On August 27, 2010, the new constitution of the Republic of Kenya was officially promulgated. The word ‘promulgate’ comes from the Latin mulgere, meaning to milk, but the constitution was not being milked out to the people. It was instead officially signed into law. In Nairobi the military paraded, and thousands of people gathered to watch and celebrate the event in Uhuru Park.
Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, was a prominent figure at the ceremony. He is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity including the genocide in Darfur. This put the new Kenya, a signatory to the International Criminal Court, in a somewhat awkward position on its first day. By international law, they should arrest President al-Bashir and deliver him to The Hague. Practically speaking, things are not quite so cut and dry. Kenya and Sudan share a small section of historically disputed border. The Sudan is known for its disappointment at neither being the mouth nor the source of the Nile, and for its widespread AK-47s.
It is likely that the arrest of your president by your neighbor on a celebratory cross border visit would not go over very well. From Kenya’s position, do you risk war with your neighbor to assuage a western-dominated body with limited power of enforcement? On the other hand, if the western powers decide to make a big deal over this, it could mean actual repercussions in the terms of U.N. sanctions. But what is the likelihood of the U.N. passing sanctions on one of the few African nations that is taking steps in the direction that the U.N. supports? And have the western powers done anything substantial about the crisis in Darfur for that matter? Al-Bashir is still in charge, and the crisis continues. There will certainly be some strong talk, but that is small potatoes compared to the act of arresting your neighbor’s president. He may be a terrible guy, but no one becomes president without someone thinking he is great, even if it is just his militant cronies. Those cronies seem more likely to make real trouble for Kenya than does the U.N.
Probably those in charge will blame the situation and the ensuing international hullaballoo on some poor official who will get fired. They could also blame it all on al-Bashir himself, who can be written off as unpredictable and defiant. The President of the semi-autonomous Southern Sudan was invited; al-Bashir came instead. What can you do? Some might say you can arrest him, but they are not seeing the big picture. It is better to do nothing and blame someone else. Alternatively they could state that they did not arrest al-Bashir because it was not in their best interests, but that kind of plain talk is not commonplace in any political sphere, west, east, or south.
Al-Bashir’s visit could be viewed in two ways. First it could show Kenya as not quite in the place where it strives to be. The visit represents a blunder of official incompetence, or the acceptance of an immoral regime, neither of which gets high marks. Alternatively, it could show that Kenya is in fact joining the group of leading nations. Taking a cue from countries like the United States and China, Kenya too can ignore international law when it so chooses, because no one will do anything about it if you are big enough to count.
The lasting impact of the day will be the effect of the new constitution on Kenya, and the country taking another step in becoming a leader among African nations. The Omar al-Bashir visit, despite its headline appeal at the moment, will fade into the footnotes of history. Kenya steps into a new position. The constitution serves as a promise to its people to develop justly and fairly, to eschew corruption and nepotism, and to ensure the rights of all.
My snarky remarks and the incidence of international blunders aside, the day marks a new beginning. I confess to having felt some emotion manifest itself in my chest when I saw pieces of the ceremony on the television at the restaurant where I was eating lunch. Kenya’s constitution had absolutely nothing to do with me, and yet I felt something. Had I seen the event on American news, I could write my reaction off to the formulaic and contrived media coverage pushing the right buttons on my sappy side. Instead I saw the Kenyan media coverage, not quite so polished, nor quite so false. This leads me to think that what I felt was something more. I believe that whether or not the constitution lives up to its promise, it was the effort and support of the promise itself that inspired my reaction. I felt a sense of humanity rising above its own failings, pushing itself beyond its instincts for personal preservation, looking towards a brighter future. Despite my disassociation with the specifics of this incidence, I am a part of that humanity. I saw us rising. Some part of me, beneath my affinity for cynical humor and my affectations of having seen this wheel turn round before felt a moment of hope and joy in that promise.
Beliefs are strange things. We can define them and put them into jars to help us sleep at night. We can boil them down to quick phrases to break out in conversation. We can claim we know our own front to back. We can so easily stop questioning them, or get so wrapped up in our everyday lives that we forget what we believe in the first place. On Friday, August 27, 2010, I remembered something that I believe. It had as little or as much to do with the constitution of Kenya as any other specific element of our humanity, other than that the constitution was what set of the thought in my mind. I remembered that underneath all of the day to day jumble, beneath the mess of pragmatic decisions and regular necessities, it is my ideals of peace and justice that give the rest of it purpose. The promulgation of Kenya’s constitution reminded me that in my own life, there is more to strive for than my own needs, more to defend than my property, more to do than poke fun at the failings of mankind, and nothing more essential than my humanity.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Tackling Taboo Territory: A Cultural Commentary
On Culture
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
The word ‘culture’ in everyday conversation often refers to the shared customs of a group of people. Dance, music, and religious practice all form a part of this concept, but that is not all. At dinner table discussions one hears broad statements referring to preferences and isms belonging to a culture. American culture has instilled in me some aspects of individualism, and also consumerism, for better or for worse. From a folk-anthropological standpoint, culture is something sacred. It should be studied but not criticized or judged. In the most limp-wristed blather, gratuitous wrongs can be brushed off as having been the product of a person’s culture. These overlapping ideas add up to an ambiguous and misunderstood concept of Culture, kept all the more ill defined by the fear of addressing it. To address Culture in any but the most reverent terms is to risk being seen as discriminatory, ethnocentric, racist, or simply as a basic, run of the mill jerk.
From a scientific standpoint, there is no Culture. There is only experience, and the material on which that experience leaves an impression. In other words, there is your central nervous system, which is how experiences are received and processed, and the constant influx of information that is the world around you. Those experiences, in their entirety, are your culture. Your culture is absolutely unique to you. You are the only person who has had all of your experiences. You have been party to shared experiences, from which we derive the popular usage of the word culture, but the whole of it is yours and only yours.
There are those who wish to put people or peoples into glass jars, or have them live in grass huts for eternity, in the name of cultural preservation, or cultural rights. Who are we, they ask, we aggressors and exploiters of the modern world, to destroy their way of life? How dare we impose our culture on their culture? Their culture is something pure and unfettered. Ours is polluted by greed and waste. These long-distance defenders, with their vociferous arguments and vehement fist pounding, have their hearts in a good place. They are criticizing societal ills that deserve criticism. And I agree that anyone should have the right to live as they choose. But culture cannot be preserved. By its very nature it is always in flux. You experience the world constantly, and so your culture is constantly changing. Every moment it changes by infinitesimal increments, as does the culture of every other person on the planet. Trying to preserve culture in some artificial scheme of isolationism or cultural tourism is like trying to capture the entirety of a moment in a photograph. It denies the very nature of the beast. They want to preserve Culture, but Culture does not exist. It never has. There is only the constant change of more than six billion cultures, some overlapping, some more isolated.
Cultural Imperialism
It is a rare politician, professor, economist, or Nobel laureate who will say that development is a cultural issue. For the very reasons outlined above, the desire to avoid the possibility of being seen as a bigot or an imperialist, development has been pushed into a corner of economic opportunity and access to resources. In truth development is just as much an issue of culture as it is of market access or clean water or sanitation.
Before the label of cultural imperialist sticks too firmly to my back, allow a clarification. It is not just the development of the global south (formerly the third world) that is a cultural issue. It is just as much an issue in Europe, the United States, the former Soviet Union, China, and everywhere else. Development, often pigeonholed into economic terms, is at its heart a human issue, and culture is as much a part of the human being as is our health or our market connections. It is one thing to provide people with clean water, it is another to teach them why the water was contaminated, and both are necessary for good development. The error would be to say that it is only the experiences of the west that should be shared. It is a fact that access to clean water has been provided on a much wider scale in the ‘developed world’ than in the ‘developing world.’ That does not mean that there are no lessons of value that could be passed in the other direction.
I have encountered the attitude that if the American system were simply imported to and adopted by a developing country, its problems of development would be resolved. In addition to being rather arrogant, this idea assumes that American (or European or whoever the proponent chooses) systems have reached the pinnacle of achievement. The pyramid is complete, it says. On the contrary, the ideas that work best for our wellbeing wherever we are should be shared, and those that do not work should be left behind. Development in the global south takes on a more urgent air than that in the western world because of enormous economic disparities and grievous health concerns, but development is no less important in the United States or Europe than it is in Kenya. Development is the passing on of those parts of your culture you have found to be true and useful, and leaving behind those that turned out false. It is capacity building. It is education.
Is it imperialism? In the international context it does come with gross differences in power and wealth. Development has been linked to military objectives and alliances. Aid packages have come with strings attached. It certainly has been a branch of the imperial charter. Historically, cultural imperialism came from the view of one side knowing and having all, and the other side knowing and having very little. Carrots are offered with provisions for friendly economic policies or security agreements. But the exchange of ideas is not always a one-way street. I see my work more as empowerment than as forcing practices onto people, and I have consistently learned more from those I teach than I think they have learned from me. My own culture has been changed by my experiences in different countries and by the people with whom I have worked. With more accurate information comes a stronger capacity to choose both for me and for those I have worked with. It goes both ways. We get a better picture of the world around us, and we choose how to act, today more knowledgeable than yesterday. The only things holding back our development could be false information, the withholding of the truth, or a closed mind. If we eschew these, each of our choices will be more informed than the last. There is choice in what practices to adopt and what to pass on. There is a process of cultural selection at work in all of our interactions. Development is our cultural evolution.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
1000 Words
The old phrase said a picture is worth a thousand words. A digital photo, by my calculation, is worth between 3 and 17 words. Digital photography has allowed for a glut of picture taking, but the pictures are entirely disposable. It costs nothing to take them and nothing to throw them away. With film, every picture you take is one less picture you can take in the future. You make each one count. The limited chances increase every photo’s value, so you will put more effort into each photo. The additional effort increases that value further. With a potentially infinite supply of digital photos to be taken or tossed, there is no need to put extra effort into each one.
Like different reproductive strategies in different species, with digital photography you can take a ton of pictures with minimal effort and hope some turn out, or you can put a lot of effort into traditional film photography in order to ensure that some will turn out as you like them. The hybrid approach is to increase a digital photo’s value. This requires the extra effort, taking the extra time, and trying to create something using a medium that encourages quantity over quality. The problem is the disposability of the digital picture appeals to our lazy side, and it seems that much more of a bore to take your time with a digital camera when you could take thirty pictures in a few seconds and hope you got at least one good shot.
It is early evening and the sun has finally appeared below the dark clouds that have hung over town since last night. The puddles on the road outside of the house where I live will not dry up before it sets. The sun is low enough in the sky to cast a golden light, particular to evenings after it rains, that throws the shadows into a sharp contrast with the glow on everything the light touches.
The immediate reaction is to reach for my camera. It is a beautiful moment, and if I can just capture it, I can take this with me. If I can preserve it in a picture, the moment does not end. It never works. The magnitude of a moment is impossible to capture. All you get is an image, a piece of it, cut out from the whole. The best I can end up with is a beautiful picture, which is something great in itself, but great for its beauty as a picture, not for the awesomeness of that moment. The act of creating a picture is not to capture a moment that is impossible to capture, but through the expense of your thought and effort, to add your vision of a piece of that moment. More often than not, I end up with pictures that are flat. But if I keep adding the effort into the mix, I may end up with something of value.
This evening, however, I choose not to take out my camera. To put a lens between myself and the light on the walls, trees, and paths outside of my window, removes me from that moment. I cannot take that with me, and I have no desire to pull myself away from it. The camera stays in its case, and the moment passes.
These here are some other pictures I have taken, trying each time to put in at least a little effort, so hopefully they are worth at least a handful of words, though certainly not a thousand. From the top they are: Vitengeni, Vitengeni again, and the Indian Ocean.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Assorted Stories
The Arabuko Sokoke Forest
On the way to Vitengeni we passed through the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, a strip of land five to ten miles wide and thirty or forty miles long. The area, protected by the Kenyan Forest Service, appears to be the one place in the coast region that has not been denuded of trees. It is also home to elephants.
I had not expected to find any of the more exciting wildlife species so close to my place of work. Since my arrival in Kenya I have seen monkeys, large insects, bats, chameleons, several other types of lizards, and one octopus. They were all very nice to see, but they are not big wildlife. With the exception of the octopus, which was entirely out of place according to my preconceived notions of African wildlife, the animals I have seen here are all expected to be around populated areas in tropical countries. But I never expected to be near the sorts of animals that spring to mind when one thinks of an African Safari. Just the possibility of seeing an elephant was fresh and exciting, and for the ten minutes we cut through the forest, I was not thinking at all about the ten candidates for Field Officer that we were to interview that day.
The vegetation in the forest stands in a stark contrast to the surrounding areas. Passing under the electric fence designed to keep the elephants in, it is like entering a different country altogether. The road is a tunnel carved through the dense undergrowth and the large canopy overhead. The air is cooler and moister. The green is darker. We did not see any elephants on the way to or from Vitengeni, but a pile of dung that appeared to weigh around twenty-five pounds testified to their presence, and to their ability to produce deliverables similar in quality and quantity to those of many bureaucracies.
Witchcraft
Witchcraft is real. Even in Kenya, arguably one of the most developed nations in Africa, witchcraft and superstition have a strong presence. I do not believe in hexes or curses, or the power of incantation, but witchcraft is real. It is not always visible, but it is there, lingering in the doubts and fears of a large and poorly educated segment of the populace.
On my first Saturday in Kenya three of my new acquaintances and I went to a local restaurant for lunch. Two others and I sat in a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw, and one on his motorcycle. Rounding a bend in the road and looking toward the intersection ahead I saw the street crowded with people, all running in the same direction, yelling. Not knowing if it was a riot, a terrorist attack, or a parade, we slowed and asked the driver what was happening. He was quiet for a moment before hearing from someone in the crowd that there was a witch. The crowd passed in front of us quickly, and I saw some boys running to catch up, looking almost euphoric at the excitement of the witch-hunt. We turned in the other direction and stopped in front of the restaurant, not understanding what had just passed before us.
Our friend on the motorcycle went to investigate, and returned a few minutes later somewhat dazed by what he had seen. A woman, her clothes just shreds barely clinging to her body, had been chased into a field by the mob. She was raving as hands and stones hit her. Two men in regular clothes got through the crowd to her and held her down, then dragged her to the police station away from the mob.
I imagine that some of the people in the crowd were frightened, and I imagine that some were angry. I hear that the woman was unbalanced or insane. But what I remember seeing with my own eyes were the boys, laughing at the game, as they chased after the witch to kill her.
The Paraguay Roll- Not on the Sushi Menu
When my bus rolled over in Paraguay it was probably going around twenty-five miles per hour. It was large and rickety, and probably could do no more than fifty miles per hour even had it been on pavement. The man who was supposed to be driving was passed out in the front row, and the guardia, the man who usually collects the fare, sat behind the wheel, trying to figure out how to switch gears without grinding the transmission into dust. He also was trying to reach his máte drinking equipment, which was stashed in a glove box four feet to his right.
It was around four in the morning. Apart from myself, the passed out driver, and the guardia acting as substitute driver, the only other person onboard was a kid of about ten on his way to Pilar to go to school for the week. The bus came through my community on Mondays and Fridays, at any hour between three and four thirty in the morning, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that ride you would wait a few days for the next bus or take a long walk through the sand or mud or both to Humaitá, about ten kilometers away, where at least one bus passed a day, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that bus you either made the walk back, or spent the night in a hammock on the courtyard of the home of one of the ex-dictator’s ex-lieutenants, but that is another story. This is the bus story, or one of them.
I glanced from one window to another, trying to catch a glimpse of something in the darkness, remembering the ride to Pilar not long before when the sky over the Argentine Chaco was illuminated by bolts of lightning and the clouds appeared out of the blackness, backlit and ominous and beautiful. Now there was nothing out the side windows, and the dim yellow headlights only illuminated twenty feet of dirt in front of us. The guardia, sitting behind the wheel, motioned to the kid to help him reach his máte equipment, and then he himself leaned across to the glove box. I glanced again out the side window. There was still nothing.
Then the headlights shown on the small tree as we were about to run it over and I shouted a warning, I’m not sure in what language. The guardia looked up but we were already over the tree and heading into the ditch. He tried to swerve us back onto the road and I thought it would be the wrong way to turn the wheels given the ditch, and an image of the wheels turning against the slope and losing their hold appeared in my head and I grabbed the handle bar above the seat in front of me as we began to roll. We rolled slowly, and I turned into it, and the seat across the aisle and one row in front of me came crashing down. The kid held on to the pole by the door. The man in the driver’s seat held on to the wheel. The passed out driver fell across the aisle, and we stopped.
We were silent for a moment. The bus was on its side, and its side was on a slope, leaving the wheels pointing up at close to a forty-five degree angle. We rocked a little, as the top of the bus, now sharing the lowest point with my side, rested on a brambly collection of woody shrubs. One of them, not the kid, thought about trying to climb out the bottom and work his way out under the shrubs, but I advised against it. The kid said he was scared, but the real driver, who had sobered up quickly, reassured him. There was nothing to be afraid of. We climbed out a window and jumped off the side of the bus to the side of the road. The wheels were still turning and the guardia climbed back in to turn off the engine. When he came back out it began to set in that they would lose their jobs, and he swore and punched the tire in frustration. The real driver, older, wiser, perhaps still a little drunk, took it more in stride. It was one of those things that happens. He grinned a resigned grin. There was nothing to do about it now. Ten minutes later the bus that passed through Humaitá every day came by and picked the kid and I up. The driver and the guardia stayed with their fallen comrade. The kid sat at the front of the new bus, and I toward the back, and I never saw any of them again.
On the way to Vitengeni we passed through the Arabuko Sokoke Forest, a strip of land five to ten miles wide and thirty or forty miles long. The area, protected by the Kenyan Forest Service, appears to be the one place in the coast region that has not been denuded of trees. It is also home to elephants.
I had not expected to find any of the more exciting wildlife species so close to my place of work. Since my arrival in Kenya I have seen monkeys, large insects, bats, chameleons, several other types of lizards, and one octopus. They were all very nice to see, but they are not big wildlife. With the exception of the octopus, which was entirely out of place according to my preconceived notions of African wildlife, the animals I have seen here are all expected to be around populated areas in tropical countries. But I never expected to be near the sorts of animals that spring to mind when one thinks of an African Safari. Just the possibility of seeing an elephant was fresh and exciting, and for the ten minutes we cut through the forest, I was not thinking at all about the ten candidates for Field Officer that we were to interview that day.
The vegetation in the forest stands in a stark contrast to the surrounding areas. Passing under the electric fence designed to keep the elephants in, it is like entering a different country altogether. The road is a tunnel carved through the dense undergrowth and the large canopy overhead. The air is cooler and moister. The green is darker. We did not see any elephants on the way to or from Vitengeni, but a pile of dung that appeared to weigh around twenty-five pounds testified to their presence, and to their ability to produce deliverables similar in quality and quantity to those of many bureaucracies.
Witchcraft
Witchcraft is real. Even in Kenya, arguably one of the most developed nations in Africa, witchcraft and superstition have a strong presence. I do not believe in hexes or curses, or the power of incantation, but witchcraft is real. It is not always visible, but it is there, lingering in the doubts and fears of a large and poorly educated segment of the populace.
On my first Saturday in Kenya three of my new acquaintances and I went to a local restaurant for lunch. Two others and I sat in a tuk-tuk, or rickshaw, and one on his motorcycle. Rounding a bend in the road and looking toward the intersection ahead I saw the street crowded with people, all running in the same direction, yelling. Not knowing if it was a riot, a terrorist attack, or a parade, we slowed and asked the driver what was happening. He was quiet for a moment before hearing from someone in the crowd that there was a witch. The crowd passed in front of us quickly, and I saw some boys running to catch up, looking almost euphoric at the excitement of the witch-hunt. We turned in the other direction and stopped in front of the restaurant, not understanding what had just passed before us.
Our friend on the motorcycle went to investigate, and returned a few minutes later somewhat dazed by what he had seen. A woman, her clothes just shreds barely clinging to her body, had been chased into a field by the mob. She was raving as hands and stones hit her. Two men in regular clothes got through the crowd to her and held her down, then dragged her to the police station away from the mob.
I imagine that some of the people in the crowd were frightened, and I imagine that some were angry. I hear that the woman was unbalanced or insane. But what I remember seeing with my own eyes were the boys, laughing at the game, as they chased after the witch to kill her.
The Paraguay Roll- Not on the Sushi Menu
When my bus rolled over in Paraguay it was probably going around twenty-five miles per hour. It was large and rickety, and probably could do no more than fifty miles per hour even had it been on pavement. The man who was supposed to be driving was passed out in the front row, and the guardia, the man who usually collects the fare, sat behind the wheel, trying to figure out how to switch gears without grinding the transmission into dust. He also was trying to reach his máte drinking equipment, which was stashed in a glove box four feet to his right.
It was around four in the morning. Apart from myself, the passed out driver, and the guardia acting as substitute driver, the only other person onboard was a kid of about ten on his way to Pilar to go to school for the week. The bus came through my community on Mondays and Fridays, at any hour between three and four thirty in the morning, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that ride you would wait a few days for the next bus or take a long walk through the sand or mud or both to Humaitá, about ten kilometers away, where at least one bus passed a day, provided it had not rained recently. If you missed that bus you either made the walk back, or spent the night in a hammock on the courtyard of the home of one of the ex-dictator’s ex-lieutenants, but that is another story. This is the bus story, or one of them.
I glanced from one window to another, trying to catch a glimpse of something in the darkness, remembering the ride to Pilar not long before when the sky over the Argentine Chaco was illuminated by bolts of lightning and the clouds appeared out of the blackness, backlit and ominous and beautiful. Now there was nothing out the side windows, and the dim yellow headlights only illuminated twenty feet of dirt in front of us. The guardia, sitting behind the wheel, motioned to the kid to help him reach his máte equipment, and then he himself leaned across to the glove box. I glanced again out the side window. There was still nothing.
Then the headlights shown on the small tree as we were about to run it over and I shouted a warning, I’m not sure in what language. The guardia looked up but we were already over the tree and heading into the ditch. He tried to swerve us back onto the road and I thought it would be the wrong way to turn the wheels given the ditch, and an image of the wheels turning against the slope and losing their hold appeared in my head and I grabbed the handle bar above the seat in front of me as we began to roll. We rolled slowly, and I turned into it, and the seat across the aisle and one row in front of me came crashing down. The kid held on to the pole by the door. The man in the driver’s seat held on to the wheel. The passed out driver fell across the aisle, and we stopped.
We were silent for a moment. The bus was on its side, and its side was on a slope, leaving the wheels pointing up at close to a forty-five degree angle. We rocked a little, as the top of the bus, now sharing the lowest point with my side, rested on a brambly collection of woody shrubs. One of them, not the kid, thought about trying to climb out the bottom and work his way out under the shrubs, but I advised against it. The kid said he was scared, but the real driver, who had sobered up quickly, reassured him. There was nothing to be afraid of. We climbed out a window and jumped off the side of the bus to the side of the road. The wheels were still turning and the guardia climbed back in to turn off the engine. When he came back out it began to set in that they would lose their jobs, and he swore and punched the tire in frustration. The real driver, older, wiser, perhaps still a little drunk, took it more in stride. It was one of those things that happens. He grinned a resigned grin. There was nothing to do about it now. Ten minutes later the bus that passed through Humaitá every day came by and picked the kid and I up. The driver and the guardia stayed with their fallen comrade. The kid sat at the front of the new bus, and I toward the back, and I never saw any of them again.
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Magically Expanding School Bus
Hoping to get to Ganze by 8 o’clock, we got to the stage at 7 a.m. and asked which matatu would be going in that direction. There were two sitting side by side, the sliding doors open, the attendants motioning for us to get in as they would be leaving soon. There was only one problem, and that was that both matatus were empty.
Public transportation does not operate on a schedule. It runs on a balance of incentives and disincentives. When there are enough people in the matatu, it starts to move. It also wants to pick up people on the side of the road as it goes. This poses a challenge if another matatu is going in the same direction. Both want to leave first to get the first shot at the people on the side of the road, but neither will leave without a respectable compliment of passengers to guarantee at least some coverage of the base cost of the trip. It is a risk game. Or perhaps the drivers simply leave when they finish their third cup of coffee, or when the card game ends, or whenever they damn well please.
There we were, faced with two empty matatus, both hoping to leave for Ganze. Rickety sliding door number one, or rusty sliding door number two? We picked the one closer to the exit from the stage onto the road. My two companions, taking full advantage of their feminine guile and foreignness, were allowed the front seats next to the empty driver’s seat. I sat two rows back. There is a silent awareness shared amongst all matatu passengers that if you don’t get the privilege of sitting in front, the second of the four rows in back is the best spot. You are less likely to be sat upon by someone than in the first row, and in the rows further back you are more likely to be hitting your head on the ceiling. I also believe that there might, just might, be a tiny bit more legroom in the second row. Not that my legs fit in any of the rows, but that extra millimeter, imagined or not, is a psychological salve. The first row is the worst for legroom, as the engine is directly in front of you, which also makes it the warmest place on the matatu into which you stuff your feet. Window seats are nice for the breeze, but bad for the dust and banging your head on the side beams above the glass as the matatu rolls back and forth on the arched roadway.
Shortly after we climbed in, a woman sat in the front row behind the engine, and a man in an Aloha shirt came and sat next to me. He spoke English well, but was impressed by my dozen words of Kiswahili. I practiced with him for a while. He verified the vocabulary list in my notebook, and occasionally made comments to the woman in front of us that made her laugh. After the initial conversation died out, we sat and waited. No one else boarded the matatu, least of all a driver. Looking at the van next to ours it appeared one person had gone with door number two, sat down in it and was also waiting.
The amount of activity at a matatu stage is proportional to the size of the town or city in which it is located. In Ganze, the stage is a single bench on each side of the road, and occasionally someone sits there with a basket of oranges to sell. I live in a mid-sized town, and there are never fewer than thirty matatus revving their engines, looking for passengers, rearranging their parking situations, and almost running over people. Around the matatus gather their smaller cousins, the tuk-tuks (rickshaws) and the piki-pikis (motorcycles), serving as taxis. There are peanut vendors, watch vendors, soda vendors, and people selling all manner of useless colorful plastic items pegged to a board that they carry with them. Want a hair band? No? How about a battery case? Child’s scissors? Giant paper clip? Three inches of flexible tubing? It is possible that I am exaggerating the scope of these vendors’ wares. I cannot report the items with total accuracy because to inspect the assortment is to make it impossible to convince the vendor that you really don’t want any of it.
It was close to an hour after we boarded and our matatu had not moved. The man in the Aloha shirt next to me disappeared. I tried to see if he had gotten on another matatu, thinking there may be better odds of leaving if we all stuck together in a sort of passengers’ union. He was gone. Then he was in the driver’s seat, revving the engine. We inched forward, then rolled back, trying several different gears as if to figure out which would get us out of the parking lot best. After a few moments it became apparent that he was not our driver who had decided to be social with the back seat passengers. He was just as anxious to get going as the rest of us. Another man came to the driver’s window, shoed him out and climbed in. This guy, it appeared, must be our driver. He revved the engine, rolled us a few feet forward and back, and then got out after a few minutes. Neither of them got back in our matatu.
Another forty-five minutes later my companions looked to me for an opinion on whether we should give up on Ganze and try again another day. Phone calls were made, and we were on the verge of bailing out, when the attendant from our matatu apparently poached customers from the neighboring matatu, causing their attendant to storm to our sliding door and slam it shut before the mutineers could board. Strong words were spoken, placating intermediaries showed up, vendors watched in anticipation, and after our attendant fixed the door which the other attendant had broken, the pirated passengers piled in, along with the real driver, who we had never seen before.
In the U.S, with its notions of cargo space and safety, no more than 8 or 10 people would be allowed in a vehicle of this size. Actually, in the U.S, a vehicle of this size usually holds five, and many vehicles considerably larger hold fewer, but whoever makes the little vans that are turned into matatus managed to fit 15 seats into the boxy frame.
At its most cozy, there were 26 people in our matatu. Children are hauled by a free arm and passed to mothers or crammed into slivers of space like bags of grain. Old women are told that there is plenty of room inside, and once they are in, they can’t turn around because someone else has gotten in behind them. The attendants hang out the side door, arms spread wide to keep anyone from falling out. Somehow the attendants always manage to collect fares as they do this. There can be 25 people packed like sardines between you and the attendant, and somehow their hand, grasping an assortment of bills, will find you. Then they will give you the incorrect change, and smile when you correct them, as if their mistake was not intentional. It’s not so much a dishonest grab at money, because he never told you the price to begin with. It’s more a test to see how much you, the ignorant outsider, will pay. These are individuals of particular talents.
After a long day visiting farms in Ganze, I was not particularly looking forward to the ride back to the coast. I had walked several miles up and down hills, had run out of water, and had not had enough to eat, starting with my skipping breakfast in order to be at the matatu stage by 7 a.m. for a ride that did not leave until 8:45. When the matatu pulled in front of the bench that is the stage in Ganze, I recognized the driver and attendant as the same who had brought my companions and me that morning. My coworkers and I had split up after the morning’s ride, and they had headed back an hour or so earlier. I smiled to the attendant as if we both knew something, and climbed in, hoping that we could at least keep the passenger level below the teens.
To my surprise, the van was almost empty. In addition to the driver and the attendant there was only one other man on board, and I stretched out in luxurious fashion, until it became apparent that that is incredibly uncomfortable in a matatu. We cruised slowly, stopping at junctions for a few moments longer than normal to see if any more passengers would appear. None did. The attendant seemed disappointed. Perhaps he remembered that I knew the actual price of the trip back. More likely he was thinking that someone else, probably the matatu that had taken my coworkers home, had caught all the fares along the roadside. We passed a school, and a crowd of children in threadbare uniforms chased us yelling, ”Taxi! Taxi!” The attendant and the driver mumbled some words between themselves, and we pulled over. Twenty-some school children got on board, giggled, marveled at the white man, and were given a free ride. The attendant, who did not make eye contact with any of the children as he gave them gruff instructions to pile into the back, gazed out the window of the sliding door and smiled. It was a good ride.
Public transportation does not operate on a schedule. It runs on a balance of incentives and disincentives. When there are enough people in the matatu, it starts to move. It also wants to pick up people on the side of the road as it goes. This poses a challenge if another matatu is going in the same direction. Both want to leave first to get the first shot at the people on the side of the road, but neither will leave without a respectable compliment of passengers to guarantee at least some coverage of the base cost of the trip. It is a risk game. Or perhaps the drivers simply leave when they finish their third cup of coffee, or when the card game ends, or whenever they damn well please.
There we were, faced with two empty matatus, both hoping to leave for Ganze. Rickety sliding door number one, or rusty sliding door number two? We picked the one closer to the exit from the stage onto the road. My two companions, taking full advantage of their feminine guile and foreignness, were allowed the front seats next to the empty driver’s seat. I sat two rows back. There is a silent awareness shared amongst all matatu passengers that if you don’t get the privilege of sitting in front, the second of the four rows in back is the best spot. You are less likely to be sat upon by someone than in the first row, and in the rows further back you are more likely to be hitting your head on the ceiling. I also believe that there might, just might, be a tiny bit more legroom in the second row. Not that my legs fit in any of the rows, but that extra millimeter, imagined or not, is a psychological salve. The first row is the worst for legroom, as the engine is directly in front of you, which also makes it the warmest place on the matatu into which you stuff your feet. Window seats are nice for the breeze, but bad for the dust and banging your head on the side beams above the glass as the matatu rolls back and forth on the arched roadway.
Shortly after we climbed in, a woman sat in the front row behind the engine, and a man in an Aloha shirt came and sat next to me. He spoke English well, but was impressed by my dozen words of Kiswahili. I practiced with him for a while. He verified the vocabulary list in my notebook, and occasionally made comments to the woman in front of us that made her laugh. After the initial conversation died out, we sat and waited. No one else boarded the matatu, least of all a driver. Looking at the van next to ours it appeared one person had gone with door number two, sat down in it and was also waiting.
The amount of activity at a matatu stage is proportional to the size of the town or city in which it is located. In Ganze, the stage is a single bench on each side of the road, and occasionally someone sits there with a basket of oranges to sell. I live in a mid-sized town, and there are never fewer than thirty matatus revving their engines, looking for passengers, rearranging their parking situations, and almost running over people. Around the matatus gather their smaller cousins, the tuk-tuks (rickshaws) and the piki-pikis (motorcycles), serving as taxis. There are peanut vendors, watch vendors, soda vendors, and people selling all manner of useless colorful plastic items pegged to a board that they carry with them. Want a hair band? No? How about a battery case? Child’s scissors? Giant paper clip? Three inches of flexible tubing? It is possible that I am exaggerating the scope of these vendors’ wares. I cannot report the items with total accuracy because to inspect the assortment is to make it impossible to convince the vendor that you really don’t want any of it.
It was close to an hour after we boarded and our matatu had not moved. The man in the Aloha shirt next to me disappeared. I tried to see if he had gotten on another matatu, thinking there may be better odds of leaving if we all stuck together in a sort of passengers’ union. He was gone. Then he was in the driver’s seat, revving the engine. We inched forward, then rolled back, trying several different gears as if to figure out which would get us out of the parking lot best. After a few moments it became apparent that he was not our driver who had decided to be social with the back seat passengers. He was just as anxious to get going as the rest of us. Another man came to the driver’s window, shoed him out and climbed in. This guy, it appeared, must be our driver. He revved the engine, rolled us a few feet forward and back, and then got out after a few minutes. Neither of them got back in our matatu.
Another forty-five minutes later my companions looked to me for an opinion on whether we should give up on Ganze and try again another day. Phone calls were made, and we were on the verge of bailing out, when the attendant from our matatu apparently poached customers from the neighboring matatu, causing their attendant to storm to our sliding door and slam it shut before the mutineers could board. Strong words were spoken, placating intermediaries showed up, vendors watched in anticipation, and after our attendant fixed the door which the other attendant had broken, the pirated passengers piled in, along with the real driver, who we had never seen before.
In the U.S, with its notions of cargo space and safety, no more than 8 or 10 people would be allowed in a vehicle of this size. Actually, in the U.S, a vehicle of this size usually holds five, and many vehicles considerably larger hold fewer, but whoever makes the little vans that are turned into matatus managed to fit 15 seats into the boxy frame.
At its most cozy, there were 26 people in our matatu. Children are hauled by a free arm and passed to mothers or crammed into slivers of space like bags of grain. Old women are told that there is plenty of room inside, and once they are in, they can’t turn around because someone else has gotten in behind them. The attendants hang out the side door, arms spread wide to keep anyone from falling out. Somehow the attendants always manage to collect fares as they do this. There can be 25 people packed like sardines between you and the attendant, and somehow their hand, grasping an assortment of bills, will find you. Then they will give you the incorrect change, and smile when you correct them, as if their mistake was not intentional. It’s not so much a dishonest grab at money, because he never told you the price to begin with. It’s more a test to see how much you, the ignorant outsider, will pay. These are individuals of particular talents.
After a long day visiting farms in Ganze, I was not particularly looking forward to the ride back to the coast. I had walked several miles up and down hills, had run out of water, and had not had enough to eat, starting with my skipping breakfast in order to be at the matatu stage by 7 a.m. for a ride that did not leave until 8:45. When the matatu pulled in front of the bench that is the stage in Ganze, I recognized the driver and attendant as the same who had brought my companions and me that morning. My coworkers and I had split up after the morning’s ride, and they had headed back an hour or so earlier. I smiled to the attendant as if we both knew something, and climbed in, hoping that we could at least keep the passenger level below the teens.
To my surprise, the van was almost empty. In addition to the driver and the attendant there was only one other man on board, and I stretched out in luxurious fashion, until it became apparent that that is incredibly uncomfortable in a matatu. We cruised slowly, stopping at junctions for a few moments longer than normal to see if any more passengers would appear. None did. The attendant seemed disappointed. Perhaps he remembered that I knew the actual price of the trip back. More likely he was thinking that someone else, probably the matatu that had taken my coworkers home, had caught all the fares along the roadside. We passed a school, and a crowd of children in threadbare uniforms chased us yelling, ”Taxi! Taxi!” The attendant and the driver mumbled some words between themselves, and we pulled over. Twenty-some school children got on board, giggled, marveled at the white man, and were given a free ride. The attendant, who did not make eye contact with any of the children as he gave them gruff instructions to pile into the back, gazed out the window of the sliding door and smiled. It was a good ride.
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