thailand. During its long period of prominence it fought many of wars, held numerous vassal states and maintained economic relationships with Indian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese traders. Ayutthaya was the central political power in the region from the mid 1300’s through the middle of the eighteenth century, at which point the Burmese seized and sacked the city and drove the centre of government south to its present location in Bangkok.

I went to Ayutthaya one Saturday in November 2009 with my good friend Maria, a fellow Australian Youth Ambassador who worked in Bangkok with Disabled Peoples International. We boarded one of the many vans making regular runs between Victory Monument (one of Bangkok’s main transportation hubs) and downtown Ayutthaya. Our fellow passengers – all working in Bangkok and returning to their hometowns for the weekend – were friendly and quiet, and most were asleep in fairly short order. The three hours we subsequently spent crawling North along the expressway in bumper-to-bumper traffic gave Maria and I a fantastic opportunity to catch up. We had a great time.

We arrived at the perfect time to grab a lunch of Ayutthaya’s most famous dish. This signature soup of meat, vegtables, and a particular type of noodle is traditionally prepared and served from small canoe-like boats (think floating market) on the river or moat. It is and therefore named, appropriately enough, Boat Noodles. Ayutthaya is also famous for the street snack Roti, a sweet and sticky fried pancake served with banana, egg, and condensed milk and bearing almost no resemblance to the savoury Indian bread for which it’s named.

After lunch we approached a group of tuk-tuk drivers. After some truly heroic haggling from both of us (lots of smiling, wheedling, teasing, and implacable refusals to consider overpriced offers), we managed to secure both a driver and vehicle at quite a reasonable price for the remainder of the afternoon. In the end, I think we only got such a good price because it was a pretty slow afternoon and because the divers thought our Thai was so cute.

We spent the afternoon touring picturesque ruins of temples, monasteries, tombs, and other monuments. They rest amongst well-tended lawns, spongy marshes, groves of deciduous trees I can’t identify but which are graced with the occasional Bodhi tree. On the day we visited, the majority of other tourists were Thai, followed by people from South Korea, Japan, and China. We also encountered a few people from Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Britain, and Germany. While the sites are definitely well visited and we had to wait our turn to take pictures of the most famous spots, they were quiet enough that Maria and I often had the more out-of-the-way corners entirely to ourselves.

At the entrance and parking lot of every site (in the shade of the afore-described trees) is a collection of small shops and vendors selling refreshments like iced tea, ice cream, fruit, sticky rice with beans or coconut in bamboo stalks, soda, and of course the ever-present dishes of rice, noodles, or noodle soup. You can also buy all manner of tourist memorobelia mass produced in one of the many factories in the region (Thailand itself of course, but also China, Cambodia, and occasionally Vietnam). Local crafts are sometimes available too. At temples and the tombs of important religious and historical figures you can also buy incense, flower garlands, swaths of brightly-coloured fabric (usually yellow and orange, sometimes pink, blue, green, or white) to leave as offerings. Upon arriving at each new site, our driver would make his way to a shady spot to take a nap or gossip with the vendors and other drivers, while we strolled off with the other sightseers.

Ayutthaya is one of Thailand’s two most popular and historically significant World Heritage sites. The other site, the old capital of Sukothai, is reportedly even more extensive and beautiful. While I’m very sad that I didn’t make it to Sukothai during my year in Thailand, I suppose it is good to have left something so special unseen so that I can look forward to visiting it in the future.

erika in the USA: NYC's not so bad

2009-11-19T19:47:00.002-05:00

The last few days found me in New York City, that famed mecca of American ideals. I’ve never had much of a fondness for the city, what with it being huge and concrete and with rude people and stinkiness everywhere. But as I arched over the river on a tall green metal bridge and saw the classic glittering nighttime skyline stretched out before me, I realized afresh how beautiful New York can be.

I was in the city to visit my beloved cousin Corban and his charming girlfriend Adrienne, who were very gracious hosts in their sweet little Brooklyn apartment, and to check out a grad school program at NYU. Being in Brooklyn with such nice people and being able to see their comfortable lives made me realize that it’s not such an impossible thing to live in New York: I wouldn’t want to stay forever, but maybe I could do it for a while. This is a shocking consideration for me, as I have gone my entire life determinedly stating that I would never ever want to live in NYC. Thanks to Bangkok, though, I’ve become slightly immune to the rigors of big cities: at least in New York I can read the signs, ask passersby questions, know the laws, know the history, and pretty much know the system. I’m also to the point where the benefits available in the city, like the profusion of world-class institutions and opportunities and the conveniences of organized urban life, may outweigh my distaste for built environments and pee smell. I’m surprised to find that I’ve also changed enough that I now appreciate the fashion, food, and other cultural opportunities more than before. It’s like I’m growing up / becoming classier: who knew?!

NYU was hilarious. I’d been in their part of the city before, both as a gay tourist (it’s in the middle of Greenwich Village, the gayest neighbourhood in an already gay city, and just blocks from the Stonewall Inn, the site of a pivotal gay riot) and as a performer back in college. I’d never really slowed down and observed the student population, though: oh oh so trendy, fast-talking intelligent yet naive rhetoric, posturing and prancing and pretentions, gay boys, bourgeois angst, but delightfully energetic, alive, engaged, and very well-connected. Kindof an embodiment of the stereotypes of the city. I was impressed by the program I was checking out, and am looking forward to applying.

On my way out of town I had the chance to meet up with a friend and former colleague, Marissa, with whom I crammed about three years of catching up into an hour’s lunch break. She’s an inspiring woman, and it was refreshing to soak up some of her enthusiasm for international social justice work.

No photos, since (as you’ve probably gathered by now) I didn’t bring any cameras with me on this trip. Instead let me part with lingering images from the city: the Statue of Liberty as seen through the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The joyful smiles of five old black homeless men singing perfect barbershop do-wop quintet. Two baggy-pants’d bucket-drummer teen boys huddled with their buckets over their heads in a doorway trying to stay dry in a cold cloudburst. A dignified old white silver-haired man striding ramrod-straight with the skirts of his black woollen trench coat billowing out behind him. The canyons of a long straight skyscraper-lined street fading into mist miles away.

erika in the USA: beloved boston

2009-11-19T19:45:00.003-05:00

This past weekend I enjoyed a two-part sojourn in the urban burbs of my former home city of Boston. First up were my dear dear dear dear friends Nathaniel and Sarah who I know from when I was tiny, and who I love more than food and water combined, and with whom I did and can always enjoy a return to my heart and myself. We cooked and ate and hugged and pig-piled and read and talked and watched documentaries and shared stupid websites and drank tea and coco and wine and played nerdy board games and generally basked in the excellent company.

I was delighted to meet their new-to-me housemate Lindsay, who is such good company that she held her own in my esteem even beside two of my favourite people in the whole wide world. And as if my visit wasn’t grand enough already, we upped the ante of awesomeness with an evening at the home of Sarah’s brother Jeff and his wife Vivian, and a host of their musical theatre friends, and a piano, and much singing of songs. Despite being too cold-ridden to sing much myself, I almost keeled over from the joy of music and intelligent kind likeminded people.

After such overstimulation, it was a blessing to be able to retreat to the soporific aquarium and later to Wakefield where my lovely college friend Sylvia and her wife Jane live in a cosy warren of a house. Because of said cold and being exhausted from too many travels I wasn’t particularly good company, but it was still nice to be able to nest and zone out with such kind and unjudgemental people, around whom I can totally relax and just sleep and blow my nose. Highlights of my stay included a nice walk in the woods, and another nice walk on the beach.

Photos are from Nathaniel’s phone.

erika in the USA: the lovely inlaws and burbs and apples

2009-11-19T09:33:00.003-05:00

Last week found me in Concord MA, where Petra’s parents Dean and Vivienne live. I’ve seen them more recently than most of those I’m visiting, since they came to visit us in Australia last year, so in a way it felt like I’d never left. It’s always a treat to see them, and to stay in their gracious home and eat Vivienne’s deeeeeeelicious food. :)

Their home is also the resting place of the pile of Petra and my worldly possessions, so opening the closet and apprehensively staring at the basement pile was like Christmas: ooh, just the sweatshirt I'd been wishing for! What a perfect sweater! (Shouldn't have been a surprise, as they were mine from 3 years ago.) Shocking, though, the extent of our possessions: we are so lucky to have so much.

On another note: I was surprised to be reminded of the loveliness of the ancient suburbs, with their hunched creaking white houses and grey leafless trees and dry grasses and muddy brooks and cold stone walls. Is this a vista that only a daughter could love, though, grey, grey, grim, dim, tight, delicate, wet, rotting, or would others think it as beautiful as I do?

Our wander through the burbs was presaged by a search for multitudes of apples, which as it turned out were no longer on the trees (early season!) but were solicitously and nose-temptingly piled into baskets for our immediate gratification. The smell of the apple barn (old wood, sweet musky apple skins, tangy spoiled apple juices, dry dirt, lingering old hay) inspired pangs of New England patriotism and hubris and sheer love that almost collapsed me. I decided on the spot to be an apple farmer for all time. (I later rationally decided there were better uses for my skills.) The variety of apple types new and heirloom that were unfamiliar to me was exciting as well, as it means I have a lot of apple tasting to do when I get back.

erika in the USA: doppelgangers in Maine

2009-11-12T14:58:00.001-05:00

Next on my itinerary was visiting in Limestone Maine, where my brother, his wife, and their twin 18-month-old boys Matthew and Thomas live. Since I’ve been away so long, I hadn’t yet met the bosy, so it was very exciting for me to meet these first members of the next generation of our immediate family. Matthew and Thomas are, of course, the sweetest, smartest, most handsome and charming children ever to exist (says she who is not biased at all).

And saying so, it’s of course not at all narcissistic to say that the two of them are remarkably similar to me and my twin sister when we were their age. :) Truly, though, the resemblances between Matthew and I, and Thomas and Lisa, are astounding: not just physical resemblance, but also similar personalities and preferences. Unsurprisingly, Matthew and I got on famously. Top activities: Legos (construction and destruction), dropping things and picking them up, throwing things, hiding, climbing up and down the mountain of soft things, and dancing. See photos for dance sequence: the little guy’s got moves! :)

It was of course also great to see my wonderful big brother Reed and his wife Sue, who are settling back into life in northern Maine after a many-years hiatus in North Carolina. Reed’s teaching criminal justice and doing police work both part time, and Sue’s kept her accounting job from North Carolina, working online. They’re both of course tired by new-parenting, but are doing well.

Reed and I got to have a day off from kid-watching and took the opportunity to ride some ATVs (four-wheelers) around in the woods and trails along the Maine/Canadian border (less than a mile from their house). I’d forgotten they’re SUCH fun, like really fast mountain biking with vroom-vroom motors. :) Of course my visit was too short, but I look forward to going back in the spring when we move back to the States for real.

erika in the USA: sister!

2009-11-12T14:31:00.000-05:00

The second stop on my American adventure was to Chicago to visit my twin sister Lisa.

Chicago is a very new city, grid crazy. It’s cold and windy. The architecture is not all it’s cracked up to be. People wear fedoras and trenchcoats for real, and art school hipsters are like hipsterdom squared. I visited many museums: my favourite was the Chicago History Musuem. We drove to Wisconsin, which (who knew?) is very close to Chicago, and visited the Mars Cheese Castle. On the way back to the city, we stopped by the rural shore of Lake Michigan, which was even more ocean-like than its city shore.

The second-best thing about my visit to Chicago was getting to hang out with my sister’s friends from her college days at Mt. Holyoke. I hadn’t seen many of them since we graduated, and it was a delight to spend time with such intelligent and silly women. I had missed that kind of low-brow high-quality company. :)

The first best thing about my visit was of course seeing my sister, who I adore and who should never ever live so far away (says the pot calling the kettle black). Watching stupid movies, eating really good food (deep dish pizza! fresh tamales! pumpkin pie!), wandering around the city, helping with her art projects, all were infinitely more fun with her than such activities can ever be without the best of company.

Random thoughts while in Chicago: Being in America having been away helps me see how strangely messed up aspects of our culture are: nothing new, but strange reminders nonetheless. Fatness, for instance: one of my first thoughts off the plane was how fat Americans are. Really, inexcusably overweight. The food with so many chemicals, so much falseness, so many calories, sad to be thinking about limiting caloric intake when at my school we worry about the kids having enough calories… And people have so many possessions! It’s ridiculous! And the fanatical conservatives: so sadly brainwashed, so frustratingly ignorant, so blatantly untruthful! I’d pity them if they weren’t so frightening. Also, bad smells: why do American public bathrooms smell so bad? I can authoritatively say that many third-world infested sewage ditches and truck-stop piss canals smell better; similarly, reeking pee in doorways and streetcorners, and the smell of homeless people: so gross, so unnecessary! Come on, America, we can do better.

erika in the USA: home at last

2009-11-12T14:29:00.002-05:00

At long last, I am visiting at home in the great old US of A. It’s strange to be a visitor in my own country: to be here temporarily, to not be able to have one house, city, state, have more of a pull on me than another, to not be able to accumulate anything since all I have for space is my suitcase, to act as a tourist, to have no place of my own to retreat.

But oh, oh, oh, is it good to be home. I LOVE this country. It is glorious and tremblingly lovely and HUGE and full of such spirit and creativity. It (generally) smells good: I practically hyperventilated sniffing at the wooded parking lot on Rt 6 on the way from Boston to CT as the smells of the fallen leaves and adjacent brook and snow in the air and wet dirt filled my hungry soul-belly.

Of course the best thing about this country is that it’s full of people I love. Firstly, my mother, who picked me up at the airport and brought me to the house in Connecticut which has been my home since I was 12. It was so good to be with her again: she’s so practical, so loving, so appreciative of the joys in life, one of my best friends.

After a day of recovering from my 50 hour trip from Bangkok and gorging myself on the delights in her fridge (chevre! cranberries! cider! bitty toasting bread!) we were joined by two of my other favourite people: two of my mother’s siblings, my aunt Pippy and uncle Ross, come in from Berlin and Ohio respectively. Together we spent the next week sorting through the possessions of my grandfather, who passed away last Christmas. We made great progress, and the family talking and stories and pictures and bad jokes and reminiscences and support and shared grief and loving not just for my grandfather but also my long-deceased grandmother and other ancestors was a real blessing. I wish we could have all stayed longer, since we are so rarely together, and so rarely step beyond the barriers of holiday rituals and entertainment and niceties to talk about these precious things and really lean back on the family bonds. I’m not being eloquent enough to do the days justice…

Loy Krathong ลอยกระทง

2009-11-04T09:21:00.003-05:00

This past Monday was Loy Krathong, which is – I’d heard – one of the most beautiful and photogenic holidays in the Thai calendar. Loy Krathong – the Thai festival of lights – is held every year at the first full moon in November. People release beautiful lanterns into the air and onto the water where, in floating away, they carry away bad luck, bad experiences, and other attachments of which their releasers wish to be free.*

These lanterns dot the sky and drift in luminous processions down rivers and canals throughout the country and even (in Bangkok) across apartment swimming pools. The floating lanterns – called krathong – are beautifully made to evoke lotus flowers and, inexplicably, turtles (possibly in reference to a popular incarnation of Vishnu, possibly a modern innovation - possibly just another example of the inexhaustible popularity of all things cute). They are all brightly-coloured and circular, and come in a variety of sizes and degrees of embellishment: some are the size of your fist, others enormous and as elaborately tiered as a classic western wedding cake. They carry candles, fresh flowers, and sticks of incense. Krathong are traditionally made of banana leaves or a special kind of bread. In today’s ecologically conscious climate, they are often made of styrofoam (sigh).

I was very excited for this festival. I even remembered to take a tripod with me when I went out, to be as prepared as possible for breathtaking nighttime photo opportunities. In vain.

Sadly, Loy Krathong was a bit of a bust for me: I went to the wrong neighborhood. I went out with friends, and it was absolutely lovely to see them, and we ate absolutely delicious vegetarian food. The gathering along on the banks of the Chao Phraya River in Banglampoo, however, was noisy, tacky, and basically boring. To top it all off, I forgot to bring that one little essential screw that attaches the camera to the tripod, so I couldn’t even use it.

It was fun to see the krathong, and even more interesting to see the amazing cottage industries that spring up around them: hundreds of street stalls selling them of course, but also whole families sitting on the street surrounded by piles of banana leaves, Styrofoam plates, flowers, and incense – making krathong as fast as they can sell them. Industrious entrepreneurs also provided a variety services to assist people in releasing their krathong. From the sculpted avenues at the top of the park, your krathong can be gently lowered into the waves with a pulley or a specially designed long-handled basket. For the budget option, you can go around the corner and one of the street kids will hop in an inner tub and paddle your krathong through the stagnant inlet out to the main river.**

It was also fun to be in the midst of throngs of people all enjoying the night out: adoring parents taking hundreds of pictures of their little angel floating his/her very first lantern, teenagers chasing each other with sparklers . . . and crowds of stolid looking firemen and emergency response people keeping an eye on everyone. At one point a boat went down the river by carrying an enormous float modeled after an unfolding lotus blossom. The flower alone was the size of a small house, brilliantly lit up and glowing an eye-blinding shade of hot pink. I took some pictures despite my lack of tripod, and here they are, but if you’re really interested in Loy Krathon I’m sure you’re better off with a Google Image search. Better luck next festival, hey?

*“Loy” is “float,” and “krathong” is what the lanterns are called: hence the name of the holiday.
** yeah, I know – kids swimming in the Chao Pharay river in Bangkok.

petra at work part two: challenges and rewards

2009-09-06T11:44:00.006-04:00

My work is very challenging, of course, and the challenges tend to fall into one of several categories. The first is ordinary work-related stresses that everyone is a familiar with – tight deadlines, lots of projects, way too many emails, etc. Next come the challenges of working in a culture and language to which I am not native. World Vision Thailand has about one thousand staff in all, three of which are white foreigners. I intimidate most people. The office politics are intense and my unfamiliarity with Thai culture makes it harder for me to recognise what would otherwise be familiar drama, and harder to respond appropriately. It took me five months to figure out the scan-to-share-drive function on the office photocopier because I kept forgetting to ask my English-speaking colleagues when they were around, and I didn’t know how to ask the question in Thai (or understand the answer, for that matter). I don’t have a personal translator, nor would it be reasonable to want one, and while my colleagues can usually translate for me in meetings etc, sometimes it’s just not convenient. That can be lonely and frustrating. Management practices are unfamiliar. In taking care to avoid a cultural misstep in the workplace, I get into a habit of uncertainty that is difficult to break. I sometimes struggle to feel confident and sure of myself even when I do know exactly what to do next and how to do it. Working through these dynamics is a continuing struggle. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be an unending one. It has gotten easier since I arrived.

There are also challenges of working in a developing country. I actually have better workplace resources and conveniences than I anticipated (a laptop, photocopier, wireless most places, most of the supplies I want), especially when compared to the majority of humanitarian workers in the world. For example, I have yet to be without electricity at work when I needed it. That said, most power outlets are frankly scary – always buzzing and sparking – and power strips are universally sub-par. This is a big deal when you work on the road with a laptop, and often need to power LCD projectors (but note, too – I have regular access to an LCD projector.)

I also develop exciting and novel health problems here. I struggled to participate effectively in a week-long conference not long ago, because I had Giardia from a bad fish dish and had to keep dashing to the bathroom to puke or to go through the equivalent process on the other end of the digestive track. It’s too hot outside, and too cold inside because the air conditioning everywhere is perpetually set to 18 degrees.

People are in general shockingly, infuriatingly ignorant of good environmental – even sanitary – practices.* Toxic paint, sewage, batteries, bleach, it all goes right down the storm drains and into the canals where poor kids swim and people fish for food, and from there into the ocean and into the groundwater, poisoning the planet. Over-consumption of cheap plastic crap is endemic even among NGO's. Giving gifts is an essential part of hospitality here. Combine that with the easy availability of every kind of stuff you can imagine(there are a TON of factories in Thailand). You get the picture. Everything has a ton of plastic packaging, which ends up in the street, in the poor neighbourhoods, and probably in the ocean as well. My colleagues are all conscientious about turning off lights and air conditioning in the office, but in some places (especially large businesses) it's standard practice to leave doors and windows open with air-conditioning on. Workplace recycling is existent but minimal - and in a country famous for illegal logging in protected forests! Meanwhile everyone – NGO’s, businesses, socialites, hipsters - pays lip service and less to environmentalism, because slogans like “love earth save earth” and “green earth” etc. are trendy and Western. Such waste is hard to see, and harder to change. The infrastructure for good environmental practices is weak to non-existent and the bad habits are well ingrained.

Another challenge is, honestly, boredom. It can be really boring to sit all day in the back of a room listening to a meeting conducted in Thai that I can’t understand but that isn’t crucial or related directly-enough to my work for it to be worth asking someone to translate. And I know that the networking meetings, especially the government events – are very important and effective in our long-term advocacy strategy, but the pace of such meetings can feel frustratingly slow. My Bangkok colleagues and I get very bored of each other at times. I had one trip that lasted two weeks. I spent a full two weeks – most meals, all meetings, 54 hours in the van all told, even sleeping because we share hotel rooms to cut costs – with the same five co-workers. I laugh about it now, and it was a great experience overall, but at the time we were so sick of each other!

Beyond all that are the emotional challenges of my work. The fact that I anticipated seeing difficult things when I started this role has not made seeing them appreciably easier. Nothing really prepares you for the reality of seeing malnourished naked children wading barefoot through raw sewage (by which I mean a shiny, mucky mixture of parasite-infected human and animal excrement, plus kerosene, stagnant rain water, rotting food, rotting . . . other things, engine oil, blood, you name it. The smell is indescribable), or visiting a market where people sit in stinky mud for twelve hours a day pulling the wings off of grasshoppers, for which they can earn up to the princely salary of 60 THB a day. For context, 60 THB is $1.76 US, and one regular serving of basic street noodles costs about 30 THB. More difficult still is realizing that, as hard as these people have it, there are people all over the region – all over the world – in even more desperate situations.

There are challenges because the stuff of my work – poverty, exploitation – is painful in itself, and sometimes further challenges simply working in this part of the world. Not long ago I spent a week in Cambodia, attending a regional training in anti-human trafficking advocacy. Participants came from five of the countries in the Mekong region. As we compared the advocacy climate and policy formation processes in our different countries, the diversity of context engendered some memorable exchanges. For example,

Lead Trainer: “Let's talk about community mobilisation. If you were planning to organise a march, rally or a protest in your town - in your country, what would you do first?”

Delegate from large communist country to the north (chuckling): “Reconsider.”

Or later,

Lead Trainer: “I’m now handing out flow-chart diagrams of the legislative process in each of your various countries, so you can analyse them...well, almost all of your countries... You folks, I'm so sorry, I looked all over the internet and couldn't find anything outlining the structure of your government...”

Delegates from totalitarian military state (laughing heartily): “Don't worry, there isn’t one! It's so simple we don't need a diagram. Our law is whatever the Senior General decides is a good idea.”

At moments like these we all laughed, because it was funny and because really, what else can you do? Here is some more development-speak for you: “Advocacy in Restricted Contexts.” That my colleagues in these neighbouring countries face extreme difficulties goes without saying, and the pain beneath the humour is heartbreaking.

So it goes without saying that my work here is difficult, but it’s also incredibly rewarding. I’m so happy to have the opportunity to be doing what I’m doing. I know that what I’m doing is worthwhile and is changing people’s lives. In fact since my main professional focus is program monitoring and evaluation – designing and implementing ways to measure and communicate the impact of our projects – I can say that with greater surety than many development workers: It’s actually a big part of my job to figure out whether what we’re doing is working and, if it isn’t, how it can be fixed. So far, the evidence seems to say that we’re doing a good job.

*I’m not talking here about abjectly poor people, refugees, etc who, generally speaking, have more immediate concerns. I’m talking about average, comparatively middle-class Bangkokians: my peers and colleagues.

petra at work part one: what I do

2009-09-06T11:27:00.005-04:00

We’ve now been in Thailand for almost half of our planned stay, and I feel pretty well at home. Professionally I’m very happy indeed, as my work is engaging, challenging, full of variety, contributing to a more just world, and using my skills and abilities to an extent to which I can feel proud. It is, as we say in the Bay State, wicked.

My official title is Anti-Human Trafficking and Advocacy Program Officer – e.g. I am an Officer of the World Vision Foundation of Thailand Anti-Human Trafficking and Advocacy Program. On the local level, we work with communities to 1) raise awareness about human trafficking, labour exploitation, and how to protect oneself from both, and 2) fix other problems that make people vulnerable to human traffickers (in development-speak, this is “increasing community resilience” and “decreasing vulnerabilities”). We also advocate nationally and regionally for the adoption and effective implementation of policies, laws, Standard Operating Procedures, Memorandums of Understanding, etc. to combat human trafficking and assist trafficking victims.*

My work is a lively mixture of writing, reading, thinking, planning, travelling, talking, teaching, and organising. I spend about 35% of my time at my desk in a crowded Bangkok office. I plan trainings and develop curricula for them, write reports on recent trainings I’ve lead or trips I’ve taken, read periodic reports from our project locations, and write reports to send back to the World Vision offices that fund World Vision projects in Thailand (primarily the US, Australia, and Canada, but also Japan and Hong Kong). I develop presentations about the program to share with partner organizations, and write the content for communications materials like fact sheets, flyers, issue briefs, etc. I keep up-to-date with the latest research and information about human trafficking – especially materials published in English. Recently I’ve been working closely with one of my colleagues to develop and finalise our anti-human trafficking advocacy plan for the next six month.

I spend another 15% of my time elsewhere in Bangkok. Just about every international NGO that does any work in Asia has an office in Bangkok, and there are always events and meetings with government agencies, UN agencies, and NGOs to attend. Most are opportunities to network, promote World Vision and our work, establish contacts and credibility, and find out what everyone else is working on at the moment. We exchange information and research, and maintain the government connections that allow us to advocate effectively.

The rest of the time, I’m travelling around Thailand to visit our project locations. Most of these are in the border regions of Thailand, where Thailand touches Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia.** Visiting project locations is called going to “the field.” Calling the poor communities where we run our programs “the field” actually bothers me (I mean, what we’re calling “the field” is somebody’s home, not just some strange “other” place where NGOs go to meet and study and run programs. If it weren’t somebody’s home we wouldn’t be there studying and working!). But, “the field” is the standard term throughout all the NGOs, and maintaining consistency is much more important than making sure the English term we use sounds PC to a native English speaker, especially since English is everyone else’s second or third language and most of the people who live in “the field” don’t speak English at all.

I usually go on these field trips in a group of three to five of my colleagues from the Bangkok office. I observe our projects being implemented and help to maintain World Vision’s local NGO and government network. On a typical trip I might visit a World Vision community centre to meet with local staff for an update, then go with them to the home of a local village leader to see World Vision volunteers run an information session about safe migration. I might accompany a World Vision youth group to their school to run an assembly on human trafficking and health, visit a few families that World Vision has helped to start helpful projects in the home (ex. raising frogs or mushrooms to eat and sell), and attend a cross-border meeting among local government and NGO representatives trying to coordinate their services to human trafficking victims. I will also train local staff in advocacy, human trafficking, and project monitoring, and especially in World Visions approach to these. I train through an interpreter, and it works like this:
1) I develop all training materials (powerpoints, handouts, etc) in English.
2) I send them to a translator, who creates Thai language versions.
3) On the day of the training, we project the Thai presentation for the participants. I present from a printout of my original English materials.
4) I speak in English and the interpreter translates for participants. The interpreter also translates comments and questions from participants so I can address them.

It’s a bit cumbersome, but it seems to work pretty well. My colleague’s work with migrant communities, after all, so they’re used to language differences and interpreters. Many are bilingual in Thai and the language of their next nearest country (Burmese, Lao, or Khmer), and most speak a least a little English as well (though they’re often too shy to use it much with me). We often bring guests – consultants or colleagues from partner organizations – to visit our projects. About a month ago I was travelling with a colleague from World Vision Australia to Ranong in Southern Thailand. She interviewed a migrant Burmese fisherman who comes regularly to the World Vision centre there. Every question and answer went through the following translation chain:
Question: Anna (English) → P’Ling (English >Thai) → P’Doh (Thai >Burmese)
Answer: K’Poi (Burmese) → P’Doh (Burmese>Thai) → P’Ling (Thai>English)

When we travel its usually by van or bus. The trips are usually long. Starting in Bangkok, it takes four hours to get to our closest project site. Our farthest are twelve and fourteen hours away depending on weather, traffic, and other factors. I have been to more roadside 7-11’s than I thought existed in Thailand. I have spent hours this year gazing at rice fields through the small filmy windows of mass-transport vehicles. Occasionally the scenery changes slightly, and I see rice fields from a different angle, or rice fields growing on mountains. It’s a good thing rice fields are generally quite lovely.

Upon returning to Bangkok, there are reports to write, emails that need a response, and issues from the trip to resolve or follow up. Then I start the next round of reading, writing, networking, research . . . and planning for the next trip out.

* And for all our much-beloved, super-progressive, sensitive, and linguistically-aware friends in the US, if you are concerned about my use of the word “victim” where you would probably have chosen “survivor,” let me assure you there’s a very good reason for this choice and I’m happy to chat with you about it any time.
** Thailand also touches Malaysia in the south, but we don’t go down there because we’d probably get blown up.

fun weekend

2009-08-26T09:59:00.003-04:00

We had a busy and excellent few days this past weekend. We greeted Saturday morning bright and early with the scrumptious treat of home-made pancakes, and then trundled off to the refugee center for a day of hard labor. Next weekend we're painting the classrooms, thanks to a donation from a local prep school. But before we can paint, there's a lot of mold-removal, scraping, sanding, roof-patching, window-fixing, bug-exterminating, and general cleaning that needs to happen. Hence Saturday found us attacking the classrooms with bleach solution and elbow grease, along with a handful of other young adults we managed to press-gang. It was satisfying work, especially for the desk-job crowd, who aren't used to immediate gratification from their labors. I had special fun ferreting out all the ant colonies (behind wainscotting, under floor, in ceiling tiles, behind air conditioner, in piano...) and forcefully encouraging them to relocate. An enterprising baby gecko gleefully stationed itself in the midst of one of the streams of fleeing ants and just sat there with its mouth open until it couldn't eat any more: truly hilarious to watch it waddle off. Tearing up the rotten floor of one classroom was also great fun. Not fun was realizing the astoundingly unhygienic and unsafe state that the classrooms had been in for years, and thinking what a toll that has probably taken on the health of the students.

After going home for a much-needed shower and nap, we went off to a young Australian's flat for the hip party of the month, celebrating Thai street fashion. The taxi ride over there was very eventful, as the city was deluged by a rainstorm severe even by monsoon standards. Many neighborhoods were flooded three feet deep or more. The taxi took a well-considered circuitous route to avoid most low-lying areas, but still often drove through water well over the doors' transoms, probably knee-deep or so. It was a testament to whatever modifications they do on those Corollas that the engine didn't so much as cough once, and our feet stayed dry despite feeling the impact of the waves on the floor and seeing the roof-high wake we were kicking up. The city barely slowed down: no mere water can flummox Bangkokians. (Oh, and the party was fun, too, despite the fact that Australians apparently think Thai street fashion is akin to clown costumes, and we were tired so left early.)

Sunday we, surprise surprise, went biking in the Bangkok jungle, Bang Kra Jao, again. This time we went with Australians Katie and Milena (who's also Columbian), both of whom really enjoyed the scenery and winding tiny 'roads'. We spotted a gorgeous bird like a bright blue kingfisher, as well as some kind of marsh hen thing, two giant monitor lizards, a neat roadrunner-ish lizard, some truely lovely butterflies, and a million cool plants. The community's weekly floating market was again hopping with ethnic Mon foods and... more food. I enjoyed my favorite fried tofu, corn, and taro fritters, while Petra delighted in her favorite rice noodles with soupy curry sauce. (Unfortunately, the later seems to have been off, since she spent the next two days violently puking, but is better now.) The highlight of the day was when, while hanging out at a forest temple after lunch, Petra started chatting in Thai with some local passers-by, and we were forthwith invited to her friends' nearby house, where we were led into their jungle backyard and fed delicious young coconuts straight from the tree by the delighted old ladies who lived there.

No wonder we are so tired this week!

my new job: teaching refugees

2009-08-19T08:13:00.003-04:00

Scene: a tiny room full to the brim with about 30 7ish-year-olds, in relative chaos. Teacher (‘T’, i.e. me): “English! Write your name in English!” S: “My father’s name, or my name?” T: “Your name, not your father’s name: your first name.” S: “What’s a first name?” T: “Your short name.” S: “But my short name is my number two name, my first name is my father’s name.” T: “Whatever name you want me to call you… Lor! Why do you have a knife?” Lor: “To sharpen my pencil.” T (pondering): “Ok.” S: “Teacher, I have no paper.” T: “Ok, write on the back of last week’s worksheet.” S: “Teacher, I’m hot. Can I go get water?” T: “If you’re hot, take off your sweater.” S: But it is my only shirt.” T: “Ok, then sit in front of the fan.” T: “Where is Jon? Why is his seat empty?” S: “Oh, he left.” T runs outside, calls for Jon, doesn’t find him, returns to the classroom before other students can disappear. (Jon appears inexplicably 30 min. later, soaking wet and grinning.) All that just today, just to get the students to write their name on their paper…

Last month I started my new job teaching at the Bangkok Refugee Center (BRC). The BRC is part of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) of Angelina Jolie fame. While most of the UNHCR’s work focuses on residential refugee camps in rural areas like those you see in the news, they have a few sites like the BRC that a) aren’t residential, i.e. the refugees don’t live at the Center but in housing throughout the community, and b) serve urban refugees, i.e. not ones relegated to a barren wasteland somewhere.

In addition to the school at which I teach, the Center has a medical clinic; a resource center for staples like food, clothing, etc.; social workers and psychological help; and vocational training (computer and business-environment skills, cooking and restaurant management, hair salon skills). The Center is located on a side-street in a fairly busy residential neighbourhood on the edge of the city’s densest area, and is comprised of a scattered hodge-podge of cement and corrugated tin buildings with tiny alleys and cement courtyards. Shockingly, all the main rooms are usually air conditioned, though many have serious mold problems. In general, resources are very very scarce, with occasional notable exceptions that occur through specific donations (i.e. pens and paper are short, but there’s a new Yamaha keyboard).

The refugees are of all ages and walks of life, from something like 40 different countries. Predominately represented are Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, China, Pakistan, Iraq, Somolia, and the D.R. Congo. Yup, that’s right: the ones from countries that the US and Australia don’t like get dumped here in Thailand, who’ll take anyone short-term. Thailand’s not a place where the Thai government or the UN will let refugees stay forever, though: they’re supposed to be placed permanently in a country that actually has the resources to take care of them, mainly the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the western European countries. The refugees’ ‘temporary’ stay in Thailand usually lasts 10 years, thanks to shocking red tape.

The refugees aren’t allowed to hold jobs, and most don’t speak Thai, so their options are limited. So they keep themselves busy, usually at the BRC. Any day will find the Center teaming with life: not only do you find the refugees and asylum seekers who are there to utilize the resources, but usually also their entire families. They come to meet up with friends, let their kids run around in a safe place, speak in their native languages, eat the cheap and delicious food cooked by the restaurant students, pick up some extra language skills and knowledge from the other visitors, and generally feel welcomed and at home. I love that it’s such a wonderful place that people just want to be there for no reason. And they don’t want to leave: it’s hard to enforce the evening closing time, as they want to stay reading in the library, chatting in the courtyard, playing on the playground.

I teach English and Music to a total of about 125 students. Most of my students are adults, with the memorable exception of two classes of 6-14 year-olds. In addition to my English and Music classes, the kids get a second English class, as well as Math, Thai, French, and Art (sometimes). The adults just take English, Computers, and some vocational classes.

There is such a range of ages in the kids’ classes because they are graded not by age but by ability. As many of the refugees have never been formally schooled before, they have to start at the very beginning. So, until I had them join my adult classes, there were 19-year-olds sitting in class with the 6-year-olds, all learning something like a first grade curricula. The differences between the 6-year-olds and the 14-year-olds are obviously drastic, though not as bad as you’d think. They’re amazingly energetic (considering most of them are malnourished), and extremely boisterous (not letting their lack of shared common languages stop them). A disproportionate number of them are very bright. They are also all, to a one, very mischievous.

The adults are another handful all together. Though less chaotic, their desperate eagerness to learn English and make good use of their time with me makes them VERY demanding. They are also understandably very keen to show their intelligence, to be understood as people worthy of respect rather than “Refugees”, making class discussions rather catty at times: imagine an entire class of teachers’ pets. An additional challenge is that though some of them have considerable schooling (i.e. Masters degrees), others have no schooling, and all have been out of school for a long time: they don’t really remember how to be students, and certainly have no precedence for how to be an adult student with a teacher in most cases younger than they are. It is hard to politely correct them, point out their mistakes, remind them that learning starts when you acknowledge what you don’t yet know, and encourage non-competitive and non-judgemental class discussion practices with these dynamics.

The kids and the adults alike are, of course, very stressed: most have undergone horrific events before reaching the relative safety of Thailand, almost all have PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), all are seriously financially strapped and malnourished, most live in very inadequate housing, all travel long distances on the most awful forms of transportation to get to the Center every day. This, of course, adds to the level of insanity in the classroom.

There is no curricula, so I make up each class entirely out of thin air. It takes a shockingly long time to plan a lesson to accommodate the significant range of ages and abilities, hold the attention of the wigged-out students, be do-able with absolutely no resources, as well as be understandable with minimum lecturing. Of course, I also try to make the content culturally and biographically appropriate, which is hard when juggling 40-odd cultures at once. And then I invariably have to change the lesson in some way at least five times an hour due to split-second feedback and observation of its reception.

Despite the above challenges, the classes have been going very well. I’m just finishing up my fourth week of teaching, and I’m seeing remarkable improvement in the students, especially the adults’ writing and the kids’ singing. The adults are starting to relax a bit, and I have high hopes for the rest of the semester.

I’ve been especially enjoying writing the music curricula, as well as teaching reading music and basic music theory to the music teacher, Kwang, and to the computer teacher, James, who has considerable musical talent and is happy to learn how to teach another subject. Some of my favourite hours at the BRC have been spent belting out Carpenters or Peter Paul and Mary hits with Kwang at the keyboard and me on guitar, teaching chord progressions and pop song formats, or both of us on hand drums for note-reading rhythm lessons. Capacity-building has never been so much fun. :)

unfortunately aquainted with local fauna

2009-08-12T08:09:00.003-04:00

Sorry for being so slow with posting. I have a great but exhausting new job (more on that soon) and Petra's been traveling nearly constantly for work.

On top of that, I've made a rather unfortunate recent acquaintance with the delightful local fauna 'giardia lamblia', which had me wracked for almost two weeks with such horrid fevers and ...other violent disturbances of the body that the hospital was, in succession, convinced I had 1) swine flu, 2) dengue fever, 3) malaria, and then when tests showed I had none of these, 4) a mysterious virus from which they wished me the best in recovering from on my own and sent me home. Of course, it was not a virus, but was eventually accurately diagnosed by Dr. Petra as good old giardia, which I could have just as easily got in my backyard in Connecticut, and was swiftly cured with a blitz of giardia-intended antibiotics. I'm now trying to build up my strength again and recover from the antibiotics. Ironic, really, that the doctors got it so wrong, since the usual modus operandi at hospitals here is to just give everyone massive does of antibiotics regardless, assuming it will help with something even if not your main complaint. The one time they don't do that is the one time it would have really helped. Petra has been an absolutely angelic nurse, waking me up every three hours (nighttime included) to make sure I drink enough water and have something in my belly, and has read me more than 1000 pages of 17th century British philosophical and political intrigues.

Perhaps not particularly exciting to recount, here, but from the point of view of my poor body it's been a quite dramatic few weeks.

planting trees

2009-07-28T01:35:00.001-04:00

As you might recall from my previous post, there’s a whole big section of Bangkok not far from where we live that’s all green and jungley still. I enjoy bike riding there, and trading the noise and tumult of big bad city-living for the sensory cacophony of birdsongs, green and textured plants, winding pathways, eddying waters, and fresh breezes.

I’m not the only one to notice the green plants and fresh breezes part: the area acts as a lung and liver for the poisons of the city, filtering out at least some of the pollution in the air and water. In order to further this cleansing, a young Thai woman (who’s also a student at Phillip Exeter Academy in NH) has founded The Giving Greens, an organization that buys green lands in order to protect them from development, runs nurseries to provide native plants to further propagate the greenness, and educates and encourages local residents to plant more trees.

This weekend, invited by an Australian in the know, we went to one of their tree-planting days. It was super-fun: we planted something like 1,000 trees, extending the green border just a little further into the city. The planting was muddy and very satisfying work, made easy by the pre-dug holes. The excellently-organized event also included charming dancing by the schoolkids resident in the green area, a feast of superb local food, free awesome t-shirts, and a great group bike-ride to the local floating market. Couldn’t really ask for more: I almost felt like I was getting away with something, not working hard enough and having too much fun.

outings and aboutings in bangok

2009-07-12T06:48:00.002-04:00

Petra and I have had a few unexpected free days recently, and made an attempt to see more of this city we’re living in. The first stop in our hometown tourism was the Golden Mount, a tall man-made hill on the edge of the old city topped by an ancient gleaming golden temple and stupa. Our guidebook promised panoramic views and peaceful quiet: the mount didn’t disappoint. While it’s theoretically the monsoon season, we’ve had a spate of some of the bluest skies I’ve ever seen, and the previous rains washed away much of the pollution, so the view from the hill showed off a gleaming, sunny cityscape hardly resembling my experience of Bangkok. Surrounded by a tight ring of trees and lifted as high as the skyscrapers, the comparatively fresh wind and lack of traffic noise was a welcome relief.

One of the most famous sights in Bangkok is Wat Arun, the Temple of the Dawn. Built in the Ayuthaya period (1600s), it’s one of the oldest buildings in the city, and has a noticeably different shape and decorative motif than any intact structure I’ve seen in Thailand. While in most photographs is appears monolithic and pinkish, it’s actually many separate structures, each distinct, and comprised of many bright colors: orange, green, grey, brown, you name it. The entire temple complex is ornately decorated: the older structures are obsessively carved, while the newer buildings are mosaiced to within an inch of their arguable lives. I hadn’t looked forward to visiting the temple, instead considering it an obligatory visit as a Bangkok resident, but found myself thoroughly enjoying the temple itself, the quiet neighbourhood surrounding, and the view across the river to the palace area.

We reached both mount and wat by boat: the mount via the klong (canal) that runs near our apartment, and the wat via the central Chao Phraya river. The waters are high and filthy, thanks to the accumulated runoff of the entire Mekong Peninsula. Even with the displeasures of stench and overactive minds imagining dunkings and virulent infection, it’s still a superior form of travel within the city: it’s fast, there’s no traffic, there are more trees and fewer obnoxious foreigners, and it allows a glimpse into otherwise inaccessible neighbourhoods. And on these trips, there were bonus cool clouds and rainbows. Plus traveling on painted long boats somehow adds romance and adventure to otherwise mundane commuting. :) And who would turn down romance and adventure?

After visiting the wat, Petra and I retired to a very posh but hidden restaurant called The Deck that is right on the bank of the Chao Phraya, directly across from Wat Arun. We sipped tasty cocktails while watching the sun set over the temple, then watched the barges push their way against the current to reach northern Thailand. Ma, I sang the obligatory ‘Barges’ song for you. Couldn’t ask for a nicer evening.

religion in thailand

2009-07-06T01:10:00.005-04:00

Unlike everywhere else I have lived, Thailand’s dominant culture and populace are not Christian. 95% of people in Thailand are Buddhist. The remaining 5% are mainly Muslim and Chinese Traditional Religion (Confucian/Taoist/Animist), with only a small fraction identifying as Christians.

In the 500s AD, Buddhism was brought evangelically to the area that eventually became Thailand. The region’s Buddhist leanings were further strengthened when it was conquered by the Buddhist Thai culture in the 1200s. We don’t know much of the region’s history between then and 1767*, but from its results we can see a great commingling of religious and cultural ideas from the various great land trading routes across Southeast Asia.

The type of Buddhism practiced in Thailand is Theravada, the same kind as is practiced in modern Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Sri Lanka (where Theravada originated). However, there are noticeable touches of Mahayanism in their worship, such as the belief that the king is a bodhisattva, and the growing popularity of the Chinese Kuan Yin (a persona of Avelokitesvara, another bodhisattva). For those of you who aren’t up on your Buddhist theology, very roughly think of the Theravadens as Protestants, and the Mahayanists as Catholics, and the bodhisattvas as saints. Think of how surprising it would be to find a statue of a saint in a Congregationalist church.

In addition to this sect-mingling, there are also a surprising number of Hindu deities appearing in Thai Buddhism. It’s not uncommon to see Ganesha sitting at the foot of the Buddha, or to find a many-armed statue of Brahma as the presiding figure at a major Buddhist shrine. Thais see no discrepancy in the two religions, taking a rather Indian approach of “more gods = more bases covered”. When asked about their beliefs, though, Buddhist cosmology spews forth, very little Hindu thought included.

Rather than the visually evident Hinduism, what slants the mental framework of Thai Buddhists away from the philosophy of the texts is animism and ‘superstition’. Thai animism is the pre-Buddhist traditional religion of the region, and is closely related to Chinese animism. It largely consists of considering and respecting both the spirits of local physical and natural places, and respecting ancestor spirits. Local place-spirits are thought to reside in anything from trees to rocks to streams, and respect to them can be seen in the garlands, paint, and offerings given to these locations. When a site has been cleared of its natural features (i.e. a building site), a tiny, beautiful and ornate house is built in which the displaced spirits will hopefully reside, so that they do not become angered by the destruction of their homes and cause trouble for the new residents. Identical spirit houses are also built and tended for the spirits of the humans who were attached to the place, traditionally the ancestors of the current occupants. Offerings of flowers, food, beverages, and trinkets are given to both types of spirit houses daily by the residents and other people connected with the shrines, with the hope that the spirits will stay appeased and will possibly assist the offerers. If the spirits are left unfed or otherwise become unhappy, the fear is that they will haunt and cause great trouble. Thais fear these ghosts more than almost anything else.

The other practices that Thais add to traditional Buddhism are what we would usually class as ‘superstitions’, though the term is considered offensive because of its assumption of inefficacy. The main practices are what Heine and Prebish call “the cult of relics, images, icons, and amulets”.** The protective amulets are most evident, worn on thick necklaces or placed on dashboards and handlebars. Upon closer inspection, protective and power-channeling talismans present themselves painted on the ceilings of taxis or even tattooed on the skin of believers. In addition to the physical lucky artifacts, horoscopes and day-associations take on great meaning and are consulted for any significant event, and the popular lotteries become a numerological wonderland of consideration and speculation.

These derivations from traditional Buddhism are completely ubiquitous among young and old, rich and poor Thais, but are not officially sanctioned by the Buddhist authorities of the country. Those authorities are, notably, the Sangha (community of monks) and the King. The King was, for a time, a monk himself, and is looked to in all matters concerning the country, from theology to taxes to technology. A thoroughly modern and well-educated man, he is able to advise on all these matters, and his word holds great sway, as does that of rest of the community of monks. Given this, it is surprising that these ‘superstitions’ continue so pervasively: the inertia of millennia of cultural practices is hard to resist.

Old practices still also dominate mainstream Buddhist rituals and worship. To walk into a temple here is not to enter a stark place of silent contemplation, but is to join a mingling crowd of stray animals, peddlers, orange-robed monks, gaudy mosaiced and gold-leafed statuary, tourists, motivational plaques, advertisements, strange odours, and discordant noises. It’s a real ‘bells and smells’ type of worship, with flower garlands, incense, candles, and food offerings stealing the show. Like Latin in pre-Vatican-2 Catholicism, Pali is the language of religion (scriptures, liturgy, etc.), so most practitioners don’t know what the words mean, making the endless mumble of the chanting equally surrealistic for all involved.

Humorously, this worship style is not limited to within temples and shrines. Buddhism is very much alive and well in Thailand, fully integrated into modern life. Statues, shrines, and other places of worship are incorporated into every street corner, mall, and skyscraper, allowing businessmen and shoppers to stop, bow, light some incense, and pay their respects throughout the day. You’re more likely to see worship being done by makeup-ed women in Prada than by monks.

This giving of respect and offerings is almost the entirety of most lay Thai’s Buddhism. As Tuchrello notes, most Thais “place little emphasis on the achievement of nirvana.” Instead of striving in meditation for the ultimate goal in this lifetime, Thais are generally content to leave that work to the next lifetime, and just look to have an easier life next time around, in which they’ll hopefully do a better job at the whole nirvana thing. They therefore generally limit themselves to accruing merit (good karma), mainly by supporting and revering the Sangha and giving material offerings to auspicious shrines or spirits. To me, this seems remarkably close to the unsavoury and lazy practice of buying indulgences, but it is considered to be quite honourable here.

While Buddhism sits strong in this country, it is not without its problems. The main challenge to the strength and continuation of Thai Buddhism has been brought by the establishment of government schools from the 1960s through today. While previously the temples were the sole sources of community education, with monks teaching the times tables along with the concept of interdependent origination, now the role of the monk is much more limited. Without the knowledge immediately applicable in this life to draw them, and with the obligations of western-style schools or work to take their time, very few students seek out the teaching of the monks these days. Not surprisingly, there are many fewer monks now than there used to be. Western-style media reporting of the inevitable monk scandals is also eroding the trust and respect of the Thai people for the remaining Sangha, and inter-sect competitions are preventing the Buddhist groups in the country from presenting a positive and clear message about the benefits of Thai Buddhism to its people.

The last challenge faced by Thai Buddhism as it moves into the modern era is that it currently grants women very little status, though the rest of Thai society is generally quite respectful and supportive of women. Lay women “primarily participate in religious life either as lay participants in collective [i.e. not personally benefiting] merit-making rituals, or by doing domestic work around temples.” (Tuchrello) Additionally, women are encouraged to financially support the male Sangha. In order to get personal merit, women try to bear a male child so that their son might be willing to gain merit for them. This not only adds to more children than are needed, but degrades the status of women in society and diminishes Thai Buddhism, which could only be enriched by the intellectual and practical contributions of the many devoted and active Thai women. While men are being entreated to join the Sangha, women are demanding to be allowed to become nuns.

"If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it. The men better let them." -Sojourner Truth

(sorry, too many photos, I know. edited slideshow and captions soon.)

* 1767, the year in which the principal Thai city was completely sacked and burned by the Burmese, destroying all previous records and much religious iconography and architecture.
* *Buddhism in the modern world, by Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish, pg 10
--William P. Tuchrello on the Library of Congress

Sanklaburi

2009-07-02T04:15:00.001-04:00

The town of Sanklaburi is one of the most beautiful places I’ve visited since coming to Thailand. It sits just north of a reservoir created about 30 years ago at the convergence of three rivers. During the rainy season the old temple – the only building left from the town that was flooded to create the reservoir – is almost entirely submerged. If the water is at just the right height and the temple only half covered, you can slip through the door in a long-tail boat and float out over the stairs. When I was there at the end of the dry season, we crossed the threshold on foot with the deserted shells of freshwater mussels crunching underfoot.

The first evening we ate dinner on bamboo platforms built out over a quickly-rushing mountain stream. The whole restaurant – platforms, kitchen, and all – has to be dismantled and moved every year before the wet season because the stream swells to fill its little ravine.

The stars are beautiful in these mountains. Electricity is not a given and the air is lovely and clear. The silence in the morning is profound, after the geckos have stopped singing and before the birds have begun. But with the first hint of sunlight, the fishermen head out on the lake in traditional boats suped-up with third class motors that sound like your grandfathers lawnmower after the cover has rusted away, and you gain a new appreciation for the noise-amplifying acoustic potential of large flat bodies of water ringed in mountains.

Spanning this large body of water is the pride of Sanklaburi, the Sappan Mon (Mon Bridge). It’s the longest wooden bridge in Thailand, stretching an impressive 400 meters from the mainland to the island village housing the local Mon community. The distinct cultural identity of the Mon people is evident throughout the area: in the art and architecture of the temples, the crafts for sale in the markets, and the food. I brought home an old Thai whisky bottle filled with honey. It comes from people in some of the most remote villages in the mountains; cloudy amber liquid, always fluid in the constant heat, frothy on top, almost too sweet but still sharp.

Many of the people in this area of Thailand are of the Mon or Karen ethnic groups, each of which have a well-organised militant faction engaged in more-or-less active warfare with the Thai army, the Myanmar government, and each other. Competition for control of major smuggling routes is fierce and bloody. Factor in small gangs of ordinary bandits, and you begin to see how complicated life can be in these mountains.

The mountains themselves are tall and jagged, with raw and rugged shapes that seem out-of-tune with their covering of foliage so green it’s almost deciduous, interspersed with pine. From Thailand we watched the sun set over Burma; high above the barred border gate, magnificent clouds drifted freely across the sky.

Note: My colleagues took some of these photos – you know who you are, I thank you!

do some good! (another library)

2009-06-15T08:13:00.009-04:00

A request from my resourceful and impeccably trustworthy friend Nan, who has been working to develop this school for some time:

(Nan's in the back row with a green shirt, cheering)

We are going to renovate the school library at Ban Ko Chang School, Ranong, Thailand on 4-7 July 2009.

Within the island and surrounding areas many families live in inadequate accommodation. The community, mostly Moken Thai and ethnic Burmese fishermen, was badly affected by the tsunami. The Ban Ko Chang School is still inadequate, with only 2 classrooms and 4 teachers. All students, ages 3-12, have to share the classrooms and teachers together, and have few resources. So our group would like to help develop it as much as we can through our resources and our minds.

Our group is a small voluntary group, working together with the vision to help the children grow strong. We think that books are very important for them: without books, how can they be strong? I hope that our work and our books can help them be good people in the future.

If you are too far from me to come help in July, you can make a financial donation for support the renovation of the school library. Even $5 USD goes a very long way here. The money will go to buy paint, brushes, ground sheets, etc., as well as books. We have already raised $570 USD, and need $1000 USD more to be able to make this library come true.

For those who live in Thailand, we would love to see many people come and join in our work or donate some things that you don’t need like used books, clothes, shoes, and whatever else you want to donate for them.

Your donation can make a big difference in the lives of children in need. These kids can really change the world if they have the equipment they need to do it! We would be glad to see our project become the important beginning of the children’s future. We would love to see children’s smiles when they see their new library. It would be great if we can share their happiness together.

If you have any questions you can ask me.

Hope, Love, make the world beautiful …
Thanks
-Nan
nanorkan@hotmail.com

You can also contact Nan directly to donate money or goods from within Thailand.

View Larger Map

chicken + boat + snake + soldier + chalice/tray spells “Bangkok”

2009-06-08T10:15:00.004-04:00

Not long ago I set off for a two week work-trip to northern Thailand, to the towns of Mae Sot and Mae Sai. Most of the towns up there have names that start with Mae. Mae means “Mother,” and the towns are all named Mother Someone because the hill tribes that live in them are traditionally matrilineal and matrilocal. The city of Mae Sot was Mama Sot’s town. Mama Sai ran Mae Sai, and so on. The Thai word for river is mae nam, mother [of] water.

Thai is a beautifully poetic and filial language – everyone is older brother/sister, and since given names are all a minimum of three syllables everyone gets ‘short names’ (nicknames). My boss’s nickname is Older Sister Small-and-Beautiful-Object (Pi Ling), the woman who runs Child Protection is Honey (NamPeung – Water Sweet – and just Honey, not Older Sister Honey because she’s younger than me), the guy who runs the project in Mama Sot’s town is Older Brother Handsome-Young-Man, which from what I hear is accurate – my colleagues are incorrigibly teasing, especially when it comes affairs of the heart.

There is currently a low-grade dispute going on around work about how my name is best Thai-ified. Key contenders are:
Paat-Trrra – an actual Thai name meaning beautiful young woman (they tell me), but to the Thai ear the vowel sound in the first syllable is just different enough from the one in my English name to prohibit an automatic switch,
Pet-taa – “diamond eyes,” which is a good meaning and pretty close phonetically with the Thai-accent version of my name, but which they don’t like for me because diamonds in Thai are hard and masculine as opposed to sparkly and feminine,
Pet – pronounced differently from above, meaning “spicy,”
Bpt-aaa – meaningless but phonetically cute – they use this especially when teasing.

I started studying Thai with the intention to stop once I’d mastered the basics. Many of my colleagues are shy about speaking English to me (and not all of them speak English). I figured I should learn at least enough Thai to make amusing pronunciation mistakes so that my colleagues would relax around me. For example, accidentally asking someone to pass me the soap to season my dinner, or talking about root vegetables while trying to express appreciation for the magnificence of Angkor Wat. It turns out, however, that Thai is actually a really fun language to learn. It has all the good stuff about Mandarin (simple grammar, no verb tenses) without the demoralising character-based writing system of 5000 characters. The Thai alphabet may have 43 consonants and 15 vowels, but at least it is phonetic.

It’s also extremely pretty, with all these little loops circles and spirals. To give you an idea, here’s my work address in Thai script:
๕๘๒/๑๘-๒๒ ซอยเอกมัย สุขุมวิท ๖๓ เขตวัฒนา กรุงเทพฯ ๑๐๑๑๐
Of course, handwriting rarely actually looks like this unless it’s nice calligraphy. Whatever it may sound like when spoken, any written language will come out in a scrawl if the author is in a hurry.

Many of the letters in the Thai alphabet represent virtually identical sounds. To alleviate the resultant confusion, the Thai’s have given each letter a special name, like Turtle, Small Cymbals, or Novice Monk. Or Hermit, Monkey, and Traditional Headdress. This is so when attempting to spell a Thai word, one person can say to another, “No, the sound is K/kh, but it’s the letter for K/kh that is called Buffalo, not the one which is called Egg.” The five tones of Thai give the language a gentler sound, and there are all these playful diphthongs. All of this is positively delightful . . . if you happen, like me, to be a really, really big language geek.

laos karaoke dream

2009-04-28T00:35:00.000-04:00

As is frequently the fate of visitors in Thailand, I had to leave the country this week to replace my expiring visa. The most economical option for me was to travel to Vientiane, Laos, a ten-hour bus ride away. While the Cambodian border is closer (as is the Burmese border, but I’m not that crazy), the usually-pricy Thai visas are currently being handed out for free in Laos to encourage tourism to Thailand, which is hurting economically since the political strife has scared away its customers. Rather than navigate the fragmented transportation and the incomprehensible and ‘expensive’ bureaucracy on my own, I signed up with one of the companies specifically formed to guide and ease the visa border run. It was well worth it, as they not only drove me and my fellow visa-needers directly the whole way, but also negotiated the seemingly-endless queues and forms such that we could usually waltz right through as a group with a mere hour’s wait in comfort rather than the day or so in line in the sun required by most. Judging by a repeated facial resemblance, I suspect this was achieved through strategic nepotism, for which I am personally grateful.

One stage of the process did require us to stay overnight in the astoundingly boring Vientiane, so while all of the Europeans and Americans went out to get drunk, I found myself on my own and in the surprising position of living out a secret life-long dream. Let me tell you: The hostel in which we stayed had a relaxed karaoke bar on the ground floor. The delightful Filipinos in our group had hijacked control of the machine, and were bravely belting out the most saccharine English-language hits of the past 20 years accompanied by strange pirated music videos seemingly compiled from New Zealand travel ads and scenes from The Bridges of Madison County. When I walked in, “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith was on (with footage of fish), and the current singer was cheerfully struggling with the lyrics. Seeing that I was American and therefore probably could deal with the words on the screen, she thrust the mike at me, and I obliged with my best Steve Tyler.

They loved me. The delighted crowd insisted that I sing all the English-language songs that they chose, about 40 all told, though I only made it through about 15 before my voice started to hurt (I blame the successful but damaging escalating modulations of “My Heart Will Go On” at around song ten, along with being generally out of practice). Despite not having the stamina they wished and being culturally-appropriately-self-depreciating at the time, I was secretly really proud of my performance, peaking with a soulful and inspired “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” which was especially well-received by the crowd. While I’m a fine singer, I know a lot of what they loved was just the ingrained American confidence and humour for which I can take no credit, as well as my almost sickening familiarity of the songs’ original melodic inflections, for which I similarly claim no responsibility. (For those of you who don’t know my musical tastes, they run more toward the complexly rhythmic and musically complex, like Radiohead and Arabic house, and usually run desperately away from anything smacking of pop or the insipid, so all my knowledge of these songs comes from the forced pop-culture soundtrack of grocery stores and malls. Ok, and maybe mix tape or two from circa 1994. Just maybe.) But for whatever reason, for one night, in the most unlikely of venues and with the last songs I’d ever have chosen, I got to be a star.

elephants

2009-04-28T00:28:00.001-04:00

Elephants are rather hard to avoid here in Thailand. Bangkok alone, the least hospitable and likely of elephant stomping-grounds, hosts dozens of the giants who with their owners beg on the streets at night, literal tail lights swinging as they flick away the flies. And as for depictions of elephants, you can’t go half a block before seeing one: the municipal seal, showing Indra seated on the back of an elephant. The Buddha astride a three-headed elephant. Sequined elephant images on tourist purses. Stone elephants standing guard like the NYC lions outside the gates of the rich. Elephants cavorting or charging, painted onto the walls of the most revered temples of the 1400s. Elephant topiary.

The Thai people have good reason to so commemorate the noble elephant: they were the war steeds and tanks that secured the land, kept off invading forces, and kept the established social ranks in line (setting aside any anti-imperial socialist or anarchic qualms as to the desirability of this). They were also the workhorses, ploughs, and backhoes of the vast terraforming that sculpted the river basin into rice fields and the forests into beautiful homes (again, setting aside environmentalist concerns).

In addition to their reverence for their labour capacities, Thai people also worship elephants. As with much of Thai Buddhist worship, significant aspects of Indian Hinduism and pre-Khmer animism have been imported and reinterpreted (more on that soon in an upcoming post), so it is commonplace to have the elephant-headed god Ganesha standing protectorate over the Buddha and roped in marigold garlands, or to have platoons of ‘toy’ wooden elephants given up onto the altar of a local place-spirit, with incense and homage offered to the tiny beasts. Even the aforementioned proliferate ‘secular’ depictions of elephants are revered, with everything from the bridge decorations to the topiary offered flowers and foodstuffs daily, and bowed to when passing. If it looks like an elephant, it gets presents and respect.

It’s a literal shame that this respect does not extend to the remaining elephants themselves. The wild elephants have very little habitat left, leading to starvation and violent conflicts with farmers. Since logging was banned to preserve what little forest remains, most domesticated elephants have been out of work. The elephants who do work, especially those participating in the ongoing now-illegal logging trade, are often subjected to horrible conditions. I met one elephant who had been prodded in her eyes so often she went blind; another who was forced to keep working even after stepping on a land mine; another who was addicted to amphetamines. Those begging in Bangkok have to breathe exhaust, drink dirty water, walk over broken concrete, try not to get hit by cars, as well as find what limited forage is available. Only ten years ago Thailand still had 4000 elephants. Nowadays only 2500 remain in this country, with fewer than 30,000 worldwide.

In order to support the small amount of healthy work available for elephants, as well as to get to safely see them in closer proximity, we ventured out on an elephant-riding trek one of our days in Chiang Mai. The elephants take a stroll through a valley with tiny us on their backs, and get rewarded by us with handfuls of snacks and the tasty forage along the path as they go. It was so cool to ride an elephant: the one we rode is named Noi, which means “Little”; she is the same age as me (and about the same place in her lifespan, as they live to be about 85 and mature as slowly as humans); she lives with her father, whom she adores but with whom she is very competitive; she’s especially stubborn, but will grudgingly do almost anything for a banana. She would lumber along, her gait so long that we’d almost forget another step was coming until we’d shift suddenly to the other side. Then she’d get a gleam in her eye and race up to walk in front of her dad, then slow down so much he’d have to pass her. I liked her style. The setup at this and similar ventures isn’t ideal, since they still keep the elephants chained up when they’re not being ridden, and they still have to live for the pleasure of people, but it’s a fair site better than oppressive logging or the elephant circuses where they are forced through literally torturous training to paint pictures or play soccer.

We so enjoyed the peaceful time with the personable and mischievous moving mountains, and were so taken by their brethren’s plight, that we ventured out again the next day to the Elephant Nature Park. The park is a heart-warmingly perfect preserve a few hours’ drive north of the city where rescued elephants can recover, roam free, and lead their own autonomous elephant lives with plentiful food, baths, elephant friendships, and lots of human love on hand any time they want. The whole place is set up for the elephants, with the desires of humans coming a far second. Throughout the day we got to feed, observe, pet, talk and walk with, and wash the elephants, but if they got bored they were allowed to just wander off: they were in charge. Washing was especially fun, as it involved getting into the river with the elephants and scrubbing them down with a brush and bucket while they rolled around and splashed and sprayed water.

It was heartbreaking to see the disabilities of the various elephants, some of whom could barely walk due to the injuries inflicted by their previous owners. But it brought happy tears to my eyes to see how they lived in community: an elephant missing a foot and the blind elephant were best friends, helping one another side by side all day; one of the old-lady elephants is the nanny to the babies, allowing the moms to go stretch their legs and gossip; a young teenaged elephant flirted with the girl-elephant he has a crush on, though the old ladies sternly informed him that she is too young for him, and suggested he talk with the nice young lady-elephant his age. Their body language and social interactions were so human sometimes it was hilarious, and I was glad to learn that in fact this is not anthropomorphization, but that they are indeed just as intelligent and communicative and complexly social as they seemed. Which makes the harm done to them all the more difficult to bear.

The woman who runs the park, Lek, is quite savvy: though she is one of the only people in the country lobbying and working on behalf of the elephants, she does so very effectively, starting at the root of people’s conceptions of elephants through education and by modeling a different system, and then working up the chain of health services, owner-training, etc., all the way to political representation. It was inspiring not only to see the elephants having such a good protector and advocate in this tiny woman, but also to see an organization so well-run, so focused in its goals, and so efficient in its projects, and all the more surprising to find this in a third-world country and in an organization with no Western leadership.

Elephants may now be my favourite animal. (Why can’t I like guppies or something?)