What We Will Become Tomorrow

Ghosts

2011-03-08T13:32:00.006Z

I’ve been thinking of her face a lot recently.

Long black flowing hair. Deep, dark, penetrating eyes. Soft, warm hands part clenching, part caressing mine.

And it’s possible she was begging me to rape her.

Late at night along Khao San road - that famous backpackers’ haunt in Bangkok - as the parties begin to wind down, the prostitutes without a client for the night become more desperate. They follow you and beg. They grab your hands with both of theirs. Stare deep into your eyes, the desperation etched onto their young, beautiful faces – carrying echoes of pain far beyond their years.

I don’t know if she was a trafficking victim. I don’t know if beyond the façade of consent there was a story of brutality and violence and psychological manipulation, or whether it was just the daily bite of poverty. But I know for many of the girls, the daily rapes are preferred to returning to the pimp or mama-san without filling their quota, and so they hold your hands in theirs, and stare deep into your eyes and beg to be violated.

Behind each story of horror is a panoply of characters. The pimps lurking in the corner, negotiating the price, and arranging the meet-up. The girls often offered promises of love and comfort. As one ex-prostitute said, the pimps know to target the girls who “just want to be loved.” And then there are the clients, the Johns. Outsourcing violence to the pimps so they can carry out rape without being a rapist, so they can live out every fantasy and desire, while maintaining a mask of innocence, hidden behind a façade of consent, perhaps even charity for the impoverished girls they exploit.

I could’ve told this story not of Thailand but of almost any city or town in the U.S. The average age of entry into prostitution in the U.S. is 12 to 14. There are over 2,500 prostituted minors in NYC. They are over 100,000 prostituted minors in the US. They work on street corners. They’re advertised online and in newspapers. They’re sold by parents and friends and lovers and strangers. They’re sold in small residential towns and in fancy escort services. And they’re all hidden in plain sight. Impossible to find. Yet found constantly by Johns eager to find some soft, warm flesh. As International Justice Mission’s president, Gary Haugen, reflected: "It's the easiest kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every day."

Some girls are sold 40 times a night. The DOJ worked a case where a girl was sold 68 times in one night. You begin to do the math. 40 rapes a night. 5-6 nights a week. 200-240. For a month. 6000-7200. For a year. And the horror can seem almost too much to be true.

People sometimes ask me how I do this work. Frankly, I don’t know how you couldn’t. You stare into the eyes of someone stripped of their humanity and sold as meat, you see children dancing half-naked on stage to satiate the appetites of Western and local sex tourists. You meet a slave. How can you live with yourself if you don’t try to do something about it?

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. In Vanderbilt Hall, a coalition of NYU law school student groups will be fundraising for GEMS, and showing “Very Young Girls,” a documentary about prostitution of minors in NYC, about sex trafficking in NYC. It’s an important reminder of the horror and pain all around us, and the real people caught up in it. And it’s even more important to remember, to learn about the people fighting against it – person by person.

Banos to Puyo 2 - drenched...

2011-01-09T00:06:00.004Z

I started off early again because I knew I had 35 to 36 kms to cover to Puyo and several long hikes. The main trail covered a series of 8 waterfalls. The first 7 you had to scramble over rocks, through lush green forests with barely existent trails to get to them. The last waterfall was more built up, and had a fairly developed trail of ladders and walkways down the mountain to get its base. The waterfall itself was amazing. It had two levels pouring into dark green pools of water at its base. I found a place to sit and eat some snacks.

After finishing the trail, my main bike ride began. I switched on some Rammstein and Pantera for the energy in the challenging uphill ride ahead, my leg still hurting from yesterdays accident. About an hour into the trail, it started raining. I kept going. In a few hours, I found a place to eat in the tiny town of Rio Negro. The sun had broken the rain for a bit, and it seemed like it was clearing up. I forgot that I was leaving the highlands and heading towards the rainforest. After Rio Negro, it started raining... harder, and then pouring. For the next two hours, rains slashed down the trail and road reducing visibility. I took shelter under trees for a bit before realizing it wasnt really helping, and just plowed through, climbing hills and racing down mountains, the lush countryside obscured by thick fog. Finally, the rain broke and made it the last 12 kms to Puyo, dripping with rain and sweat.

The trail was done, and as for me, I feel like another adventure... after a nap.

Banos to Puyo 1 - What a day...

2011-01-08T23:30:00.005Z

Today I covered 25 kms on bike, 10 kms on foot (up and down mountains). I´m sunburnt, bruised, bleeding, and sleeping in a hotel that´s still under construction. Man, backpacking is awesome.

The day started out early. I got up around 7 am to start hiking and headed to the trail to Bellavista Mirador, up one of the mountains overlooking the tourist trap of Banos (but jumping off point for some off-trial adventures). At the overlook, you see an incredible view of Banos, sheltered by lush green hills and a snow-capped volcano in the distance. I continued up the trail to the small village of Runtun. On the way down, there was several large groups of school children heading up for a special English class. A few of the teachers stopped to ask me directions, laughing that they were asking directions from the sunburnt gringo on the trail. The long lines of kids would have give me high fives (or rather low-fives since they were so short) as they passed me. There were also several groups of stragglers, kids around 9 or 10, lagging behind on the long, hot trek up the mountain. They also stopped to ask me how to the get to the school, and for a few precious moments, we chatted in Spanish about their English class and I gave them directions up the trail. It was probably the first and only time I will ever be asked for directions from Ecuadorians, in Ecuador.

I made my way down the rest of the trail to the Virgin Mary overlook, and then returned to Banos to prep for my bike trip. I grabbed a quick lunch of cuy or guinea pig from a local stall. Stacks of the guinea pigs lay on the grill, including several on sticks. It never ceases to amaze me how, even in a tourist trap like Banos, you can quickly leave the beaten path and find local stores and vendors, which offer more authentic experience for less money (and with better food).

Finally, I was ready to set off on the Banos to Puyo bike trail. It would take too long to describe everything on the trail, but here are a few highlights.

At Mano de Novia, a gorgeous double waterfall, I took a small, rickety cable car to the top of the waterfalls and a small village. They had a tiny fishing pond, and two local women caught one of the fish for my second lunch. I took it to go, and then hiked down to the bottom of the waterfall, eating my food as the power of the falls sprayed water in my direction.

Continuing the trial, I found another waterfall, name El Placer, which is rarely visited by tourists. I went off wandering the back trails, locals pointed me to a path to the cascade, and I found a spot halfway down, water streaming down both sides of me, and the water plunging over the precipice just a few steps from where I sat.

The next major waterfall was Pailon del Diabolo. After a long hike down, you climb through a narrow cave system to get right below the waterfall, its raw power drenching you with the cold, refreshing water. After that, you can continue the hike to a small rickety bridge giving you a clear view of both levels of the falls.

At this time it was getting rather late, so I needed to hike back up and look for a place to sleep in Rio Verde, a small town surrounded by lush green hills and a roaring river. I asked around for a hostel, and locals only mentioned one to me, which I visited but was overpriced. I knew there were supposed to be other hostels further down the road, so I decided to set off and see if I could find them. In my haste, I got distracted waving to a couple kids, crashed my bike and skinned one of the my knees. Now limping and bruised, I continued biking the next 2.5 kms up the hill only to find both hostels closed. One of the owners mentioned that he thought there might be two hostels in Rio Verde (I had only seen one).

I headed back as light was beginning to fade. I asked again about a hostel, and the locals I talked to pointed me to the same one. I began wandering around town, and noticed a building that looked kinda like a hostel but without a sign. There was a man washing his car in front of the building and I asked him about it. Turns out he was just working on building a new hostel, and he had one room that was sort of ready. He showed me the room, dirty floor, mattress without sheets, windows covered with construction plastic. They quickly cleaned the room and gave me some 101 dalmatians bedsheets. It was perfect.

And so my day ended, 25 kms on bike, 10 kms on foot, 4 waterfalls, bruised, bleeding and exhausted, I would sleep in a barely constructed hostel in Rio Verde.

Pigs

2011-01-06T23:14:00.004Z

I heard a pig screaming today.

I was at the traditional animal market in Saqsili. Every Thursday locals from the countryside flock to the Saqsili market to sell an assortment of animals - sheep, cows, pigs, llamas, alpacas. The market only takes place in the morning, so to get there, I caught a 3 am bus from the quaint mountain village of Chugchilan. Saqsili itself is a sprawling town. Small in our eyes, but large for the countryside. Sheltered by mountains and fields, the animal market takes place in a parking lot, crowded with vans and flatbed pickup trucks.

The air was rich with the sounds of sheep and cows and pigs. Lone lambs would call out for the rest of their herds. In Quilotoa, I watched lambs find their herd, their calls echoing throughout the gorgeous volcanic lake until they found eachother, the lamb gracefully bounding down the mountain to return to its home. At the market, pigs would cry out as they tried to escape - their legs tied to posts or vans, or when they forced into a new truck for transportation to their buyer's village.

I had a quick breakfast at one of the vendors - cows, sheep, and llamas streaming by as I ate, and one of the vendors protested when a cow took a dump in front of her stall and the new owner just continued on by (someone came by to scoop it up in a little while). After breakfast, I walked around some more, making my way through the crowd of people and animals.

I heard an especially loud cry, and saw a pig with it's legs propped up and tied against a truck. Several people were gathered around. One of the locals had a knife and began to castrate the pig. At the end, you can see the blood smeared on their bands. But it was really the cry, the scream - piercing, shrill, and filled with feeling - that sticks with you. If you had any doubt before that pigs - known to be as intelligent as dogs - feel pain and emotion, you wouldn't now.

When I was in Sierra Leone, my security guard's dog, whom I came to see as my own, was "neutered" with a hot knife and iron. Doggie Doggie's cries reverberated throughout my house, and when he came out, he limped forward, head down, tail between his legs, blood staining his fur. I fed him some chicken to try to cheer him up.

As they led off the pig, it had a similar limp. He was lightly whipped by a rope to keep him moving, to who knows where.

Dogs are pets. Pigs are food. What a cruel twist of fate.

On familiarity

2011-01-03T22:51:00.006Z

The road has a familiar feel to it. Almost every country I go to, the same motifs repeat themselves. Wandering around old colonial cities, finding hole-in-the-wall restaurants to break bread with locals, avoiding the tourist and gringo hotspots. The long, smelly bus rides to local attractions. The hikes through cloud forests like Mindo, the chats with locals, and the beaming faces of kids when you juggle for them. The poverty seems the same as well. Rolling hills covered with shacks, the dirty hands and faces of street children begging for handouts, the indigenous women selling various trinkets and their young children playing around them in the cold crisp night air. The elderly men and women wearing age with deep, beautiful wrinkles that we fight so passionately in the West.

Today, I left Quito and headed to Latacunga, a small-city and gateway to some of the hiking and mountain biking in the Andes. Sheltered by nearby volcanoes, the town hosts a sprawling, dirty local market. Various games of street volley ball take place, with crowds gathering when old, hardened veterans take up a game, or when fresh, untalented gringos like myself join in. Unlike many markets, Latacunga's isn't built for tourists but locals, and during my time there, I didn't see another white face. Being a stranger in this world, felt familiar to me.

In Quito, after visiting the Old City, I spent my first night wandering around the Mariscal Sucre, or the new town part of Quito. Tourists throng around the area of La Mera and Reina Victoria with glitsy bars, Western music and restaurants. I watch a local vendor in the middle of the plaza. Her young child runs in circles around her, dancing to the pop and hip-hop tunes blasting from the nearby bar.

It's odd how people travel so far to surround themselves with the same scenery as back at home. In the quest for the exotic, we reveal how wedded we are to the familiar.

But I suppose I'm doing the same. Perhaps it's stranger in my case, that being alone on the road, that being an outsider feels the most familiar of all.

Tomorrow I head to Quilotoa for three days of hiking around a volcanic lake and to remote, mountain villages. Tomorrow, I take a familiar path.

On dogs and children

2011-01-03T22:40:00.005Z

I ate today at Latacunga's local market at a line of street vendors. Two empanadas, one tostadas, carne, pollo y roz feast for $1.70. A variety of disheveled dogs wander around the market searching for food. It's a common sight in the developing world. Packs of dogs in Sierra Leone would mill around at night, sometimes forcing you to chase them away when they became too aggressive. Sometimes simply begging for morsels to eat - their dirty, unkept look a stark contrast to their well-groomed counterparts back at home. Sometimes you see abandoned puppies wandering the streets or beaches alone, and devouring the scraps of fish and chicken you would toss their way. Before resting at your feet, their tiny bellies bulging from the unusually generous meal.

In Latacunga, one skinny black dog stood out. His hair clung together in the chilly downpour. His worn ears, hanging like rags, dripping with the cold water trickling down from the heavens. His broken leg dragging precariously behind him as if it was about to fall off and join the rest of trash strewn throughout the marketplace.

I cut off a piece a piece of meat and tossed it to him when he came close. He eagerly gobbled down the meat and the remaining bones from my plate.

It took me only a few moments to remember the children going hungry nearby. Wandering the market with a similar purpose.

A prelude and reflection - Part II: Cynics and cynicism

2010-12-31T19:47:00.015Z

A little more than a year ago, I was around Penn Station heading home late at night. There was a group of people along one of the mostly abandoned streets. I looked to see what they were staring at, and I saw a man standing over a smaller guy, beating him. The guy on the ground didn’t have a shirt on; his pants were down to his knees, revealing his blue boxers. He had his hands up, cowering under each blow.

There must have been close to twenty people watching nearby.

At first, I just continued walking. I was tired and it was close to finals for school.

After a few steps, I stopped myself. I went up to someone and asked if he had called the cops. He laughed.

I dialed 911, and told the dispatcher what was happening. She asked whether I saw a weapon, and I said I didn’t. I waited around a bit and the beating continued until I heard sirens, and the guy managed to briefly escape and began stumbling down the street with the other man chasing him. People laughed.

The cops arrived and began pursuing them. I continued my walk home.

I was struck then by how easy it was to be a bystander.

After a devastating earthquake in China, the classical liberal and free-market economist Adam Smith reflected that injustice and suffering remains unanswered because we care more about our pinky finger than a million deaths. In his thought experiment, Smith argued we would still sleep soundly knowing a million people died that day. We would be much more “disturbed” by the thought of losing our pinky the next day, or of our sports team losing a game, or of failing a test. The death of millions could be shut out of our mind.

And it’s true that we’re only human. But maybe that sentiment is the problem. We use our humanity as an excuse. Instead of as a call to become better.

My blog is titled “What we will become tomorrow.” It is a quote from Paul Rusesabagina about his fellow Rwandans, who in the summer of 1994 picked up machetes and butchered and tortured and raped their neighbors in an orgy of violence orchestrated by the Hutu Power. Rusesabagina, who saved over a thousand from the genocide, reflected that the problem with his countrymen was you never knew what they would become tomorrow.

But Philip Gourevitch was right that this was also a hopeful sentiment in a way. If tomorrow is unwritten, if each day is in some imperfect sense a blank slate, then we can write on it what we wish. We can decide to be bystanders. Decide to passively go along with injustice, and ignore the injunction on the walls of the Holocaust Museum - “Thou shalt not be a bystander.” Or we can decide to work on our weaknesses and failings, and try to live up to the best in us.

Perhaps it’s our cynicism that holds us back. But Greek Cynics were actually strong believers in self-improvement. First outlined by the philosopher Antisthenes in the late 5th century BCE, Cynics were skeptical about human nature; they were pessimistic about the selfishness and cruelty of man; they believed overcoming the worst in humanity was hard and difficult, but they weren’t “cynical.” Cynics believed that people could become better, and their philosophy was a testimony to that challenge. They believed in self-sufficiency and discipline, and achieving happiness through a life of virtue and harmony with nature. They believed that people could come to represent the best in humanity, if they were willing to be disciplined and work at it. In that sense, Cynics were optimists.

Most of us will work hard at our careers, our studies, and our hobbies, but we rarely devote the same energy, care, and discipline to the things that really matters. We don’t devote ourselves to studying the art of living, how to love better and stronger than before, how to better care for our family and friends, and how to be more empathic and kind.

All this is just my long-winded way of saying two things. First, we’re bystanders all the time. There is horror and suffering all around us, and we remain content to keep walking on by. Put it out of sight, and out of mind. Second, tonight I leave on another adventure. Just me and the open road. It can be a lonely path. Let’s hope this latest adventure is a journey as well.

Happy New Year.

happy new year

2010-01-02T15:30:00.004Z

A year ago I was in Phitsanoluk, Thailand, enjoying a local celebration with dancing and local Thai heavy metal bands. Two years ago I was in Dogon Country in Mali, watching a traditional dance and drinking millet beer, which was being passed around in calabashes all night long.

This year I’m in Oaxaca, Mexico. The celebrations have been going on for several days with the Zocalo and the square in front of the gorgeous baroque style cathedral filled with dancing, music, and street performers throughout the night. On New Year’s eve, a large fireworks display, standing some twenty to thirty feet tall, was set up in front of Santo Domingo (the most beautiful church in Oaxaca). The full moon had slowly risen up over the façade of the church, its brilliant silvery orb illuminating the nearby clouds. The firework display was lit from the bottom, and then whole thing went up and changed shape and form as they burned through, until it reached the top and set a wheel spinning, sending bursts of light and color in every direction.

At the Zocalo, my group of friends and I grabbed some mezcal (the local drink, made from the same agave plant as tequila but distilled in a different way). At midnight, locals tossed thunderous fireworks in the plaza near the cathedral, the boom echoing throughout the zocalo. My Austrian friend, Nalie, taught me the basic steps of the Austrian waltz, so she could celebrate in her traditional way. After the celebration, we went to a nearby bar and got some local beers on the rooftop terrace overlooking Santo Domingo.

We went back around 3 am. As we walked back, we passed some of the local street vendors and accordion players that had been there since morning. They still sat on the street corners. Their children sat next to them, heads buried in their knees or hands, trying to grab some sleep. A few young children, maybe 5 or 6, lay wrapped in blankets next to their parents, trying to keep warm as the cold night air descended on the city. The accordion music echoed throughout the cobblestone streets.

That afternoon, sitting in Santo Domingo, I had read Borges’ story about the lottery in Babylon. The protagonist had been omnipotent and a slave; he had been poor and rich, based on the Company’s lottery. As had everyone else. The lottery evolves into a parable on the capriciousness of life, where death and life, fortune and failure is subject to little more than a roll of the dice.

Harvey Dent, in the graphic novel Arkham Aslyum, once reflected, gazing at a full moon through the bars of Arkham. “The moon is so beautiful. A big silver dollar flipped by god. And look it landed scarred side up. So he made the world.”

I don’t agree with Dent’s cynicism. It’s not true. At least, not for everyone.

On bracelets

2009-12-29T16:16:00.008Z

I bought a bracelet today. Two young girls, no more than 6 or 7, crowded around me at the ghostly white temple at San Juan Chamula, offering various items to sell, pleading with their small, dirty hands; their faces wearing more years than their age.

Chamula is a small remote town. On market day, the plaza in front of the main church is crowded with merchants from the surrounding villages. Chamulan men wear white or black woolen vests and large cowboy hats. Inside and around the temple, the locals strictly enforce a “no photo” policy. Young children run over and block the views of foreigners trying to sneak their cameras out; foreigners eager to capture a shot of the local culture, a trophy to their cultural sophistication, all the while treating it with disrespect and disregard.

The inside of the temple is gorgeous. There are no seats, just a thin blanket of pine needles on the ground. Candles line the floors and walls, sending smoke swirling up to the ceiling, dancing in the rays of the light. Tzotzil women from nearby villages in beautiful deep blue and red garments set up make-shift alters, brushing away the pine needles and laying out candles in rows and worshipping until the candles melted into small wax rorschach blots on the ground, the flames dissolving away. Young children in black woolen dresses, sit beside their parents, slowing learning the rituals passed down for generations. Sometimes gazing around the smoke filled chamber with as much confusion and bewilderment as the few gringos wandering around. Every now and then the boom of firecrackers for the ongoing Christmas celebration would reverberate throughout the church, briefly interrupting the prayers and songs of worshippers inside.

After awhile I head outside as I hear approaching music, I open the church door and see the entrance surrounded by Chamulan men in colorful garbs and a full band; locals are waving pine branches and incense began a slow journey to the heavens, until dissipating in the cool breeze sweeping over the hills. Nearby, firecrackers are set off, first one sent soaring over the church, followed by a series of large deafening blasts. I walk over to a nearby pavilion and watch the celebration for the next hour.

Two young girls approached me. You turn down dozens of kids like them a day. The deep black eyes staring at you. Their dirty fingers gripping yours. They plead and they beg. And you say, No. Shake your head. And pretend to have no money. You have money. More than they could dream of, but not enough for all of them. So you turn down most. I found myself unable to this time, unable to resist their cute pleading voices and faces, found a bracelet I liked and let them tie it around my wrist.

Reading at a Zapatista café in the afternoon, young children wander in and out, asking to shine my beaten and worn boots. They offer little animal figures, more bracelets, scarves. Children from Europe and America play around them.

I sit and read. Two kids sit on the steps outside the door. Sometimes they look over. Sometimes I avoid eye contact. I don’t want them to come over, to be forced to say no again. Almost in shame, I bury my eyes deeper into my book. Like many tourists, backpackers, and travelers, I’m tired of reality intruding on my vacation.

It reminds me of the mobs of kids in Mali, twenty or thirty kids swarming you at every village. Sometimes not asking for anything, just grabbing your hand and following you around, tiny fingers fighting for any part of you that they can grab. I think of the kids at Angkor Wat. You buy one bracelet and suddenly a dozen desperate faces peer up at you, until you can barely fight your way from the crowd to the next ancient temple demanding your attention, demanding you turn away from flesh and blood.

It’s easy to get annoyed at the constant begging. You often get frustrated and perhaps turn away more rudely, more forcefully than you should. I remember one of my first weekends in Sierra Leone. I was tired from work and heading into the market. Someone began nudging me from behind, asking for money. I shrug him off and turn around, annoyed at the intrusion of my physical space. I turned and stared at a young boy, probably no more than 12 or 13, holding up the two stumps left where his hands used to be. He must have been no more than 6 or 7 when they were hacked off. His hands final farewell, before they fell to the chopping block, probably the mocking RUF question, “short sleeve or long sleeve?”

In Mali, a friend of mine and I talked about cultural differences, where the child may simply not understand someone with wealth not sharing it. The community ethos, or communitarian spirit was so much stronger. It was natural to share whatever you had. A group of kids approached us asking for money. Their cloths ragged and torn. Bare feet against the dirty ground of Segou. The Niger River cutting its way through the sweeping desert hills. We replied by asking them for money. They took out what few coins they had, held it out in their tiny, dirt-caked palms, and offered it to us.

Feliz Navidad

2009-12-27T14:17:00.004Z

All of Tuxla spread out before me like a glittering field of fireflies. I couldn’t help but remember the firefly colonies at Kaula Selangor, Malaysia. Here, from above, on one of the mirador’s overlooking this city, mountains sheltering the capital of Chiapas, it seemed almost alive as one, one colony, natural and organic. The poverty and urban dirt shielded by the darkness, and the cold night warded off by new friends.

Mexican music filled the air, and the young Mexican kids and adults from the city shared local drinks, stories, and dance moves as Christmas was celebrated in their unique way.

Early that evening, I had left San Cristobal with my two new friends (Mexican and French). Her family was kind enough to invite us over for Christmas dinner. Sharing a family meal, listening to various American and Mexican pop songs on one of their cellphones, drinking coronas and sidre, and bowing our heads for the blessing, I truly was blessed to experience those moments.

It has been awhile since I had the warmth of a family for Christmas. In 2007, I was with Tuareg’s under the canopy of stars in Timbuktu, enjoying the freezing cold of the Sahara and the sweetness of the local tea (the first cup is "bitter as death," the second, "as sweet as love"). In 2008, I was in Chiang Mai at a local festival. In Tuxla, it was nice to be around a family again, to feel the warmth of those who cared about and loved each other.

Perhaps the irony of traveling is I’ve gone so far to find magic, when the strongest magic is back where I’ve left it.

Feliz Navidad.

Traveling solo

2009-12-24T15:32:00.004Z

You’re almost never alone on the road. I’ve been in Mexico around 5 days now, and I’ve been with people almost the whole time. In Tulum, I went to Coba and a local fair with a nice Austrian. In Palenque, I met a variety of people: a couple professional tattoo artists and metal heads from Norway, a Korean girl who went caving with me behind Misol-Ha (exploring the dark reaches of the cavern with a small torch until we reached a several waterfalls), a group of students from Hong Kong at Agua Azul, and a Guatemala girl who lived in Paris and worked in Pakistan with architectures without borders. The professional tattoo artist explained to me how he learned by ordering a tattoo kit and then asking friends if he could practice on them. A few of his better or (more daring friends) agreed, and he learned the trade by experimentation on his friend’s skin.

On the road from El Pancham to San Cristobal, bouncing from colectivo to colectivo, I was traveling with a French mechanical engineer and we met a Mexican girl on the way. We ended up hanging out with her for the rest of the day, wandering around San Cristobal, grabbing helados late at night, and exchanging travel stories. Today, I head out to meet them around noon to visit some local museums and then go salsa dancing with some of her friends for Christmas eve.

Such is the solitude of being a solo traveler.

A prelude and reflection – part 1

2009-12-24T14:33:00.011Z

“A weed is just a flower that’s misunderstood.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’m on the road again.

Many of my friends at law school asked about what I do while traveling. I suppose before I restart my travel blog, I can offer a short snapshot.

A year ago I was at Bakong Temple in Battambang, Cambodia. I met a group of Khmer kids from a nearby highschool and they told me about a cave below the temple. They asked me if I wanted to join them, and we headed down the side of the mountain to find it. With cellphone flashlights and candles, we plunged into the depths of the cavern, squeezing through tiny passageways, the pitch darkness only rarely broken by the cracks in the ceiling. Rays of light danced in the swirling smoke of various incense altars scattered along our winding path, like ballerinas flittering in and out of existence. We finally found the main open cavern. A single string of golden sun hung down from the roof. A small shrine lay before us. We turned off our lights and lit the few candles by the altars. The cool, dampness hung on my skin, but instead of coolness penetrating within, it was a warmth from the candles, from the Khmer kids whom I talked to in a smattering of Khmer and English. The silence consumed the air, and even for someone who doesn’t believe in god, or spirits, this moment became truly sacred.

I travel to find moments like these. It’s not about the pictures in front of Chitzen Itza or the Great Wall, but those rare moments where something magical and sacred happens, something that can’t be caught on film but only carried around as some deep part of you. It means taking time to leave the beaten track, find the random and mysterious, even if it takes days or weeks to discover those few memories.

Over the years, I’ve collected many of these moments: finding rocks to juggle for Tibetan kids in the Sea of Bamboo near Yibin in Sichuan, China, or watching the sun set over the mountains in Hsipaw, Burma, sharing tea with the lone monk in the temple on the ridge. It’s teaching Khmer girls around Ta Phrom how to dance to heavy metal music, or loosening up street kids near Angkor Wat’s Roulos Group with juggling until they make you a necklace of flowers and present it to you. Or having tea with Taureg’s for Christmas night in Timbuktu, under the glistening canopy of stars.

It’s squeezing into the cramped cave full of worshippers near Uspatan, sleeping in monasteries in Burma, and hitchhiking on construction rigs out to the Baia de Gatas in Cape Verde. It’s having locals in San Antao give you grogue to keep you warm on a cold night as you struggle with the last stretch of a hike or trying to learn Bambara from kids in Mali.

And it’s juggling in parks in NY and meeting kids and seeing the joy and wonder on their faces. Because magic, real magic, exists all around us, and while traveling isn’t necessary to find it, it sometimes reminds us, reminds me to keep looking, to keep seeing the world anew.

One of my favorite Japanese artists, Yoshihiro Suda, would finely sculpt every day plants and weeds, and place them in hard to find locations in museums. Discovering art – which was often merely a finely crafted depiction of the common (and sometimes common nuisances) – would become a magical experience, an experience we could replicate if only we could peel back the scales on our eyes. Then we can find the romantic poetry in order and the every day, like Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton’s theological masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday. Or as Alan Moore commented in The Watchmen:

“But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take our breath away. Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg. Come, dry your eyes. And let's go home.”

fear and trembling

2009-02-25T13:02:00.001Z

You can see it on their young faces. You can watch their hands shake.

fear and trembling.

Tiny frail girls, barely past puberty, trembling half naked on the stage – terror etched into their eyes as they cower before their pimps and mistresses, forced to flout their youth and beauty to the voracious appetite of Western and local sex tourists.

Welcome to Patpong, Bangkok. Welcome to hell.

I think of the movie, Pan’s Labyrinth. The monster feasting on children with a banquet table before it. Why is there such a longing among many to destroy innocence, to devour beauty? Is that not part of the appeal, the Western fetish with wide-eyed Asian women, looking years younger than their age? There were plenty of places to get cheap sex with pretty Asian women, but the more youthful, the more innocent the better, the stronger the draw.

I’m in Phnom Penh. The weekend night market is in full swing. A romantic song floats through the air, and a tiny girl, probably less than 10 years old, takes the stage in scarlet lipstick and make-up, a bikini-style red dress barely covering her un-developed breasts. A shirtless man takes the stage and joins her in song. Romance fills the air.

Most sex tourism, most child rapists in Southeast Asia aren’t Westerners. They’re locals. And it’s easy to see how in the culture. Westerners flee to Southeast Asia to find a haven for their appetites of young, under-aged Asian flesh. Local males can feast upon it at will. It’s part of the culture; it’s common and normal. The night belongs to them.

Here, I’m the freak and outlier.

I think of the Madonna-Whore syndrome. That attraction to the Madonna figure of Virgin Mary, and that lust for the whore and slut. You walk around the bars and clubs of cities of Southeast Asia enough, and you see both blended together – the sweet innocent faces of Cambodian and Thai girls, wrapped in sexy clothing and erotic dances.

I think of myself. Being a white male, you often get attention from the girls. They’d wave, or say hi flirtatiously, or run over to exchange a few words and run back giggling to their girlfriends. The playful flirting is fun. The attention is nice. They’re mostly schoolgirls, probably barely out of highschool.

When does friendliness end and pedophilia begin? When do we cross the line and begin to become the monster we hate? Like Nietzsche wrote, “You gaze into the abyss and the abyss gazes into you. Stare not at monsters, lest ye become a monster.”

Among the backpacker and traveler circles, we rightly voice self-righteous indignation at sex tourism. But most of us are sex tourists as well. We don’t go to rape children, or buy Thai and Cambodian “love” for a night of passionate fucking, but we go as silent witnesses, silent voyeurs into a world of rape and exploitation and brutality. And then we return to our bars and our guesthouses, and voice our indignation to each other, patting ourselves on the back for being better than the sex tourists. But many of us go to see the culture of exploitation; it is a twisted, perverted tourist attraction, another cultural experience to photograph and pocket in our bag of experiences, and move on to the next one. And we become sex tourists as well.

I’m in a bar now. It’s an unlikely place to find myself. Cambodian girls dance around poles and on tables in sexy outfits; girls talk and flirt with you to get you to buy them drinks, which they earn a commission for. A mid-aged American sits down across from me. He tells me about his wife working in Burma for MSF, all the while he wraps his arm around a young Cambodian beauty next to him and slides his hand over her legs. I meet a nice pretty girl. She doesn’t seem to belong here. I suppose she doesn’t belong here. None of them do. People shouldn’t have to sell themselves. People shouldn’t be for sale as objects, even if they consent to it. Anymore than anyone should be willing to buy someone like an accessory at a market. What corrupting, corroding effect does that have on our soul?

I look around and I see people that treat women as nothing more than meat and objects to be exploited and used. I look around and see young girls trapped in a prison of sorts, wanting to study and have careers but forced to sell themselves in order to survive and support their families. I look around and see men eating it up, devouring youth and real beauty.

I look around and I see my enemy. And it is myself.

I left in the morning. Paid for my drinks. My entrance fee. My contribution to a culture of selling youth and beauty to the eager appetites of elderly and young men. They offer love, marriage to some of the women. Seeing love as another commodity to be bought. Offering another form of prostitution decorated in the veneer of respectability.

I started this trip reading Thomas Merton’s classic work, Seven Storey Mountain. Similar to Saint Augustine’s confessions, it’s a story of being lost and finding one’s way through the fog, a story of intellectual and physical debauchery before returning to a simpler, more spiritual path.

I haven’t crossed any line that most would find wrong. But me.

I went for a night to witness and experience. I forgot that my silence has a voice, and a price.

expected value

2009-02-22T09:11:00.001Z

When I tell people I used to work for UNICEF, some of them ask me whether it’s worthwhile giving money. Being somewhat cynical about development aid, it’s a hard question for me to answer, and usually I give some long-winded and vague response. I have written before about the problems of development, so I won’t revisit them now. Rather, recently I thought of what the proper response to that question is, or at least, the way I think about it now.

There’s no guarantee the money you give to charity will help. Sometimes it may hurt. But in general, and especially regarding the best organizations like MSF, Oxfam, UNICEF, etc, charity is at worst ineffective. It’s at worst a waste of money. But we gamble on things all the time. We gamble on a movie we haven’t seen, betting that we’ll enjoy it. Or going to a restaurant we’ve never been to, or try a dish we’ve never had. Gambling is simply part of life.

With something as complicated as development, you can’t expect a guarantee that it’ll help a child go to school, or give a sexually abused girl psychological counseling, or save someone’s life. The question is not whether charity will definitely help. The question is whether you’re willing to take the gamble that it might.

When I give money, or when I work for an organization like UNICEF, it’s not because I know it will help. There may be only a 10 or 20 percent chance that I will do any good, but when we’re talking about saving a life, or giving a child an opportunity to have a future, that’s a gamble I’m willing to take.

I was also thinking about this recently because it relates to life in general. Most of our decisions are gambles. The trips we take, the hotels we stay at, the bars we go to. We obviously have ways of calculating the odds, but in the end, it’s a roll of the dice. In probability, they talk about the “expected value”, where you calculate the risks and potential reward or loss, and then get the expected value of any endeavor.

A few of you will know what I’m talking about, but I suppose I decided the odds are low anything will happen or work out with the path I’ve set myself on. But even so, if it does, the rewards, the benefit could be so great that the expected value is still high, and the gamble is the right one.

S-21 (Cambodia)

2009-02-09T11:54:00.001Z

Tuol Sleng. S-21. The infamous prison of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. After Vietnam invaded in 1979 and the US switched political support to the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam transformed S-21 into a museum, documenting the atrocities.

Many things strike you about the museum. It’s old. Run-down. Many of the torture chambers left as they were, the instruments lying on the metal beds, a single large photo of the victim on the beige wall. You can walk through the tiny cells, some separated by wood, some by brick, the balconies covered in barbed wall to prevent desperate prisons from jumping to their deaths, euthanizing themselves against more torture. You walk through endless rows of pictures of the prisoners – men, women, young, and old. Young girls and boys stare at you with blank eyes, sometimes a tinge of anguish peaks through, or you see a slight grimace in the otherwise set stares. Women with babies in their arms face you in black and white. The faces seem to stretch on forever. You want to move quickly through them, spare yourself the silent torture of their penetrating gaze. But you can’t. Or I can’t. I looked at every face. Everyone who had a story, a family, a life. What right did I have to turn away. In Guatemala, victims walked weeks just to go to some run-down commissioner in a tent to tell their story to the truth commission. The desire to tell stories, to explain what happened, to be have your sufferings heard and recognized, it burns deeply within us all. What right did I have to not listen to what they had to say. After all they went through, didn’t their silence at least have the right to be heard.

The rows of pictures continue, and begin to transform to scenes of torture. You recognize faces of inmates you saw earlier, now twisted and distorted in anguish and horror. Children tortured to death in the burst of revolutionary fervor, in a desire for an agrarian utopia. It’s often overlooked that genocide is a utopian ideology; it’s idealistic in the purest sense. Genocidiares have a vision of an ideal world, and set about establishing it, with blood and fire.

I think of the pretty Cambodian girl I hung out with last night. I see her face among the rows of black and white photos. Her in the cramped prison cells.

I flip through the notes from previous visitors. Never again. Nunca mas. Never forget. Words of outrage.

And Darfur still burns.

Battambang (Cambodia)

2009-02-08T12:13:00.002Z

2/08/09
In Battambang, I took a bike around to explore the main temples and sites. It turned out to be a magical day. At one of the temples (which actually served as the inspiration for Angkor Wat), I met some kids on a school trip to the temple, and ended up chatting with them in bits of Cambodian (Khmer) and English. They offered me some food (slices of mango and oranges), and then told me about a cave around the base of the hill that they were going to. I followed them down the steep path to cave entrance, where two young kids in tattered clothes and flashlights were waiting. Over the next half hour to an hour, they led us through the cave, crouching and crawling through tight spaces, which opened up into large caverns with sunlight piercing the roof hundreds of feet above us. The final stopping point was a small Buddha shrine in one of the caverns, surrounded by dripping stalagtites.

Similar to Burma, Battambang receives few tourists, and probably as a result, the people are especially warm and welcoming. “hellos” and “bye-byes” greet you at every turn, and girls giggle and wave at the sight of a white man wandering through the countryside. My little bit of Cambodian (Khmer) makes their response especially enjoyable, as they respond with surprise and delight, or run away giggling after exchanging a few words. At lunch, I juggled for some young school kids, and they shyly hide from me anytime I tried to take a picture (at the request of their mother). I have some great shots of them burying their faces in their arms.

In evening though Battambang really comes alive. The main riverside garden or park is packed with food vendors and Cambodians dancing. Similar to one park in Bangkok, the dance is a combination of yoga, aerobics, and choreographed moves. The scene was picture perfect though. The sun setting over the river, a park packed with Cambodians dancing to variety of songs including some oldies and Beatles hits, and children playing all around you. As I said, magical.

Sitting in the park, watching the various dances and children around me, I thought about another thing I had seen today, one of the killing caves of Battambang, where the Khmer Rouge bayoneted, bludgeoned and shot to death thousands of people, dumping them deep in the cavernous mouth of the earth. The killing cave is now mostly a series of concrete steps down into the cavern, where you find a platform with a reclining Buddha, peacefully smiling at you, and various shrines and cages filled with skulls and bones –all mixed together, a jumbled mess as identity was lost and forgotten in the mass grave. My driver for the day told me about the people in his family who were killed by the Khmer Rouge, and how they still don’t know where their bodies lie. Perhaps in that gash in the earth, mixed among the bones, lie members of his family.

More steps led me further into the darkness, deeper in the earth’s mouth. It was almost pitch black except for a stream of light from the surface, piercing the darkness. I wonder how many people stared up from this point, in their final moments. How many died here.

I’m proud of being an American. But in Cambodia, staring out from the grave in the belly of the earth, today is not a proud day. America failed the Cambodians. America betrayed them. And America bears a terrible responsibility for the brutal bombing inflicted on the country, for its abandonment of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, and for providing political support to the Khmer Rouge after Vietnam invaded in 1979 and stopped the genocide.

Today was a magical day. But not all magic is good or heartwarming. Seeing the Cambodians now, feeling their warmth and hospitality, watching them dance to Beatles songs as the sun lights up the sky, I can still feel the dampness of the killing cave. Its magic will also stay with me.

Cambodia

2009-02-08T12:08:00.002Z

I’m in Cambodia now. I just spent three days biking around Angkor Wat. Like many foreigners, you’re mobbed by children throughout the temples trying to sell you books and souvenirs, begging you to buy from them. It’s easy to be annoyed and frustrated at them ruining the peace of your excursion by trying to make a living.

After a day of this, I decided to try to and see if I could get some kids to loosen up, and interact with them as kids rather than just a hassle to be ignored. That morning I biked the 15 kms out to Roulos group. The normal swarm of kids converged on me before I made it to the temple entrance, and then converged again after I left. I bought a soda (to recover from the long, hot bike ride), and then went searching for rocks. Recruiting the kids into my quest, and I preceded to juggle with rocks, entertaining the kids for awhile. The kids quickly warmed to after this, and even prepared some gifts for me out of flowers, and would continually bring me more rocks whenever I dropped (which given the various shapes of the rocks, was quite often...)

The next day, continuing my experiment, I met some Cambodian girls at lunch, and after joking around with them for awhile, talking about their lives, etc, I introduced them to the metal band Volbeat on my ipod and tried semi-successfully to get them to dance with me (meaning two of them sorta did, but the other two didn't). Still all in all it was quite a successful day. Oh, and of course, on the way, I saw some amazing temples like Ta Phom and Angkor Thom and Bayon, etc :)

Side note, the night I juggled with the kids at the Roulos Group, I also met a cool Canadian, who happened to be a magician, so we spent the night with me teaching and showing juggling tricks and him weaving his crazy card magic. Quite a night. Siem Reap is taken over by the western circus.

Golden Rock (Burma)

2009-02-08T12:00:00.002Z

1/6/09
It hard to overstate how friendly, warm, and charming the people of Burma are. Yesterday Taylor (an American that I’m traveling with) and I went to speak at an English class and just talk with students for a couple hours. Afterwards, we made our way over to the Golden Rock, which is near a town called Kyaiktiyo. After arriving in Kyaiktiyo, you take a pickup truck to the base camp, Kinpun, for trips the Golden Rock. The Golden Rock a precarious boulder, just balancing off the edge of a cliff. Supposedly it rests there on a Buddha hair (holding the boulder in place) and on top of the boulder is a large golden stupa. Anyway, the base camp Kinpun is quite an interesting town. All along the main street are souvenir vendors, and the main souvenirs seemed to, I kid you not, large bamboo machine guns with a little wind to make the sound of a gun shooting. Along the side of most of these guns is written, in big letters, “U.S.A.”

For a military state, which has quite a bit of animosity towards USA, these USA labeled guns at one of the most sacred sites in all of Burma was quite interesting in itself. That the kids would run around pretending to be Rambo (and specifically Rambo 4 according to them), whose latest movie is banned for featuring, among other things, Rambo massacring the army of Burma’s junta, only added to the bizarre act of playfulness and political defiance. The arrival of two American’s, Taylor and myself, I think added to the fun as we played with kids, pretending to be shot and shoot eachother.

At the store, I bought a bamboo bracelet for 300 kyats, or approximately 25-30 cents.
The store owner and presumably their father gave Taylor and me each a nice necklace as a present. Each necklace probably worth more than the bracelet. Which is both remarkably generous and a remarkably bad business model.

We walked around some more. I’ve never been such a tourist attraction before. Girls will point and giggle, come over and pinch you and then walk or run away. People come out to the streets, almost lining the walkways like adoring fans, just to wave and say hi as you pass by. Child stare and then wave and smile when you mumble a few Burmese words or simply wave.

Today we hiked up to the Golden Rock. Most tourists take a pick-up truck most of the way, only hiking the last 45 minutes, so for most of the way up, foreign tourists weren’t a rare sight, they were non-existent. But along the way, we passed many pilgrims from Burma making the return trip, toting their large bamboo USA guns on their shoulders. Our greeting on “min-gala-beh” received a wide range of responses to “oooooh! Mingalabeh!” to boys waving their hands and pumping fists, “Mingalabeh!”, to Burmese women telling us we were beautiful, to girls giggling and pointing. The greetings of “bye-bye” instead of “hello” were also endearing. Near the top of the ridge, we can caught beautiful views on either side and found a small place where I bought a squirrel (roasted to a crisp) and ate it (while Taylor took a few weary bites). The squirrel looked thoroughly disgusting, though it just tasted like well-cooked turkey jerky. The owners of the shop amused themselves by bringing out various things to shock us like a large stuffed muskrat and other heads of dead animals. After that short stop, we continued up and reached the temple complex for the Golden Rock (paying the exorbitant foreigners entrance fee, oddly always charged in US dollars. Sometimes they’d let you pay in kyat, but you pay not in the government rate, which is 400 kyats to the dollar, but the black market rate, which is 1200 kyats to the dollar… so the government doesn’t even follow its own rules on the exchange rate, after all they want to pump us for as much cash as possible).

After watching the sunset at the Golden Rock, we headed back down the mountain, catching the last pickup truck to Kinpun camp. Taylor and I decided to celebrate the day with an ice cream shop we managed to find after much searching. But ice cream is well worth the quest.

A Witness...

2009-02-04T05:56:00.009Z

Of all the countries I have been to so far, Burma has been my favorite. Burma contains everything a traveler like me is looking for. The scenery is spectacular and interesting - from sweeping rivers cutting through karst filled landscapes and towering limestone mountains to ancient teak monasteries. The people are friendly, helpful, and shockingly generous. Poor store vendors offer gifts; monks approach you at cafes and offer you food from their donation or alms bowls. Strangers greet you like old friends and take you out for dinner without asking or expecting anything in return.

Peering from off the edge of the towering Zwegbin mountain, you could watch the sun slowly descend from its perch in the sky, casting the Than Win river in bright red glow. Almost every day, I would simply sit down and think what a great trip it was, how every day was filled with a special type of magic, from simply sitting around a lunch table piecing together conversations with bits of Burmese and English, or biking through the 3000 temples of the plains of Bagan, there was a magic, a sense of mystery that still pervades and emanates from the country. This mystery is perhaps most apparent in Shwe Dagon Pagoda, the massive 98 meter golden stupa (painted with real gold) that dominates Yangon, the former capital. Especially at night, when the stupa is surrounded by candles (lit as offerings to the Buddha) and the gold shimmers in the soft light, hundreds of pilgrims come to pray and meditate, and you become lost in place of magic and wonder, and swept along in the slow tide of pilgrims making the slow, deliberate clockwise orbit around the stupa in the center of compound.

But there is a way in which this is the saddest country I’ve ever been to. It’s remarkably beautiful. The temples amazing; the people sweet and friendly. But hanging out with the Burmese you meet, you catch glimpses of the horror and fear they live under. You can hear the slight tinge of terror in their voices around soldiers and even police; the hushed tones about Generals they don’t like (and hence temples they avoid because they were build by them); the coded references to the “incident” around Shwe Dagon pagoda (meaning the monks who were massacred there last year). It's eeire walking the streets, knowing recently that had been crowded with protesters and then flowing with the protesters blood as the government cracked down with their full fury and viciousness. The people are cute and sweet, offering gifts from a necklace from a store owner around the Golden Rock to fruits and sweets in Moulmein, and it seems so sad. Cuteness, sweetness trapped in this hellish country – this beautiful country become hellish by the vicious regime in charge.

Many travelers avoid this country partially due to the travel ban that Aung Suu Kyi advocated years back. But as she continues to remain under house arrest, the travel ban feels like a collective house arrest for the people in this country. Unable to leave because of travel restrictions from the government, they remain caught in a large prison of sorts. War and conflict surrounds them in the Kayin, Rakhaing and Shan states of Burma. The government maintains a hidden but ubitiquitious presence. Monks point out “spy” monks near Shwe Dagon Pagoda; military checkpoints keep track of both local and foreigners movement throughout the country.

It’d be easy to move around this country and just see the beauty and history. Like in Sierra Leone, lost among the white sand beaches and rolling mountains, lost in the lush forests and caught up in the friendly people. But there’s a deep hidden horror, just beneath the surface, just barely hidden from view and you need only spend a little time, a little effort to see it in all its brutality. The horror of day to day fear, the horror of poverty, the horror of a regime bent on retaining power at costs and all the brutality that entails. You notice the absence of street children in many cities. A seemingly positive sign, yet also a silent reminder that Burma has the most child soldiers of any country in the world, some 80,000. Street children disappear into the military, brutalized and brutally turned into the governments instruments of brutality throughout the country.

I have spent the last four weeks in Myanmar, in Burma, traveling all around, witnessing beautiful, amazing, wonderful things. But perhaps more than anything else, I am a witness to horror.

------------------------------------------------

Mount Zgewin and a field of 1200 Buddhas in Hpa'an

Shwe Dagon at night

Sunrise at Bagan

Burma and Cambodia

2009-02-04T05:23:00.002Z

So I'm back from Burma, and I recently arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Because of government restrictions and monitoring of the internet, I wasn't able to blog while in Burma. But over the next couple days, I'm going to begin posting some of the notes I wrote while I was there, not necessarily in chronologically order. For a short summary of the trip, it was simply amazing, the amazing trip I've taken so far. The people were charming, friendly and generous; the scenery spectacular, and the religious sites really retain the sense of mystery, magic and wonder. Even in Angkor Wat, I must confess I find myself fairly underwhelmed after exploring the 3000 temples in the vast plains of Bagan. But that's all for now. I'll delve more into the stories and places and people in my following posts.

Myanmar/Burma

2009-01-02T14:12:00.002Z

I'm off to Myanmar/Burma tomorrow, so I probably won't be posting for awhile.

One picture from Ko Panyi before I leave:

Ayutthaya

2009-01-02T10:29:00.005Z

I just spent the day biking around the ruins of Ayutthaya. Watched the sunset at Wat Chai Wattaranam and then the crescent moon take its position over the main prang. I think some of the pics speak for themselves... back to Bangkok tomorrow and then Yangoon

new years

2009-01-02T10:20:00.004Z

I ended up spending New Years in Phitsanulouk. I opted against Chiang Mai for several reasons. Chiang Mai was becoming quite lively around New Years, with numerous parades, dance performances and live music performances, and New Years was obviously going to be quite a celebration. Yet Chiang Mai, being the "go-to" spot for all tourists (Western and otherwise) was becoming completely flooded by tourists. Phitsanulouk seemed small enough (and close enough to the more popular spots of Ayutthuya and Chiang Mai) that it wouldn't receive many tourists. Yet Phitsanulouk was also large enough and lively enough to hopefully have a decent celebration (and hopefully a less Western one at that). So that was my gamble. And after ten hours on the bus (three from Tha Ton to Chiang Mai and then seven more to Phitsanulouk), my gamble paid off.

Phitsanulouk is a cozy town by the river with a huge, lively night market. The night market became the center for the festivities with three separate stages for dances and music. Endless rows of food vendors and souvenir stands lined the streets, with people setting off firecrackers into the river. The middle music stand was devoted more to the young crowd with (yes, Brandon and Maya you can be jealous), Thai heavy metal and rock bands performing all night long.

As for the tourism, I think I was one of maybe three. All in all, it was pretty awesome.

Juggling, Tea Festival, and Tha Ton's many Buddhas

2008-12-30T13:21:00.005Z

As Joseph said before he kayak accidentally flipped over spilling him into Lago de Atitlan (I would also accidentally follow only moments later), “This is what traveling is all about.”

Today was like that.

After a chilly night in Mae Salong (temperature dropped to around 50 degrees and without heat, you simply bundle up in multiple blankets and sweaters), I woke to the sound of the morning market. Looking out my window, the sky was just starting to light up and sun slowly peeking over the mountains in the horizon. I hastily got washed and made my way partially up the hill for a better view of the sunrise.
The morning market by now was in full swing. While small, it had a very nice feel, local, authentic, devoid of tourists and normal fanfare surrounding tourist oriented markets. You could watch people from the local tribes – Akhan, Luisa, and Lahu – trading, selling and purchasing goods much as they had done for decades, probably centuries. I bought a few bracelets as souvenirs and decided to collect them from any place that held a special place during my travels.

I left the market and returned to my guesthouse (which was essentially just a family’s home, where they rented out one room). The main host was playing guitar, and he had two guitars so we jammed and chatted for a little bit. After he left, a couple cute kids watched and listened as I played, and I decided this was a good time to introduce a little juggling in the fray. When I first started juggling, their faces simply lit up, entranced, and then giggling with joy. For the next hour or so, I juggled for the kids, trying to teach them the basics. They brought their parents and relatives, and the common area of the house had become quite a lively area. The best is always slowly building the relationship with the kids, where they might be a little shy at first, nervous around this strange “farang” (white man) in their house, until they loosen up and became relaxed, fighting with each other for a spot on my lap.

The kids had to leave for school, and I headed to the local tea festival. Initially, I had been worried when I arrived at Mae Salong because most of the guesthouses were full (I thought it might be flooded by tourists). It was flooded, but in a different way. Rather than Western tourists, it was mostly Thai tourists and mostly from surrounding villages for the annual several day long tea festival. It was still pretty early at that time, so I visited a nearby wat overlooking the valley. On the way back, the festival was in full swing. Dozens of food, tea, and souvenir stands. Various dance groups began to perform on the fairly large stage. I saw dances from the various nearby villages – Akhan, Luisa, Lahu, and one or two more. And amazingly, I was the only white face in the crowd.

Around noon, I needed to head to my next destination Tha Ton, so I found the minibus down to the Tha Ton bus station. The ride cut along the ridge of the mountain, sweeping around the curves with gorgeous views of the surrounding valleys. At the bottom, the overcrowded bus to Tha Ton was heading off, so I tossed my bag on top and grabbed onto the back of the bus or really pick-up truck. After a pretty ride, I found myself at Tha Ton.

Tha Ton is another really pretty town. Mostly one street, Burmese Shan refugees make up a substantial portion of the population due to Tha Ton’s proximity to Myanmar (and due to the outgoing violence against the Shan in Myanmar). Tha Ton is basically cut in half by the Maekong River, with a pretty bridge connecting the two sides, and towering mountains forming the background on either side. The main attraction is the various temples and Buddha statues on the mountain. In 9 stages, you walk or drive up the hill visiting the various sites. And they are definitely worth visiting. Probably even more spectacular than Mae Salong, the various statues are massive and ornate – the glimmering white sitting Buddha, the golden Buddha with dragons surrounding him, the massive multicolored stupa overlooking the valley and Maekong (with multiple levels and overlooks inside), and the famous standing Buddha (with its back turned towards Myanmar).

I spent the afternoon exploring the various sites, and returned to the stupa to watch the sunset.

All in all, it was a great day.

Tomorrow I head to either Chiang Mai or Phitsanoluk for New Years. I’m not sure which yet.

(PS. I'm starting to realize I blog in spurts... I'll have to work on being more regular with my posts)

Mae Salong

2008-12-30T13:07:00.002Z

Following Chiang Rai, I took an early bus out to Mae Salong. I had to change at a tiny town, Ban Basang, to a pick-up truck turn taxi for the ride up the mountain. Mae Salong is built along the spine of the mountain. It’s basically one main street with a few houses, shops, restaurants, and guesthouses along the side. On the peak behind Mae Salong, there’s a large pagoda and temple overlooking the surrounding mountains and plains. I made the climb in the early afternoon after grabbing lunch in a Yunnan noodle shop (Mae Salong was actually founded by Chiang Kai-Shek after his nationalist army was driven from China and took shelter there; hence, it still retains a strong Chinese influence and often is seen as more Yunnan in its stylings than Thai).

Offering close to a 360 panorama, the view from Wat Santikeree was spectacular. Possibly even better than the buddha’s footprint near Krabi.

All in all, I really like Mae Salong. It’s largely devoid of tourists. The town is small and quaint, and people are friendly (including the nice Akhan woman at the guesthouse, peering over my shoulder as I type away on my mini-computer). The scenery is spectacular, and the chilly air (and it’s actually chilly up here, making me glad I’ve been carrying my fleece around) is a welcome relief.

Tomorrow I head to Tha Ton, another village town around the Golden Triangle (the area bordering Thailand, Laos and Myanmar (Burma – I’ll be referring to it as Myanmar for most of my blogs because I need to get used to calling it that since I’m going there in about a week.. probably not good to accidentally call it Burma once I get there). The Wat Tha Ton is supposed to be excellent, with the massive standing Buddha on top of the mountain (largely the reason I’m going there).

Random thought at dinner, I think it’s interesting how geography and politics go together. You usually find mountains or rivers near the borders of countries. The Golden Triangle being the perfect examples, but you can also look at the Karen areas of Myanmar bordering Thailand, or the Shan areas further north, or the Kauchin areas of Myanmar bordering China (again mountains). The Malaysia-Thailand border also becomes mountainous all of sudden, and Singapore, of course, is cut off by water. Similar examples abound throughout the world, and the reasoning is fairly straight-forward, mountains form a natural defensive wall; they serve as markers to the legacies and histories of war and conflict, the ebb and flow of borders, settling on the most naturally defensive areas.

Chiang Rai - land of a thousand smiles... or a thousand tourists

2008-12-30T13:05:00.001Z

12/28/08
So for a bit, I thought Chiang Rai wasn’t too touristy. I had just arrived by bus from Chiang Mai, passing some gorgeous temples and beautiful scenery along the way. I found a nice, isolated guesthouse (Ya House), where I got a second floor bungalow seemingly entirely made of straw and bamboo and offering the prospect of hot showers. After settling in, I made my way down to the river and came across several wats along the way, where the monks were just performing the final ceremony to close down for the evening. One of the temples had a pretty green backlight illuminating the emerald Buddha inside. Returning from the river, I walked past a nice night market and grabbed some duck-rice for dinner at a street corner. Nearby, the ornate, golden clock tower glimmered in the early evening light.

At that time, I preferred Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai. Tourists were few and far between. There was a lively night life removed from the lady bars and nightclubs on the main strip in Chiang Mai, and street food was common. I took my chance and continued on to the reportedly “tourist-centered” Night Bazaar. At first, it seemed fine. A wide variety of stalls and venders, similar to the night bazaar in Chiang Mai, flood the streets. There were also two stages for performances. One being worrisome, given that it had “Night Bazaar” in Thai, English and French (a warning if there ever is one). The first few acts were fine. A couple musicians, a dance, and then a group of pretty Thai woman took the stage, dressed in fancy, flowery outfits, then began to dance and lip-synch to a song… in English, about Thailand being the land of smiles and where all your dreams come true. So much for my illusions about it not being too touristy.

After the song, I made my way back to my bungalow. In all though, I really liked Chiang Rai. While the night bazaar is very touristy centered, it’s quite easy to get away from it to a decent day market and night market, which still seem to be focused on the locals and haven’t been inundated with Western tourists. Many of the wats in Chiang Rai are also quite pretty, and I preferred some of them to even the best that Chiang Mai had to offer. The new White Temple in particular was amazing.

7-singles

2008-12-22T15:11:00.003Z

While walking along one of the main canals in Bangkok, I discovered a little known gem - Bangkok's juggling club. Actually, I don't know if it's official or anything, but a group of Thai jugglers meet pretty regularly at this small park near the canal. They're also joined by a decent amount of expats living in Thailand, a Belgium guy, one Japanese, and a Spaniard. Some of them were quite good, especially the Thai jugglers who are actually professional here. It was awesome doing the 10-club feed again, some nice runs at 7-singles, and teaching them the rotating Y-pattern. Oh, the joys of juggling...

land of queues

2008-12-22T15:08:00.002Z

I went to get my visa for Thailand extended. And I can't help but comment on how inefficient the whole system was. First, you queue at the information desk to find out what to do. Then you get a form to fill out and queue for the line where there's actually space to fill it out. Then you queue to get back to the information desk to be told you need to photocopy some pages of your passport, so you can go queue at the photocopy store across the street, all so that you can finally queue again at the information desk to get your official number in the official "queue" for turning in your paperwork.

Oh and of course once you turn in your paper work, you get another number to queue for picking up your passport.

Phang-Nga

2008-12-20T11:26:00.008Z

12/19/08
I just arrived in Phang-Nga. I wasn’t certain I would come here. I heard it was really nice but it’s a little out of my way to Bangkok. Still, I decided it was worth a detour, and so far it hasn’t disappointed. The town is basically set on one main street. On either side, there are souring cliffs and karsts cutting up from the plains. I made plans to do a tour of the nearby national park and a visit to the stilt village of Ko Panyi. This afternoon I made my way to a couple temples and then Tapan Cave (?) and Dragon Temple. The whole town is completely devoid of tourists (or rather western tourists), which is a nice break from the tourism central of Ko Phi Phi and Ao Nang. Prang-Nga seems to draw more local tourists visiting the rather ill-kept “places of the interest”.

Anyway, Tapan Cave and Dragon Temple were awesome. Similar to Haw Par Village, Dragon Temple featured morbid figurines of punishment in the afterlife. Such as:

To top it off, a pack of gibbons had taken over the area, hanging out the massive distorted statues, and the place was eerily quiet. There was also a small temple at the top of a cliff that offered some excellent views of the surrounding area.

Other photos:
Full moon rising over the mountain at the river town outside of Taman Negara

Petronas Towers at night:

Petronas Towers from KL or Menara Tower:

Reflection of Kaula Lumpur skyline:

Ton Sai and Pranang

2008-12-20T11:16:00.005Z

12/16/08
So I arrived at Ton Sai yesterday. Ton Sai is the backpackers beach (basically cheaper and grudgier) in the area, and I actually like the scenery more. The setting is cozier, with massive imposing cliffs surrounding the beach (which is admittedly worse for swimming and sun-bathing, neither of which I particularly cared about). I found a cheap private bungalow in the back of the forest behind the beach. The bungalow is mostly wood and bamboo, and setting is perfect. The woods are filled with birds and animals; the nights quiet and still, except for the sounds of nature.

Ton Sai also has the advantage of being close to Rai Lei and Pranang, two of the nicest beaches in the area (Pranang is actually ranked by many as the second nicest beach in the world). Before visiting Pranang, I took a fairly steep hike and climb up to viewpoint over Rai Lei, and then another climb to this absolutely marvelous lagoon. The trail plunges straight down into this beautifully quiet and cool canyon, insolated from the sounds and chaos of the outside world. The canyon continued down to a crystal clear lagoon, surrounded by massive cliffs on all sides, with stalagmites hanging off the cliff faces.

After the lagoon, I made my way to Pranang for the sunset and some juggling. The beach definitely did not disappoint. Limestone islands rise out from the ocean, soaring cliffs with stalagmites form an auditorium-like setting, and crystal clear waters top it off. On one side of the beach, you can explore several caves. One of them leads into a pitch black chamber, where you feel your way through a small opening until a glimmer of light reveals the way out.

2008-12-17T01:55:00.015Z

12/15/08
I decided to be a tourist for a day. After basically three weeks of backpacking, long train and bus rides, hiking through rainforests, and staying in some dingy $2-$3 a night dorms, I found a nice private room at Ao Nang beach in southern Thailand, off the Andaman Coast. Windows with screens (absolute luxury), so I didn't have to choose between stuffy hot air and mozzies harassing me during the night. Functioning, warmish showers. Basically the stuff of dreams, and well worth the $12 I spent on it. The scenery itself is quite spectacular. I took a longboat ride from the main town of Krabi after my morning hike to Wat Tham Suea. Wat Tham Suea is a massive Buddhist temple. The main part of the visit is climbing up one of the karsts to see the "buddha's footprint". I had done the Batu Caves outside of Kuala Lumpur, and much is made of the 237 odd steps you have to climb. Not to be outdone, you need to scale 1,239 steps to reach the buddha's footprint. But the view was pretty impressive, offering a 360 panorama of the surrounding karsts, mountains, and plains. And since ithasn't been really discovered by the tourist circuit (or people are discouraged by the number of steps), it was nice and quiet up at top.

So the longboat ride was also wonderful. You see fields of limestones karsts, cut through sparkling blue-ish green waters, and ride pass imposing cliffs, at times reaching through the water like bony fingers. My ride the next day would be even better. My tourist activity for the journey so far was an expensive speedboat tour of the surrounding islands, primarily Ko Phi Phi, Banana Islands, Monkey Island, and then a stop-over at Maya Beach (where the movie "The Beach" was filmed). The tour also slipped in three snorkeling stops, a couple of gorgeous alcoves, and a half decent buffer lunch. All for the exorbitant price of 900 baht, or around $25.

Rhys hanging off the back of the speedboat with me:

Maya Beach:

An alcove:

Today I head to Ton Sai, near Rai Lei beach to do some hikes, and then I'm off to Phang-Nga park and Bangkok.

Couple other random tidbits on my trip: Food tourism is awesome. In Singapore, I feasted at hawker centers. Basically Singapore's government decided to clean up the streets and moved all the street food into food or hawker centers. So in one food center, you'll have 30-40 amazing street food venders and feast for practically nothing. I got some kway toew (flat noodles) with oysters, a soup, half a duck and noodles, for around $5. And then when I got to Thailand, this is what they did to my food:

Ok so that was actually intentional. Pad Thai here is unbelievable. I had two massive orders last night... for about $2.

Haw Par Villa in Singapore... creep and morbid. The figurines depict some of the punishments in hell. Of course disobeying your parents gives you about the same amount of punishment as killing someone. Tells you something about Chinese culture. Some other highlights include the fireflies at Kuala Selangor. It's amazing watching the trees blinking with thousands of fireflies. I also spent a night there. It's kinda a dive, but there's a decent hike to one of the bukits (hills), where you can watch swarms of monkeys and get views of the Malacca Straits.

Bugatti, development and souls

2008-06-23T10:08:00.004Z

Writing in the New York Times magazine the philosopher Peter Singer once queried, “In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one —knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?” He based his analysis on the famous example of Peter Unger in Living High and Letting Die. Unger lays out an example where a man’s prized possession, an invaluable Bugatti car, and a child lie on opposite tracks. A runaway train is heading towards the child and about to kill it. The man can easily divert the track by flicking a switch, but by doing so, he would destroy his car. He chooses to let the train continue on its course. The child dies.

Most of us would view this as gravely wrong. It invokes individual horrors like the Kitty Genovese case, where people watched a woman being brutally raped and murdered and did nothing to help; it brings up images of the Clinton administration passively allowing genocide in Rwanda to unfold; and it invokes theological speculation on the divine bystander in the heavens. If we have the power to act, to stop evil, to end or alleviate the suffering around us, we have an obligation to do so. As the Holocaust Museum in DC reminds us, "Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."

Unger and Singer use this example to cast a penetrating light to the indifference of our day-to-day lives: how time and again we stand idly by while children die of preventable diseases, how we linger as woman are gang-raped in Darfur. People starve while we gorge on fancy meals in New York and Paris. We take expensive vacations that could finance the education of hundreds of kills and provide thousands with 6-cent treatments that could save the lives of children from diarrhea.

But as a development worker in Sierra Leone, you also realize how imperfect this analogy is. Aid is often ineffective and even harmful. In south Sudan and Rwanda (especially in the refugee camps in Goma, Zaire), aid was manipulated by rebels and genocidiares to consolidate their position and continue to carry out massacres. Even something as supposedly non-political as food aid is, as Laurie Garrett notes, often harmful since it’s purchased in-kind (in the US or Europe for instance) rather than locally and requires massive transport costs. These in-kind food donations can undermine local markets, drive up prices through higher fuel costs, and create a costly dependency in communities – all in the name of aid. The presence of NGOs and UN agencies also has a distorting effect on local economies: increased demand from Western workers raises the price of certain commodities and basic goods, the middle class is drained because the best and brightest are hired into international development and relief organizations. And in general, as the former World Bank economist William Easterly comments, the West hasn’t been particularly stingy in aid (even with the lamentations of Bono and Jeff Sachs on the West missing the 0.7% of GDP target for foreign aid). The real question is why the $2.3 trillion given to Africa hasn’t shown more results in terms of improving living standards and promoting development. If we’re doing so much good, why aren’t things getting much better?

Merely pumping more money into the system might not be the correct response. For someone sitting in New York, the choice is rarely as clear cut as eating dinner at a fancy restaurant or saving a life. After all, even the calculation of programmatic expenses for NGOs and UN agencies is rarely properly understood. A substantial proportion of programmatic expenses are allocated to over-paid consultants (primarily in the EU and UN), and due to the reporting system, many NGOs and UN agencies “burn money” on large unnecessary (and harmful) construction projects so they can request more money from donors.

While I’m all for aid and I believe Singer and Unger’s analogy holds some important moral lessons, reality is not nearly so clear cut… Or at least not for everyone. Their moral argument does hold for some people though: the development workers such as myself.

For those of us who’ve chosen this life, we aren’t hundreds or thousands of miles away from the people in need; the children dying of hunger or preventable diseases aren't separated by layers of bureaucracy, inefficiency, corruption and outright incompetence. They're right next door; they're in the slums of Kroo Bay and Susan's Bay. They're asking for food and begging for money. They're the amputees you see every day, and the street children covered in dirt and flies. In Sierra Leone, when we purchase fancy meals from the splendid views of Country Lodge or the cool confines of Mamba point, the children needing help are just outside.

People like me find ourselves the ones most open to condemnation by Singer and Unger's analysis. For every night in a place like Sierra Leone, we spend relative fortunes on our housing, on our food, and children nearby go hungry, hidden in darkened hills of a pre-electricity age, sheltered by broken down and rusty metal rooftops, walking in streams of waste cutting and curving around the rolling hills of Freetown. We face the choice most days and make the choice to turn away, telling ourselves we need that comfort. And maybe we do. And maybe as good utilitarians offering ourselves this comfort, this escape will ultimately help more people.

But I also wonder about the choice to be here, the choice to be confronted so starkly with Singer’s pop quiz on a daily basis and knowing that you will fail this test repeatedly… perhaps the real sacrifice is not the material comforts of New York, but a sacrifice of one’s soul. Because we – more than most – are faced most starkly with daily tests of our own humanity, tests our humanity has demanded we expose ourselves to, and tests we fail time and again.

I have wondered about this many times. Maybe I should feel like a better person being here. But I feel dirtier than normal, like being here reminds me how dirty my hands are, or maybe being here makes my hands dirty, because I become the one turning away from the child right before me.

Perhaps the real question then, is whether I love humanity enough to be willing to sacrifice a part of my own.

Iran and Democrats

2008-06-03T10:12:00.004Z

With only a month left in my contract in Sierra Leone, I decided to change this into a more political oriented blog.

McCain spoke recently at the powerful Jewish lobby AIPAC, where he sketched his approach to Iran. Democratic blogs like Huffington Post, Democracy Arsenal, Yglesias, and others of course have been jumping all over his "confrontational" approach, for instance arguing as David Shorr and Ilan Goldenberg do, that there should be direct talks with Iran. Some of the evidence they use to illustrate the value of engagement with Iran is ironic. They point to the 2003 letter sent to Cheney proposing a dialogue. They note the pro-American Iranian youth. They reflect on Larijani's rise to the speaker of the parliament, harkening a more pragmatic voice as opposed to Ahmadinejad. They downplay Ahmadinejad's role in foreign policy, especially now as even hardline clerics begin to turn against him, and of course, downplay the general threat to posed by Iran based, in part, on the 2007 NIE estimate.

But most of these examples provide evidence for a "confrontational" approach, not the conciliatory engagement advocated by the bloggers or scholars like Ray Takeyh and Vali Nasr. The NIE estimate says with "high confidence" that Iran stopped its program in 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq, and the 2003 letter was also after the invasion of Iraq. Implying that like Libya's WMD disarmament, the invasion of Iraq might have led to some of the most substantial accomplishments in WMD and nuclear disarmament.

Ahmadinejad's influence in Iran has also waned as the US and international community (even the IAEA belatedly) has become more serious and united in opposition to Iran's nuclear program. And yes, his economic policies deserve much of the blame for weakening domestic support, but all the democratic, progressive bloggers also note that the sanctions have been hurting Iran's economy (ergo, based on their own logic, sanctions have helped create divisions in Iran and given space for a more pragmatic approach).

The simple fact is that the evidence suggests Iran responds more to pressure than just engagement. Clinton's endless overtures to Iran; Europe's endless offers of incentives to Iran; and numerous US offers to talks with Iran have gotten us virtually nothing. The only actions that have gotten either internal divisions in Iran, Iran to halt it's nuclear program in 2003, or Iran to actually reach out to the US for a dialogue have been because of pressure, not engagement. Even many Iranian diplomats admit this privately - that Iran didn't take the US seriously until we blew up some of their ships and ports.

Perhaps there's some compelling evidence hidden away that engagement has really worked with Iran. I haven't seen it, and given that even the advocates of engagement point to the results of confrontation to support their position, one has to wonder if such evidence can be found.

While I'm not an advocate of military strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities or otherwise, we'd be remiss to think that direct talks and engagement are likely to produce anything unless they are coupled with serious pressure. Following Acheson's advice on negotiations, I tend to think we should focus on building up "positions of strength", increase multilateral and unilateral pressure on Iran, and also show the Iranian people that if Iran changes its behavior the US can and will really help them. Iran respects strength. If the US builds up its strength, keeps the door open for negotiations (at the lower levels first - which incidentally McCain supports, just not presidential talks), Iran will want to talk to US. After all, as the Democratic bloggers point out so well, the US still has most power regionally. We just have to make that power more usable.

(One last note on Iran's threat. I don't understand why people get so offended at the thought of military strikes against Iran. If they take US targeted military strikes against Iran as acts of war, why haven't Iranian backed terrorist attacks for the past 20+ years been considered acts of war? Iran kills US soldiers and citizens around the world; US does nothing, and then the US talks of hitting Iranian military sites and everyone criticizes the US confrontation, rather than noting US restraint. Nor should we be deluded about the existential threat to Israel that a nuclear Iran would pose. One nuclear weapon in Tel Aviv would destroy the Israel - and incidentally, Iranian "moderates" like Rafsanjani also make this argument, not just the crazies like Ahmadinejad.)

Loss and luxury

2008-05-07T11:10:00.003Z

Death is all around you here. It seems almost every couple weeks someone’s relative or close friend or child dies. You return from vacation and colleagues at work are gone. But life seems to move on as if barely anything has changed. Hardly any time or energy is spent grieving for those whose time has past.

Perhaps it makes sense. Perhaps grief is a luxury only the West can afford.

Cape Verde

2008-04-04T15:34:00.006Z

I just got back from Cape Verde. It was one of the most spectacular trips of my life. I'll be posting photos soon, but for now, two quick anecdotes.

On my first day of hiking, I decided to go against the advice of the professional guide at the residencial, Casa Cavoquinho, that I stayed at. He said the path was extremely hard to follow and very difficult and dangerous. He was right. When I told one of the villagers near the top of the mountain what I intended to do, he looked at me like I was insane. A couple of kids followed me most of the way pointing the way down... down a practically vertical drop, with barely visible switchbacks cutting back and forth, several hundred meter drops on either side. After I made it past the most difficult section, I met a kid, probably no more than 10, carry a bag of rice and a knife. He seemed as if he were waiting for me to come down. He began to lead me through the rest of the trail, waiting for me whenever I paused to take a picture. Whenever we got to a difficult section, he would wait at the bottom to make sure I made it down ok. After we finished the last hard part, I thanked him and we parted ways. I never had a better guide in my life.

On the way back from Lungi International Airport, I decided against the overcrowded and lumberous Kissy Ferry. Instead, I made my way through the ramshackle village port of Tagrin and found some of the boats that head over to Freetown, across the mouth of Sierra Leone river that spills out into the Atlantic. You often see them, overcrowded and making their journey across the water. The boats are broken down messes, made of wood and leaks. The seats amount to either standing against the side or balancing on the edge, gripping the sides to prevent yourself from falling over the side as the boat rocked about in the waves. After enough people boarded, the boat set off. Mid-way across the water, another boat approached on the return trip from Freetown, and my boat began to veer directly towards it. The boats nearly crashed head on, the sides grating together, and people sitting on the sides of the other boat diving toward the center to avoid the colliding wood. At the last second, one passenger from the other boat dived on. Apparently that's how transfers in Sierra Leone take place.

An Eostre Thought and Easter Confession

2008-04-03T17:57:00.000Z

(I wrote this the night before Easter while sitting on my balcony overlooking a city stuck in a pre-electricity error. I had just been reading the Bhavagad Gita, and trying unsuccessfully to drown out the preaching of a Sierra Leonean version of Rev. Wright with Ali Farka Toure’s Malian jazz. I post it now as a belated and bit convaluted Eostre/Easter reflection.)

Easter - the most sacred Christian holiday - was named after a German fertility goddess, Eostre. It's a relic of a conversion effort by Christians who realized that - like Joe’s Nye soft power - they could make conversion more palatable by masking it in the pagan holiday’s garbs of bunnies and eggs and Eostre. Soft power in conversion: the compliment to the traditional hard power of coercion through threats of hellfire and bribes of eternal reward and drinking wells - luring the Dogon people from their cliffside homes at the Bandiagara escarpment to the stretching plains of Mali...

Both Good Friday and Easter are about suffering and death, and about god's answer to suffering and death. I have written of suffering before regarding the girl from Moyamba. From Aquinas to Swinburne, the Free Will Defense (FWD) and every explanation of problem of evil must cast all evil, in every detail, as necessary and essential for some higher good (in turn transforming god into Raymond Sullivan's ironic utilitarian deity rather than typical Kantian, commandment-based moralist he's portrayed as). For if some evil is truly unnecessarily, Archibald MacLeish's refrain would hold true, "I heard it called out in the yellow wood, if god is good, god is not god. If god is god, god is not good." So as a result, they try to answer pointless suffering by denying it altogether. But no Free Will Defense of Aquinas or Plantinga or Swinburne has been able to weave an argument to justify or excuse the ingenious savagery, the brilliant detail and artistry of cruelty... from a 14-year old girl forced to go through FGM by the Bondo secret society in Sierra Leone; to a 12-year old being raped and dying of her injuries in Bo district; to a girl from Moyamba menstruating from her nipples.

But just like the traditional answer to the problem of evil, the traditional take on Easter tries to make sense of suffering, death, and evil by turning that them into something good, the Sad Friday into a Good Friday, a theological "switch in time" to rewrite history. Jesus’ death becomes some form of divine human sacrifice (i.e. the lamb of god as in the tradition to slaughter a lamb as a sacrifice for sins); blood ransom to Satan or Ancient Law (that god crafted himself, as in C.S. Lewis’s depiction); substitutionary atonement with innocent blood appeasing god; or, in the Jack Miles’ creative literary portrayal, divine suicide. In each depiction, Jesus’ death then becomes part of his plan, his goal and purpose, and his cry on the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani? (My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?),” becomes either a mistake or an act of sophistry.

But to take away Jesus’ abandonment by god is to take away his humanity. To make it part of some divine plan is to make it inapplicable to the horrible, meaningless, and absurd suffering around us. Jesus becomes the austere image in the cathedral halls, the serene face on the stained glass instead of the startling image in Hans Holbein’s painting, “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” which so shook Dostoyevsky it haunted him his whole life. As Prince Myshkin exclaimed, “Why some people might lose their faith by looking at such a picture!”

It is that suffering and abandoned Jesus that appeals to me, because it is that Jesus that you see, to borrow from him, in the “least of these.” It is that Jesus reflected in every child recruited into the Small Boys Unit (SBU) of Charles Taylor, in the rank and file of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. It is that Jesus reflected in every prisoner languishing in the cells of Evin in Tehran, in the dungeons of China, and the modern day gulag of Russia. It is that Jesus reflected in the children dying of disease or families wiped out by natural catastrophes. But too often, Easter tries to transform this senselessness into god’s divine plan, his divine instrument of justice. All evil, all suffering becomes a necessary part of god's plan, and god becomes a monster, Christopher Hitchen's dictator-in-the-sky.

Too often, Easter - instead of offering meaning - denies the real horror of the cross altogether, denying reality and offering insult to injury by undermining Jesus' death. And in doing so, it turns the god it is meant to praise into a monster, justifying evils that can never be explained or justified.

For me, the Easter moment, the Easter story is about the struggle to find the hope in the face of pointless, meaningless suffering. It is the question that made Kant back away from his deontological framework, forcing him to adopt a teleos based on god’s divine justice. It is the question that caused the disciples to abandon Jesus, to only return and found the world’s largest religion in his name. I turn to Jesus – like I turn to the Gita and the Eightfold path and the Analects – because these wisdom traditions struggled with these questions of suffering and meaning. But maybe the problem is even if I find the answer, I would be left like Loonquawl and Phouchg in “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” unclear about what the question really is…

I confess I hope there is a heaven, a resurrection to provide some semblance of justice in the end; that all the dying children may have a chance to know some of the wonder and joy and beauty of life. But I also know even if death has been defeated, as in that famous verse of 1 Corinthians 15:55, suffering hasn’t. No power in the world can take away the suffering those innocent children felt. No god is powerful enough to pull off that "switch in time".

I also hope that if our abandonment is as final, as agonizing as Jesus may have come to believe on the cross; if that abandonment - that “final disappointment” as PJ Harvey would say - is really the final answer, I hope we can still discover magic in this world. For if this is all there is, then everything we do today, in the here-and-now, is all that matters, and that will ever matter.

Adam Smith, free markets, and horror

2008-03-19T18:11:00.007Z

Free markets are thriving in Freetown and throughout Sierra Leone. You see the competition all around you.

Except the capital is war and poverty. The clients are expats. And the merchants are anyone with a story of suffering and hardship to tell. And the product is horror.

All along the streets and beaches, Sierra Leoneans compete with each other over finding and often contriving the right story to tell of war, poverty, and loss. Sometimes the pitch is simply nudging you with the remaining stumps on their arms (or “residuals” as prosthetic limb designers call them) or asking for money to watch the African cup. Some are prepared with letters and documents of their hardship and needs. Some just follow you for miles on the beaches, requesting aid as your new found Padi (Friend) or Brother. Some tell of their families being killed in the war; some tell of their hungry children at home; some simply tap on the window as your car drives by; some stick their deformed arms in your face or grab your hand pleading for money and food to eat.

It’s a skill, honed by years of sales to expats, discerning what the NGO or UN agency or individual needs to hear to open up the pocketbook and dole out some money. It’s a talent finding the right pitch to reach into the deep pockets of white man, sympathetic and naïve. And so hardships and difficulties are invented, and Sierra Leoneans become fierce advocates for their own impotence so the white man can come and rescue them.

But the pitch becomes so good, comes so often, it becomes harder to discern truth from lie, genuine hardship from contrived. But then, in a country like Sierra Leone, with a life expectancy around 40, with 75% of the population under $2 a day, with over a quarter of the children dying before the age of 5, what hardship isn’t genuine here?

George Packer wrote of war amputees who were brought to Long Island, New York, to be fitted with expensive prosthetic limbs and then returned to their homes in Sierra Leone. He discovered that many of the prosthetic limbs were left gathering dust in some corner of their shack or tin hut. It was so much harder to get sympathy with a nice prosthetic limb on your residual… victimhood was so much easier without a visible sign of the aid you’ve already received.

Maybe this isn’t the capitalism, the free market Adam Smith had in mind. Maybe this is an example where individual self-interest is counter-productive, causing people – like me, with deep pockets and sympathy – to no longer know who to believe and then turn away by default, even from the genuinely needy and genuinely honest. Maybe this is part of the irrationality of man, Kahneman’s psychology of decision-making, injecting itself into the rational calculation of economics. Maybe this is a downside Smith or Milton didn’t consider… Milton, the economist, but I suppose John Milton pertains as well.

For truly, a country sitting on billions in diamonds, with rutile, bauxite, petroleum and now even uranium; a country with arable land and vast fisheries; a country with miles of stretching beaches for the European tourist; a country with all that relying on free market victimhood and horror, isn’t that truly a paradise lost?

White Man in Africa

2008-03-12T11:17:00.005Z

Several months ago I was working in my office and one of the local cleaning girls came in. She had been cleaning my office for the last couple days. I like to talk with most of the cleaning and security staff, so I asked what her name was and how she was doing, briefly chatting about a local Sierra Leonean band, Jungle Leaders, and their popular album Pak En Go. Within moments of becoming friendly, the whole dynamic changed and I began to feel uncomfortable, both with her and the other cleaning staff. Like many before me, I had become another rich white man about to rescue some cleaning girl from poverty.

I decided I shouldn’t be as friendly in the future.

Walking to work on a weekend, I stopped and chatted with some kids, saying “hi” or “kushe.” As I was walking away, a couple girls in the group approached and threw their arms around me. I kept walking and shrugged them off as they began offering me prices.

Taking the back road to my apartment, Fatima, a pretty Sierra Leonean girl I met a couple times near my apartment, waved me over to her place, where another girl was doing her hair. Both were probably no more than 14 or 15. She smiled at me and asked how was work, and said she'd see me tomorrow.

In bars and nightclubs in Mali, in restaurants in Senegal and Guinea, on the streets in Sierra Leone, being a white man in Africa… It's almost disturbing to see how easily one could be seduced by the power at your fingertips.
-------
On the way back from work, I took a poda-poda (shared mini-bus) to Congo Cross on the way up to Wilberforce. The poda-poda stopped to drop someone off, and a man standing by the road offered the normal greeting, “Hey White man.” And added, “You come here and fuck our sisters.”

It was rude. It was offensive. And too often, it was right.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note:
After posting On Prostitutes and Whores, the topic emerged in the national news in the US with the Spitzer prostitution ring scandal. This led to several interesting articles on the various approaches regarding various legal approaches to prostitution. Most notably, Sweden has legalized prostitution but, in contrast to Amsterdam for instance, focuses on arresting and prosecuting the clients. Initial evidence suggests that clamping down on the demand and treating prostitutes as victims has been the most effective. The Spitzer scandal is also ironic because Spitzer had taken the lead in reforming New York State law by signing, only last month, a bill strengthening the law against clients (such as himself). New York Times also carried a recent op-ed arguing that the theory women choose prostitution is generally a "myth" propagated by the clients.

On Prostitutes and Whores

2008-03-05T12:29:00.003Z

Walking back from work at our temporary headquarters in Kimbima Hotel, I spotted a common sight in Sierra Leone and the developing world – a young relatively well-dressed girl escorting an elderly white male around. I ended up sharing a taxi with them part of the way up Lumley beach – the girl informing the clueless gentleman of the taxi-fare (three times the normal going rate) before they headed off to the open embrace of Bunker Beach Bar.

It’s an obvious guess that she was a prostitute. You see them all the time here – whether at Paddy’s – the notorious bar where UN staff such as myself are banned, Atlantic, or in the lobby of almost any hotel frequented by expats. Some are young; some are tall and skinny; some are short; and some are missing both hands.

Sometimes you just meet the pimps, like the teenage boys I met while wandering around the streets of Mopti and Bamako in Mali, eagerly offering up their “sisters” as “babies” where I could get “good sleep, no pay.”

They say wherever an army goes, prostitution follows. Perhaps, more accurately wherever humanity goes, prostitution follows. And in a country as impoverished as Sierra Leone, it’s easy to see why young girls and women capitalize on their comparative advantage in providing cheap sex to a mostly expat clientele… For a girl surviving a war without hands, why shouldn’t she, why wouldn’t she be willing to sell the rest of her body in order to survive?

As the taxi continued its way towards Lumley junction, it occurred to me that maybe the word prostitute or whore doesn’t even fit in many cases, at least not when one considers the origins of the words. The notion of sex for hire is actually not inherent in the etymology of prostitution; rather, “prostitution” has its roots in “sex indiscriminately offered” (fem. of prostitutus, pp. of prostituere, 1530). The dirtier and more offensive of the terms, “whore”, is derived from the Old English word hōra, which in term is from the Indo-European root kā meaning “desire” or “lust”, and the Proto-Germanic word khoraz (fem. khoron-) “one who desires.”

But many ‘prostitutes’ aren’t necessarily indiscriminate or lustful or desiring of sex. After all, they’re selling something – their body or sex – for something else. It’s anything but indiscriminate, and it’s not sex they’re after. Plenty of women and men in the US and worldwide give that away for free. We look down on prostitution because they’re exchanging something we believe shouldn’t be exchanged (sex and by implication self-respect, dignity) for money. Except in places like Sierra Leone, they may be exchanging sex for survival or some chance, no matter how slim, to escape from the grind of every day life, and that is something harder to ask someone to give up. Especially when all we have to offer is some esoteric ideal of human dignity and self-respect – a Kantian Kingdom of Ends far removed from the biting poverty of the here-and-now… And it is far removed from how the “civilized” world has functioned and continues to function. After all the exchange of sex/mating for stability (measured generally in terms of material comforts) has been a central feature of marriage and courtship and dating for time memorial.

But of course all this leaves out half of the picture, namely the elderly chap being led off to Bunker Beach bar – the clients or the “Johns”. The Johns are also exchanging something for sex but not nearly as much stigma is attached to the male clients that feed the industry. Because of the ingrained sexism of our language and culture, the names for Johns are not nearly as varied or colorful or insulting as those for whores, hookers, sluts, and strumpets. After all the clients don’t live in shanty towns and slums or learn to deftly manipulate clothing with the remaining stumps on their arms; instead, they return to their civilized professional careers as UN employees, NGOs workers, businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. But more than any prostitute, these men are exchanging money in order to be able to carry out their lust and fantasies. And they’re the ones continuing to feed a multi-billion dollar industry often based on the rape of children and modern day “comfort women”; a multi-billion dollar industry based on people choosing to turn themselves into an object to be sold on the market.

In the end, I don’t know if she was a prostitute… but I’m fairly certain he was a whore.

Random Stories

2008-03-04T16:33:00.006Z

My office on Jomo Kenyatta road is undergoing renovations so we moved “temporarily” (i.e. 3-4 months) to Kimbima Hotel at Man of War Bay in Aberdeen. My “office” is now a former hotel room with a balcony that overlooks the Atlantic. You can walk out to the balcony and watch dolphins in the Atlantic.
---
On the way back from work, I pass Lumley beach. Some days you can see the amputee soccer game around dusk. The ones who lost a leg play as strikers and defenders, moving around deftly on crutches and carrying out vicious take-downs by using their crutches to rip the other players’ crutches away. The ones who lost hands or arms play as goalkeepers.
---
Sample songs written by children in two villages of Kenema District, Sierra Leone, as part of the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) project.

Mende:
“A’ mu heimie yeh seseh -
Kekeh latrine bur mu weh
Mu gbe a li la dogbui hur
Nao mia wah a hegbei”

English:
“Keep our environment clean
Father dig us some toilet
So we can stop going into
The bush to shit
Because this will cause illness”

Krio:
“A luk titi na wati dan di
Na kaka, kaka di gei gei oh, oh….
Na sei oh, kaka di gei korela, oh…
Na korela, kaka di gei, belerun, oh….
Na belerun”

English:
“I look over there what did
I see is shit, shit can cause
Sickness oh, oh… sickness, shit
Can cause cholera, oh… cholera,
Shit can cause dysentery, oh… dysentery”

Sierra Leone has the highest child and maternal mortality rate in the world.

A girl from Moyamba

2008-02-29T15:57:00.008Z

Several months ago a colleague of mine told me about a case he was working on. Four years ago a 14 year old orphan girl in Moyamba district, Sierra Leone, was offered “love” by a young man. She rejected him. Later when she was going to collect palm wine, he ambushed her, attacked her with a cutlass and raped her. As a result of her injuries, she "menstruates" every month through her nose and nipples. She needs to be hospitalized every month, and recently has been going into a severe fit every time.

After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.

Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.

As someone focused on human rights issues, it’s not as if I haven’t read or seen my share of horrors. And like many people here, I almost believed, in a twisted way, optimistically and naively that I couldn’t be shocked anymore. But this was new. A way of suffering I never even knew or could have imagined possible.

Dostoyevsky commented, “We talk of bestial cruelty. But that is a cruel insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so artistically cruel as a man.” We can and should admire the amazing artistry of beauty in this world, but the darkness is just as artistic, just as creative, just as inventive.

I thought then, and I think now of Ivan Karamazov querying his brother Alyosha in the smoky tavern. He tells Alyosha about a “poor child of five.”

"(She) was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty- shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?"

And he asks Alyosha, if Alyosha could create a world to guarantee man’s future happiness, where he could transform all suffering into joy and comfort, but only on the condition that “it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature - that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance - and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

When Dostoyevsky left the Siberia prison camp where he was exiled for six years, he commented, “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” Like Kierkegaard, the despair of a godless world, where “everything would be permitted,” terrified him too much. So even if it meant rejecting truth, they decided to take the leap of faith, accept Pascal’s wager, and simply embrace god as a divine placebo to the hopelessness they saw facing them otherwise. There would be none of Feuerbach’s ability to find hope in the rejection of god and embrace of “the anthropological essence of religion” - god as merely a projection of man. Nor would they be able to find comfort in the Nietzschean “will to power” after the declaration of the death of god. Rather faith in god grew partially from the fertile soil of fear, fear that if they “gazed into the abyss the abyss would gaze also into them,” fear that a life without god could only be sustained by Schopenhauer’s irrational “will to live,” fear that the world may really be as dark as it often appears, and only some otherworldly power and faith could salvage the wreck.

But I’m not concerned with whether god exists or not. Stuck with my Euclidean mind, it’s an answer beyond my ability to discern. Perhaps I prefer to take the folk singer Iris Dement’s refrain and “let the mystery be,” or bear homage to Kierkegaard’s concession that he is too stupid to understand philosophy, and philosophy is too clever to understand his stupidity. I just can’t help but wonder: Dostoyevsky argued that without god, all things are permitted. But if god does exist, if god can and does act in this world, and if a girl will menstruate every month through her nose and nipples, what things aren’t permitted, even with god?

My question is then like Ivan’s. If you could create an architecture guaranteeing man’s future happiness, divine justice, the conversion of all pain to joy, but one girl must be raped and have to menstruate every month through her nose and nipples… would you consent? And perhaps more importantly, could you praise such an architect?

On the road to freetown...

2008-02-20T11:30:00.010Z

On Tuesday, I made my way back from Kabala in the Koinadugu District of Sierra Leone. We rolled down the windows of the 4WD, offering some relief from the heat by letting the dry, dusty, hot air rush into the car. As we pulled into Makeni for a brief stop to buy some vegetables, a woman came over. Her right arm was marred by severe burns from her hand to shoulder. The scars covered her flesh like a thick bacteria slowly crawling its way up and around her body. Her left hand was even worse. A mangled mess, her fingers wrapped around themselves and splayed off in different directions. You could only imagine what caused the injuries. Perhaps in the war she was caught in a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attack; or perhaps the Civil Defence Force (CDF) or Kamajors suspected her of RUF complicity; or perhaps it was just a cooking or work accident. There are so many potential sources of pain and injury. It need not be as "glamorous" as civil war, genocide, slaughter, or torture. Torture comes in too many forms to narrow it down in such a way...

The woman approached our car, and shoved her disfigured hand in through the window into our faces, asking for money. Like anyone else, we recoiled, said no, and rolled up our windows. We finished our shopping and continued on our way back to Freetown.

I suppose I should try to say something profound now. But these things happen all the time here.

---

For reasons I may explain later, I came back from Kabala with a new sense of purpose in the choices I have made. Or at least I tell myself. I've always been good with words, laying out philosophy and principles with rhetorical and poetic flourish, but words without actions are dead, as James 2:20 reflected about faith. There's no need to write about all the new things I've learned or decided. If I really learned them, the only words that matter will be carried out through my actions, in the kingdom of the here-and-now, and anyone with eyes to see will be able to judge what really lies in my heart and in my head. For now, I depart with just one last reflection.

While climbing one of the many hills in Kabala, I thought about the great commission - the moment in the christian story when Jesus tells the disciples to go out into the world and spread his word. Jack Miles argued in God: A Biography how, in the Jewish canon, god had been moved to silence after his argument with Job, how god never spoke again but became the silent, reclusive, tired Ancient of Days described in Daniel. What if the central narrative of the Bible is less about how god acts in the world, but how he's decided not to? Maybe the great commission is also a hand-off of responsibility to us, to take on the burden of the world and heal it, to become "world saviors," as the Gnostics would put it? Christian or not, maybe there will be great strength and power and compassion and love available to us if we seek it ("seek and you shall find") - whether from man's natural goodness, his ability to reason, or from the "divine spark" in each of our hearts, or whatever term of art we may use - but perhaps, at the end of the day, the only god to help us is the god within us. The responsibility is ours. And it's terrible and terrifying, and liberating...

We need not fly to Sierra Leone to find injustice and suffering. It can be found anywhere - in our cities, in our towns, in our neighborhoods and in our day-to-day relationships, and it's just as real there as anywhere else. For human rights doesn't begin in some remote corner of the Congo, or some impoverished slum in Freetown. It begins at home - with how we treat everyone we profess to hold dear in our heart. If we can't do even that right... how can we ever talk about human rights and respect for man?

Saving the world

2008-02-05T15:22:00.001Z

The last village we visited today was Serabu in Kenema District of Sierra Leone. Our CLTS team, Kamboi, was already there implementing the strategy. While walking towards the meeting area, Kamal Kar - the pioneer of CLTS - noticed a young boy lying on the steps of a building. He asked the surrounding members of the community about the kid. The kid was clearly severely dehydrated in the dry, dusty 40 degree heat; his frail arms seeming as if they would break when we touched them. We got a water bottle from our vehicle, and gave him some salt and sugar water to rehydrate him. Our Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) escort took him to the local health center. As the kid began to vomit, the nurse reported that the village had a very high rate of diarrhea and dehydration but most didn’t come to the health center because of a local witch doctor.

While all this happened, our team worked diligently to carry out our strategy to get the community to clean up the village, unaware of the tragedy slowly unfolding steps away. How easy it is to become so focused on saving the world that you lose sight of saving one person.

(Children in the village of Serabu after they wrote and sang a song telling their community to clean up the village so they don't get sick and die)

(Children continuing through the village singing)

The many faces of Sierra Leone

2008-02-02T15:04:00.002Z

I just spent a week working on a Community Led Total Sanitation project. I head up to Kenema for a week tomorrow to continue the project. During this week, I caught a glimpse of the many faces of Sierra Leone.

A kid and an orange

2008-01-26T14:27:00.003Z

A kid offered to buy me an orange today. I met him at Lumley beach as I was juggling with some other kids. He was with a group of friends of his, who were pushing him around in a wheelchair. When he came over to watch me, he crawled out of the wheelchair and slowly pulled himself across the sand - his right arm and leg inverted, twisting around themselves like a poorly formed vine. We tossed the ball back and forth, with him throwing the ball into various juggling patterns. He explained how he was living on the street around the bus station along Wallace Johnson street; he no longer had any family because most had been killed in the war or died of diseases. Beyond his fellow street kids, wheeling him around in his chair, he had no one. And then he offered to buy me an orange because he had some money.

When I was in Mali, as a UN employee, I “earned” DSA (Daily Subsistence Allowance) for resting. I earned more money by taking a vacation than these children may make in a lifetime; I earned more money for one day of “rest and recuperation” than families here make in a year. I came here to fight against injustice; sometimes I wonder if I’m part of the source of it. We talk of income inequality back in America, but we have no idea of what it looks like. The UN perpetuates one of the most glaring systems of income inequalities in the world, and I am the beneficiary. And while we maintain our positions of wealth, a poor street kid offered to buy me an orange.

In Mali, I thought a lot about one of Thomas Aquinas’s arguments, and as the children stripped off their old and ragged clothes and headed to play in the ocean, I thought of it again. Aquinas, in contrast to Nozick or Rand, argued that right to property or ownership was based less on possession than need. That a rich person may possess great wealth but that person had less right to that wealth, that food, that life-saving bread than a poor person, a poor and hungry child. He argued that in a sense, it was the wealthy that were stealing from the poor simply by not sharing the possessions they had. I have no interest now in parsing the philosophical merit of this argument, or dissecting the practical policy or economic implications of following the logical conclusion of this argument through to the end. Only sitting in the hot sun on Lumley beach, the sky filled with the harmattan haze, the children frolicking naked in the waves, a poor street child pulling his inverted and twisted body over the sand, I couldn’t help but feel there was at least a seed of truth to Aquinas’s claim.

After spending a few hours with them, I ended up doing what everyone else does, and what you‘re forced to do a hundred times in a country like Sierra Leone. I walked away, heading out into the long stretching beach before me - this slice of paradise, and turned my back to the least of these.

Reflections from the past

2008-01-24T22:50:00.001Z

I was just reading some entries from a brief blog I kept in Princeton. I put them up now because the sentiment still resonates with me, and I wrote it better then than I could do now.

(journal)

5/9/04

at the end of the day, i want justice; i want be the voice of the voiceless; i want to do what's right

at the end of the day, i want to be happy

i wonder sometimes if those things are incompatible....

1/20/04, 10:01

sometimes i think that the hardest thing about believing in humanity's potential is being constantly reminded how far short we fall of it.... perhaps, an idealist isn't someone who believes in an ideal world, but someone who refuses to lower his values, refuses to abandon the ideal even when it's betrayed by those around him...

there are 70,000 child soldiers in burma

last year, 10,000 children were abducted and forced to become soldiers in the Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army

in 1994, we watched genocide unfold in rwanda, and witnessed the fall of Srebrenica

11/30/03, 4:27 pm

my dad brought me "the watchmen" on friday, and i reread most of it again last night. there's something about that story that always gets to me. i have often wanted to walk from this path that i have chosen, longing for some easier road, to be able to close my eyes to the world's dark underbelly. but i can't. and even if i could, i would never choose to do it. once a man has faced the truth in all its forms, he can never turn back.... sometimes i ask myself why i fight for the rights of strangers. watching mehdi zana speak about his eleven years in torture, knowing that his wife was probably going through something similar; i was able to formulate what i had been feeling and thinking for so long.

if someone i loved was suffering or being tortured, i would want some random stranger to do something, anything to try to make a difference. how can i ask anything less of myself? i am that random stranger to so many people.

11/29/03

1:27pm

i suppose i feel talkative today. sitting alone in the basement of a deserted robertson hall. i just reflected on jacob landau's eerie pictures about man's inhumanity to man. maybe i shall go looking for beauty later today...

11:25 am

beauty is present in the simplest of things

"in the depth of winter, i finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." - albert camus

11/12/03, 3:29 am

it's another all-nighter in Friend. the issue of human rights in liberia lies before me. i wonder sometimes why i pour over these human rights document, learning the stories of unnamed women being gang-raped, left in some abandoned village, bleeding from their vaginas. or of child soldiers pumped with "bubbles" to make them brave and strong as they can engage in some horrible, random atrocity. or of soldiers dressed in wedding dresses and flowing colorful wigs, amputating and collecting limbs to acquire some reward from their commanders. what is it that makes us stare into the heart of darkness? what is it that allows us to still survive despite the horror? is it simply schopenhauer's irrational, all-pervasive, irresistable "will to live," a wild dionysian ethic pulsing through our veins, a Karamazov thirst for life? how can we stare at beauty after seeing such horrors? doesn't the contrast with the beauty make the horror too terrible to bear? but how can we help but stare at beauty after living in such darkness? needing something to cleanse our souls of the terrible filth of reality? how can we maintain faith in humanity seeing it so degraded? how can we lose hope when we see the good that people can do? "Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good that we feel certain that evil could be explained."

it's so late that's early.... i've been staring in the shadows for so long, sometimes i wonder how my eyes will adjust when they see light again. but i want to face these demons, i want to believe the world is beautiful despite everything; i want to be able to proclaim the beauty of world, not out of ignorance or fear of facing reality, but because i have seen it in all its heart-rending horror and all its breath-taking wonder.

it's late. and i need to focus my mind on negotiating some path through problems of terror in some far off land..... i've been thinking of this quote from The Thin Red Line recently: "what difference do you think one man can make in all this madness?" i don't know. but i want to find out.

About me:
In High school and at Princeton, one could easily chalk my career as a success with a solid academic record and impressive extracurricular resume. Like most students, I could list my accomplishments as I have done and fool myself into thinking that they really mean something important, but I don't think that they do. My success is not defined by those things. My focus throughout high school and Princeton has not been acquiring awards or recognition. Despite the due care that I put in all my works, laboring over every word in a paper, obsessing over each nuance of the guitar string, or learning the precise angle for a drop shot, it is life that I have tried to invest the most care into. My final work, my final project is simply the life I live.

When Buddha was asked who he was, they said: "Are you a God?" He said, "No." "Are you an angel?" "No," he replied again. "But then what are you?" He said simply, "I am awake." I have often longed to wake up, to see the world with an un-obscured vision, to slice through all the distractions of existence and to begin to truly see the form and logic pervading all things. I do not believe that humans are destined for intellectual or moral slumber. I do not believe that we are unable to move the world and move ourselves. We are so busy making excuses for our failures; we are so willing to abnegate our responsibility, to relinquish our ability to change ourselves. We often forget that life is an art; we must take due care to live properly and study the precepts for living a good life.

For the past several years, I have studied human rights violations, pouring over heart-rending accounts of slaughter and destruction.

Why? Because if any of my friends were being beaten or raped or tortured, I would have a problem with someone standing by and doing nothing about it. If this is true, then seeing the immensity of evil in this world; I cannot with clear conscience stand by with utter indifference in the face of such abject suffering.

Why? Because when I say that the world is beautiful, I do not wish to say it because I am ignorant and unable to face the darkest corners of reality.

Why? Because if we wish to know truth, then we cannot pick which truth we wish to see, for there is only one truth, one reality, one world, and it is simply up to us whether we wish to face it or run away to cower in fear of a reality we are unable to face.

What we will become tomorrow

2007-01-09T04:30:00.000Z

This is my first post, so I suppose I should explain two things: first, the title of the blog and, second, why I'm blogging at all. I took this title from something Paul Rusesabagina said, "With my countrymen -- Rwandans -- you never know what they will become tomorrow." And in his country, it was true. In a 100 days, in the summer of 1994, around one million Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered mostly with machetes and gardening tools. The perpetrators were mostly "regular" people asked to kill, to do their "work" in eliminating the Tutsi cockroaches. Much has been written about why this took place in this tiny country in the Great Lakes region of Africa, pointing to colonialism, illiteracy, overpopulation, and any assortment of explanatory factors. Others have written extensively on the culture of obedience in Rwanda, most notable in the fetid squalor of the overflowing prison cells. In 1995, as many as nine prisoners were dying per day from diseases, all awaiting a trial that promised to be years in the coming - if at all. Bill Berkeley visited one of them, writing:

"My guide through the Kibungo prison was the elected leader of the prisoners, a thirty-eight-year-old former businessman named Joas Kaburame, himself accused of genocide... I asked Kaburame what seemed to me an obvious question: Was there ever any violence in this awful place?
'There are no fights,' he replied matter-of-factly, without a trace of irony, 'It's forbidden to fight. They must respect the rules.'
"This was the culture of obedience, chillingly illuminated, at the very heart of Rwanda's darkness: three thousand accused mass murderers packed in horrendous conditions like snakes in a bottle - and no violence."

All this is not to propose some answer to the question of Rwanda, but that the question exists in the first place. What would Rwandans become tomorrow? It wasn't written in stone. Some of the perpetrators would reply simply, "I was told to kill, so I killed. They don't tell me to kill, so I don't kill. If they asked me to kill again, I would kill again." Yet saying that it isn't written in stone is, in an odd way, as Philip Gourevitch noted, the most optimistic thing you could say about Rwanda. It meant there was hope.

And in the end, it's one of the most important questions we can ask of ourselves. We can't change our past, and obsessing over it is often a sure way to repeat it (certain that our past inevitably lays out a roadmap for our future, we ensure that it does). What we can do, and all we can do, is focus on the here-and-now, and build towards the tomorrow. We don't know what we will become tomorrow, which means we can become better, which means life is an open page and we can try to write what we will on it, which means we carry in ourselves a terrible and terrifying responsibility to live life artfully and well - or we and others will suffer the consequences of our negligence.

The second question, of why I'm blogging, is perhaps harder to answer. Most of the reasons people give for doing anything are vastly different than the actuals reason for doing anything. We put a nice, rational public face on our actions, as explanations for our deeds and misdeeds, but they rarely explain our actual motivations, which exist in the bizarre, almost indecipherable, world of our emotions and personal history, a world of magic and wonder, fear and terror, signs and symbols, of mystery. So almost any answer I give now will probably be at most partially true, and only partially honest. I'm blogging because I want to write fairly regularly again, about ideas and thoughts, philosophy and religion, and this seemed a forum to motivate myself to do it. But in reality, I'm probably blogging because I should be heading to Madras right now, and in some bizarre chain of connections, this seemed the proper response to not being there. And that's a puzzle I'm not sure I will ever fully be able to decipher.

Best,
Darren