Security Isn't Free, Either

I once heard a Harvard professor give a talk describing the yumminess vs. safety scale for food regulation. Yummy food (yes, I’m quoting here) is frequently unsafe, and safe food rarely yummy. Head to the Texas border, he said, to see it in action. The same ingredients are used in burritos on either side of the border, but the Mexican version, with its unpasteurized cheese and fresher, unmedicated chicken, bursts with both flavor and, occasionally, Salmonella. The American version is recognizable as a burrito but has little taste in common with its more daring cousin. We’ve sacrificed some deliciousness in favor of safety.

Turn now to the news media, wherein, several times a week, in the midst of debating the war in Iraq, a TV pundit draws an indignant breath and intones, “Freedom isn’t free, you know.” The point, however self-righteously delivered, is well taken: while we’re at home enjoying the myriad privileges afforded us by our open and thriving society, men and women in uniform are giving their lives that this should be so.

The Bush administration daily levies the argument that they need increased power “to secure our freedoms” and “protect innocent lives.” We must have warrantless wiretapping on the instantaneous basis of need; we must allow the search of individual library records – to do anything less would compromise our safety. We put our liquids in 3 oz. containers and raise our hands above our sides and wonder nervously where the line will be drawn.

It turns out that, just like safe food, security isn’t free either. In this case, though, the price is paid in freedom.

Consider also that more than 4,000 American troops have been killed in Iraq, with more than 30,000 wounded and as many as 600,000 Iraqi deaths. We spend $725 million dollars a day to “fight them over there so that we don’t have to fight them here”, a plain reference to the security we gain from our efforts. Assuming that that argument is valid, is it worth the price?

How many Americans would live fuller and freer lives if we used that money and effort for freedom rather than security? The opportunities to do so are manifold: schools could be built; tuberculosis cases could be detected; economic stimulus checks could be increased; community centers could be heavily endowed; Pell grants could be funded at record levels; residents of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward could be helped to move back in; veterans could be offered medical care at non-VA hospitals.

All of us want to prevent the next terrorist attack on the United States. Any one of us would sacrifice his or her own life to save thousands. But as a society, would we endanger our children’s educations to prevent 3,000 deaths? Would we compromise the American dream by cracking down on immigration and discouraging foreign visitors? Would we send our sons and daughters to uncertain death? What about to prevent 6,000 American deaths? Or 50,000? Such questions are the stuff of nightmares and of responsible government, and the abilities to humanely understand, resolve and – most of all – explain their nuances are the differences between great leaders and tyrants.

So no, security is not free, but many are the simpletons in power who imply (and maybe even believe) that it is. Our leaders know that every ounce of security we claim is paid for with a tax on our freedoms, but the invocation of sacred, unimpeachable freedom is often too great for them to resist. Beware any politician who would stop at nothing to protect our freedoms, for these are the men and women most likely to trample them underfoot.

Traditionally, we defer to anyone touting an interest in our protection. Protect our bodies and our wealth, he or she likely means, but we would do well to remember that such protections are not without cost, and that that cost is paid in our freedoms – freedoms whose protection, in the end, is up to us.

Job Satisfaction

Stanley Aronowitz, the Green Party’s choice for Governor of New York in the first years of this decade, once informed my class at Bard that we should not – could not, in fact – live our lives through our jobs. He told us that the day’s labors hadn’t always crept so deeply into home lives as they did now. As a nation, he said, we’d forgotten that we work so that we can come home and be with our families, practice our hobbies and pursue our dreams. In short, we work to live, and not vice versa. In the anti-establishment atmosphere of our tiny (emphasis on) liberal arts college, his words resonated strongly.

On reflection, though, I’m less moved. Should we not derive satisfaction from our work? If we are to enjoy our jobs, if they are to enrich us spiritually as well as monetarily, how can we draw Aronowitz’s line between labor and love? Have we devoted ourselves too fully to our jobs when we arrive late for dinner? When we skip a lunch hour? When we go out more often than not with our friends from work? When we talk shop rather than sports or politics with our colleagues? Is there any opportunity that shouldn’t trump an office obligation?

Or should we look to merge our jobs seamlessly with our lives, each twined around and through the other until we find ourselves asleep every so often on the keyboard at the office? Do we live to succeed?

If so, how can we find time for love? How much can we really be there for our children when we’ve committed ourselves to what is, after all, a righteous and necessary cause that would fall without us? (Is it possible to commit oneself body and soul to a job without convincing oneself that it is a righteous and necessary cause?)

It’s also worth considering whether occupants of different places in the economy might give different answers to these questions of commitment, value and priority. Are there jobs that, by their natures, must be abandoned without compunction when the proverbial whistle blows? Examples include most service jobs – plumber, janitor, bus driver, physical therapist, scribe. There’s a strong argument to be made that the “elite” levels of American culture are composed of jobs that don’t permit such detachment – vocations that cannot be left at work. Perhaps those of us who yearn for labors of love rather than labors of lucre that enable lives of love are tacitly admitting our place in the overworked aristocracy. (Was there ever such a glib phrase as “working Americans”, used largely to refer to the blue-collar middle-class?)

Should that divide exist?

Too, is there not a divide between what we want from our jobs at age 25 and what we’ll want when we hit 60 or 75? Shall we dive in now and live our labors to the exclusion of all else, planning to come up for air in our fertile years to make a family and then, gradually, to relinquish our yoke to the coming generation in favor of creature comforts and membership in our communities? Or would those years dedicated so heavily to vocational work have too high an opportunity cost in neighbors, friends and lovers, in books and in art?

If we decide, as many of us have, to go all-in during the sunniest days of our lives with an eye toward reining in our horses when the evening comes, can we really understand the sacrifice we’re making?

Finally -- and with a tip of the hat to Zac, who kindly reminds me that not all things in life are black and white – is this dichotomy an oversimplification? Surely there is middle ground between a menial job to bring home the bacon and a back-breaker of a job to satisfy even the most sweat-thirsty brow. I don’t doubt that I sold janitorial jobs short by describing them as mindless nine-to-fives, and in fact, I’ve spent some time with mops myself and have taken much pride in a floor well-scrubbed. But the question remains: How much of ourselves shall we invest in our occupation, and how much shall we lay in reserve for after the whistle blows?

Thoughts?

Oh, Mexico

The crashing surf provides mood music for the the hermit crabs scuttling passive-aggressively under banana leaves here at Mar de Jade, some hour’s drive south of Puerto Vallarta on the coast of Mexico. I share this space – campus is far too prosaic a word for this place, and estate smacks too strongly of cruel capitalism – with students and guests from around the United States.

The owner/proprietor/guru/storyteller-in-chief is an MD, MPH from los Estados Unidos who came to this area some decades ago to help build a public health infrastructure for the locals, who were (and still are) sorely in need. The zen retreat at which I stay doubles as housing for volunteers at the clinic that she still runs every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, providing free consults from doctors who donate their time. I went with them and found that I wasn’t entirely underfoot: taking blood pressure remains instinctive after my summers at Hopkins, and tough as the language barrier may be, a ready smile still puts most patients at ease while the doctor collects a history.

Still, I was struck by the differences between the “Mar de Jade Clinica Campesina” and the clinics I’ve frequented myself over the years. Few Americans would voluntarily tread into a doctor’s office with an open-air waiting room covered only by a trellis and vines, replete with flies and a noisy children’s program on the other side of the courtyard – certainly it’s not what we imagine as we debate the future of healthcare in this election. White lab coats are a distant myth to us as we usher the next patient into our semi-private exam rooms. The most high-tech tools available in the exam rooms are tiny flashlights for measuring pupil dilation, with reflex hammers a close second. One patient presented with an epidermal infection that we would have lanced but for lack of a scalpel. Women crowd the line outside the room containing the newly installed sonogram, and our OB/GYN, on loan from a Kaiser Permanente hospital in California, rushes madly through the patients in an effort to make sure no one goes home unseen.

Our patients are unfazed by the five to six gringos facing them in each examination room. We are frequently introduced by the English-speaking volunteer doctors as “mis collegas” – their colleagues – and are allowed to watch, certainly to speak during, most of the more prosaic procedures.

I am struck by the unwieldiness of the translation process. Though our doctors are conversant in Spanish, the histories are taken slowly for reasons both cultural and linguistic, as the doctors tiptoe their way through unfamiliar medical foliage in asking and then are faced with speedy yet meandering responses from the patients. I’ve been impressed everywhere in Mexico with the locals’ unapologetic belief in the importance of a good story, and the case interviews are no exception: sometimes we hear about a family member’s death for ten minutes before we finish the examination and call in the next patient. Having just read “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, though, and faced with a paucity of medical resources, it occurs to me that an authoritative tone and an attentive ear are the most consistent medications we have available to dispense. I hope they help.

Whether they do or not, the clinic does have more modern techniques available. The lab tech comes in a couple of times each week to collect blood samples for analysis, and we can refer patients for ECGs or X-rays. These are all expensive, though, and even $50 US is an unreasonable sum to expect from the far from well-to-do patients who line the walls of the waiting room. The familiar battery of multi-syllabic medicines is available here as in the US, though the attenuated supply is hard to believe.

Lunch is hamburgers, known to all of us, in our newfound wry Mexican style, as “the American food.” We munch away and mainline lukewarm fruit punch as we debate the merits of allowing our interpreters to converse with the patients themselves and then relate the gist of the exchange back to the doctor. It’s not HHS-recommended procedure and there’s always the chance that we’re missing important nuances, but it seems to get the job done and it certainly puts the patients at ease, so no one feels too strongly about changing the process.

The line dwindles and our shoulders slump as the day draws to a close. We hop back in the truck to return to Mar de Jade and compare notes: doctors from the US and Canada, medical students from the South, post-bac students from the West Coast, and a PA and assorted others, including yours truly, the representative Baltimoron.

Au Revoir, NOLA

Looking back over my three weeks in New Orleans, I'm surprised (but pleased) to find that Jazz Fest was the least of my pleasures and privileges there. Certainly seeing Billy Joel and the Roots in the same venue was spectacular, but how could it compare with helping to turn this....


...into this...?



Or with the times that I learned to drywall:


...and what a subfloor looks like:



...and how and why to end it all:



I learned the difference between drywall drills and impact drivers, between legitimate contractors and exploitative frauds, between compassionate government and laissez-faire excusism, between disposable cities (myth) and indispensable cultural centers (reality),
between theoretical idealism and you-provide-the-materials-we'll-provide-the-labor world-changing effort. I learned about the ubiquity of good people and new friends, and the truth of Margaret Mead's most famous admonishment. I learned that jazz lives most fully in the streets.

And for all that a nice suit and a cubicle to work from lend forward momentum to movements, I learned that there's nothing like grueling work on the front lines to ease your soul and make measurable change in the world. Viva volunteerism.

So I'm back now, reflective and sun-tanned, and I cannot recommend too strongly that you volunteer yourself with lowernine.org. To my friends in the foundations of the rebuilding effort: thank you, and best of luck. I'll see you again soon.

The Little Things

Unimpressed With The Press

John McCain was in the Lower Ninth Ward yesterday. This is a small area, so it's not surprising that he spoke two blocks from where I was working. In light of the context and of the education opportunity for the Boston, MA high schoolers volunteering with us that day, a cadre of us split off from the rebuilding groups to get a taste of the Presidential race.

Senator McCain stepped out from the Straight Talk Express to shake hands, take pictures, and thank several National Guardsmen (amen, Senator!) before taking the world's most abbreviated tour of the Lower Ninth. It comprised about three blocks of Lamanche Street, and culminated in a press conference outside St. David's Church:



He traveled a mere three blocks, with perhaps five doors opened to him (two of them Christian centers, the rest local residences). All of these buildings were in condition similar to this one:


...which is striking, since there are houses in the Lower Ninth (blocks away from his route) that look like this:


And yet today's papers attribute special significance to Senator McCain's description of the Bush administration's failures in Katrina, since he "stood in the Lower Ninth Ward" while declaiming them. Senator McCain spent at most an hour and a half in the Lower Ninth, and neither he nor his aides saw anything representative of the conditions there. There's a lesson here about the all-too-human tendency to mistake background for context and appearance for substance.

There's also a lesson about the sensationalist and bloodthirsty bent of the press corps. Senator McCain was reported to have taken "direct aim at the Bush administration",

"tick[ing] off a long list of mistakes by the current administration, saying there were 'unqualified people in charge, there was a total misreading of the dimensions of the disaster, there was a failure of communications.'" [Ibid.]

I heard the question that elicited this response, and I have no doubt that Senator McCain carefully chose his words to leave the President nothing more than vaguely responsible for the Katrina and Rita disasters. The reporter asked, "In what ways did President Bush fail in dealing with Katrina?" That part's true enough. The above McCain quote selected by the Times was preceded by something like, "Well, I think we all know that mistakes were made, and we've talked about them in depth. There were..."

In other words, Senator McCain answered a completely different question than the one that was asked: to wit, "What mistakes were made in dealing with Katrina?" Note the passive tense. Note also that all but the first of the examples the Senator cited were at least as applicable at the local level as they were at the White House. In fact, the Senator gave the example of non-interoperable radios used by relief personnel, an example which in no way reflects the President's judgment or action.

The logical follow-up question would have been: "Senator McCain, we're aware that those mistakes were made. In what ways did the President contribute to them?" But it was not to be.

Instead, the press corps somehow heard a screaming indictment in the Senator's delicate treatment of the President. I was there, though, and I see no dissonance between the tenor of McCain's softshoe yesterday and his decision to campaign with the President. I was, however, disappointed by the face-to-face docility and consequent misinterpretation offered by the press.

In fairness, though, what can you expect from a press corps that covered the Senator's stroll down Lamanche while corralled into media-friendly feeding troughs?


Lest you should think, as I did until I asked one of the Guardsmen present, that this was a nefarious plot to restrict journalists to taking only those pictures arranged by the campaign, know this: the reporters requested those flatbeds.

I hope that this indolence isn't typical of all campaign reporting. To my knowledge, no reporters cased the neighborhood to observe the condition of houses off the anointed path. No reporters interviewed community leaders ahead of time to find, for example, that the City had fought against reopening the local school, and that children (and therefore neighborhood residents) had been allowed to return only after months of effort by the community associations. No reporters had sufficiently examined records or newspaper reports to be able to ask Senator McCain his understanding of Presidential responsibilities, both legal and persuasive, in a situation such as that following Katrina, and, as above, specifically how the President did or didn't acquit himself of those perceived responsibilities.

In short, the press dropped all of the balls on this one. Senator McCain at least gets credit for visiting the Lower Ninth Ward, however briefly; for leveling criticism, however inchoate, at the White House for its myriad Katrina failings; for speaking directly to the Guardsmen present; and, perhaps most of all, for shaking hands with and then publicly thanking the stellar high schoolers I was working with:


And yes, that's Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal next to Mr. and Mrs. McCain. They travel together, you know.

Vultures of the Lower Ninth

In the fine tradition of the reading material at my old dentist's office, see if you can spot what's wrong with the following picture:


If you said, "The foundation columns for that house are unsteady piles of cinderblocks or poorly mortared bricks, all unattached to the house itself", you'd be both out of breath and quite correct.

If you said, "That 6x6 is neither attached to nor supported by anything on the near side", you'd be correct as well.

But if, based on the abundant evidence, you concluded that this New Orleans homeowner was defrauded by the contractors who skipped town with her money after doing only perfunctory work, you'd win the grand prize.

The standard deal in the Lower Ninth (as, I believe, in other places) is that the contractor negotiates with the homeowner a price for an agreed-upon list of projects. After that, the homeowner pays the contractor 40% of the total price for the first 40% of work. When that's complete, another 40% is paid, and then a final 20% payment is exchanged when the work is complete.

Of course, these deals are largely arrived at on a handshake basis. Worse, homeowners rarely know how to verify the bona fides of a contractor, and the government's done a phenomenally poor job of regulating the contracting market. As a result, the standard eventuality for work 'round these parts is that the homeowner pays 40% for the first set of work, lays out the second 40% and then finds that a) the contractor has skipped town without a forwarding address, and b) what work was done was of such poor quality as to require near-complete reconstruction.

Witness, then, the "beams to nowhere" (original phrase -- citations, please!) and disintegrating pillars above. Elsewhere in Miss Sheila's house, the uneven floors, sparse and improper screws and nails, cracked drywall and crooked doorways are salt in the still-fresh wounds left by Katrina. Mentioning contractors in any gathering of Katrina survivors is a surefire recipe for rolled eyes and strained, knowing smiles.

The work we do here isn't top-quality by any stretch of the imagination, but it is conscientious and it is honest and it is accountable, and damn if those floors aren't level when we're done with them.

Technoliteracy

If you're a family member or are otherwise obliged to read whatever screeds I post here, you can click the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" link at the bottom of the page and follow the directions there. That way, all new posts will be emailed to you directly.

If you want the really easy option, let me know and I'll put you on the notification list for new posts.

Southern hospitality

A house down the street caught fire on Saturday. Walking home with Jake from our build site, we both saw barbecue-magnitude smoke over the rooftops. After we identified the smell as insulation rather than hot dogs, we about-faced and hurried down to the scene. Smoke billowed from under the eaves.

I'm proud to report that NOLAFD had three trucks there within five minutes of my call, and that as a result the house sustained little external damage beyond smudging. I'm crushed, though, for poor Roy, whose numerous concerned neighbors said that he'd just had his utilities hooked up and was getting ready to move back in. Sometimes you just can't win for losing.

Next to me, a kid of 15 or 16 calmly remarked that a house down the street had been intentionally set alight the week before.

"You know why?" I asked.

"Couldn't say," he squinted, and turned away.

In a neighborhood where only one in twenty houses is occupied, though, I have to say how struck I was by the turnout and evident concern. Residents crowded the streetcorners and inquired after the owner, all asking who had his cell number and whether he'd been there that day. Thinking back to my own neighborhood in Baltimore, I find myself wondering how many people beyond our immediate neighbors would know how to get in touch with my family if anything went wrong. Hell -- I try to remember my neighbors' names.

That evening, volunteer conversation was crowded with speculation along those lines. How far does southern hospitality extend? Are its qualities different from those of northern hospitality? Jess suggested that the height of fraternal consideration in her New Jersey town would be to dust off someone else's car after a snowstorm. Last night, we met a guy on the ferry across the river who invited us into his home, served us drinks, and then went round for round with us at the local pub. The northerners in our little group were stunned at his unabashed generosity, while the southerners rolled their eyes and suggested that all that snow had damaged our brains.

Back on Saturday, all of lowernine.org hied over to the local community center, run by a man named, simply, Mack. [see inset] At least once a month, he and his organization host a crawfish boil, that most N'w'O'linean of traditions:

Ingredients:
1 utterly poised and jovial host
10-20 neighborhood families
10 bushels of crawdads
1 bushel of shrimp
1 mind-boggling pot each of turkey necks and corn on the cob
8 tables
2 cases beer (Budweiser, obviously)
Volunteers to taste

...and, after an hour or three of salting, cleansing, spicing, and boiling, food is served for all at communal tables. It's glorious, not least because eating crawfish requires a level of dedication and fine digit coordination not practiced by the casual lobster diner.

I talked with locals about the Lower Ninth and how far it's come since they were perched on their roofs two and a half years ago. The two women at my table positively glowed as they simultaneously thanked the Lord for their recent good fortune and fine neighbors and ribbed one of the Peace Corps volunteers for not knowing what a crawfish was.

Again I submit to you that this simply doesn't happen in the north. Perhaps it's peculiar to communities under great stress, to groups of individuals who haven't the individual resources or accomplishments to celebrate en famille. Or perhaps la famille becomes a more inclusive term as you leave the Mason-Dixon farther behind.

Or perhaps it's just New Orleans, where the jazz musicians smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk between sets with anyone who's got a light.

Caption contest!

So: Is there a ban on prayer in schools, or is there a ban on organized prayer? [Hint: It's the latter.]

Also, how tempted are you to have this guy put in your air conditioner?

Now: Who's got a good caption?

From New Orleans, Day 2

I'm writing now with my filthy workboots kicked up on the computer table. A welcome glass of water perches next to me and the floorboards lurk dustily in the gloom as 70 decibels of hiphop thuds in from our technology shed, which structure performs double duty as storage closet and sound garden.

I hadn't got the first idea what to expect when I came down here, and it's just as well – my northern city boy's imagination couldn't've prepared me for this. In the first place, LowerNine.org (yes, that's their actual name and yes, that's a sign of the times) is unlike anything I've ever experienced; if you've never spent time in a commune, you'll probably have to strain for analogues, too. The building we call home can't be more than a couple thousand square feet of shoddily-painted, crooked-floorboarded makeshift housing. It's a hodgepodge of modern computer equipment, canned soups, compost cans, ragged curtains cum room-separators, dinged-up kitchen utensils and homemade bunkbeds (think "unadorned yet firmly bolted 2x4s") outfitted with inflatable mattresses and secondhand sleeping bags. The bathrooms gleam, though, and there's a laundry machine and dryer for long-term volunteers (as opposed to "shorties", a category to which I've avoided condemnation only narrowly by dint of my three-week commitment). The volunteers – we're nearly all volunteers here, though some plan to be here for two years or more – are largely my own age, scruffily attired and desperately in need of baths. Idealism and technical know-how are rampant, and a good pun does not go unacknowledged.

In short, this place is perfect.

That couldn't be less true of the lower ninth ward, though, where military police patrol the streets, cabbies dare not drive and I'm told that only 1 in 20 houses are occupied. I'll see if I can snap some pictures of the contrasts (waterlogged vs. restored, e.g.) when I go to serve dinner at the community center this evening. In the meantime, let me begin by saying that two years, seven months and seventeen days since Mayor Nagin first ordered the evacuation of New Orleans in anticipation of coming storm, signs of continued reconstruction progress in the NOLA's hardest-hit ward are hard to see.

Which isn't to say that progress hasn't been made. The roads, while pocked and gouged by the storm, are almost completely free of debris and most of the larger wreckages have been carted off to the city's landfill. Most of the larger businesses have been rebuilt, beginning (of course) with Home Depot, at which hotbed of activity I spent most of my morning. All of the utilities work just fine, food is readily available, and when standing anywhere besides the residential neighborhoods it's almost possible to imagine seaside NOLA as a placid, sleepy well-run town.

Step onto those residential streets, though, and the story changes. I already mentioned that the habitation rate here is dismal; it's not hard to see why that's so. At least nine of every ten houses suffer from the contorted roofs, leprous paint jobs and empty windows symptomatic of a hurricane's passage. I haven't had a chance to go inside the untouched ruins yet; perhaps I've been warded off by the runes left from the emergency crews two years ago, who used a simple cross-and numbers system to indicate the date the house was surveyed for damage, what organization surveyed it, how many unclaimed pets were found inside and how many bodies would need to be carted away. I make instinctive connections to Passover's angel of death whenever I see more than two houses so marked in a row, though of course these symbols are more epitaph than prophylactic.

In this environment, it's easy to see how LowerNine.org keeps busy. Our volunteer corpus fluctuates in size from ten up to fifty or sixty around spring break ("the busy season"), with an average, I'm told, of around fifteen people. New Orleans residents submit applications for aid from Lower Nine. If we accept the application – it's not yet clear to me what our criteria are, or whether any applications are rejected – then we'll commit to rebuilding the homeowner's residence, asking only that they pay for the materials. Since labor is by far the most expensive factor in such work, we're very popular: as of this writing, we're actively working on somewhere around five homes and our waiting list is 100 homes long.

I've only gotten the barest taste thus far of how we do our work. When I arrived yesterday, I plonked my bags down under my bunk in the shorties' room, donned superhero-appropriate workboots and ratty jeans, and headed out to reinforce the floor at Ms. Sheila's house. (All of our community partners are Mr. or Ms. Firstname to us. And partners they are, too, since most of them work with us on their homes. Consequently, there's a lot of love here.) For five hours, I read the measurements passed to me from beneath the house on bits of plywood, used a chopsaw to cut 2x8 boards to those lengths, and then helped to hammer and then nail them into place as supports for loose floorboards. Others finished drywalling her closet and then gave me a tour of the nearly-complete house, including the metal flashing they'd applied to the bottoms of her windows so that water wouldn't soak through the poor materials chosen by her original contractors.

Last night was a gaily trip into New Orleans proper, replete with jazz and alcohol and embarrassing personal stories, about all of which more another time. This morning I awoke, ate eggs'n'spinach, canned fruit and fried potatoes before heading out to buy materials for Mr. Charles' house. Home Depot was excruciatingly slow, permitting me the luxury of a quick nap in a folding chair while we waited an hour for our gargantuan shipment of wood. It was glorious, with an impeccable follow-up act: lunch.

This afternoon marked my first ever trip to a municipal landfill. Darren, Marwe and I stood hip-deep in a metric ton of the sludgy, maggot-ridden wood, cardboard, linens, drywall, leaves, and other detritus of a successful construction operation and shoveled it all over the truck's side. Around us, sulfuric gases billowed and bulldozers outfitted with steel-studded wheels plodded their prehistoric way around the hive. I smell awful, I'm pretty sure I inhaled a full pound of asbestos and I'll never wear that pair of jeans again (…until I wash it tomorrow) – and boy, am I happy.

We came back and I sat down to write, but was pleased to be interrupted so that several of us could head over to serve dinner at the local community center. Beef stew, white rice, chicken cacciatore and delicious peas and carrots (all, I'm pretty sure, from a can) were served to a curious agglomeration of the neighborhood's ne'er-do-wells, a group comprising volunteers (some from as far away as England), ordinary residents looking for some company, and one actual ne'er-do-well (the medical clinic, I informed him, is Tuesday from 10 to 1). Pretty prosaic stuff, really, but there was abundant free food and I ain't complaining.

So here I am back at the ranch, happy and sunburned and (I'm sure) smelling like roadkill, and eager to do it all again tomorrow. More as events develop!