It’s Sunday night after a nice weekend of getting none of my main tasks done. I did however get my Nook Color rooted with great, easy to follow instructions from Maurine Mongeon. That was an accomplishment only because it took quite some time to write the .img files on the microSD card.
But that’s not really why I’m writing. As I await my household goods patiently, I think about the things I look forward to most. They are not the things you might think a person who recently moved continents and left all friends and family behind might pine for. What are they?
First, a bit of back story, the shipment was originally supposed to arrive in Hanoi around 19 May. I headed back for a wedding on the 13th of May, so I had arranged for delivery of my stuff on the 24th. Incoming folks get a ‘Welcome Kit’ which includes stuff like a TV, sheets, silverware, etc. My sponsor recommended getting the Welcome Kit packed up and shipped out before my stuff was delivered because it just makes it easier to keep track of whose stuff is whose. I thought, that’s a great idea, so I had the folks pack everything up on the 13th, I went to sparring class, got beat up, showered, and hopped on the plane bound for Tokyo/NYC.
I arrive back on 23 May, read through my emails on the morning of 24 May only to find that there is no delivery of stuff for the 24th. As a matter of fact, the container is in Singapore waiting for more crap to fill it up. Hmm … now I have an empty apartment with no plates, no silverware (but I do have really sharp knives!), no pots, etc. At least I have amazing sheets.
As of this Thursday (2 Jun), the container should have arrived on Friday and I should have my stuff perhaps by Wednesday (the 8th), or so. Just another part of the game, right? Ship and wait.
So what am I missing? In order of descending importance, or read another way the item at the top of my list would produce the single largest decrease my overall level of annoyance by not having it.
I Need a Garbage Can
A tall garbage can – though the one we got for the wedding won’t fit under the sink and will look out of place in the kitchen, it surely beats the current arrangement.
Any other sized garbage cans – so I can occasionally through things away in the bathroom without having to walk to the kitchen.
Dish drying rack – as you can see, a pasta strainer works well … until you need to strain pasta.
Bath mat
Tripod – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to take photos on my balcony that require the rock steady stillness that only a tripod can provide. Tonight is a good example. There was awesome lightning in the sky that I could have captured, maybe, but the crazy safety and balancing system I put together on my balcony ledge was a little too precarious and slip shod to trust for the length of time I would need for a good shot. Instead, this is all you get (see below).
Mustard – I haven’t wanted to buy it here because I know it’s on the way. Nothing else tastes as good on a sandwich of dark bread, tomato, and cheese. Though the chili fish sauce is good, it’s just not the same.
Pepper grinder – one of the Vietnamese guys on the soccer team brought pepper from a family farm for folks. I can’t wait to use it.
I Need a Dish Rack
Anything stand out as a shocker? Perhaps nothing on the list is that shocking. Perhaps it’s just that when Marjie put the garbage can on the registry, I wondered “why the hell do we want garbage cans on our registry?” She was very persistent about wanting them, and very excited to get one. Now, I’ll be excited when that silly garbage can arrives. Oh how life’s pleasures change over time.
To make myself feel better about being excited about a garbage can and dish drying rack, I will say that I brought the stuff I care about most with me, which includes all the electronics crap, camera, address list, and good pens. If I didn’t have the computer and regular Internet, I’d be crazy right about now … or I’d be insanely smart from having read a lot of books. Or I’d be brain dead from watching River Monsters and Man, Woman, Wild because those were the only shows that ever seemed to be on TV.
All I got from the crazy storm and lightning show today …
Front of the Front
Lightning
The video below isn’t really all that great, but you can see the wind suck the curtains right out of the apartment. When I step outside, you can’t see anything, but you can hear the ‘howl’ of the wind and rain if you have your volume up.
When you earn a few hundred dollars a month, you don’t have money to fill the tank. When your car is so old and beat up that the fuel gage doesn’t work, how are you to know when to fill up? Well, you actually figure out how many liters of gas you put in the car and keep track of how many kilometers you drive the car.
Literally, when we put gas in the cars, it’s a few dollars at a time and the driver always makes a serious mental note about how many kilometers they can drive before they run out of gas. I have never seen so many people who know how many kilometers it is from the house to work, from Harare to Masvingo, Harare to Bulawayo.
Yes, we generally have an idea of the distance between Richmond and Virginia Beach, or New York and DC, but … how many people can tell you exactly? Almost everyone I’ve talked to who drives a a car knows it’s 346km from Harare to Mutare. Folks know it’s exactly 11km from home to the office. New Yorkers may know how many minutes to the subway and from the subway to work, but we’re thinking in time, not distance.
It’s amazing how attuned to the different rhythms of life you become when adversity is imposed upon you. Low wages, expensive gas, and crappy old cars all conspire to make driving less than reliable and always a challenge.
My first impression off the plane was – flat. Then I felt the temperature – cool. Then I saw the airport – am I in Zimbabwe? I ask, because this airport looks so much better than the one in Delhi. I sailed through customs and was met by Shep, Sisa, and Chenge at the airport.
Driving into town, I was at first reminded of Ethiopia. There was a smell of burning wood in the air, along with the browning grass, and gnarly trees that brought back memories of my first experience in Africa. The more I drove around, though, my thoughts turned to China and Kyrgyzstan. Both of these places had infrastructure before the neglect set it. Kyrgyzstan more so than China, I seem to recall. The houses all have walled in yards. Glass is often cemented atop the wall to discourage unwanted visitors from just hopping over when no one answers the gate buzzer. These aren’t just houses for the rich, but the middle-class.
I learned, though, that houses cost $150 – $300k, depending on the area, so few Zimbabweans actually own them. They simply rent. In some areas, you have million dollar homes. In Zimbabwe? Are we talking about the same country? Who knew? At least rent is cheaper than New York. They are stunned when I tell them how much my rent is.
Food, is not cheap, either. There are no coins for change, so there’s dollar-rounding on your food bill. By that, I mean what ever the final price is, it’s rounded up to the nearest dollar, or you get a bunch of candy as change. You can expect to pay about $3.50/lb for chicken or beef, unless you go to a butcher, where you could get the beef for about half that per pound. A 2L bottle of water costs $0.80. A 1lb box of instant, Nescafe coffee cost about $6.50. Shocking.
Doubly shocked when you think about how little folks make and how high unemployment is. So, even though it’s better, it’s still not a cake walk. But where is it a cake walk? I can go a few blocks away from my Park Slope apartment to find folks struggling to make ends meat. It’s not any easier in the US.
And gas? How about $1.50 per liter. That works out to about $5.70 per gallon. And, this is a city with unreliable public transportation. You ride minibuses, you catch lifts, you walk. Unless of course you have a car and money to continually fill the gas tank to drive along so-so roads, many of which are riddled with potholes. Cars are mostly older models of Toyotas, BMWs, Mercedes, trucks, even Pugeots.
Still, this place is nothing like I expected. If you read the US State Department’s website, you’d think setting foot in the country is tantamount to either a jail term or death sentence. Far from it. I know there are shenanigans that go on here, but the people are friendly. I’m amazed by how many Shona say that they are a peaceful people, not like those South Africans. So, despite the high prices, the pollution, the power cuts, and the lack of running water – all things that I pretty much anticipated (except the high food prices) – Zimbabwe has refreshingly It’s much better. Much better.
I heard this benediction on (you guessed it) Democracy Now!. The Sierra Club recorded Edward Abbey during a talk they sponsored at the University of Utah. I thought this was brilliant!
May your trails be crooked, winding and lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys, tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal, mysterious swamps infested with crocodiles, and down from there into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down, down again, into a deep, vast, ancient, unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
I just returned from the Gulf Coast. It was Spring Break 2009 and I had a wild time. I went shopping for Cheerios with my Grandma, ate curry chicken sandwiches at Le Bakery, and met with the ladies of El Pueblo to discuss their website. I know, most of you are blushing and wondering how I could publish even these brief descriptions of activities on the web. Still, it’s my style to say it like it is.
Seeing Grandma was my main goal. I love y’all – Caitlin, Bootsy, and the rest of the Gulf Coast crew – but Grandma’s family. The last time I had been down to see her was August 2008, when I had my follow up visit with the surgeon. Although she’s pretty feisty as an 86 year old, each visit more clearly shows the signs of her aging. I think if I were to live there, the changes are gradual enough that I might not notice them. With the longer snapshots of time between visits, they’re hard to miss.
The big thing that seems to be going is her short-term memory. We were in Big Lots looking for Cheerios. We didn’t find the kind she wanted. Five minutes later we were close to the same aisle and she said, “We didn’t look for Cheerios yet.” ”Yes, we did Grandma.” ”Are you sure?” “Yes, Grandma.” That’s just one example of many. Her long-term memory seems to be going, too. She doesn’t remember how to make the bread pudding she always used to make. She has a hard time remembering peoples names.
Her driving (off road) scares me most. A couple months ago, she apparently took a turn a little too wide near a construction area that caused her to land in the soft mud. She had to get a tow truck to pull her out. That incident came on the heels of her being pulled over by a police officer for driving too slow. Apparently, another driver called the police and complained about her. She was shaken and her confidence broken.
Although it’s scary for her to be on the road, it’s scary thinking about her trapped in her house. The closest store is Walgreens, three miles down the road. Her son, my uncle, Brian and his wife live about 5 miles away. For the rest of us, that’s no problem. But at 86 with the increased traffic and new road construction, it’s a nightmare for Grandma. She already spends most of her day at home alone. Phone calls help, but she is used to seeing people all the time. Just before Katrina hit, two of her sons – Peter and Denis – still lived at home. So there were people around, even if they lived their own lives.
She still has her wit and her smile, she’s just slowing down. When people are at the house, she is very chatty and very active. It was so sweet to see her with her second newest great-grandchild. Elizabeth was born in September 2008. Grandma loves to hold her, smile at her, and make eyes. She is transformed. I suspect she loves babies. More deeply, though, I also suspect it connects her with her youth. As a mother of eleven boys, there was almost always a baby in the house for twenty years. Although tough times, I know she looks back at those times with fond memories. Through the newborns, she reconnects with the family history that seems to be fading for her.
When I see her, I wonder what I will be like in 50 years. Will I be as healthy as she is? Will fate be as kind to me as it has been to her? So much of what is important to me is being physically fit, moving, and (trying) to keep my brain sharp. How will I handle the loss of muscle, the loss of memory, the loss of loved ones? These questions come unbidden to my mind when I see her. I worry about her. I worry about me. I should take solace in the fact that I have her hearty Scots blood in my veins, but the solace doesn’t keep me from wondering. I try to thoroughly enjoy each moment I have now, knowing that it will fade into a memory, which in turn will fade.
In the end, I will learn the answers to these questions. Everyone does. It’s part of living.
I just enjoyed reading this story about villagers in the hills of Darjeeling opening their homes to travelers for home stays. I love this quote, which is so true:
“Only a few days?” he said, appalled. “You have to stay at least two or three months to enjoy this place, to even begin to understand it. What are you going to learn in three days?”
So remember that when you go travel. A few days is never enough. Like the Dutch teachers I met in New Zealand in 2003 told me, “Take your time.”
It’s funny how a random, brief interaction with two people can create an impression – a directive, even – that you remember years later. I was somewhere on the path (track in the Kiwi parlance) to see Tane Mahuta -Lord of the Forest, and the largest known living kauri tree in New Zealand. The kauri tree lives in Trounson Kauri Park on the North Island. I think I was already receptive to their message of slowing down my travels, which is why it resonated with me in a way that allowed me to change my travel plans completely.
I had planned to go to South America, study Spanish in Bariloche, Argentine, then go to China, then get a job … Instead, I loved New Zealand so much, I extended my stay until after the premiere of The Return of the King. Yes, I am a fan. Although I think Tolkein was not the best writer in the world, Peter Jackson and his team did a fantastic job putting the story on the big screen. For the premiere of the final movie, there was going to be a big celebration in Wellington I didn’t want to miss.
I won’t gore into more gory detail that’s already covered in the daily details of my state of mind. But almost six years later, “Take your time,” still resonates. How many other life altering messages are there that we can hear when we’re in the right frame of mind?
All that from a story about staying in a village in the hills of Darjeeling.
I’m reading an article by Edward Anderson and Hugh Waddington entitled “Aid and the Millennium Development Goal Poverty Target” published in the Oxford Development Studies, Vol 35, Number 1, March 2007 [or go to the online version and pay $30 to read the article ...].
Needless to say, it’s been a long while since I did the sort of math that requires derivatives, solving for curve maxima, and looking at statistical analysis to determine coefficients. That’s what this article is about, though. At this point, you’re probably reconsidering the $30 investment. The authors go through a pretty rigorous development of an estimated amount of foreign aid required to meet the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the level of poverty in 1990 by 2015. The poverty level is defined as the number of people living on an average $1/day.
Anderson and Waddington develop the assumptions and solutions, with all the caveats that come with using any data collected and published any where in the foreign aid world, to arrive at a number of about US$50 billion per year, or double the current amount.
Implicit in the calculations are that a country’s growth as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP) is the best way to measure the reduction in poverty. What about alternative growth indicators that include other factors such as health, environmental degradation, and overall well-being? We know that our current form of capitalism, with emphasis on not-so-free markets, is incapable of pushing us to environmentally sound, sustainable growth. And what do we really mean by growth?
So my question is: What does this analysis look like if we use the more holistic determinants of prosperity and well-being? How much aid do we need to provide? Does everyone need to earn $38,611 per capita (2007 US figure from UNM, also here at BEA) income to feel unfulfilled, while at the same time depleting the earth of all its resources?
I think the answer is no, but coming to that conclusion needs some mathematical gymnastics and some rethinking about what sort of growth is important to us, to our offspring, and to our planet’s ability to sustain our definition of growth. Sounds like a dissertation, if someone hasn’t already written it.
On Friday, I attended the New Student Retreat at Wagner. Although I enjoyed the day, I think orientation more appropriately describes the activities. We spent time hearing how important the academic code is, we performed a group building exercise, heard Irshad Manji give us an inspirational speech, performed a mini-case study, and met some staff, faculty, and fellow students.
The time I spent on Friday going through the orientation simply reinforced the correctness of my decision to attend Wagner. I left feeling more excited about the opportunities that await me here at Wagner. Many of the other students are younger than I am, but there is a level of enthusiasm and dedication to public service that refreshes, renews, and invigorates.
What can I say that is concrete? There are professors and students interested in all aspects of public service and international development. Each time I’m asked what I’m interested in, I feel like I answered something different. Sometimes it was overall resource management – like, where do we get some of the tantalum we use in cell phones and how do we not let it fuel war? Another time, I said I want to work on post-conflict development. Although I might not have been able to articulate it on the spot, upon reflection, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive aspects of international development. The improvement of an economy depends on supplying raw materials, services, or manufactured goods needed by others around the world. Supplies of raw materials are limited and their extraction from the earth needs to be managed to ensure that by-products of the extraction or processing don’t cause further problems that could impede a country’s population in rising from poverty. Conflicts disrupt the flow of materials by breaking supply lines, scaring off workers, or conscripting them to fight.
How do you balance the competing political reasons that cause people to fight with the equitable distribution of a country’s wealth amongst its people? I don’t know that a few classes at NYU will enable me to answer this question – great minds have worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without resolution – but it will provide me some frameworks for thinking about how to create solutions.
Where does this interest in post-conflict development come from? Iraq and Afghanistan. We’ve killed too many innocent people in both countries to not take responsibility for rebuilding what we destroyed. I’d like to be part of that solution. More broadly, I’d like to be part of Obama’s pledge to rebuild our standing around the world. Participating in diplomacy and building prosperity are the keys to improving our standing. We’ve flexed the military muscle. Now it’s time to show that we’ve got brains to flex, too.
Still, I’m open to where my academic wanderings might take me during my time at Wagner. I still enjoy writing and I do enjoy number crunching. Let me refine that – I enjoy doing something with the numbers I’ve crunched. Having information is great, but I’d rather use it to make better-informed decisions. What would work like that look like? I don’t actually know, but that’s what I’m open to. I think, though, that my openness will still revolve working on improving the god-forsaken places where war and conflict have destroyed hope.
In Mississippi, my presence as a volunteer brought hope to the survivors of Katrina. I hope to do the same in other places around the world, while also offering something concrete as a result of my presence. I look forward to exploring how I can do that.
Given that the events and talks on Friday stimulated the thoughts that percolated over the weekend, I guess it really was a New Student Retreat.
