Wednesday, June 30, 2010
That and How.
Someday, when this journey is over, we will sit together. Perhaps we will be cupping steaming mugs, perhaps we will be stabbing salads, perhaps we will driving to and fro. Because that is what one does when one is young and lives on an island.
And we will be talking. Of boyfriends, of other friends, of awful bosses, of the more awful lack thereof. Because that is what one talks about when one is young and lives on an island.
And then you will ask me of Africa.
And I will tell you certain things when you ask me of Africa.
You will ask me of the weather.
I will tell you that there are three seasons. That it rains from November to April. That May through August have cold morning and nights. That the heat descends as viscous beast in September until it is deadened by fall’s first storm.
I will not tell you how when it rains, it silences all sound of humanity until you cannot remember what it was to think and just sync your breath and your heartbeat to the steady staccato drum. I will not tell you how when it is hot, you sit doing nothing but track the sweat as it beads in your elbows, the back of your thighs, some little nook of your soul as the temperature sweats from it any desire besides lethargy. I will not tell you how when it is cold, the thatched roofs steam with the warmth of breakfast fires and sleeping hearts, and how you enumerate every drop of water in you as the dryness closes in, a desertification of chapped lips, of cracked heels, of absent tears.
You will ask me of the village.
I will tell you that the people live in mud-and-grass homes, clustered by families and clan. That they get water from wells and cook on fires in open-air gazebos called kinzangas. That they grow cassava and maize and groundnuts and pumpkins. That they buy incidentals like soap, salt and cooking oil from little stands called tuck shops.
I will not tell you how the women sit for hours plaiting each other’s hair and how their laughter reaches to a place in your femininity that you did not remember existed. I will not tell you how when you return home, the grandmother who sits sentry in your path raises her hands in greetings and how the skin hangs like war medals from her bones and how if there are gates to some heaven surely they should be manned by a woman such as this. I will not tell you how on full moons, families morph to creatures of singing and dancing and how you lay in patches of moonlight and let the bonds of others cocoon you into sleep.
You will ask me of the children.
I will tell you that there are many. That they can make balls out of anything. That they run from their houses just to see you bike by as though your daily commute is a Haley’s Comet and not some fixed constellation in their skies.
I will not tell how they wear the rags of clothing that were once designer – Oshkosh jumpers, babyGap tees – and you wonder if the happiness of previous owners lingers on and if mutual proximity to growing bones and scrapped knees will bring a connection yet unknown. I will not tell you how they are in the schools, with shorts that ride up thighs and shirts that no longer button and with feet and minds that make the long walk to classes every day knowing there is no future beyond what this simple village can provide. I will not tell you how sometimes when you look at them, your very body aches for it, with its white skin and residual cells fed from supermarkets and hope, houses a spirit equal to theirs and the claustrophobia that injustice provokes leaves your spirit banging to get out.
I will not tell you all this because I have lost the words. Between here and there, adrift in the ocean or at unclaimed baggage perhaps, are my descriptions, my adjectives, my nouns.
I will tell you the that’s but not the how’s. I will try to make us understand. Because that is what one does when one is young and lives on island and once, once lived in Africa.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
A Ride through Britt's Random Ramblings...
Hello again, dear friends, family and assorted others. It’s been a while. Since writing last I have celebrated a one year anniversary as a Zambian resident, spent three days tranversing the continent on a train, read 10 books, cemented and painted the walls of my little hut, now affectionately known as Kamizhi’s Cottage, and spent countless rainy afternoons and candlelit evenings sewing and my newest craft-based obsession, collage-ing. (side note: the current trend is anything that cannot feasibly be modified with a chitenge scrap – i.e. tabletops, door, magazine files) should be covered with photo clippings and leftover wrappers. So far my cat has escaped the chitengifization of 2010 but he did earn himself a bowtie.) Confession: while much of my craft-happy binge can be blamed on the rains, another major factor was my decision to smarten up my reading lists. While I love reading the classics and policy books that fill out Solwezi library’s shelves, a few weeks of straight James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are enough to drive even this most bookish of girls to the needle and glue stick as it were.
There is no real unifying theme to this entry besides its randomness. So I’ll skip the strained transitions and label each new thought line as it appears. Enjoy the glimpse into the disjointed musings that have been bouncing around my head these days.
School and Such.
Work goes well. January started a new school year in Zambia – a much more logical system. At seven years, two of my favorites children on the family compound are now old enough to walk the two kilometers to school and back. Twin brothers, they love to show me their workbooks on the days they actually go. They point out their clumsily drawn alphabets with pride-filled gap-toothed grins. Workbook gained and teeth lost – concrete evidence of the passing months.
At my zonal school, we’re trying to start a small library out of our resource centre. If anyone has any free(ish) ideas for encouraging literacy in kids, please pass them on! On another kinda note, I’m spending this week training the incoming volunteers at my old training stomping grounds of Chongwe. Don’t really feel like I know enough about anything Zambian to be an effective trainer but perhaps I’ll fool them (and myself).
Stuff
Peace Corps Zambia’s population operates the way the world’s population should. In order for new volunteers to come in, the old ones have to go out. Meaning that in about a month, a good quantity of my friends here will be returning to America-land. While I get this on principle, in practice it is much harder to accept. Besides causing emotional strain, this upcoming departure also has me thinking a lot about stuff, literally.
Packing has never been a pleasant experience for me. I hate deciding what to leave and what to take. I like my things. I want them with me. I believe it hurts their feelings to be left behind, a theory I trace back to early childhood movies where toys came to life behind their owners’ backs and lamented their slow fading into disuse. But maybe that’s just me trying to put a veneer of psychological romance to my materialism.
Already I am dreading the task that my friends are now confronting – packing up their Peace Corps life into as small a space as possible, jettisoning most of it as giveaways to other volunteers or the village, and strapping the remainder on their backs as they set off for final vacations before the real world begins. Seeing this process made me realize two things: I have a lot of stuff; I am very attached to it.
Who would have thought that this experience would make me embrace my materialism? Perhaps it is just that this little cottage is the first place that is truly all my own. And the longest I lived anywhere for one stretch since leaving for college. Ideally I would like to just pick this whole little hut up and plop it down somewhere in America, preferably a rather incongruous urban setting. With maybe the addition of electricity and plumbing.
The upshot of my stuff dilemma is that I still have a year to cultivate a Buddha-like non-attachment. But I’m not holding my breath.
My ramblings on how to save the world/Stop reading if you are not a development major with some time to kill
Two of the more intellectual reading materials that have passed over my desk these days are Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” and New York Times’ special women’s rights issue (timed to complement columnists Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book “Half of the Sky”) Klein’s book links a suspension of democracy, neoliberal market changes and torture, starting in Pinochet’s Chile and continuing throughout transitional countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. This trifecta is responsible for the explosion of inequality and dearth of social safety nets in the developing world and for the “shocked” populations’ refusal to demand their basic economic rights. The Times focused more on the traditional outrage-inducing rights violations – Indian women whose husbands drank away their microloan earnings, Afghan girls attacked by acid throwers on their way to school, African mothers with botched or fatal childbirths and no access to contraceptives, American wage earners with bank accounts three-fourths as full as their male counterparts. Reading the stories of these anecdotal women, there is a clear connection between the hit-you-over-the-head blatant abuse and my rising sense of injustice.
For Klein’s book, the lines of repression are murky, no drunken spouses or rapist soldier to villain-ize but a complex web of global corporations, think tanks, international organizations and suited speculators. A fog of evil or just plain selfishness that has none of the solid edges of a traditional enemy. It’s hard to get riled up about private banks and export treaties. Together the book and the magazine revived the dichotomy of my AU life – “The Shock Doctrine” mirroring the dry economic readings and second generation rights lectures; The Times that of noisy student meetings and impassioned coffeehouse debates. (side note: I have been missing my days as a linked-in member of activist circles for a while now. A small sacrifice to make for my Peace Corps experience, which requires a hiatus of activism while a government employee. Still, a part of me aches for the communities of loving fighters. We who built up imaginary utopias, who dirtied our hands with policies and actions, who knew that when the world’s hurt pushes you to your edge the only solution is to scream into the void and pray that your echo brings you back some hope.)
It is cliché to say that the modern bleeding heart will care a lot more about the easy, personalize, gross individual rights violations highlighted in The Times than the vague, systematic violations perpetuated against entire populations by the market. For one thing, the neoliberal rights violation is less an abuse of a person than a restriction of the realm of the possible. If throwing dissidents in prison or mutilating genitalias could be compared to beating a dog, then imposing neoliberal markets sans social safety nets could be putting that dog on a very short leash. Who’s to say it would leave if it got the chance anyway. And if the leash leaves the dog defenseless against the elements and would-be attackers, well is that really the leasher’s fault?
Most people recognize a good economy that provides jobs and opportunities and a state that provides healthcare, education and security as prerequisites to any good quality of life. Still, most people who care about other people in this world are by nature fixers. It’s a lot easier to “fix” hunger by donating a cow than it is to throw off a global yoke of an economic system. One solution can be finished with the click of the mouse in between email checking and dinner plans. The other takes a little longer.
Call it the “drive-thru” mentality. We like issues that can be easily packaged, ones we can throw our money at and move on, full on cheap empty calories and conveniently ignoring the lack of nutritional sustainability.
Being here has made me painfully aware of this drive-thru ethos of helping. Zambians are conditioned to see Westerns as donors – of school rooms, of medical supplies, of water wells. These money-based quick fixes may satisfy a village’s immediate hunger, but they do absolutely nothing to permanently nourish a country that is starving for better systems of education, healthcare and sanitation. Worse, they perpetuate a dependency on aid, make skills transfer work like the Peace Corps’, unspeakably difficult, and allow for a governmental sloth on basic rights issues. It’s the equivalent of a Big Mac’s artery clogging, spare-tire inducing effect and it is only getting super-sized.
It seems that countries like Zambia need more than aid to develop. They need the changes hinted at in Klein’s book. They need a rollback of the neoliberal revolution of the 90s. They need a greater state hand in the market. They need the Third Way that was briefly thought possible after the fall of communism but eclipsed by dominance of unfettered capitalism.
Sadly, these changes will not be as easy coming as the aid dollars. And perhaps my conclusions are too short-sighted. I’m too near the problem to see the solution. Perhaps the next book I read will send me another pseudo-intellectual diatribe. Maybe I just miss college term papers more than I’d like to admit. Regardless thanks for putting up me. As always.
There is no real unifying theme to this entry besides its randomness. So I’ll skip the strained transitions and label each new thought line as it appears. Enjoy the glimpse into the disjointed musings that have been bouncing around my head these days.
School and Such.
Work goes well. January started a new school year in Zambia – a much more logical system. At seven years, two of my favorites children on the family compound are now old enough to walk the two kilometers to school and back. Twin brothers, they love to show me their workbooks on the days they actually go. They point out their clumsily drawn alphabets with pride-filled gap-toothed grins. Workbook gained and teeth lost – concrete evidence of the passing months.
At my zonal school, we’re trying to start a small library out of our resource centre. If anyone has any free(ish) ideas for encouraging literacy in kids, please pass them on! On another kinda note, I’m spending this week training the incoming volunteers at my old training stomping grounds of Chongwe. Don’t really feel like I know enough about anything Zambian to be an effective trainer but perhaps I’ll fool them (and myself).
Stuff
Peace Corps Zambia’s population operates the way the world’s population should. In order for new volunteers to come in, the old ones have to go out. Meaning that in about a month, a good quantity of my friends here will be returning to America-land. While I get this on principle, in practice it is much harder to accept. Besides causing emotional strain, this upcoming departure also has me thinking a lot about stuff, literally.
Packing has never been a pleasant experience for me. I hate deciding what to leave and what to take. I like my things. I want them with me. I believe it hurts their feelings to be left behind, a theory I trace back to early childhood movies where toys came to life behind their owners’ backs and lamented their slow fading into disuse. But maybe that’s just me trying to put a veneer of psychological romance to my materialism.
Already I am dreading the task that my friends are now confronting – packing up their Peace Corps life into as small a space as possible, jettisoning most of it as giveaways to other volunteers or the village, and strapping the remainder on their backs as they set off for final vacations before the real world begins. Seeing this process made me realize two things: I have a lot of stuff; I am very attached to it.
Who would have thought that this experience would make me embrace my materialism? Perhaps it is just that this little cottage is the first place that is truly all my own. And the longest I lived anywhere for one stretch since leaving for college. Ideally I would like to just pick this whole little hut up and plop it down somewhere in America, preferably a rather incongruous urban setting. With maybe the addition of electricity and plumbing.
The upshot of my stuff dilemma is that I still have a year to cultivate a Buddha-like non-attachment. But I’m not holding my breath.
My ramblings on how to save the world/Stop reading if you are not a development major with some time to kill
Two of the more intellectual reading materials that have passed over my desk these days are Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” and New York Times’ special women’s rights issue (timed to complement columnists Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book “Half of the Sky”) Klein’s book links a suspension of democracy, neoliberal market changes and torture, starting in Pinochet’s Chile and continuing throughout transitional countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. This trifecta is responsible for the explosion of inequality and dearth of social safety nets in the developing world and for the “shocked” populations’ refusal to demand their basic economic rights. The Times focused more on the traditional outrage-inducing rights violations – Indian women whose husbands drank away their microloan earnings, Afghan girls attacked by acid throwers on their way to school, African mothers with botched or fatal childbirths and no access to contraceptives, American wage earners with bank accounts three-fourths as full as their male counterparts. Reading the stories of these anecdotal women, there is a clear connection between the hit-you-over-the-head blatant abuse and my rising sense of injustice.
For Klein’s book, the lines of repression are murky, no drunken spouses or rapist soldier to villain-ize but a complex web of global corporations, think tanks, international organizations and suited speculators. A fog of evil or just plain selfishness that has none of the solid edges of a traditional enemy. It’s hard to get riled up about private banks and export treaties. Together the book and the magazine revived the dichotomy of my AU life – “The Shock Doctrine” mirroring the dry economic readings and second generation rights lectures; The Times that of noisy student meetings and impassioned coffeehouse debates. (side note: I have been missing my days as a linked-in member of activist circles for a while now. A small sacrifice to make for my Peace Corps experience, which requires a hiatus of activism while a government employee. Still, a part of me aches for the communities of loving fighters. We who built up imaginary utopias, who dirtied our hands with policies and actions, who knew that when the world’s hurt pushes you to your edge the only solution is to scream into the void and pray that your echo brings you back some hope.)
It is cliché to say that the modern bleeding heart will care a lot more about the easy, personalize, gross individual rights violations highlighted in The Times than the vague, systematic violations perpetuated against entire populations by the market. For one thing, the neoliberal rights violation is less an abuse of a person than a restriction of the realm of the possible. If throwing dissidents in prison or mutilating genitalias could be compared to beating a dog, then imposing neoliberal markets sans social safety nets could be putting that dog on a very short leash. Who’s to say it would leave if it got the chance anyway. And if the leash leaves the dog defenseless against the elements and would-be attackers, well is that really the leasher’s fault?
Most people recognize a good economy that provides jobs and opportunities and a state that provides healthcare, education and security as prerequisites to any good quality of life. Still, most people who care about other people in this world are by nature fixers. It’s a lot easier to “fix” hunger by donating a cow than it is to throw off a global yoke of an economic system. One solution can be finished with the click of the mouse in between email checking and dinner plans. The other takes a little longer.
Call it the “drive-thru” mentality. We like issues that can be easily packaged, ones we can throw our money at and move on, full on cheap empty calories and conveniently ignoring the lack of nutritional sustainability.
Being here has made me painfully aware of this drive-thru ethos of helping. Zambians are conditioned to see Westerns as donors – of school rooms, of medical supplies, of water wells. These money-based quick fixes may satisfy a village’s immediate hunger, but they do absolutely nothing to permanently nourish a country that is starving for better systems of education, healthcare and sanitation. Worse, they perpetuate a dependency on aid, make skills transfer work like the Peace Corps’, unspeakably difficult, and allow for a governmental sloth on basic rights issues. It’s the equivalent of a Big Mac’s artery clogging, spare-tire inducing effect and it is only getting super-sized.
It seems that countries like Zambia need more than aid to develop. They need the changes hinted at in Klein’s book. They need a rollback of the neoliberal revolution of the 90s. They need a greater state hand in the market. They need the Third Way that was briefly thought possible after the fall of communism but eclipsed by dominance of unfettered capitalism.
Sadly, these changes will not be as easy coming as the aid dollars. And perhaps my conclusions are too short-sighted. I’m too near the problem to see the solution. Perhaps the next book I read will send me another pseudo-intellectual diatribe. Maybe I just miss college term papers more than I’d like to admit. Regardless thanks for putting up me. As always.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Dear Mr./Ms./? Universe,
Per Stevie’s suggestion, I am writing my New Year’s letter to the Universe. What is it that I want out of this great big beautiful world this decade? What is it that I am grateful to already possess? Being here has alerted me to the incredible miracle of my existence. I am blessed beyond my understanding, but for the grace of colliding genomes or conspiring deities go I. It’s easy to assume that these blessings are noticed now only in the stark contrast of poverty and disadvantage that I live in, as if privilege casts a glow discernable only in the darkness of need. That’s not quite true. Yes being here has helped me appreciate the material circumstances of my life – my education, my financial security, my American passport. But it has also helped me to discover the other more valuable blessings that litter my world. These things are not so easily linked to economic status or geographic location.
Like a true Oscar winner, let me first recognize my family and friends, guides and mentors. Both in America-land and here in Zambia, I have continually been surrounded by those who love me. Everyone always says they’re grateful for friends and family. It’s kind of one of those automatic likes necessary for membership in the human race, together with puppies and hot-from-the-oven cookies. But you don’t always realize that gratitude until you’re alone in a hut with your thoughts and your memories and the knowledge that there’s a whole web of people out there who only wish you well. It’s a wonderful, wrapped-up, cozy feeling, contemplating that web. In the world of instant, intrusive communication, such a network can be taken for granted or resented as entangling. From here I can see only the benefits, this primordial support system as old as mankind. I talk to my network (side note: Verizon has totally ruined that word for me. All I can see is the ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy) less here but I cherish its members more.
There are other blessings that I can now name, inherent things I have unearthed since arriving and new things that have grown into my person in this African soil. I am braver than I thought. I believe that most of us have a greater capacity for daring and adventure than our closed-in existence allows us to express. I am blessed with the opportunity to test the boundaries of ability again and again. I am blessed with health and more importantly, when my blessing of health fails me, with a young body that can recover stronger than before. I am blessed with a wandering mind and the time to let it explore whichever nook or alleyway it desires. I am blessed with a hard-won and ever-morphing spirituality that endures exposure to all that is both banal and evil in the world and still finds ways to fill moments with giggle-inducing joy. These gifts have been intensified by my socio-economic position but not produced by them. These are the gifts that the Universe has sent with me on this journey and I strive everyday to be worthy of their company. You shouldn’t cast pearls before swine. Neither should you be swine behind your pearls.
Now that tangent is over. Back to the original goal: to ask the universe what I want out of this shiny 2010. For the sake of space, let’s eliminate the unrealistic ones – the ability to fly, doing a handstand in yoga, a singing voice. Then the beauty pageant answers – world peace, a cure for AIDS, a zero calorie sweeter that doesn’t give you cancer.
Where does that leave us? I want my loved ones at home to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. One of the hardest parts of Peace Corps service is the separation from all of you. Take care of yourselves and seek out every opportunity for joy you can. It’s cliché to say that life’s too short not to, but I’m thinking that with a letter to the Universe I’m already to far enough into the cliché hole to say the hell with it.
I ask that the Universe to keep giving me new experiences; new chances to see existence from fresh eyes. I ask for more laughter on transport, more skipping down dirt paths, more rainy mornings with tea and crosswords, more hijinxs with the children who alternately drive me crazy and keep me sane. I ask the Universe for more moments with Zambia. I ask for a renewed urge to write, and the elusive ability to have these words move closer to the reality I desire them to express. I ask for the humility to accept that as impossible. I ask to continue learning with a sense of wonder and I ask not to fall into the fate of jaded misanthropes like so many starry-eyed seekers before me. I ask to leave off my flowery verbal ramblings occasionally – if only for the sake of my practicality-loving friends who are surely rolling their eyes right now.
Oh and Universe, if in the process, some cute new clothes, a mint green Vespa, beach-front vacations, and other what-nots a 23-year-old girl desires should happen to fall my way I wouldn’t be opposed. Just saying.
As usual, I have mentioned little specific to Zambia. I’ll try to put another day-in-the-life post up soon. This blog has always been more of a way to bring you along on my personal journey than to take on the monumental and egocentric task of reducing Zambian culture to a sporadic, one-page blog entry. Sorry for boring all of you loved ones who read out of obligation. For others, hope you’re enjoying the ravings of my mefloquine-addled, craft-addicted brain. Thanks for reading this. Fingers crossed, the Universe did too.
Like a true Oscar winner, let me first recognize my family and friends, guides and mentors. Both in America-land and here in Zambia, I have continually been surrounded by those who love me. Everyone always says they’re grateful for friends and family. It’s kind of one of those automatic likes necessary for membership in the human race, together with puppies and hot-from-the-oven cookies. But you don’t always realize that gratitude until you’re alone in a hut with your thoughts and your memories and the knowledge that there’s a whole web of people out there who only wish you well. It’s a wonderful, wrapped-up, cozy feeling, contemplating that web. In the world of instant, intrusive communication, such a network can be taken for granted or resented as entangling. From here I can see only the benefits, this primordial support system as old as mankind. I talk to my network (side note: Verizon has totally ruined that word for me. All I can see is the ‘Can you hear me now?’ guy) less here but I cherish its members more.
There are other blessings that I can now name, inherent things I have unearthed since arriving and new things that have grown into my person in this African soil. I am braver than I thought. I believe that most of us have a greater capacity for daring and adventure than our closed-in existence allows us to express. I am blessed with the opportunity to test the boundaries of ability again and again. I am blessed with health and more importantly, when my blessing of health fails me, with a young body that can recover stronger than before. I am blessed with a wandering mind and the time to let it explore whichever nook or alleyway it desires. I am blessed with a hard-won and ever-morphing spirituality that endures exposure to all that is both banal and evil in the world and still finds ways to fill moments with giggle-inducing joy. These gifts have been intensified by my socio-economic position but not produced by them. These are the gifts that the Universe has sent with me on this journey and I strive everyday to be worthy of their company. You shouldn’t cast pearls before swine. Neither should you be swine behind your pearls.
Now that tangent is over. Back to the original goal: to ask the universe what I want out of this shiny 2010. For the sake of space, let’s eliminate the unrealistic ones – the ability to fly, doing a handstand in yoga, a singing voice. Then the beauty pageant answers – world peace, a cure for AIDS, a zero calorie sweeter that doesn’t give you cancer.
Where does that leave us? I want my loved ones at home to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. One of the hardest parts of Peace Corps service is the separation from all of you. Take care of yourselves and seek out every opportunity for joy you can. It’s cliché to say that life’s too short not to, but I’m thinking that with a letter to the Universe I’m already to far enough into the cliché hole to say the hell with it.
I ask that the Universe to keep giving me new experiences; new chances to see existence from fresh eyes. I ask for more laughter on transport, more skipping down dirt paths, more rainy mornings with tea and crosswords, more hijinxs with the children who alternately drive me crazy and keep me sane. I ask the Universe for more moments with Zambia. I ask for a renewed urge to write, and the elusive ability to have these words move closer to the reality I desire them to express. I ask for the humility to accept that as impossible. I ask to continue learning with a sense of wonder and I ask not to fall into the fate of jaded misanthropes like so many starry-eyed seekers before me. I ask to leave off my flowery verbal ramblings occasionally – if only for the sake of my practicality-loving friends who are surely rolling their eyes right now.
Oh and Universe, if in the process, some cute new clothes, a mint green Vespa, beach-front vacations, and other what-nots a 23-year-old girl desires should happen to fall my way I wouldn’t be opposed. Just saying.
As usual, I have mentioned little specific to Zambia. I’ll try to put another day-in-the-life post up soon. This blog has always been more of a way to bring you along on my personal journey than to take on the monumental and egocentric task of reducing Zambian culture to a sporadic, one-page blog entry. Sorry for boring all of you loved ones who read out of obligation. For others, hope you’re enjoying the ravings of my mefloquine-addled, craft-addicted brain. Thanks for reading this. Fingers crossed, the Universe did too.
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