The Lightning (Bug)

Remembering Our Roots

2009-09-01T17:52:00.002-04:00

I left the U.S. in mid-June to see the world on my own for the first time. When I boarded my plane in New York, national discontent over an uncertain bailout and a too-long-for-Dick, too-short-for-Richard health care plan was only just approaching a boiling point. I came back at the end of July to find our country in the early throes of Communism, according to some, or Fascism, according to others, or even the Apocalypse. Many worried aloud that the beleaguered American experiment might be rocking on its heels.

It might behoove us to keep some perspective as we debate wealth distribution, hierarchies of need, and what it means to be free. I saw some things abroad that helped calibrate my own.

In Ethiopia, locals explained to me that in 2005, their government had held an election. The opposition had won with almost 100% of the vote in every part of the country that had hosted elections monitors. In the remaining, much less populous areas of the country, the government counted the votes and, unsurprisingly, claimed victory. When the opposition protested, the government had them arrested and jailed. All but the state-run newspapers were closed. Ethiopia’s only telecommunications company, also conveniently state-run, blocked text messaging (that insidious tool of the revolutionary) for two solid years. The government remains in power today. Few expect anything but a show in the 2010 election.
In its countryside, I met Ethiopians who walked seventy kilometers once a week for water, grain and firewood. 9 in 10 Ethiopians face a two-day walk just to reach an all-weather road. Still others will die in childbirth because there are only 2,000 doctors in Ethiopia – a country of 85 million people. Not that the imbalance matters much, since there hasn’t been a public hospital built since the 1950s, there’s no public health care system, the average yearly income is about $100 USD, and the doctors almost all live in the inaccessible major cities.

In Egypt, I booked a trip to see Abu Simbel, Pharaoh Rameses III’s 2,000-year-old monument to himself. The hotel awakened me at 2 AM so that I could join the convoy for the 230 kilometer drive to the site. We had to start so early because foreigners are not allowed to travel unescorted in that part of Egypt: the police surrounded all twenty of our buses, keeping us safe from terrorist strikes. For my train trip back to Cairo, I was required to purchase a first-class cabin ticket – the open second-class seats are considered too dangerous for Westerners.

On the streets of Addis Ababa, a man told me that his father had been murdered by Somali insurgents some twenty years before. I gasped and stopped still as he explained that, in order to provide for his mother and two sisters, he had had to abandon college and thereby all hope of joining the middle class. Somehow I choked out that I was “so sorry to hear that”. I was sure that he would cry.
But he kept walking. “Ah,” he said. “It happens.”

I suppose it does.

To be fair, my trip took me through beauty as well. I watched the sun set over the Pyramids, I bargained in Africa’s largest open-air bazaar, I heard prayers sung in the hand-hewn rock churches of Lalibela; I saw HIV-positive mothers giving birth to HIV-negative children under careful medical care, I toured hospitals built on the ruins of prisons, and I was touched time and again by the kindness of strangers. I saw the sights and heard the sounds of civilizations that were old when Christianity first set foot on American shores.

But by far my fondest memory is of the customs station in John F. Kennedy International Airport at the end of my return flight. “Welcome home,” said the agent, and I nearly cried.

It takes a great shock to make clear the incandescent promise of the things, large and small, that we take for granted. Our air conditioners work. Our water runs. Our votes are counted, our trials are open, our supermarkets overflow with food, and our children, who will be taught to read and do arithmetic, will be limited more by their ability than by their grandparents’ birthplaces. What’s more, we are safe from the violent predations of insurgents – so safe, in fact, with such deaths so unprecedented, that when 3,000 Americans were murdered all at once, we invaded two sovereign nations to prevent a recurrence.

Of course we have things to work on, and of course we differ over the best ways to improve. That’s the essence of democracy. But we’ve got an awful lot to be proud of, and a thriving system that, while slow to adapt, is near unshakeable in its strength and possibility. So if you worry that disagreement over the next steps for an already excellent health care system, or the most effective methods for using tax dollars, constitutes the end of a nation, here’s my advice to you:

Go take a trip.

No Photos Permitted Inside

2009-07-14T05:00:00.002-04:00

...and, perhaps illogically given the clear flexibility of Egyptian Antiquities guidelines, I didn't take any.

Finally Found a USB Hook-up

2009-07-14T04:50:00.003-04:00

Abu Simbel!

The Great Iron Tortoise

2009-07-11T14:42:00.002-04:00

(continued)

At the station, the attendant behind the counter scrawls "Seat 17, Car 13. // Plat. 1" at the bottom of my entirely handwritten ticket. "Platform 1," he says. The top reads, "Train 997. 8 PM." I shoulder my bags and head through the perfunctory security check.

I've figured out the Arabic numbering system, but the digits on the sides of the already-arrived train at Platform 1 don't appear to say anything lower than 1,115. I ask a guy in a station attendant's uniform where I should be. He grabs my ticket, frowns, and says, "Platform 4! Hurry! It leave!", and points energetically to the tunnel under the tracks to the other platforms.

I'm skeptical, so I find one of the omni-present soldiers and ask him what's up. He gestures to his superior, who speaks English, and explains what's on my ticket. The three-star (or so his epaulets proclaim him) frowns and says, "Platform 4!"

Puzzling!

I trundle back out to the grungy front lobby and find the gentleman who sold me the tickets. "They said platform 4. What's going on?", I ask hopefully. "Platform 1! But go, it will leave in a moment!", he harrumphs before leaving his desk for the station's inner sanctum. I'm lost.

I head back out to the tracks and appeal to a civilian for help. He grabs my ticket. Frowns. Scratches at the marks. Says, "You need to run. Come." And he grabs my arm, and down we go beneath the tracks, through the tunnel, back up to the air at platform 4. Another train! My Good Samaritan hands me off to one of the passengers. This guy performs the by-now-familiar divination ceremony over my ticket and, clearly non-plussed but self-assured nonetheless, leads me three cars up. "This is your seat," he says, pointing to seat 13.

I check: my ticket still says seat 17. "Really? That's....that's great. Thank you." He nods, I nod, and I drop my bags.

By way of background, I made my trip down to Aswan in a 1st-class compartment. I've never been in the 2nd-class cars before, or even seen inside. It's a different world. Where 1st-class has plush seats and is relatively clean, if cramped, 2nd-class has battered, patched, threadbare seats that clearly that well attached to the car itself. It also has plenty of room and a much more jovial, communal atmosphere. Though I paid for a 1st-class ticket, I'm perfectly happy here.

The other vital piece of background -- a tidbit I didn't learn until I ran into a fellow erstwhile Egyptian traveler while in Istanbul -- is that Westerners are not to be sold 2nd-class tickets, and are in fact required to sit in 1st-class. 2nd-class, I was informed in hushed tones, "is not safe."

So bear this in mind, gentle reader, as the conductor scoots through the car collecting tickets. I show him mine. He squints, obviously confused. The man behind me stands up and talks excitedly, likely making a point about the law and my clear Western provenance. The conductor shushes him and then shrugs, as if to say "Who really gives a shit?" He hands me back my ticket and walks on.

The Egyptian attitude toward security never fails to astound. (There are metal detectors and X-Ray machines at all the entrances to the national monuments and antiquities sites. But there are no monitors for the X-Ray machines, and the metal detectors beep plaintively for each person who walks through. It's a tiny one-note ode to good intentions. Or maybe not: The same traveler who told me about the 2nd-class law claims he saw someone get pulled aside after a metal detector only to offer a 10-pound note and pass without scrutiny. Others claim that, much like marijuana laws in the States, the ubiquitous Egyptian security precautions are mainly excuses to investigate anyone the police couldn't nab under other pretenses.)

So the train pulls out. For the first half hour or so, I sit and chat with the gentleman across the isle from me. His name is Musim, and at age 28 he owns and operates his own ore-extraction business. After some involved talk about Egyptian business and the value of a law degree ("I always keep a lawyer on payroll. They make problems go away"), he asks what I do. "I'm a student," I tell him.

"How much does that cost each year?"

"God. Upwards of $40,000. Sometimes $60K, depending how you count."

His eyes bug out. "So you will be rich after you study? You will make that money in your government job?"

"Lord no."

"So you will be poor?"

"More than likely."

"You do not want to make money?"

"It's not really the point. I'm in this to do good, you know?"

He pauses to consider. Then: "We need more people like you in this country."

We chat, first about Egyptian and global politics, then idly, until sleep overtakes both of us. As night falls over the alleged Train 997, we clatter and rattle our way back to Cairo.

The Living God

2009-07-11T13:02:00.000-04:00

July 8th:

Wake at 2:30. Hotel staff raps on my door seconds later. I dress, grab my camera and head downstairs. My stomach begins to hurt almost immediately; I won't belabor that point in this entry except to say that the day was more suspenseful than would've been ideal, and that you haven't experienced indignation until you've had a bathroom attendant demand cash from you before he'll hand over the toilet paper.

The bus is packed, one of twenty or more in a police-escorted convoy full of tourists. The police are necessary, as it turns out, because this route has been attacked by terrorists before, and for a variety of reasons -- many of them having to do, allegedly, with US funds allocated for Egypt for each American tourist permitted in-country -- the Egyptian government is quite solicitous of American tourists' perception of safety. I'm too tired to notice much beyond the bus' regrettably intermittent air-conditioning, a state of affairs that's almost worse than no air-con at all since one never has the chance to acclimate to either setting.

Two hours' drive gets us to Abu Simbel, Temple of Ramses II. The international political tensions of the '50s led to the construction of an unsurprisingly poorly-planned dam on the Aswan river, which runs directly by Abu Simbel. When the flood water threatened to overrun one of Egypt's prize possessions, they picked the whole thing up piecemeal and moved it 60 meters uphill, going so far as to construct an entire rocky hillside to house it.

And a good thing too, because it's tremendous. You've seen pictures, I'm sure -- three gigantic sandstone effigies of Ramses II, with just the legs of the fourth visible after the torso tumbled in the early 20th century. Two are seated on each side of the entrance to his temple. His favored children stand at his feet, and representations of his best wife, Nefertari, stand miniscule to the side. Lines of captured Asian and African slaves are carven in relief on the side of the entrance, which leads into a thirty-foot hallway flanked by colossal representations of the Gods whose company he joined when he died. Claustrophia-inducing chambers branch off of the main hallway, and all of the walls are decorated with reliefs of his victories -- martial, political, theological and marital. Nothing is carved fewer than five feet off the ground, so even the minimally-exaggerated scales of the represented figures seem superhuman. At the back of the temple another statue of Ramses is seated next to three major gods of the Egyptian pantheon; twice a year, on his birthday and on his day of ascension, the sun's light reaches this chamber, illuminating each figure in turn from left to right or right to left with the exception of the God of Darkness, who remains always shrouded.

It's mind-blowing.

There's an argument, I suppose, that the graffiti all over the site detracts from the grandeur of these immortal ruins. I'm not sure I agree -- seeing the dates and names carven in chests, on walls, in the figures of the almighty gods themselves, I'm reminded of the fallibility of all things, and of the generations of explorers who fought their way to this site and, exhausted and amazed, put their names among the superstructures of the righteous as if to say, "I, too, exist!"

What I don't like is the tourists -- greasy, sweaty, corpulent, near-translucent, sunburned about the neck, posing like the King Tut dancers we all loved on SNL, complaining about the infernal heat and panting heavily after hauling themselves off the bus -- and the E-Z-Serv, anodyne unmistakably tourist culture that's grown up around this greatest of monuments. Not all the tourists look or act this way, obviously, but I've been in Ethiopia or Egypt for two weeks now and I could count the overweight people I've seen on one hand. Yes, Western-style living has its advantages, but it's easy to see where the stereotype comes from. And enough of them carry such an economy-distorting disposable income that their interest brings with them lines of palm trees, phalanxes of stores and tchotchkes and ice cream shops that sell their wares at five times the normal price. The Temple feels caged, a prisoner held thousands of years from its own time to entertain the idle whimsy of the moneyed classes. Ramses' legacy is deracinated, bereft of the cultural context that would lend credence to his efforts or validation to his dreams of immortality. He is diminished before us.

I don't know why the caged bird sings, but I can guess why he might throw himself against the bars until either impact or mercy set him free.

I'm awed and shell-shocked at the same time. Some of this might be dehydration; I slurp desperately at my water bottle and head back to the bus.

2 hours of cramped driving later and we're back in Aswan, which Wikipedia describes as the driest town on Earth. We've run the gamut of local sights, sounds and tastes, and I decide that I've had my fill of Egypt. A quick trip to the internet cafe, where the kids are still playing Halflife over the LAN, yields me a ticket to Israel. I grip hands ceremoniously with D., say farewell, and hop what turns out to be a 15-hour ride to Cairo.

Cairo to Aswan

2009-07-10T03:28:00.003-04:00

Looking backwards a couple of days, written while overlooking the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofya in Istanbul:

July 6:

I've spent at least an hour now watching the tracks at the Cairo railway station and I've only just seen my first train. In spite of this lack of activity, or perhaps because of the bottleneck, the quays are packed like sardine cans. Women, children, men, soldiers -- of whom there are many, though most bear the sleepy expression of men not given serious duty -- all crowd the stone benches and gritty floors. Many sit with their legs hanging over the lip into the track space. Others wonder unconcernedly across the tracks to the station for a drink, navigating with ease the scrap metal, shattered bricks and consumer jetsam spread between the tracks. When finally a train does pull in, it's discharged its passengers and taken on a new load literally before it pulls to a halt: the doors open as the first car of the train reaches the station, and people climb into and out of open doors and windows as though they're being chased. I don't envy the weak or uncoordinated their fight to board, let alone for seats.

D., my Australian fellow traveler, and I have joined forces to head down to Aswan for the next couple of days. Aswan's a small town a ways down the Nile, possessed of the usual complement of shoreline restaurants, spiffy hotels, and beckoning bazaar streets. We'll stay there for the evenings and hop a tour bus for the 250 KM trek to Abu Simbel, home to Ramses II's temple to himself.

It's a good thing we've got so much to look forward to, since pretty much all this train's got going for it is fitful air conditioning. Bugs crawl happily into and out of grates, the seats don't recline, the private cars are hardly private, and when the conductor offers us different seats he grins expectantly and rubs his fingers together: "Baksheesh?"

We settle in to sleep for the 12-hour ride.

July 7th:

16 hours later (yeah, 16) we reach Aswan and are met by an emissary from the hotel, who swiftly negotiates a cab for all of us. D. and I check in, grab a couple of single rooms, desperately flip the air conditioning on to combat the 40 degrees Celcius ambient temperature, and grab lunch across the street. It's Kirshi (sp?) -- a uniquely Egytian, as far as I can tell, blend of lentils, three kinds of noodles, rice, tomato sauce, crunchy fried onions and, for the more adventurous, a murderously spicy sauce to taste. Delicious!

We walk through the bazaar, steadily less patient with the shopkeepers who leap up at the first sign of attention and ask what you're looking for. It isn't possible just to browse: let your eyes rest too long on one shop and you'll be whisked away on a five-minute tour of all of the owner's wares, then press-ganged into a purchase by a man who cannot stop smiling. I've never said "No, thank you!" so firmly or so often in my life.

D. suggests that Egyptians must view bargaining as an extension of ordinary conversation, in contrast to the Western view of money talk as a separate and vaguely discomfiting beast. Looked at this way, the pushy vendors are marginally more tolerable, but it's still enough to put you off shopping for awhile.

We walk and drink liter after liter of water while we burn the hours before our 2:30 wake-up call for the Abu Simbel bus ride. On a whim, we hop a motorboat ride across the Nile to the tombs that fill the hills overlooking the town. In this, as in all things service-related for foreigners in Egypt, we succeed only after extensive negotiations with the boat owner. Once across the river, we find that the tombs closed at 5 PM, and it's already 6. "No problem," say the older, clearly unaffiliated civilians hovering mischievously at the entrance. "We the chiefs of the Tombs. Have keys. You want to visit?" Maybe we could have hit up the tombs after hours. We're struck by the facial illegality and the hassle of it all, though, and so we pay a nominal bit of baksheesh to a nearby guide to take us up and over the tombs to the stone hills that provide a vantage for the river and the city. He obliges, and we slowly rise above the Nubian Village on this bank (vehemently separated from the Arabic town on the other side of the river), its appearance that of a tide of buildings lapping against the sudden desert. We scramble upwards and are rewarded with the promised view, rock promontories providing a steady spot on which to rest and bask in the distance and the evening sun. A few pictures with just us and the guide and we head back down to the boat, across the river, through the streets and to the hotel to sleep before our early morning.

Getting Lost. Finding Myself.

2009-07-05T10:15:00.001-04:00

July 5 (Sunday)

Confession time: I love shisha. Contemplative, dignified, and uncontaminated by pretension (cigars, anyone?), designed to share, as varied and nuanced in its way as any wine or coffee, some quality time with a hookah brings me great peace. It's hard to imagine rushing anywhere while the coals turn slowly white and the smoke dissipates lazily like a dream you once had. I feel a little like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland -- wise, contented, enigmatic.

I'm writing these words while sitting outside a street cafe somewhere behind the Khan el-Khalil, Cairo's street market district. Tea, shisha and the hubbub of the street keep me company. An early start, several hours of satisfied wandering and a cab ride brought me to the entrance of the market. The gate itself is heavily guarded and barred, but pedestrians are allowed through without a second thought. On either side, timeless mosques with indubitably 21st-century sound systems call the people to noon prayer. The Imam's clear voice rings out over the square, dancing around each note and making the streets reverberate with the word of God.

It's a shame the bazaar -- or at least the one street of it that I see -- is such a tourist trap. It's filled with the same kitschy crap you can find at any stall in Cairo -- carven pyramids, cat-headed effigies of golden Gods, cheap shoes, hookahs, men who call you friend before asking where you are from, telling you about their friend in America and then demanding that you come see "something you won't see anywhere else in Cairo!" -- which would be true, I suppose, if I were a one-day tourist and hadn't seen anything else at all in Cairo. As it is, two separate vendors have already performed the same trick for me, lighting a match in a bottle of perfume while hinting darkly that we would both die together if it contained a single drop of alcohol (it doesn't, of course, being of a pure local recipe; all breathe a sigh of relief). Perfume stores like this one are hardly novel. I walk quickly through the packed but somehow half-hearted market street, carefully noting the trash in the corners, the children pushing carts of bread, the New York City-style t-shirts ("You can LOOK, but you can't TOUCH") on occasional display, and I take the first random turn I can. Then another. Then another. Quickly, gratifyingly, I am lost in the back streets of Cairo.

For a time these streets get smaller and smaller, more and more trash-filled -- the air sours and emaciated kittens forage for food in the rubbish and offal -- and at one point I am alone in a dingy, filthy alleyway that looks like all of its residents, touts and passers-by were raptured away in a long-gone moment: streamers hang greyly, garbage leans against the wall like tired beggars, and there is silence. I walk on.

Soon the streets reopen, gaining in width and verve and shedding the thick coating of detritus that marked the streets furthest from the beaten path. Old but serviceable cars beep and rumble around corners, dodging pedestrians every few feet. Vendors sell drinks and hookahs and falafel. Backwater mosques that look 1,000 years old beckon the traveler into their tenebrous worship spaces. The streets shine through their thick coat of dust, resplendent in the sunshine. Footsore and thirsty, I claim a seat at this quintessential streetside shisha bar to smoke a bowl and sip exquisite (if, regrettably, bagged) tea. Shops and street traffic jump to life as the afternoon wears on. Someone turns on a stereo; the area fills with the bouncing, infectious rhythms of popular Arabic music, all drums and chanting and, bizarrely, a touch of funk guitar. Everyone smiles and laughs, frequently in my direction. Two gentlemen invite me to sit with them, but I wish to write and so indicate my thanks but stay in my seat.

This part of Cairo is thick with the juxtaposition of age and modernity. Islamic latticework, grungy but evocative, climbs up many of the buildings. The streets are sized for walking, not cars. Chisel-marks are apparent in the squared blocks that support many of the buildings. Button-down shirts over wifebeaters (do we still call them that?) are more common than robes for the men. Jeans are ubiquitous in the younger generation while older men tend to wear slacks -- rarely well-laundered -- with a belt and a good shirt. The women all wear headscarves, rarely chadors. Here, as elsewhere, the children are giddy and adorable.

Rested, I walk for hours more. The busiest streets are lined with colossal walls that would have been appropriate for repelling an army 2500 years ago. Smaller make-shift walls hide the seas of slum living from casual passers-by, or perhaps from those who wish not to see. I come to the Ring Road, Cairo's answer to DC's beltway: On one side are trees and roads and apartment buildings; on the other, the dry and brittle clay-colored desert that must be Old Cairo, or maybe Islamic Cairo. It stretches for miles left and right, and in the distance to the sun-baked cliffs that demarcate the City by towering impassably over it. In front of me what might have been houses are now just four walls contiguous with the next structures, rows and columns in every direction. The sand is parched, the plants desiccated. In the distance the dwellings rise several floors off the ground and the undulating corpus of the eastern city is punctures in places by the triumphant spires and domes of mosques, each topped with a skyward crescent moon. I bake in the sun and slurp down my sixth liter of water for the day. Standing on the bridge over the ring road, I turn left and see posh hotels; right, the accumulated dwelling places of the last millennia. Awed, I descend to the street and catch a cab back to my hostel.

The Days Are Just Packed in Cairo

2009-07-03T13:43:00.002-04:00

July 2, continued:

First thing out the door I meet Mustafa, an unhesitatingly outgoing 22-year-old Bedouin who is in Cairo during his final summer off from University. Sometime in the coming weeks, he tells me later, he will marry. Or rather, commit to marry: his father is rich, and so up to $8,000 will be spent on dowry, paraphernalia and ceremony, and between these purchases and the arrangements that must be made by the two fathers, it will be November before the ceremony.

Of course, all of this may be moot. Mustafa takes me back to his shop and, over shisha and tea, tells me in increments of his forbidden British love. He and she fell for each other last year. She invited him to be with her in Britain, but he worried what might happen if things turned sour: "She might throw me out! And then what would I have?" It might not have worked out anyway: Mustafa is deeply Bedouin -- their wives must convert to Islam if they do not already practice it and live with the husband in the family house.

In fact, wives take over responsibility for the family from the aging matriarch. In fact, this is why Mustafa must marry: Western-style bachelorhood or marrying abroad would deprive Mustafa's family of a matriarch (or, depending on how you look at it, of a hand-and-foot servant for the retiring generation). Most of his peers married at seventeen. He is years late to the party -- or, as he unhappily refers to the institution, crossing his wrists dramatically, to "jail".

And no wonder he thinks so: His Bedouin would-be, meticulously vetted in both person and family by Mustafa's father, cannot hold a candle to the knots in his stomach whenever he contemplates the "Together Forever" teddy bear that hangs conspicuously in his perfume shop. Mustafa wants to please his family and his God, but he plainly cannot get excited about wedlock while his sweetheart lies over the ocean. If she hadn't cut off ties when he demanded conversion and relocation, closure might be more attainable. For now, he prepares to walk the plank.

(Side note: As I write this, sweltering in the hostel's stagnant air, the young man behind the front desk is checking his friends' Facebook walls).

To end the incident at the beginning, Mustafa's shop is a model of efficiency. It's located about 3 minutes' walk off Talaat Harb square in Cairo's downtown, a very high-commerce area. A couple of twists and turns through alleyways and you arrive at his shop window which contains rowns on rows of delicately handmade bottles plus, oddly, one mass-produced Western-style cologne called "FAHRENHEIT". Some of the bottles, wrought in gossamer glass, are shaped like peacocks or fantastic animals. To the side is the entryway.

The shop itself is unexpectedly warm and welcoming given its size. Plush red benches run round the edges, and the mirrored walls hold almost as many simple, sturdy bottles of his various wares as they do pictures of his family. Prominently displayed in the center is his heart-wrenching but, to the uninitiated, saccharine teddy bear. The whole shop is just one five by four room.

The wares themselves are supplied by Mustafa's father, who has been making alcohol-less perfume from his own flowers for decades. Mustafa presses samples on me -- quite literally! -- shaking bottle after bottle, removing the flass stoppers and rubbing the collected perfume on my arm. "See?" he asks, pointing to the Arabic label. "Rose. Wehrrd. Wuh -- rrrr -- duh." He sounds it out for me. Roll the "rrr" and you've got your first Arabic word.

(Now two of the hostel staff prepare for evening prayers, aligning their mats with the patterns in the linoleum, which must bast been laid out just so exactly for this purpose. It is 7:20 PM. With gentle synchrony and only one speaker, the three staff stand, kneel, bow, rise and breathe to the slow rhythm of a murmured "Allah-u Akhbar!" Serenity rules the moment. What must it be like to know that you will have the opportunity five times each day to share the most personal and important aspect of your life with anyone you choose? It must lower the stakes on other social enterprises. It must be easy to reckon someone a friend, or at least an equal. Could anyone of your faith ever truly be a stranger?)

The most interesting part of the visit is Mustafa's fuestbook. It must be forty pages long and is full of effusive messages from the sundry tourists that Mustafa has evidently been accosting in Talaat Harb Square for years. He claims he does it to make friends, not to sell his wares, and at least at first glance the evidence supports this assertion. Handwritten testimonial after handwritten testimonial praises his hospitality, his kindness, and, most endearingly, his family -- Mustafa apparently invites nearly everyone to meet his father, two sisters and three brothers, to stay in their guest house, to eat their food. "If you meet 100% of the people in Cairo," he says, "only 2% would want to be friend. The rest are selling. This is why I hate Cairo. I am 2%!"

His words would ring truer if his family didn't arrange all-day cab rides for travelers to Egypt's historic sites or if he weren't so intent on demonstrating the virtues of his wares. Nonetheless I am taken in, writing my own soaring note in his guestbook, permitting him to write in mine (see previous page of journal), and, most tellingly, shelling out for his opium-derived (perhaps he means poppy?) perfume and an admittedly lovely bottle in which to display it. He plays the host impeccably and my guilty American conscience demand these things. I shall have to reflect on this later, especially in light of an admonition I received several days ago that my empathy would make me vulnerable to shysters. The worst thing that happens in this particular instance is that I part with some money, and in fact I have a good time swapping stories and life advice while drinking tea and shisha with my new Bedouin friend. It's possible that this routine isn't designed with a sale or two in mind. But perhaps it is. Food for thought.

I spend the rest of the day walking around Cairo's downtown. The Nile is five minutes from my hostel, and it gleams beneath the setting sun. Huge casino-boats and individual chartered boats ply its waters while children throw fishing lines into its shallower edges. Lovers perch on the rails, posts and benches that line its shores, the young men in the tight-fitting t-shirts and jeans --sometime even the greased hair -- I associate with '80s-era TV, the young women in dresses or long skirts or even jeans, but always with their hair colorfully wrapped. Cars pass by at meteoric speeds when they are not caught in traffic. The bridges across the Nile, from which one can see for miles, are packed with cars; on their footpaths, workaday Cairenes sweat and trudge their respective ways home. Wherever one looks there are crumbling buildings with faded facades nestled up against the glittering glass faces of the newer, more vitally commercial buildings. The roofs of the oldest structures are crowded with satellite dishes producing the effect of plastic-and-metal rooftop gardens, of modernity taking root in antiquity.

In the streets, familiar models surface: the dung and trash and stray animals of the poorer quarters directly across the street from five-star hotels and international buildings; the commuter buses, the streetlights and crowds and on-ramps of any self-respecting metropolis. There are many new facets, though. The air is dusty rather than merely polluted, the heat bone-dry. Many people carry buckets of water in the poorer areas of town. Markets occupy entire streets, with just enough room left in between the rows of clothes and melons to permit the occasional dedicated car to squeeze by. In the back alleyways of the markets, older women sit desultorily next to their produce while boys play pool on a transplanted table across the street. Everywhere the sun beats down.

I make it back to the hostel and head out for dinner with S., E. (both Frenchmen traveling together), D. (Australian) and R. (Brazilian). All are on personal odysseys of five months or more. D. began his trip in Australia and has seen the Philippines, India, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and now Egypt, along with places in between. He will head to Europe before he returns home. When I ask the group what spurred them to take their trips, he is the first to answer: "What, have you never worked in an office?" We all laugh, satisfied. I think of Alex.

S. and E. are headed back to France from India, all overland. They tell wonderful stories of finding, upon finishing many of their meals in Pakistan, that a stranger had paid their bill. They attribute this kindness to strangers to the teachings of the Qur'an.

This is R.'s first stop on a trip that will span what seems like every country in Europe after a brief tour through the Middle East. Though Brazilian, he doesn't care for football; this apparently gets him in hot water with his mother, and my wry inner monologue suggests that self-preservation might be the reason for his travels.

After dinner I mistake D.'s rice pudding for a gratis table treat and eat half of it. I'll get ribbed about this for awhile. But it *was* delicious.

Back to the hotel. I fall instantly asleep.

Alone With the Nile

2009-07-02T10:01:00.001-04:00

I wake as we begin the Cairo descent. At first I am confused by the way the land outside disappears into whiteness -- it takes me a second to recognize the bleached, stretching sands. Tiny adamant roads wend through the desert, vast and bright and imperturbable. I've never been awestruck by a landing before.

Shortly thereafter pits appear in the desert, then a clone army of sand-colored buildings, then the city itself, all dancing around the Nile. There must be some sort of ordinance or tradition that governs construction -- literally everything blends in with the desert.

We land. The air is warm and wet, almost perfumed. The sky is clear for a quarter mile or so before it disappears into the same smog I became used to in Addis. According to Lonely Planet, Cairo is in the running for world's most polluted city.

Visa is $15, dispensed cheerfully and without question at a bank branch before customs -- it is nothing more nor less than a tariff on travel. No pretense about regulation here.

Customs is quick. "Sorry, I grew a beard," I joke as he opens my passport. "It's that hair you should be worried about," he counters, then "All done! See? Very quick!"

At the baggage claim, my backpack is a no-show. I wait, in case it's just delayed like they say it might be. If only.

But wait! My faith is rewarded! Bag arrives separately. I flee happily for a cab -- no stand, but a two-fingered man asks, "Taxi?" and I nod. He quotes me $20 US for the trip to my hotel. I laugh, and so does he. But his boss corroborates, and I, feeling my inexperience, acquiesce.

I get a quick second to breathe on the way out of the airport as the driver stops to offer a sip of his bottled water to one of the guards. Then he slaps his gearshift and all hell breaks loose.

Taxi driving in Cairo turns out to be a blood sport. New York City cabbies look like rubes in comparison. Streets are packed to the brim with cars, few of which obey any traffic laws. Lane markers resemble international law: inconsistently delineated and optional even when clear. My driver clucks disapprovingly when I move to don my seatbelt, indicating that I should just spread out and enjoy the ride. I bet it has more to do with the shape the seatbelt is in: when he drapes his own across himself moments later, it lacks a buckle. Its only possible purpose is to forestall police attention -- does Egypt have seatbelt laws?

After a particularly knotted intersection, he grins and makes fish-through water hand motions to indicate that I should be impressed. I am: if we didn't leave any paint behind, it wasn't for lack of opportunity. I clap approvingly, and we share a laugh.

Lonely Planet suggests that any driver is more likely to take me to a hotel run by a friend of his than to the one I requested. This is exactly what happens. I pay him anyway, going so far as to add what must be perceived as a $1 Foolish American bonus, then get directions to my hostel and walk the necessary blocks, backpack in hand.

Along the way I stop for water. "Two pounds", says the man in the street stand. I give him a 100 and he hands me what turns out, after two countings, to be ten pounds less than the requisite c hange. I point this out. He touches his head to indicate that he must be losing his mind and hands me the additional 10.

Finally, I reach the hostel just fine and, after some wrangling, secure one of five beds in a shared room -- $8 US a night, breakfast included. It is noon, my first roommate offers an "I don't speak English but you seem okay" smile, and I am ready for Cairo!

(largely unedited from scribbled journal)

A Happy Birthday to the Public Servant

2009-02-06T10:06:00.000-05:00

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."
Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot / Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
Dr. Seuss (The Lorax) (1904 – 1991)

"Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere."
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864 - 1912)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 – 1969)

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919)

Boredom: Is It Catching?

2009-02-05T19:57:00.004-05:00

I left an open prompt on gchat today: "Informal poll: When was the last time you were bored?". Sarah responded, and away we went:

Sarah: saturday. but on purpose.

me: heh. tell me more.

Sarah: stressful week, wanted to feel bored. so i did everything i had to do for a while, and then i sat around for a while and felt bored.
when was the last time you felt bored?

me: Hm. Well, here's the backstory:
Someone was complaining to me yesterday about people who got bored.

Sarah: uh huh

me: "What, you can't read a book? Watch a movie! Fucking do push-ups! Who gets bored!"
...
and I realized I can't really remember the last time that happened
to me, anyway
I mean, maybe 20-hour plane flights

Sarah: i can't remember the last time it happened and i didn't do something about it
hahaha TRUE
if i get bored i go do something else, usually

me: Right. I mean, I've never been exposed to boredom long enough that it ground at me
Right.

Sarah: fair

me: (Maybe I have been, but it's been a long while)
You think that's universal?

Sarah: (amen... 5th grade the last time i can really remember)
that cool people don't get bored
and icky people do?

me: I mean, do people just claim boredom to get a sweetheart to come over for a hookup session?

Sarah: haha well here's what im thinking
maybe there's two states of boredom
paralytic boredom and ... proactive boredom

me: I think probably the first ten minutes of the one lead, when unchecked, to the other
right? Or are some people prone to one but not the other?

Sarah: i think some people are prone to paralytic boredom

me: If you're a proactive bore (har har), can you fall into the other after years of neglecting your impulses?

Sarah: thinking of some of my students here
and never do anything to snap out of it

me: If you're the other way, can you be trained to be proactive?

Sarah: well i think people can change, so yes to both

me: (assuming, of course, that proactive's the way to be -- but I think that's an easy case to make)
woot!

Sarah: i think it's the only case to make
who wants to be a paralytic bore

me: truth. My bet is it's addictive, though
much like depression

Sarah: amen
i wonder if it's any different
maybe the boredom is a symptom of depression

me: Hmmm!
Or vice versa.

Sarah: who knows

___________________________

...do you, gentle reader? When was the last time you were bored? And what kind was it?

Security Isn't Free, Either

2008-07-20T13:59:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-07T14:30:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-05T22:41:00.002-04:00

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

2008-05-07T14:17:00.011-04:00

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

2008-05-06T11:00:00.005-04:00

Unimpressed With The Press

2008-04-25T19:30:00.012-04:00

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

2008-04-22T19:00:00.005-04:00

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

2008-04-22T09:16:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-21T22:11:00.008-04:00

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!

2008-04-21T19:00:00.005-04:00

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?

2008-04-15T16:07:00.000-04:00

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!