I am down in Parakou taking out the second half of finances for my PCPP Project Latrine grant. I wasn't expecting the project to be developing so quickly, but its a good thing! The families and masons have been incredible and efficient and everything is running smoothly. As of date, I have collected all 50 family contributions, and all families have at least begun if not finished digging their holes. We have completed 31 latrine covers, and 12 frameworks (the ring of bricks that serve as the foundation for the latrine cover). We also are having a cement shortage in village, so I will be heading to the neighboring village on the main road today to see if I can order a tractor of 2.5 tons of cement.
Thanks to all who made this project possible. I have posted 4 photos so far on my picassa website, also linked to this blog. I will keep taking pics for a nice album at the end. Ok, back to work!
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Project Latrines!
Happy Holidays! My project has been accepted and is ready to receive funding. Here is the link: Project Latrines
Thanks for the help and I look forward to future blogs describing in detail the projects events.
-Elliot
Friday, August 28, 2009
Starving for fun
I have made it nearly a year into post, and 14+ months in Benin. One of the new volunteers asked me the other day, “so it went fast right?” I responded, “looking back, everything seems as if it went fast, but this last year was one of the slowest I can remember.” Now with time to reflect, I will still say that’s true. Yes, there have been busy times, and I can’t believe I have already hosted 3 visitors (one twice), but going through training feeling like a 12yr old with nagging parents, and then like a 1yr old with all of the languages was not an expeditious process. Then we have post, which for me (cannot generalize here) could be compared to middle school summer vacation. It is the first summer you are left alone by your parents, which inherently means much open time to figure out what to do. The analogy goes further when most of the people I interact with daily don’t act older than 14, and the amount of gossip here is at times sickening. You have very little capital, and you know even less of the microcosm you have arrived into. Let class begin.
Despite the slowness at moments of this past year, I have learned a great deal about myself, Benin, building, books, languages, etc... I am currently sweating into this journal at 13:00 on the first day of Ramadan. I was woken this morning at 4:50 just in time for the morning prayer and our last meal until sundown, 19:30. As Abu was banging on my screen door telling me to come outside, I hazily remembered myself saying I would try Ramadan (they call it le Carême here) for 4 days with the family. I didn’t know, however, that I had also invited myself to the prayers at the mosque as well. I stumbled outside into the courtyard which should have been black except for the two light bulbs dangling from the mango tree pulsating to the thieved Nigerian gas inside the knockoff Chinese generator. Yes, I commonly had the chance to enjoy this sonorous luminosity along with a blaring Yoruba video most nights of the week, but this, at 4:50am, was a privilege. We did our prayers and I ate my pate and gumbo sauce and went back to bed until 8:30am. Today, this is the quietest I have ever heard this concession. Nothing better to quiet the family than a little starvation for Allah where 65% of children are already malnourished.
Thinking back to my arrival, I actually thought about trying to fast, thinking in some way my asceticism would change the way I think about life. Now, after reading what I have, I know how foolish this was, that starving the body (in addition to all other forms of denial) are not gateways to a higher existence. So even though my opinions have changed, I am still here, starving myself. As I attempt this sacrifice for the next 4 days, I will be reading Nietzsche’s attack on religion and demand that richness, excess, cruelty and sensuality must be brought back in replace of poverty, godliness, suffering, and spirituality. Cheers, Nietzsche. I’m doing it however for the comradery, and just purely to see what my body feels like after 15 hours without food or water. Less than 6 hours left and all I can say is that I’m hungry - just like every other day here when the only produce I can find is onions and okra.
I have to go back to the middle school here. In a book I just finished, the author was talking about refugees from Cambodia, all living together in the states after years of torture, and the only conversations happening were about the new people they met on the voyage, love, and general gossip that you hear anywhere. For those of us traveling to other countries to see, or help change ‘extreme poverty’ (however that phrase is defined today) we learn like from this book, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over throughout history: How much do you love me and who’s in charge?”
A year has gone by in Benin. Really? I guess things have changed. The reasons I came over here are still the reasons I am here, though altered, slightly. But that’s what situations do, they alter your perceptions. I feel very different about development, money, architecture, and relationships than I did before, but when you think about it, don’t you always ask yourself, “I knew I always thought that.”? Its very strange maybe only since I’ve been here long enough, but I can’t remember how I was before Benin, and yet, I know how little I understood about this experience: PC, Africa, my role here as a volunteer... I think what I want to say is its hard to see another person’s perspective, even your own from another time. Its as if all unknown is out there, waiting to be explored, and afterwards you see that the unknown was already known. Maybe within a frame of time or maybe one’s subconscious, but can you ever look back and know what would have happened if you did it differently? The question is the answer. Just the usual destiny and choice melting pot conundrum.
So going into year 2 yes, it will be different. The ride isn’t over, but it will be downhill. My expectations and dreams have either become realities, or its too late and now I am able to let go and move on. I will be more free without the pressure of 2 years of potential on my shoulders, as things are falling where they should. I am beginning to feel a great thing, and that is that I do not fantasize about other places, and experiences as I once did. Call it an inner peace if you will, but I feel more comfortable where I am and I am beginning to feel content with the world as is.
As I write this, three little boys from my concession are 5 feet from my door, all naked taking a bucket shower, and from the small amount of Baatonu that I know, are covering themselves with soap singing, “Baatooreey Baatooreey!” (Aka Whitey/foreigner). Ha, I can always count on someone here to break any over philosophizing I may be doing and bring me a fresh glass of reality (whatever that is).
I suppose in the end here I want to say that I’m exactly where I want to be. I may not be using my architectural skills, or saving lives here, but I still have a purpose internally, just as everyone does, and I have found mine clearer here perhaps due to the lack of outer purpose, when at the beginning my dreams of developing Africa overnight all by myself seemed only too easy. Sometimes we need to derail to see what train we’re riding on. Ok, now I’m hungry. Going to return to this simple life, complex in so many ways.
“Time triumphs over Space, and it is time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of culture, on this planet in the incident of man - a form wherein the incident of life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.” -Oswald Spengler
Oh, and before I forget, I will be posting some new photos also. My graffiti in village has begun!
Despite the slowness at moments of this past year, I have learned a great deal about myself, Benin, building, books, languages, etc... I am currently sweating into this journal at 13:00 on the first day of Ramadan. I was woken this morning at 4:50 just in time for the morning prayer and our last meal until sundown, 19:30. As Abu was banging on my screen door telling me to come outside, I hazily remembered myself saying I would try Ramadan (they call it le Carême here) for 4 days with the family. I didn’t know, however, that I had also invited myself to the prayers at the mosque as well. I stumbled outside into the courtyard which should have been black except for the two light bulbs dangling from the mango tree pulsating to the thieved Nigerian gas inside the knockoff Chinese generator. Yes, I commonly had the chance to enjoy this sonorous luminosity along with a blaring Yoruba video most nights of the week, but this, at 4:50am, was a privilege. We did our prayers and I ate my pate and gumbo sauce and went back to bed until 8:30am. Today, this is the quietest I have ever heard this concession. Nothing better to quiet the family than a little starvation for Allah where 65% of children are already malnourished.
Thinking back to my arrival, I actually thought about trying to fast, thinking in some way my asceticism would change the way I think about life. Now, after reading what I have, I know how foolish this was, that starving the body (in addition to all other forms of denial) are not gateways to a higher existence. So even though my opinions have changed, I am still here, starving myself. As I attempt this sacrifice for the next 4 days, I will be reading Nietzsche’s attack on religion and demand that richness, excess, cruelty and sensuality must be brought back in replace of poverty, godliness, suffering, and spirituality. Cheers, Nietzsche. I’m doing it however for the comradery, and just purely to see what my body feels like after 15 hours without food or water. Less than 6 hours left and all I can say is that I’m hungry - just like every other day here when the only produce I can find is onions and okra.
I have to go back to the middle school here. In a book I just finished, the author was talking about refugees from Cambodia, all living together in the states after years of torture, and the only conversations happening were about the new people they met on the voyage, love, and general gossip that you hear anywhere. For those of us traveling to other countries to see, or help change ‘extreme poverty’ (however that phrase is defined today) we learn like from this book, “There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over throughout history: How much do you love me and who’s in charge?”
A year has gone by in Benin. Really? I guess things have changed. The reasons I came over here are still the reasons I am here, though altered, slightly. But that’s what situations do, they alter your perceptions. I feel very different about development, money, architecture, and relationships than I did before, but when you think about it, don’t you always ask yourself, “I knew I always thought that.”? Its very strange maybe only since I’ve been here long enough, but I can’t remember how I was before Benin, and yet, I know how little I understood about this experience: PC, Africa, my role here as a volunteer... I think what I want to say is its hard to see another person’s perspective, even your own from another time. Its as if all unknown is out there, waiting to be explored, and afterwards you see that the unknown was already known. Maybe within a frame of time or maybe one’s subconscious, but can you ever look back and know what would have happened if you did it differently? The question is the answer. Just the usual destiny and choice melting pot conundrum.
So going into year 2 yes, it will be different. The ride isn’t over, but it will be downhill. My expectations and dreams have either become realities, or its too late and now I am able to let go and move on. I will be more free without the pressure of 2 years of potential on my shoulders, as things are falling where they should. I am beginning to feel a great thing, and that is that I do not fantasize about other places, and experiences as I once did. Call it an inner peace if you will, but I feel more comfortable where I am and I am beginning to feel content with the world as is.
As I write this, three little boys from my concession are 5 feet from my door, all naked taking a bucket shower, and from the small amount of Baatonu that I know, are covering themselves with soap singing, “Baatooreey Baatooreey!” (Aka Whitey/foreigner). Ha, I can always count on someone here to break any over philosophizing I may be doing and bring me a fresh glass of reality (whatever that is).
I suppose in the end here I want to say that I’m exactly where I want to be. I may not be using my architectural skills, or saving lives here, but I still have a purpose internally, just as everyone does, and I have found mine clearer here perhaps due to the lack of outer purpose, when at the beginning my dreams of developing Africa overnight all by myself seemed only too easy. Sometimes we need to derail to see what train we’re riding on. Ok, now I’m hungry. Going to return to this simple life, complex in so many ways.
“Time triumphs over Space, and it is time whose inexorable movement embeds the ephemeral incident of culture, on this planet in the incident of man - a form wherein the incident of life flows on for a time, while behind it all the streaming horizons of geological and stellar histories pile up in the light-world of our eyes.” -Oswald Spengler
Oh, and before I forget, I will be posting some new photos also. My graffiti in village has begun!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Why We Travel
Just finished reading this essay by Pico Iyer which I found to give me the words I have been thinking of in my head for sometime now. Thanks! (apologies for typos, the scanner took the text directly.)
Why We Travel
from Salon Travel
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fail into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship— both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling car obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing every thing I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of Wild Orchids (on the Champs-Elysées) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Illinois, it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator — or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around arid turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet — and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra terrestrial too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your adios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and conic to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon — an anti—Federal Express, if you like — in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I in variably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long—lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import — and export— dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more — not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes — they help you bring newly appreciative — distant — eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second — and per haps more important — thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward pas sages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9:00 P.M., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, arid, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity— and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the often Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to collie into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious— to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves — and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are horn again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small ex tent, and make a day last a year — or at least forty-five hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with ex pressing myself hut simply with making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown hut the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily ex cited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me — no one can fix me in my résumé — I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
And that is why many of us travel in search not of answers but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me. In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families — to become better Buddhists — I have to question my own too-ready judgments.
“The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should he perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, howl would come back to my apartment in New York and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language and you don’t know where you’re going and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel hooks are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home movies, the oddities in Malian anecdotes, and the fall guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouvé that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to matchmake them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction — not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)— is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, in famously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists at home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates t. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me, astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new empire, postnational, global, mobile, and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The place mats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broad cast the wonders of San Francisco. And — most crucial of all — the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn back ward and tight 50 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their oolong teas — and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco, or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am in many ways an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at seven, and cannot really call myself an Indian, all American, or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic — the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million — it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere, and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology too com pounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room — through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing — not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful fourteenth-century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris’s House Arrest, a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants, and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On page 172, however, we read, “La isla of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator — a fictional construct (or not)? — confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to he — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V. S. Naipaul’s recent book A Way in the World was published as a non fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, My Other Life, were published in The New Yorker they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek with out us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home in side us, we also — Emerson and Thoreau remind us — have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, arid the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it al lows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Maithiessen’s great The Snow Leopard), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sacks’s Island of the Colorblind, which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way of keeping our minds mo bile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Why We Travel
from Salon Travel
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fail into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship— both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling car obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing every thing I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of Wild Orchids (on the Champs-Elysées) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Illinois, it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator — or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around arid turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet — and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra terrestrial too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your adios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and conic to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon — an anti—Federal Express, if you like — in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I in variably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long—lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import — and export— dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more — not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes — they help you bring newly appreciative — distant — eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second — and per haps more important — thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward pas sages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9:00 P.M., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, arid, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity— and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the often Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to collie into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse, and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious— to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves — and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are horn again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small ex tent, and make a day last a year — or at least forty-five hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with ex pressing myself hut simply with making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown hut the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily ex cited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me — no one can fix me in my résumé — I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
And that is why many of us travel in search not of answers but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me. In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families — to become better Buddhists — I have to question my own too-ready judgments.
“The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should he perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, howl would come back to my apartment in New York and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully through my photographs and reading and rereading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language and you don’t know where you’re going and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel hooks are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home movies, the oddities in Malian anecdotes, and the fall guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouvé that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to matchmake them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction — not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)— is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, in famously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists at home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates t. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me, astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new empire, postnational, global, mobile, and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The place mats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broad cast the wonders of San Francisco. And — most crucial of all — the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn back ward and tight 50 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their oolong teas — and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco, or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am in many ways an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at seven, and cannot really call myself an Indian, all American, or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic — the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million — it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere, and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology too com pounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room — through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing — not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful fourteenth-century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris’s House Arrest, a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants, and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On page 172, however, we read, “La isla of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator — a fictional construct (or not)? — confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to he — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V. S. Naipaul’s recent book A Way in the World was published as a non fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, My Other Life, were published in The New Yorker they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek with out us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home in side us, we also — Emerson and Thoreau remind us — have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, arid the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it al lows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Maithiessen’s great The Snow Leopard), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sacks’s Island of the Colorblind, which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way of keeping our minds mo bile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
mayday
Hello all, I’m feeling like an update has been long overdue (December 7th last post?), so without any more excuses and rebuttals let’s get this thing rolling.
Life is moving along fine in Benin. I am now 10 months into my service and still everyday I feel like I understand a little bit more, feel a bit more comfortable in this environment, yet still am astounded several times a day at the sites I see. The chaleur (hot season) is coming to an end, which means lots of rain until October. I have seen it rain only 3 times since last October 15. I have been busy at post, building houses, clay pot refrigeration systems, working at the hospital doing baby weighing and vaccinations, developing an artists club with students from the high school, and hosting some American visitors- my girlfriend Ariela twice and my mother once. My pops has told me he is also on his way over to test out Africa as well… see you soon D!
Currently I am up at the northern volunteers workstation, helping build a new house for the Peace Corps volunteer leader. I am in the midst of changing the bathroom that the masons built out at 5x4ft, and changing a storage room into the new bathroom. Its quite an experience working under this building system, or lack thereof, compared to the states, where there are 20lb binder after binder of building codes, then followed by inspections. Here? Whatever floats your boat, that’s what gets built here. You wanted a doorway there? Ok, smash the wall out. The building’s only 7inches from the property wall/setback? Don’t worry, you can get behind from the other side (meaning you can only get behind the house from the other side leaving you stuck in a dead end crack between the house and the wall.) These are a few of the conversations we had just yesterday.
In my village, the building gets even more perplexing. They build these small little prison cells, with a salon (entrance room, like a living room I suppose) and a bedroom. The two rooms combined almost always have a total of 2 2’2ft windows, and less than 200sq ft of area. Almost all buildings in villages are built like this, little compartment after compartment with no hallways, one small door at 6ft if you’re lucky. I ask them why they don’t put in more windows. They have several reasons; there isn’t money for the window (they cost more than the mud that would fill that hole), or they just put in a window to have a ‘window’, meaning they don’t understand that a window gives air and natural lighting. They also say the windows jeopardize the structure, which they do since they don’t want to pay for 3 pieces of wood to make a window frame, and since most the houses are made from either mud, mud brick, or cmu’s, the easy option is to just fill it up with wall. What they are left with is a small prison-like oven, that is ingenuously designed to bake all day from the Sahel sun, with a thin highly conductive metal roof, putting most these spaces at over 105 degrees most of every day. I’m working with a number of masons at the moment trying to teach them about direct sun exposure, and cross-ventilation, etc… with some encouraging results, but the big hurdle is still the people, since they are the final say in how their house gets built.
As for my own oven rooms, I have undertaken several projects in hopes of cooling the place down. I began with building a large veranda off the west side of my house that was just baking under the sun every after afternoon. Then my friend and I knocked two holes in the wall up by the roof and placed screened hollow cmu’s to allow for the hot air to escape. Then, the grand finale was covering the entire corrugated metal roof with thatch, which has two benefits, one it stops the direct heat gain from the sun, and second it makes the rain on the roof soothing, instead of the typical Armageddon sounds of the water pounding right through to your core. Now finally, I plan to ‘snorkel’ my house like I did at my old post. This means cutting holes through the metal and putting in a periscope-like tube with screen on the outside end, and fixing it to the wood structure inside underneath the metal. It worked amazingly well in my old house, so I have high hopes here. Eventually I want to develop an object that anyone living under a corrugated metal roof can use, to let the hot air escape and still keep the rain out. I think if one could make and sell that system for under $3 a tube, you would be selling millions. By the way, if anyone knows the amount of people in the world that live under corrugated metal roofs, I would love to know. I would guess the number is astounding.
Onto other things, my health hasn’t been this poor since I can remember, so I am being consumed often by tactics to get myself on the right track. The food/diet consists of corn flour, leaves, and some tomatoes, onions, and peanuts. Occasionally you find some meat, if you are bold enough to eat it, and since there hasn’t been any rain, the cheese and eggs have nearly all dried up. In my town you can’t even find tomatoes anymore. Bring on the rain! So in addition to that situation, I go up and down with gastrointestinal issues weekly. It has been 2 weeks without a solid stool, and it is horribly depleting. I feel (and probably am) malnourished, since what little I can eat doesn’t get absorbed into my body due to whatever kind of evil parasites are in there. At night I have been waking up feeling like someone kicked me in the balls (guys, I know you know that gassy feeling that creeps up into your guts). I’m very used to all this by now, since it started for me back in August, but there have been periods, maybe even a month in time, where I felt better. I am really discouraged since you can never pinpoint the cause of all this. So I bleach and boil my water, try to cook most my food myself, wash my hands constantly, but still no luck. I have decided that I just have a weak stomach, since there are other volunteers that still haven’t fallen ill since arriving here. Unbelievable. So as miserable as this sounds, its really more of an annoyance at this point, and I am doing everything I can to get better- and I will. So worry not. I plan to put on the 20lbs I have lost within the first week back to the states. Taco Bell beware.
Alright, this blog feels like I hardly scratched the surface of the life here, but at least its a morsel. Its back to this house for me… getting what I came here for, some gritty construction work. Hope all is well with you, and send me some updates. I’ll get to them eventually! Nkwa sosi…
Life is moving along fine in Benin. I am now 10 months into my service and still everyday I feel like I understand a little bit more, feel a bit more comfortable in this environment, yet still am astounded several times a day at the sites I see. The chaleur (hot season) is coming to an end, which means lots of rain until October. I have seen it rain only 3 times since last October 15. I have been busy at post, building houses, clay pot refrigeration systems, working at the hospital doing baby weighing and vaccinations, developing an artists club with students from the high school, and hosting some American visitors- my girlfriend Ariela twice and my mother once. My pops has told me he is also on his way over to test out Africa as well… see you soon D!
Currently I am up at the northern volunteers workstation, helping build a new house for the Peace Corps volunteer leader. I am in the midst of changing the bathroom that the masons built out at 5x4ft, and changing a storage room into the new bathroom. Its quite an experience working under this building system, or lack thereof, compared to the states, where there are 20lb binder after binder of building codes, then followed by inspections. Here? Whatever floats your boat, that’s what gets built here. You wanted a doorway there? Ok, smash the wall out. The building’s only 7inches from the property wall/setback? Don’t worry, you can get behind from the other side (meaning you can only get behind the house from the other side leaving you stuck in a dead end crack between the house and the wall.) These are a few of the conversations we had just yesterday.
In my village, the building gets even more perplexing. They build these small little prison cells, with a salon (entrance room, like a living room I suppose) and a bedroom. The two rooms combined almost always have a total of 2 2’2ft windows, and less than 200sq ft of area. Almost all buildings in villages are built like this, little compartment after compartment with no hallways, one small door at 6ft if you’re lucky. I ask them why they don’t put in more windows. They have several reasons; there isn’t money for the window (they cost more than the mud that would fill that hole), or they just put in a window to have a ‘window’, meaning they don’t understand that a window gives air and natural lighting. They also say the windows jeopardize the structure, which they do since they don’t want to pay for 3 pieces of wood to make a window frame, and since most the houses are made from either mud, mud brick, or cmu’s, the easy option is to just fill it up with wall. What they are left with is a small prison-like oven, that is ingenuously designed to bake all day from the Sahel sun, with a thin highly conductive metal roof, putting most these spaces at over 105 degrees most of every day. I’m working with a number of masons at the moment trying to teach them about direct sun exposure, and cross-ventilation, etc… with some encouraging results, but the big hurdle is still the people, since they are the final say in how their house gets built.
As for my own oven rooms, I have undertaken several projects in hopes of cooling the place down. I began with building a large veranda off the west side of my house that was just baking under the sun every after afternoon. Then my friend and I knocked two holes in the wall up by the roof and placed screened hollow cmu’s to allow for the hot air to escape. Then, the grand finale was covering the entire corrugated metal roof with thatch, which has two benefits, one it stops the direct heat gain from the sun, and second it makes the rain on the roof soothing, instead of the typical Armageddon sounds of the water pounding right through to your core. Now finally, I plan to ‘snorkel’ my house like I did at my old post. This means cutting holes through the metal and putting in a periscope-like tube with screen on the outside end, and fixing it to the wood structure inside underneath the metal. It worked amazingly well in my old house, so I have high hopes here. Eventually I want to develop an object that anyone living under a corrugated metal roof can use, to let the hot air escape and still keep the rain out. I think if one could make and sell that system for under $3 a tube, you would be selling millions. By the way, if anyone knows the amount of people in the world that live under corrugated metal roofs, I would love to know. I would guess the number is astounding.
Onto other things, my health hasn’t been this poor since I can remember, so I am being consumed often by tactics to get myself on the right track. The food/diet consists of corn flour, leaves, and some tomatoes, onions, and peanuts. Occasionally you find some meat, if you are bold enough to eat it, and since there hasn’t been any rain, the cheese and eggs have nearly all dried up. In my town you can’t even find tomatoes anymore. Bring on the rain! So in addition to that situation, I go up and down with gastrointestinal issues weekly. It has been 2 weeks without a solid stool, and it is horribly depleting. I feel (and probably am) malnourished, since what little I can eat doesn’t get absorbed into my body due to whatever kind of evil parasites are in there. At night I have been waking up feeling like someone kicked me in the balls (guys, I know you know that gassy feeling that creeps up into your guts). I’m very used to all this by now, since it started for me back in August, but there have been periods, maybe even a month in time, where I felt better. I am really discouraged since you can never pinpoint the cause of all this. So I bleach and boil my water, try to cook most my food myself, wash my hands constantly, but still no luck. I have decided that I just have a weak stomach, since there are other volunteers that still haven’t fallen ill since arriving here. Unbelievable. So as miserable as this sounds, its really more of an annoyance at this point, and I am doing everything I can to get better- and I will. So worry not. I plan to put on the 20lbs I have lost within the first week back to the states. Taco Bell beware.
Alright, this blog feels like I hardly scratched the surface of the life here, but at least its a morsel. Its back to this house for me… getting what I came here for, some gritty construction work. Hope all is well with you, and send me some updates. I’ll get to them eventually! Nkwa sosi…
Sunday, December 7, 2008
In and Out
Hey everyone, it’s good to be back online. After a 3 month episode at post, I am back down south for a 2 week formation with the health and environmental volunteers. Unfortunately, I will not be returning to my post afterwards, but instead heading to a new village. After countless attempts, months of searching, and many fights with my work partner, my village was unable to find me a house suitable to peace corps standards. Which is not a difficult task. But, in the village, there seems to be a latrine problem (less than 20 for the 4,000 pop.). Needless to say, they couldn’t find me a house with a latrine- kind of a big deal. For the time being I was sharing an already full latrine with 3 other families totaling 12 people. Not exactly what the PC doctors like to see a volunteer getting into. So unfortunately, I recently packed all my stuff, found a station wagon to move me out, and I am in limbo with all my stuff at the workstation until the formation is over. Then I will be heading back up north to move into my new post, only 30km south of my old village.
It was really difficult to leave after putting in so much time and making so many friends, and really starting to feel comfortable in the village. I was working way more than I expected, usually from 8-6 mon-fri, sometimes working on the weekend also. There was vaccinations, pre-natal consultations, Plumpy Nut sensibilizations, baby weighing, child births, and my favorite, the bandaging room, where people are coming in with moto accidents, machete fights, and bull horn wounds. It’s a messy, loud place inside that room. There were many times I had to take a step outside when the cutting or stitching was getting deep. Pretty amazing to see this stuff that would cost thousands of dollars in the states being performed by untrained people in a village without electricity or running water. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
So aside from all the health work I have been doing, I have been staying busy with some other activities as well. A team of masons showed up in November and started working on a new water system with 5 new pumps. After a few days watching, I got to become one of the guys building CMU’s out of wood blocks and cement, laying out the pumps and finishing them off with the last few coats of cement. It was similar to plaster work, but rougher. I still think that stuff is an art though, incredible how easy they make it look and how well the masons can shape the cement. I’m still in the training phase for sure. But we finished the pumps a few weeks back, so now we are waiting on the plumbers to show up and finish the faucets, and then we should be able to open up the pipes! Pretty exciting to be able to see the whole thing happen from beginning to end.
I have also been doing a little English teaching at the local high school. I met the head English teacher a month back when he came to the hospital to have some words translated. Now I have been correcting papers, doing some recordings to give proper pronunciations, and there is a radio show in the works, where we would get to go to the nearest big city and be on the air every couple weeks. In addition to that, I am learning 2 other languages, Bariba and Peulh, being tutored in both 8 hours a week. The Bariba is more prevalent, but I prefer the Peulh since it sounds much better, and the Peulh people are the nomadic tribes that mostly do cattle herding. They wear bright colors with lots of jewelry and are taller, thinner, and lighter skinned than the other cultures, due to a northern African influence. They are a very beautiful people.
I found a soccer field back in September and started playing with the team several times a week, and started running every morning to get ready for marathon training when ela gets here. I have also been reading a lot, since after 7pm its dark and people usually stay close to home. Just finished War and Peace, and it wasn’t like I thought it would be. Pretty good story, though could have been half as long. I must admit though that it is a challenge to stay up past 9:30. when there is no stimulation your body just shuts down. And similarly, it is just as difficult to sleep past 6:00. Between the Muslim calls to prayer, the roosters, goats, pigs, and corn pounding in hollowed out tree stumps, sleeping in isn’t an option.
So it has been a busy past 3 months, and now I am getting ready to start my adventure again somewhere else. And even more excited to have my lady come visit in 3 weeks! We’re going to have to learn the village together. So that’s the quick and dirty of my life here thus far, it’s a different world not having any amenities, being unable to email or post photos, etc.. for long periods of time. I of course will be looking hard for more construction work at the new post. Right now I am looking at some potential well/latrine projects that wouldn’t be too difficult to get rolling. Can’t say the next time I will be posting, but it could be in a week, or 3 months, but I’ll try to get something up. And any one reading, be sure to send me an email/update of whats going on in your life. I’m interested to know!
Lastly, I finally got some pics up! Not many yet, but they’ll be coming little by little. Check them out at: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=elliotgrochal&target=ALBUM&id=5215902358532593793&authkey=Q5sb_AZmJmM&feat=email
It was really difficult to leave after putting in so much time and making so many friends, and really starting to feel comfortable in the village. I was working way more than I expected, usually from 8-6 mon-fri, sometimes working on the weekend also. There was vaccinations, pre-natal consultations, Plumpy Nut sensibilizations, baby weighing, child births, and my favorite, the bandaging room, where people are coming in with moto accidents, machete fights, and bull horn wounds. It’s a messy, loud place inside that room. There were many times I had to take a step outside when the cutting or stitching was getting deep. Pretty amazing to see this stuff that would cost thousands of dollars in the states being performed by untrained people in a village without electricity or running water. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
So aside from all the health work I have been doing, I have been staying busy with some other activities as well. A team of masons showed up in November and started working on a new water system with 5 new pumps. After a few days watching, I got to become one of the guys building CMU’s out of wood blocks and cement, laying out the pumps and finishing them off with the last few coats of cement. It was similar to plaster work, but rougher. I still think that stuff is an art though, incredible how easy they make it look and how well the masons can shape the cement. I’m still in the training phase for sure. But we finished the pumps a few weeks back, so now we are waiting on the plumbers to show up and finish the faucets, and then we should be able to open up the pipes! Pretty exciting to be able to see the whole thing happen from beginning to end.
I have also been doing a little English teaching at the local high school. I met the head English teacher a month back when he came to the hospital to have some words translated. Now I have been correcting papers, doing some recordings to give proper pronunciations, and there is a radio show in the works, where we would get to go to the nearest big city and be on the air every couple weeks. In addition to that, I am learning 2 other languages, Bariba and Peulh, being tutored in both 8 hours a week. The Bariba is more prevalent, but I prefer the Peulh since it sounds much better, and the Peulh people are the nomadic tribes that mostly do cattle herding. They wear bright colors with lots of jewelry and are taller, thinner, and lighter skinned than the other cultures, due to a northern African influence. They are a very beautiful people.
I found a soccer field back in September and started playing with the team several times a week, and started running every morning to get ready for marathon training when ela gets here. I have also been reading a lot, since after 7pm its dark and people usually stay close to home. Just finished War and Peace, and it wasn’t like I thought it would be. Pretty good story, though could have been half as long. I must admit though that it is a challenge to stay up past 9:30. when there is no stimulation your body just shuts down. And similarly, it is just as difficult to sleep past 6:00. Between the Muslim calls to prayer, the roosters, goats, pigs, and corn pounding in hollowed out tree stumps, sleeping in isn’t an option.
So it has been a busy past 3 months, and now I am getting ready to start my adventure again somewhere else. And even more excited to have my lady come visit in 3 weeks! We’re going to have to learn the village together. So that’s the quick and dirty of my life here thus far, it’s a different world not having any amenities, being unable to email or post photos, etc.. for long periods of time. I of course will be looking hard for more construction work at the new post. Right now I am looking at some potential well/latrine projects that wouldn’t be too difficult to get rolling. Can’t say the next time I will be posting, but it could be in a week, or 3 months, but I’ll try to get something up. And any one reading, be sure to send me an email/update of whats going on in your life. I’m interested to know!
Lastly, I finally got some pics up! Not many yet, but they’ll be coming little by little. Check them out at: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=elliotgrochal&target=ALBUM&id=5215902358532593793&authkey=Q5sb_AZmJmM&feat=email
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Check-up
Bonjour tout le monde, this will be a quick post to rekindle the flames and let everyone know that things are going well. Time is getting shorter and shorter before we all get sent off to our lonely (and free time heavy) posts. Everything is great in stage, having trouble dealing with too little time right now, as we have been busy with a dinner last night at the town hall with the mayor, getting back from our post visits last week, dealing with final french examinations, and preparing speeches in local languages for the swear-in ceremony next week.
A few top headlines, a loose panther was trapped and killed on my block last saturday 15 after I left from lunch. My family told me it was gris-gris (witchcraft) and that the panther was in fact a person in the form of the animal, roaming the streets to sek vengance upon a wrongdoer. The neighborhood ate the beast once it had been sufficiently slain with a coup-coup (machede).
The post visit was interesting, having the taxi break down on the way up during a huge storm, getting pulled into the next city by another car and some rope. Seeing my hobbit house, with 2 rooms, together smaller than my bedroom in Los Angeles, with a ceiling of 6.5 feet, and a good supply of dead animals and insect infestations. The 'sauna' has two small holes for windows and a latrine outside around the corner next to the pigeon holes (yes, three real pigeon holes. now you'll never know if I am using metaphors).
We are off to Grand-Popo for our last excursion as a group, which will be a nice relaxing break on the beach. Looking forward to that and our shoping day next week to buy all necessary tools for surviving my 2 year camping trip up north. Alright, the rest will have to be done in writing for the time being. Hope this post finds you all well and joyful! A la prochaine...
A few top headlines, a loose panther was trapped and killed on my block last saturday 15 after I left from lunch. My family told me it was gris-gris (witchcraft) and that the panther was in fact a person in the form of the animal, roaming the streets to sek vengance upon a wrongdoer. The neighborhood ate the beast once it had been sufficiently slain with a coup-coup (machede).
The post visit was interesting, having the taxi break down on the way up during a huge storm, getting pulled into the next city by another car and some rope. Seeing my hobbit house, with 2 rooms, together smaller than my bedroom in Los Angeles, with a ceiling of 6.5 feet, and a good supply of dead animals and insect infestations. The 'sauna' has two small holes for windows and a latrine outside around the corner next to the pigeon holes (yes, three real pigeon holes. now you'll never know if I am using metaphors).
We are off to Grand-Popo for our last excursion as a group, which will be a nice relaxing break on the beach. Looking forward to that and our shoping day next week to buy all necessary tools for surviving my 2 year camping trip up north. Alright, the rest will have to be done in writing for the time being. Hope this post finds you all well and joyful! A la prochaine...
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