Wandering Through the Between

Customer Service With a Nice, Warm Glass of ShutTheHellUp

2012-01-15T22:57:00.001-05:00

This was written on January 7, for what it’s worth:

We are now tens of thousands of feet in the air, 4 AM India time, flying over central Asia. Getting to this point involved an absurd process. We didn't realize, when we separated from Dave's family briefly to check in to our flight that the attendant put us in non-sequential seats. Dave has 19J and I have 19K. Saumya had 19E. Even though we bought the tickets together and paid for A, B, and C. And the person at the gate had zero tolerance to even the idea of trying to be useful or at least sympathetic. She was rude and abrupt, saying no change is possible (even though it is the airline's fault, not ours). She said it was our fault (excellent move!) for not catching their mistake earlier. Not that that would have made any much difference, I don't think. We sit at the gate and stew and go over our options. Quietly we load our rifles of anger with the ammunition of injustice. Peeved, we rehearse our lines: We paid all this money to go all this way and we wanted to sit together and they changed it and it's their fault and someone needs to fix this and why is “customer service” so bad in India and why is it not even customer service, but “annoyance management,” for the employees here, since a problem is something they have to “deal with” instead of fix? And so on and so on.

At Saumya's insistence, we board the plane as quickly as possible and take the two seats we know we've got, and the seat we think we should have, 19H. Saumya thinks squatters rights may have some currency in the battle ahead. She explains to the flight attendant the situation, that we were misbooked, that we paid to sit together, that she is (is) going to sit here, and it's their fault and they need to fix it. Voices are raised, tensions are high. Dave and I chip in what meager support we can give. We say the error was made by the woman who checked us in at the check-in desk. The flight attendant pulls an awesome card none of us were expecting. “That person who checked you in at the Air India desk – with the orange vest (Air India's colors)? That person does not work for Air India.”

Wha-hut? Classic. Excellent move, sir. This is the “There is no Cherai Beach” move. Deny the customer an ability to exist in the same plane of reality as the rest of humanity. Warp the dimensions of space and time based on a perspectivity of chaos and uncertainty. It's Kafka-esque. The airline that checked you in, the airline you got your tickets from and whose plane you are sitting on now – that is not the airline that we are. We? Who is 'we' anymore? The non-check-in part of Air India? Is he saying that they have outsourced their check-in process to a subcontractor not formally associated with their airline and thus abdicate any and all responsibility for the process where by their passengers will check their luggage and board their plane? On what space-time continuum do you exist, dude?

As these shockwaves blast through our three collective minds and we reel in existential doubt about the reliability of reality as we have so far perceived it, the flight attendant leaves us. The departing jinn offers one kernel of hope: if the person whose (aisle) seat we are taking is willing to switch, then we can do that. Saumya says that this point is irrelevant. She paid for three seats together and is taking three seats together. She is staying put and they will have to deal with it. Such sheer willpower and unflinching assertiveness, I am learning, is what it takes to get things done in this country. Dave warns against being physically removed from the flight by security (a dramatic end to this escalating arms race between Air India and Team Roedl-Verma-Orvin) while I quietly bet that the person who has that aisle seat will be much more reasonable that the stubborn bureaucracy of this airline.

The unlucky winner does eventually find us, this well-dressed young Indian man with speaks with almost no trace of any accent other than American English. He listens to Saumya's genuine plea but does ask incredulously, “You want to trade me my aisle seat for your middle seat?” He shrugs and is a good guy who takes one for the team, and goes to the middle seat. We celebrate by planning to buy him a drink once we get in the air.

Since his row (across the aisle from us) is not fully yet, he sits on the aisle until the person in that aisle seat comes. I think we're in the clear, as it passes 2 AM and no one has taken that seat. We all win: he gets the aisle seat he wanted and we get to sit together.

But then there are some late boarders, who had delayed connections and trouble at immigration, who board and sure enough that aisle seat he wanted is actually taken by a man who is boarding with his wife who is in a green and blue sari. Reluctantly our friend is bumped to the middle seat. The man takes the aisle, and the woman takes the aisle seat in front of him.

It could not have been five minutes later that the woman stands up and politely asks our savior to switch seats with her. She would like the middle seat to sit next to her husband. Looks like Air India is in the habit of splitting up more couples than a divorce attorney. He more than happily obliges, and so balance, order and harmony is restored in the universe, like a Shakespearean comedy: our three-person party has their consecutive seats, the stylish Indian American has his aisle seat and the late-boarding couple has their consecutive seats. Let's all celebrate with a six-person wedding? All in spite of the best efforts of Air India to fuck up everything, somehow, It All Worked Out in the End.

Which gets to a larger point about how things are “difficult” in India. That is the word Saumya's Dad used (who is from here), and which we saw in full focus on our three week trip. There is just a great deal of hassle. Things change and people don't take responsibility and there is no sense of customer service, and the terms of any agreement seem to always be in flux. There have been at least four or five occasions on this trip where that has happened. Screaming matches about who is the most right. You said one thing, now you're saying another thing. You said we would have the use of the van the whole time, now you're saying you clock out at 5 pm. You said breakfast was complimentary, now you're saying we have to pay 350 rupees per person (That's a $7 breakfast in a country where we had a sit-down dinner for a group of 12 for less than $90.) You said we had this block of these three seats and now we don't? And on and on. Everyone has to be challenged. Everything becomes a confrontation, a match of wills, an argument. And it's kind of exhausting. You agree to certain things, those things change without reason or notification and then you have to fight and yell for them to go back to the terms we originally agreed upon.

This is certainly an issue in the US (I am thinking: cell phone companies, airlines, internet providers), but I don't think it's on such a scale and over such trivial things as in the US. I think there is a stronger sense of customer service in the US. We've gotten some pretty atrocious service in India. For example, one evening at a nice restaurant in a fancy hotel, our meal took over an hour to come out. We asked several servers what was going on and by the third or fourth time we asked, the waiter simply silently gave Saumya a “stop” sign with his hand and walked away. Unbelievable. That about set me through the roof (as a former waiter). Even when we talked to the manager, he never apologized for the rudeness of his staff or the lateness of our food. He only listened and seemed embarrassed, but he didn't do anything to make it better. He didn't comp us dessert or take 10% off the bill, even though Saumya dropped the name of a powerful uncle or two who were shuttling us around to his favorite hotels and restaurants in southern India (including this one).

Is this a cultural thing? Am I just missing something entirely? Part of me really dislikes the “Oh it's a cultural thing” argument because it seems cheap and simplistic. But maybe it really is. Different cultures approach life differently, and maybe this scrappy aggressiveness is inherently more useful than a passive acquiescence in a crowded, busy country. Or maybe we Americans are too thin-skinned when it comes to this stuff: if we were raised to expect conflict and to thrive on it, it would not be nearly as uncomfortable as we often find it. So maybe Indians see no problem with this kind of habitual confrontation. I approached India with American assumptions about being served as a customer and was showed a different perspective. I think that challenge to my assumptions will be ultimately beneficial, and may even help me appreciate what we have here.

Or maybe these are the dejected musings of a burned-out traveler, through this flight of sixteen hours of darkness, this one slowly rolling night, with one destination in mind – home.

Putting the Krishna back in Merry Krishmas

2012-01-06T00:44:00.003-05:00

(Written January 2)

I thought I’d find India to be a very spiritual place. From the vibrant, colorful pictures in my “Discovering Hinduism” textbook from Hinduism 210 at Northwestern, I thought India would just glow with devotion, spirituality and wisdom. By my count, four major world religions got started here (Hinduism of course, along with Buddhism (many forget this), Jainism and Sikhism (much smaller by comparison)).

So there must be something about this place. It’s incredibly vibrant, as it has, as far as I can tell, representation of basically all major world religions. The vast majority are Hindu and Buddhism has a small following as well, but there is a substantial population from the Abrahamic religions as well: Islam is the second largest religion, and Christianity has a small, but in pockets appreciable, presence (schools and hospitals built by missionaries, etc. Surprisingly to me, there are almost three times as many Christians here as Buddhists). Even Judaism has a few adherents here and there. We were in Fort Kochi, a city used by the Portuguese (or Dutch?) to trade with India. After the fall of Jerusalem and the sacking of the Temple in 70 CE by the Romans, a population of Jews fled here. Amazing. Jews have been living in this part of India for about two thousand years. We visited the synagogue in the old Fort Kochi, in the “Jew Town” neighborhood. And we have felt this diversity of religions the whole trip: when we visited a cathedral in Patna, we did so as the call to afternoon prayers was being sung from the mosque across the street.

In Kochi (Southern India) – Jew Town

Dave and Saumya stroll through quaint, colonial Jew Town in Fort Kochi.

What has really surprised me is how much people get into Christmas here. While we were touring in southern India, we saw Santa Claus, Christmas trees, reindeer, fake snow, Christmas Lights, snowflakes, huge lit paper stars, etc. It seems Christmas just becomes part of the national calendar, even though 2.3% of the population is Christian. This may come from the fact that Christmas has such a strong commercial component in the West.

Scary, red-faced (boozy?) Santa Claus in the Kochi airport. You see this same Santa mask all over the place. I found it creepy.

We’re certainly on the tourist route, and that may explain a lot why the bustling consumerism of Indian cities has drowned out the quiet, spiritual places. The India we have seen so far is loud and crowded and pushy and dirty. Hinduism is everywhere, but in a diffuse way. Every home has an altar, and there are altars on street corners, and embedded into recesses into walls you’ll find a little Ganesha or Vishnu with some flowers, fruit and a dull incandescent bulb. Mandirs, or temples, of various sizes and sophistication pop up all over the place. I guess I imagined that I’d have to push sramanas and yogis and gurus out of my way just to get a decent cup of chai. I suppose I naively expected to see the wise masters of Hinduism and Buddhism venerated under the trees where they would meditate and levitate and exhort the people on matters of the soul.

When I got my boarding pass in Kochi to fly to Patna, the printer cuts off at the sixth letter of the first name. My full name was thus shortened to “Christ Orvin.” I appreciated the compliment (?). Later, in Patna, Saumya’s grandmother, Dadi, had trouble with my first name and sanctified my English first name further: she called me “Krish,” short for Krishna. Let’s put the Krishna back in “Merry Krishmas!”

Oh, Jet Airways, you flatter me (?)!

India has been, of course, a mixing of the spiritual and the material, as the whole world is. I thought to myself on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and High Holy Day of capitalism, that early Christians took a pagan holiday (winter solstice) and decked it out with Christian imagery and called it our own (Christmas trees come directly from pagan practices). We also did this with Easter (I think eggs, bunnies, etc. are pagan signs of fertility). I realized that our modern paganism of capitalism has taken the holiday back.

On Christmas Day I tried to find a church with English services in Patna. I couldn’t find one, although I did find a closed church, with a courtyard swimming with people. A large statue of Mary was being venerated with candles, fire and garlands of flowers. People just seemed to be chilling out on the steps of the church; kids were playing games and the teenage boys were either trying to look cool or flirt with the girls. The door was locked, but the church was decorated for the season. Long strands of blinking colored Christmas lights were draped from the roof and down the walls. The statue of Christ with arms raised was surrounded with by blinking lights and an LED sign wishing everyone a merry Christmas. Viraj, Saumya’s irreverent brother, who was tasked with finding a church for the Christian, said it looked like a casino. Maybe this is the complete union of the material and the spiritual, when our churches look like casinos.

I’ll Get My Own Spoon, Thank You: Labor, Population and Employment in India

2012-01-05T23:57:00.001-05:00

(Written January 2)

I was sitting in Dadi and Dadaji’s front lawn, drinking tea and reading the Atlantic under the coconut palms, when I wondered what made this place, Saumya’s grandparents’ house, so incredibly relaxing. It felt like an all-inclusive resort. Our daily pattern was: get up – early morning chai – breakfast – do whatever – noon chai – 2 pm lunch – nap – do whatever – 4 pm chai – do whatever – 6 pm snack/dinner – 8 pm chai (?) – 10 pm dinner. A pretty packed schedule. And soon enough a pretty packed waistline as well, with sugary, milky chai four times a day that came with “biscuits” (cookies).

And If I Don’t See You – Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Good night! – Chai is a 24 hour affair. Dadaji: “If there is nothing to do – have tea.”

Dadaji chillin’ in the front yard – where we’d spend most of our time in Patna.

And it was clear enough: servants. There were probably half a dozen people gainfully employed under Dadi’s (grandmother’s) roof: a cook, a driver, a go-to-guy for anything, a handyman, an old man who raised Saumya and her father who had basically retired from doing much but stayed on the payroll, and an additional cook hired to feed the fat raging hordes of Americans that had descended, locus-like upon this place.

DadI: “Eat something!” (continual exhortation, even when eating)

I was sitting at the table once, doing something, and felt like I could really use some chai (it must have been around 8am, noon, 4pm or 8pm). And literally the next thing that happened was Ramu, one of the servants, walked in with a tray of tea. Is he telepathic?

There are a lot of people in India. About a billion, give or take a couple tens of millions. A lot of those people live in big cities, and more come each year. The rural population is experiencing a drain on their youth, as they give up farming and move to the cities to find jobs. And a lot of those people end up working as servants in middle-class and upper-class homes, doing odd jobs or trying to sell things. (On a side-note, the door-to-door market here is huge: door-to-door cotton candy salesman, door-to-door carpet salesman, door-to-door kitchen pot salesman, door-to-door masseuse, door-to-door purchaser of old newspaper for recycling, door-to-door guy who irons your clothes for you). Labor is so cheap here because of the tremendous population looking for work, that even middle class families can afford a couple servants to help out around the house.

It’s a really complicated thing, this system. The initial reaction by most Americans is one of resistance to being served. As a nation we have a strong independent streak, so we are afraid of dependency. Someone clearing your plate from the table instead of taking it to the sink yourself seems awkward. Having someone walking behind you carrying your shopping bags seems shameful. Waiting for a servant to bring a spoon from the next room instead of just getting it yourself seems silly. But it’s how things are done here. Americans would probably bristle at this idea of someone serving you like that; they’d probably make quick and thoughtless comparisons to slavery, that shameful scar on our collective past. To those who had not really experienced the relationship between servants and their employers here, that may seem like what’s going on, but there is much more to it.

The important thing to think about is the alternative for these people. If they lived in these rural villages they’d have little (or no) electricity or water. We drove by some of these small towns and their grinding poverty. Rickety shelters made of torn-open rice sacks, or palms, or dried bamboo, with of a roof of a tarp or plastic sheeting. The measly fire in the dirt in front of the house and the steaming pot with hopefully something for breakfast. Barefoot children in the road chasing goats with sticks. Men idly talking in small circles, smoking cigarettes. Defecating in the creek. Malnutrition. Limited schooling. Spending afternoons plastering wet cow dung onto sunny walls to dry it for fuel to cook dinner. And I’m making no attempt here to tug at the heart strings – this is much the reality, as I have seen it and as I’ve been told.

Working as servants they get out of rural poverty and have a chance to make a better life for their children, who can often get to school more easily in towns than in the countryside. Better access to medical care, employment, etc.

And the servants become a quasi-extension of the family. The old man who shuffled around the house, doing no appreciable work still had a “job” that paid him something in a country with a limited safety net for retirees. While not entirely charity, his continued employment speaks to that fact that there is real gratitude for the work he did over fifty years ago to raise Saumya’s dad and later Saumya herself. Saumya’s family is also helping to pay for the education of some of their servants’ children. Members of her family are pitching in to make sure the next generation would have more opportunity to improve themselves. Her family may be a huge anomaly, but I would not be surprised if it indicates a larger trend.

This positive feedback loop is literally transforming the world. The story of the last forty years (and the next forty, at least), will be the dramatic alleviation of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. This is happening most dramatically in India and China, but in other parts of the developing world as well. The hungry and destitute are becoming poor but not hungry, the poor are becoming working class, the working class are becoming middle class, etc. And this huge sucking sound, that inexorable demand for Earth’s resources, is attributable to this increasing living standard as well. Steel, coal, rubber, water: pump it, smelt it, ship it, burn it. The resources and energy required to lift a third of the planet’s population out of poverty. And meet their new demands for more consumer goods.

Going from under a dollar a day to a dollar a day, or going from a dollar a day to two dollars a day may not seem like much to us. But that increase doubles their income. And counts for something. A long way to go, of course, but it is a major advancement.

I’m still thinking a lot about this system and the people here, about the economy and about the population and labor and what it all means. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions yet. I think it’s complicated. I think the general trend is positive, in the alleviation of poverty, despite the intimidating urban, environmental and social challenges it brings. I think this dynamic, the alleviation of extreme poverty and the slow expansion of a global middle class, will be the driving force in the world for this century. Let’s hope we have the collective courage to meet the new challenges that it brings.

“I Choo-Choo-Choose You”–Train Travel in India (long post)

2012-01-05T22:55:00.001-05:00

(Written January 2)

We’ve taken a couple of pretty epic train rides here in India, that are experiences probably worthy of a post. Our first was in southern India, from Chennai to Alleppey, where we would enjoy lounging around on a houseboat in the backwaters of the state of Kerala. Our second train ride was from Patna, where we stayed with Saumya’s grandparents for a week, to Delhi.

When we got out of the cab at the train station at Chennai, my Developing World Safety Alarms kicked up to about Defcon 2. The jostling crush of people (Brain: PICKPOCKETS!), the groups of men lazily leaning against the wall, eyeing the people passing by (Brain: LOOKING FOR TARGETS - TARGETS!), the child beggars (Brain: DISTRACTIONS FOR TO MORE EASILY ROB YOU WITH, MY DEAR!). From inside the protective walls of our cab, I nerdily recalled Alec Guinness’s classic dry delivery of Obi Wan Kenobi: “Mos Eisley Space Port – you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” I shoved all my money and my passport and credit cards into my under-the-clothes money belt (Saumya calls it my “Mormon underwear”). I probably would have put my laptop and iphone in there too if they would have fit. I carried my bag in front of me and tried to open up my peripheral vision to 270 degrees. Which, it turns out, did not help me read the departure board written in Tamil.

We found our car and our berth. The car’s long main corridor had a series of two berths along the long side and more communal areas (“coupes”) with four berths, setup with a lower and upper berth. We had an unconfirmed reservation that got bumped to a waitlist, so our three berths (for Saumya & Dave and I) got downgraded to two. A college-age Indian woman and her mother joined us sitting on the two lower berths waiting for the TT (Ticket Taker). A silent, heavily mustachioed Indian man in cheap polyester brown pants and a tan button-up shirt sat across from me and tried to hide his curiosity (alternatively, boredom).

The TT came by and looked at our tickets. He may be my favorite stranger on the trip so far. A thin man, he was dressed in a blue blazer, white pants (white!), a red tie and white dress shirt whose cuffs extended well beyond his coat. He had thin hair, carefully parted and greased down, and a pair of spectacles that through some miracle or magic balanced ever so carefully from the end of his nose. He had the air of an experienced (but unpretentious) butler whose radical economy of speech and motion had been pared down to the absolute functional minimum. Like some very stoic and quiet Saint Peter, in his arms he carried an enormous ledger that held a thick stack of sheets printed on dot-matrix paper (dot matrix!). He looked at our tickets, flipped through the tome, found us and carefully noted our attendance. A bureaucrat to the n-th degree, he took his job tremendously seriously. Saumya politely asked if we could extend our ticket from Kochi to Alleppey (some part of the downgrade process also changed our final destination, so we would only go most of the way. Fascinating.) He said “I will return.” Regally he rose from our bunk and glided silently through the curtains. We giggled and giggled about how cool this guy was. Having completed his circuit down the train, he returned the way he came. As he passed by, Saumya said “Sir?” He turned, peeking his head in between the curtains, and said “Madam, I will return.” He did, too, this miraculous piece of work of a man, this wondrously efficient cog of the bureaucracy! He came back with the Eternal Ledger and consulted a long table of destinations, times and prices. He flipped to the back of his book and made a series of handwritten calculations, amid his other calculations for different customers. “Madam, the additional fare to Alleppey will be two hundred and fifty six rupees per head.” Saumya: “Per head?” TT: “Yes, ma’am, per head.” After a pause he clarified, “Per person.”

He also was on the case so we could get another berth, so Dave and Saumya could have separate bunks. Around midnight I got woken up and found the TT with Saumya in the hallways, trying to get a separate berth along the side, apart from Saumya and Dave, for me. He explained that the pair of pushy, nosy British women who interacted with us while boarding kindly requested that we surrender our berth to them (they were waitlisted and did not have a seat and were not supposed to even have boarded the train). I’ve never seen someone so politely say in between the lines that “Ma’am, please tell me ‘no.’” This TT was a Jedi, a ninja. “It is not required, madam,” he tells Saumya. “It is their request. But you have your berth.” This guy was a master. We kept our berth. His subtly was so nuanced Saumya didn’t even catch it until I mentioned it later.

Our car was class “Second AC,” which is one down from first class. In Third AC you had six people in the coupe with you, with the berths stacked three deep. But you still had AC. In the standard sleeper you had six people and no AC. In the final car I think it was mostly fend for yourself (ie, stand, sit, lie down as you can).

The bathroom was another experience entirely. I had gotten used to “hole in the ground” latrines in Panama. I have never experienced a “hole in the floor” bathroom on a moving train. That was literally all there was. You could look down and see the tracks racing by under you. (I was later told that people who live by railroads generally relieve themselves on the railroad tracks, probably because the trains are already indiscriminately discharging their waste there). Beside the hole there were two small elevated platforms for your feet, a water sprayer and a cup (this is the standard Indian-style (vs. Western Style) toilet in India). There was a sink and mirror with soap. I am not sure of the mechanics of how Indian-style toilets work (with just water how do you dry off? Do you walk around with wet undies?). And I can’t imagine the physics of trying to do this on a swaying, starting and stopping train. As Nick, Dave’s brother, later would wax philosophical, “I was trying to figure out how the physics of that transaction would be possible.”

I couldn’t resist – it’s an innate Peace Corps Volunteer response: “Take me to your toilet!” What you can’t see are the railroad ties whipping by through the hole…

Once I got my shoulder-width wide upper berth to myself, separated from the incessant fluorescent hallway lighting by a thin blue curtain, I managed to get a decent amount of sleep. I would sleep in approximately two-hour increments, roll over and doze back off again. The berth was beyond time. I had no idea what time it was because I left my iPhone in my bag and there was no window. I would occasionally peak my head out the curtains and look to see if other people were waking up. If not, back to sleep.

Saumya came by around 6 AM (becoming quickly our standard wake-up time). I was sitting up and writing in my journal, fresh as a daisy (short lived! such a short-lived daisy!). We all got back together in our shared coupe and watched the tropical landscape go by as the sun came up. Vendors went up and down the train cars hawking their breakfast food. We had some terrible idly and sambar (the soupy sambar came tepid in a plastic bag) and a couple of fried vadas (deep fried, dense chickpea-based savory donuts) that had been fried hours ago. A man walked down the car carrying a silver coffee urn saying “koppee, koppee, koppee.” We got a Doctors’ Office Pee Cup sized-cup of super-sugary, super-milky coffee made, I think, with Nescafe instant. He walked by at least seven times. Saumya’s second cup, on his eighth circuit, was attributed to his perseverance.

The Land Beyond Time: Second AC berth - More comfortable than you’d expect!

Our second train trip, post-Patna, with Dave and Saumya’s combined families, was quite different because we were rolling in First Class. The “kids” quickly seceded from the parents to found an independent a “Kids Coupe” (Dave, Nick, Saumya and I). A magical transformation had occurred between Second AC and First Class. The thin curtain that separated us from the main hallway had been transformed into a thin wall with a sliding door (with lock!) and curtain. There was about an extra eight inches on each side of the berths, which made a big difference. Over the speakers we were feted with horrendous music of such poor sound quality that it sounded like a bleating/dying/birthing goat (the volume was quickly dropped to zero). Our fresh sheets were delivered in a brown paper bag to ensure their freshness (because they’re in a bag – come on!). We were served chai immediately after boarding, on a small collapsible table (this is new). We had a full dinner (six options?!?) that included a butterscotch ice cream cup as dessert. The food was a big step-up from the airplane food that I had expected: spicy, flavorful and filling. And on a whole different level from fend-for-yourself/maybe-there’s-a-dude-selling-cold-sambar mentality of Second AC. After the dinner an attendant cleaned the floor with a rag and a spraybottle. A different attendant came in to make our beds. What luxury!

Traveling in First AC is just like the sugar they give you – Superfine!

Hot and Sour Soup on First AC comes with crackers: Or, Bake and Cake (we didn’t have to do either)

Having boarded the overnight train on the evening of December 31, we rang in 2012 with our First Class snores on a train in India bound for Delhi.

The Road: A Space Between Spaces

2012-01-05T22:51:00.001-05:00

(Written January 2, 2012)

Written while sitting on a six-hour bus ride from Delhi to Jaipur. Expect to write a number of posts here and then spam them when I find wi-fi. Saumya is in the backseat explaining the intricacies of Indian familial naming conventions. Auntie is reading a novel in the front seat. Everyone else is basically watching the foggy world of Delhi in winter whip by.

We’re “back", in a sense. We landed in Delhi two weeks ago and flew out the next morning to Chennai, in southern India. We spent a week touring in the south and then took a flight up to northeastern India to Saumya’s grandparents house in Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar. We spent a week there with her family and then took a fourteen hour overnight train ride to Delhi over new years (we left in the evening on Dec. 31, slept through the new year and arrived yesterday in Delhi). We did some touristy stuff in Delhi yesterday (Red Fort, Gate of India, Parliament, President’s house, Humayun’s Tomb, etc). We had a delightfully carnivorous meal last night at a place called Kharim’s, a middle eastern tandoori place in a crowded and dirty but somehow quaint Muslim neighborhood in Delhi. After a week of mostly vegetable dishes (of unbelievable quality and quantity) at Dadi and Dadaji’s house (Saumya’s grandparents), the transition to so much meat has our collective stomachs doing the mambo.

I think it was appropriate that I was traveling in India during Advent, the season of waiting (not just “for Christmas” as most believe, but also for the eschaton, the end of time, the second coming of Christ). I have spent a lot of time waiting. I thought the other day that we have become so used to long times traveling and waiting that now most any other travel we could eat for breakfast. Fourteen hour flight. Six hour bus ride. Fifteen hour train ride. The concept of time almost changes. I have realized how much I really enjoy when the passage of time is synced to the passage of space. Our flight was fourteen hours long, but we went 8,000 miles. It was a long flight. But we were going a long way. In the States, a two hour flight to Chicago takes five hours with getting to the airport, security, waiting, delays, arrival, deplaning, baggage claim, etc. The travel doesn’t seem slow enough. You’re always moving, except for those two brief (relaxing?) hours in the air. Here these long journeys give you time to really mentally settle into the waiting. To the passage of time. And look out the window: the passage of space. There is a more serious contact with reality on the ground instead of in the air. Cars. People. Men peeing by the side of the road (O, if I had a nickel!). Hotels. Road signs. Power lines. Motorcycles.

But mostly I’m enjoying the time required in travel. Touring can be an intense experience. So much to see and to do in so little time. To “take advantage of being here.” And then we make choices to get to the next place as fast as possible. The flight instead of the train, train instead of the bus, etc. Then the time “between places,” on the road, between spaces, in itself becomes a new space. The space of the road.

“There is No Cherai Beach” - Reflections on the “Global South”

2011-12-27T01:34:00.001-05:00

(Written Dec. 26)

More and more I find myself remarking, probably to Dave and Saumya’s (slight?) irritation, how things here remind me of Panama, or how things here are like how things are in Panama. I try to limit it because I’ve noticed it and have become self-conscious about it. I don’t want to be the Panamanian equivalent of “This one time, at band camp….”

But there are a lot of similarities I’ve noticed, so I’ve kept a list. Here’s the current one, which has both the abstract and the mundane:

Trash. There is no municipal trash pick up (as far as I can tell). Instead, trash is thrown into the street or collected and burned. The toxic fumes released by the burning plastic have a distinctly acrid odor. In the evening, or whenever several families are burning their trash simultaneously can get particularly suffocating. The air burns with pollution you can feel.
Regulation and Rules. There is a conspicuous lack of oversight, rules, regulations, etc. A lot of the ones I’ve noticed are related to health and safety. There are always seat belts, but the short end to fasten it is often shoved back into the seat cushions, irretrievable except to the most fastidious adherent to safety. Men ride on top of trucks with enormous shifting loads, holding on by a rope or a rail. Three teenage boys ride on a motorcycle. Food is sold in the street, literally, in baskets or in tarps that are lying on the ground. I doubt there is much food inspection, etc. The chemicals that are allowed here I am sure are present at more toxic levels than are allowed in the US. Posters and ads cover every available surface of buildings, both residential and commercial. Traffic is a free-for-all (cops are mostly ignored). Bribery and corruption exist on many levels and is often complained about (even though I’ve not experienced any directly).
“Cold Weather.” It’s maybe 65 degrees here in Patna, Bihar. The high is probably 73 or so. In the early morning it may get to the high 50s. People dress here like they are about to ascend Everest, though. It reminded me of Panamanians bundling up in 60 degree weather, with hats and scarfs and winter gloves.
Broken Glass on Top of Walls. People embed intimidating shards of broken glass into the tops of the walls around their homes and businesses. Cheap security, these green, blue and clear teeth look ready to relieve a potential burglar of a quart of blood.
The Answer is Always Yes. We get this a lot, especially when the language barrier is more pronounced. A variation on this is The Ambiguous Response. For example, we asked for directions to a local beach at the front desk of our hotel. The exchange:
- Us: “Do you know where Cherai Beach is?”
  Hotel employee: “Cherai Beach.” (Not a question. A flatly-delivered repetition).
- Us: “Yes, Cherai Beach. Do you know where it is?”
- Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach.”
- Us: “But our guidebook says it’s nearby, though. You don’t know where it is?”
- Employee: “It is here.” (Points to map, indicating the entire local coastline).
- Us: “But our book says it should be up here.”
- Employee: “It is right here” (Leans over, squints dramatically and tries to find something with the tip of his pen in the downtown area. Determines a very specific spot to answer us).
- Us: “Our guidebook says we have to take a ferry to get there, and that is just off the main road. We have to go one island over and drive for thirty kilometers.”
- Employee: “There is no Cherai Beach there.” (Turns to maintenance guy leaning on counter, there is a lively exchange in Tamil)
- Employee: “Oh, that Cherai Beach. Yes, it’s up there, about thirty kilometers” (what our guidebook originally said – no new information gained in a wasted ten minute exchange).
Beating Clothes On A Rock. Women will stand in the river and thwack their clothes against a rock. Or they will smack them with a broad wooden paddle. They rub detergent into the clothes before doing this. Think about this the next time you use the laundry machine.
Stray animals. Hideous, starved dogs were a constant fixture in Panama. Here they seem less physically abused and maybe even (well?) fed. Here of course, cows and water buffalo do roam the streets freely. I can’t imagine how these city cows carry on conversations with country cows, though. I also don’t know what they eat: there is very little grass here that hasn’t been trampled by constant cricket games. Driving to a church on Christmas Day in a failed attempt to find an English-language services, we were barred from entrance to the church by a bellowing and quite angry water buffalo. Our driver leaned on the horn and the beast irritably lumbered off to the side.
“The Tienda.” I don’t know what the Hindi word is for these, but they are like little general stores you can find anywhere. No corporations or CVS’s though, chains here are something you buy, not where you buy things. You can get everything from cookies to machetes to school uniforms here. In India they are remarkably small: some I’ve seen are not much bigger than 10x10, 10x20, etc.
Single Serving Everything. You can buy things in single servings. A single pen, a single cookie, a single band-aid, a single diaper. Pretty convenient, actually.
School Uniforms. Kids out of school in their white and blue or white and brown uniforms. I guess uniforms never really caught on at public schools in the US.
Mosquito Coils. I guess these exist in the US too. Quite useful. Probably carcinogenic.
Excessiveness of Advertising. Everything is covered in ads. Ads for toothpaste and luxury silks to ads for your local politician or cellular service provider. The Political Poster With Awkwardly Photographed Local (Often Unsmiling) Representative seems to be a developing-world meme. Ads hang from awnings, are plastered on sandwich boards in the street or against concrete walls in a long duplicative series, in massive billboards against the front or side of buildings, or are hung up in stores.
Grandma Has Elbows and Knows How to Use Them. In Panama if you weren’t careful, the tiny indigenous old ladies would push you out of the way to get on the bus ahead of you. I’ve had lots of people cut me off in lines here. You have to push and shove to get what you want. I was in line to get tickets to a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a man cut directly in front of me and stood maybe four inches behind the next person. I unfortunately made the rookie error of giving the person in front of me TWO FEET of breathing room. I won’t make that mistake again. In India this aggressive, pushy (to Americans) me-first attitude makes more sense, given the massive population and the limited space. In Panama, with a population density roughly of South Carolina, it makes much less sense to me.
Little Regard For Those Who Are Sleeping. I noticed this this morning. There were four of us sleeping on cots in a hallway and around 6 am people started moving around, talking to each other, opening and closing doors, making the tea, etc. This was a distinct feature in Panama as well: in an open, busy house with multiple generations and few substantial walls, when the first person woke up in the house (at 4:30 AM), there was little regard for the sleeping. You can’t have a “library voice” if you’ve never been to a library.

More to come on what is really distinctly Indian…

Sidewalks Optional, Cheating Death Not

2011-12-27T01:31:00.001-05:00

(Written Dec. 23)

India is somewhat infamous for its crowded streets, chaotic traffic patterns and hell-bent, survivalist drivers. So I expected some thrill, some danger, some chaos.

I had no idea.

In traffic here things are perfect chaos. I think that is the right term. It is perfect, in a sense. The mad harmony of constant merging and passing and honking and cutting each other off. The drunken ballet of near-death experiences.

The roads are the city’s arteries and veins and they are truly alive with a bristling variety of wheeled (and unwheeled) things. Pedestrians cut off bicyclists and pedaled rickshaws while enormous dump trucks barrel past cabs and the miniature three wheeled “autos” (auto-rickshaw). The bicycles seem to all be custom jobs, the biodiversity so high that not one of them is the same in this thriving Darwinian transportation jungle. Some are long with racks on the back, while others lead with an enormous flat bed for carrying goods; many have four or five propane tanks slung across the back wheel, pedaling through this dance of death like some kind of two wheeled kamikaze. Their potential combustibility does not seem to deter aggression against them - clearly their evolutionary advantage is only slight in this survival-of-the-fittest cage-match. I’ve noticed the “pedicab” model does seem standard here, though, with two forward-facing seats (or rather room for two or three or seven on a forward-facing bench) with a second bench in the back facing whatever is tailgating the pedicab (a ulcer-causing point of view, I’d imagine). There is a single bar across the back bench, I suppose to limit the inconvenience of people sliding off the back bench and into someone’s windshield.

No one seems very in control of this insanity, either. Traffic lights are installed in some major intersections, but often are not working, ignored entirely by drivers, or superseded by brown-uniformed police officers who direct traffic flow. Blow through red lights, force your way in, regardless if they are letting you in (or not, as if often the case). These traffic lights and formal, striped lanes are ghosts: neither believed in nor in any way able to affect the actual functioning of the real world. They are the hollow, meek “thou shalt”s of a feeble state trying to tame a restless beast.

The road is a space. It is not a series of parallel, equally sized lanes that can contain one vehicle at the time. The road is a space. Or really, the road is space. It is a kind of cosmic vastness without boundary or border, where all vectors of travel are simultaneously possible. The rule of thumb: if you can fit, you will fit. There is no void, no openness in this space, however. It is packed, dense. Heavy particles, these massive dump-truck protons, lumber slowly through it, while speedier and more restless electron bicycles, motorcycles and “autos” buzz and spin and whirl around everyone all the time, seeking some gap in the denseness to rush ahead. The bicycles and motorcycles pass the autos, who pass the cars, who pass the trucks, who pass the buses. This is the liquid hierarchy of traffic flow in India.

There is a kind of miraculous joy to this traffic, and even a kind of efficiency. The miraculous joy in that (so far) we have not been in or seen any traffic accidents of any kind. I am sure I’m drifting into the wildly anecdotal here, and I am sure if I googled India traffic statistics, I’d be appalled (thank you lack of internet connection). But no one seems to get hit or hurt. Most traffic backups are caused by seven vehicles trying to fit down a space for three or by a mechanical failure. Speed does temper the lunacy and probably helps prevent the fatal accidents we have in the US. In this turgid flow of people and machines, you can’t get much about twenty or thirty miles an hour. Once, out of town and free of congestion, I think we may have hit 40. Maybe not.

Americans’ sense of space is vast. The plains stretch on endlessly in their flat monoculture until the mountains rise up and then crash into the ocean. Our history is one of settlement and expansion and the seemingly limitless availability of yet further westward land. We drive with much the same feeling of space. We need fifteen to thirty feet in front of us and behind us, or you’re tailgating or being tailgated. At least five to six feet is required on the left and right sides of the car or someone is cutting you off. In India, all of those dimensions have been shrunk vastly. If you can fit, you will fit. It is as if everyone drives with a two-inch force field around all sides of their vehicle, be it bicycle or cab or truck or bus: no one gets past those two inches, but also anyone can get right up against those two inches.

The perverse kind of efficiency comes from every single square inch of the space being filled by someone on/in something. If you had a country that contained 20% of the world’s population and that needed to get places occasionally, you’d probably want your roads as full as possible as well.

The other thing is the honking. The horn here is not an emergencies-only signal that you’re stopping quickly or that someone did something really stupid. It’s a way to say hello. “Hi, I’m over here behind you!” “Hi, I’m still over here behind you!” “Oh, look now, I’m on your right – Hello!” “I’m passing you now to go some place faster – see you later!” Each sentence is a honk. Multiply by one billion.

Hinduism is an extremely open and pluralistic religion; it accepts and welcomes most perspectives and the wisdom of other religious traditions. Mohammed and Jesus are honored as prophets and sages. If I lived here and had to drive (or walk or bike for that matter), I’d be praying to whoever in the heavens was working the late-night hotline shift as well.

Tiger Prawns, Ben Hur on Steroids, and the Smell of Carcinogens in the Morning: Initial Impressions of India

2011-12-27T01:25:00.001-05:00

(Written Dec. 22)

I don’t know how it got to be this way, but it’s already Day Five of my trip to India with Saumya and Dave, good friends and former neighbors. Well, it’s gotten to be Day Five because we’ve been busy running from place to place, fending off jet lag with a quiet desperation (and many power naps and cups of coffee), etc. Also, a silence due to a lack of internet connection. I should start typing things out offline and then posting them in a mad rush when I can get wi-fi access. Expect: silence, silence, silence – TORRENT.

India! It’s still hard to believe I’m in India. There is a lot to write about. Too much. I’ll try to send out periodic updates and keep my posts to a measurable and sane size. No promises though.

Initial impressions, maybe? Start there? I could walk you through Days One Through Five, but the narrative slog seems a bit daunting right now. Maybe I can close with Highlights of The Trip Thus Far.

Initial Impressions. Wow. I was not ready for this. Well, in a sense I sort of was. Two years living in Panama with Peace Corps got me ready for a lot of this “developing world” stuff. And I see a lot of similarities between the two countries. I’m making a list of some of those things (future post - yes, sure, I’ll promise it). But India is also clearly its own thing.

The first thing I noticed about India after leaving baggage claim in Delhi was the air. Walking out of the terminal, we could see the cloudy, murky fog. Or smog. It was hard to tell which. I was told both. The air had a kind of thickness and mass to it; it would cling. What did TS Eliot say about the fog in Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, as a cat rubbing its back against a window-pane? The air burned with a smoky acridity. It smelled like smoldering campfire. And indeed, as we drove out of the airport with bags loaded on top of the car, I saw several small fires with heavy black plumes of smoke. The memory of the smell came back, from Panama. Burning plastic. Dioxin. Oh how I love the smell of carcinogens in the morning!

Traffic. My God. I will have to do an entire post on this. But imagine the chariot race scene from Ben Hur with a billion people on mopeds honking all the time. I think this is the one-sentence way to get you there to what this is like. I’ve never experienced anything like this driving. Please-Don’t-Watch-These-Mom videos coming soon…

Food. Wondrous. Everywhere everything all the time wondrous. There is some terribly tragic irony that the culture with some of the best food in the world had to submit for many decades to the culture with some of the worst food in the world. You would think with all the buckets of money the Brits were hauling out of India through the spice trade they would have at least actually used some of the spices in their food. Oh well. But I digress. We have eaten like kings and queens. I expect this trend to continue onward ever upward. Once we go to Patna, Saumya’s home town, I am told to expect an endless train of food that will leave me horribly, horribly inept at returning to the US and my routine of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch everyday.

People. Millions. Literally. Tons of people. Everywhere. For a sense of scale: take everyone in the United States. Multiply them by four. Now put them in a space about the size of the land east of the Mississippi. That’s India. Crowded. Loud. Honking. My God, the honking (see traffic, above).

Not as “developed” as I thought it would be. I had expectations that since India is part of the BRIC bloc of developing nations (along with Brazil, Russia and China) that there would be a sense of sophistication and ease that you’d anticipate with a middle-income country. Clearly India is way down the road to getting there, but is not there yet. No one talks about Panama, since it’s so off the radar and they simply don’t have tens of millions of people to raise out of poverty. But the rich-poor, development-index scale in my head was skewed toward “India wealthier than Panama” so far has not panned out in an appreciable way. I am sure that if I had seen India ten years ago, before they were clocking a 9% GDP growth rate for a decade, I would be floored by the improvement. And surely there is a very strong and strengthening middle class here that will be a strong civic foundation for the world’s largest democracy.

Highlights, thus far. Definitely yesterday and last night, which we spent on a houseboat lazily drifting through the “backwaters” of the state of Kerala, in southern India. Clear blue skies, warm weather, the gentle smacking of the water against the side of the boat, the rustle of the coconut palms, epic feasting on fresh seafood, including several tiger prawn, which are the Shaquille O’Neals of shrimp, at about a pound each and the length of your forearm. Another, odd highlight may be the fourteen hour overnight train ride to Alleppey, for our houseboat experience. Probably deserves its own post. A fascinating travel experience. In addition, a long, long list of little details that have been accumulating that may be of some interest. I’ll try to get those down in a semi-thorough way.

I think I’ve just promised about a half dozen posts. I better get on this.

Airborne, Looking Down at Constellations

2011-12-02T22:13:00.001-05:00

I recently flew home for Thanksgiving, down to Charleston from DC. I do try to enjoy the miracle of flight. Walk into a room and sit down. They close the door. Two hours pass. You stand up and they open the door. You're in a new city, a new country. Sit down for seventeen hours and Chicago becomes Delhi. Remarkable. Caracas becomes Miami, becomes Lucerne. Journeys that would have taken months, years, fly by (sorry) in a matter of hours. We went from feet to hooves to carriages to trains to cars to planes. What will the next breakthrough be? Our last step cut an eight hour car ride into a hour-plus flight. Will the next step proportionally reduce an hour-long flight into a seven and a half minute trip?

Numbed by our Blackberrys and the safety pantomime before takeoff, I think we've lost our sense of wonder at air travel, that we are in this metal tube blasting along in the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. I think about the math going on, the physics going on in the moment of takeoff. I wish I could see it. I wish I could look out the window and see the formulas and fractions flying by. Air pressure, wind velocity, thrust, gravity on the hull, friction on the tires, the weight of the passengers and their tubes of toothpaste in their carry-on luggage, the wind resistance and the aerodynamics. The tympani roll of the plane slowly gathering speed, the rumbling over the runway, the moment where the nose lifts, the pressure forces you down into your seat, and then the mystic moment when the back wheels no longer touch the earth. Upward thrust under the wings has exceeded the force of gravity. We are airborne.

I flew back to DC at night, over the Eastern seaboard, across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. I had a window seat.

As we fly over our planet, I look down at the flecks of illumination in the inky sea of darkness below, the bright dabs and swirls, the luminescent dots and lines, these spiraling galaxies of white and orange and pale green lights in the blackness. The landscape below is bristling with light, sometimes lethargically, sometimes enthusiastically. The densely packed light in the distance weakens as it spreads out from its core, the steaming orange fallout from the light pollution atom bomb of a town.

I wonder what we are passing over: what is the name of this town? Is this the Walmart? The Moore's house? The Jiffy Lube? New Bethlehem Baptist Church? The Krogers? My generality at this distance above is countered by the real specificity of what is below.

It's basically uninterrupted. Shopping malls, roads, clusters of subdivisions and cul-de-sacs, parking lots and warehouses. It is not as bare and primeval as you would think it would be. Has sprawl consumed the whole world? Where are the back woods, the mountain cottages for our Thoreaus and shramanas (if there are any left)? I remember that amazing view of the Earth from space, the image of "the world at night" where it's so clear how everything east of the Mississippi is a broad and spidery web of stars, linked together by fine filaments and strands, some of the lights glowing hot and bright and white, these little incendiary stars, our cities laid out in constellations on the Earth's surface.

Are we copying the heavens? Are we laying on the Earth's surface our image of ourselves? Are we mocking the old constellations of crab and twins and bull? Praising them? What are the constellations we are making, in these lines between Tuscon and Birmingham and Charlotte and New Orleans? The Grande Latte? The Failed Marriage? The iPad 2? The Traffic Jam?

The ancients looked up at the heavens and counted the stars in awe, marking lines between them and seeing in the cosmos familiar forms from our planet. We moderns have done the opposite - we have looked down at our planet and painted it with lines of light and stars of our own invention. We have made constellations. We have created our own cosmos.

Grandmother

2011-10-16T21:51:00.003-04:00

Walking across 16th Street this perfect fall afternoon, I noticed an elderly couple in the front seat of a wide, gray Lincoln parked at the light. The woman, small and fragile in that unmistakably grandmother way, with her white hair done in that characteristically beauty parlor perm, with the big black sunglasses wrapped around her regular glasses, dressed still in what seemed to be church attire, being driven south, for whatever reason, down 16th street this Sunday afternoon. Her husband, driving, in his white Members Only jacket, that seems clearly to me a thing of the mid 1990s, his hair thinning and jaw slightly open, giving him a look of confusion or boredom. But the woman was the one that fascinated me.

Old woman. Old grandmother.

She reminded me of my late grandmother, “Nana” to us. Whose patience and love were oceanic and eternal. Her little mannerisms, her expressions, her fragility and the lightness of her when you pressed up against her to “give her some love,” the bones that seemed like a bird’s, weightless and airy. The way she dressed, in that prim, controlled, proper style. Her biweekly trips to the beauty parlor to get her perm. The big gray Lincoln she drove, that battleship of a car that would cross lanes with a slow, wide drift. The car everyone of her generation seemed to drive.

And I thought: these people. These grandmothers of ours. They are going away, their lightness and beauty and love blown away like these dry, colorful leaves. The women who dressed like that, who were raised like that, who talked in that way in that time that was the 1930s in South Carolina. Or Anywhere, America. The little pleasures of her life, the candy of her childhood, the firm discipline of her mothering, the warm drawling love of her grandmotherhood. Her church dinners and county fairs and school dances. Her courtship and her marriage, her living and her loving.

And her dying. That unexpected last journey we all take. Death is the unexpected trip. It leaves behind human things: the dirty dishes in the sink, the food in the fridge, the clothes needing a wash. The gas tank of the car in the “carport” (a term I’ve only heard used by Nana and Grandad) still there registering some level of empty. The rolls of paper towel in the closet that will never be used. The towels she cleaned but never would dirty. Like she walked away from everything, took a trip. And never came home.

And the leaves of their lives are blowing away, this whole generation. Whose hands soldered bolts onto battleships and repaired the aircraft and built the guns when the whole world had gone wild with war. People whose childhoods were formed in the Great Depression, who heard Roosevelt’s fireside chats, who fought and won the war and thrived in the idyllic golden years of the 1950s, with their Ford motorcars and automatic washers and driers and mixers, all made wondrous and magical with electricity at prices they could afford. Then their hesitation and fear during the 60s, the protests and sex and race riots and drugs that turned everything they knew was sacred on its head.

These ones are fading fast and there are few women of my Nana’s generation left. Their places will be filled by those who grew up during or after the war. They will dress differently, talk differently, act differently. The Baby Boomers, my parents, will become the new grandparents. Even these Columbia Heights hipsters, with their tight jeans, asymmetric haircuts and elaborate tattoos will become grandmothers to generations yet unborn.

And we will all be blown along, floating in the air, dry and beautiful and fragile, until we at last also find our resting spot amid those who arrived before.

With Grace in Your Heart and Flowers in Your Hair: Christian Imagery in Mumford and Sons

2011-09-25T21:28:00.001-04:00

I’ve recently become obsessed with a new album: Mumford and Sons’ Sigh No More. It’s a rocking, singable, exuberant and deeply visceral album. I’m no music critic, so I cannot comment in detail on the musical nuances of the album. I do know, however, that I really enjoy the banjo plucking, guitar strumming, double bass thumping, the beautifully blended four-part harmonies and the driving, boot-stomping rhythm. This is one of those albums, much like The National’s High Violet that makes me just want to sing along the whole time.

I cannot remember now exactly how I came to them, or they to me. I know my pastor, Wendy Moen, mentioned them to me once and I made a note to look into them. I did, but I did not become deeply seeped in their music until I saw the video for “Winter Winds.”

One of the most striking moments I remember from that video was Marcus Mumford dragging a chair and a guitar through a field of high grass under a cloudy sky, with the haunting lyrics of “the shame that sent me off from the God that I once loved was the same that sent me into your arms…” I found that very moving, very emotional. The “God I once loved?” Why is this mainstream band talking about God? And the more I listened to their music, the more I found deep Christian imagery (the first two words of the album are “Serve God”). I’ve looked into some of what they have said about this imagery, and about the kind of “church revival” feel of some of their concerts. They say that those themes and images come up, but it’s more a concern about spirituality instead of about dedication to institutional Christianity, and that they have each had different spiritual journeys.

Regardless, the imagery is very developed and pronounced throughout the album. The song “Roll Away Your Stone” (the title image clearly one of the resurrection – “the angel of the Lord … rolled away the stone” (Matthew 28:2); “[the women] were discussing who would roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb … but when they arrived they saw that the stone … had already been rolled aside” (Mark 16:3)) When the singer (“speaker?”) says that all of his bridges have been burnt he is reminded “that is exactly how this grace thing works.” (A direct mention of grace reappears later in the album, in “After the Storm” – “Get over your hill and see, what you find there with grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.”) The mention of grace is fortified in the next phrase with an image of repentance and reconciliation: “It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with the restart.” These lines, if any do, certainly seem to refer to the story of the prodigal son and when the shamefulness of his return is transformed into exuberant celebration by a merciful father.

Penance and purification dominate in “White Blank Page” where the singer asks if you can “kneel before the king and say I’m clean, I’m clean…” The later reference to “loving you with my whole heart” can be interpreted as a secular reference to a lover, but the final use of this phrase widens it to a more theological plane: “So tell me now where was my fault in loving you with my whole heart / Lead me to the truth and I will follow you with my whole life.” This is almost lifted from the Psalms: “Show me the path where I should walk, O Lord… Lead me by your truth and teach me, for you are the God who saves me…” (Ps 25: 4-5). Or Jesus’ “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Plus “disciples” were simply “those who followed.” Following someone with your entire life seems a spiritual level of devotion.

A smattering of biblical imagery emerges in “Timshel.” The mother of a “baby child” is told that this man’s choices will “make man great, his ladder to the stars.” Ladder to the stars sounds like Jacob’s dream of a ladder to heaven. And the final line “I can’t move the mountains for you” references Jesus’ “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed and you said to this mountain ‘Get up and move’ it would move...”

“Thistle and Weeds,” while not overtly quoting scripture, does have strong suggestions of biblical language. “I’m on my knees and your faith in shreds it seems … Corrupted by the simple sniff of riches blown I know you have felt much more love than you’ve shown. I’m on my knees and water creeps to my chest.” This sounds almost baptismal. And the corrupting influence of the excessive love of money. The refrain of “plant your hope with good seeds, don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds” echoes of the “Parable of the Sower” who went out to sow and some seeds fell on good soil, and some among weeds, and some among the rocks. The line “There’s more than flesh and bones, let the dead bury their dead, they will come out in droves” is almost lifted directly from Jesus in Matthew 8:22 – “Let the dead bury their dead.”

The lyrics of “Awake my Soul” (at least an overtly spiritual title) have a line of “where you invest your love, you invest your life.” This is very similar to Jesus (Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34) “where you treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Later in the song we hear “you were made to meet your maker,” a maker we’ve heard of before in “The Cave,” where we are told “you can understand dependence when you know the maker’s hand.”

The more apocalyptic imagery is reserved for “Dust Bowl Dance” where we hear the narrator say “there will come a time when I’ll look in your eye / You will pray to the God that you always denied / Then I’ll go back out and I’ll get my gun / I’ll say you haven’t met me, I am the only son.” This seems to reference “Not everyone who cries out ‘Lord Lord’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 7:21) and/or the parable of the ten bridesmaids where the unprepared bridesmaids knock on the door begging entrance but are told by the groom “I don’t know you.” (Matthew 25:12). And of course the “only son” phrase summons images of Christ, who, it is said in the Nicene Creed is “the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father…”

All of this is to say that Mumford and Sons is not a Christian band in the strictest sense, but that their bold (and sometimes subtle) use of both scripture and references to spiritual themes will make them even more relevant to a society seemingly always in search of its soul.

Ten Years of War, An Imagined Forgiveness Unbound and a Truly Radical Response to 9.11.01

2011-09-17T08:51:00.001-04:00

Ten years. It's remarkable. With all the hype of this last week I am hesitant to add even more to the 9-11 remembrance frenzy. But I have been thinking about this event and wanted to put down some thoughts.

We were attacked that day. As a nation it seems, we were struck. Almost three thousand people lost their lives. It was a horrible, jaw-dropping tragedy of tremendous proportions. Everyone walked around like they had knives in their hearts. I remember going, instinctively, to St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, my church in Charleston, and sitting at a wooden pew, amid the calm and colorful stained glass, the vaguely indifferent Christs with their hands weakly raised in blessing (why isn't he ever smiling?). Rhett was there too, wandering among the stained glass. And I sat alone and wept. The people outside walked around like they were in a daze or actual shock. The dead eyes. The distant looks. The slow walk. The noticeable absence of laughter and smiling.

At church this Sunday we had a remembrance service at the National Law Enforcement Memorial. Prayers for peace. For healing, for restoration. For love. For forgiveness.

The lessons I read that morning were all about forgiveness. Joseph forgives his brothers who threw him in a well and left him to die but thought better of it and instead sold him to an Egyptian slavers. Years later when Joseph becomes powerful and his brothers are the epitome of the powerless, dusty and starving and begging for his forgiveness, he pardons them. In the Gospel we hear Jesus' parable about the slave who was forgiven a 10,000 talent debt (an unimaginable sum) who refuses to pardon the 100 talent debt of his peer.

Pastor Tom noted in his sermon the unplanned but significantly important occurrence of these texts on this day. Forgiveness. Are we to forgive? How? Who are we to forgive? Those who wrong us? Al Qaeda? Terrorists? Peter asks Jesus how many times he is to forgive a brother who wrongs him. Jesus says if you are counting you’re missing the point.

And yet what did we do? Did we turn the cheek as a nation? Or did we cry out for revenge? Three thousand Americans lost their lives that day. An eye for an eye mentality (to many not a very “Christian” response) would have said we should have killed three thousand terrorists in return. But we did not take an eye for an eye. For our eye we took an eye and a tooth and a tongue and an ear and both legs and an arm. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of them civilians: children, women and the elderly. Killed in the night in terrifying aerial attacks, some not even delivered by fighter pilots but by armed and silent drones in the sky. Were we going to win the “war on terrorism” by ourselves using the tools of terror? Night time raids, terrifying drone strikes from the sky, holding prisoners without cause or reason almost indefinitely? This is who we are?

What else could we have done? It seems now that there was only one response. This was an act of war. And so: “they will have war.” I think history will remember this first war of the 21st century as a 20th century reaction to a 21st century problem. We thought to solve a transnational problem of international scope like terrorism we would invade a nation. That a plot that unfolded across the globe in wide variety of countries (including Germany!) would suddenly be seen as rooted in just one state? It was a state reaction to a non-state actor. (Such a funny phrase, “non-state actor” – I imagine freelance Soviet theater bums; fired by the state, they have become “non-state” actors.)

The technological execution of combat however, would be highly 21st century, though. An analyst in Langley, VA, types in some coordinates in a computer. An armed, unmanned drone in the sky above Afghanistan drops a hundred pound bomb at those coordinates. The explosion is mostly unseen from an American point of view, the consequences even more so. What does a hundred pound bomb hitting the ground look like? What does it do to buildings? To people? To lives? We are totally removed from it. War and human suffering made even more distant, made even more detached, trivialized. Made into a video game.

In a sort of sense, this was the non-war. The nobody’s war. (With of course the notable exception of those executing it). This was the war that really seemed to be so far removed from the general populace’s consciousness that it wasn’t even happening. This was a war that the media only covered extensively when things were really bad, and I guess there is not much you can blame them for, given that it was a decade long. We had prosecuted this war, with its duration and scope, with fewer men and women than any previous war, so very few of us know the sons and daughters who have gone off to fight in it. It hasn’t scarred our consciousness the way Vietnam did. No one even had to pay for it. We weren’t asked to give a patriotic contribution or a “war tax.” The war would be free! We had a surplus! (Remember those days and the “problem” of what to do with it?).

What else could we have done in the face of this attack? We could have said: no more. Three thousand people have died this morning. We will mourn those people. We will support those families. But we will also be more vigilant. We will defend ourselves, so that no future blood will be spilled. That shall be our prime goal. We will launch a “war” to save lives and prevent bloodshed. We will build up our security at ports and harbors and airports and train tunnels. We will spend as much as it takes. We will work with international partners to beef up our understanding of this group, this non-state actor known as Al Qaeda and we will bring them to justice. We know the world is chaotic – it was on September 10, 11 and 12. And it will continue to be. We will not try to dupe you into thinking that the chaos and the danger of the world can be driven back completely. But as long as we are not afraid, they have lost. We will respond to their radicalism of hatred with a radicalism of love. Our forgiveness, foolish as it may seem or be, will, in its quiet, soft way, break their hatred and their fear. As Lao Tzu says in the Tao Te Ching, “The soft overcomes the hard… the gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”

What would the consequences of this kind of radicalism be?

We cannot know. What is done is done. And in this sense this is all just idle imagining. The unbinding of an irresponsibly loving forgiveness. I can’t see that response ever coming from any president.

And this is where we hit on the real fact that this is not an American response to an American tragedy. This is a human response to a human tragedy. I remember looking at the TV with those smoking towers and thinking, “Send me to war.” That seems unbelievable now. But that was my first reaction, a human reaction, and the reaction of millions. Immediate vengeance. You did this to us, and we will do this to you. This is simply human. Who could forgive in that moment?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how (could?) the same scriptures I read on Sunday could be used not for forgiveness but for vengeance. How a more conservative reading of the Bible would find “evildoers” and praise the wars as patriotic defense of our nation, despite the hundreds of thousands of casualties. How do you “read around” forgiveness? How does a language of forgiveness and peace get converted into one of retribution and war?

Ten years later, can we forgive? If we can, what would that mean? And if we can’t?

Always We Begin Again

2011-09-11T22:11:00.000-04:00

It seems odd or at least unexpected to restart this blog after such a long break. It was designed to be a travel blog, a record of my thoughts and experiences while on the road in Guatemala and Mexico. And I guess I liked the idea of it and the name of it, the sense of it, enough to decide to write on it again.

I wonder why now. Today seems like such a significant date. But it's really the physical new start to an idea I've been toying around with for some months now.

Why blog? Why write? Why say anything? Aren't there already too many people saying things? Aren't we already drowning in the shouting idiocy of our political class, the media and the writhing mass of the Internet, with its accusations, recriminations and outbursts? Why add another voice? Wouldn't a voice of silence, in some sense, be appreciated? One not talking, the silent one amid the chanting crowd? There is also a sense of "look at me" millenial type navel-gazing involved with writing about yourself.

I've thought seriously about these questions. And yet I've decided to come back to it. I guess I just like writing and I have been told by some they enjoy reading my writing. So why not keep writing? And maybe someone will read it. Maybe someone will respond to it. Maybe it will resonate with someone. Maybe a conversation could get started.

I don't know what will happen here or what I'll write about. Probably about the things that interest me. Politics. The environment. Religion and spirituality. History. Economics. Society. Art, theater or film. Maybe some of all of that.

The last post was from November of 2007. This blog is four years old?

There is a sense of risk here, too. Writing. Putting out on the Internet the wandering, rambling thinkings of this 28 year old version of myself. I'll probably look back on much of this with the awkwardness and slight embarrassment I get from reading things from my past that I once thought were so great, so well written. My senior thesis. That essay I wrote in high school AP English. Really? This? But hopefully I can keep a bemused sense of detachment from it. To think, Ahh, yes, this - I remember this.

This was meant to be a travel blog. I was on an interesting and different road. Central America! Spanish! Bringing your own roll of toilet paper with you! The stream of interesting and engaging things was seemingly without limit. Now it's "Just here." I'm "just here" in DC. And yet, I'm only here for a while. Unless I die here. I'm really just passing through. Oh, those were my eleven years, my three years, my forty one years in DC. Now this is the new period of my life, in London, in Mobile, in New York, in Arrequipa. How funny. The illusion of permanence. I'm here forever! Simply because I'm here now. There is no sense of end or terminus because this is "home." But in the long term, who knows how long this home will be my home. Until I have to pull up the stakes, pack up the tent and move on.

So a renewed sense of wonder. Of engagement. My life as a 28 year old unmarried man in Washington DC, the nation's capital, in these the years just after the end of the twenty first century's first decade. A brief moment. A window in time. A statically irrelevant blip on a geological timeline the expansiveness of which is beyond my comprehension...

And yet. (Always, "and yet") Here I am, writing in a park on a brand new and very tiny Toshiba laptop computer, seated on a bench in Kalorama Park in DC, wearing shorts, flip flops and a T-shirt, with my legs crossed, on this warm and humid September day that really is just the final waning (one expects? hopes?) experience of summer. Before the chill, the leaves, the darkness of fall...

(The post title comes from the Rule of Benedict; it's a phrase I find particularly lovely, a way of forgiving yourself and beginning anew.)

A Single Shaft of Light

2007-11-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

I considered a grand apology for all the half-thoughts, mental vomit and intellectual garbage that has cascaded from my mind onto this webpage. I suppose I could make it. But part of me wants to stand by what I've written, confused and angry and contradictory as it is, as hypocritical and pretentious as it may be.

The correct word at this point would be a good Greek one, metanoia, the word for “turning around,” literally (often translated as “repentance”). It wasn't that the Prodigal Son repented his poor behavior but that he turned around. And walked home. Back to the start.

Yesterday I sat in Santo Domingo cathedral here in Oaxaca, Mexico, and after a long and torturous session of self-examination and confusion, I walked out. And looked around. What, who did I find? An open plaza, with people mingled around its edges. Vendors and old Mexican women chatting on benches, tourists taking photos, young Latino lovers tangled up in each other, children toddling to an open-armed mother, friends laughing with each other about some shared joke. People. Just people. Doing what people do: be people. Silly, sad, serious, angry, joyous people. And I saw myself among them. I stood still and watched them move around me. The afternoon clouds shifted and a single shaft of light lanced across the sky. Hope. Peace. Reconciliation.

The turning will take time. I have moved too quickly, assumed to much and judged too harshly. We are all people, with our problems, hopes and joys. All sorts of things are mixed up in me and I haven't settled them out yet. Again, it will take time. I'd not like to go into all the details of what things I've discovered in my life that are not healthy and need to be surgically removed through some intense concentration and letting go.

I saw myself, briefly, clearly, in that moment in Santo Domingo. It was not pretty. You spoiled brat. I have put the world at your feet and given you everything and more and your heart is still hard, your eyes still cold and dead, your mind weakened by trivialities. The mystery and wonder of your daily life has been ignored, taken for granted and skimmed over. I felt all that lays behind me, all that lays still ahead of me, and a great sense of thankfulness arose in me. The weapons of the self I use to defend the narrow, fragile defenses and boundaries and frontiers of “my” space in the world crashed to the ground and shattered. And my heart, eyes, mind lept up at the reality of my existence, the wonder and miracle of being alive.

I almost pulled the plug on this whole blog. Because I saw in it perhaps a true image of a part of me: and it disgusted me. Ugly, twisted meanness, selfish defensiveness, the contorted scars of anger and fear, the old blemishes of doubt and judgment. Ancient, primordial roots of what is the mixed bag of my human-ness. The immaturity and hypocrisy rushed to the fore with blinding clarity. And I had to say, Yes, this is part of me. The blog, if anything, has done this and it is a service. Probably not all our thoughts should be made public to all people anywhere at any time. But it forces self-examination, I suppose.

Americans are wonderful people. American culture is wonderful. It is a land truly blessed by God. I want to make that absolutely clear. Panamanians are wonderful people. Panamanian culture is wonderful. Never will I be able to retract any of these statements. But we must be realistic as well. Americans have their problems. And so does American culture and society. It's not all sunshine and gumdrops. But the same goes for Panama. It has its separate problems and faults. On both sides are mounted great advantages and great disadvantages. Unfortunately, both sides may fail to appreciate this. For most people (American and Panamanian), the formula is simple: USA=good, developed, rich, easy; Panama=bad, underdeveloped, poor, difficult. Explaining this to Americans is easy. And Panamanians would jump to agree to these simplistic statements. What is the unexpected truth is the wealth of advantages Panamanian culture has and the weaknesses in the American culture which has, by some standards, sold its soul to gain the whole world. And in that light, Panama may still have its soul, its fire and dance and love and family that is sometimes harder to find in America, or weakened.

I've seen both sides pretty well, American and Panamanian. And I bet explaining the disadvantages of America and the benefits of Panama to either side is an uphill battle. It may be impossible. I don't blame people for not being able to make the jump. Two and a half years ago I never could have made that jump. It's really incomprehensible, without living in rural Panama for two years like I have, a commitment few would be able to make.

I may have rushed too far to correct this imbalance or misunderstanding in some of my writing. I may have been intensely critical and harsh toward Americans, Western culture and the scorecard of “developed/developing states.” For that I apologize. I am very proud of Panama and very honored and grateful for my experience there. But I don't want that returning-to-America pro-Panama pride to rub the wrong way and be interpreted as a slight, insult, or venomous barb against the culture that raised me, formed me, challenged me and provided me the vast opportunity to jump out of it for a while and see it from the outside.

Well, there I did it and apologized.

It feels better.

I want to find Latinos in America and speak Spanish and get them to teach me how to salsa well. I want to listen to Panamanian radio via the internet and read Panamanian newspapers on the web. I want to call my community and not lose touch. I want to enjoy time with my family and move through my American Life slower, more appreciatively, and more engaged with other people. I want to carry the best of Panama, its generosity, openness, hospitality, sense of time and relationships, to the people I love in America. I want to find the correct balance of both cultures that is realistic and healthy. I want the best of both worlds to inform my life as I move forward.

It will be a challenge. But what isn't?

I have three more days in Mexico. Then I fly to America, to Charleston, to my home and my family, to a new dawning horizon in my life.

Existential Crisis Of A Tourist

2007-11-14T10:23:00.000-05:00

So this is Mexico.

What changed? Most obviously, the vegetation. Crossing the river between Guatemala and Mexico that was the first thing that struck me, the change in plant life. I felt like we were in East Texas or Louisiana. All the palm fronds and big banana leaves that make up the landscape between Darién and the Petén suddenly disappeared. Trees like the ones we'd find in the southern U.S. And the food, to a smaller degree. Lots of salsas, picantes (spicy salsas), condiments. We have ecstatically discovered that literally all food is made better with lime. Mexico has given me at least this.

Mexicans are very proud people. They know their history and culture and language much better than I know mine. A sweaty, bespectacled Mexican squabbles with a seated, overweight Mexican in a stretched shirt about the minutia of dates during the Mexican Revolution. And my ponderous ignorance on American history, the forgotten and dusty pages from AP American History in high school.

I hate to say it, and I hate how these entries turn out so negative or critical, but the nature of the beast is that it's all starting to run together, all these towns and plazas and squares and fountains and churches and ruins and indigenous clothing and foods. From the highlands of Peru, to the jungles of Guatemala, from the historic quarters of Panama: most obviously the vast “conquered” swath of territory from Chile to the Rio Grande we call “Latin America”, the rice-and-beans, Catholic, Spanish-indigenous culture that millions call home. It is all starting to blur together. I am in the midst of a small existential crisis with my identity as a tourist.

I wanted for so long to be a “traveler,” separate from those “tourists” who jump on their chartered buses to run out to ruins and churches for their tours in English. But I'm among them. And I suppose accepting that title is a step towards honest self-examination. Stepping off my grand (did you notice?) soap-box about Peace Corps about how I'm now somehow “different” (I've noticed my difference but don't know the details of this difference yet). We fall into the same tourist-traps, the Lonely-Planet-guided path to all the “cool places” discovered as “cool” and then condemned with the golden touch of death, the thumbs up from the guidebooks which simultaneously rockets a town into the tourism industry, while also constraining it with all the problems inherent in such an industry. The loss of authenticity and culture, the sort of sad and sometimes sick parading of culture, the pedaling of history as a trinket made (sometimes in China) for you to take home to prove somehow “I was there.”

Pride. Maybe that's all it comes down to? My vast, idiotic scorecard of “where I've been”: my nausea at adding five to six new countries of places I now “know” (horrifically superficially). To compare with others, to their scorecards, to see who “wins” in this insane race to “see the world.” Why? Why this desire to “know” a place? I ran into an old Australian couple who (deliberately or not) dropped names of all the countries in Asian and Latin America they've been to, and they mentioned that they visited China twice, in the 1970's and a few years ago, and how completely different it was. So even the places we've tagged as “known”, “seen”, “checked off” change more rapidly than we can visit and revisit them. So what the hell are we doing?

Ideas from the smart guys I'm traveling with: Education, Entertainment. A kind of relaxation (I don't always see running around frantically to “see the sights” as relaxing), a different experience from the work-a-day life we are used to. And to get interested in some topic you never considered (the history of Mexico's revolution, Mayan astrological-architectural correlations, the demographic of illegal immigrants to the US, South Carolina history, the comparative strength of the Mexican economy in Central America and its relation to NAFTA, etc). And that curiosity inspiring you to look up/research the facts for yourself. Or, reversed, to see the places you've already read about, to see first hand the ruins you've read a book or two on. If only I could do this research ahead of time.

We saw Monte Alban yesterday. So what? Why, after that two hour tour in Spanish, am I better off? What did I learn or how was I challenged or changed? Did I do that just to add another ruin to the list of ruins I've seen? We took photos and turned down tourist trinkets, we paid our entrance fee and walked around. Cool.

The fact of the matter may be that my appreciation has plummeted since joining this wild adventure in a culture I now feel so at home with, post-Panama. That it's all “ho-hum” now what in two to five years will be “wow!”. I've exhausted my travel-endurance, perhaps in these crazy two years, visiting in two years more countries than I'd visited in my life prior (almost: five/six to five/six, depending if you count Kenya or Costa Rica). But doubling in two years my perspectival horizon may have stretched me too far. And this is the “what are we really doing here?” whiplash.

I'm open to your comments and help to free me from this entangled mess I've inadvertently snagged myself in (acknowledging my hopeless tendency to over-complicate things normally accepted casually by Most Anybody).

Turkey sounds nice. Charleston sounds nice. Family sounds nice. Christmas lights. Sunrises over the marsh. Long visits with family. After almost two and a half years, I'm on my way home. Home.

Show me the way to your Sanitary/Bath/Service!

2007-11-01T21:41:00.000-04:00

The word for bathroom in Spanish varies from “baño” to “servicio” (Panamanian) to (as I now learned in Guatemala) “sanitario.” A question for the “servicio” always ends with, you mean “sanitario”? Like we actually speak this language. We, as always, learn to roll with the linguistic punches. At dinner we sat around with a Guatemalan in a 3 tacos-for-$1.30-place and discussed things said/done (phrases, gestures, vocab used) in Panama but completely useless here. He was amused by Panamanian antics. So am I. Ahh, the Mother Land.

So, to update you in my typically obtuse style … after volcanos and lava and such (see below) we decided walking over lava was JUST SILLY and decided to take three days to see the bien famoso Lago Atitlán. Another interesting and much less dangerous experience.

With a bus from Antigua, we arrived in Panajachel, the gringo-town famous for making Peace Corps volunteers nauseous with too-many-Americans. We promptly left (having sampled the only good thing in the town, a delicious piece of fried chicken unrivaled on this continent) and crossed the sparkling water to the town of Santiago de Atitlán, a cool very not-touristy place where we spent several hours walking around the same block looking for our hotel (which we literally collapsed in front of, not realizing it was our hotel … the name had been changed since the publication of our absurd guidebook). The day was low-key. We enjoyed views from the hotel roof of the beautiful parorama that is the lake. Later we enjoyed views from the bed as we soaked in a little cable T.V. The height of the achievement of the day was by far the find of 10 Quetzal ($1.30) street-meat dinner which was the most flavorable piece of beef I’ve encountered in this continent. Avacado, beans, tortillas, rice, beef, sour cream. Heaven, in a word, on a Styrofoam plate. I gloated in our great victory a bit and the other guys (their names are Alan and Josh) rolled their eyes in collective disgust. I will without a doubt miss the super-fast, super-cheap, full home-cooked meals in often-outdoor eateries that are so characteristic of this culture. America is a corporate demon from which I must find a means of escape!

The next day we high-tailed it out of there and went to a bizarre location, across the lake, the little town of San Marcos La Laguna, a strange haunt of gringo-hippies and poor Guatemalans. The town was ghettoized into the ritzy/trendy massage parlors (seriously), sauna baths, meditation centers, yoga clubs, etc. by the water and the poor, much more interesting Guatemalan side of town with the typical basketball court, small comedors (eateries), dirt streets, young Guatemalan children standing in doorways barefoot and bashful, etc. Much less pretty and much more real. I enjoyed the Guatemalan side. The trim and neat, an-effort-made-to-be-natural-yet-distinctly-fake gringo playland, the artificial world of plant-life and chic little cafés populated by dredlocked, glazed-eyed hippies, wearing lots of hemp and prayer beads, distinctly turned me off. They have made spirituality into a commercial phenomenon. A pay-for-yoga-classes-and-attain-enlightenment kind of “soft soap” (CS Lewis) way of thinking that I feel cannot work. I want to fly-in an Aghori tantric yogi and show them this guy and tell them THAT is yoga, a man sitting in a graveyard at midnight, covering himself in human ashes and eating burnt human flesh (DO YOUR RESEARCH if you want to do this I’m-going-all-eastern-because-the-West/Christian-culture-fails-to-speak-to-me stuff).

But it got me thinking a lot about identity and authenticity, two important words to think about. How one defines one’s identity and how one remains authentic, always being who one is (identity). It also started a lot of good thoughts on the nature of spirituality and how it can be authentic or commercial. How visiting a monastery has a much more genuine, authentic aspect whereas paying for trendy classes and yoga-equipment has the hint of wanting to be accepted through a certain identity, a group of friends and associates that forms one’s identity as a calling-card for what one is. This stuff worries me. I also thought about the nature of space in spirituality: how one should not need a special/beautiful place to “do” spiritual things/live spiritually. How ideally spiritual living saturates daily life and can be done anywhere at any time. Why must I meditate on the most beautiful lake in the world and then go to a steam bath and relax and do yoga to find peace? Perhaps these “retreat” type situations are important breaks in the spiritual journey, refuges of rest, but they cannot be made into a real lifestyle, can they? Is that what monasticism is, a kind of escape from certain pressures (daily, worldly) to other pressures (spiritual, emotional)? I feel it’s something much more than that. Any monk would argue you flee the world to find the world (paradoxically). That to enter the monastic lifestyle turns one from a kind of reality so that one can see that reality most clearly and plunge into all its consequences.

Why do these entries come out so judgmental and harsh? I feel peace corps has taught me to start to view the world from others’ eyes and judge them less for what I perceive as their faults. Yet I find a disturbing intolerance continually creeping in: for trendy, wealthy Americans flopping around this continent or world in search of meaning/truth/reality by paying lots of money, or trying to learn Spanish to appear cultured or worldly, or pushing their agenda on others. We were in a little bus today going to a famous kite festival today in Santiago de Antigua and the high-tension, high-stress Americans grated on my nerves to an unexpected degree. They were freaking out that we were leaving 30 minutes late (it didn’t matter, we got there and the activities still had not started). A hyperactive Spaniard chewed out the bus driver and I almost said something to him. The motor wouldn’t start, so we had to hop out and bus the bus til the engine fired. They were flabbergasted. I thought, Welcome to the Developing World, Welcome to Reality. This is how things are for a lot of people on this planet. Deal.

Peace Corps has given me a phenomenal gift: a two year life lived in rural, trying conditions in the developing world, and I am immensely grateful. It has opened my eyes and shown me how things really are. This amazing, life-changing gift comes with a great burden, the burden of knowledge: of having scales of ignorance drop from the eyes and the painful truth rush in and blind. I have seen the world as very, very few people on this planet have (at least the people from the so-called “Developed World” (a term full of problems)). All of us, every Peace Corps volunteer, has had this experience and now we are asked, demanded, to live in a culture, a country, a civilization which has none of the experiences we have. I see us as a kind of lonely elite, a great but sad minority of Americans which has seen the real world, the Other Side, and now must return to live in the dismal grandeur, the great vomiting insanity of capitalism and consumerism that is the “Developed World.”

More fun thoughts coming soon!

Molten Lava, Razorsharp Rocks, Gale-Force Winds, Noxious Gases and Freezing Temperatures!: The Best Experience of My Life!

2007-10-28T21:21:00.000-04:00

New things are happening! So our little Three Musketeers adventure through Guatemala is taking new twists and turns. The laidback days in White People Ville USA, Antigua, Guatemala, have come to a thankful close, and yesterday we went out with a proverbial bang worth of such a figure of speech: an afternoon hike up a volcano and ACROSS LIVE LAVA FIELDS. I have never experienced anything like this.

Jammed against the large white Eastern European man in the front seat of a mini-bus, we swerve back and forth across the winding turns of the Guatemalan highlands. Tumbling out of the van, we are met with a sea of little Latino boys' faces asking "Wanna stick?" Just like that. In English. There were probably close to 30 of them. Pushing our way through them and gently refusing, until we took some lucky bloke up on the offer and paid to get a walking stick, we waded our way through a pack of horses ready to rent to rich and overweight tourists. But we are/were Peace Corps volunteers!, we scoff. Bring me your worst volcano, Guatemala!

And Guatemala did. The hike was a bit much, at least the initial climb, which was straight up for about 45 minutes. My lack of cardiovascular stamina made itself shamelessly known. But the endorphines racing through my veins, the sweating, pounding screaming insanity of my heart was a welcome companion up this slope. I don't make any claims to be a great hiker. Then we reached the summit and got a spectacular view of the surrounding volcano country. This was only the beginning of our fun. Our guide, in a delightful mix of English and Spanish, said we were going to go Down There (pointing to a black smoldering death pit that would have inspired Dante to pen his Inferno (he may have added more devils and torture racks than we found)).

The initial instructions were not very reassuring. We are going to take some precautions, our wise and energetic guide tells us. These precautions involve testing the black crusty lava with a stick before stepping onto its brittle and razor-sharp black death-surface of cutting-fury that could easily collapse into smoldering foot shoved into liquid magma. I grinned. No form, no paperwork, no insurance, no warning. I looked up into the sky and saw a few eager lawyers drifting above us in circles, waiting to pounce to the ground with claims to sign. Smiling, we collectively thought, this is the stupidest best idea of our lives.

The first part was pretty easy. The rocks seems pretty sturdy (cold lava "frozen" in rippling flows). They were unmistakably sharp, and covered with lots of little brittle lava-blades that we could use to slip in our Mach 3's, should need be. Then things started heating up (literally). The cold, bitter, and steady wind we had faced at the summit mysteriously and alarmingly disappeared. Suddenly there was a steady, almost imperceptible heat from some source. We found out it was the ground we were walking on. The brittle, crusty black surface was radiating the heat that was undoubtledly glowing and churning below its fragile surface, eager to consume a nice gringo leg. Then the first sighting occured. A 20 foot crack in the surface, and a foot or so down the glowing orange-red plasma you'd associate with real Oh My God This Is Like Real Life/National Geographic Lava! We, of course, doubted it was really lava and did what any responsible, intelligent citizen would do and POKED IT WITH STICKS. Sure enough, the sticks caught fire. Man alive, we thought. Lava. Real honest-to-goodness lava. Passing steam jets and scrambling up more and more of the crusty surface, we were made nervous by the quickly setting sun (I'm no "explorer", but I'd rather not be trapped on a live lava field in the dark and have to make my way home). Our guide was On A Mission and we soon found out why: a lava flow bursting out of the ground like a geological tube of magma toothpaste. Orange, glowing, flowing, real lava. We all lost it. Lots of phototaking. And then, following our needs as responsible, intelligent citizens (see above), we POKED IT WITH STICKS. Turns out, yes, it was real lava. (Amusing photos to be posted soon).

I'm no lava expert, but I was shocked by how HOT lava is. You get close to the real stuff, and it's absurdly hot. I could hardly stand to be that close to it for more than a few seconds. It felt like jumping in an oven real quick.

The sun setting, we scrambled to the tierra firme, and made our winding way up to the same summit and began the night-descent to the van waiting below. The return trip was not that thrilling, and was taken up with a lot of laughing, reviewing of photos and movies, and wonderment about how stupid and awesome we are.

Today we made the transfer to Lago Atitlan. I had no idea how beautiful it really was until I spent more than 3 hours here (first trip to Guatemala). We will be here, wandering around the perimeter of the lake for three days, taking photos, hiking, visiting meditation centers, learning about herbal medicine, and maybe doing some kayaking. All and all, a wild pair of days. This vacation has been a trip! (idiocy of statement assumed).

My issue with white people

2007-10-27T13:07:00.000-04:00

So I have been getting into coffee. My strict no-coffee policy has been slipping recently, as I accept coffee if it's offered to me but I won't buy it. I still feel like I'm cheating with the sugar and milk. It should be straight or not at all, I argue. But I am gradually getting my feet wet. And this internet place has free coffee. It's pretty weak but hey, it's free.

I have found that in Antigua there are all these white people trying to learn Spanish. They are Europeans and Americans and Australians and Israelis and such. I should be glad. Peace Corps taught me that learning a second language is an experience that nothing can really equal. The process, humbling and frustrating and exciting, changes your whole perspective on the world. You begin to realize the differences in expression, in communication. Things like tone and cadence and rhythm all enter into language, so it's almost musical. The process is extremely enriching.

I want to send millions of Americans to other countries to learn a second language. I'd make them learn Spanish. We as a culture need to get ready for that fact. The fact that we are not the center of the universe and one day not all the world will kneel at our presence and kiss our holy feet with an English kiss. It just shows great arrogance and ignorance. "Learn some English" we hear disdainfully muttered to new immigrants to this country. My response? "Learn some Spanish." These people are guests in our country and we are showing them the ugly, mean, ancient face of American racism. I have been a foreigner in a different country and people treated me specially because they wanted me to leave Panama with a good impression of that country, that I would go home and tell my countrymen that Panamanians are kind and generous and patient, loving people. In the reverse case, in the mirrored case of a Mexican or Ecuadorian or Colombian who has moved to the U.S., who has given up the comfort of his own language and people and culture and family and history, to travel thousands of treacherous miles to a strange and often unwelcoming country fills me with a real disgust. I want to turn everything around: and when your Italian/Jewish/Polish/Swedish ancestors came to this country, when they sacrificed everything and left everything behind, were they not greeted with that same ugly disdain? When will we learn to treat each other like humans?

My rant will slowly drift toward some magnetic pole. Yes. So all these white people are learning Spanish, which is the real passport to an entire continent. From the Rio Grande to the Tierra De Fuego in Chile, a continent becomes accessible, a culture and history and people comes really, finally alive. Millions and millions of people can now have a conversation with you. But something in this annoys me. What is it, I cannot tell. I am impatient with these new learners of Spanish. I see their faltering, fumbling attempts to speak and I get annoyed. This says a lot about me, I suppose. I want everyone to learn Spanish but I want them all to skip that intermediate phase where they fumble around for words and make a lot of errors. I want them just to be fluent. I walked behind a guy with his Spanish teacher here in Antigua and the conversation clunked along until the Spanish teacher gave up and switched to English. I felt frustrated. Just learn it and really speak it, I want to yell. I need more patience in my life. Study it and speak it and practice it and get out there and just DO it. So many people here are just doing it in a kind of yuppie or hippie way, like they want to learn Spanish to be all fashionable or trendy or something. I don’t know people’s motivations to learn Spanish, so I don’t know if they want to use it to travel or to get a job or what. But they take these Spanish classes and live in Antigua and then go out to trendy bars with other Americans where the whole barstaff are English ex-pat’s or something and they all speak English with each other. It seems silly or sad. And it frustrates me because it’s not how I learned, perhaps. They aren’t out in the campo, living where you can’t speak English with anyone except when you see other volunteers. They are sort of sliding by, feeling they are all special or something, and they’ll go home and have this “great experience” of living in this foreign city and they’ll talk all like it’s so exotic and challenging and there was so much suffering involved in throwing your toilet paper into a trash can at the side of the toilet, or not having a car to go wherever you want, or having to eat different food. It will be Peace Corps Super Lite and they will think it so hard.

And I suppose it is. I am too hard on these people. I want everyone to do Peace Corps or some similar challenging experience or almost not do it at all. Do it or don’t do it. Don’t dick around with this in-between stuff.

And of course this argument is absurd. It’s all relative. To someone who really lived in the jungles of Africa for 25 years as a missionary, working in solitude and fear and danger, my little two years in too-developed, skyscrappered Panama was a pampered existence. We want to think we are all bad-ass and yet there will always be someone more bad-ass than us. Peace Corps Mali volunteers probably would laugh at the idea of a volunteer in Panama or Costa Rica. It all goes back perhaps to me taking this experience so seriously when for others it may mean very little.

I smiled to myself when the title of this entry popped into my head. It is perhaps a testament to how far I felt integrated into Panamanian culture. I now talk about “these white people” and yet forget I stand, at least epidermically, among them. Yet something has profoundly changed. I can step out of my body and my mind and my background and stand with another, in another body and time and place and language and culture. I think PC is making or has made me more empathetic, with the ability to see it from another’s perspective. And yet the diatribe above. It’s not complete. Seeing things from another’s point of view. Understanding that if I was living X person’s life with all the different forces and conditions and trials of that Other Existence, I would probably act the same way. I am trying not to judge so much. Understanding why people do things. That we’re all just people and we’ve all got our faults. And to this lost, broken, twisted people arrives God and stands among us not in American flesh or Jewish flesh or African flesh or Cambodian flesh or Panamanian flesh. He comes in human flesh. A human. Among us. To tell us what? That we are all just humans and that we should love each other, that we should see the piercing glory of God in the glint of another human eye, the radiating force of the divine life playing in this surging river of flesh and color and pain and love we call this life.

My prayer, continually, is “don’t give up on me.”

Thoughts to Meringue

2007-10-26T18:50:00.000-04:00

Another day in Antigua, Guatemala. The gringo-saturation of this town is getting to me. I think it's time to be moving on. But tomorrow should be exciting. A hike to an active volcano, Pucaya. Throwing things in live lava flows. And seeing what happens. Wish I had a camera to film the destruction.

New things in my life besides blogging: YouTube. I've realized all the music videos I loved so in Panama can be found with a simple YouTube search. I've currently been on a meringue binge, so it's a great joy to have all the meringue I'd ever need at my finger tips. I think I will keep up with Latin music in the U.S. I went from hating to tolerating to enjoying it. My slowest transition. But perhaps my deepest one. Latin Americans are so passionate and dramatic. Their music follows suit. We have much to learn from them. An image of joy in my head is the return to america and rolling through the streets of Charleston in my yeye camry with the windows down pounding meringue or salsa or tipico or ballenato and singing along, attracting stares.

Chilly and cloudy in Antigua. Nice quiet walks and moments in empty cathedrals. Insence and candles. And I send out an email to Mepkin Abbey, a third visit in December? I need time to process things and I cannot think of a better place.

People here are very small

2007-10-25T13:27:00.000-04:00

I am in Antigua, Guatemala, for the second time.

I had forgotten two things. One is that it is colder here than I remember. This is good because it reminds me of fall and turkey and changing leaves and Thanksgiving and sweaters. The second thing is that people here are very small. All of them. Por lo general, as we say. Most of the women barely reach my chest. It's like some land of little people and their tortillas and colorful clothes.

Traveling alone is interesting. You have freedom to do as you wish and yet it's sort of lonely. So I wander around, doing what I like most to do, just wander. Hemingway wrote "cruise around by yourself and see what happens to you." I think this is good advice. I try to walk as slowly as I can and do as little as possible and just observe things, just take it all in.

Responding to the initial (i first typed "inicial" ... Spanish may have a permanent place in my mind) criticism to the title of this blog: my idea or image was that Dante, the poet, in the Divine Comedy, passes from Inferno (hell) through Purgatorio (purgatory) to Paraiso (heaven). And yet my idea was AFTER all of that what if Dante just wandered around between all the stuff in between? It's sort of how I see my life, wandering through the between. Lost and curious and quiet and patient and slow and impressed by all the between that is between heaven and hell that we call this world.

This will be my journal on the road that is public. The real one is private.
Blog is such a hideous word.