Thursday, December 4, 2008

Of expired snicky-snacks and not-so-hungry hogs.

Much of my pre-Peace Corps days – when not reading up on Zambia or writers’ groups – are spent in an organic discount odds-and-ends shop known as Deals and Steals. A cult favorite among Northamponites, Deals and Steals provides the liberal masses with their wheat germ, Terra Chips, and coconut milk without breaking too much into the college-student/NGO-slave laborer piggy bank.

Our clientele ranges from the super-green young professionals; the lunch-snack-hording mommies; the mac-and-cheese consuming hippie/hipster artists; and the plain 99-cent-max-purchase town destitute. So how is this wonderful store able to provide such deep discounts on bulk granola, Fair Trade chocolate and organic olive oil, you ask? Some products make it to our shop on Pearl Street from the wreckages of small businesses now folded. Others are overstock or damages from the big box health stores – Trader Joes, Whole Foods. Still more are items that have been discontinued. Stock up on your shitake mushroom pad thai now because you’ll never be seeing that again. Most, though, of our items are simply out-of-code, especially the .99 cent collection of chips, cereals, cookies, crackers and bars that line the Bargain Wall. Still taste good, perhaps a bit on the hard side approaching June or July. Just old. Expired. Past their prime.

So I spend most of my days looking at dates. Yes, I am paid a meager sum per hour to do what my Grandmother has turned into an obsessive-compulsive neurosis – check expiration codes. Old items get one price based on how far past the good date they are, and in-date items get another. Really old items get placed in donation bins that get picked through weekly by Food Not Bombs or eaten by hungry health-food-lovin’ employees. (No names here.)

You learn two things working in Deals and Steals. One – that time is a continuously moving evil force of nature. Two – that the act of filling America’s pantries and tables has spawned a vicious culture of all its own.

First, time. As I said before, I spend most of my days battling dates. In-date things on the shelf go out of date. Prices need to be changed. Out-of-date things go too far out of date. Products need to be pulled and thrown into donation bins. Incoming products need to be pulled out of (excess) packaging and evaluated. How long ago was August? June? March? Wasn’t summer just around the corner? Is July really five months dead? Is it December 4 today? Surely you’re wrong? I just put those cookies up a week ago. They can’t be bad yet.

Dates have become my constant reminder of Africa. So long has passed since graduation, since summer, since fall. I calculate these months on my fingers and the memories seem like yesterday. But the food is already bad. Those lucky in-date few transport me to where I will be when they make their migration to the Bargain Wall. Mar 13 09 – what then? A recent email from the Peace Corps, bumping my departure date up to February 17, hasn’t helped the expiration contemplation.

Time is relentless. Constantly the food is going stale. Quicker than we can eat it. We are selling it for ninety-nine cents, buy one get one free and still it will go bad. It will wind up in the donation bins in the back and when it goes quite old, it will be taken by a local farmer to feed his pigs. We are a small store, barely bigger than my bedroom thrice-over, and still we have need of a pig. To eat the food we cannot stomach ourselves.

This segues me to Deals and Steals insight number two. The American way of procuring food is twisted, over-indulgent, and wasteful. Okay, this is not a blog to rave about one pseudo-liberal’s aversion to modern society. That would be slightly hypocritical as I now sit in a warm coffee shop on an iBook with a tummy-full of expensive caffeine and undoubtedly imported trail-mix.

Still, my close encounter with the grocery system has been harrowing. There is a whole food-marketing-industrial complex dedicated to providing us with as many foodstuffs as we can desire. All wrapped and delivered in elaborate packages, further packaged in excessive cardboard, then shrink-wrapped into pallets, placed on trucks and shipped across the country. Before that, they probably began on a ship, before that a factory, before that a field (or worse a laboratory) in a land far far away.

I see only the food that is rejected by other, more legitimate stores. How much do they discard of? And what of the stores with no Deals and Steals nearby, no willing purchaser for their broken boxes or expiring crates? Consumers pay for perfect. Waste is but fundamental counterpoint to the chock-full Stop-and-Shop’s we have all come to love.

Such revelations are particularly hard when viewed next to Zambia. As one of the more stable countries in the region, there is a tendency to think that the problems that wrack, say, Zimbabwe don't apply there. Still, recent articles in the Times of Zambia and AllAfrica.com mention food shortages, rising mealie meal (a dietary staple) prices and slight political unrest. The government has taken action but they are predicting food shortages to hit a low this winter. “The country will run out of maize at the end of February 2009 and that there will be need to import the shortfall to last until May 2009 when we would rely on our own produce," said Agriculture and Commodities Minister Brian Chituwo.

According to the Times, people are cutting back on unexpected visits because everyone knows food is scarce. Importation is unusual and there are worries that the prices will increase beyond what the lower class is capable of paying. The government has sought to quell fears and denies the shortage is a national disaster.

Think of it. The need to import food being considered a potential national disaster. The United States is quite the agricultural powerhouse but I cannot imagine running out of food, or needing to calculate the exact time when the current supplies will run out in relation to the next harvest. Like food doesn’t always appear in elaborate packages, from cardboard boxes, from shrink-wrapped pallets, from 18-wheelers, from cargo ships, from lands far far away.

Working in Deals and Steals, it is hard to picture the culture that I am moving rapidly towards, faster than the crackers going stale on the shelves. It is strange in my little role in the food-industrial complex to imagine an existence so tied to the land. It is difficult to think of the New England pig growing fat on the perfect-good food that Americans just couldn’t eat in its two-odd-year shelf life. It is unfathomable to contemplate starvation. Perhaps I am being ethnocentric, but the words food shortage and Africa still conjures up images of starvation and famine. Zambia will never take on the crisis situation of Malawi or Ethiopia. I know this. I also know I am not ready to see someone starve. I hope to never be ready for that.

Not while our Massachusetts swine are still getting fat.

Friday, November 14, 2008

the hecklers.

There is something inherently condescending about volunteering abroad, isn’t there? What do I, a slightly educated American baby, have to offer that the entire continent of Africa is unable to produce on its own? And at some level, is there a lack of gratitude implied by leaving one’s home, family and privilege for 27 months on a whim?

These questions were raised to me by very compassionate friends – the very anti-modernization theory, the pro-American, and the just plain skeptical. Once quick to dismiss these doubts, they nonetheless invaded my subconscious and took up permanent residence in head.

These internal hecklers started at it in earnest Sunday night a few weeks ago, one of my last shifts at the restaurant where I work. Our kitchen assistant, a mid-aged woman from Guatemala, sliced peppers while I lamented the dismal lack of customers in the dining room and zealously munched oyster crackers. “How long you go for,” she asked, between knife falls. “Two years, 27 months,” I say.

“Oh. Long time,” she said. “What your mother say?” I smiled, and explained yet again, how my family was sorry to see me leave but knew that this is something I really wanted to do and so on and so were overall happy about the Zambia thing.

She looked up from her work to grab the Saran wrap. She hadn’t been home to Guatemala in seven years, she said. In that course of time, her sister had died of cancer, and not having a green card, she was unable to attend the funeral. She still expected her sister to answer the phone when she called. She still waited for someone to pass her sister the line in the rotation of family members who crowded the receiver to speak to her.

Going back to Guatemala would require a lifetime commitment and a sacrifice of a hard-earned American life –friends, job, a private apartment in town. My decision to take off to Africa for a life of voluntary deprivation seemed baffling in comparison.

(Unfortunately for me,) a recent Campus Progress article echoed similar fears. Noting that the main benefit of the Peace Corps service now is cross-cultural exchange and not concrete development work, Adam Welti says, “Changing the structure of Peace Corps to allow for more short-term, highly-skilled positions for those men and women with more years of experience could help change the monolithic nature of white, fairly privileged and under-experienced volunteers that tend to enroll now.”

These Peace Corps criticisms have likely been floating around since Kennedy’s proposed the idea in ’61. And people like my restaurant kitchen assistant, those who own experiences make my choices seem more like indulgence than heroism, will always be there to give my own doubts substance. Still, I take faith from the blogs of current Volunteers in Zambia, and their professions of doing good work (no matter how biased!)

So for now, this white, fairly-privileged and under-experienced volunteer, will have to continue to write, read and educate herself as best as possible. I am now a card-carrying Massachusetts Public Library member and have been devouring books on Zambia. I have learned that eldest generation of elephants in Zambia have been killed by poachers and the remaining adolescents group together in packs of rule-deprived bandits and teen-aged mothers. That song and dance is the best way to teach sexuality to villages (there a really interesting group dance that mimics the birth cycle if anyone's interested). That tsetse flies may be one of the seven deadly plagues. That Zambia is complex, beautiful and contradictory, just as everyone one of us is.

Persistent wireless stealing - thanks Netgear - has kept me up to date on my blog and newspaper reading, which is now at an all-time hopeless level of addiction. On the good days, that's just enough to keep those internal hecklers at bay.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Dear friends, relations, and assorted others:

As you may or may not have heard through the grapevine, I’ll be joining the Peace Corps and shipping off to Zambia this February. For those who didn’t know: Surprise! To those who did: Thank you for helping me through those crazy, exciting, and chaotic 10 days between invitation and acceptance. Your support – and ability to sit through long one-sided conversations – was invaluable.

According to my fancy, schmancy invitation packet, I have been invited to the “Real Africa.” In PC-language that means I will be living in a hut (my own hut), without running water and electricity. Yes, I realize this description implies that other more modern African cities and countries are less realistic/authentic to the African identity. No, I do not agree that modernization is inherently Western or that a people loses its ethnic or cultural roots by improving quality of life and offering basic creature comforts. Let’s let that slide for now. I feel the African modernization vs. African identity will occupy many of my ipod-, tv-, computer-free nights in the near future.

Also, I will be granted my own mountain bike. Navigating Zambia will require about 5 to 20 miles of biking on a daily basis, from what I gleaned from blogs. Maybe more depending on where I am stationed. The thought makes my butt hurt. And as some of you know, I have a tendency to crash bikes into various immovable objects.

I will be working on a highly successful radio education project called “Learning at Taonga Market.” The AIDS crisis has decimated Zambia’s supply of teachers and general poverty makes it difficult to have traditional classes in rural areas. A large percentage of children are orphans, and these kids often sacrifice schooling to support themselves. The radio program offers a “fun, engaging” form of learning that is accessible to everyone. And tests show that children who attend radio classes do just as well or better than children in formal classrooms. As a volunteer, I will be working at a district level to build capacity in this program (in existence since 2001), recruiting new participants, working with the Ministry of Education and incorporating life skills and HIV/AIDS education. I’m glad the program is indigenous to the community and not a Westernized imposition. It seems my life energy is continually moving to the intersection of media and advocacy. Using communication to feed, house, love, and help makes me feel more alive than I can explain. This may be my acorn (for those of you who get that).

More about Zambia: It’s a land-locked country slightly larger than Texas. It is neighbored by Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Tanzania. The official language is English and the main religion Christianity. It has a tropical or temperate climate depending and it rains from October to April. Google Image Search informs me that it is beautiful. It is famous for Victoria Falls, adventure safaris and “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” It was once Rhodesia. Lonely Planet has a country guide with a section on extreme outdoor sports. Friends, start saving your pennies now.

Not-so-hot things about Zambia: 1 in 6 people have HIV/AIDS (2003 est.). Life expectancy is 38 years. It’s one of the poorest countries in the world.
There are many things I am afraid of. Spiders not being the biggest of them right now. There are many things I am impatient for. Namely my very own mud hut. There are many other feelings I am not sure about dancing around like Northern Lights in my peripheral vision.

I drive my Volvo on Main Street and drum out Simon and Garfunkel melodies and think of Africa. I am nervous that I will fail that mission, but I remind myself that it is not a mission but an adventure and adventures cannot be failed unless they are avoided. I worry that the sorrow will engulf me. Then I think of the countless other alleged “sufferers” I have embraced. These homeless and impoverished individuals left me with a richer understanding of joy. And I think of the people I have met of privilege, who have taught me that unnamable sorrow of small deaths, and managed mediocrity, of unvoiced desires and furtive escape plans.

At some point, sorrow finds us all, whether on suburban cul-de-sacs or under African skies. There is no blood on the door that will ward off the human condition. This plague comes to everyone. Getting this may be part of growing up.

Now, I know I am not going to save the whole big world. Or even just a little country. Limitations are everywhere and my manual fully prepares me to be frustrated by the Zambian bureaucracy. I harbor no rosy expectations of international development.

So why go? Why abandon a country with many legitimate problems of its own, especially when doing so means sacrificing friends, family and a reliable toilet source.

Why not? Maybe I watched too much “Into the Wild.” Or read too many adventure stories. Or loved my Indian fort in the backyard a little too strong. The accurate variation of the Thoreau quote in this blog’s title used to hang above my bed. I loved it since hearing it uttered with whispered reverence by Robin Williams in “The Dead Poets Society.” Perhaps Nineteenth Century recluses are better at expressing me than me. The Peruvian revolutionary Javier Heraud puts it similarly, this universal need to temporarily check out of society,

“But it is better than other ways,” (he writes)
“I recommend it –
get away for a time
from the bustle
learn what it’s all about
in those mountains.”

So dear ones, don’t take it personally. I am not abandoning you. Everything you have given me has brought me to this decision. And I will send you blog posts and letters and e-mail and send cosmic vibes. In return, I would like countless care packages of goodies and similar shows of positive energy. And a few blog comments now and then.

If all goes as planned, I’ll leave for staging February 28 and train in the capital until I begin my actual service in May. From then, it’s straight on ‘til morning, i.e. May 2011.

So if anyone wants to see me in the next 2½ years, please alert me soon! Between now and February, I would also like to a) Acquire a list of fabulous reading, recipes and music; b) Learn some musical instrument; c) Practice running from poisonous things and other crazed bikers; d) Watch lots and lots of movies; and e) Pack.

This is the thing I will not do: I will no longer start thoughts with the phrase “Brittany in Africa…”

Examples:
Brittany in Africa lives in a mud hut and carries water on her head.

Brittany in Africa reads nightly under the constellations and produces deep insights into our existence on Earth.

Brittany in Africa is beloved by small children who follow her like little woodland creatures around a Disney princess.

Brittany in Africa bikes mountains and has calves of titanium and steel.

Brittany in Africa sustains herself on food she grew, picked and cooked.

Brittany in Africa spends her days weaving, sewing, potting and other crafty –ing’s associated with fair trade products, hipsters and women’s collectives.

Brittany in Africa is better, stronger, prettier, primitiver and holier than Brittany in America. (and yes, primitiver is not an actual word but it works.)

This is surprisingly hard for a degenerate daydreamer. I will also refrain from posting long rambling discourses on the state of my soul.

Thank you all. I love you and am more grateful than you can know.