This is a cannon:
Specifically, this is a U.S. Civil War-era cannon. This weekend I went out to Gettysburg with the Tremors and a friend in from the midwest. All along our tour route, many cannons were missing. The Divine Tremor commented: "Gee, I didn't know the war in Iraq was going THAT badly..."
That is all.
Postscript to "How I Spent My Summer Vacation"
When I have returned from previous mission trips, I always feel elated, buoyed by the possibilities of change. It always seemed to me that our trips made a very real difference in people's lives. Today, however, I seem utterly weighed down by melancholy. It's not that we didn't do good work in helping people to restore their homes. But this:
is going to happen again and again. It's not a matter of "if" another hurricane. It's a matter of "when." And it feels very much like the government just doesn't care. They expect, almost demand, that someone else pick up the pieces. So people are just haphazardly picking up the pieces the best they can--what kind of a beneficent model of democratic governing is that?
Today, as I ran errands, I saw people in line at Citibank and Starbuck's and the Gap. I just wasn't in the mood to participate in our New York City understanding of "cultural capital." After 9/11, one of the things Guiliani told us all to do to help was to keep shopping so that the economy didn't nose dive.
Today, I just wanted everyone to pick up and go to Louisiana and think about someone else for a change.
If you haven't read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, it's a good time to read his masterpiece of Latin American magical realism. I've been thinking about the town of Macondo where it rains for years & year as the weather and the plot line intersect. For me, fiction is often a good way to make sense of the events around me. For the last three days, all of the news outlets have been bombarding the air waves, our television screens, and our computer screens with images and stories of last year's Hurricane Katrina disaster.
So as the news simultaneously brings us word of Hurricanes Ernesto and John bearing down, where can I even start in talking about the ravages of a year of loss and devastation? I am just back from Louisiana where I spent my summer vacation, along with the Divine Tremor, on a mission trip to rehab homes affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We spent a grueling week in hot temperatures (and no ac!), gutting a home for a single mother with 2 toddlers. We tarped the roof, removed mold, treated the wood for future damage, and prepared for new dry wall to go up. In another home, we gutted and installed a new kitchen for another family. Both families have been living in FEMA trailers since December (and FEMA trailers, for those who haven't seen them, are ridiculously tiny).
On the one hand, it was immensely humbling to be with these families and to help them in their road to recovery. As with previous trips I've been on, I learned a lot and found myself refocused on what's important in life. It just feels good to disconnect from the world for a while. We worked in a small town without any box stores or fast food chains. The closest "shopping" district was over 1/2 hour away.
On the other hand, watching people suffer through this kind of devastation with almost no help infuriates me. For the 2 families we helped, we met dozens and dozens more who still aren't in their homes. One woman told me that she didn't know anyone who was back in his/her home. Without insurance money or FEMA money, people have been putting their lives back together one piece at a time. Out of one check they have enough to buy the razor blades to scrape up the flooring in their homes. Out of another series of checks they have the money for the dry wall. And from still another check, money for mold removal. This doesn't begin to address the $12,000-$20,000 they need to raise their homes 10 feet off the ground. Where's the help? Where's the recovery assistance?
And so the "Katrina retrospectives" this week have been getting on my nerves. They are trying to spin the "recovery" too much; Katrina and Rita aren't over--they're a constant part of people's lives. They can't walk away from Katrina or shut off the television and go off to a movie or out to dinner. From Biloxi to Gulfport to New Orleans to the bayous, there are thousands and thousands of people who are living as refugees of one of the most preventable disasters in American history. New Orleans didn't need to happen; more work could be done with building new levees in endangered areas; more work could be done in helping people hurricane proof their homes. Instead, too many of those who were affected by last year's storms have been left to the mercy of volunteer groups, private donations, and the whim of a federal government's disorganized recovery plan.
A year ago, many of us in the blogosphere spent time writing about how we couldn't believe the images we saw on our television screens. Over and over again, we wrote about our disbelief that a disaster and a governmental paralysis of this magnitude could strike the United States. Once again, just a few short years after 9/11, the United States again proved unable to meet the significant challenges
At a town meeting in New Orleans today, President Bush said:
"We're addressing what went wrong," he told residents at a high school gymnasium in an uplifting speech that spoke to the heroic efforts of rescuers and the death and despair left behind when the floodwaters receded.
"Unfortunately, the hurricane also brought terrible scenes we never thought we'd see in America," Bush said. "Citizens drowned in their attics. Desperate mothers crying out on national TV for food and water. A breakdown of law and order and a government, at all levels, that fell short of its responsibilities. (via cnn.com)
Telling us what we saw isn't enough. I'd like to see the government roll up its sleeves. After Katrina hit New Orleans, Michael Moore took his entire staff (and paid them!) to the south to do recovery work. What would happen if every member of Congress took his/her staff and went to the affected areas and spent 2 weeks working? Imagine that kind of commitment instead of speeches analyzing what went wrong.
As we were working, we heard a lot of understandable grumbling about FEMA. Here's a sampling of what people on the ground are saying:
Heard out and about in town:
Heard on the local radio:
"Today marks the anniversary of the explosion of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. FEMA has processed 60% of the applications."
At the end of 100 Years of Solitude, Macondo slides into oblivion, almost drowning under the weight of the waters that have deluged it. Some of Macondo's demise centers on the inability of the community to support one another. I had an amazing time working on homes and meeting the families and working side-by-side with them. However, I wonder about where we're headed as a society when we can allow so many people to have so little, and to allow them such little avenue for hope, when so many others have so much.
Action Steps:
16 airports (okay, JFK makes it in there more than once in the to and from home category) in 18 days. You will forgive me my sporadic postings, dear reader?
And now? I arrive home, more than a bit tired from my many travels, but excited about everything I have seen! I will do some narciposting on travels over the next few days as I catch up on the news (Lebanon! Israel! Stem Cells!). So much to say, so much to catch up on. For my first travelogue, however, I will focus on a category called "weird things in airports." The cover of this week's Time Out New York features a vending machine with beer. (They are thinking about cool ideas to steal from other cities)
But, the Atlanta airport offered something even weirder: the iPOD Vending Machine. I kid you not. With a 4 hour layover in the airport, Lingual Y and I had ample time to roam the corridors of the airport and behold:
the iPod Vending Machine. For $199.00 (a bargain!), you can walk away with an iPod for your next flight. Even weirder? People actually lined up to use it. (How do I get that life, where I have an extra $200.00 for a "splurge" in the airport?).
Yes folks, the iPod Vending Machine. It reminds me of the scene in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats when the young woman buys a condom at a vending machine and looks over all of the other available products in the vending machine row. Japanese vending machines are ubiquitous. Japan-Guide.com reports that Japan has 1 vending machine for every 23 people, selling products such as:
"alcoholic beverages and cigarettes are also numerous. Many more varieties of vending machines can be found in smaller numbers. They sell goods such as ice cream, rice, instant cameras, cup noodles and even omikuji, the small fortune telling slips of paper sold at shrines and temples."
Beer? iPods? Condoms (well, okay, I actually think that one's a great idea)? What's next?
My dear readers, my poor blog has been abandoned of late for unexpected, followed by expected, travel. This weekend, Lingual Y's grandmother died and we traveled for the funeral.
We were home for a little over 24 hours before I was off again. Alas, the travel gods struck down my good travel fortune. Let's just say that yesterday was not a marble day!
I spent 6 hours waiting for the weather to clear from JFK so that I could leave on a business trip. To your left, is what a cancelled flight looks like!
I am now off on a zero dark thirty flight in the hopes of arriving as close to the start time for my presentation as possible!
Regular posting to resume shortly, I promise. And now? Into the night in a NYC cab. Exciting!
Hola de Mexico!
I arrived in Mexico yesterday to a bright, sunny and beautiful day, watching the blooming marigolds blush along the side of the road. We took the bus from Mexico City to Puebla, one of my all time favorite cities in Mexico. I am relieved to say that the rampant global capitalism affecting much of Latin America is progressing at, perhaps, a slower pace here. While the zocalo now features a Burger King & Subway, in addition to the McDonalds that has been here as long as I have been coming to Puebla, the city seems untouched in other ways. The calle de dulces wears its dia de los muertos window dressings as the sugar skulls dominate the visual landscape. The town is preparing for dia de los muertos and we have discovered, delightfully, ofrendas all over the town. This afternoon, we wandered into a high school with a sign saying "Pasale y ver nuestros ofrendas." The entire first floor of the school was covered with ofrendas made for everyone from Che Guevara to the women who have been killed in Juarez to two teachers from the school to several young women who created an ofrenda of "only Mexican and indigenous items" because they wanted to be true to the tradition they were honoring. I feel immersed in a very familiar history as I walk around this city. It seems to weather the change of modernity alongside its ancient history. And somehow, I have the belief that long after the McDonalds and the Subways and the Burger Kings have fallen the way of Ozymandias, this town will continue to prosper with its own traditions and its own particular way of being.
Till the next cybercafe comes along...
On a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, I climbed up and down San Francisco from Union Square to Washington Square to Nob Hill to Lombardi Street to Chinatown to North Beach to Fisherman's Wharf. Let's hear it for San Francisco in the sun! Let's hear it for street fairs and free music! Let's have a little shout out for Ferlinghetti. Yay City Lights Bookstore!
Ferlinghetti, from "Brainwashed Poet"
He dropped his pencil
And picked up a bomb
And the pencil writing backward
Came to a point
And exploded as if it were loaded
With something worse than verse
And he was the first poet
To have his pencil shots
Ring through the night
(You may want to reference A Week Without Traffic Lights, Part I in Religion, Travel for a better context for the following post).
The day after we returned from Costa Rica, Lingual Y and I went for a walk in our neighborhood. Walking past the Gap, Ann Taylor Loft, Starbuck's, Blockbuster, Bath and Body Works, and Citibank, I felt besieged by American capitalism. I wanted to go home and hide. I felt bombarded by it all.
Growing up, I lived in a home where material goods took little precedence in the household. I never had the newest shoes or clothes or toys. My mother made most of my clothing; we received presents at Christmas and birthdays, but not during the rest of the year; Lingual Y often jokes that I'm an immigrant in my own culture because I was raised to question society's values.
At the same time, however, the materialism of the U.S. is seductive. I want to look nice, have nice things, and be able to participate in my culture (okay, with obvious exceptions like I did not join the "majority" in the last election...). But desire is created by seeing. When you're not around those things, the desire dissipates. Guess what? If you don't see an iPod for a week, you're not consumed by thoughts of how cool your life would be if you could just tuck a slim little iPod into your pocket on the subway, thus effectively silencing both the subway conductor and the people begging for change.
It's been almost four weeks now. I can't believe how easy the transition back to everyday life has been. I came back ready to reject my cell phone entirely and now I'm back to being a slave to its every ring. Commercials for Target again look appealing. The new song on the Delta ad is catchy--it almost makes me want to try Delta instead of Jet Blue (okay, now I'm kidding. Not fly Jet Blue? What, are you nuts? Jet Blue= every smart girl's airline).
I was up at 4 again today and already working. I left the office at 7 p.m. The ways we are consumed. The ways we allow ourselves to be consumed. The ways we lose perspective. The reasons we seek out opportunities for balance. For separation. For a new theoretical lens.
My friends called me at 7 a.m. Pacific Time today to let me hear the sea lions while I was in my office. I listened to another world on the other end of the phone and I thought about how lucky I am to have friends who want to bring their happiness to me. The sea lions transported me back to January when I walked the same streets, and sat in the same places.
Four weeks ago, I was up to my elbows in concrete. My clothing was spattered from head to toe
with cement. I wore heavy work gloves and carried wheel barrows. I got a sun burn. I met amazing people. I fixed a roof. I thought I was running away from something. I thought I would find answers.
And yet, I've found that we carry who we are with us across all boundaries. I will always be opinionated. I will always be strong willed. I will always analyze a situation to find weaknesses. I will always want to make things better. I will always piss people off. I will generally react badly to authority. I will always struggle with a desire to be gracious. And, I will often fail as I don't reach the bar I set for myself. I will always disappoint myself. I will always fail to live up to my own expectations.
On one level, it was too easy to readjust to American life. I don't want it to be this easy. I want
calluses, scars--in the sense of ritual scarring--to carry with me. I don't want to be sitting here eating Ben & Jerry's as I write. On another level, I can't walk by CVS everyday on my way to the subway without thinking about what it was like to be in a place untouched by the artificial constructions of identity. Does it really matter what you wear? What you have? I'm not talking idealism here. I'm talking about the ebb and flow of perception, the whims of social construction.
It's not often that I'm stopped in my tracks. The old monkey mind here is always working; as Sarah says, "I'm so tired I can't sleep..." But Siquirres represented an absolute halt to my life as I know it. I guess if you live in rural America, it's possible to experience this. In New York, however, every moment of everyday is consumed by someone selling you something--subway ads, a sap story on the train for some ducets, telemarketers, a lifestyle choice, the weird guy who busted into my class today representing "Student Life" but really scalping comedy show tix. In Siquirres, I was taken out of those trappings of my life; I was stripped down to the roots of me--who I am without things. Who I could fit into my backpack. Who travels with me.
And for once? I think I like her. I like the way she sweats on the roof, the way her clothes get dirty, the way her body aches at the end of the day. I wish she were here now.
Inevitably the beginning of a new semester means the beginning of my insomniatic cycle. Up at 4 a.m. today, I resisted the urge to click "open" on my work e-mail--I've been putting out fires for days now. Instead, I settled into the chair, prepared to write a pithy post on Bobby Fischer. Only, I didn't really know anything about Bobby Fischer. My chess skills basically suck and I get my ass kicked every time Lingual Y and I play. He's doing research for the new novel, which in part will address chess, and so he's been talking about chess and chess history. The other night at dinner he announced that Bobby Fischer was being held in Japan for the crime of violating U.S. sanctions against the former USSR when he played Spassky in 1992 in Budva, Yugoslavia.
So, I rather thought I'd spend the morning reading a few articles on the Fischer crisis and then offer my damning criticism of antiquated U.S. policies. Here's the problem: the only thing I knew about Bobby Fischer until this morning was that he is a chess player and that I really liked the Jodi Foster classic, Searching for Bobby Fischer. His name invoked some romantic notion of evenings spent by the fireside relaxing over a well-executed game of chess.
So, I spent the hours before dawn this morning reading up on Bobby Fischer. Instead of my vitriolic post raging against the idiocy and irrationality of U.S. policies (we can sanction Cuba, but we just love China! Choose the "transparency" level of your foreign policy leveled against random Communist country X, please), however, I discovered a more challenging task. You probably already know this, so add it to the "duh" column: Bobby Fischer is a bit cracked. He's anti-Semitic, raging, unbalanced and well, just a little bit odd. He is, of course, a hell of a great chess player. For more on Fischer, check out Wikipedia.
So as the sun began to rise, I didn't really want to write about Fischer anymore. I was unsettled--at the same time I'm a proponent of free speech--and didn't want to spend my morning defending him.
My day has been bookended by crisis politics. Tonight's WW epi (you knew it was coming, right?) featured Jed and Leo in secret negotiations with Fidel Castro. As the product of a public American educational system, I'm sorry to say that I didn't even know that Cuba existed until I was in college. It simply didn't appear in our history or world geography books. If it did, we certainly didn't discuss it. A lie of omission?
In my adult life, however, I have come to know the world of Cuban exiles intimately. So tonight's WW epi pushed all of the buttons it should have. As Leo, Jed, and various other officials debated the plight of Cuba, the same old arguments came out. WW didn't have much light to shed on the situation. And, the epi ended with a romantic address by Jed to the U.S. nation about changing relations with Cuba. Now, normally, I would celebrate Jed's decision to eschew election year politics and take a stand. However, the epi rang shallow. For once, it felt like WW had strayed much too far from reality.
At the end of the day, Fischer is a genius, but a narrow-minded brilliance that apparently shines in directed places; he simply isn't brilliant when he lashes out.
At the end of the day, U.S. policies against Cuba, and against the former USSR, aren't rational. They instead measure the affective--that intangible measure of American sentiment. How many Americans have been to Cuba? Have studied Cuba? Know anything about Cuba? So, how can U.S. policy be based on anything other than an irrational fear of the "other" ? How is a U.S. policy that continues to persecute Fischer anything other than a reaction to salt in an old wound? And how is Fischer himself a physical manifestation of the deep racial and ethnic divides in the U.S.?
I feel immersed in irrationality--a day bookended by other people's fear and loathing.
A little over two weeks ago, I landed at LaGuardia International airport after one of the most intense weeks of my life. As the plane circled New York City, the bright circumference of the city glowing a bright, welcoming, American-style hello, I wondered how "life-changing" my week in Siquirres, Costa Rica had been.
I do not find myself without words very often, but as I have tried to transition back to the United States, and New York, in particular, over the past two weeks, I have found that my life was irrevocably altered by spending a week in rural Costa Rica. I have jokingly said I spent a week without traffic lights, cell phone, or e-mail. And while that's true, the trip was much more than that.
For me, this trip was a significant reconciliation with my younger self. I continue to grapple with the meaning of "tenure" and what it means to have arrived at a place. As someone who has spent a lifetime defining herself by dislocation, it is somewhat troubling to find herself rooted in a particular place. When you spend a lifetime moving from place to place, it is your sense of self that is the constant. By knowing who you are and what you believe in, you can re-establish yourself time and time again. It's not about creating a new self in each move, but rather maintaining a constant self from place to place. Each place changes you subtly, but you are still you.
Even as I write that, however, I am aware of how New York has hardened me. I'm not always sure that this has been the best move, or the best place to be rooted. The other day, I walked blindly by a woman struggling with a wheelchair over a mound of snow. Lingual Y saw her struggle and doubled back to assist her. I wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't stopped. Sometimes my New York self saddens me. In short, New York troubles me greatly at the same time it was my life's dream to move here. Perhaps more significantly, I struggle with how I have allowed myself to be constructed by work.
I love the disjunctions in any individual and one of my particular oddities is my comfort and dedication to institutionalized religion alongside my radical, Marxist politics. I'm comfortable with my contradictions. I was raised in the tradition of religion as social justice; those familiar with social justice ministries and "liberation theology" will recognize the easy alignment of social justice ministries and radical politics.
Yet, over the past 4 1/2 years, while I have attended church regularly, have worked at my church's soup kitchen and Habitat for
Humanity, I have felt that the church has been less of a priority for me and that
work has been the central focus of my life.
I sought out the mission trip as a time of service and reflection, to get
re-centered in my spiritual life, to reconnect to what's important to me, and to celebrate receiving tenure by taking
time to serve other communities.
So, I went to Siquirres, on the eastern coast of Costa Rica. We went to build a basketball court. And, at the outset, I wasn't sure what that meant, but I knew that the trip fit into my vacation schedule between classes and I was excited to see what this new adventure would bring.
On the surface, I'd like to say that Siquirres is a community like many others in Latin and Central America. I recognized the forms of economic despair; I felt familiar with the community's longing for the United States; I was prepared for the ways that poverty manifests itself, particularly in forms of desperation like drug and alcohol abuse and prostitution. I mean, I live in New York.
But let me backtrack a little. I imagine that Siquirres will be the star of several future blogs as I continue to process this experience. What did we do? We built a basketball court.
I know that sounds weird. A basketball court? In the beginning, I took a fair amount of good-natured ribbing from my sister, about going to build a basketball court. First, if for no other reason than as a well-intentioned academic, I have spent little time engaging in all things athletic (except for my fabulous, yet short-lived career as a girl kick-boxer. sigh. another future blog, perhaps). Second, my sister (who shares my own political leanings) wondered what political change a basketball court might bring.
And I was inclined to agree with her, but I felt compelled to go to Siquirres to see it for myself. I was drawn to the "what if" of the situation. I wanted to know at some level, what it meant. And, on another level, I think I was desperate for some larger meaning in my own life. The early to rise, late to bed, always working, never any time for writing routine was wearing on my heart and soul after 4 1/2 years.
What I was utterly unprepared for was the way that the basketball court did represent social, political and cultural change within Siquirres. As towns go, Siquirres is not a spectacular tourist destination. It's a little like thinking of vacationing in Pottsville, Pennsylvania (with all due apologies to Pennsylvania, a state I called home for many years). On the surface, Siquirres is untouched. It lies in the center of the banana plantations of Costa Rica. Many of the townsfolk are employed at the banana or pineapple plantations that dot the countryside. There is no McDonald's, no Walmart, no Subway, no Citibank, no Gap, no Banana Republic (ironic, no?), no Barnes and Noble. All of the ways that most Americans have come to construct their lives simply aren't options there. In part, I think, Siquirres is so far removed from the economic structures of American capitalism that those companies simply wouldn't invest in Siquirres. There's no money to be made. And, much like New York, Siquirres has its troubles.
We were invited by the local congregation. They are growing a youth ministry at an astonishing rate--from 4 youth to 30 in less than a year. These youth have a vision for changing their community; they want to invest in and begin to revitalize their community. They wanted a basketball court. And we arrived, en masse, to make that happen. Now, I want to be clear: the basketball court would have happened with or without us. It happened faster because we were there.
The youth of the church have a vision to change their community. Siquirres has, as a central part of its downtown, 2 soccer fields. And, as the Lonely Planet will tell you, those soccer fields have been taken over, particularly at night, by the local drug lords. On our second day there, we went out with the youth to a local bar to see what the night scene looked like. From inside the bar, which sat on the soccer field, the drug dealers lined the soccer field's border. Ominously, they weren't aggressive, they were expectant.
And the youth want to take their town back. So the basketball court become a site for social, cultural, and political change. They want to offer their friends, and other youth in the community, a safe place to play. They want to offer drug & alcohol programming; they want to start job training; they want to build a cafe to sell drinks and food. So we arrived to build a basketball court. It took a week and we finished 3/4 of the court, which the youth have now finished (after our return to the States).
I think I found what I was looking for in Siquirres. I found a work that was real. There's a profound difference between being able to measure the feet of concrete you've laid in a single day or the way the roof doesn't leak at night because you've patched it; it's work that has a tangible, immediate effect. Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I wonder how much change I make grading one essay at a time.
It's been two weeks and I still have trouble finding words to explain where I've been and what I've done. In my life so far, I've been very lucky to travel far and wide. I love to be in new places & to experience new things. Often, though, traveling for me is a little like playing "dress up" as a kid. I like to take on the identity of a new place for a while, see how it suits. My Siquirres trip, however, was not a new identity, but a challenge to my continued identity. Siquirres challenged who I am at the core of every one of my categories for understanding myself. I had to negotiate language, culture, gender, sexuality, ability, race, class, religion, and nationality. The trip was about community-building, both among our team and among our new friends in Siquirres. I knew that my world had begun to shift subtly as the plane landed. What I felt most, although I was glad to return to family and friends, was a profound sense of loss. I felt both like I was abandoning my new friends and like I was abandoned in New York--back to life as I know it, but wondering what it all means. What I hope? That I can begin to reconstruct my own ways of understanding what hope means in a community and how communities can change themselves. The lesson of Siquirres? In part, not to teach, but to remember how to be a student.
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