Screams from the Pink Collar Ghetto

My travel map as of 2012

2012-01-12T17:44:00.002+07:00

Memorable Meals from 2011

2012-01-02T17:28:00.001+07:00

Check out my food blog and the post I wrote about Memorable Meals from 2011

2011: A Year in Movies

2011-12-29T08:13:00.000+07:00

I love to go to the movies but Bangkok (despite having spectacular theatres) does not really play many of the types of movies I like to see. However, I did manage to sneak in quite a few (thanks to airplane trips to Europe, Asia, and South Africa).

Loved:
1. Captain America - reminded me of Indiana Jones. I particularly loved the USO show part with the cheery music!

2. The Help - brought me right back to South Carolina

3. The King's Speech- saw in Feb 2011, good old Anglophilia movie

4. Little Red Riding Hood* - lush and romantic with some amazing images. Great Scenery chewing by Gary Oldman and much better teenage love than Twilight.

5. True Grit** - particularly Matt Damon! But everyone was great in this movie. You can't go wrong with the Coen Brothers!

6. Jane Eyre* - another stylistic and beautiful retelling of an old favorite - plus Michael Fassbender!

7. Midnight in Paris - Don't like Woody Allen anymore but could not resist this film. The guy who played Ernest Hemingway was amazing!

8. Hanna* - A crazy race around Europe. I loved it. The girl assassin is amazing and I love Eric Bana.

9. Cedar Rapids* - fantastic and funny and surprising. I felt like I had been to this conference. Better than Bridesmaids in my opinion.

Not Too Bad:
10. Contagion* - you get to see Gwyneth Paltrow's head be sawed off in an autopsy!

11. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2* - I wept, I'll admit it. Some pretty good war scenes and very intense. A great ending to one of my favorite kid's series.

12. Submarine* - some great 70s scenes, a great protaganist, and a good reminder of heart break.

13. Water for Elephants* - Robert Pattinson is not too bad and I do like Reese Witherspoon but Christophe Waltz steals the show as usual.

14. Bridesmaids - had to see it after all the hype but was rather under-whelmed. It did hit female friendship quite well but I could have done without the diarrhea jokes. But I loved the Irish cop.

15. Get Him to the Greek** - love Russell Brand but don't like the fat guy with the curly hair. I don't find him funny, just weird. But P Diddy was quite funny....

Should have been better:
16. One Day - the book was great, the movie sucked but had some okay parts. Anne Hathaway was completely miscast and the aging effects were terrible.

17. X men First Class* - stylistically beautiful but I didn't buy Kevin Bacon as the villain. I also saw because I'm obsessed with James Macavoy and Michael Fassbender.

Saw because I was desperate to watch a movie:
18. The Priest - surprisingly interesting - cowboys, the Spanish Inquisition, and ugly vampires. And I like Paul Bettany.

19. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - I thought I was going to see Fright Night and surprise! A shitty Katie Holmes movie about the tooth fairy!

20. Mr. Popper's Penguins* - some amusing parts but why is watching penguins shit a crowd pleaser?

21. The Hangover 2 - loved watching Bangkok in its squalor but again, it went too far and was not funny enough.

Hated:
22. Tower Heist - seriously bad. I could have re-written the whole thing and was tempted to do so. I felt like I could predict the lines. And Eddie Murphy should have been funnier.

23. Somewhere - As my friend Brian Griffin said at the end of this snoozefest - "I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit" - come on Sofia Coppola!

24. Thor - small people rattling around in a big set and an annoying hero who I wanted to see die. Watch the trailer I linked to - its definitely better than the movie.

25. Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon* - See previous review. "CRASH, THUD, BANG"

KEY:
* Saw on the airplane
** Saw on the movies on demand in the hospital

Christmas in the Tropics

2011-12-11T11:24:00.001+07:00

It feels weird! It's warm and sunny out. There are christmas trees and glitz everywhere. I can't bring myself to buy a tree because I'll be gone for most of the holiday season. But I put on the Christmas tunes last night and drank some red wine.... I have zero motivation to buy gifts, write Christmas cards or decorate a tree. In fact, I mostly feel like this right now thanks to my unsuccessful visit to Sweden.

My review of Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon

2011-10-20T18:17:00.000+07:00

Sadly, I was forced to watch Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon while on an Emirates Air Flight from Dubai to Cape Town. I also had to watch Mr. Popper's Penguins and the Green Lantern. It was grim. Here's my review of Transformers:

ANGRY MAN SHOUTING (Shia Labouef) I AM IMPORTANT
Lame wise crack
Explosion
Hot girl being lingered over for 10 minutes by camera as her mouth is wide open for no good reason
ANGRY MAN SHOUTING
LOUD MACHINE FLYING THROUGH AIR
INCOMPREHENSIBLE MACHINES FIGHTING - LOUD MAGISTERIAL MUSIC
Optimus Prime!
Sentinal Prime!
MAGISTERIAL MUSIC!
LOUD MACHINE!
CRASH!
Fat man making wise crack!
LOUD MACHINE!
LOUD MACHINE!
LOUD MACINE!
Hot girl shouting
LOUD MACHINE!
LOUD MACHINE!
American flag.
The end (4 hours later)

La Dolce Vita

2011-09-21T17:24:00.000+07:00

Scenes from a fantastic weekend in Paris.... ooh la la.

Things you can do in Bangkok but not in Amsterdam

2011-09-20T17:05:00.001+07:00

Go to the Grocery store and have the clerk greet you with a smile and say - Home Delivery, Madam?
Pick up a super sweet Thai Iced Tea from a lady in a cart by the side of the road that she carefully wraps in a napkin and puts in a special little plastic bag "Sling" so you don't get your hands wet from the melting ice.
Get an hour foot rub while drinking a cheap "Chang" beer for less than $3 complete.
Have the lady at the work cafeteria remember you and greet you by making your favorite salad of chopped chicken "Laab Gai" with "Extra spicy, kap khun ka" (a far cry from the MSF Cafeteria)
Be thankful for a 32C degree (90F degree) day .... because its a break from the heat!
Consider going to a tropical island for the weekend idly and discard the idea because you can't be bothered to sit in a taxi for two and a half hours.

As popular as Durian in an Airplane's overhead compartment

2011-09-20T16:51:00.000+07:00

Ever get the feeling that no one wants you around? I'm trying to get to Pakistan to help with the "Gender Marking" process and its rather unfruitful. Difficult to get visa, difficult to get anyone to respond to emails or phone calls, I feel rather useless... In a bit of a funk, I went to the grocery store at lunch and bought some durian on a whim. For those not familiar with durian, its a delicacy in Thailand and SE Asia and rather notorious for it's "aroma".

According to Wikipedia, "the edible flesh emits a distinctive odour, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Some people regard the durian as fragrant; others find the aroma overpowering and offensive. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as almonds, rotten onions, turpentine and gym socks. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in southeast Asia."

But that's not all!

'While "the smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable", later descriptions by westerners are more graphic. British novelist Anthony Burgess writes that eating durian is "like eating sweet raspberry blancmange in the lavatory."^[23] Chef Andrew Zimmern compares the taste to "completely rotten, mushy onions."^[24]Anthony Bourdain, a lover of durian, relates his encounter with the fruit thus: "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother."^[25] Travel and food writer Richard Sterling says:
“ ... its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away. Despite its great local popularity, the raw fruit is forbidden from some establishments such as hotels, subways and airports, including public transportation in Southeast Asia.^[26] ”
Other comparisons have been made with the civet, sewage, stale vomit, skunk spray and used surgical swabs.^[27] '

So I had a couple of bites. Creamy - sort of the texture of a ripe avocado or a steamed artichoke heart. And a perfume-y taste... I would say similar to almond/rosewater. But three bites was enough. Its rich. So what do I do with it now? I need to segregate it from the rest of the house.

"Throw it away," advises my friend Lauren, "Preferably in another country."

I double-bag it and put it out on the balcony. I gaze over at the pool - 12 stories down, maybe I could toss it down there.

Then I realize - I should keep and finish my durian. Because today I feel unwanted, ignored, and useless - about as popular as a durian in an overhead compartment of a plane on a long-haul flight. So maybe instead of that old childhood song "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I think I'll eat some worms" - I'm going to eat some more durian.

Somali Region, Ethiopia (video)

2011-09-17T11:16:00.003+07:00

From my September 2009 trip to Ethiopia and the Ogaden region. Hanging out with some camels down at the watering hole.

Review of "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

2011-08-30T16:04:00.000+07:00

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember very clearly reading this book while living in South Carolina, dreaming of a different life. I was 22, working as a bartender, and already pushing the limits of what was acceptable at the time. I sat in some crappy Hardees or Lizard's Thicket eating by myself obsessed with the prose. The zooming enthusiastic embrace of the everyday and the possibility that you don't know what the next day will bring. Through the lens of the book, I saw my crappy surroundings as an adventure.

I'm afraid to re-read it. It's a book for the young and the confused. It's a book to inspire you to find beauty in a place like Hardees. In 2005, when I was 38, I went to the famous La Cucaracha in Mexico with a woman I met at my guest house there. She loved Jack Kerouac. We talked to 18 year old punk american kids fleeing the law, toothless drunk guitar players with heroin problems, and horny Mexican waiters trying to pick up gringas. I didn't enjoy it. I wanted to go someplace nicer with better service and more sophisticated people. I had grown too old for Jack Kerouac.

View all my reviews

Review of "A Moveable Feast"

2011-08-30T15:59:00.003+07:00

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a gossip Ernest Hemingway was - his character assassination of F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were amusing but so petty. But the idea of traveling through Europe so cheaply and writing and drinking and knowing fantastic people still inspires. Oh to live on $5 a day and travel from France to Spain.

I'm staying in the ghostly remains of Hemingway's Paris - I am living in a friend of a friend's apartment four houses up from where George Orwell lived in "Down and Out in Paris", I've walked past Hemingway's apartment on 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine yesterday for a glass of wine, I felt like I saw a pale wan Fitzgerald drive past yesterday... but oh how its changed - touristy restaurants, rowdy british football showing bars, expensive fromageries... but still the allure and the romance remains.

I still feel that Hemingway's descriptions hold up and like American aspiring writers - I too long to live in Paris, write the great American novel, and drink wine and hold forth with likeminded individuals... vive Paris!

View all my reviews

Summer in Europe

2011-08-16T22:21:00.000+07:00

I"m back in Europe after six months! I have missed it dreadfully... and I hae the wonderful opportunity to stay in a woman's flat here in Paris! How divine! I was joking with a friend that I might go all Mr. Ripley and steal her identity. She has an adorable place, fantastic books all over the shelves and a balcony where you can sit at a little table, drink a cool glass of white wine and get on facebook! It's all I ever dreamed of while sweating away the summers in South Carolina (sans facebook - I suppose back then I would have written in my journal out here... and I still will!)

Today I did my favorite thing in the world, I met a friend for coffee, went to the market to buy fresh plums, nectarines, apricots, cherries, and strawberries, stopped off at the bakery to pick up a baguette, and then popped in the wine shop to flirt with the cute young french proprietor and get recommendations for a nice white to drink on the balcony.... he offered to join me! Ah Paris!

While I really enjoy living in Asia right now - I was always drawn to Europe as a girl (my longlost homeland - I moved from Belgium as a girl). While sitting on a Thai island, drinking gin and tonics overlooking the Mekong in Laos, and riding elephants in India thrills me - they are always destinations - not home. I long for the every day markets and chatter of European cities. I wish my French were better. I need to force myself to speak it.

Perhaps I'll do a year in Haiti for the next job and then return to France where I can perfect my french and just enjoy the wine, cheese, and bread! Ah! Until later....

Alarm! Red Flag! Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

2011-08-05T09:57:00.000+07:00

Well - I have had a rough week... actually probably a rough six weeks. I went to Nepal for two weeks to set up a donor monitoring mission which was not so bad - the Nepalis are such lovely people and Kathmandu is an interesting and charming and chaotic city - filled with (as some Indian man i met in the airport limo told me) "Hindu Characters". I enjoy being in Nepal - greeting people by saying Namaste, casually passing shrines and stupas, and ancient beautiful buildings - flying on planes called Buddha Air or Yeti Airlines.

But then I went to Afghanistan. At first it was fun - I have a potential blog post in here to compare and contrast my law breaking NGO ways with the UN discipline I"m supposed to maintain. I was sleeping in a shipping container, seeing old friends, commuting in armored cars, training (which I love). But it wore me down eventually - the relentlessness of work, the dreariness of the place (despite some beautiful touches like the rose garden and honeysuckle in front of my little apartment), and the never ending watchfulness you develop. I flew from Kabul to Delhi to Bangkok - had a 12 hour layover where I literally changed out the contents of my suitcase from Salwar Kameezes to sundresses and headed back to the airport to Frankfurt and Oslo. I had a brief romantic interlude in Copenhagen with this man that I adore but who is extremely elusive and then back to Bangkok. In the meantime, suicide bombers blew up the hotel I had been working in while I was in Kabul.

When I got back, I was tired. so very very very tired. Like sleeping all day on a Saturday and Sunday in a hot rather fevered state with a deep lack of energy I've never experienced. I didn't feel depressed, I literally felt like I was a completely de-charged battery. My brain was still working but my body wasn't. It was worrisome. Now of course, me being me, I immediately thought - maybe I'm depressed! Burned out! I had just been in Scandinavia and watched two Finnish and Swedish films (One of which railed on and on about the youth today who can't hold down a job without becoming burned out within six weeks). My American Capitalist work ethic kicked in and said - HEY! Because you were out sick last summer, you can't hack it anymore! You are weak! So I joined a gym, got a personal trainer and started working out. It worked! I had lifts in my energy but I still felt not right. So I went and found a therapist. Done. Probably stress! And working on sexual violence is tiring. And I had some friends going through some things that was mildly stressful. My nerves felt stretched though - I was on a phone call one day and it was all I could do not to scream and throw the phone out of the window into the pool. And nothing that bad was going on. Time for a vacation??? Then the horrible Norwegian terrorist blew up the Government building next to where I had been interviewing in Oslo. Hmm - extreme terrorist attacks following my every move.

Finally, someone pointed out to me that it might be physical... which made sense... I had struggled with an upper respiratory infection when I got here, then got some nasty intestinal thing that came to plague me in Laos and Pakistan, and I had been sick for almost a year when I moved to Europe. New continent - new antibodies needed. Plus traveling in Pakistan and Afghanistan is tiring. I heard a miraculous story of a man I know who was run down and very snappish and angry. He went to a doc, found out he had a parasite, they gave him a pill and he literally could fell it making him better. I wanted that pill. I was tired, snappish, easy to offend, and slumping into not caring about anything.

So the fantastic admin assistant at the office made me an appointment for the next day at the Bumrungrad hospital. I went in and got all the exams - stool, urine, and blood (hey - I'm a humanitarian aid worker - I like to talk about stool, urine and blood!). I couldn't give more samples though because I was leaving the next day for a training in Pakistan. I only had a 2 day window of opportunity for any treatments because then I was off to Nepal and then off to Europe for holiday. In Pakistan I felt a bit better. At least my energy and time was taken up by the demanding training participants. But my patience was thin and I was in love with my comfy Marriott bed and never wanted to leave it.

I flew home on the "red-eye" and went immediately into the hospital to get my test results. I felt haggard. I just wanted to know what parasite I had so I could get that magical pill. The lovely doctor gave me the good news first - blood tests were fine - no anemia, no cancer, no bad thyroid, no bad liver. Stool tests fine - no parasites (disappointment!) but the urine test showed I had an infection. Now my co-worker in Afghanistan had a UTI which was making her feverish so I know that they can have weird results on the body. Aha! I thought - that's it. But then the doc sent me to the Ultrasound room. I got an ultrasound - in an aside, I mentioned that I used to have kidney stones. Back when I was 24 - in both kidneys - but I gave up coca cola and now I was fine! Well guess what. I'm not fine.

The doctor sent me immediately to the urologist. They discovered an almost 2 inch kidney stone in my ureter of my right kidney that was blocking my kidney, sending urine back up into it and infecting it. How had I not felt it? Dunno. So, I thought... lithotripsy! I've had this before. No problem! Nope. The doctor said it was too big not to operate on and he wanted to do it right then and there. Cut a big incision over my hip and go in and fish out the stone. I was terrified. My closest friends in Bangkok were mostly out of town. The doctor was confident but I have never had surgery before. I texted my friends. They were shocked. I went into surgery. Right before the nurses came to get me, I was really sad and felt very alone. Then I thought of my mom. In the 60s, she was living in Taiwan with my father and had me. This was before men were in the delivery room. I channeled her energy- she was a fighter - and I thought - well if she could do it 40 years ago, I can do it now. So I just sucked it up.

So now... where am I? After surgery in a foreign land and five days in the hospital recuperating and two days in my apartment coming to terms with the fact I have a 10 inch scar on my hip, a tube in my bladder and kidney, and a postponed return to Europe... I am feeling a bit better. Unable to sleep really... and feeling vulnerable but the exhaustion is gone and hopefully my energy will return.

I don't have any lessons to share. I just feel sick and vulnerable and a bit more mortal. It's not going to be the suicide bombers of Kabul that will get me! It will be something ridiculous and human like a kidney stone.

2011-07-06T15:16:00.000+07:00

Homesickness: Depressed or Melancholy about being away from home and family

It was the fourth of July on Monday - and it snuck up on me. I have been traveling a lot - From May 18 - May 25 I was in Pakistan and then I was in Nepal from May 30 until June 11th, Afghanistan from June 11 - 24th, and Norway and Denmark from June 24th until June30th. Almost 6 weeks straight! I sat there on the 4th of July missing South Carolina and Washington DC and New York City. I wanted to eat my dad's fantastic potato salad and a tomato sandwich (with Hellman's mayonnaise). I wanted a barbecue with hot dogs and hamburgers and corn on the cob. I wanted to watch fireworks. Most of all, I wanted to just hang out with my friends - good friends. The kind you can talk about inane things with and giggle and just HANG OUT. I didn't really make an effort to find out if there was any "American" stuff going on in Thailand though. I was "home" from traveling but it didn't feel like home.

But Bangkok isn't really my home unless home is where your cat is. I have belongings in a storage unit in South Carolina and a storage unit in Amsterdam. I have my things in my apartment in Bangkok but I'm still trying to make that my "home" - I bought some carpets in Afghanistan and i'm having a ceiling fan installed. By the time it becomes home - it may be time to leave.

I have a strong urge to travel - I've been wanting to go trekking in Nepal, learn to tango in Buenos Aires, or just travel through Laos, Cambodia, Burma, the islands of Thailand and Vietnam. But I also just want to have a place I can come home to. I've been thinking about downsizing to a cheaper apartment here in Bangkok and consolidating all my stuff here. But eh... I miss having a home. Where I know my neighbors - where I can pop out to the local shops and say hello to the folks. I feel a bit uprooted. or maybe I just need a holiday.

Khlong observations

2011-07-06T10:48:00.002+07:00

Khlong Observations: July 2011

hot pink bougainvillea and oleanders spilling over balconies -
suddenly, a flash of an orange fish suspended in a opaque green fish tank precariously perched over the edge and
drooping green trees against a cerulean blue sky.
Wicker bird cages, gingerbread trim, and teak houses with
saffon monk's robes hanging on the clothesline.

the smell of green curry and chilis hitting hot oil
rotting vegetation, diesel fumes, frangipani

Rickety green foot bridges
old trains hurtling across the khlong
arches of yellow flowers reflected in the murky water.

Re-post:Humanitarians: missionaries, misfits, and mercenary part 2

2011-07-05T11:07:00.002+07:00

I just finally posted this but it keeps popping up as July 2010 - ....

http://screamsfromthepinkcollarghetto.blogspot.com/2010/07/humanitarians-aka-mercenaries.html

Riding on the khlong in Bangkok

2011-07-05T10:46:00.000+07:00

So I commute to work on the khlong (canal) in Bangkok as in the video above.

Today I'm in a sort of depressed funk. I think its due to a number of things:
Romantic confusion;
Realizing I don't have much zeal for returning to Afghanistan for work after missing (by two days) a suicide bomber attack on a hotel where I was staying;
Knowing I have six months left on this job contract but not wanting to move again;
Missing my friends in the US since it was the 4th of July and I didn't do anything special - I didn't even make my dad's famous potato salad. (however, I plan to do it for the weekend and have a bbq with my friend Carol).

So I'm trying to combat it by listening to some good music to change my mood. Here is the playlist on the canal this morning:

George Harrison - Give me Love
The Beatles - The End
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Refugee
Falco - Der Kommisar
My Chemical Romance - Teenagers
Ludacris - Rollout (My Business)
Earth, Wind, and Fire- Boogie Wonderland
AC/DC - You Shook Me All Night Long

Between AC/DC and Ludicris - the mood lifted....

Reunited!

2011-03-21T10:04:00.000+07:00

So this weekend my friend Mike kindly delivered my cat Simon to me in Bangkok. Simon is a world traveler. Simon came into my life when he was three years old. He was born near Washington DC and a woman who worked with my friend Jeanne had him since he was a kitten. She developed terrible allergies to him and had to find him a new home. He bounced around a bit through a couple of people and then Jeanne suggested I go and meet him. I had been missing a cat in my life since my cat Dante went to live with my father when I was in Guatemala (and my father refused to return him).

Simon came to live with me in Washington DC where we lived for four years on 18th street in Dupont Circle/Adams Morgan. He was very happy in our little one bedroom apartment and our biggest problem was figuring out how to keep him from being too fat. I traveled a lot for my job at Refugees International and my friend Brian who lived down the street was his "baby daddy" and pitched in.

When I took the job in Amsterdam, Simon made the flight over to Europe. Despite not enjoying European kitty litter and developing extremely expensive tastes in wet food and a neurotic hair pulling problem, we were relatively happy there for almost four years. The cold weather meant that Simon developed the habit of sleeping under the feather duvet at night with his head on my pillow. He was a very good winter cat as his body temperature kept me warm and he loves to sit on laps or stomachs. He adjusted to the changes and like any good Dutch person grew to love those few days of sunshine when we would sit on the roof deck and soak up the sunshine.

When I got the job in Bangkok, I wondered whether or not I should bring him with me. He's 11 years old and the separation time plus the time in the cargo hold of the plane can be very stressful on cats. He had already developed a hair pulling problem due to stress in Holland so how would he handle the international flight? My friends Jeremy and Marjolein acted as foster parents while I found a suitable apartment in Bangkok.

I was a nervous wreck the week of the flight - I sent copious numbers of check lists, emails, skypes, text messages, and phone calls to make sure Operation Simon Le Bon went smoothly. I first had to get time off work to go to the airport. My contract says I cannot take any leave for the first three months that I'm working here so getting a day off was a bit of a challenge. Luckily my supervisor is a pet lover and imported his own dogs in from Colombia so let me bend the rules. I left around 11am to get to the airport for Mike and Simon's expected arrival time of 12: 45pm. It was strangely cold in Bangkok that day and I hadn't brought a sweater with me. I was waiting for a taxi to take me to the sky train and there were tons of people in front of me. As I was so anxious, I decided to throw caution to the wind and take the motorcycle taxi.

Off we zoomed over the flyover and weaving in and out of traffic at a high speed. The mototaxi guy took us headfirst into oncoming traffic, up onto the sidewalk, and seemed to be relishing my clenched face in the rearview mirror. Again, I thought, I said I would NEVER DO THIS AGAIN! And I thought - what good will this do for Mike and Simon if I'm in a hospital or dead? But I made it to the skytrain and jumped on the Airport link for a smooth 30 minute ride to the airport.

While at the airport, I started to grow anxious as I stood with the hundreds of chinese, Russian, and Israeli tour groups welcoming people in from immigration. I found an office that said "Customs Control" and went in there to show them my pet import license. After many phone calls - they lead me behind security and customs onto the baggage claim floor where they warned me not to show anyone my passport and get out of there as soon as possible. I went to oversize baggage, a giant freight elevator opened up and there sat the tiny little kennel with a very pissed off looking Simon crouched in the back.

I tried to pet him and he let out a piteous meow and then turned his back to me and went to sleep.

I stood with Simon by the baggage claim until Mike made it through immigration. Not a sound was heard out of the kennel. We took off to the Animal customs/quarantine office. The two Thai officials who had been there before were nowhere to be seen but my import permit was sitting on their desk. Someone came in and called them for us where they were out taking a smoke break. They came in and started filling out lots of forms, rifling through Simon's forms, and fifteen minutes and 100 baht later - we were sent to the customs line. Mike showed his passport (they didn't even look at Simon) and I paid 1000 baht and we were free to the taxi. A 45 minute taxi ride home, I opened up the kennel and Simon popped out.

He took a quick saunter around the apartment and smelled everything. He drank a little water. Let out one big meow and then curled up on the bed to go to sleep. He's a trooper! He seems to like the warm weather, he hasn't vomited, pulled out any hair, or even yowled since he got here. He found a nook he likes in my sweaters (of course) and happily sits under the dining room chairs and explores the balcony.

We're renuited! And it feels so good!

Old Bangkok

2011-03-17T16:30:00.000+07:00

When I take the canal taxi to and from work, I have glimpses of old teak houses draped with jasmine and old green trees draped over the canal. On my walk down the soi to my house, I pass three or four of these old one or two story houses with their low slung verandas. But more and more are disappearing under skyscrapers and luxury hotels. I wish I could have seen old Bangkok in the day.

More observations from Bangkok

2011-02-27T18:20:00.000+07:00

I've officially been in Bangkok for 24 days. Well, I haven't had as much time to write as I had hoped - this city can be rather overwhelming and my hotel where I was staying was on a loud, busy, and chaotic shopping street (Thanon Petchburi) and after negotiating traffic or walking through the streets, I was normally reluctant to head back out. I was also having trouble sleeping - what with the noise, the air conditioning, and the very high pillows that they had on offer. I also struggled a bit with the air quality here - there is a lot of smog and I had throat and chest problems for the first few weeks.

Finding an apartment here was much easier than it was in Amsterdam - there are estate agents who will find tons of places fro you and show you around - they are paid by the apartment buildings not you, so they are not as biased as the ones in Amsterdam (who wanted to charge you a month's rent to help you and therefore only wanted to show you the most expensive apartments around). So after about 4 days of apartment hunting - I narrowed it down to where I wanted to live. I wanted someplace quiet (that crazy street was getting to me) and I wanted someplace that was vibrant enough that I could walk outside and find street food, massages, bars, and grocery stores. Sukhumvit Soi 13 seems to be the place! I can take a tuk tuk or a motorcycle taxi or walk 15 minutes to the end of my street and there is the sky train (Nana stop) and everything you could want from Indian/Bangladeshi food, German beer halls, department stores, McDonald's, Starbucks, tailor shops, teak shops, Thai iced tea stands, fresh fruit vendors, Australian bars, the CHIC hotel, the Trendy hotel, Seven-Elevens, and an expat grocery store. Meanwhile at my end of the soi, the khlong goes past and I can cut through an abandonded building to the pier and catch the taxi up to the main shopping area where I used to live where I can also transfer to the boat to my office.

My apartment is huge - I'm going to install ceiling fans because although its temperate right now, it gets stuffy. I have humongous bedrooms with king sized beds and three bathrooms with showers and tubs all for less than my apartment in Amsterdam. I could have spent less but my job is reimbursing my housing so i won't pay anything for this apartment and I do love having houseguests.

So - some random things that have gone through my head since moving here:

The beautiful wats (temples) are sprinkled throughout the city - gold is everywhere.
It's surprisingly green but not green enough. The air quality would improve and the noise would improve if all of those skyscrapers and buildings were required to have green roofs. How lovely it would be.
The food is fantastic - but yet you can still find bad food. The backpacker's paradise - Khao San road has the worst food I've tried yet. Its also more expensive than even the giant shopping malls.
Thai culture probably has more to it than shopping and eating but I haven't discovered it yet.
People are friendly and cheerful. It's a pleasant change from Amsterdam to walk down the street and greet and smile at people. Many of the working class people in Amsterdam were cheerful and friendly (all the market dudes and small shop keepers) but its hard to be cheerful and smile when you are cycling through hurricane force winds and rain to get to work in the dark.
Tuk Tuks and motorcycle taxis tend to rip off foreigners - they are supposed to be cheaper than the air conditioned taxis but inevitably they end up quoting me much higher prices... so I take the taxis. But I'd rather take the motorcycle. That is until I remember my trip through Sri Lanka (see "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again")
There are more english language books here than there were in Amsterdam... I am going to go to the Khao San Road tomorrow and stock up. The backpackers trade them in and I'm sure I can get some good deals.
Its good to have friends visit you. I just had a fantastic Friday night and Sunday brunch with my friend Patrick and his partner. Awaiting my friend Olga to arrive at my apartment in an hour for dinner. I feel lonely sometimes but mostly happy to be still in touch with beautiful friends from around the world through the internet!

Old Emails: 2006 in Northern Uganda

2011-02-27T12:54:00.000+07:00

November 7, 2006
Kampala to Gulu

When RI visited Gulu in February 2006, it was too
dangerous to drive to Gulu. Due to attacks by the
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who were fighting with
the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), NGOs
usually flew or went in military convoys. Since the
government of Uganda and LRA have begun peace talks in
Juba, South Sudan, a lot has changed. My colleague,
Madame X, and I drove to Gulu from Kampala on Tuesday.
While there was a lot of initial confusion about
whether or not we would have to leave at 5am (as many
of you know, I’m not a morning person), we eventually
decided that we would leave at 7am so we would reach a
key bridge before the military convoys and get to Gulu
around 1pm. It was raining and quite cool when we left
Kampala and made our way through the traffic clogged
rush hour listening to a local radio ‘morning show’
that specializes in calling up listeners and
pretending to be in love with them and encouraging
them to declare their love as well. About an hour
outside of the city, the scenary changed- the sun came
out, the countryside became very lush with banana
trees and mango trees and occasional monkeys running
up to our car as we swerved around potholes.

Our driver, Andrew (not his real name), started to
tell me about his childhood in Gulu. “Sometimes, I sit
with my wife and I ask her why I was born an Acholi”
he told me, “to be born an Acholi is to have nothing
but problems.” He elaborated later – “my brother was
abducted by the LRA when he was fourteen years old. We
do not even know where he is. We believe he is dead.
He is dead to us. You see – we cannot be living always
in the past. We have to try to survive. My family fled
to Kampala when the rebels came to fight. But it is
the UPDF who gives us the problems.”

When we drove up to the outskirts of Gulu town, we
began to see the immense government-controlled camps
where the displaced Acholis live. While the conflict
with the LRA has lasted for over 20 years, it wasn’t
until about 1996 when the government of Uganda
mandated that the bulk of the population had to move
into these camps where they could be ‘protected’ by
the UPDF. In order to protect the population, the UPDF
enforced a very strict curfew, beating or killing
anyone found outside the camps for suspected
collaboration with the LRA. Sadly, putting everyone in
the camps, allowed the LRA to attack the population
with ease. Many times the camps would be attacked at
night and children abducted and huts burned down.

Andrew became more visibly agitated the closer we came
to the town. “See that soldier there? All he has to do
is use his gun and steal someone’s bicycle. That
person would have to give it to him. We have no power
here in our own land.” We arrived at our guesthouse
and he was anxious to leave. Have a cold drink, we
offered. “No. I am not from here anymore. I want to go
home to Kampala.” He said and drove off back down the
Gulu-Kampala road.

Old Emails: 2005 in the Congo

2011-02-27T12:48:00.000+07:00

Part Two of the Saga

We had quite an exciting day in Ituri on Wednesday of
last week when we finally got out of the town and
surrounding areas. We accompanied CESVI, an Italian
NGO, on a trip to a camp called Kafe on the shores of
Lake Albert. It was in a pretty remote area so we
drove for two hours down to the shore and then boarded
boats loaded up with NFI (Non-food Items - blankets,
soap, tarps) to distribute to the approximately 10,000
IDPs (refugees who are still in their own country) who
had fled recent fighting and moved to this area
trapped between the mountains and the lake. On top of
the area being fairly remote, they also had a big bout
of cholera going on because the lake is cholera -
endemic and people were refusing to drink the treated
water brought in by NGOs because it smelled of
chlorine.

After waiting about 30 minutes at the beginning of the
trip for two Italian journalists to finally get out of
bed and join us, we took off in a convoy of three
jeeps and our truck to head over the mountains down to
the lake. The countryside was so beautiful. I had
always heard how beautiful Congo was but it had never
really hit me until we were driving for hours without
really encountering a lot of people. The rolling hills
are covered in lush green grass with flowering
"flamboyant" trees and boulders dotted about. We did
get stopped twice by the Army at roadblocks but these
are the "Ituri First Brigade" who are trained by the
Belgians and South Africans and supposed to be
professional. As they didn't shake us down for money,
we were impressed. However, we had interviewed IDPs
and other community folk who said that there was a
problem with the brigade - they hadn't been paid for a
few weeks and were starting to "feed themselves by
their guns" and looting some communities.

We landed down by the lake to board the boats. The
boats that were transporting our goods were long "john
boats" (from those of you from South Carolina) with
small outboard motors. We climbed won on to them, made
ourselves comfortable on the tarp settled on top of
the bags of goodies, and settled in fro the two hour
boat ride. As some of you may know, I get seasick
pretty easily so I took the precaution of taking
dramamine and wearing some sea-sick arm bands that are
supposed to help. They helped but I slept for about an
hour on the boat trying to cover my feet with my
backpack and pull my bandana over my face. It wasn't
enough - I'm bright red and sunburned right now with a
lovely demarkation of my long sleeve, my seasickness
band, and my sunglasses outlining parts of my body.

About a half an hour before we reached the camp, we
encountered some pretty fierce winds and the lake got
really choppy. They had handed out lifejackets to the
"muzungos" (white people) so we felt okay about being
plunged into the choleric waters but one of our boats
accompanying us (from German Agro-Action) was not as
lucky. They capsized and lost their entire load of
food and we rescued their workers and continued to
head into Kafe camp. The waves were really choppy and
we got soaked as the water splashed up on us and by
the time we reached Kafe, where we could see the
people lined up on the shores waiting for us, we were
really wet. The Congolese rowed out in pretty
unseaworthy canoes to meet up with us. Those boats are
a three man operation - two to row and one to bail. As
the boats docked, the Congolese men ran out to them
and carried the cargo in to different distribution
points near the shore. It was reminiscent of old
movies about colonials and their African porters
lugging everything on their heads.

It was pretty awe-inspiring to see the non-food item
distribution. There were hundred of bags filled with
blankets,soap, and tarps, one for each family. the
first thing off the boat were ropes and stakes where
the humanitarian workers outlined intake and outtake
queues. The Italian agency, CESVI, had handed out
slips of paper to the head of households the day
before and they lined up to receive the distribution -
as there is very little to do in a refugee camp, the
rest of the people lined up to watch this. CESVI
selected women to pass out the bags because men are
notoriously corrupt in these matters - giving their
friends two or three bags. The tickets were checked
when they entered the queue and checked again as they
left to catch people without them. The women streamed
in with babies strapped to their backs, hoisted the
bags on their heads and then headed back to their
huts. It was a seamless procedure.

After documenting the distribution for a while, we
decided to walk around the IDP camp. The army is
camped out there but the population doesn't mind
because they feel safer. The fact that the army is
Congolese means that they suffer the same
socio-economic condition as the IDPs. In fact, three
soldiers died of cholera. They eat the same food as
the IDPs and most wear flip flops in lieu of boots.
The IDPs seemed to be in pretty good condition - there
was a small market set up where one could buy ladies
underwear, sugar from South Africa, or salt - a
luxury. Some IDPs have money but most have very
little. It's a common misconception that most IDPs and
refugees are completely destitute - the problem is
some of them have money but there is nothing to buy.

The storm on the lake had really begun to pick up so
we decided it would be too difficult to take the boats
back - espescially since they were so light now
without anything loaded into them. We negotiated our
way onto the MONUC (UN in Congo) helicopter piloted by
the Bangladeshi air force. Like any other military
men, they were reluctant to do anything they didn't
have paperwork authorizing them to do. Andrea, my
Italian colleague and the most skilled negotiator, got
them to call their base and get confirmation that we
were okay. After a few hectic uncertain minutes where
I began to worry that we were going to have to stay
overnight in the camp or face another few hours of
sunstroke on the boats, we were cleared.

We said "Au revoir" to the IDPS who all gathered
around the helicopter to wave us off and took off for
the return trip. As opposed to the five hours it took
us to get there, we were home in 30 minutes. So, off
we went to the "Hellenic" - the favorite restaurant
(of two) in Bunia for cold "Nile" beer, brochettes of
beef, pommes frites, and cucumber salads. As the
sunburn kicked in, I decided I need to go home so I
paid a 'moto taxi' (motorcycle) one dollar (way above
'le prix Congolaise') and roared off down the dusty
road to the amusement of all of the Congolaise women
around me.

More later about the convoluted trip routings of the
UN MOVCON (office in charge of transport)....

Old Emails: 2004 Liberia

2011-02-27T12:42:00.002+07:00

Monrovia, Liberia
March 14, 2004

Please excuse the group format – I decided that it is much easier to write an email on my computer in my room at night than it is to start writing only to have the electricity go out on the computer right as I’m about to hit send. I’m currently in Monrovia , Liberia . I spent one week in Sierra Leone and landed in Monrovia yesterday. It was not as exciting as my previous trips to Sierra Leone . Sometimes I think its more fun to travel alone because then you get in more scrapes that make more interesting stories.

I did finally get to fly on a helicopter. If you remember from my previous Sierra Leone adventure, my biggest disappointment was that the helicopters were all grounded and I had to take the ferry. Well this time, I got on the helicopter. It was a little anticlimactic. It’s loud, smells like helicopter fuel, and the seats are basically bench seats along the sides of the helicopter so there are no backs. It’s not so bad for the 10-minute flight from the airport to the hotel but for the hour-long trip to the provinces, it’s not that great. They give you headphones to wear to block the noise so you can’t talk to any of your neighbors. I have discovered (something that Alec already knew) that I can pretty much sleep anywhere – on a helicopter, in a train station, in a bumping car on a back highway in Haiti. Closing your eyes and napping is a very useful alternative to nausea, which is my other option. On the last part of the helicopter trip there was a big to do as they loaded up the helicopter with fresh supplies for some of the troops. As our “onboard snack” we were able to help ourselves to the tomatoes, cucumbers, and cabbages that were stacked between our feet. As I was the only woman on the flight, I was also blessed with the only earplugs that they had.

We’ve been using the UN military helicopters and planes and in general, the Ukrainian and Russian pilots are very chivalrous and help me into and out of the helicopters. I felt sort of like a movie star on Friday. The Bangladeshi troops stationed at the Bo Airport asked if they could have their picture taken with me. It could be sweet and innocent but I know better of what those guys are capable of doing. There are probably disgusting things being done with my photo as we speak. That’s the flip side to the chivalry.

Colleague is teaching me to drink single malt scotch and I am teaching him how to hear the beat in music so he can eventually learn how to dance. We have argued a couple of times about gender issues -in criticizing anything about the military, are you ignoring the fact that the soldiers may die at some point fighting to protect the civilians. I argue, the military are supposed to protect the citizens – particularly the women and children – not rape them. It’s so disturbing the things that you hear in this job. I heard about a gang of Bangladeshi soldiers gang raping a 10 year old. Some man also raped and gave an STI to a 3-½ month old baby. These people are usually never punished. They can often make monetary payments to the victim and get off scott free. Anyway, I’m trying to expose it all in the bulletins that we’re writing so maybe I can embarrass the UN more to take this stuff more seriously and punish these guys.

Surprisingly though, I am not opposed to the military or to the presence of UN peacekeepers. They are in general, very good. You see them playing with the kids in refugee camps, they organized volleyball games with the Sierra Leone kids out in the wilderness outside of Kenema. They are usually fathers who have young children at home and they keep the pictures of their children with them. I met a very nice and enthusiastic young Pakistani man who has three kids. He talks about them fondly and how overwhelmed his wife is and how he wants to go home so he can play with them and let her rest for a while. It’s sweet. Of course, I haven’t really met the Nigerians, Ghanaians, or other African troops. They are supposed to have thousands of girlfriends and leave behind lots of babies as they pull out of the country. This is no new revelation, this has been happening since the beginning of time but it’s scary and sad that absolutely no progress has happened on this issue.

We stayed in Bo at the house of one of the UNHCR staff one night. He was American and had satellite tv so we had a good time watching MTV and talking about Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, and old Saturday Night Live skits (in particular the one about Strom Thurmond during the Clarence Thomas hearings). Unfortunately, there was no electricity after 11pm and it is the middle of the dry season. That means it’s hot as hell and there is no breeze at night. The next day was a relative paradise compared to that. We stayed with the Pakistani Battalion in the field near Kenema. They put me up in the VIP “container” – it’s a former shipping container that has a bathroom and an air conditioner. I even had my own “room attendant”. The food was out of this world! A huge buffet of several kinds of curry. The Pakistanis treated us like royalty.

Liberia looks a lot better than it did the last time I was here. The restaurant at the hotel we are staying in has instituted a delicious Lebanese style brunch that we indulged in this morning. It was a nice change from the nonstop diet of Barracuda that I had adopted in Sierra Leone . I’ve been trying to avoid dairy, salads, uncooked foods, and anything other than bottled water. So all I eat is barracuda and rice.

The air conditioners are working; we have running water with pretty good water pressure, and CNN. In fact, we were watching CNN yesterday afternoon talking about work and suddenly – Ken Bacon, our boss, appeared on the screen! He was being interviewed live about the Sudan . What a small world. There we sat in Liberia, watching our boss in Washington , talk about the Sudan . We were finally able to get on email today so I am feeling a little less cut off from the world. It looks like there is a lot of construction going on. I am looking forward to getting out of the city. We are going to try to ride along on a patrol of the UN peacekeepers. Perhaps I’ll get my picture on a tank a la Dukakis.

Anyway, nothing too exciting has come out the trip to Liberia yet. We did run into the waiter that was working here the last time I was here. He remembered me because we had a memorable evening doing fancy napkin folds and teaching each other different kinds. He bought me a drink. Unfortunately, it led us to open up the bottle of Scotch that we bought in the Paris duty-free and start drinking while listening to Johnny Cash on colleague's Ipod. I decided it would be fun to stay up to 2:30am and dance in my hotel room to Haitian music. Amazingly, Scotch doesn’t really give you a hangover like wine does! A monster may have been born. We’ve spent today just writing up bulletins and trying to outline a larger document we want to write and put out when we return. I get more work done here than I ever do in DC.

Old email: 2006 Lebanon

2011-02-27T11:36:00.001+07:00

One of the things that I miss the most about my old job at Refugees International was how much freedom and creativity I had there. As I sit here now working at the UN and stewing under "travel authorization" forms and formal ccing of people and slaving over my email's tone - I miss my "cowboy" days. MSF for all its "cowboy" attitude had nothing on Refugees International. When you are picked up from the airport, shepherded around, and have a place to live, you are not free to meet the crazy and the wild and the wonderful from the world.

Here is an email I wrote to my friend Alec about getting my hair cut and colored in Beirut during the war there. I spent 6 weeks in Beirut during the Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah. While it was intense and scary, there were these weird moments of normality - I got my hair cut, I bought sunglasses, I went out for drinks. Here's one of them:

August 7, 2006
Beirut, Lebanon

Let me relate my latest scare. Was it a bomb? No. A terrorist? No. An anti-western demonstrator? No.

I got my hair cut in Lebanon and my roots touched up. Since my hair is fried out and platinum blonde right now from the Sudan/Beach/Mexico and I never had time to get it cut before I came, I decided to take Kristele up on her offer to find a hair dresser.

I am traumatized. The hairdresser, a very dapper very hip looking gorgeous (straight!) Lebanese man asked
me through my translator if I wanted to make my hair match the lighter or darker part of my hair. I said, I don't want it the same color as my ends and launched into an explanation of how it had become quite a bit blonder than I normally had it because it had been ages since it had been cut. He offered to put highlights in it and tone down the color a bit. Sounds good. I then explained how I wanted it cut so it's more curly and that I always just scrunch it with some product and he knodded.

Imagine my shock and horror when they took the bits of foil off and my hair was dark brown with white stripes in it. I started to panic but he tutted me. "It will look very natural." Then I started to remember what Lebanese women look like. They are all a size 2 with dark tans and they have severely highlighted hair that is either dark brown with chunky blonde highlights or red blond with white highlights. They wear designer jeans, stiletto heels, off the shoulder dresses and carry Fendi purses.

I had just spent three exceedingly hot hours in a parking garage interviewing refugees and was wearing a very wrinkled linen shirt, my RI vest, those orange shoes, and was sweaty, shiny, and feeling very bloated and fat. And nothing makes you feel worse than sitting in the chair, facing the mirror with your scagged back wet dark brown with white striped hair reflection looking back at you. I just stared at my lap. "I can wear a bandana until I get to Paris. Noone knows me here." I reassured myself.

Then he washed it and low and behold, it blended in. Then we sat at the chair and he cut the first piece of hair at my chin length. "I still want it long!" i shrieked at my translator. He just chopped away without talking. I was scrutinizing the color and watching to see where the white parts were peaking out. I could still see them, I thought.

Then he turned me away from the mirror and made me bend over while he blow dried my hair. He turned me around to the mirror.

It's ash blonde. It matches my roots and eyebrows. It's...... my natural color. And the longest part barely reaches my shoulders.

I don't know how I feel.

I just came out of the shower after scrubbing myself clean. Put on fresh clothes. Put on some makeup and my earrings. I'm drinking a beer and preparing myself to go look back in the mirror again.

I don't know how I feel about being my natural color.

I'm going to be 39 tomorrow. I suppose after 15 years, it's about time.

Old emails: 2005 Sri Lanka

2011-02-27T11:19:00.002+07:00

Old post I found from Sri Lanka which has a lot to do with my time in Bangkok so I thought I would re-post it:

September 8, 2005
Colombo, Sri Lanka

I did a (stupid? fun? adventuresome? foolish?) thing yesterday. I was a little tired of riding the buses
from town to town. While they are cheap, they are often crowded and I was afraid I wouldn't get a seat on this last bus. But first a little back story...

Sunday, after taking the bus and a tuk tuk to Sigiriya (about 3 hours from Kandy), I decied to go on safari. We took a jeep out to the national park and I saw three herds of wild elephants, some monkeys, wild peacocks, and tons of painted storks. It was really fun and a little expensive on my budget ($50). I then went to the posh $200/night hotel to have a drink and hang out and soak in the ambience rather than sit on the porch of my rather seedy run down rest house and drink lime and soda. The guesthouse workers told me that I need to "watch out for elephants in the road' at night so its not safe to walk (which is probably a lie - these guys would squeeze money out of a turnip)
so they gave me a taxi (not a tuk tuk for 80rupees but a taxi for $35 a day). The fancy hotel is about a 2 minute drive down the road from my rest house. "Pay what you like Madam", they said. I said "Okay, I'd like to pay nothing."

Anyway, the one gin and tonic I drank made me loopy. I blame not drinking for a week and the incredibly
intense ayurvedic massage I had which made me feel like a side of Kobe beef being tenderized for the
slaughter.

On the way back to my guest house, after almost running over a cobra, I agreed to take a motorbike to Polonarruwa yesterday. Thats' right, ride on the back of a dirtbike with my backpack on for two and a half hours. Now the reason why this is foolish is that the cars in sri lanka practice "trickle" style driving. If there is a hole in traffic, they trickle into it. Nature abhors a vaccuum and all that. So, as I clung to the back of my slightly fat Sri Lankan driver in a helmet that turns out to be made of styrofoam, we zoomed in and out of traffic with buses, 18 wheelers, tuk tuks, army jeeps, and cars alternatively passing us (while sometimes passing anothr truck simultaneously) on a two lane road that winds up through the jungle. I was scared out of my mind (not to mention in pain from my backpack which has too many books in it and breathing exhaust). It was, in the words of Jonathan Coe or somebody "a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again". We also had to dodge people, dogs, a water monitor, cows, and a goat while driving along. I was also told to keep an eye out for elephants as we took a shortcut through a national park.

I'm lucky to be alive. all of this took place after I climbed Sigiriya rock fortress (which takes two hours) and climbed another mountain to look at some buddhist caves. My back, legs, and arms are dying but I'm too afraid to get another ayurvedic massage.

I wrote that yesterday, today I took the 5 hour bus from Polonnaruwa to Colombo. I think our driver might have actually been a demon from hell. He drove like a crazy person. I began laughing fiendishly whenever
some new unsuspecting soul got on the bus - GOOD LUCK SUCKER! We made it somehow and I'm now having culture shock as I sit in our luxury hotel that Joel reserved for us.

Some photos from Thailand

2011-02-27T10:33:00.000+07:00

My new office, the United Nations building. I'm on the 3rd floor in the UNHCR Regional Office.

One of the most fun parts about moving here is using the public transportation - in this case, the canal water taxis. Not many farang (white people) on it and it MOVES unlike Bangkok's auto traffic. Downside - toxic water splashing you in the face. These canals are not too clean.

The view from my new apartment down into the pool. It's got a proper pool where you can swim laps. And yesterday, after a harrowing day shopping in grocery stores and department stores crowded with people, I relaxed by taking a swim and then floating for about half an hour, just looking at the sky. Now that's a way to come home.

My new apartment - beautiful hard wood floors and balconies. I'm ITCHING to get to the plant shop and buy some jasmine, basil, tomatos, and chilis for the balcony. There's actually two balconies - one off my bedroom and one off the living room.

Everywhere you go in Bangkok, there are people selling and consuming food. Here's a snap from the street next to one of the big malls here - they sell giant prawns which they grill and the tables are set right there on the sidewalk next to the traffic.

Here's a view from one of the overpasses on the canal or Khlong. The contrast between old Bangkok on the water and the modern crazy obsessed with new city is most marked here.

Jim Thompson's House. He was an entrepeneur (and probably a former spy for the US) and he built this gorgeous house from traditional thai houses. It is so lovely it made me want to cry. How can I live like that?

Tropical flowers....

Here's the Erawan shrine. It's a very popular place with Thais waving joss sticks, buying garlands and garlands of marigolds and jasmine, and Thai dancers performing for those who are thankful that their needs were attended to. This shot is from the skywalk overhead that I was using as I transited from one shopping mall to another. Again -the contrast between the traditional and the modern really intrigues me. Cultural Hybridity indeed.

Cool tropical fruit drinks.... I am obsessed with Lime Sodas but this passion fruit, mint, cocktail was pretty impressive too.

Saturday in Bangkok

2011-02-08T17:08:00.000+07:00

Wednesday and Thursday: Days one and two – a blur of jetlag, air conditioned high rises, indecipherable UN jargon, taxi cabs, and room service.

Friday: Day three –I finally shook off the jet lag funk and decided to explore and have a thrilling adventure! I took a water taxi home with two Finnish ladies from my office who showed me the way – we paid 8 baht (the euro is currently at 1 = 41 baht so approximately 20 euro cents or a quarter in the US) and rode a speedy motorized canal boat under bridges and through the canals that hide inside Bangkok. I got off a short walk from my hotel, headed into a seven-eleven, bought some milk, beer and snacks and tried to see what was going on around me. I went into the mall across the street which was chock-a-block crowded with trendy little dress and t-shirt shops with names like Gin/Tonic, Vodka, and Buttermilk. Everything looked doll-sized. I felt like a tall Irish milkmaid awash on the shores of a manga cartoon.

On the Saturday morning, I got up, organized my crazed hotel room (big suitcases everywhere that spewed my belongings form where I had rifled through them trying to find things to wear in this tropical environment). After a dip in the pool, I headed to the sky train. There is a very efficient (although not very big) metro system here in Bangkok. The Sky train is an elevated train system that is incredibly easy to use – it cost about 20 baht to move from one part of town to the other. The stops are clearly marked in English and Thai and its air-conditioned and quick. I headed towards a part of town called Sukhamvit between the Nana and Asok stops to look at the neighborhoods in anticipation of moving to the area. It’s a very expat friendly area but also quite business-y. There were Au Bon Pains, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonalds, and shopping malls everywhere but also street vendors selling squid on a stick, noodle soups, and sweets. It’s also the home of the infamous Soi Cowboy – a Vietnam war left-over strip of go-go bars, sleazy drinking establishments and yes – even a Dutch bar that sells bitterballen and Frikandel. I can’t get away from that food!

I went to get a massage at a lovely spa called Divana – a small garden house at the end of one of a soi (Soi means alley or lane). It was so luxurious – I chose which massage oil I wanted to have and the ladies lead me to the room where I was asked to change into mandatory provided disposable underwear (size XL for the large American posterior, of course). After 70 minutes of being climbed on, prodded, kneaded, and tugged – the knots and tension from the moving process dissolved. I felt completely zoned out. That blissful feeling was quickly undone by my next stop – the Consumerist paradise known as the Siam Paragon mall (Siam Paragon Food Hall.) It was overwhelming!

I had so much to choose from that I had to be really strict with myself and force myself to choose the first thing I saw that I wanted. Otherwise, I would have been crippled with indecision! So I had Hainanese Chicken and Rice (which I discovered in Singapore) which was delicious. Its so simple but so good that I learned how to make it at home just so I could have it again! I washed it down with some Thai Iced Tea (so sweet it made my teeth hurt) and to counter balance the sweetness of the Thai Iced Tea, for dessert I decided to have Green Papaya Salad which they prepared right in front of me.

After I fed the beast within, I wandered through the food court looking at everything for offer just for future reference. Next time - I can choose between the Pad Thai stand, the noodle soup stand, the curry stand, the sushi bar, the satay bar or if I want to wander away from Thai food, I can have noodles from Vietnam, Japan, China, Singapore, or even Italy! And for the more discerning palate, there is McDonalds, Burger King, and Dunkin Donuts!

I love food and I love choices in food and I love trying things that I have never had before. This is the sad thing about traveling alone.

I had big intentions of going to a movie that night. Since Thailand has a thriving bootleg DVD business, I had read that all the big movies air here at the same time as Hollywood releases them so as to cut down on having them bootlegged. The Fighter, an Oscar nominated film, was playing at the posh theatre but the air conditioning ws so cold that I didn’t think I could hack 2 hours sitting in a sundress. Just like Holland, I’m going to have to learn to carry a sweater with me everywhere I go! So I skipped the movie and headed home to the hotel to watch a mawkish Richard Gere and his dog movie while chatting with friends in the US over the internet. The good thing about this move is that it has made it easier to communicate with my friends from the US but now I’m 6 hours ahead of Europe and can’t seem to get in sync with anyone there. Hello- friends from Europe! Email me when you are up so I can call you!

Next up – a Sunday at the weekend market….

First impressions: Bangkok

2011-02-03T18:51:00.000+07:00

Yesterday, I arrived at the incredibly beautiful and efficient airport - took a taxi into town - lots of highways but decent non crazy driving - not like India. The city is huge and filled with skyscrapers but also lots of mango trees and the river!

I'm staying in a super mod studio apartment on the 26th floor. There's a pool. I overlook a mall. I watched Shaka Zulu and the BBC coverage of Egypt while falling asleep, ordering room service (Chicken with green curry), reading, checking facebook, and falling asleep some more.

UNHCR picked me up in a sleek town car this morning - I passed a monk in saffron robes crossing the highway, a bunch of riot police eating breakfast and getting ready to go to a demonstration fo the red and yellow shirts, women in traditional thai clothes cooking over a charcoal briquet, and several old white men backpackers who were up to no good, I'm sure.

In the office, I am back in cubicle land. I have a big cubicle next to the office fridge, microwave, and copy machine. Hmmm - promotion? Demotion? Hard to tell -people share offices here and the secretaries sit in the cubicles but I still feel like I have more privacy than I did in the open arrangement of MSF. Turns out I know one of the women in the office here - we met and had drinks in Juba, South Sudan. Small world!

I went to lunch after a round of "how do you do?"s and sat outside in the courtyard filled with beautiful tropical trees and cats (!) and ate some dim sum dumplings and larb gai that was made freshly for me and a thai lime soda - cost 3 euros, approximately. For the condiments table in the cafeteria, there are four giant bowls of chilis - chilis in vinegar, chilis in fish sauce, dry chilis, and raw fresh chilis. I sunned my pathetically pale arms in the sun and listened to my stomach scramble around to try to deal with the chili peppers in my larb gai.

After flagging a taxi home (not that easy of a job!), I've returned to the modern skyscraper in the sky where I hear Chinese New Year going on down on the ground but I fade in and out of jet lagged dreams filled with Egyptian riots and Dutch snowstorms....

Things I am going to miss about Amsterdam

2011-01-26T22:15:00.000+07:00

Am feeling so overwhelmed by packing, sorting through my stuff, and trying to move so this isn't a very coherent post but I wanted to start listing some of the things I'll miss about dear old Amsterdam

* Biking home at night over the canals in this gorgeous old city
* The fantastic healthcare system at the OLVG hospital. I had to get a chest xray and I was in and out in 20 minutes without an appointment - they also have an espresso cafe in there!
* Raw herring with onions and pickles on the street corner
* Inexpensive flowers and some beautifully composed bouquets for less than 25 euros!
* The Grocery store in the airport - what a great idea!
* Gezellig cafes all over the city where you can linger at your table for hours without being rushed.
* Good looking Dutch men all over the city! The ladies are nice to look at too but the men are gorgeous! I can see my friend Susanne saying "Greasy Hair, Shiny Shoes" right now but I find them hot!
* The efficient trams zipping past my apartment all day.
* Rainbows - yes it rains a lot here, but the upside is that I've seen more rainbows in this city than any other time in my life.
* Green parakeets that used to sit outside my office window in the tree.

What I won't miss... well, in the spirit of positivity, I'll leave that for another post. Today it's all about the love.

Read this book!

2011-01-18T19:18:00.000+07:00

black and (A)broad: traveling beyond the limitations of identity by Carolyn Vines
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Note: I know Carolyn Vines personally

Carolyn's voice is one that is missing from much of the travel literature that I love to read. She's African-American, came out of a challenging childhood from a racially tense country, and is well-educated, funny, and fearless. Carolyn chronicles the story of her fascinating life from Indiana in the American midwest to Voorschotten, Netherlands. You'll learn alot about how black women think and what struggles they must overcome as Carolyn evolves from the "good daughter" or "sell-out" black woman (depending on who you talk to) who makes good grades, loves her Spanish classes, and grows up in the 70s and the 80s in the United States. As Carolyn tries to find her own path through racial and gender stereotypes, expectations of the family, community and her own fears, and survives heart-breaking personal tragedies, she evolves personally into her own woman who defines herself as a writer, a loving wife, and happy mother of two beautiful biracial girls living in a bizarre little white country in Northern Europe. Her take on everything from cycling through the rain while trying to keep up standards of having "good black hair" to the intricacies of dealing with Crohn's disease in Dutch toilets will make you laugh, make you sigh, and keep you wondering what is next for her. Personally, I hope she has a second book in her - I'd like to read more about how her academic research about the role of African women in the Caribbean has shaped her own thoughts on racial identity as an African-American woman living outside of the US. This book touches on that topic many times but I kept wanting more.

View all my reviews

Changes in 2011

2011-01-02T18:17:00.000+07:00

As you may have noticed - 2010 was not a great year for me as far as writing and being creative... I was on sick leave for five months due to a combination of stress from work (non stop travel, Haitian earthquakes, and human resource problems at my org) and from personal grief over the illness and death of my father in 2009 and it definitely impacted my ability to put my thoughts down on paper (or the computer!).

Although I had adventures and traveled a lot in 2010, I couldn't find it in me to write as much as I used to... for the record, I did manage to hit several new countries this year and most of them were for pleasure and fun, not work*. It was odd not to visit Africa this year - although my time in Haiti and India were certainly memorable. 2011 should bring some big changes... I've accepted a job with the Norwegian Refugee Council and will be seconded to the United Nations as a Gender-based Violence Regional Training Manager for Asia. I'll be working on building capacity in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal to fight gender-based violence and I'll be moving to Bangkok, Thailand!

Its a big change - but I think I needed something. Although I have learned a lot in the big humanitarian agency where I currently work, its never really been a good fit for me - the lack of prioritization on women's issues, the reluctance to do advocacy, and the byzantine office politics and proud refusal to professionalize has undermined my own belief in my abilities and I feel stagnant. I'm not sure that this new job will be perfect - are there any "perfect" jobs out there? And I will miss Amsterdam and Europe and my lovely colleagues from my current job but I am ready to try something new. Thai cooking classes, meeting Afghan women's organizations, and working for the Scandinavians... lets see how it goes! Wish me luck and pack your bags and come to visit in 2011!!!

*Here's my travel itinerary from 2010:
January: Kerala, Delhi, and Manipur India
February: Istanbul and Selcuk Turkey
March: Port-au-Prince, Haiti and London and Liverpool, UK
April: Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina
May: Edinburgh, Scotland, Paris, France and Texel and Verschelling in the Frisian Islands of Holland
June: Berlin, Germany and Gdansk, Poland
July: Paris, France
August: Copenhagen, Denmark
September: Tuscany, Italy and Bologna, Italy
October: Berlin, Germany and Prague, Czech Republic
November: Ghent, Belgium, Maastricht, Netherlands and Berlin, Germany
December: London and Swindon, UK

Pubs I visited in London

2011-01-02T18:00:00.000+07:00

Check out some of the pubs I visited in London on my food blog....

Fit for duty

2010-10-03T04:26:00.000+07:00

I'll be heading back to work in the next few weeks. I am a little nervous but ready to jump back into the fray! I'm looking forward to new challenges and figuring out what's happened while I've been gone. But some lessons learned from this time off -

* I have to maintain a healthy work-life balance. I like my life in Amsterdam and have made some new friends and deepened friendships with other. I have to make sure life is not just about my job.

* I have to try to stay focused on my own objectives - there are things I want to accomplish in my career, things I want to accomplish for myself - giving everything leaves me with not much left over for myself. I don't want to do that again.

* I've got to make sure I keep my eye on what is important - trying to help survivors of gender-based violence - not worrying about the state of affairs internally in my organization. I've only got so much energy - I'd rather spend it on survivors and empowering women around the world!

Other Social Media

2010-09-12T16:50:00.000+07:00

I haven't been very prolific in writing this summer - probably a sign of my burnout. But I am doing a lot of reading and you can follow some of my thoughts in other ways too if you so desire.

On Tumblr
http://smartipants.tumblr.com/

On Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/60783800@N00/

On Twitter
http://twitter.com/smartindc

and there is always facebook but we're probably already friends there if you have a facebook account!

Humanitarians aka Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Mad Men: Part Two

2010-07-20T21:40:00.014+07:00

(I left this post lingering unpublished from my return from my sick leave. It was written in October 2010. I'm in a different place now but I think I'll post it anyway.)

Well I've finally decided... I'm in it to win it (to paraphrase Hillary Clinton). I'm not giving up on humanitarian aid yet. A couple of things have convinced me...

1. Helping a friend apply for a training course, I was reading her writing sample. I got pretty excited about it and had lots of ideas on how to beef it up. I want to turn this writing sample into a joint paper on how quality of care can be as important a humanitarian principle as neutrality or independence. I feel like I have something to say again... I want to write some papers for publication and I want to make an impact on this crazy profession again. I think I'm getting ready to find my voice, which has been lost for a while.

2. I don't feel so alone anymore. With so many of my friends in the same exact organization are burned out right now and struggling.... I realize that its not just me. Sitting in the misery and depths of burn-out, I felt like a crazy person. I was the only one who was so angry and outraged. I was so exhausted and tired of fighting all the time. I was sensitive and impacted by everything. I felt like my skin had been scraped off and there was nothing protecting me anymore. But the more I get out of that state and talk to others, I realize that it is normal to struggle in abnormal situations. I need to take much much better care of myself nowadays. I have to learn to prioritize keeping myself healthy and de-stressed. I'm never going to change my passions and personality but I can change some bad habits.

3. Opportunities are presenting themselves to me. I've been stuck wondering what to do... but just by stopping for a little bit and ceasing to try to find the answer for everything and MAKE things happen, I've suddenly been shown a few different ways I can move forward. And a few little glimpses of a changed life that could make me happy and content. And they are all still related to being a humanitarian worker -I am not going to have to drastically change my identity. I have a better idea of who I can be in my career but I realize my career is not the most important thing to me anymore.

4. Discovering how wonderful and supportive my friends and family are. While I'm dealing with burnout, I'm not depressed. I've struggled with depression in the past. I'm just plain ole damn exhausted. And my friends who check in on me, call me up, meet me for picnics, take me to Poland, and listen to my frequent crazed thoughts about this and that are my lifeline. No man is an island. But I've felt like an island for a while - but thanks to my sister, my friends, and even random new strangers that I meet at after football celebrations and talk to - I realize that there is a lot of love and good things out there. I'm building back up my batteries. You gotta have a good network to survive this life.

So what have I learned in my downtime?

Humanitarian agencies can be dangerous places to work. While my friends who don't work in the business don't really get why its different than other bad organizations, the ones who do understand that its a toxic soup of poor management, nepotism, severe power politics, and a never ending supply of idealistic volunteers who will always step forward to accept the abuse. I think its the idealism thats the worst part of it.... over and over again, I've had to end conversations with people i've just met about where I work. I'm out on stress leave and when people hear where i work, they can't believe it. I don't want to tell them about it. I believe my organization is one of the best providers of humanitarian assistance in the world. I don't want to kill off charitable contributions! A lot of the stress is brought on by my own inability to make boundaries, draw lines, say no, and protect myself. The good people outweigh the bad but sadly the good ones have to leave after a while to protect their sanity. They often return but always trying to warn the rest of us about how bad it can be. But the abusers of power, the corrupt people, the incompetent, and the (frankly) insane are tolerated here because "they really care about women and children" or because "you don't know what they were capable of doing back in (historic crisis)". Idealists all, we tolerate abuse and poor working conditions on the belief that those who are there must be good people just like we hope we are.

A friend once told me, when I was on a quixiotic quest to improve DDR programs in West Africa by becoming a donor, that going to work for the World Bank would kill me. "That beast is too big to poison from within" - he said poetically (he's a pretty poetic and philosophical guy and the one to take with you if you get harrassed by the cops in Kinshasa... he can sweet talk his way anywhere!). I'm an idealist and I always think that I can improve things and contribute to the bigger good. I want to give away all my good ideas and work in teams and I believe deeply that consensus and participatory decision-making are the ways to go. But the place I work right now doesn't work that way. That beast might be too big to poison from within.

So I have to find my own way - I don't want to leave. I still have things to accomplish here. I am going to have to fight to keep working there - I have also learned to find the other thinkers like me and stick by them. It's too tempting to get pulled into the clique but as my beloved graduate school professor once told me, "As an anthropologist, you are always going to be the gadfly". I want change and I want to improve the world to assist the most vulnerable women and children out there - that's not going to happen by being coopted by power or by shutting up when the going gets tough. I believe in what I do and I know there are others out there that do as well - I find them every time I go to the field or meet a new colleague (usually the depressed looking ones lurking by the copy machine). To use a cliche - its a marathon not a sprint so I have to change tactics and build up new stamina. I need to start ignoring the crazies and focusing on the good folk.

Chronicle of my eating adventures in Paris

2010-07-18T16:10:00.000+07:00

So I'm going to chronicle my eating adventures in Paris to the best of my ability on my "food blog", Bleu Cheese and Red Wine.

So far, I've written about my purchases at the local grocery store (a bit different than what I can find at the Piggly Wiggly but not THAT different!) and my tastings of the cheeses that I purchased.

Make me laugh

2010-06-30T21:46:00.000+07:00

My friend and I were discussing serious issues and we both realized we just need a laugh. Following is a list of funny movies I compiled for her that I love:

Pineapple Express
Shaun of the Dead (I love zombie films!)
Hamlet 2 (very cheesy but funny)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (for Russell Brand and the pig killing scene)
Fish Called Wanda (classic!)
Wet Hot American Summer (if you ever went to summer camp)
Pootie Tang (maybe because I watched it 10 times in Haiti but I think its hilarious)
Rushmore (I saved Latin, what did you do?)
Stripes/ Ground hog Day/ Caddy Shack/ Meatballs (you can't lose with Bill Murray!)
40 Year Old Virgin (just for the closing credits)
Best in Show
Princess Bride (b/c I am a romantic)
Office Space (You've been missing a lot of work lately, I wouldn't say I've been missing it! )
Anchorman (for the jazz flute! and after shave!)
South Park: The Movie
Raising Arizona/ The Big Lebowski
Young Frankenstein/ Blazing Saddles (My sister and I used to watch these on HBO and laugh for days)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (classic)

An amazing video of Istanbul

2010-06-25T13:25:00.000+07:00

I went to Istanbul for vacation in March. It was a fascinating and lovely city... here's a nice video that captures it.

Istanbul from O.G. on Vimeo.

Humanitarians aka Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Mad Men: Part One

2010-06-24T21:53:00.000+07:00

Me on my first trip to West Africa in October 2003

I've been doing a lot of thinking about what to do with myself and my career the past few weeks. I just exchanged emails with my former boss at Refugees International to ask him for advise and he said "For better or for worse, you are an international humanitarian/human rights worker" (and I could hear his tone - deal with it!) I do love the field and the work but I was very close to losing my belief in it a few weeks ago due to the non-stop stress this job entails.

First of all, this field is filled with crazy people! The current wisdom is that all you find is Mercenaries, missionaries, or madmen (or misfits, depending on who you ask). I've certainly encountered them all - from the jungles of West Africa to the cities of the Middle East. And am I one of them? I certainly was close to becoming a misfit five weeks ago when I found myself telling stories of Haiti and freaking out my "civilian" friends. We're adrenaline junkies, I think, with ill-developed senses of danger, and willing to take risks that many others from our families and friends wouldn't do. My family were always aghast that I was EXCITED to go to war zones and help out.

But where else would I work if I wasn't an aid worker? Before I went into development and humanitarian work, I worked in the restaurant business (with two very very short sojourns for a mortgage company and a retail store and a longer one in a healthfood store). I always knew I wanted to "help" in some way. My heros growing up were Wonder Woman and Florence Nightingale (I was always Batgirl when we played make-believe because I thought her motorcycle was cooler than Wonder Woman's plane though)!

As I figured out what I wanted to do with my life in college, I tried on three courses of study: Journalism (which I quickly dropped because it was boring), Pre-Medicine (which I dropped because I hated studying for chemistry and math), and International Studies (where I thrived). I turned the Journalism interest into an English Language minor because I loved to read and write poetry - but international studies fascinated me. Latin American wars of independence, ethnic conflict in Africa, The Soviet Union, and nuclear war - (after all it was the 80s). I ended up following the Soviet Union the most due to a charismatic professor, Gordon Smith, and fantasies of moving to Moscow and fighting the cold war, I guess. But studying these things didn't give me a clue about what I could do with my life.

After college, I went to work in the restaurant biz as a bartender. Restaurants are filled with even crazier people than humanitarian agencies - both the staff and the customers. When I was 21 years old, I managed my first restaurant and I had to make schedules around people's rehab, parole hearings, and keep them from the drugs during the work hours and clean up the sex after work. I don't even remember going to bed for two years because I stayed out drinking every night and just passed out every night. But at least I wasn't bored out of my mind like I was in the bank or the "Joyful Alternative", the hippie clothing shop I worked in. I yearned to leave South Carolina and see the world but I was broke and not sure how to do it.

Having been born in Taiwan and growing up in Belgium to a military family, I knew I wanted to travel the world and I knew that I was fascinated and appalled by war. The military was not an option for me so I thought about the Peace Corps. When I worked in a health food store dishing out advice on herbs, vitamins, macrobiotic food, and organic vegetables, I became aware of alternative medicines, indigenous rights, and anti-corporate anger. This pushed me into women's health as I was always finding young women who couldn't afford birth control or abortions coming to me to get herbs to miscarry. I became radicalized. I wanted to work on women's health in Latin America. The Peace Corps wanted to send me to do fish farming in Africa. I passed on the Peace Corps.

I moved to DC and went to grad school... I was finally on track.

A blog that I love, Tales from the Hood, wrote recently about how Americans understand humanitarianism and human rights. How we focus on our rights, the rights of others, and look at things from a rights-based perspective. I am typical of this approach - I started out in the field of development by working with grassroots organizations to defend human rights in Latin America at Witness for Peace and then the National Coordinating Office on Displaced in Guatemala. I wanted to be a human rights defender and I loved working on the issue of economic justice for women in Guatemala and Nicaragua. The erosion of the advances that women had made in the Sandinistas and in the refugee camps under the new economic reforms was my rallying cry. Women's rights are human rights!

Through a series of weird missteps, I took a detour into large scale USAID funded health and development and began to learn about Africa. I focused on reproductive health and sexual health and gender issues. While I was junior and naive, I had a lot of opportunity to see from the inside how ineffectual the USAID development model was and how the money all came rolling back to the US through the use of highly paid consultants, business class flights, and US only rules for purchasing cars, computers, etc. I struggled to implement a sophisticated computer driven health information system in Haiti where they probably would have been better off with pencils and papers and calculators. Through a wonderful Haitian colleague who was 20 years my senior, I learned a lot about the Haitian people and how decision-making went down.

Throughout it, I felt that my role was to use my privileged status as an American to move forward the goals of the people in countries less fortunate than my own. From time to time, I would become deeply aware of the injustices in my own country - lack of access to health care, poverty in the deep south and on the Native American reservations, inner city violence, and the like and fret over why I chose to work outside the country. But I also knew, selfishly, that I wanted to experience the world and meet people from places I would never venture just on 'holiday'.

I was determined to work on the issue of gender-based violence and help women and children around the world who suffered from this violence. Whether through development or relief work, I didn't really care but I struggled to carve out a niche working on this. The advent of the Bush Administration made me realize that I couldn't stomach US style development and I went into what I thought was the more principled field of humanitarian work.

So where do I stand now? Six years of 'humanitarianism' - three from a US advocacy based perspective, three from a European operational perspective. I've been to West Africa, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Sudan, the Congo, Somali region, Zimbabwe, Lebanon and Colombia.

I've been disgusted at the industry - because that's what it is, an industry. I've been repulsed by the selfishness and paternalistic and racist attitudes of some "humanitarian" workers. I've been annoyed by the lack of thoughtfulness, integrity and intelligence in program design. I hate how they treat us, the workers, like cogs in a machine, to be replaced when we wear out.

But I've been inspired by truly wonderful people - 25 year old nurses struggling to do the best with limited resources for their abandoned and stigmatized patients, business men and former soldiers who have left behind comfortable lives to work side by side with mechanics, truck drivers, and office workers all over the world who treat them as trusted buddies, and smart creative crazy people who don't take no for an answer. I can't imagine my life not being involved in this world as much as I sometimes hate it. So here I am, burned out from non stop travel to Somalia-Ethiopia border, the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the border of Myanmar-India, and post-earthquake Haiti in less than six months while weathering the death of my beloved father and assorted family stress.

Next up: Where do I go from here? (This is the part where I solicit ideas and strength from the three people who read this blog)....

On the hunt for Mexican food in Amsterdam

2010-06-10T16:54:00.001+07:00

I reviewed a Tex-Mex restaurant on my "food blog", Bleu Cheese and Red Wine.....

On the Hunt for Mexican Food in Amsterdam

Humanitarian aid worker pick up lines

2010-05-19T23:14:00.000+07:00

A blog that I read, Tales from the Hood ran a little blog post about "pick up lines" for Aid workers.

Some of their offerings included:

“Guess we’d better test these reproductive health kits ourselves….”

“Your pipeline is soooo big!”

“Don’t worry: I can do distribution all night long.”

“Care to join me for a needs assessment?”

“Is that a Thuraya in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?”

“Damn, the electricity is out. Looks like the only thing we have is the spark between us….”

“I have a warehouse of expiring condoms…”

“This one time, on the Jalalabad road….”

Taxi driver showed girl his driving license and said, “See? It says here that I’m authorized to transport dangerous cargo. That would be you!” *wink, wink*

That makes me laugh because on my first trip to Darfur in 2004 after a couple of pretty raucous parties, someone started a list of "sure fire ways to get laid in Darfur" but rather than punny- they relied more on the context and the fact that a natural response to being around death and dying is to embrace the very act which creates life. A lot of aid workers are young - really young! Sometimes it feels more like fraternity parties than the office parties of Washington DC. Work hard, play hard is the motto and there's a reason that if you want a stable marriage, you have to leave the field.

I remember a few of the lines on the top ten list but I wish I had written them down:

"You wouldn't believe what I saw today. I"ve got a bottle of "liquor" from the African Union mission. Wanna get drunk?"
"I am scared to sleep alone after the security event - can you just hold me for a while? "

But a favorite from an impromptu dance party in Haiti in March -(while listening to Aisha, the ubiquitous song played in almost every setting I've ever been to) "DAMN, why can't I be French and in [name of my org] France and make love to this song every weekend?"

And it also reminds me of some lines used on me too... but those, well, I'll tell you those in private. ;^)

Best of 2010 to date

2010-05-09T18:03:00.000+07:00

Here's a few of my photos from my life in 2010 to date. I traveled to India - Delhi/Taj Mahal/Manipur/Kerala, Turkey- Istanbul and the roman ruins near Selcuk, the post-earthquake devastation of Haiti -Port-au-Prince and Carrefour, Edinburgh Scotland, a nice trip with my sister to Charleston South Carolina, and a bike ride with friends through the Tulip Fields of Holland.

This and that

2010-05-09T15:40:00.001+07:00

Just an update on what is going on since my posts from Haiti - I removed the posts due to concerns from the place where I work - I will be looking at them again and seeing if I can repost them after editing them as I do not like the idea of being censored about writing about what I feel.

What's been going on since January 2010:
While preparing to return to India around the anniversary of my father's death, the Haiti earthquake struck. As I had worked in Haiti for a few years in the past, I was really horrified but luckily, the people I care about there were fine. I worked hard to get there to try to help with the earthquake.

Tried to relax a bit in India and went to visit Kerala - it was lovely. Traveled to Manipur, a conflict ridden area of India between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Made some new friends. Had my heart broken when one of them died.

Traveled to Haiti - very intense and media impacted conflict - funniest memory, sitting between the Scientologists and the Mexican Coast Guard in the UN cafeteria and hoping for sitings of Sean Penn and his machete and gun walking around the Petionville Golf Club like the Sheriff of an old western town.

Difficult trip back to South Carolina - my first one since my father's funeral. Good to see Alyson, friends from home, and the kitties. So sad to learn that George, my dad's cat is very sick and won't be with us much longer. Wish I would have hugged him more.

Volcano eruptions closing European airspace meant that I got to spend more time with my friend Rick who was stranded here - we went cycling in the tulip fields and had a great time

Skipped Queen's Day this year and went to Edinburgh to see the town - hiked on Arthur's Seat, ate too many oysters, drank whisky, and had a grand old time

Am taking some time off to recuperate from two very hard years - my father's sickness and death, the crappy economy that has impacted my sister, nonstop travel to some of the world's crappiest places, working on sexual violence in conflict in a not very supportive world, and spending all my time doing ANYTHING but looking after myself has taken its toll. I'm going to be in Amsterdam for a few months trying to re-center myself.

I've been thinking of taking up some new physical activity - rowing/hiking/climbing/tango/tennis/karate/salsa.... any recommendations?

Rape in Haiti

2010-04-03T00:46:00.000+07:00

If you want to read the post about Rape in Haiti, please go here.

Preliminary Thoughts about Haiti

2010-03-23T01:38:00.000+07:00

If you want to read the blog post that I wrote when I first got to Haiti in March, you can get it here.

Bullies at work

2010-03-20T01:22:00.002+07:00

If you want to read the post from March 5, 2010 about Bullies at work, go here.

A few of my favorite things: A photo show

2010-02-21T00:19:00.001+07:00

Here's a collection of some of my favorite things from photos through the years including fields of flowers, cows, farmer's markets books, tea, and hotdogs!

Bests and Worsts

2010-02-07T11:46:00.002+07:00

While sitting in a little bungalow in Kerala reflecting on the sad state of my recent manicure, I decided to reflect on some of the best and worst things that I've learned while traveling these past 15 years. In no particular order:

Best Manicure and Pedicure: Boston Day Spa in Addis Ababa, 2009: My manicure lasted for almost two weeks – a lifelong record! I was served hot tea, had a massage chair, and nice ambience. Not too expensive either!

Honorable Mentions: Washington DC, 2003 - 2007: The pedicure place across the street from my house on 18th and T streets was reliable and fast and not too expensive. Downside: Constantly trying to make you feel bad and insist that you needed facial waxing.

Singapore, December 2009: In a mall somewhere with Suzie. I have never had such shiny toe nails. And they lasted almost two months.

Worst Mani/Pedi:
(Three-way Tie Amsterdam/Mexico City/Delhi)
Near Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam, 1999: They scrubbed my foot so hard they cut it open and I bled, and poured such hot water on my feet that they scalded me. I could barely walk afterwards.

Zona Rosa, Mexico City, Mexico, 2005: Again, the pedicurist believed that my right big toe just needed a good digging to get the nail bed to right itself (it’s never been the same since I dropped an ice bucket on it at Garibaldi’s in South Carolina). Not only did it hurt like hell and bleed, I got an infection and had to lance it with a needle and a match in Guanajuato a week later.

Defence Colony, Delhi, India, January 2010: I could still see through the nail polish after two lackluster coats of varnish and the lady painted over my cuticles. On the way home from the salon, it began to chip.

Best Journey in a foreign country: Train from Fort Cochin to Alleppy, India, January 2010.Inside: chai salesmen, sleeping business men in the bunks above me, and an ambience unchanged from the 1920s. Outside: Water buffalos and green palm trees and canals and bridges.

Drive from Port Elizabeth to Cape town, South Africa, October 2003Most spectacular sunset ever seen somewhere between Mpmulenga and Knyssna, riding along the Garden Route, riding an ostrich for the amusement of German tourists in Outhoorn, drinking a Castle beer at Ronnie’s Sex Shoppe in the Klein Karoo, crossing the Drakenberg Mountains, coming down into Cape Town to see Table Mountain.

Riverboat ride north of Bangkok, April 2002.Trees so filled with fireflies that they seemed to glow and levitate, heavy smell of dark brown water of South East Asia, green jungle on every side.

Worst Journey in a foreign country: Car ride from Nyala to Kass, South Darfur, Sudan, October 2004We were shot at and it broke out a window. Old pimped out hoopty that we rented broke down and the Janjaweed helped us get back on the road. Lots of tales about bandits that got all the cars on either side of us but not us. Potholes. Tense and frightening. Two weeks later we heard a woman from USAID was shot at the same point we were at. She lost her eye.

Motorcycle Ride from Sigiriya to Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, September 2005Styrofoam helmet, aching back from too many books in my backpack, scared out of my mind by the weaving and dodging traffic, screaming buses and 18 wheelers. “A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again”

Car ride from Port-au-Prince to Gonaives, Haiti and Gonaives to Cap Haitien, Haiti: February 2005A backbreaking trip across the moonscape of a devastated land, it took four hours to go about 60 miles. The 2nd part of the journey was over an extremely treacherous mountain pass with no guard rails, potholes and people in every treacherous hairpin turn. Afterwards, the driver informed me about the brake problems in our car.

Best meals in foreign countries:Side of the road from Boguila to Bangui, Central African Republic, March 2007A piece of freshly caught fish grilled over a charcoal flame with hot peri peri powder and tomatoes and onions, washed down with a cold coke, eaten with fingers. It might have been made better by the fact that I was on a 10 hour land rover trip squashed in the front seat with another person and with a big barrel that reeked of oil behind me.

Beirut, Lebanon, August 2006:
Everywhere we went, we would get some sort of street food and it was ALL divine - from zataar filled croissants to labneh to zataar pizzas with fresh goats cheese on them to the Arabic and Italian ice cream parlours where we conducted our meetings. At night, we went to divine little bars and drank "Malcom Lowry's" and ate fresh Ceasar salads prepared by beautiful men while listening to the latest lounge music. All war zones should be so gorgeous.

Le Quartier Francais, Franschhoek, South Africa, October 2003: Freshly caught salmon trout grilled and served on a plank of wood accompanied by a divine South African Sauvignon Blanc by the glass in a beautiful old French Huguenot farmhouse overlooking a vineyard. Downside: My traveling companion had a stomach virus and couldn’t even eat her broth although she tried valiantly.

Califa del Leon in the Colonia Condesa neighborhood, Mexico City, Mexico, May 2006: My first Taco al Pastor - roasted pork served with cilantro and pineapple on a fresh tortilla. All you can eat until you can’t eat anymore. Washed down with a cold beer and eaten on the street corner in a beautiful neighborhood in Mexico City on my first night there.

Camel Market, Khartoum, Sudan, December 2005:Freshly slaughtered lamb purchased and then brought to Sudanese women who stir fried it over charcoal briquettes with salt and pepper -served with a leafy green like arugula, tomato salad, freshly baked bread, and peanut sauce. Washed down with lukewarm plastic bags of water while sitting on plastic garden chairs and swatting flies away in the mid day heat of Sudan. Sometimes the setting isn’t that important.

Malabar House, Fort Cochin, Kerala, India, January 2010: Seafood Uttalpillum (?) – a spicy mix of freshly caught Sea bar, tiger prawns, and squid cooked in a spicy tomato curry sauce with tapioca mashed potatoes served with sparkling water and a Kingfisher beer in the courtyard of the Malabar House next to a Sitar and tambla concert under a full moon. I sat under a mango tree next to a pool of water.

Somewhere outside of Saint Johann in Pongau, Austria, May 1998: I fell off the meat wagon and was trying to get back on. My boyfriend at the time wanted to stop at a famous place for Frankfurters dipped in mustard and grated horseradish. Even though I was a vegetarian, I couldn’t resist. It was delectable and I’ve never looked back since.

Pave d'Auge in Beauvron-en-Ange, Normandy, France, July 2009: A Michelin 1 star – foie gras, a chilled red Sancerre, divine fish, vintage calvados, exquisite service

Castelmuzio, Tuscany, Italy, August 2009:
My first taste of pecorino cheese dipped in truffle honey served with a Vino Nobile. To die for! Eaten in a small little apartment overlooking the hills of Tuscany, an olive grove, and the abbey from an English Patient.

The Royal Thai restaurant at the Cinnamon Lake Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, September 2005:Thai Seafood Green Curry with Joel. “Make it how it should be made” he answered in response to do you want it spicy. We sweated and ate and sweated and ate until we almost passed out and had to stagger back to our hotel rooms. We came back the next night for more.

Hotel La Cayenne, Les Cayes, Haïti, 2001-2003 :
Poisson au gross el or Lambi Kreyol for dinner. Served with a big boiled plantain and spicy rice and beans and cold Prestige beer. Or Spaghetti with avocado and hot sauce for breakfast. Something about that hotel and the food brings back good memories.

Little restaurant near a great small Fado joint in Alfama, Lisbon, Portugal, February 2008:Grilled sardines, a bottle of vinho verde. Divine!

Worst Meals in a Foreign land:
Saclipea, Liberia, December 2004:Boiled cow head with hard rice in eaten out of a communal bowl with five Liberians and a Congolese. “That white woman can’t eat that hard rice!”

ICRC party in Nyala, Darfur, October 2004: Ate nothing but rancid “La Vache Qui Rit” cheese and sandy bread for three weeks, came to a party at the ICRC rooftop and lined up for the barbecue. My mouth was literally watering. The par-cooked goat meat that I swallowed almost without chewing was bad. I had to decide whether to make myself vomit then or hope for the best. I hoped for the best and got food poisoning. That’s when I learned about Oral Rehydration Salts thanks to my friend Mamie and the MSF clinic.

Most Monotonous Diets in foreign lands:
Everything at our hotel in Pretoria, South Africa, March 2004:
All you can eat buffet. You had to fight off hordes of German tourists to get to the food and then it was bland, over cooked, and sauced with what seemed to be paste. Terrible in its nothingness particularly compared to what I knew South Africa was capable of.

Traveling through Kinshasa, North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri, DRC , May 2005: Almost every day we ate beef brochette, pommes frites, and a beer. By the end of three weeks, I was dying for vegetables and was pretty convinced that I had “trigger finger” from gout.

The MSF Cafeteria, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2007-2010:Every day you have your choice of dried out breads, processed mystery meats and cheeses packaged in plastic wrap or odd salads such as canned beans, celery, canned corn, and olives in mayonnaise or red peppers, canned black olives, fake tofu/feta, celery, and raw onions swimming in olive oil with no vinegar. Deep fried cutlets that when cut open are made of spaghetti. Soups that are either grey or brown and taste vaguely like paste or canned beef flavor. Buttermilk or milk to drink. “But it’s free!”

Worst book to read in a war zone:
David Rieff’s Bed for the Night in Darfur in 2004. Will kill any sense of hopefulness that you might have and replace it with despair.

Best Book to read in Haiti before the earthquake:
The Comedians by Graham Greene. I was reading it all night and woke up in La Cayenne hotel to open my door to the blinding bright Caribbean light. Outside was a Haitian man in mirror shades, a red speedo, with a big gun. I thought it was the tonton macoute. I closed the door and splashed water on my face. When I reopened the door, he was still there. Turns out President Aristide was coming to the hotel and he was in the advance body guard team.

2nd best book to read in Haiti before the earthquake:
The Comte de Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – French. Rackish. Dumas was rumored to have black blood. Keeps you endlessly entertained and is long enough that you don’t have to carry another one around with you.

Best Song to enter a war zone to:
“Rock the Casbah” by the Clash. I listened to this as I drove overland from Syria to Beirut during the August 2006 Israel-Hezbollah clash.

Best song to dance to in a refugee camp in Sudan:
“African Queen” by 2Face Idiba – at the Bulls eye night club in Kakuma Refugee Camp near Lokichoggio, Kenya.

Song I’ve heard on every continent that I’ve traveled to:
"Aisha" by Khaled. Sung live in a nightclub in Cairo, innumerous car radios in Beirut, on an iPod at a Save the Children party in Darfur, at the nightclub in Honduras, at a house party in Papua New Guinea, at a hotel party in Mumbai, India.

Books I didn’t like about places I’ve been to:
The Catastrophist, Kinshasa, Congo. All I remember is that the author kept describing the so called irresistible woman as having extremely thin hair. What woman wants to be described by a man who is obsessed with her as having thinning hair? Why did that even occur to the author as a way to describe the heroine? There was something in there about someone spitting in someone’s face. Everyone was annoying and I wanted everyone to die by the end of it.

The God of Small Things, Kerala, India. At this point, I don't know why I didn't like it but I recall not liking it.

Books I did like about places I’ve been to:
Anil’s ghost in Sri Lanka
The English Patient in Tuscany, Italy
The Comedians, Haiti
The Heart of the Matter, Sierra Leone
Country of my Skull, South Africa
Berlin by Anthony Beevor, Berlin, Germany

Eat, Pray, Love?

2010-01-26T13:53:00.000+07:00

Have I been subconsciously impacted by Eat, pray, Love? I was making folders to organize my holiday plans in Istanbul and India when I noticed I had four holiday destination folders: Iowa, India, Istanbul, and Italy. If Elizabeth Gilbert went to Italy to eat, India to pray, and Indonesia to love - what have I got? Iowa for family, Italy to eat, India to mourn, and Istanbul to breathe? Have I got a book deal here somehow????

Mother India

2010-01-25T13:26:00.000+07:00

I haven't enjoyed India very much on this trip. I was extremely reluctant to return for a number of reasons - some professional and some personal. It seemed like a cruel twist of fate that I should be back in India almost at the year anniversary of my father's death - again alone on holiday without anyone that I love nearby.

But some friends here have got me thinking - maybe India (or fate or karma) is trying to tell you something. Maybe I need to go away for a week alone to think about everything. I've been in such a bad place for the past year - not quite myself - alternating between manic and depressed, reckless and overly cautious, emotional and deadened.

So - if fate doesn't conspire against me, I'm going to try to go to Kerala for a few days -floating on the backwaters, getting ayurvedic massage, maybe taking a cooking course before I ead up to Manipur for a field visit. Let's see what happens. Maybe I just need to entrust myself to fate and let it all flow. Stop trying to be the master of my own destiny.

Dreams

2010-01-19T02:36:00.000+07:00

I'm in shitty dirty dusty Delhi in the same hotel as I was in a year ago when I came here to do a training. They are conducting all night construction outside my window. But somehow, I fell asleep at a reasonable hour despite the big wedding celebration going on below as well.

I was in the midst of a long and convuluted John Le Carre influenced dream about spies and red light districts and schoolyard friends. And then, like a boxer punching through a screen, a very clear and intense picture of my father. My father in his schoolyard in Iowa at the family reunion that we went to in July. I could see him exactly in his green plaid flannel shirt. Thin like he was in the last years of his life but smiling with his glasses on.

I'm now wide awake. Right before he died when I was in Udaipur alone, I awoke in the middle of the night -an odd event as I normally sleep like a log all night long. I awoke with aterrible retching feeling like i was going to vomit. I brought the bucket into my bedroom and put it next to my bed like my parents used to do for me. But then I went back to sleep. About 2 hours later, I woke up seconds before my phone rang with my sister on the other end to tell me my father had just died.

Now when I wake up like this, I"m afraid it means something else really bad is going to happen. I've been plagued with fear since the Haiti earthquake -afraid to hear more bad news. I am wishing to get there. My humanitarian emergency organization has no use for me. I want to help the people of Haiti rather than lying here in a lonely hotel room in India feeling helpless again.

Sneeuw!

2010-01-11T00:46:00.000+07:00

I'm over the winter weather already. I enjoyed the snow when Alyson and Calvin were here because it made staying home cozy and nice. It was the holiday season so we drank, ate cookies, cooked, watched movies nonstop, and it felt fun.

This weekend, I think I plunged into winter hibernation. After an adventuresome Friday night out (drinks, dinner, and 3D IMAX extravaganza followed by walk in the snow along the Amstel river), I think all my get up and go disappeared.

I've been watching hearty Dutch people strap on the skates and hit the canals. I've seen the snow come and go all day for two days. I've made turkey soup. I've read a book. I've watched old movies thanks to the BBC. I've played with the cat. I've napped. If I had an oven, I would have baked bread. I'm preparing myself to knit and practice my flute. I've reached the end of the internet.

It's time to make a move. I either have to take up winter weather sports, take up meditation, or hit a tropical area.

Frog in a pot of water

2009-12-29T21:31:00.000+07:00

While I was in our project in the highlands of PNG, I was "evacuated" with staff by a 10 seat prop plane that was chartered to fly in, pick us up, and deliver us back to the capitol. It was actually quite emotional - after a meeting where the management informed the national staff why we were leaving and everyone hugged goodbye, we rolled out of the compound in a convoy of white landrovers to the airstrip followed about ten minutes later by crying staff - I felt like I was in an episode of M*A*S*H. My colleagues were worried about leaving patients and colleagues behind and wondered if they would ever return. Despite the fact that I had only been there three days, I was emotional too and even felt some tears in my eyes when we took off down the old dirt runway.

A little background:
In the area where we work in the highlands, its extremely violent and neglected. The people there still wear traditional clothing often and they conduct elaborate tribal wars. Because of the violence, there's been almost no one working there for years. We run a project focused on sexual violence, domestic violence, and surgery for violent injuries. For the past few weeks, there's been a bunch of drunk men with seriously big machetes (one was like 3 feet long!) breaking into the hospital and shouting death threats at the staff. Since we are a neutral agency, we don't use armed guards so all we can do when they come in is lock ourselves in the compound.

Since the authorities woudn't do anything about security, management decided to "send a signal"by evacuating the staff. The community was so pissed off at the authorities for problems in the past that they sent 20 people to kill the CEO with machetes and spears three months ago. So security is a big issue. But the people in PNG are very emotional - it was hard to communicate what the "signal"was that we were sending...
the community was also incensed that we were leaving so they staged a demonstration outside the hospital threatening to burn the place down. Which we were afraid they might do. So as we were packing up on Tuesday night for our 11am evacuation flight, we heard gunshots from right outside of our "doublewide" trailor (or prefab house as its called in PNG) where we were staying. The radio handsets that we are all required to carry with us everywhere went off and we were told that we had to hunker down.

It's been a while since I heard gunshots... in DC, it wasn't that unusual but in Amsterdam, if I hear that sound, I assume its a car backfiring. I've grown accustomed to peace - even though I work in war zones. On the Ethiopia-Somalia border, I saw men running around with automatic weapons but I don't recall hearing shots.

I was staying with a psychologist and a doctor in the prefab house and we had all been chatting as we packed so we all went into the hallway and sat on the floor while our unarmed guards went out to investigate. Then there was another gunshot from closer to our house. We realized that we had the door to our house still wide open but were too afraid to run past all the windows to close it. So we decided to crawl into the shower and sat there for thirty minutes until we got the all clear. Since the UK doctor was listening to Kelly Clarkson whle she was packing, we had to continue to listen to it while we sat there wondering what was going on. So I got to contemplate the fact that I might be killed by a crazy drunk man while sitting in a shower of a doublewide lstening to Kelly Clarkson. Not exactly how I thought I would check out.

In the end, it it was all fairly uneventful. Supposedly the police were "checking their weapons" or one of the drunk dudes that has been harrassing the hospital was in an altercation with another guy and someone pulled a gun. Everyone seemed to think it was fairly uneventful and we had some laughs about sitting in the shower later on. But now that I think about it, I feel more like the frog in the pot of water that doesn't know how hot its gotten until its boiled. The violence in Papua New Guinea is so pervasive that it's hard to see it. The people are so sweet and friendly and nice but there is a potent brew of an unfamiliar culture based on payback and revenge and home brew that gets angry men drunk faster.

Sometimes I think about the risks that I take in my line of work. In general, I have a higher than normal tolerance for risk, I suppose. But sometimes I think that I have become immune to thinking about danger which is a bit scary. I wasn't really scared when we were crouched on the floor, I stayed calm and we thought of options. I remember being scared in Lebanon when the bombing started and I realized I had no idea what to do if the building I was in was bombed. Preparation has always helped me feel calm - if I know what I'm supposed to do, I can just go on auto pilot. But in PNG, I felt scared in the nightclub in Lae but not in the hospital compound in Tari.

Friday night in Papua New Guinea

2009-12-13T04:58:00.003+07:00

“I shot the sheriff but I swear it was in self defense“

Went out to the Yacht club in Lae which is filled with fat old white Australian men sitting drinking numerous draft beers and getting drunk. We go because the drinks are cheap and there is a breeze from the sea. Three women, a woman from India, a woman from Germany, and I sit gossiping about work, gossiping about men, talking about our lives – an unusual sight in Papua New Guinea – there is no man there to protect us, to hover over us, to tell us what to do. So the Papuan women are intrigued and always come to talk to us. One comes over – she’s lovely, dressed well, very drunk. She starts off telling us about how she is being forced to do things she doesn’t want to do - things that she wishes she wasn’t doing. We’re concerned and waiting to hear what is going on. But she instead talks about being unable to get pregnant, about having irregular periods, about being unable to conceive and how sad she feels because she has the money because she’s married to a white man, to go to a local clinic and get a d&c. I still wonder what she’s trying to tell us. We encourage her to visit us at the sexual violence clinic. She says she works near by and has heard about us. We never mention the word Sexual Violence.

She leaves and we all look at each other – we were thinking the same thing. We start talking about leaving pamphlets in the bathroom so the women who work here and the women married to expat men can read them in private and know where to go for help.

Anyway, its Friday night. The other women have been working for five days straight treating about 25 women who have been brutally beaten by their husbands, raped by strangers, and have brought in their children who have been sexually molested. I’m tired because my brain has been stretched to its limit by an American doctor who wants everyting NOW and challenges me. I am happily tired. Rather have this than ridiculous office politics. We’re drinking gin and tonics and looking at the mountains that meet the Pacific ocean and the big moon. The mental health counselor tells us about a karaoke night nearby at a place called the Melanesian Inn. Supposedly the nurse and the logistician got pissed and sang “Bohemian Rhapsody” there, completely unaware that a video was playing behind them of women in bikinis holding bananas and riding elephants seductively.

We’ve got to see it. We’ve got to go there! I have to see a karaoke place where women hold bananas suggestively. I always forget what they are really like. So we drive over in our big white humanitarian Jeep, I hope out of the back in my pink sundress, clambering down the back step with my gold strappy sandals. We walk in – 15 kina charge! Outrageous (that’s almost 3 dollars! And beers are only 1 dollar 50). But they wave us in – three single women! We walk in to an intense punch of the scent of cigarette smoke, body odor, and what smells like barely disguised sexual frustration and anger. I’m suddenly aware of the vulnerable position we are in. I’m not used to it. In my countries, in general, I can wear skimpy sundresses to bars and dance and talk to men, and no one is going to drag me off into the bushes and rape me. I’m a little nervous, I hve to admit. I feel vulnerable with four gin and tonics in me and nothing between me and my modesty but a cotton sundress. I didn’t dress provocatively – it was so hot and humid so I wore the dress because it’s lighter than cargo pants and a tshirt.

We are the only non Papuans in the place. The music is nice but the man are DRUNK and the women start to cluster towards us. They are all prostitutes. It’s been my experience that prostitutes tend to be the nicest women in the world (with the exception of those on 13th Street NW in DC in 1996 but that’s another story). These Papuan women who are almost certainly on the game come and sit with us – eager to talk to women and chat with us and find out what is going on. “Me no savvy English, me talk talk pidgin” says one. One, who is smoking a small cigar keeps kissing my hand and smiling at me. They are funny and nice. We order a round of drinks.

Suddenly a band strikes up – keyboard, bass guitar, guitar, drummer, and two singers. They are singing John Fogerty’s Centerfield. “Put me in coach, I’m ready to play!”- we get up and dance. The music is surpsingly good. A very short mideget like man comes up to dance with us – he dances in ecstasy with his hands in the air, maintaining a safe distance. One of the prostitutes begins to grind against me. To Centerfield! I dance away. The woman who has lived here six months is laughing hysterically looking at our faces as we find ourselves danced against the wall by the female prostitutes. The band begins to play “I saw her Standing there” by the Beatles. We keep dancing. Some men come up and dance too close – a security guard eases on up and puts their arms on the men and whispers in their ear – the men back off. I wish they had that service in the US. Dutch men are so cold, they never dance too close.

We feel protected – we dance and sing as the band moves into Bob Marley – I shot the Sheriff – an ironic song given the violence in Papua New Guinea. But an awesome version! The singer has a great voice. And then into … of course… no party is complete without it – “No Woman No Cry”. But still the female prostitute is kissing my friends arms and grinding against me. We decide to take a break to have another beer. And then! The Drifters! The music of my youth in South Carolina – at Camp Saint Christopher, at the Swan Lake Dance competitions, at Myrtle Beach – at school dances. I have to dance to this. The other girls don’t want to dance so I find myself on a dance floor with two prostitutes and four men, dancing and trying to shag to “Under the Boardwalk” . I twist and turn and try to spin the prostitute but she seems unable to follow my guidance and keeps trying to grind. So I sing – UNDER THE BOARDWALK – DOWN BY THE SEA- UNDER THE BOARDWALK- ….

A man starts screaming – two men carry him out on their shoulders as he twists and thrashes about. The men start circling closer and closer. The guards are eyeing us nervously. A giant huge man with hands twice the size of me comes up to talk tome. He’s a local Rugby player. He won’t admit it at first and when I ask him what he does, he says, he’ll tell me later insinuating all kinds of things. He has great dimples. It’s midnight. Another drunk falls over a stool and lands on the floor. The prostitutes are gathering again –their betel nut stained teeth shining against their dark skin in the black light. The smell of unwashed and sweaty skin is overwhelming and the fans aren’t helping ventilate – just pushing the smell closer and closer to me. I’m getting nervous again – so we leave.

As we walk up to our driver with his humanitarian logo embossed vest and our giant white SUV, he tells us there is still a fight going on – the man who was thrown out of the bar! We can’t resist. We have to go look. There are five security guards still watching. We climb in to the car and head home at midnight – one more hour before curfew but it feels prudent to go home now. Just another Friday night in Lae, Papua New Guinea.

More shopping in Singapore

2009-12-08T16:58:00.000+07:00

Turtles for sale in a bucket in the seafood section - not for pets!

The "Smoking Kills" folks in Singapore are strict - photos of people in advanced stages of cancer and miscarried fetuses!

Frogs for sale in the seafood section too. Those legs look pretty small

Fresh crabs!!!! So nice!

And of course, Jackie Chan herbal shampoo.

Shopping in Singapore

2009-12-06T10:39:00.000+07:00

I've always said, you can tell a lot about a country by the flavors of potato chips it sells. Pringles in particular is very adapt to adjusting to the local market.

In Holland you get a lot of Indonesian spices (reflecting their former colony). In France, you get Roast Chicken with Thyme. In England, Vinegar and Salt, Cheddar Cheese, or Worcestershire sauce. In the US, Nacho cheese, buffalo wings and blue cheese, or barbecue.

This is what I saw in Singapore

Deli

Sunday evenings

2009-11-16T00:06:00.001+07:00

On a trip to Devon with my friend Naomi, I recently met her brother-in-law, a singer songwriter named Chris Bond (pictured above surfing in Devon). He has a beautiful song called "Our Roots" that I really love. I have been having a bit of a rough time last week - too much stress and anxiety at work, dark winter afternoons, not enough exercise and fresh air, too much alcohol - so one day, when I was home recovering from a cold I couldn't shake, I listened to this song over and over again which soothed me. He has a refrain that says "its no good for our soul" (although it might say its no good for us all!) but I like the first interpretation better.

My good friend Willy got me out of the house this afternoon and took me rowing on the Amstel. The sky was a pewter gray and the leaves that still clung to the trees were a dark gold. It's a beautiful palette and peaceful to be so close to the water. We went by houseboats, called in on a friend of hers painting in his studio, practiced my rowing techniques, and then cycled back home into the city. As we cycled by, we had the uniquely Dutch experience of 20 men in velvet pantaloons and blackface rollerblading past us. Yes, its Sinterklaas time!

So after a healthy afternoon, on a Sunday evening (one of my favorite times of the week), I'm trying to do a few things this evening that are good for the soul.

Listening to Billie Holiday, Louis Jordan, Chet Baker, Blossom Dearie, Ella Fitzgerald, Van Morrison, Buena Vista Social Club and other music that reminds me of home
Cooking with organic vegetables - tonight wild mushrooms called "pied de mouton" and freshly made linguini
Drinking tea while wearing a cardigan and slippers.
Snuggling with Simon, the fuzzy Siamese, who purrs contentedly on my lap
Making little snacks of freshly baked Rosemary foccacia and pieces of Elstar apples.
Reading a good book while curled up on the couch under a blanket.

Tomorrow, I'll face the office again. But now, I'm recharging my batteries, replenishing my soul.

Grief

2009-11-15T16:50:00.000+07:00

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break." ~William Shakespeare

When my mother died in 1997, I was 29 years old and in graduate school. I was dating a man named Michael and living in Washington DC in a group house with three other women. I had a persian cat named Dante and I worked part time at Witness for Peace, a grassroots Latin American human rights organization.

Why my father died in 2009, I was 41 years old and had been working full time for twelve years. I am not seriously involved with anyone romantically and I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands alone in an apartment in the Oost. I have a siamese cat named Simon and I work for Medecins Sans Frontieres, a medical humanitarian organization.

So a few things have changed - but not that much. Grief has caught me unprepared. I thought I could handle it- after all, he had been struggling healthwise and whenever he became ill, he would remind me that he had had a very good life and was tired and didn't want to live forever. I spent three weeks with him at Christmas, cooking him anything he liked to eat, and chatting with him, and taking him to doctor's appointments. We cooked spaghetti together and drank champagne on New Years Day. We had a wonderful time. I left in January, expecting to see him in April.

It's been eight and a half months since he died suddenly. I miss him dreadfully and as the Christmas season sneaks up and the year anniversary of the last time I saw him, the sadness becomes overwhelming sometimes. I feel unmoored by grief. Things I took for granted are gone. I don't have a 'home' anymore except for this rented apartment. Alyson and I are attempting to sell our childhood home and I haven't been back to South Carolina since March after the funeral. My landlady and I had a minor dispute about the use of the guestroom a few weeks ago and I felt a huge sense of violation of my privacy. I just wanted to go home and I don't have one that is mine anymore. I was enraged and overwhelmed by my anger.

When I travel to new countries now, I become overwhelmed by the fact that I can't call my father before I leave and when I get home to tell him about it. He always wanted to know what the beer was like. There's noone now, really, to worry if I arrive safely or if I return okay. My sister and friends care, I suppose, but its an empty feeling to know that the parents who always fretted over my safety and wouldn't let me drive to a Duran Duran show are no longer there to worry about me anymore. I cry now at departures because there is noone to wish me off and I cry at arrivals because there is noone there to welcome me home. Airports which before had been so incredibly exciting and dull at the same time are now emotional.

Sometimes the emotions are so raw that they feel unmanageable. I do not know if I can describe this feeling that sits on my chest like a heavy millstone. So for comfort, I turn to the words of others to assure myself I'm not crazy and that this is a human experience.

" The deep pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost." ~Arthur Schopenhauer

"I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't."
— C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes."

— Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in."

— C.S. Lewis

"As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop."

— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

Haunted By Halloween

2009-11-02T01:06:00.000+07:00

Haunted by Halloween

By ROBERTSON DAVIES

TORONTO -- Halloween deserves a house cleaning. Our strongly superstitious age needs Halloween, but cannot do anything with it in its present degenerate form.
Halloween has been thrust too much into the hands of children. Dressing children as ghosts and witches, and sending them out on the night of Oct. 31 to demand tribute from the neighbors, or perhaps to proffer collection boxes for a variety of more or less worthy charities, is contrary to the deeper meaning of Halloween. The old festival is not childish, nor associated with good works and community spirit.
The deeper meaning? What lingers today is a foggy recollection of the great Celtic festival of the Death of the Year. The Celts divided their year into the growing months and the resting months. The former began on the first of May with the Feast of Beltane, where the returning sun was welcomed by huge bonfires on the hills. The latter started after the harvest had been gathered. The waning of the sun was marked by the Feast of Samhain, a two-day affair, celebrated after sundown on Halloween and on All Saints' Day, Nov. 1.
It was the Christian Church, of course, that instituted the feast of All Saints. The church was crafty about adapting pagan celebrations to its own purposes, and when it set about its methodical substitution of Christianity for the old Celtic religion, it carefully noted that at Samhain the Celts remembered their ancestors and their heroes, and did them honor in a number of ceremonies, including, so the missionaries said (but the evidence of missionaries must always be carefully weighed), human sacrifice. How logical, then, that the old feast should serve the new faith and be-come a time when the saints were recalled on Nov. 1 and all the other faithful dead on the day that followed, called All Souls'?
If we were to take a new look at Halloween, what might we do? Surely revive the custom of giving some respectful heed to our forbears.
We of North America are not so likely to do this as are the peoples of the rest of the globe. Is it because of our driving ambition to do better than our parents? Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?
Nevertheless, our forbears are deserving of tribute for one indisputable reason, if for no other: without them we should not be here. Let us recognize that we are not the ultimate triumph but rather we are beads on a string. Let us behave with decency to the beads that were strung before us, and hope modestly that the beads that come after us will not hold us of no account merely because we are dead.
Today and tomorrow are the proper days for such reflection. It need not detain us for more than a few minutes, but it should be sincere. A few gentle thoughts or even -- I hardly know how to put it without moving you to indignation or laughter -- a brief prayer would not come amiss, and might turn your thoughts in a fruitful direction.
There have always been people who give no regard to their forbears, and it was they who were thought in the days of the old Celtic religion to suffer on Halloween. That was the night when the spirits of the neglected or affronted dead took vengeance on their unworthy descendants. They were on the rampage as bats and owls, ghosts and bogles, and they were not always careful where their vengeance fell. To be out on Halloween was to run great risk of physical or psychological harm, for it was then that the underworld of chaos and death settled old scores.
Wise folk, long after Christianity ousted the Old Religion, kept indoors on the night of Samhain and followed tradition by trying to foresee the future. There are still people who remember bobbing for apples at Halloween parties. It is a method of divination now turned into a game. My father recalled that when he was a boy in rural Wales, girls used to drop molten lead into cold water on Halloween because the lead would surely take the form of the first letter of their true love's name and if it did so he would marry them.
Fortunes were told by "scrying," which was to see images in a basin of water (later a crystal). Soul cakes -- rather than shortbread -- were baked and given to the children who went "souling" from door to door -- the beginning of the modern trick-or-treat. By the 19th century, we can presume, it was safe to go outdoors.

Did I not speak earlier of this as a strongly superstitious age? Who can deny it, when fortune tellers of all sorts prosper as they have not done in 50 years, as sophisticated young business people resort to them, within a few yards of the great Market of Phantoms, Wall Street itself? Has there ever been such a brisk trade in crystals and tarot cards? Have wizards ever advertised so unequivocally in the very best publications?
There are laws almost everywhere against witchcraft but how often are they invoked? There are covens of liberated women who let it be known that they are witches but are anxious to have it understood that they are White Witches, who do no harm and simply get together to invoke the Great Mother, the supreme Nature Goddess, and eat a few vegetarian dishes. Their attitude shows the cast of mind that has gelded and trivialized Halloween.
The Great Mother, who is said to have anticipated the reign of the Great Father by several millennia, was, like Nature, not unremittingly benevolent. She had -- or should I say has -- an eerie, nasty side, and the rout of evil spirits on Halloween was only one of her ways of letting it be known. She had three natures -- Virgin, Consort and Hag; the Hag was rough and, in the form of children got up as witches, still makes a farcical appearance on Halloween.
What might we profitably do on Halloween? Look backward, and consider those who went before us. The road ahead is inevitably dark, but to see where we have been may offer unexpected hints about who we are, and where we should be heading. Triviality about the past leads certainly toward a trivial future.
Robertson Davies is author of, most recently, "The Lyre of Orpheus."

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

2009-10-21T05:33:00.000+07:00

Writer's Block

2009-09-24T12:20:00.000+07:00

I've been suffering from writer's block. I suppose its not unusual, after all, I'm still struggling to accept my father's death and work and its accompanying dramas seem to suck up all the time and energy I have. However, here's a short run-down of all the things I'd like to write about or post but haven't had the energy to do yet.

My trip to Tuscany and the fabulous food
My trip to Normandy with my sister to visit the D Day sites - very thought provoking, particularly since I then went on a course on International Humanitarian Law in Brussels immediately after.
The use of anthropologists in Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan
The encroaching winter time - it's 7am and the sun isn't up yet. I'm not sure if I'm prepared for this!
The rest of the photos from my trip to the midwest. Espescially the Corn Palace in South Dakota and my speeding ticket in Nebraska.
My love for pre-WWII espionage novels

Anyway, I'll try to carve out some time and inspiration.

Still bewildered in Holland

2009-08-28T01:15:00.003+07:00

Even though I've been here two years and four months, I still find things that bewilder me from time to time. Tonight I went shopping for sheets and new pillows because my sister is coming to visit and she's a pillow snob. I went to the Bijenkorf because its a swanky department store and I was feeling flush with cash and wanting to splurge on some high thread count sheets.

When I go there, I realized they don't have single, double, queen, california king and king... they have 90 cm, 200 cm, 220 cm lengths and different widths! I have no idea what length and width my double bed is. I tried to describe it by saying things like "It's for two people and its longer than normal." Hmmm. Then I bought some pillows. They are square - not rectangular. The bed set that I bought has a duvet cover and two pillow cases but no fitted sheets.

It's really humbling to be an idiot asking silly questions as an adult. But on a brighter side - I'm so Dutch acclimatized, I rode home with two duvet sets, two giant pillows, a box of wine glasses, my purse and extra raincoat all packed on my bicycle without a single accident. I didn't risk listening to my iPod during the time but I did think about it.

Tuscany Adventures

2009-08-18T21:03:00.002+07:00

Gay Pride Parade

2009-07-31T20:34:00.001+07:00

Saturday, August 1 will be the Gay Pride Canal Parade in Amsterdam. My friend Alec will be joining me from the US and we'll go and watch 10 Dutch American couples be married by the Mayor of Amsterdam. There's tons of events going on. The Yoga for men logo caught my eye so I thought I would share it with you all. Enjoy!

Ted Gose

2009-07-21T13:14:00.004+07:00

I was devastated to hear that a very dear friend, no family member, died this weekend. Some of you may remember Ted Gose, the man who donated his house to host my father's funeral luncheon. He died this weekend. My heart goes out to his 16 year old son, Art, who I've known his entire life and his wife, Barb, and his daughters and step-son.

Ted (or Teddy Bear as my father and mother liked to call him) was a wonderful man. Warm, funny, smart, and endearing. He had the biggest heart in the world. My parents lived across the street from him for almost 20 years and thought of him as the son they never had. The photo above is from a dinner we had at Angel's - a mexican restaurant in Sumter that my father loved. Ted arranged for them to donate food for my father's funeral. Ted and Barb always dropped by and took my dad out or checked in on him to see how he was doing. He was there to give me advice when I needed it and to help out whenever we asked.

I loved Ted very dearly. I will miss him. My heart breaks. Its just too much. The world will be a much sadder and lonelier place without him.

Road Trip 2009: Of South Dakota and Corn Palaces

2009-07-20T13:38:00.004+07:00

Neither Alyson nor I had ever been to South Dakota or Nebraska. We had gone to Iowa as young girls with my father, I had been to Minnesota for a wedding after college. Since we were flying into Omaha, we thought we couldn't miss the opportunity to see South Dakota too. Unfortunately, we were trying to conserve Alyson's vacation time so we missed the cousins big trip to the Badlands and didn't have time to stop at Laura Ingalls Wilder's homestead spot that was about 2 hours off the highway but I have a feeling that we'll try to return to South Dakota. Home of Tom Brokaw, Cheryl Ladd, and Tom Daschle!

Road Trip 2009: Surprisingly beautiful Nebraska

2009-07-20T03:16:00.007+07:00

My only real interaction with Nebraska in the past has been awe at the power of the 80s Cornhusker football team, reading "My Antonia" and Little House on the prairie books, and my friend Linda who was from there. I had a vague image in my mind of long flat boring countryside. Boy was I wrong, I found Nebraska beautiful. I would even go back although I'm still smarting from my speeding ticket from Norfolk, Nebraska. At least the police officer was polite! And talk about good service, the folks at the rental car agency were about the nicest people I've ever met in my life!

Enjoy some photos from my road trip with Alyson.

The Pie Auction Video

2009-07-19T14:55:00.002+07:00

4th of July in George Iowa, part 2: The Pie Auction

2009-07-19T14:23:00.008+07:00

The Pie Auction

What could be more small town and quaint than a pie auction? I had visions of the Andy Griffith Show in my head. Some dear old Aunt Bee laboring over her peach pie but being beat out by the hot new spinster teacher in town so the men banding together to purchase Auntie Bee's pie for an inflated price. I had big plans to purchase a rhubarb pie in honor of my Dad who loved rhubarb pie above everything. It was going to be one of the highlights of the 4th of July weekend in the Midwest.

The George, Iowa pie auction was held behind the elementary school by the baseball field right after a musical performance and before the fireworks. There was a small amusement park set up in the parking lot with a ring toss and bingo. You could buy ice cream and popcorn at the concessions stand. I arrived with my sister and my cousin Catherine prepared to bid for a pie.

Imagine my shock and horror to learn that the opening bid for these 109 home made pies was $100! The first pie went for almost $300!!!! This was no small town Southern sleepy pie auction. These Iowa farmers were rich! They auctioned 109 pies with the cheapest one going for $125. And they auctioned them like a true hog auction complete with fast talking auctioneer, spotters, and a loudspeaker placed somewhere over my head. It went on for at least an hour and a half. I couldn't even get in on the action for what sounded like a gross pie - sour cream and raisin. That one still was out of my range at $125.

I realized I had been laboring under a misconception of what small towns were like. Being rural and being a farmer does not necessarily mean being poor, I have learned. Years of living in the south and being subjected to "we're going to lose the family farm" movies form Hollywood lead me to believe that in the midst of the economic crisis that was to be rivaling the Great Depression that a small town pie auction to support the school would be an affordable deal. I know that George, Iowa suffered greatly during the last Great Depression. Signs in the museum spoke about "one of the many single men who drifted into town searching for work" and my father spoke about times being lean. But with the age of government subsidies for farms and a heavy reliance on genetically modified seeds, modern technology, and intense fertilizer - the Iowa farm looks mighty prosperous compared to the meager efforts I've seen in South America, Africa, and Asia.

So while in many ways, the 4th of July celebrations in Iowa were as stereotypical and patriotic and fun as I had expected, I learned an important lesson thanks to the pie auction. I think I may now be opposed to farming subsidies for US farmers.

UPDATE:
I suppose I was struck deaf by the garbled loudspeaker next to my ears at the pie auction. My cousin Linda has informed me that the video shows the pie being auctioned at $50. It was hard to keep track as 109 pies were auctioned and I was just anxiously awaiting the fireworks. But the first pie and several others did go for $300. Most of the purchasers were local businesses.

For those who feel that I maligned the good people of George, Iowa by saying how surprised I was that the town was prosperous, I apologize. I very much enjoyed my visit to George and found very pleasant people there. I was surprised at the wealth in a town of about 1000 people but I invite you to compare and contrast it to the farm towns that I've visited in South Carolina where grinding poverty is a visible way of life. The recession has hit my hometowns of Columbia and Sumter, SC hard and the effect is visible with for sale signs and foreclosure signs all over town and the line around the Salvation Army stretched around the block.

As for not supporting farm subsidies - I also invite me to send me info to educate me to your point of view. While the analogy of the pie auction and the wealth of the US farmer may be a clumsy one, I'm still not sure that farm subsidies are the way to go. Feel free to post links in the comments section.

4th of July in George, Iowa, part 1: The Parade

2009-07-18T18:28:00.012+07:00

In honor of my father, my sister and I went to George Iowa for the 125th anniversary of the town, my father's hometown and birthplace. I"m going to post a series of videos, photos, and remembrances of that weekend.

The Fourth of July Parade:
You can't have a fourth of July parade without men in funny hats driving souped up little cars. This is one of the best examples I've seen.

Vacation - all I ever wanted!

2009-06-25T21:46:00.007+07:00

"Vacation, all I ever wanted! Vacation - had to get away!" The Go-Gos

So its the first official day of my much anticipated vacation. When I planned it, I was in the midst of manic whirl of work, emotional turmoil, and lack of sleep. So it is a bit jam packed with activities and not necessarily all that restful but still - vacation!

I flew from Amsterdam to New York City yesterday - seasoned traveler that I am, I think its indicative of my mental state and the chaos I've been living in that I somehow got lost on the way to the airport. I go to Schiphol about once a month, at least, and I somehow managed to get lost. Granted, I shared a bottle of Prosecco, a bottle of sauvignon blanc, and some port with friends at a sunlit cafe in Amsterdam the night before so I was a little hungover but to get lost!? I blame it on my friend Jennifer who gave me a shortcut through the Amsterdam Zuid station to Schiphol from my house. Of course, it wasn't her that misdirected me, instead it was my hungover brain that made me misremember that and head to the Amstel station instead. I had to backtrack and that made me lose thirty minutes as I hemmed and hawed over whether to take the metro or a train. Then I missed the train to the airport and hadto wait another 20 minutes but hopped onto the wrong one. I caught my mistake and finally made it to the airport with only 45 minutes before departure. Luckily, I have an "elite status" with KLM so can check in with business class and cut the cue. Some seasoned traveler I am!

After an uneventful flight where I watched "the Watchmen" and "He's Just Not that Into you" along with a bloody Mary at the recommendation of my friend Mireille, I slept a bit and began to unwind a little. I zipped through immigration and customs at JFK arriving outside the airport about 30 minutes after I landed. Then I decided to brave the New York subway system to get to Harlem, where I'm staying with friends. After an uneventful ride, I arrived at Alka's house to a cold beer, good food, catching up and gossip. Slowly, the tension is starting to melt away.

So what's my crazy agenda like? Friday and Saturday - wedding festivities for Brian and Kevin in Brooklyn. I anticipate dancing like mad and laughing hysterically with my date and best friend, Alec. Sunday after a sumptuous brunch, we intend to drive back to DC where I'll stay catching up with old friends until Thursday.

Thursday morning, I fly to Omaha, Nebraska where I meet my sister and we rent a car and drive to George, Iowa.
for a family reunion. It's the 125th anniversary of my father's hometown and Alyson and I are trekking out there to honor him.

After 4th of July fun including: a street dance, duck race, tractor pull, and pie auction. Americana!!! I have made a special iPod mix to get me prepared for my immersion into my roots and to entertain my sister who is feeling a bit cynical about it all. She remembers our trip to Iowa as being filled with pig farms, corn, and 18 wheelers. I don't see why that is a problem but to cheer her up, we plan a side trip to the Corn Palace in South Dakota when we drive back to Omaha (even though its a bit out of the way). We are accepting other road trip destinations as well. Giant balls of twine?

On Monday morning, I return to DC and hop on a train to Chester Country, Pennsylvania where my good friends Rick and Cat will wine and dine me as we sit on their porch, drink great beer, grill out, perhaps walk around and look at the cows in their rural community, and reminisce. Their kids are gone to grandmas that week which means I'll miss them but it also means the adults don't have to be responsible and not stay up too late drinking for fear of children bouncing on beds in the morning!

On Wednesday, I return to JFK where I fly to Paris.

In Paris, I pick up a rental car and drive to Honfleur in Normandie where I will meet up with my old friend William and his fiancee. We'll spend a few days there drinking calvados, norman cuisine, touring the countryside and fattening up and then I take the train back to Amsterdam.

A bit whirlwind but sure to be fun as it encompasses some of the things I love the most: my family, my friends, road trips, and good cuisine.

Remembering what's important

2009-05-29T01:12:00.004+07:00

It's Thursday night on a beautiful sunny summer evening in Amsterdam. My neighbors are outside barbecuing and I can hear them from my bedroom window. I'm listening to Django Reinhardt and trying on dresses. I just got my hair cut. I'm making peace with my life - trying to obey my horoscope and see the beauty everywhere. Enjoying the sun on my face as I cycle home. Ignoring the scar from my fall in Colombia on my knee as I try on neglected sandals and high heels from DC. When I open my email to find a note from my sister in South Carolina. She's got old letters and my mother's old diary which I gave her after I found it in my mother's bedside table. My sister scanned in a letter that she found that I wrote to my mother when I was so young offering to start doing the cooking and washing around the house if I could start washing my own hair.

Suddenly all the ridiculous self imposed stress from work and the petty dramas which make up my every day life seem so small and far away. And I miss my family. I miss those who knew me when I was 8 years old and thought cooking with my mother was the coolest thing in the world. Hanging out with my dad when he walked down the street to pick up the Sunday papers. Riding bikes with my sister around the neighborhood and putting the cat into ridiculous costumes.

Sometimes I love my life - so "glamorous" living in Amsterdam, hanging out with fabulous and beautiful women, drinking wine in the park, and traveling to dangerous lands to try to help people. But right now I would trade it all just to come home again to 2 Warren Court, Sumter South Carolina and eat my dad's potato salad and catch up on the gossip of the court with him and just be home. Home Home Home. Where I often felt 14 years old and ridiculous but always loved and accepted.

Thunder and Lightening

2009-05-26T14:00:00.003+07:00

There was an amazing thunderstorm in Amsterdam last night. The whole sky was lit up with lightening and the thunder made my house shake and the cat hide under the covers. It was truly impressive in its force. It makes one aware of our tenuous position on this flat little spit of land that reaches out into the sea.

I love thunderstorms - especially heat lightening on a hot hot summer night in South Carolina. But this one kept me up for hours and I couldn't get to sleep. My mind kept racing around the different worries that I have and rather than being comforted by the overwhelming power of the storm and my reminder of how insignificant I am in the face of nature, I instead was plagued with incredibly realistic dreams about my worries.

Getting through the Day pt 1

2009-05-08T16:25:00.001+07:00

"What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it."

— Gabriel García Márquez

2009-04-20T03:47:00.000+07:00

"Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen."
-- Henry Miller

In Memory

2009-04-12T04:27:00.000+07:00

Easter often coincides with the anniversary of my mother's death - April 11, 1997. I was in graduate school in George Washington University in Washington DC just finishing my comprehensive exams. My mother had been struggling with ovarian cancer for about 2 years and had taken a turn for the worse but my father had hidden it from me so I could focus on school. All I remember from that frantic flight home to see her before she died was how beautiful the weather was. April 11 often coincides with the most beautiful part of the South Carolina spring at my childhood home in Sumter. The azaleas are a riot of coral, purple, hot pink, and red with some white blossoms tucked in for contrast. The tulips that I bought long ago in Amsterdam are bobbing in the breeze and the dogwood trees and wisteria are in an ecstasy of bloom. Even my father's prized lilac bushes that were specifically bred to survive the hot Southern summer produce fragrant purple flowers.

Last year I was in South Carolina nursing my father back to health after he had surgery for a broken arm. We spent the day quietly at the hospital, reflecting on how much we missed her but not talking too much. We're not a family that talks about our emotions freely. I took photos of the garden in Sumter realizing somehow that I wouldn't spend another Easter there.

This year, I had hoped to go to England to visit my mother and grandmother's grave. My mother was cremated and my father had half of her ashes placed in the grave of her mother and half kept in a marble box in South Carolina for the inevitable time when he would die and they would be comingled. We traveled to Stratton Saint Margaret, the village where my mother grew up in Wiltshire (now a part of Greater Swindon) and had a small ceremony there for her with her family who were unable to come to the funeral in South Carolina. 1998 was the last time I saw my Uncle Roy, my Aunt Pearl, and my cousins Francis and Rob.

I just couldn't get it together. I returned home from Colombia on April 8 and had to try to get the ticket and everything sorted by the 10th and my jet lag, unorganized finances, and the complex Dutch and UK train systems on line defeated me. So I stayed home this weekend. It was lovely in Amsterdam today. The weather was warm and balmy. The tree leaves are starting to bloom. The daffodils are out. My friend Naomi gave me a bouquet of daffodils (the favorite flowers of both my mother and I) which I placed in my favorite blue pitcher that my mother and father brought back from a vacation in Italy before Alyson and I were born. I went to the butcher shop and bought a lamb shoulder and to the market where I bought some peas and some mint. I have rosemary growing on my balcony.

I'll honor my mother's memory by cooking today. She taught me how to cook when I was about 10 years old. She was a great cook even though she didn't enjoy it like my father and I do. In previous years, I've always tried to cook something special on the anniversary of her death so as to be bonded in memory of all those Christmases and Thanksgivings and Easters cooking in our kitchen in Sumter with my mother (and then my father). Although I am not in her kitchen today, the skills that she taught me (it's all in the timing! hunger is the best sauce!) will stay with me. I'll always be with her when I cook.

The Guerrilla disease

2009-04-02T06:56:00.002+07:00

I haven’t worked in Latin America (proper) since 1997 when I worked with Witness for Peace and NCOORD looking at issues in Nicaragua and Guatemala and this trip to Colombia marks my return to the context. In 1999 I lived in Guatemala for a little while mostly to study Spanish (and drink beer, and dance meringue, and go to movies with my friend Jamie). I always wanted to return to work here but there are so many capable locals who can do the work that they don’t really need many folks from the US to come down. On top of that, the US has played such an active role in many of the conflicts (overthrowing the Chilean government, supporting the Argentine dictators, overthrowing the Guatemalan socialist leader, Arbenz on behalf of the United Fruit Company, waging war in Panama, Nicaragua and El Salvador, and our continuous attempts to over throw Castro in Cuba) that American do-gooders aren’t that welcome. In particular, Colombia has “suffered” from particular attention by the US government. Our insatiable appetite for cocaine has made the route from the coca fields from Coca right up the Central American peninsula quite dangerous. There’s money to be made there and the overlap between political battles between the government of Colombia waging a war against terror against left wing guerrillas with the aid of “paramilitary” groups combined with the money to be made in a land grab to run cocaine, grow bananas, pineapples, avocados, coffee, and tobacco has made life hard for the peasants (indigenous people, people of African descent, and mixed “mestiza” population) who work the land and try to scratch out a living. The US government spends a lot of money arming the government of Colombia to “fight narco-traffickers and terrorists” with little to show for the 1.7 million USD dollars per day that the US Government gives to the army but the longest running civil war in the world and the most internally displaced people in the world (an IDP is a “refugee” who has not crossed an internationally recognized border).

In fact the US influence here is so strong that I’m supposed to pretend I am Dutch or any other nationality besides American. I’m an attractive target for political guerrillas to trade with the Colombia government and I can put the teams here in danger because the patients will fear that I’m a spy from the government and the paramilitaries. While my experience in Lebanon with Hezbollah taught me that its better not to lie as they usually know already what nationality you are, I’ve resolved to say “I live in Amsterdam, the Netheralnds” and “I flew here from Holland” – all of which is true. It’s hard though because my Spanish isn’t great nd we’re not supposed to speak English in front of strangers including in bars or restaurants or in the clinic in front of patients. I mostly stand around listening eagerly and hoping to catch a few words. My dormant Spanish has made a creaky comeback and I can chat to an extent as long as the other person doesn’t speak too quickly. My vocabulary is good by my grammar sucks. I mostly limit myself to banal observations about how hot it is or how delicous the frijoles I'm eating are.

After 10 years of focusing primarily on Africa with some focus on Haiti, Nepal, and Sri Lanka – I’ve finally made it back to South America. I’m learning a lot here. Many of the issues that plague the people of Latin America also plague the people of Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the poor in North America… in particular, the disease of the poor are the ones that have the most restrictions on how you can treat them. One that I found particularly interesting is Leishmaniasis also known as Kala Azar. It appears to be a larvae from a but that when you are bit, injects parasites into your blood and you have wounds that won’t heal on your legs and arms and you can get parasites in your spleen, liver, and bone marrow. The bugs that carry this disease in Colombia live in rotted wood. In Colombia, we mostly treat women and children with this disease because they are the ones who are gathering wood or water and going out into the jungle the most. However, in many of the mountainous areas of Colombia, there are also a high number of Leishmaniasis cases.

The disease is very stigmatized and known as the Guerrilla disease. Therefore the government requires mandatory reporting of anyone who has this disease (violating their right to privacy) and strictly controls access to the medicine used to treat it. As we see mostly women and children, we are trying to lobby the government to drop this stigmatizing treatment of these patients and let us treat them so they can go on with their lives. While I have seen access to healthcare controlled for certain ethnic populations (poorly staffed and run health clinics for the Acholi in Uganda or the Ogadenis in Ethiopia), this is one of the first times I’ve encountered a disease linked to political issues.

The Lipstick Jungle

2009-04-02T06:53:00.002+07:00

On my first day in Bogota (a Sunday), I sat watching television with the head of mission here. Every other commercial was for a fat burning pill or a special halter that lifted your breasts up high so you could have better cleavage. It made some of the back braces I’ve seen seem comfortable. My traveling companion is Colombian and we had a discussion about the different standards that Colombian people have about their physical appearance versus the European and Norte Americanos who come down here. Colombian women favor close fitting stretchy clothes (really, no matter what their body shape is) and wear skinny spaghetti strap tops and skin tight leggings. They always seem to have long painted nails, immaculately done hair and makeup. It’s quite different here than the normal humanitarian crisis where the fashion du jour is baggy linen pants, tee shirts with the company logo, bandanas, hiking boots or tevas, and shapeless faded clothes. It’s sometimes difficult to tell if I’m at a Grateful Dead show or a humanitarian emergency.

She was outraged by the expatriates that seem to see it as a political statement to never bathe, to wear clothes filled with holes, and wild unkempt hair and beards. “It’s disrespectful to the people who make an effort to look clean and tidy no matter what their status.” I agree with her. I’ve heard (mostly men) make proud comments at meetings about how they won’t wear a suit or be dictated to by others. “We don’t wear suits! We come in looking like we have come straight from the field!” they tell me as they sit on tables rather than chairs and stomp around headquarter in downtown sophisticated Amsterdam in hiking boots, pants that zip off to turn into shorts, with crazed looking hair and beards.

The expats in Colombia still wear the “uniform” of faded tee shirt, linen pants, and sandals but the national staff here normally prefer to wear tight jeans, sexy tops, and the shapeless open logo’d vest over the top that can be quickly shed at closing time. The hair is immaculate and the make up is on. I think its starting to rub off at least on the female staff. I found this quote in a report from head quarters to the field.

“Colombia is a favourable country for different kind of (plastic) surgeries. For ex-pats this has shown to be attractive. However, as every surgery has its risk, it is recommended to undergo any elective surgery after the mission and not during holidays. “

Already I feel super frumpy in my baggy linens and tee shirt. I have taken care to wash my hear and apply product and makeup each morning but still the national staff seem to regard me with a sad and patronizing look for my inability to look like I’m on my way to a disco in 100 degree weather with 100% humidity in the middle of the jungle. My preference for organic fabrics and loose fitting clothes is at odds with the polyesther stretch outfits and short shorts here. At least I’m wearing lipstick and mascara!

Small World: Colombia, South America

2009-03-30T08:46:00.006+07:00

I am currently near the border with Panama and Colombia which requires flying from Medellin into Apartado – a true “banana republic” that is a flat hot area completely covered in banana plantations. From the air it is a very strange site – completely covered in the tall banana plants with the fruit covered in blue bags to protect it from insects. After a day of meetings with the team here, we headed out to Rio Sucio – a project with the Afro Colombian population. This required a 45-minute drive up the highway passing ranchers on horseback and military checkpoints to a town called Turbo. Turbo has a thriving fishing industry and we drove up to the riverside that was strangely reminiscent of Ghana – African men selling and haggling over fish with small boats made out of hollowed logs and big old tramp steamers cruising in while women cook fried fish and serve fruit juices to everyone. The organization's boat is high powered and seats about 12 in bench seats and we all wear our logo branded life jackets and climbed in under the flag and headed out. We crossed the Gulf of Uraba past a Colombian navy ship looming large and gray out of the middle of the brackish water and turned into the river. It was a three-hour boat ride down the long river past small communities to Rio Sucio where we run a medical clinic. At one point we passed two Afro-Colombian men carrying three horses in their canoe as they headed across the river to the big city.

Rio Sucio is a city that is at crucial geographic area in Colombia – near the proposed Pan-American Highway and on the main rivers that narco traffickers use to move “product” up to the Americas. The Government of Colombia and the FARC guerrillas also fight for control of this area and people are repeatedly forced off their lands. Small “Peace Communities” of collectively-owned land have been established here but there are few government services and the presence of narco traffickers, Para militaries who regularly threaten society’s “unwanted”, the guerrilla and the army means that people are often forced to flee their land and few government workers are willing to move to these areas. Rio Sucio is a small town right on the river that is regularly flooded every winter. It reminded me of both Haiti and West Africa. The population is mostly Afro Colombian and the loud reggaeton music blaring out of the discos in the “Zona Rosa” made it feel like the Caribbean. I was there to advice the clinic on how to improve their services that they offer to women who have been raped and beaten (a pretty common phenomenon if the nuns who came to our clinics are to be believed.)

The living conditions in the house were not too bad. The ground floor is the clinic with two modern toilets and showers for the eight or so staff that live there. The upper floor has a porch that overlooks the river (and the little toilet houses that other houses have built right out on the river) five bedrooms and a big communal kitchen with a small gallery porch overlooking the town’s main street. One of the boat drivers cooked us coconut rice and red beans with pork that were divine! Just down the street was a small market that sold beer and coca cola and there was a small TV down in the clinic. It was hot but there was electricity and fans – a big improvement over many of the places I’ve stayed in Africa.

Next door to the clinic was a small NGO that supported community health promoters. I was very interested in them because when I worked for Witness for Peace in graduate school, I learned about a book called “Where there are no doctors” which promoted the grassroots type theory that communities should not wait for the state or international organizations to come to provide healthcare for them but instead should take care of it themselves by training community members to provide basic healthcare. The organization that I work for had just signed a contract with this group to extend their services. I had always been very impressed and inspired by the “Where there is no doctor” model (I’ve got all the books in the series and have used parts of “where there is no doctor for women” for myself). In 1997 after my mother died, I spent about three months working for a group called the National Coordinating Office for Refugees and Displaced People of Guatemala (NCOORD) keeping their office running until their new executive director came to town. The previous director, a man named Curt W., was a super nice guy who discussed with me the ideology of the Christian Left, taught me about the concept of “solidarity” and “accompaniment” that characterized the Christian Left ‘s resistance to the Ronald Reagan sponsored Contra Wars in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

He was a kind and funny man and we talked for hours about where to go in life. At the time, right before my mother died, I was planning on joining Witness for Peace in Guatemala to work with maquiladoras (female sweatshop workers). He had decided that this sort of human rights work was good but he wanted to contribute more so he went back to school to become a physician’s assistant so he could actually deliver healthcare to the population. He was off to Quintana Roo in Mexico to start implementing the “Where there is no Doctor” approach. I was very inspired by him and a bit frustrated with the economic advocacy that Witness for Peace was doing. I ended up taking a job with Family Health International on the Women’s Studies Project where I worked on clandestine contraceptive use in Mali, the impact of being infertile in Egypt, and domestic violence in Bolivia. While I didn’t like the USAID funded approach of Family Health International, I never forgot Curt and the work he was doing and eventually when my contract ended I went to Guatemala to study Spanish. I hooked up with a small NGO providing healthcare there and met a woman who was also studying Spanish. We spent long hours arguing about approaches. (She eventually ended up in Liberia working for CRS and I saw her five years later there!) Although I ended up working in a USAID funded health organization for four more years after Guatemala, I was always inspired by the work of NCOORD, Witness for Peace, and other Latin American Ngos that practiced real proximity with the people – living amongst them in a humble manner and helping them meet their own needs.

I eventually joined MSF looking for a type of experience as promised by MSF’s credo of temoignage and commitment to speaking out about injustice suffered by their patients.

Fast Forward back to Colombia. After two days of meetings with the team and walking around the town, I met the famous Dr. Alan who ran the NGO. He looked familiar to me – a smiling red haired man with a beard. We said hello in the street and I said to the German doctor I was walking with, “he looks familiar. I bet I’ve met him before.“ The next morning early at 6am, we got up and loaded up the boat to return to Apartado. Dr. Alan was coming along for the ride. I introduced myself to him. We started talking and he told me that he knew Witness for Peace and had been on their board of directors. We started talking about people that we knew in common and eventually it came up that he had worked at NCOORD. I asked him if he was in the DC office and he said no, he was normally in Chicago. I said I had worked there in the DC office for a few months and knew a man named Curt there. He looked at me funny. “Curt W.?” I said – yes I think that was his name. He started laughing, “I’m Curt W.! I go by Alan here in Colombia because it’s easier for everyone to pronounce!” It turns out he’s been living in Rio Sucio for six years working as a coordinator for the health promoters program. He left about four months ago to return to the US to write the new “Where there is No Doctor” with his wife and child. He had just returned for his first trip back to Rio Sucio. We talked for three hours catching up on our lives and talking. I never thought I would run into him again but I got the chance to tell him how much he had inspired me and put my life on a different course.

What a small world.

My eulogy to my father

2009-03-02T03:28:00.002+07:00

We gave my father full military honors yesterday for his 23 years in the US Air Force with Taps, a flag, and a 21 gun salute. Here is the eulogy that I wrote and read at my father's funeral yesterday followed by the poem posted before, "Somewhere over the Rainbow" by Judy Garland, his favorite singer and then remembrances from friends. We closed it with the theme song to Zorba the Greek which summed up to Alyson and I his joie de vivre and love for that sunsplashed country and its music, food, and people.

The Eulogy
When my father was ill last year, I came home from overseas to help Alyson take care of him as he recuperated. We spent a lot of time together and one day he told me how much he hated growing old – that it was not for sissies. We reflected on how some of his woes were caused by his lifestyle – good food, good drink, and living life to its fullest. “Would you do it differently, if you knew?” I asked him. “No,” he said firmly. “To thine own self be true.” And he was – he was always true to himself.

He was born in George, Iowa, a small town near the border of Minnesota where he had what seemed to be an idyllic childhood. He told us his stories of his grandmothers hollyhocks and four o’clocks, rhubarb pie, hanging out with his friends at the swimming hole, helping out his grandfather Pa at the bar that they owned and running home from outraged teachers to be protected from spankings by Ma. But he lived through the depression (and we were always reminded of this when he would advise us not to spend all our money on frivolous things and that a sandwich with one piece of cheese was PERFECTLY ADEQUATE). His father fought in World War II ending up in Papua New Guinea which I recently visited. His mother moved to Minnesota to work to support the family and he told us funny stories of selling gardenias to soldiers out on dates and being terrorized by priests at Catholic boarding school. We heard stories of his working in a hotel in New Mexico, picking apples (and being fired) in Washington State, working in a bowling alley and a bank in Los Angeles. He talked about his glamourous cousin Sue who took him to lunch at the Top of the Mark in San Francisco and cherished memories of driving through the night to come home to his cousins Catherine and the Veenker clan to drink beer, play cards, and catch up on the family gossip.

Eventually he joined the US Air Force- and traveled the world as he had traveled the US. He went to England where he developed a deep love of British culture. He was stationed in Turkey and Greece – we have the old Bouzouki records to prove it. Eventually, he ended up in England again where he met my mother, as legend has it, on his birthday. He claims he wooed her with American whiskey and cigarettes. They fell in love, married, and had adventures together all over the world – from Taiwan to Belgium to settle in Sumter, South Carolina.

Alyson and I remember South Carolina the best – Mom and Dad dancing together and family parties with other mixed British-American friends. Dad would pick us up from school when we got sick and haul our bicycles home. Parties at the house included Dad’s specialties: Brandy Crème Royal, Cherries Jubiliee, his world famous Iowa potato salad and other amazing meals. It’s a tradition to watch Jeopardy in our family and he was so proud when I made it onto the show (although he soundly beat us at a game of Trivial Pursuit the night before my audition). He sat through numerous football games, marching band contests and piano recitals but also went to New York City to see Broadway shows and enjoyed long evenings at the beach playing Steal the Pack.

I received many gifts from my father: a love for traveling the world - he gave me great advice that I foolishly ignored about the tourist traps of camel rides behind the pyramids in Egypt; a love for reading – sharing a taste in British police procedurals, fantasy novels, and “bawdy thrillers”; a love for cooking – one of my most cherished memories is making his famous spaghetti sauce one last time this past Christmas and arguing over how much celery to use; liberal politics – oh how he missed not being in Sumter when a Democrat took the White House in November so he could rub it in to his Republican friends, and a love for music and dancing – including Frank Sinatra, big band music, and Broadway musicals. His love for adventure and sense of humor made our lives fun and rich. He would come to visit me in Chapel Hill or Washington DC and even Guatemala – often staying up later than the youngsters and regularly shaming us on the dance floor. One of our favorite stories is how he charmed a Dutch girl in Guatemala away from my friend Jamie because he was such a good dancer. We had to drag him out of the disco.

He was always surrounded by women– from the ladies of Warren Court like Lynn and Sandy and the Wand girls visiting him in the hospital, to the ladies of the British Wives Club, to the nurses and physical therapists with whom he flirted during his illnesses. Even in his last hours, a nurse admired his fine head of hair – one of his biggest vanities. “Imagine that,” he said to me once “ 80 years old and still vain.”

I'd like to thank my sister Alyson who brought Dad into her home and took care of him the last six months. The last 11 months since he fell and broke his arm have been hard for all of us. When his good friend Mrs. Farris gave us a photo from his 80th birthday party the other day, Alyson and I were quite taken aback to see how he had aged in a year. He told Alyson once how shocked he was to look in the mirror and see that he had become an old man overnight. Whenever we would be worried that he was becoming a hermit, traveling only to Aldi’s and the library, we would suggest he try out the senior center. He would tell us with great outrage that he didn’t want to hang out with old people and he was CERTAINLY not going to learn small engine repair or whatever scut work they palmed off on old folks.

Alyson and I hated having his freedom curtailed and leaving his beloved house in Sumter. Moving to Columbia was difficult for all of us. However, even in his last months with us, we still enjoyed our family pleasures of watching “obscure Irish dramas”, arguing about politics, visiting with dear friends like the Arndts and Farris’ for gossip and British treats, and cooking elaborate breakfasts with both bacon AND sausage. While his death came as a shock to Alyson and I, we both feel some sort of peace in our grief, because he is reunited with our mother who he loved, and won’t have to suffer the indignities of old age any more. We can both imagine him now, dancing and laughing and enjoying all the good memories of a long life filled with love and happiness.

Poem

2009-02-26T16:11:00.000+07:00

A Parting Guest

What delightful hosts are they—
Life and Love!
Lingeringly I turn away,
This late hour, yet glad enough
They have not withheld from me
Their high hospitality.
So, with face lit with delight
And all gratitude, I stay
Yet to press their hands and say,
“Thanks.—So fine a time! Good night.”

James Whitcomb Riley

My father

2009-02-23T14:14:00.003+07:00

At about 9pm, February 21, 2009 my father, Donald Julius Martin, died. My sister, Alyson, was with him and she said he died very peacefully. I am, of course, grief stricken as I loved my father very much. But he hated not being able to do what he wanted exactly when he wanted and how he wanted and he missed my mother very much. He was extremely independent and active up until last March when he fell and broke his arm which led to him moving in with my sister in Columbia and leaving his beloved house in Sumter. Here's one of the last photos I took of him this Christmas when we cooked his famous spaghetti sauce together in the house in Columbia.

He will be very much missed.

SlumDog Millionaire

2009-02-23T14:13:00.001+07:00

I wish this had happened to me when I was in India

Pink City Days in Rajasthan

2009-02-19T23:46:00.005+07:00

I’m in Jaipur, the Pink City of Rajasthan India.

After a riotous few days in Mumbai, racing around the city in auto rickshaws and catching up with old friends at a conference on Sexual and Reproductive Health and being hassled by immature coworkers, I am finally on vacation in India. It’s long been my dream to come to India and I’m just disappointed that I can’t spend more time here. Traveling for work is completely different to coming someplace to travel. I squeezed in a few hours each night to see a couple of things in Delhi and Mumbai but I wish I had the time to see all the different provinces of India better.

First impressions of Jaipur:
·I arrived at eight am on a small commuter flight. The streets were wide and lined with trees from the airport. That combined with the men’s traditional dress and the 1940s styling of the taxi made me feel as if I were stepping back in time.
·My room at the lovely Madhuban guesthouse wasn’t ready but I sat in the gracious restaurant by the pool in a window seat and drank tea for an hour or so and then slept in the canopy bed for a few hours.
·After a drive to the “New Gate” of the old city, I walked through the streets and saw an elephant carrying a bride, three or four camels carrying carts, numerous cows, brightly dressed women in saris, and too many young men trying to sell me gems, rickshaw rides, textiles, and the like.
· As the sun lowered in the sky, I watched the famous pink city glow in the fading sun and saw a movie being shot at the City Palace. No Shah Rukh Khan, sadly. He's my current Bollywood crush.
· At twilight, I watched a bunch of local young men play cricket in a lot until my presence became a distraction and I had to jump in a rickshaw.
· I went to a Hindu temple and watched everyone pray and sing while draped in garlands of marigolds.
· I ate Masala peanuts - roasted peanuts mixed with chopped onion, cilantro, tomato, lime juice, chili, and spices with a Carlsburg beer and some garlic naan for dinner.
· I rode a bicycle rickshaw “Indian Helicopter” back to the hotel, seriously underestimating how far away it was and got stuck in a traffic jam with my pashmina wrapped around my face and watched three Rajasthani brass bands compete to see who could play the loudest over three different weddings right next to each other. Another elephant went by and several silver decorated horsedrawn carriages. Wedding mania!
· I ordered my favorite sweet lime soda and turned on my iPod to sit on the balcony of my guesthouse and relax before bed.

First impressions of New Delhi, India

2009-02-07T18:30:00.011+07:00

Beep Beep! Hooooooooooooonnnnkkkk! Beep Beep!

That's my first impression of New Delhi and one that hesn't changed much in the past 2 1/2 days. I arrived about midnight on Wednesday and the MSF driver took me to my hotel. We dodged traffic (a free flowing carefree thing where you signal moves with your horn and ignore red lights, pedestrians, lane dividers, and giant trucks). Over giant overpasses and through enormous roundabouts we went. Amsterdam and Washington DC are rural villages compared to this place. After coming through a million diversions due to ongoing construction of the new metro line we went until we finally arrived at my hotel, the hotel Vikram, an unassuming little place with a lovely view of the Metro construction and highway.

I then checked into my hotel room. It was pretty quiet... until I went into the bathroom. It's not unlike showering on a major highway. But I'm a heavy sleeper and in the bedroom with the overhead fan on for white noise and the curtains shut, you don't really hear the horns in the background.

After two days in the office getting ready for the workshop, I finally stopped working long enough on Saturday to try to see some of the town. The first thing I did was go to buy some yarn for an exercise for our training. The doorman sent me down to Central Market in a rickshaw (basically bicycle attached to seat for two on the back). I assumed since it was a bicycle, it wasnt'far away and we would be going down residential streets - Nope! Off we went in the little rickshaw onto the major highway that runs in front of my hotel. I often think that the only way I survive on these trips of mine is a very underdeveloped sense of danger. I just held my skirt down around my knees and tried to look unconcerned.

After running aroudn the market and getting some rope (since yarn appears to be a foreign concept), I got back into a rickshaw to go to the hotel. This time, the rickshaw driver found an even more congested route back to the hotel. At one point, trucks, and buses were overpassing us and honking. He pulled into the "left turn lane" near the hotel and we sat in the middle of the largest roundabout you've ever seen in your life as cars, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, and trucks roared around us. Then he made a break for it.

I decided to upgrade for the second portion of my trip and get a tuk-tuk (three wheeler scooter) for my excursion out shopping. Again - back onto the highway and ripping through traffic honking away. All the rickshaw drivers can do is ring their bells to join the din but the three-wheelers have a proper horn. At every intersection, we stop and every inch of space is filled with motorbike drivers with women perched on the back, men on bikes with giant loads of wood, people on foot, policeman on motorbikes with their supervisors behind them, and more three-wheelers. I was so relieved to finally get to the destination.

It was called Hauz Khaz, an urban village that promised to have art galleries, antique shops, and other goodies to explore. After looking in the gorgeous antique shops and realizing that I could afford things I just had no idea how I would get them home. The "urban village" is on the grounds of a beautiful park containing the ruins of the tomb of Firoz Shah which means the "Royal Tank" - which is a reservoir and overlooks a lovely green mandmade lake where people loll about in the grass and chat with each other and young lovers hold hands and gaze at each other soulfully. A bunch of men were playing cricket with some young boys. I sat in the park for a while where I made the acquaintance of every teenage boy in town, I think.

Anyway, it was lovely and warm and breezy and the teenage boys were polite and curious. I didn't feel threatened by them and I heard them discussing the mystery of how I can be American but live in Amsterdam amongst themselves later. After another nervewracking ride back in the three-wheeler, I returned to the hotel.

The meeting participants are arriving tonight and I'm having dinner with one of the facilitators who is Indian and has promised to navigate the restaurant choice for me. Tomorrow, the Taj Mahal!!!

Woe is Me

2009-01-28T18:00:00.002+07:00

I'm becoming more Dutch every day. I had a bicycle accident this morning.

I was zooming to work listening to my ipod with my giant India Lonely Planet and a box of Swiss chocolates in the only bag I could find hanging from my handlebars. I got around the corner and BOOM. The bag got caught in the spokes of the front wheel, I ground to a halt, I flipped over the handlebars and dragged the bike and myself into the center of the intersection and landed on my face in the middle of the road.

Luckily, nothing was broken except my bike and my Lonely Planet (and tragically, the box of Swiss chocolates). I hurt my instep of my foot, scraped my knee and ripped a hole in my jeans, and destroyed my pride. A man walking to work rushed over to help me and helped me stand up. I limped with my destroyed bike to the bike shop that was conveniently located right where I fell. I then had to limp to work on foot feeling in complete shock and embarrassed.

When I got to work (it was really cold this morning), I had crystallized salt from the tears on my cheek.

But the bike store people were really nice and informed me that statistically it is very difficult to kill yourself in a bicycle accident. So I got that going for me.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-01-11T21:40:00.006+07:00

Well its a bit late for New Year's resolutions as we are 11 days into the new year but as this is the last day of my vacation, I'm officially counting the new year as starting tomorrow.

1. Treasure every moment I have with my family. It's killing me to leave South Carolina but my father is doing better and is fairly healthy right now. So I leave with a more calm state of mind than I had in September. I'm looking forward to the big family reunion in Iowa in July.

2. More connections with friends - I really enjoyed seeing some old friends on this last trip. Talking for hours seemed like we had never NOT been in touch. It's good to connect and it reminds me that human interaction is what its all about. It's not about making money, accumulating things, or even accumulating more countries on my "Where I've Traveled" list. It's about authentic human connections that make you laugh, cry, and think.

3. Less time on the internet. I've become addicted to reading blogs. I guess its the same as when I read magazines a bunch but with blogs, there's so much information coming at you all day long that I have to do something about it. I'm going to try to limit myself to 2 hours a day.

4. Being more active. My body is aging every day and while I feel like I'm still 16, the creaking in my knees when I squat down to fix the pilot light or the aches in my shoulders after raking the yard are reminders that I'm not. I have to appreciate my body and staying active will keep me younger longer!

5. Continuing 2008's resolution to be more creative. I started a painting class in 2008 which I love. I'm going to really hunker down and work on writing. I have an idea for a novel based on my experiences in West Africa. Also, some travel stories that I never really wrote down anywhere. More photography. More cooking. More viewing of art.

6. Less toxicity in my life. I have to start ignoring all the people who make me crazy. There are toxic people and organizations in this world. They suck up your time and energy. "That which does not destroy me makes me stronger" used to be my motto but phew - I'm tired of the struggle, constantly struggling to not be destroyed. It's not a challenge anymore to deliberately face off in battle with the destructive elements of the world. I am going to minimize the things which make me crazy and maximize the things I enjoy. If this means less prestige, less status, or being more isolated, so be it. At least I'll have more energy to focus on creativity, my family, and my close friends. "Living well is the best revenge" can be my new motto.

Goodbye 2008

2009-01-01T21:57:00.000+07:00

Goodbye 2008! It was a hell of a year. Here's a few of the highlights and low points. Let's hope 2009 is a bit nicer to family Martin!

Highlights:
Learning how wonderful my family and friends were as they helped my family and me out during some stressful times. Thank you cousins Dorothy, Don, Catherine and Dickie, Mike, Michele D, Calvin, and Chip. Thanks to everyone else who looked after Simon and supported me.

Meeting new and interesting people, great concerts in Amsterdam, and some beach parties too!

The election of Barack Obama as US President which showed the world (and me too) that the US is still an extraordinary place where good things can happen.

Going to Papua New Guinea

Presenting my work at a conference in Uganda

Vacationing in Rome to see my friend Brian and attending my friend Diana's son's baptism.

Holidays in Berlin, Lisbon and Lake Naivasha, Kenya

Low points:
My father's accident where he broke his arm. This lead to a sudden decline where we had to move him out of my childhood home in Sumter, SC to live in Columbia with my sister.

Alyson's broken leg - while in the process of the move, she fell down some stairs and broke her ankle. About a day later, she found out that her company was being merged with Verizon and she might lose her job.

My father's illness - after moving to Columbia, he suddenly started experiencing terrible pains. They hospitalized him to perform tests. We suspected cancer. he developed pneumonia and they didn't think he'd make it. I flew 42 hours from Papua New Guinea to South Carolina but luckily he survived.

Helping him rehabilitate and learn how to walk again in some of the grimmest healthcare settings in the USA. Learning about what happens to you when you are a prisoner and develop cancer or need kidney dialysis.

The death of my friend Sunny.

New Year's Eve Rituals

2009-01-01T03:21:00.003+07:00

On the Millennium new year's eve of 1999-2000, I was determined to have good luck so I tried to perform every ritual I could find. 2008 wasn't particularly lucky for me and my loved ones so maybe I'll try to recreate it again...

Here's a list that I'm compiling. Feel free to share yours!

* Drinking champagne at midnight
* Kissing a loved one at midnight
* Eating twelve grapes at midnight and making a wish after each of them
* Wearing yellow underwear at midnight
* Turning your underwear inside out at midnight
* Walking around the house with a suitcase to travel in the new year
* Wearing polka dots to bring good luck
* Setting off fireworks and banging pots and pans at midnight
* Have large denomination $ in your pocket at midnight to get money in the new year.
* Throwing water out of the windows to wash away evil spirits at midnight
* Throwing flowers in the water as an offering to the Brazilian goddess of love.
* Eating Collard Greens for money on new year's day
* Eating Hoppin' Johns for luck on new year's day

Happy Holidays from Amsterdam

2008-12-21T19:37:00.000+07:00

In action in Uganda

2008-12-19T17:44:00.005+07:00

In June, I presented at a conference in Uganda supported by the RAISE Initiative. I was just checking out their website and found these photos of me "In action" - thought I would share them. See - from running around in landcruisers and interviewing women in war zones, I've turned into a convention-eer. But what a nice convention it was by the shores of Lake Victoria.

For any JSI alum reading this, yes, that is Steve Kinzett that I'm hanging out with.

Gotan Project in Amsterdam

2008-12-15T06:17:00.003+07:00

I first heard of Gotan Project when I was visiting a journalist in Pretoria, South Africa. She was from Uruguay and she was playing it while we had dinner with her. I had Bajofonda Tango cd at home and immediately rushed to get the Gotan Project. I've been listening to them ever since. About a month and a half ago, I was in line to buy tickets to see Stereolab when I saw that Gotan was coming to town. I bought a ticket for 30 euros. I love Amsterdam's music scene. You can get into some amazing venues and see great music for really not that much money. Here they are performing my favorite song which they rocked tonight. enjoy!

Over sensitive? Or insensitive?

2008-12-11T23:58:00.003+07:00

Following is the invitation that was sent out in my organization inviting us to the Xmas party. The party was held last year in the cafeteria of the building and we were all invited to bring our iPods for music. While we always pinch pennies around here - the other branches of our organization have their parties in pubs or outside the organization or have a luncheon.

I was completely offended and annoyed by this invite and am going to boycott the party. Am I over-sensitive and surly? Or are they insensitive? I invite you to weigh in at the comments section...

The Management Team of (MY ORGANIZATION) would like to invite you all for the yearly Christmas Party. But this is not all.. the MT would also like to invite you to join our effort to get ready for the New Year.

How? After five years our office is getting messy, with (empty?) boxes on top of cupboards, old and teared posters, never used shadow archives, and other stuff.
Therefore we feel it is time for a big clean up. We will start this exercise as of 14 o'clock and hope all will join to take out everything that is not useful anymore.
Facilities will place containers on each floor to collect our junk. Around 17.30 our office should be tidy so we can start the Christmas Party, where our caterer will serve drinks and bites in junk-style..

RSVP: Please inform Service point before Friday December 12th if you join the Christmas Party.

Hope to see you all there!
Best wishes,
The Management Team

Dusseldorf Weihnachtmark

2008-12-10T14:25:00.004+07:00

In order to get into the Christmas spirit, I traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany this past weekend to visit the Christmas Market (or Weihnachtmarkt). Dusseldorf is about 2 and 1/2 hours from Amsterdam so it was an easy trip there. Holland's main Christmas type celebration is Sinterklaas (with my pal, Zwarte Piet)which isn't as big on the decorations that recall "Christmas" to Americans. In fact, the decorations tend to be black men scaling walls with sacks over their shoulders and tall bony bishops. Don't even get me started on the special that I saw with a Miley Cyrus type girl singing a song with six back up dancer Zwarte Piets doing "egyptian" style moves.

Back to Germany! A friend once told me that all Christmases are based off the German model. And going to the Weihnachtmark definitely puts you in a "Holly Jolly" mood! We drank copious amounts of Gluhewein (a hot spiced red wine), ate bratwurst, roasted chestnuts, Flamkuchen (a cheesy pizza type thing with bacon and onion!), crepes, chocolate, and more gluhewein. While you gorge yourself, you can wander from decorated square to decorated square and look at handmade angel chimes, candles, sheepskins, tree decorations, angels, jewelry, and all manner of gifts. In the old town market, the altstadt, they had displays of traditional crafts with wood workers, ironsmiths, candlestick makers, and glassblowers making and displaying their wares. But back to the food.... the point of the market is definitely the food. We ate our way across the market and back and still managed to find room for more!

It wasn't super cold, which was a bit of a relief, as I've been recovering from the flu, but we had a lovely time wandering around for two days. I'm definitely in the Christmas mood now - and not feeling overwhelmed or negative like I often do in the US where I'm overwhelmed by adverts telling me to BUY BUY BUY! Support the economy! Get a diamond from your boyfriend because if he doesn't buy you one, he doesn't love you! Shop til you drop! I guess I prefer to eat til I pop!

Banishing a Bad Mood

2008-12-08T20:08:00.003+07:00

Have you ever just been overtaken by irritation, anger, snappishness and the like? I once walked into my friend Alec's office and noticed that he seemed like he was in a bad mood. I said "I sense an air of pissiness about you" and it sent him into a totally terrible mood. Today, I don't know what happened - I had a great weekend seeing my friend Dumiak at the Dusseldorf Christmas market and chatting with my friend Jen over dinner. It's Monday morning. I woke up late, I rushed to work, I couldn't get motivated to do anything and suddenly - I was in a bad mood. Every email is infuriating me. Every minute late people are to talk to me is a minute too much (coming from someone who is chronically late, this is rich).

I don't want to talk to anyone. I don't want to be bothered. I want to sit on the couch and knit or pet Simon. I want to lay in bed and sleep. I certainly don't want to struggle with my colleagues at work and attend meetings and push along my dreary work. It's an uphill struggle every day anyway, and it doesn't help when a bad mood has perched itself on my shoulders and is threatening to make me lose my temper and say or do something I might regret. I still have four hours left in the day and numerous minefields to avoid.

So - according to the internet, here are some ways to banish my bad mood. I would appreciate any readers sending suggestions of their own as well.

Step 1: Decode Your Mood
Sometimes you know exactly what’s upsetting you. Or do you? Figure out what’s wrong.

Step 2: Calm Down
Start by taking a few deep breaths to get your emotions under control. Then choose one or more of the following techniques to help clear your mind.

Focus on Breathing
Take 10 deep breaths. Breathing may help restore the balance between the parasympathetic (or restorative) and sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous systems, buffering your body’s natural reaction to stressful situations.

Make a Pie Chart
Draw a circle and create slices of a pie chart to represent all the things that are upsetting you. Include everything you can think of, even if it’s as mundane as the nonstop rain outside. The act of presenting your concerns visually clarifies things making the problems easier to identify and therefore to manage.

Find a Quiet Place
Ideally, go someplace where you can have privacy to shut down the stimulation to your brain. If you’re at a busy place, like your office or a restaurant, he suggests, head to the bathroom and take a few minutes for yourself. If you’re at home, go to your bedroom or a place that feels comforting.

Distract Yourself
Read a favorite funny website, play with your dog, fold laundry, or wash dishes for a few minutes. Diversions allow your emotions to calm down. And because your brain keeps processing the problem even when you’re not consciously thinking about it, you’ll be better able to deal with the issue once you return to it.

Get Some Exercise
If possible, go out for a brisk walk, or do some stretches or yoga poses. Just 10 minutes of an active and distracting activity breaks the flow of rumination and lifts people’s moods. This leads them to think more clearly.

Blow Off Steam
Call a patient friend. Be sure to tell her you’re not trying to fix anything — you just want a listener. Talking through your concerns makes them seem more manageable. But once you’ve vented, it’s important to let it go.

Step 3: Create a Strategy
Talk to a Problem-Solver
People often think they should be able to handle problems on their own, and they don’t want to burden others. But it’s easier to strategize with support. Discuss things you can do to feel better as well as fix the problem.

Make a List
It should include things that will make you feel better, like sending flowers to your husband, calling Dad’s doctor to discuss his progress, or going to the gym at lunchtime. Lists force you to structure your concerns and help you move into problem-solving mode. Number the items in the order that you want to accomplish them.

Visualize Your Ideal
Take a few minutes to close your eyes and picture what you want in the moment, as if it’s actually happening. This visualization technique is basically a form of rehearsal. For instance, after you and your sister argue, imagine the two of you having a great time over dinner at your favorite restaurant. The memories of the fight will be replaced by a positive picture of harmony and fun.

Blackface Holiday

2008-11-27T22:36:00.004+07:00

I'm full of guest bloggers these days... my creativity is dried up but I'm loving what my friends have to say. Feast upon my friend Black and (a)Broad's thoughts on the Sinterklaas and Swarte Piet festival this year...

A Dutch Holiday in Black Face

Aaaahhhhh. That glorious time of year is once again upon us. Pepernoten (tiny spiced cookies) are strewn all over the place, random shoes seem to walk themselves into stores where they wait to be filled with wat lekkers (usually pepernoten or candy) or a small gift. Talk of Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas or Santa Claus, but also eponymous for the celebration itself) fills the air as do threats from parents of ne’er-do-well kiddies that old St. Nick won’t bring them anything if their misbehavior continues. Sinterklaas has just traveled by steamboat all the way from Spain with his white horse Amerigo and his helper Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). For your average Dutch person, Sinterklaas is unthinkable without Black Pete – skipping about, entertaining the little ones, and throwing out wat lekkers – dressed up in medieval Turkish or Moorish costume, black curly wig, face painted with thick black paint, and bright red lipstick.

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View of the US elections from Iraq

2008-11-26T20:04:00.003+07:00

A note from a friend posted in Iraq about the election:

I woke at 3am in the bitter cold (I think it dropped to about 45 degrees that night) because my heater wasn't working. That adage about the desert getting cold at night isn't just a myth. Shivering and exhausted I flipped on the tv to watch the first returns come in. Armed Forces Networks has 9 channels and so ABC, CBS, FOX and MSNBC were all on.

In all of these letters, I've stayed as far away from discussing politics as possible. But a ton of people have asked what it was like to watch it from here and what was the reaction of Iraqis and my fellow Marines. Moreover, I think this past Presidential election does have relevance to my experience here. Firstly, because so many of my Iraqi counterparts themselves have asked me about it and its impact on what happens to US forces in Iraq. Secondly though because of how many of my fellow Marines reacted and for me its connection to why I joined the Marines. It is no secret that most of those in military are more conservative, and so were hoping John McCain would win. I on the other hand (I'm sure this is a huge shock for everyone) lean politically liberal and had voted for Barak Obama.

So it was a pretty lonely experience to be rooting for the Democratic candidate amid a sea of people cheering for the Republican… While Marines do whatever the President (Whoever that is) orders them to do, the culture since I joined back in 1991 has been one of very open anti-Democrat and pro-Republican bias. Mocking and ridiculing Democrats is openly socially acceptable, while doing so against Republicans is very frowned upon. That is not to say everyone in the Marines and military is a Republican, or that there are no Democrats. But it has been rare until very recently in my 17 years in the Marines to hear open expressions of Democratic support, but very common for such support for Republicans. I think most Marines just swallowed their dissappointement and decided to go on and do what they've always done, serve the Commander in Chief, no matter what party he is. On this massive Marine Corps base here in Al Anbar, you wouldn't really know an election took place other than it appearing on the TVs hanging in all the chow-halls. No one realIy talked about it or anything (except for the occasional contractor wearing an "Obama for President" shirt the day or two after the election. I should point out, that none of my commanders have ever discriminated against me at all for my (usually well known) political divergence from the social norm.

Recent events in Iraq, in the United States and across the world, especially under the little-liked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, have for the first time since I joined, provoked and created a space for open political disagreement within military social circles though. This includes reconsideration by many troops that support for Republicans isn't as implicitly part of the definition of military service as many had believed in the past. Nevertheless, the significant majority of the military remains strongly conservative in political outlook and by wide margins support Republicans rather than Democrats. So, I didn't exactly have anyone with whom I wanted to watch the election returns, even if I expected to be happy about how it turned out.

Despite intellectually knowing that Obama had the upper hand going into election day, considering how the Democrats had become famous for bungling sure opportunities, I was quite nervous even as the returns rolled in through the early morning. Then of course, they called Virginia for Obama just before 7am. I would like to think that it was my personal vote that put him over the top there. And with Virginia, Obama crossed the threshold and was declared the next President of the United States. I just sat there stunned at the edge of my bed.

I sat there, soaking it in, flipping among the different channels to make sure MSNBC didn't just get trigger happy (remembering that such things actually have happened in very recent elections). Nope, it was true. However it was when they reported that hundreds of people had gathered right outside the White House to dance, sing, wave American flags and celebrate that I began to cry though. I was thinking that this is in part why I and many others were here in the Marines, in Iraq.

When we join the Marines, we swear an oath to, "support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, against all enemies, foreign and domestic." We don't swear allegiance to any man, even the President, even to the Presidency itself. We follow only the President's legal orders as we are loyal in the end not to the President, only to the document which gives both the President and us legitimacy. It directs us to follow ALL of his legal orders, even if we disagree with his politics and policies. He is our Commander in Chief, but he, like all of us, is not above the Constitution. That there can peacefully be such a radical change from the Bush administration to the Obama administration… overnight, in one fell swoop…. That the system can work that way, that well, that peacefully, is why so many of us joined… because only in that kind of system can we all have the freedom to live and believe, and be as we would like.

OK, California just declared otherwise with regards to gays and lesbians. But that means for the second reason on this election day, Dr. Martin Luther King's declaration is awesomely prescient and appropriate that, "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice."

And of course this also is emblematic as to why this election is so relevant to motivations that drove so many of us choose to join the military. It is pride in the meaning of our country. When I say that, it isn't some knee-jerk, nationalism. It is not a mindless assumption of "my country, right or wrong" and that we are great, just because we are the strongest and wealthiest. It is instead a pride in the character and nature of our country. Pride in—among other reasons—that bedrock aspect of our culture that is a distinctly American belief in progress.

My friend who is Swiss, and others in the past as well, have noted to me this obsession with progress as being different than European cultures. And I have especially noted the striking contrast with Arab cultures. Embedded in the very Constitution that defines our country—which explicitly set out a path to alter it for the better as our society evolves—is a belief in progress. Around the world, Americans are viewed negatively for many reasons, we are often viewed as arrogant, ignorant, clumsy. But we are also perceived as almost absurdly reverent in our belief that progress is always possible. That no problem is insolvable, no conflict intractable, no destruction final, no barrier insurmountable. My Bosnian friend calls it naively optimistic. And deeply embedded in American culture is that belief. And Barak Obama's victory is—I think—the epitome of that ideal. In fact, for this reason, more than one fellow Marine told me since the election that although they voted for McCain, now that they think about it, they are happy Obama won.

I voted for Barak Obama because I like his policies more than John McCain's. But I think for millions of Americans (75% of whom apparently are happy he will be President, according to one poll, even if only 53% voted for him), it isn't even about him as an individual. Less than 100 years ago, neither he, nor Hillary Clinton nor Sarah Palin could vote everywhere in our country. He won on the ticket of the Democratic Party that was the party of slavery. It was the party of President Woodrow Wilson who banned all blacks from working in the federal government. And the state that put him over the top, was Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. Even if he had lost, Sarah Palin would have become Vice –President. I wouldn't have been happy because of the policies she would have advocated. But at the same time, I would have been proud. Here was our female Vice-President, running on the ticket of the party that since the 1960s has used the term "feminist" (which my understanding is someone who wants equal rights for women) as an epithet. We move along in fits and starts, but we constantly push ourselves farther along.

It turns out actually, that I had any number of friends (many of whom I don't think even know each other) who were among those that poured into the streets of our capital on election night. They began walking, then flooding down across Lafayette Park onto Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House. At first they just strolled and stumbled, then they ran. Apparently they spontaneously came from all across the city by the tens that grew into hundreds. Of course, they were chanting for the new President Obama… and were taunting outgoing President Bush. But they were also there, proudly waving American flags, and then began singing the national anthem. Yes, they were celebrating President Obama, but they were celebrating just as much or more, that affirmation that Robert Kennedy so powerfully stated forty years ago to students struggling against South Africa's Apartheid Regime, "Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny."

Just a couple of days ago I was speaking with an Iraqi Lieutenant about their upcoming elections in January and he remarked about how corrupt the Iraqi government was and that he wanted a "great democracy like America's." I tried to explain that it has taken us quite a while to get to where we are, and it hasn't been easy and it still isn't perfect. Two years ago, a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana was found with like $80,000 cash in his freezer, which most likely were bribes from a Nigerian politician. And just this past month the sitting senior Republican Senator from Alaska was convicted of seven counts of bribery.

Then, exposing that American, optimistic naïveté, I noted that democracy is not a place to arrive at, but a path to travel. While the Iraqis are barely at the beginning of the road, they have at least found where it starts and are standing on it for the first time in their 5,000 years of history. We in America, with Barak Obama's election, have looked up, realized how different the landscape is around us and proudly noticed how amazingly far we have traveled… even in just the past 40 years.

International Day against Violence Against Women

2008-11-25T23:53:00.005+07:00

Note: I wrote this for the org that I work for but they chose not to run it today so I run it myself with no mentions of who I work for.

Don’t let women suffer in silence!
The International campaign of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence begins on November 25 and provides an opportunity for everyone to come together to speak out against sexual violence. Where I work is on the frontlines since we work where armed conflicts, breakdown of societies, disintegration of families and communities and disruption of services leave women and girls vulnerable to rape and domestic violence.

From the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Papua New Guinea, my colleagues witness and treat the consequences of sexual violence including sexually transmitted infections, HIV/AIDS, unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion. Our mental health programs also help women with psychological trauma including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or even suicide attempts. The women that we treat are only the tip of the iceberg. Sexual violence is underreported globally and many women suffer in silence because of the stigma around rape and the lack of healthcare services.

Dying from shame In western countries, women who have been raped can get healthcare at almost any clinic. Still, women don’t always go for fear of what people will think of them. This is also true in conflict zones. Many women jeopardize their health and do not seek urgently needed healthcare. Survivors would rather die than have their “shame” known. In the refugee camps in Chad, only 1 woman out of 215 interviewed by my colleague admitted that she had been raped - although many women talked about the problem. After the interview, our staff gave them the opportunity to speak with our mental health counsellors where more women acknowledged that they had been raped. Only then were they able to talk about this painful subject and start their healing process.

Demanding to be heard Not all rape survivors want to keep quiet, however. In the DRC( where sexual violence is reaching epidemic proportions), Women realise that by going to a healthcare clinic, the community will know that they are rape survivors. Yet, they try to get care, sometimes traveling for days to get to the few medical facilities that provide it.

Hardly available In most countries, it is still difficult for rape survivors to get specialized medical care. In Lae, Papua New Guinea, there are legal services available for survivors, but almost no healthcare. In July 2008, I visited our Women and Children’s Support Centre where in 6 months our team provided health and psychosocial services for over 1,000 men, women, and children. I am helping the team to advocate with the ministry of health to provide specialized health services throughout the country. In Colombia, violence against women occurs frequently, but only 20% of survivors seek medical care. Our teams in Colombia treat survivors of sexual violence and also urge authorities to insure there are health services available for all survivors.

Despite the many obstacles facing them, women all over the world struggle and fight to maintain their dignity after sexual assault. Join me for the next 16 days, in making sure that they do not suffer in silence.

More information about what other NGOs are saying:
Christian Aid
Care International
UN Campaign to End Violence Against Women
UNIFEM
ICRC

25 November 2008

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!!!!!

2008-11-10T01:32:00.002+07:00

This just in - Barack Obama has announced that he has compiled a list of 200 Bush Presidential Orders that he will reverse!!!

First up, will be ending the horrific Global Gag Rule which has stopped U.S. aid to going to foreign NGOs that use funding from any other source to: perform abortions in cases other than a threat to the woman’s life, rape or incest; provide counseling and referral for abortion; or lobby to make abortion legal or more available in their country.

Called the "gag" rule because it stifles free speech and public debate on abortion-related issues, the policy forces a cruel choice on foreign NGOs: accept U.S. assistance to provide essential health services – but with restrictions that may jeopardize the health of many patients – or reject the policy and lose vital U.S. funds, contraceptive supplies and technical assistance.

When I worked for a USAID contractor, JSI back in 1999- 2003, I watched as the Bush policies decimated work that we were doing to promote safe sex, get women badly needed access to family planning, and forced organizations struggling to do good work in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to make hard choices.

I almost cried when I realized that this horrific misogynistic, anti feminist Bush era is over. Goodbye to:
U.S. trying to undermine international agreement on women such as the UN Commission on the Status of Women in March 2005 where the US stood alone in trying to undermine international consensus at the United Nations. The U.S. delegation spent a full week focused on its anti-abortion amendment to the one-page reaffirmation of Beijing. In spite of vigorous lobbying on the part of the U.S. delegation, countries of the world stood firm in rejecting the U.S. language.

In March 2004, the USA was the only one of 38 country delegations to oppose a declaration to ensure greater access to reproductive health services, greater efforts at HIV/AIDS prevention, and the protection of reproductive rights for all.

In December 2002—the Bush administration had made clear its radical shift in policy by refusing to reaffirm the importance of progress on women's health and rights. The U.S. delegation dominated negotiations with an agenda that ignored the health needs of women and girls over the objections of every other country present. It incorrectly claimed the terms "reproductive health services" and "reproductive rights" "promote abortion." Adhering to a narrow and unproven "abstinence-only until marriage" policy, it also tried to remove all language citing "consistent condom use" as a viable way of preventing HIV infection. In the end, the U.S. position was defeated by a vote of 32-1.

Trying to block WHO's efforts to decrease unsafe abortion
At a time when 68,000 women die annually from the consequences of unsafe abortion and countless others are left with lifelong health problems, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stood alone in trying to block the addition of early pregnancy termination pills to the World Health Organization's (WHO) essential medicines list.

Putting anti-feminists in charge of gender equality in Iraq
On September 27, 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that a portion of a $10 million grant to train and educate 150 women leaders in Iraq would be awarded to the Independent Women's Forum (IWF). Co-founded by Lynne Cheney, National Review editor and former Heritage Foundation Vice President for Government Relations Kate O'Beirne, and others, the IWF is an ultra-conservative organization with an explicitly anti-feminist track record. Although the organization is supposed to be promoting equality and democracy for Iraqi women, it has in fact opposed several key efforts to promote gender equality in the United States, including the Women's Educational Equity Act, the Violence Against Women Act, and Title IX, the landmark federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Internationally, IWF has opposed key provisions of the Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), including women's right to equal pay for equal work, paid maternity leave and child care facilities for working mothers, and minimum quotas that would ensure women's representation at all levels of government.

Bye Bye Bush - women of the world, breathe a bit easier... Barack Obama has got it, baby!

Scenes from a Party in Washington DC

2008-11-06T18:52:00.000+07:00