birthday narcissism

YES. It's true, I had a birthday. I ought to write a long reflective blog entry about what the this past 23^rd year of life has meant to me... But I think that instead I'll tell you what I think the next one will hold:

I'm going to stay in Botswana for another year.

Okay, so it's about 85% likely, but that's pretty good odds.

What do you think? Good idea/bad idea?

Birthday fact about Jenn: I can do seven chin-ups, overhand or underhand. I'm not sure if that impresses you, but it impresses me, and if you want to argue – it's my effing birthday. Or it was. Recently.

....

The past two weeks have been a frustrating marathon of funding proposal development, culminating in a meeting with the president and vice-chairperson of the board yesterday afternoon. It was strange to be schmoozing with rich, middle-aged white men again – it felt like being back at Princeton. A good ol' boy is a good ol' boy, apparently, wherever you happen to find him.

I found their attire amusing – it always strikes me as funny that Americans (and other foreigners) coming to Botswana for the sole purpose of meetings still wear head-to-toe safari gear. They roll up in hiking boots, $200 North Face ultra-breathable shirts with multiple mesh slits for extra airflow, and pants with more pockets than even the Crocodile Hunter would know what to do with. Fancy, functional hats, even though they're under some kind of roof the entire time that they're in-country. They arrive at the airport, drive in an air-conditioned car to an office, sit down under the ceiling fan and have a meeting... and then they get back in the car and drive to the next office. BUT BEWARE, THIS IS AFRICA!!! There could be breakdowns, elephants, tribal uprisings, land mines, vicious dust-storms, bush fires, rabid spring hares... ANYTHING. Best be prepared. Get out your GPS-equipped cell phone. Strap on that Leatherman. Never mind that you've only ever used it to open a bottle of wine.

(Note: I myself am guilty of this sort of over-preparation, though not to such an extent. Whenever I was hiking in India, with my boots and hat on, I would be totally shamed by the women in saris and plastic flip-flops, massive loads balanced on their heads, charging uphill at twice my pace. I blame it on the altitude. And hey, a giant bundle of firewood is just like... a really fashion-forward hat?... right??)

Anyhow, I was hoping that this funding proposal would be the one to deliver me a salary for next year, but it seems unlikely. Although they were positive about some of our other projects, they nixed the game farm project, due to the involvement of hunting. Hunting is not – gasp – PC enough for their donors. The complaint seems obvious in retrospect, considering that they're an American organization, but after six months here I've forgotten what “PC” means. I've also lost some of my schmoozing skills, not that they were too considerable to begin with. I'm bushing out, man. Hopefully these skills can be quickly re-learned, because I'm going to need them to deal with future donors... They noticed the Obama sticker on my laptop, and with a burst of panic I realized I should start thinking like an American again. “Wait – laptop covered in stickers – unprofessional!” “Oh shit – they'll actually have an opinion on my political leanings!” “Must not sit in lotus position during meeting!”

If this is the state of my etiquette after 6 months, what will I be like after 2 years? I don't know if I'll be able to re-enter politically correct society... But I hate being politically correct, anyhow. Africa is not a place for the politically correct, if you really want to get into things. If you just want to skim the surface, throw food and used clothing at some poor orphans, I guess you can be politically correct... Otherwise, abandon all hope. Also, Africans themselves are not politically correct - nor are they concerned about being politically correct - and so, if you are concerned about being surrounded by political correctness, this is not the place to be.

On the other hand, I fed a small child today. That's PC money in the bank, right?

dikitsana

ATTAAAAAAAAAACK!

The Capacity to Learn?

I've been reading Jared Diamond's “The Third Chimpanzee.” Human evolution is one of my favourite subjects – both the evolution of homo sapiens itself, and the subsequent cultural evolution that has shaped human life. (Debates about cultural evolution to follow?) One of the things that leaped out at me when reading “The Third Chimpanzee” was Diamond's statement that one of the primary defining characteristics of the human is innovation. Though chimpanzees use basic stick tools, and teach that skill to their children, it does not occur to them to improve on the stick.

Perhaps they're not able to, you say – perhaps the dexterity isn't there? An example even closer to humans, then. The Neaderthals used very basic stone tools, but over the 100,000 or so years of their existence, they never improved upon them. Stone tools have been found at Neanderthal sites of 100,000 years ago, and the exact same stone tools have been discovered at Neanderthal sites from 40,000 years ago. The human ability to innovate appears as unique as it is instinctive – doesn't it seem normal, natural to you (dear reader), that we should improve on what we have already? The basic genetic makeup of the human being has not changed in the past 40,000 years or so, but the way we live has changed almost beyond belief. There is no other animal for which this is true.

Another thing we humans do is learn. And how much we have to learn! From the very beginning of the species, even before we had things like alphabets and times tables to memorize, children had to acquire a mind-boggling amount of naturalistic knowledge – which plants to eat, which not to eat, and which were useful for medicine, construction, and craft work. Beyond that identification, they had to know when to harvest them, how to harvest them, and how to use them. When you go out and walk around the woods, how many plants can you identify, let alone list the life history, harvesting season, and preparation for? Then there is the knowledge of animals - how to identify the tracks of an animal, and how to tell by those tracks how old the animal is, what sex it is, how long ago it passed that way, and if it was healthy. (If you walk with an experienced Bushman tracker, they can tell you all that and more from a few tracks.) The children must also know the habits, behaviour, and life history of that animal, and how to hunt it or avoid it.

It's automatic, I think, to assume that the humans of 10,000 years ago would be confounded by the complicated modern world we live in now – but when a baby is born today, its potential is exactly the same as it was from the moment that homo sapiens evolved. “If we could carry ourselves back forty thousand years in a time machine,” writes Diamond, “I suspect that we would find Cro-Magnons to be equally modern people, capable of learning to fly a jet plane.” Just think about that for a moment. Also important - I'm sure that they would want to. Curiosity is ingrown; human beings want to learn. They want to know more.

There's a scene in the book Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, that illustrates a similar point – the protagonist, an Australian man, is sitting at the edge of a slum in Bombay with one of his friends, who is a lifelong resident of the slum. They are looking out to sea. “Did you know,” the friend says, “that the chemical balance of the primeval sea, when life first emerged, was almost exactly the same as that of the womb?”* The Australian is surprised. He is amazed that this slum-dweller, who has spent his whole life in a mud-and-plastic-bag hovel on the edge of Bombay, knows about the chemical composition of the primeval sea. Then he kicks himself. We may each of us have different opportunities to learn, but we all have the same potential, the same curiosity.

I kick myself for that kind of prejudice all the time. I've met Xgaiga, a San elder, several times – he's always seemed cheerful but lethargic, and without much to say. But walking through the bush with him during the last plant workshop, he was a different man. Sit him down in a busy office in the city and he'd be utterly ignored – ask him to recite his 7-times-table or write an essay and he's lost - but walking through the bush, he is charismatic, confident, knowledgeable. He darted from plant to plant, rattling off an encyclopaedia's worth of information about each specimen. Suddenly he stopped, scrutinizing some vague marks in the sand. “Small snake. Going west, about 8 this morning.” His audience nodded sagely in agreement.

Similar to the Shantaram moment, I'm always – unfairly – surprised when a co-worker reveals some kind of obscure knowledge. In fact, all it reveals is my own handicaps: How does one GET knowledge, I find myself wondering, without 16,000 miles of library shelves? Or a reliable high-speed internet connection, at the very least? Even the Discovery Channel!?! Where else can you learn stuff, anyway?? Information is so easy-access these days that I tend to forget what a real thirst for knowledge is like – when you want to know, and you can't just look it up. When you have to value, and remember, each new piece of knowledge you get - because there's no Google, no Wikipedia, not even a card catalogue. All knowledge is valuable, and you must hang onto it inside your own head. Nowadays we are drowning in information, and as with anything that comes in excess, we forget its value... I rarely remember things, I just remember how to look them up. Sometimes this seems wonderful; sometimes, terribly sad.

More on retention and transmission of knowledge, and the role of elders, and why the human race even HAS elders.... later.

* I don't have the book here and can't find the quote online, so it's just more-or-less what that passage was about. Sorry.

Info about Neanderthal tools taken from "The Third Chimpanzee." Thanks Jared Diamond, you rule.

katsi

The kittens are alive. So is the garden. Sorry for the absence.... Working madly on funding proposal that is due much sooner than we initially thought it was.

sidebar

Added a new bit on the sidebar, below "links". Just a catchall for things I find interesting but don't rate a blog entry. I also updated the list of other people's blogs.

Food Security: a short thought

gemsbok cucumber

The grand purpose of last week's workshop was: "To create a learning network that empowers communities to conserve, sustainably use, and benefit from their plant resources." We spoke frequently about "food security," which is a major issue for most of the people in Africa. Generally people try to achieve food security through agriculture. Indeed, most of the food security initiatives being pursued by groups at the workshop were based around small-scale agriculture (gardens), since their areas are too dry for larger-scale agriculture.


I find this all extremely ironic, because agriculture has in fact been the source - more or less - of food insecurity. Agriculture led to huge booms in population, resulting in the dire state of the earth today; and modern agriculture, with its excessive use of fertilizer, leaching of the soil's nutrients through perpetual aggressively-grown monocultures, and increasing emphasis on biofuel and animal fodder crops, has led to enormous food insecurity. From the very beginning, agriculture led people to dangerous dependencies on a few crops. (Exhibit A, the Irish Potato Famine!) Basically, food security requires a diversified portfolio.... Precisely the kind of food portfolio that traditional hunter-gatherers had. Living off of wild plants, you need to consume a huge variety to survive. Certainly there were a few staple foods - mongongo nuts, for example - but the enormous range of plants known and eaten by the Bushmen made sure they never went hungry if conditions were bad for certain species. No potato famine for them.


I don't mean to suggest that we should all go back to hunting and gathering, nor do I mean to suggest that all agriculture is bad. (Rotate your crops! Fertilize responsibly! Don't plant monocultures! Don't mow down the Amazon rainforest to PLANT SOYBEANS, you idiots! Apparently that's the leading cause of Amazonian deforestation at the moment...) There's room, however, for some bitter laughter. The Bushmen had, in a certain sense, greater food security than most agricultural societies throughout the ages. Now that the means to their traditional food systems are gone, they're encouraged to replace it with agriculture, something supposedly better but in fact much worse - especially because, in this case, it depends on pumping a limited supply of water out of the ground. SWEET. Like I said, nobody's going back to full-on hunting and gathering.... But pause, and take agriculture off the pedestal.

bovines by moonlight

traditional dancers, not bovines

The workshop is finished. I stumbled back into my house last night, fell asleep at 8pm without having supper and slept soundly till 7 the next morning. This may have had something to do with a last-ditch effort at painting Ghanzi red on Saturday night – after the traditional dance (picture above, but for best photos, please see facebook in the next few weeks), a few workshop participants rallied for a trip into town.

Unfortunately, by the time we got organized and on the road it was past 11pm, and by the time we got to Ghanzi, everything was closed. Typical. Undeterred, we drove down the road a bit, parked, and in the time-honoured tradition of pick-up truck owners everywhere, flipped down the tailgate and cracked open some beverages. About an hour later, we decided that we needed some entertainment, and the subject of cow tipping came up. The moon was more than half full and the night was clear, so we could easily follow the farm roads in pursuit of our hapless prey: the cow.

COWS AT NIGHT:

First you discern only the vague, lumpy shapes. They are shadows, grey and black and silver, muddled abstract forms bulked on the side of the road. Then you hear the soft snuffling and breathing, the occasional shift of hooves, the flick of ears and tails beating against their hides. There's a smell, a warm odour of digested grass, trampled dung, and coarse hair. They are large, and for a crazy moment you doubt that they're cows at all; for a split second you think oh shit, it's buffalo, we're going to fucking die. The strangeness of domestication hits you – these are animals, huge and heavy and powerful, with vulnerable young resting at their feet, and yet you can safely approach them. You can walk right up as if to shake hands, reach out towards their flicking velvet ears, make sudden noises and move towards the little ones, and basically do whatever you want. They're not going to surge up and stampede, or kick the hell out of your ribs to protect their babies, or spear you on their horns, or bite a chunk out of your leg... Did you know that an ostrich has a powerful enough kick to kill a person? A cow could beat the crap out of you if it wanted to. I mean, witness bull-riders or matadors. You don't even need to be gored, you just need to be trampled. Not even trampled, just walked on a little bit, by accident. They are huge. Imagine trying to punch a cow. Would it even notice?

Despite all of that, there we were: three suspicious human creatures in the middle of the night, making our mildly-inebriated moonlit approach. The cows didn't care. An air of exasperated submission – what do you want now? - and a shuffling of hooves, but nothing more. Domestication! What a strange and powerful thing. Despite being domesticated, however, the cows were most definitely awake, so we decided to abandon the cow-tipping idea. (I have still never tipped a cow. It's on my high-priority to-do list.)

I think I'm going to leave this at "cows" for now, and write more about the workshop later.

Transit and Returning

NOTE: Lest this uncharacteristically swift blog-updating throw you off track, there's actually a post on religion that I made yesterday. Not sure if you care, but if you do, don't miss it!



After a meeting and then a sociable weekend in Maun, I'm headed away from D'Kar again today – this time to Dqae Qare, to take part in a week-long workshop on traditional plants. It's only 10km to the turn-off and then a further 15km or so down the sand road to the lodge, but even short trips around Ghanzi District can be an adventure... There were two car accidents this week involving KFO vehicles, which makes me very nervous, though no-one was seriously injured. Heavy rainfall + sand and/or gravel roads = major mathata (problem).


The tar road is usually okay, though it can be less than perfect if you're riding in the back of a pickup truck, as I was yesterday when I hitched back from Maun. After waiting for the bus, which (typically) didn't come, I packed into the bus to Sehitwa and then waited for a lift with the rest of the people going to Ghanzi. We were lucky enough to get picked up right away, by a friendly Motswana driving an empty pick-up – unfortunately, the back wasn't covered, and we hit two torrential rainstorms on our way.


I saw the first storm looming in front of us, but as we entered the shadow of the thunderheads, I felt it; the temperature dropped dramatically, the road began to steam behind the truck and the air thickened with rain. Gabbling an explanation about why my bag NEEDED to be in the front, I shoved the bag containing my laptop, camera, and ipod (i.e. all of my worldly possessions...) into the cab and then curled into a little ball with my hood pulled firmly over my face. The guy to my left did the same, but the guy to my right sat stoically with his head up, facing rear, occasionally sluicing the water off of his face with the back of his hand. The three women sitting against the cab flattened themselves against it to avoid the brunt of the downpour, and the 70-ish chain-smoking Swedish tourist abandoned his cigarette, abandoned any hope of curling up over his rather prominent belly, and, grinning, faced the rain. The driver, two women, and two babies in the cab were probably laughing at us – but we were all laughing when we exited the first rainstorm, dripping and feeling the thunder shake the car.


When I got out at D'Kar (10 points to Jenn, for being the white girl that got out at the village instead of the town!), my electronics were serving as what must have been a rather uncomfortable pillow for a sleeping baby. I negotiated a fare with the driver, and started down the road towards what is surprisingly starting to feel like home. It's not the same when you drive into D'Kar – there's the extra two kilometres of insulation from the village, 5 more minutes to listen to the radio and chat before you're unloaded right at the gate of the office compound. When you get off at the bus stop and shoulder your pack, facing a road that seems to head straight into the bush, it's different. The village is its own self-contained universe; as soon as I step off the Maun-Ghanzi road and into the boundaries of D'Kar, I'm part of it again. It's like an organism, or a very large open-layout house. Everything in its place. Everything familiar. I know the donkeys, the children, the yellow flowers. The crumbling mud huts and weed-infested, haphazard patches of maize.


I wonder how small a place must be before you get that feeling about it. Perhaps it's the isolation that tips it over the edge – the unity and the boundaries are obvious. There are no suburbs in D'Kar, there are no distinctive neighbourhoods. Unlike most villages in India, it doesn't bleed into nearby settlements – once you're there, you're there. Nowhere else to go, except across fences and into cattle farms. I like returning to D'Kar, and I like the sense of absolute control over my surroundings, the relatively few elements that I have to think about. Garden. Office. Books. Friends. I'm starting to find it peaceful and comforting, rather than terribly frustrating. Either the cabin fever has faded, or I've gone completely mad. (Dare I mention that I'm considering staying a second year?)

Religion, Missionaries, Answers?

Continuing with the discussion of aid work and its efficacy – what about missionary work and aid from Christian organizations? A couple of interesting articles:
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God (thanks Cath!) - From an avowed non-believer, the positive effect he sees Christianity having on African communities, and his theory that having an organized spiritual centre does more for the attitude and motivation of the people than anything else he's seen – regardless of whether the author believes in Christianity, he believes it is having a huge positive effect on people.

Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love. I think the comments page for this has moved elsewhere, but the argument it generated among readers was fascinating! How dare Nick Kristof, a liberal columnist for the NYT, how DARE he post a column that said religion wasn't all bad? Kristof, who has travelled to every corner of the globe, gives a moving description of the Christian aid workers he's seen, persisting in areas so remote and hopeless that nobody else would stay.

Can faith drive people to stay when secular NGO workers back out? Can it turn around the attitudes of a community when no amount of well-meant training on the value of education and how-to-start-a-small-business can accomplish a similar change? In countries where the conflicts of colonialism, tribalism, traditional culture vs. modern world are clashing and leaving people in a morass of confusion about who they are, can religion provide a necessary grounding to help people move forward? I ask these questions without any sense of the answers; I'm an atheist, but I'm certainly willing to see the benefits of religion. (I'm going to leave out, for this discussion, the question of whether bringing Christ into your life will benefit your immortal soul.)

I think it's true that most secular aid work does very little to improve the morale of the communities and countries they work in; it fosters a culture of dependence that leaves both governments and people less motivated and less confident in their own abilities, and often a sense of victim's entitlement – as if each new infusion of aid is an admission of colonial guilt, and the recipients are somehow owed this never-ending stream of free money. In that sense, I think perhaps missionary work can provide a greater sense of empowerment; it doesn't foster the victim mentality, and you can get your own personal connection to god, which I suppose is empowering. On the other hand, it can be incredibly patronizing, discount the validity of local traditions and religions, and spend time and effort trying to accomplish religious conversion instead of something more practical. Depends on your outlook, I suppose. And to some extent, depends on the missionaries and/or aid workers in question. D'Kar has experienced the best and worst of missionary work – from corrupt priests using their influence to have sex with underaged girls, to 100% unselfish involvement and service for the community that truly does not come with any strings attached.

I've also witnessed, in D'Kar, some of what the first article was talking about – I'm a skeptic, but I can't argue with the facts: practically all of the community leaders in D'Kar are devout Christians, and they're good community leaders. I think that, in large part, this can be attributed to the fact that there's a strong anti-drinking element in all of the missionary work in D'Kar... Alcohol tears this community apart and keeps it down, and it's only individuals from the Christian community that abstain (there are, of course, Christians that drink as well). The difference it makes in their lives is remarkable. Not to say that there aren't some equally wonderful and effective individuals that do drink, but they are few. Whatever it is about converting to Christianity that does it, the Christians have managed to beat the bottle. I also think that missionaries are often more personally encouraging to communities – I think that there are many more missionaries than secular NGO workers that truly care about their community on a personal level, get to know people, get involved, spend a lot of time in the same community, and generally convince people that they care. I think that matters. Of course there are secular NGO workers that do just the same, but missionary work by its very nature is more personal. That kind of compassionate, long-term involvement and leadership can do a lot for a community, I think. It can help convince them that aid workers don't see them as hopeless victims, but as people with potential that are worth investing in.

As overall development agencies, I tend to think that missionary work and religious aid are not doing that well – nor is that their aim. As disaster relief, they're great. As remote medical workers, great. Distribution of donated goods, great – though donated goods come with a lot of problems. Development, education, income generation, getting communities to stand on their own two feet? Not so much (again, not their primary goal). Despite the good work I've seen it accomplish in D'Kar, I don't think that Christian morality is the final recipe for stable African communities – I think perhaps it's a sign that having been thrust into this maelstrom of Modern Africa, people need something they can believe in. Something larger than themselves. I'd venture to say that that something ought to be their country, their people, perhaps their continent or region - but they've been denied that, due to the utter failure of most African leadership. Is religion a good replacement for now? Maybe. As I said, I can't argue with what I've seen in D'Kar.