all things hold

study abroad

2012-01-17T22:27:00.007-06:00

After yet another lunch with my co-workers started out with me exclaiming "I can't believe that in Arizona someone can get away with doing X!", one long-suffering office buddy noted that my time in Arizona is like a study abroad trip. In a few weeks I get to return to the coastal comfort of living in a generally politically progressive place and tell stories about the wild things folks do out in Arizona. Among the things that have been shocking me lately:

On Martin Luther King Day (yesterday), the Tucson school district banned a number of books dealing with themes of race, ethnicity and oppression, including works by several local authors, Paolo Freire, and The Tempest (I never knew Shakespeare did colonial critique, but I'm certainly curious now!)
This morning I went to a state senate committee hearing that advanced a bill to make participation in the National School Lunch Program (federally-funded free and reduced price meals for low-income kids) non-mandatory for public schools in Arizona... how can you turn down free federal money to feed poor children?
And then there are all the guns, and the fact that an establishment that doesn't want you to carry a weapon inside must clearly state that at the entrance (like this sign my roommate took a picture of outside of a Starbucks):

But mixed in with those "can you believe it?" stories will also be a lot of stories of folks being faithful here. Collecting signatures. Holding vigils outside the offices of officials who create these and many other policies. Hauling brass bands out into the desert to play for immigrants detained in the middle of nowhere. Coaxing real food out of desert soil with minimal water. Providing free healthcare for those being denied it. Leaving food and water in the desert for those who get lost or stranded crossing the border. Turning vacant lots into sunflower fields.

books of 2011

2012-01-09T22:18:00.002-06:00

I have a bit of a memory problem where books are concerned. Two weeks after reading a novel, I'm lucky if I can remember the name of more than one major character. A month or two later, and I couldn't tell you a thing about the plot. A year out, and I'm lucky if I can even recall whether I liked it or not.

A couple months after I read Toni Morrison's Beloved towards the end of 2010, Mark, wanting to test my literary amnesia, asked me the name of the grandmother (a central character). I couldn't remember it. A few days later I received a triumphal text with the words "Baby Suggs" (the grandmother's name, of course). Only problem is, he had read the book ten years before.

While I couldn't make myself magically start retaining the details of what I read, I decided that keeping a list of the books I read was a place to start. Reviewing that list at the end of 2011, I also found it to be a good way of marking a year past.

Breathing Space reminds me of how Heidi Neumark's words opened up space for me to cry with the weight of the stories people told me as I prepared their taxes. The Time Travelers Wife, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian all came from a Brooklyn roommate, when lots of time on the subway meant I could go through a novel a week. The New Jim Crow was from a sermon recommendation at my NY church home, and changed the way I understand justice and law enforcement in the US. Young adult fiction in Spanish is for the anxious summer of wondering what moving to Arizona would be like and if I would, in fact, be capable of doing the job I was assigned. And there is more serious stuff too, Dreams in a Time of War, Strength in What Remains and Half a Yellow Sun, all accounts of war in Africa, were difficult to return to in the evenings after days of conversation about poverty, race and class.

Here's the list (just don't ask me too much about the books!):

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Breathing Space by Heidi Neumark
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiongo
A Shorty History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
En Busca de Milagros by Julia Alvarez (translated)
Harry Potter y la Piedra Filosofal by JK Rowling (translated)
Sweet Charity by Janet Poppendieck
All You Can Eat: How hungry is America? by Joel Berg
The Ground Beneath her Feet by Salman Rushdie
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngoiz Adichie
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Vergese
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

growing vegan

2012-01-04T00:04:00.003-06:00

In the last days of 2011 I did some journaling in response to the same set of reflection questions I answered at the end of 2010. Best books I'd read, what were my greatest challenges at work, who had been important in my life - no problem. But I got stumped halfway through: How had I grown physically in the past year?

I didn't run any races, take any classes, or reach any yoga goals in 2011. To be honest, I hardly did any exercise at all. But as I thought about it I realized I did start making one significant change - I began cutting animal products out of most of the meals I cook at home. I don't see myself ever going all the way, but am enjoying my new mostly-vegan-at-home routine. In my half of the fridge right now I have some eggs (for the occasional quick source of protein), a stick of butter that's been there for quite some time, a hunk of good Parmesan cheese that I use once or twice a month, and mayonnaise left over from a recipe I made back in September. I'm using more avocados, almond milk, dried beans and coconut milk, and none of the cow's milk, yogurt and cotija cheese that were my fridge staples seven or eight months ago. I still eat as I used to when not cooking for myself (dairy, eggs and sometimes fish), but the joys of a fellowship stipend don't allow too much of that.

Mark Bittman has some simple vegan recipe suggestions this week, and I made one of them tonight: Sweet Potato Stew (to which I added garbanzo beans).

All brown and out of focus...delicious!

throwback

2011-10-20T00:17:00.004-05:00

It appears my new co-workers have me figured out. Today, after examining my lunch, one of them commented, "you're kind of a throwback...a back to the earth kind of person".

Contents of the lunch? A farmers market orange. Homemade tomato-basil soup. Homemade vegan coleslaw. Slice of homemade bread.

Yep, guilty.

I can (and have) said a lot about the economic, political, environmental, and spiritual reasons why I want to be as involved as possible in what I eat. But beneath all of that, there's what it does for me emotionally. In my considerable moving around in the last four years, I've noticed my first instinct after a move or a long trip is to cook. Something about stirring a pot of soup or kneading a loaf of bread helps gather all the pieces of me scattered in transition.

I'm finding I need that gathering now more than ever - new place, new job, new roommate, to be followed in about four months by another new place, new job, new roommate. Even the very space I live in is in transition - an extended-stay housing complex with constant turnover.

This past Sunday afternoon, I got to spend part of an afternoon manually prepping beds (read: scraping in the dirt with a hoe) on a local organic farm. As the farmer was showing me how to break up the soil, she described it as a form of meditation. By the end of my two hours, I had the beginnings of my old farming calluses, sore shoulders, one blister, and a deep sense of contentment and happiness that I've been missing in Phoenix.

I also had a very generous bag of free produce:

just in time

2011-08-15T22:54:00.003-05:00

Last Friday was a slow day at work, and under the pretext of getting ideas for updating my resume I started browsing LinkedIn profiles. There they were, peers and former classmates two or three years out of college, with stable jobs involving things like retirement benefits, dental and vision insurance, and vacation time and paying something more than just-enough-to-keep-you-out-of-official-poverty. There were published articles, graduate degrees, professional headshots and promising careers in big-name companies. I started sliding into the same nasty mess of envy and insecurity I used to get reading through my facebook feed and looking at pictures of other people's vacations, weddings, babies, home improvement projects etc.

What do I have to show two+ years post grad? Two (very soon to be three) one-year stipended positions. No new degrees. Nothing published. Not much.

And then, from a client I've written about before, I received the following email:

HI Sarah

It,s joe just dropping you a line to say hi thing,s going good still looking for a job and no luck still so bye for now .Drop me aline once in awhile to hear from you BYE BYE JOE

And I took it all back.

clean and dirty

2011-06-22T18:19:00.005-05:00

I think a lot about my food, where it comes from, and what the quality is like. So when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released their most recent "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean Fifteen" (a list of produce with the highest and lowest levels of pesticide residues, respectively), I scribbled it down in the little green notebook I carry everywhere, between the grocery lists and subway directions. Make sure to buy organic when getting apples, celery and strawberries. Conventional is okay for onions, sweet corn and pineapples. Got it.

Except it's not quite that simple. Because often the produce with the least chemical residues (and therefore the least risk to the consumer) is the most dangerous for the farmworkers doing the planting, tending, and harvesting. Tom Philpott, who writes about food and agriculture issues for Grist and Mother Jones, explains that demand from consumers for less pesticides left on fruits and veggies when they get to the store has pushed growers to rely increasingly on fumigants. Prior to planting, the beds are covered with plastic and pumped full of poisons that kill everything (good and bad) living in the soil. Because fumigants are volatile and highly reactive, they break down quickly and don't show up on produce. But they are also very dangerous for the farmworkers who handle them, and have been linked to central nervous system disorders, lung and kidney problems, and birth defects. After all, what do you expect from pesticides originally designed as chemical weapons?

So is buying organics the answer?

Yes and no. Yes, because organic farmers are prohibited from using non-natural pesticides and herbicides, so no one has to handle these chemicals, and the soil and surrounding environment are able to maintain healthy biodiversity. I had the pleasure of witnessing this even on our little five acres in Oxnard. And no, because organic certification has nothing to do with the actual levels of pesticides found on produce. At the farm I worked on last year, a single lane dirt track was the only "buffer zone" separating our organic field from the neighboring conventional one. The Santa Ana winds would regularly blow dust for miles across the Oxnard plain, carrying with it everything that had been applied to other fields. Buying organics is a start, but it doesn't do much for farmworkers, most of whom have very little choice about where to work. They may be washing organic celery in the morning and picking conventional strawberries in the afternoon.

In the end? It may not solve everything, but I always feel better when I can talk to the person who grew it.

what I'm learning

2011-06-21T20:26:00.007-05:00

This past year has made me conversant in a number of new subjects. Social welfare programs in the US. Things tourists do that annoy New Yorkers. Taxes. Taxes in Spanish. The subway system.

One thing I got an education in that I wasn't expecting: criminal justice in the US.

A year ago, I couldn't have told you with certainty which was more serious, a felony or a misdemeanor. I didn't know the difference between jail and prison. I'd never seen a stop-and-frisk. I wouldn't have believed that a person's right to vote could be taken away for life if they were convicted of a crime. I couldn't have distinguished parole from probation. I wouldn't have understood the signficance of "felony-friendly" employers.

I've learned all this on the job, from men who launch into a speeches trying to minimize their felonies as soon as they sit down to be screened for our services. From calling clients to follow up on their benefits applications only to be told that they are federal inmates and can't receive personal communication. From mothers, wives, grandmothers, aunts, girlfriends who can't include everyone in their household on their food stamps cases because felons and the families that take them in can be kicked out of public housing.

But I hadn't put the dots together until a sermon I heard a few months ago. The pastor used evidence from Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness to talk about the unjust laws, practices and attitudes that have brought us to the point where one in three black men in the US is under the control of the criminal justice system. Alexander argues that changes in the criminal justice system in the last thirty years, particularly the War on Drugs have created a caste system in the mold of slavery and Jim Crow. Black men are no more likely to break drug laws than their white counterparts, yet they are stopped, searched, charged, and convicted at exponentially higher rates and their sentences are usually much harsher.

She describes not only the criminal justice system, but also what happens to those released from prison with felonies. The can be denied housing, jobs, public benefits, and the right to vote (among other things). I'd estimate that more than half of my male clients check "yes" next to the question "Have you been convicted of a crime". This is fair game on any job application, and for many of them it makes finding employment nearly impossible. Indeed, some of the only "felony-friendly" employment options are also some of the most dangerous jobs available - work in construction, commercial driving (with a focus on transporting hazardous materials) and environmental clean-up (involving removal of toxic materials like asbestos). It's no coincidence that these careers are a focus for my organization. But all the job placement in the world doesn't touch the injustice of the system.

The pastor ended that sermon with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr, and with the spiritual "Let My People Go".

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt's land
Tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go!

Read the book if you can. If you can't, at least read the sermon.

hot

2011-06-07T17:06:00.007-05:00

I had the privilege of growing up in what I believe is the most ideal climate possible. Nairobi has average temperatures in the sixties and seventies. I wore flip-flops almost every day and had my window open year-round, allowing for breezes in the dry season and sound of heavy rain in the wet months. It never got too hot, cold or humid. I might need a jacket in July and August, but otherwise my wardrobe didn't vary throughout the year.

Seasons have been an adjustment. Four years in Chicago and one of the snowiest New York winters on record mean I think I've got winter figured out (although that doesn't mean I enjoy it). And now, in New York City without AC, I'm having to figure out how to do summer.

A few of the things I've learned to do in the last couple weeks:

1. Move outside. The sidewalks and stoops in my neighborhood are now host to domino games, family gatherings, and impromptu water fights made possible by open fire hydrants (I saw three on my walk home from work today and it was only 85 degrees). In one apartment building I noticed two older ladies with pillows permanently placed on their window sills so they have a soft spot for their elbows while they watch the street and try to catch the breeze. I've taken to hanging out on the roof of my building, which has the added bonus of a great view of the entire Manhattan skyline.

2. Eat cold stuff. My roommates and I are avoiding anything that adds any extra heat to the apartment, so that means the stove and oven. I've started looking for the coolest days of the week and doing all my cooking then, and even so I'm switching to lots of raw or mostly raw recipes.

Dinner of apples, celery, cucumber, broccoli and avocado with tahini lemon yogurt sauce.

Other recent creations include cucumber salad with peanuts and lime, raita, dilly potato salad, and I'm looking forward to experimenting with different types of gazpacho. I've also started making cold-brewed coffee in my french press. It's great because it makes a concentrate that I refrigerate and dilute in the mornings with cold water and ice for iced coffee.

3. Wear less. The first thing I do when I get home in the evening is change into a tank top and shorts. Unfortunately this doesn't qualify as business casual, and it's been tough figuring out clothes that are both cool enough to allow me to walk to work, and warm enough to keep me from freezing in my way over air-conditioned office. One of the things I love about thrift shopping for clothes is how finding things I like that fit me is like getting a little gift from the universe. I knew I needed a black skirt for work, and within 2 weeks I had 4 (although this did nothing to address the fact that 95% of my wardrobe is black, gray or brown).

4. Ventilate. I love my apartment. I love the big windows and all the light and space.

Why yes, that is a hammock swing.

However, only one pane of the beautiful old factory windows opens. And the size of the space means it would be too expensive to cool the whole place (if we had a functioning air conditioner). And we just so happen to be on the top (and therefore warmest) floor of the building.

I live at the top of that ladder, on the opposite side of the apartment from the windows. My room gets really stuffy. So I have a large fan to point at myself, and a small one in the little space between my wall and the ceiling that is sucking some of the hot air out of my room (I hope).

But do I feel ready for the first 90+ degree day tomorrow?

Not so much.

homemade

2011-05-31T19:35:00.005-05:00

Despite the moves and upheaval, what does it mean to live a home made life? Not in the briefest sense of the briefest pass of the term, but if you parse out "home" and "made", what does that really mean? How could that feed into a more peaceful and simple living?

A bowl of borscht, one of three soups made for a potluck-ish birthday celebration.

I'm probably getting too old for this, but I made my mom a drawing for her birthday.

Now it looks like this.

First attempt at bread from scratch.

taken care of

2011-05-24T17:39:00.005-05:00

A couple months ago I started to notice sensitivity on one side of my mouth to hot, cold and crunchy things. After pretending for several weeks that nothing was going on, I couldn't ignore it anymore. And I found myself in a situation I'd never been in before. I had to decide whether or not to get medical care based not on whether or not I needed it, but if I could afford it.

Growing up, this scenario would never have crossed my mind. As the child of a doctor and a nurse, my every pain and complaint was looked up in the Merck Manual and sent to a local specialist. The resulting diagnosis was then run by various medical acquaintances around the globe, just to be sure nothing was missed. Occasional sharp pains in my right knee? X-rays, orthopedists, and physical therapy. A day of vertigo? CT scan, MRI, and a visit to a neurologist and an ENT specialist. A nasty but routine case of a tropical illness? Med-evacc'ed to Singapore accompanied by an American EMT within hours of diagnosis. No potential problem was every left unaddressed, and cost was never an issue.

But here I am in the real world, with an annoying-but-not-debilitating sensitivity in my teeth that might (or might not) be an indicator of a cavity (or something even more unpleasant), which will almost certainly get worse (in terms of both pain and cost of treatment) the longer I let it go. And as for paying for it? I'm on my own.

And here again I'm getting just a little taste of the uncertainties and ugly trade-offs my clients face. It is absurd that dental and vision care are not included in regular medical insurance (as if the ability to eat and see were somehow non-essential). It is sick that people with incomes over $707 per month are expected to be able to pay for their own healthcare in New York City. (For a point of reference, that's a little bit less than what I pay for rent, utilities, and a monthly subway pass each month, and I'm not exactly living large).

As strange as it feels to consider forgoing a needed dental examination because of the cost, my situation is pretty tame. A few months ago one of my clients told me he had a growth on his neck that was getting bigger, but he couldn't find out if it was malignant or benign because while his unemployment benefits put him above the income range for Medicaid, they also didn't come close to covering the cost of a consultation or insurance.

My story doesn't turn out too badly. I figured out how to afford a dental check-up the same way I afford to get my hair cut in the city (letting a student do it). Turns out there was no cavity, so I'm probably off the hook.

But I wonder what happens to everyone else.

follow up

2011-04-28T18:24:00.001-05:00

A couple months ago I would, with some regularity, interrupt unrelated conversations with Mark by bursting into tears over the situations some of my clients were facing. I was taking in enough of the pain and difficulty people told me about that it started overflowing into other parts of my life. I knew it wasn’t healthy or sustainable, but as the pace and volume of my work began to escalate with tax season I found myself absorbing less and less. A few weeks ago I even caught myself being short with my blind or illiterate tax clients who hadn’t filled out their intake forms while waiting to be seen.

But apparently my capacity for compassion is back, and with an unlikely object.

I have sustained, long-term contact with only a few of my clients. Most of them I see once, call to follow up with, and that’s it. But there are a few. One guy in particular came in several months ago looking for a job and was immediately “one of those”. Sarcastic, self-deprecating, and disagreeable, I didn’t expect him to stick with our organizations’ program, but he did. He had gotten fired a few years away from retirement, was behind on his rent, and really needed a job. I kept badgering him over the course of several weeks to sign up for a free cellphone, and at some point he decided I wasn’t all that bad. He started stopping by my desk every time he came back to the office for a job interview. Over the course of the last few months he hasn’t found a job, has had to go on welfare (which means he has to spend 5 days a week at a dead-end city “job center”), and got evicted from his apartment. Worst of all was how I could see all of it in the new lines and hollows in his face when he stopped in a few days ago.

My teary outbursts are less frequent now, but I’ll admit I still don’t know what to do with the stories.

washing feet

2011-04-22T14:59:00.004-05:00

I spent a good part of my afternoon yesterday in a meeting listening to higher-up administrators of some of the city's social services agencies give glowing accounts (accompanied by colorful charts and optimistic statistics) of the programs they operate for the city's poor. It was hard to believe these efficient, responsive, generous programs are the same ones my clients tell me about.

Yesterday was also Maundy Thursday, and I read these words from Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on the blog for the NPR radio show On Being. He was speaking in reference to a medieval tradition in which monarchs washed the feet of the poor in commemoration of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples at the Last Supper:

What about having a new law that made all Cabinet members and leaders of political parties, editors of national papers and the hundred most successful financiers in the UK spent a couple hours every year serving dinners in a primary school on a council estate, or cleaning bathrooms in a residential home?

What if those administrators, the mayor, and the Wall Street bankers spent a few hours doing some of the assignments in the Work Experience Program, like picking up trash on the sidewalks and cleaning public restrooms without pay?

fasting

2011-03-31T19:58:00.002-05:00

I'll admit, I'd been a little disappointed by Mark Bittman lately. The NY Times food writer used to provide simple, easy recipes as The Minimalist. The only reference source I use more often than his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is Wikipedia. His recent promotion to weekly Opinion columnist writing about a range of food and food system topics has, however, been less pleasant. He now bites off huge (and important) issues, dispatching problems like US agricultural subsidies them with simplistic solutions (subsidize veggies instead of corn!) in under 1,000 words. (Of course, I make the same complaint about Times columnist Nick Kristoff, who covers international politics and development, so perhaps my issue is with the column format in general.)

Nevertheless, Bittman just about restored himself in my mind with his most recent column, "Why We're Fasting". Earlier this week he joined activist and religious leaders around the country who are giving up food for a period of time in response to the current federal budget negotiations. Under serious consideration are huge cuts to anti-poverty programs like WIC (nutritional support for pregnant women and those with young children), Head Start (free preschool for kids from low-income families), food stamps, and international food and health aid.

I first heard about the fast through Bread for the World. I'll admit I dragged my feet on joining in, but Bittman's piece was a helpful reminder. I know from my clients how essential these services are for poor people here. In the case of food stamps, I know from my own experience how important they are. I believe these cuts are wrong. Today, I fasted.

further reflection

2011-03-04T20:39:00.002-06:00

Two more responses:

What is more important to you now? What is less? Who knows you -- really knows you? How is prayer changing your life?

In what ways have I used my gifts to affirm my neighbors & friends and to encourage human flourishing both generally and particularly?

reflection

2011-03-02T19:10:00.003-06:00

In preparation for a time of reflection on the year I am ending, I asked a number of the women whose thoughts, prayers, poems and silences have shaped me this year for questions:

In the last year, how have I been touched? How have I touched others (physically, emotionally and spiritually)?

Despite the moves and upheaval, what does it mean to live a home made life? Not in the briefest sense of the briefest pass of the term, but if you parse out "home" and "made", what does that really mean? How could that feed into a more peaceful and simple living?

What has given me life? How have I given it? What would it mean to live and love freely?

How did you perceive power as a child? What ideas, self-representations, objects, stories and people held power and meaning for you as a child? How did these ideas change and shift as your fire or power was tampered with?

What is the most important thing you have learned about yourself in the past year?...in a more self-critical vein, I like sometimes to think of what CS Lewis calls the "disordered loves" - how does what I crave or desire mask my transcendent desire for God?

What has been the time you felt most alive in the city? Series of moments? What is one city landscape that has really connected with your spiritual state of being?

What a gift.

where are you from?

2011-03-01T20:17:00.004-06:00

"Where are you from?" For most people, it's a fairly straightforward question. "I grew up in ______."

Not so for us third culture kids (TCKs). We are:

...individuals who, after having spent a significant part of the developmental years in a culture other than that of their parents,develop a sense of relationship to all of the cultures while not having full ownership in any. Elements from each culture are incorporated into the life experience, but the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar experience. (from Third Culture Kids: The experience of growing up among worlds by David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken)

...people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves" (Salman Rushdie in Unrooted Childhoods)

Growing up, my answer to the hometown question depended on who was asking. When bargaining with Kenyan vendors at the crafts markets, I came from Kilimani (a Nairobi neighborhood). When traveling in East Africa, I was from Nairobi. To friends I made at youth group while we were on furlough in Georgia, I was from Kenya (though I often had to identify the continent for them as well). I embraced my TCK identity, and made sure that every new person I met knew where I grew up. It was a source of pride.

In college, that started to change. When swapping introductions with classmates I began dreading the standard "so where are you from?". My answer would usually either shock my new acquaintance into an overly-broad question ("So what was that like?") or provide a launching point for an enthusiastic description of his or her life-changing two-week trip to Zambia and subsequent "heart for Africa".

And in the last two years, I've found myself hiding my background. Once upon a time I eagerly shared my overseas upbringing, particularly with those from other cultures. I figured they would appreciate my global perspective and cross-cultural skills. And yet I've found something less than affirming in the responses of the Somali refugees, the undocumented Mexican farmworkers, and (most painfully) the Kenyans. There are polite questions about what my parents were doing in Nairobi, followed by silence.

Why? Because while I might have places or at least cross-cultural exposure in common with my immigrant friends, our experiences of change are entirely different. For me, moving between continents is easy. There is no walk through the desert, no wait in a refugee camp, no years-long visa application process. While our international lifestyle means I see my family members less often than I'd like, there are no legal or bureaucratic barriers to visiting them. And when I travel, money, med-evac insurance and white skin insulate me from the lived realities of the locals.

As my work has brought me closer to the poor in the US, I've realized that my TCK background can hurt rather than help my efforts to relate cross-culturally by highlighting my economic and social privilege. I've taken (somewhat ironically) to hailing from the Chicago suburbs.

So how do I now answer the question: "Where are you from?"

It still depends on who's asking.

the happiness of chickens

2011-02-06T20:40:00.004-06:00

Every culture has its' own set of unspoken rules governing interaction in public space, norms dictating how close you can walk behind someone, how many people can comfortably fit on/in the motorcycle/minibus/train car, and what circumstances justify interaction with a stranger. In New York, this last one involves a lot of non-interaction. Lots of trying to not make eye contact on a crowded train. Lots of waiting silently on subway platforms. Lots of passing people on the sidewalk without even looking up.

From my observations it takes something special to make a New Yorker engage a stranger - a particularly cute baby, an especially good book (like the exclamations I got while reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle recently), shared frustration over some shortcoming of public transit (okay, so maybe that last one's not so special, but commiseration is still nice).

I find those moments are especially few and far between in neighborhoods like the ones I live and work in, where differences in language and race and the tensions of gentrification further inhibit conversation. So one of the bright spots in an otherwise dreary week (lots of tax clients + freezing rain + working every day), was reading this story from the NY Times. Set in Bed-Stuy (the neighborhood I work in), it involves not only one of those rare opportunities to break the code of non-interaction, it also features chickens.

And what's not to love? There's something intrinsically happy about a chicken. The name: a little hiccup in the mouth. The shape: a jaunty upswing of feathers, a grin. The ceaseless bobbing, scratching, pecking. It's nearly impossible to feel melancholy in the presence of chickens.

nightmares

2011-02-03T18:27:00.002-06:00

In high school, I used to have math nightmares. I'd wake up anxiously trying to figure out a difficult trig problem, and it would take me awhile to realize I was in bed and relax enough to fall asleep again.

I had my first tax nightmares last night - same format, but with a filing statuses and 1099-Rs where quadratic equations and matrices used to be. They're the product of very full work days, of learning a different language (tax law) and trying to explain it in another foreign language (Spanish).

Nightmares notwithstanding, it's great work. After months where the best I could offer my clients was a list of documents they'd need for appointments at yet another office, it feels good to be able to actually provide a service. And to know it does something.

This video highlights the economic impact of the most significant tax credit we help folks claim - the Earned Income Tax Credit. Watch out for Yanira Rodriguez -- she's interviewed here as an EITC recipient, and she's another one of the tax preparers at my site!

esperando

2011-01-25T23:21:00.003-06:00

As we're beginning to prepare tax returns at my VITA site, we see a lot of a certain type of client. While the employed are still waiting for the W-2s to arrive, our tax clients are primarily folks with no taxable income - those receiving disability insurance, social security, or public assistance. Viuda. Ciego. Discapacitada. Retirado. New York City provides a small school tax refund to all its' residents (although why we're giving back money set aside for an under-funded school system remains a mystery), and these folks are the first to file.

Unlike our general clientele, they're rarely missing any documents. Each carries a fraying, overstuffed envelope or a faded plastic bag filled with various ID cards, official letters, bills, divorce papers and receipts. These scraps of paper and bits of plastic, written in bureaucratic language incomprehensible to even those who are literate and do speak English, are their only source of security. One missed appointment, one misunderstood letter, and their only income could be cut off for months. They rattle off their birthdates, medical conditions and financial situations with ease after years of waiting in offices and being asked to prove they have nothing. For many of them, la vida es esperar. Life is waiting.

Their waiting heightens my awareness of my own. I'm having trouble moving on from Advent, trouble following the church calendar past Christmas and through Epiphany. I resonate with Heidi Neumark when she says

Probably the reason I love Advent so much is that it is a reflection of how I feel most of the time. I might not feel sorry during Lent, when the liturgical calendar begs repentance. I might not feel victorious, even though it is Easter morning. I might not feel full of the Holy Spirit, even though it is Pentecost and the liturgy spins out fiery gusts of ecstasy. But during Advent I am always in sync with the season. Advent unfailing embraces and comprehends my reality. And what is that? I think of the Spanish word anhelo, or longing. Advent is when the church can no longer contain its' unbearable, unfulfilled desire and the cry of anhelo bursts forth.

As my clients wait for me in the reception area, as I wait for them to sift through their papers to find the ones I need, as we wait together on the slow tax program to tell us what their refund will be, I am aware of my waiting, of my anhelo.

Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.

I'm waiting for that.

hot or cold

2011-01-12T22:53:00.003-06:00

Today I as I stood in line for coffee at the deli counter of the bodega down the street, I noticed a helpful handwritten sign announcing "No EBT currently".

There's just one problem: there was nothing at the deli counter that one could legitimately use EBT for. Ever. Even when their cash register was working. One of the food stamps rules is that you can't use them to buy "hot, prepared foods". Thus I could buy a jug of cold apple cider, but not a cup of it warm, and the same sandwich which I could not (legally) buy warm would be no problem cold and wrapped in plastic. Bodega owners skirt this regulation by ringing up warm sandwiches or other prepared foods as produce.

The sign brought up some sticky questions that I've been rolling around for the last couple weeks, since my most recent classist-comment-from-a-foodie encounter. A well-off self-confessed "food movement" member, upon hearing about my work, asked me if I saw a lot of people trying to defraud the food stamps system. The short answer (and the one I gave her) is that I see far more clients who aren't receiving the full amount they're entitled to (never mind enough to feed their families), than I do people trying to use the system.

But is there stretching of the truth? Yes. Are household arrangements reported so as to receive the most food stamps? Sometimes.

Does that bother me? I'll be honest - not really. Why? Because for every person I know will be less than completely truthful about their situation in the social services offices, there are several whose honest circumstances would get them hundreds of $$ a month who refuse to go because of how they've been treated or because of the stigma attached, even in parts of this working class community, to receiving government benefits. Because I've seen very few people with the means to actually, adequately cover their needs get excited enough about a few extra $$ for food to even attempt the whole ordeal. And because I'm much more bothered by the fraud perpetrated by some of the world's wealthiest individuals across the East River than a hundred dollars here or there for groceries.

Is this entirely consistent? No, maybe not.

Thoughts?

food stamps...I forget what numeral comes next

2011-01-11T13:29:00.003-06:00

After reading my hungry season post, my most frequent and most staunchly anonymous commenter (my mom, of course), asked how I was doing on food stamps.

The answer: just great.

But as I merrily swipe my EBT card for fruits, veggies, staples and the occasional indulgence (olives! cheese!), I'm more aware than ever that I'm pretty much the most ideally-situated food stamps recipient ever, and that my experience is worlds different from the average. Why?

I'm white, educated, and speak English. The worst I encountered at the food stamps office was ignorance and disorganization. I wish I could say the same for some of my clients at work, whose experiences have been so bad that no matter how dire their situation, they refuse to return. Also, when my case was originally declined I was able to follow up with my caseworker and get the decision changed. Most recipients consider a rejection notice final and don't ever contest it.

I have the time and skills to cook from scratch, and I enjoy it. Cooking from scratch is cheaper. It's also not an option for folks who are juggling multiple jobs and family obligations.

I'm single. I'm able to receive the maximum individual allotment of food stamps - $200 a month. If there was anyone else in my food stamps household, our per capita allotment would be decreased (for example, 2 people = $367)

I'm a vegetarian. Meat's expensive. Beans, lentils and eggs...not so much.

Most of my income doesn't count towards my food stamp eligibility. Due to a special legal provision, my stipend does not count towards my income. What I take home each month would make me completely ineligible for food stamps if it were all included. And did I mention neither the benefits allotments nor the qualification criteria have anything to do with where you live? So the fact that food is more expensive in NYC than most places and that it's impossible to rent a room for less than $500 a month here does nothing to change what people are entitled to.

I have farmer/vendor friends. Even though my market is closed until April, several of my farmer/vendor friends have moved to a year-round market in Brooklyn and still insist on giving me free bread and produce.

I'm a US citizen. Undocumented and over 18? No food stamps. Got your green card? Well, you're eligible, but only if you've had it for at least 5 years.

I live in NYC. Although the city is more expensive than most places, almost all the farmers markets take EBT. That's unheard of most other places.

And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Mentioning that I'm on food stamps gives me a bit of rapport with some of my clients when I'm recommending they apply, but in reality my situation couldn't be more different from theirs.

"grayed in, and gray"

2011-01-10T17:24:00.004-06:00

One of the biggest changes I've noticed as I adjust to city life (particularly city life in the middle of winter in the neighborhood with the second least amount of park space of any in NYC) is how my poetry appetite has changed. Old friends like Wendell Berry, Jane Kenyon, and Mary Oliver don't awaken appreciation or love for a cold, half-industrial landscape and its (human) nature. They don't make much sense of prison or public assistance. So I was thankful to stumble across this Gwendolyn Brooks poem:

Kitchenette Building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent," "feeding a wife", "satisfying a man."

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its' white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! Not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

My first client today was a (40 year-old? 50 year-old? what's that in street years?) army veteran, obviously mentally ill, upset and complaining vaguely about one part of the so-called social safety net after another. Grayed in, and gray.

what could be more beautiful?

2011-01-03T19:41:00.007-06:00

I'm pretty sure the first question I asked after deciding to move to NYC this year was an anxious "But what will I eat in the winter?" A year and half ago I wrote about reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and how that book got me interested in connecting the dots with this whole food thing. It also put southern California on my radar, because where else (at least in the US) can you have almost any fruit or vegetable, local and in season, available year round? So it is with considerable concern that I begin my first post-farm winter in a place with real seasons.

I'm no die-hard locavore. Lots of my food comes from more than 100 miles away and I'm okay with that. But after a year and a half of eating mostly fruits and vegetables I grew myself or got from a friend at the farmers market, my taste buds have changed. I'll easily cruise through several pounds of New York farmers market apples in a week, but since holiday market closures forced me to buy produce at the local supermarket last week I find I can barely choke down one apple a day. I can taste the difference.

As a pretty serious farmers-market-vore, I'm lucky to be living in NYC, where several markets both run all the way through the winter and accept food stamps. Even so, in an appropriate reflection of my least-favorite season, there's little at these markets other than root vegetables and apples.

So, I'm trying to heed the wisdom of Opal from one of my favorite Toot and Puddle books, Wish You Were Here.

While Toot is off exploring the world and discovering exotic flowers in Wildest Borneo, Opal wonders (paraphrase) "What could be more beautiful than a marigold"? What could be more beautiful than what is available here, right in front of me?

So in that spirit...dinner!
Quinoa salad with grated carrot and apple, pickled beets (and their lovely juice, of course) dressed with lemon juice, red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and garnished with non-local-but-still-seasonal-so-don't-judge-me orange segments.

What could be more beautiful?

the hungry season

2011-01-02T10:54:00.004-06:00

When I first moved back to the US it was hard for me to hear the difficulties low-income folks face described using the same word, "poverty", whether we were talking about people in suburban Chicago or in the slums of Nairobi. Could the same term used for a family living in a one-room, dirt-floor shack in Kibera be applied to a family who might be struggling to make ends meet but owned a car and a television in the US? Were the predicaments of people whose annual per capita incomes measured in thousands of dollars really in the same category of those whose annual incomes were only in the hundreds? Could circumstances marked by the swollen guts of obesity be compared to those resulting in the distended bellies of kwashiorkor?

So I've been surprised, living and working in north/central Brooklyn, to find a lot of similarities between the smells, the stories, the situations of poverty here and there. I'm familiar with the "hungry season" experienced in poor rural communities in the global South, the lean months when the stores from the last harvest dwindle but the current crop is not ready. And I'm learning about a similar cycle of plenty and hunger in the US.

Walmart, Costco, and other grocery outlets throughout the country brace for the first of each month a bit like retail stores do for Black Friday: they stock up, hire extra staff, extend their hours, and prepare for crowds. Like on Black Friday, the shopping frenzy often begins at midnight.

Except rather than discounted clothing and gift items, these shoppers are buying bread and baby formula. The first-of-the-month sales bump, well-documented over the past couple of years, occurs when each months' food stamps benefits are deposited at 12am on the 1st. The purchases reflect that fact that many families' food stamps allocations are insufficient, leading to a monthly cycle of plenty and want. A study of family eating patterns in my neighborhood showed that most families make one big trip to the grocery store at the beginning of the month with their food stamps, and tend to rely on family members, taking out credit at bodegas (corner stores), and food pantries when they've exhausted their benefits at the end of the month.

While this cycle is only one element in the complicated set of factors that allows many of the US's most food insecure people to also be its' heaviest, it certainly contributes. The report showed that many families tend to overeat at the beginning of the month when food is plentiful. As stocks dwindle weeks later, parents will often give their kids cheap junk foods that can make them happy in the hungry times. Once-a-month grocery trips also promote consumption of processed foods, since most fresh items wouldn't last the whole month. And the majority of the bodegas where people shop most frequently don't stock fruits, vegetables, and other healthy foods. It may not be famine in the Sahel, but the hungry season is here, too.

And while poverty looks different in a Maasai village in Kenya, an informal settlement in Phnom Penh, the factory-fields of southern California, and the streets of north Brooklyn, the prayer is the same.

Utupe leo riziki yetu

Danos hoy el pan de este dia

Give us this day our daily bread

tax fun

2010-12-30T15:05:00.002-06:00

In celebration of finally finishing the riveting Link and Learn tax training for volunteer income tax preparers, I thought I'd share a couple of the items I found particularly entertaining:

"To correctly apply the substantial presence test, it is necessary to define the term 'United States'". This section goes on to explain that the United States includes US territorial waters, but not US airspace, leading my co-worker and I to wonder if one wouldn't have to pay taxes if one lived in a hot air balloon.
If, however, you live on the ground you'll need to use certain charts to determine how much tax you need to pay, including, potentially, the Standard Deduction Chart for People Born Before January 2nd, 1946 or Who Are Blind.
There are also other deductions available, so you need to ask clients if they have any expenses in the following categories: "medical and dental expenses, taxes you paid, home mortgage interest you paid, gifts to charity, job expenses, and certain miscellaneous deductions". (Why yes, I have certain miscellaneous deductions that I'd like to itemize.)
However, you may not deduct for donations made to certain organizations, including business organizations, civic leagues and associations, political organizations and candidates, social clubs, foreign organizations, homeowners associations and communist organizations.
Oh, and sorry, your blood donation is not tax deductible.

And the fun doesn't stop with tax trainings. I also like seeing how clients fill in the box marked "marital status" on our benefits screening intake sheet. While the standard answers include single, divorced, separated etc., I've also seen

"In a relationship"
"None" and "Not"
And (my all-time favorite) "Good"

walk to work - the blizzard edition

2010-12-28T20:29:00.004-06:00

Sunday: Mark and I caught what ended up being the last Chinatown bus leaving D.C. for New York. We left at 5pm and arrived in New York around 1am (a trip that normally takes 4 hours). I eventually stopped counting the number of accidents due to the heavy snow between Philly and the city. Once the bus was thoroughly stuck on a Manhattan side street, the driver allowed us out into the blizzard to find a train station. The subways were running, though with tons of delays and service changes, including the one that meant my train was no longer going to my stop. I got the pleasure of a 1/2 mile hike through what was then about 2 feet of still-falling snow, and arrived at my apartment at around 2:30am.

Monday: Snow day!

Tuesday: Since the train still wasn't stopping at my stop and I was more than a little curious to see what the rest of the neighborhood was like with all the snow, I walked the 2 miles to work this morning.

At least you can see these cars...many were completely buried.

Pile of snow about as tall as I am.

One of the better-shoveled sidewalks.

Right through the middle of this picture, there is a road. I promise.

Yes, the path goes right over the park benches.

Somehow I managed to live four years in Chicago without ever experiencing anything like this.

And here I thought there weren't any adventures to be had in the USA.

solstice

2010-12-20T23:01:00.003-06:00

Every year my church in Chicago has a Longest Night service, a "gathering for healing and remembrance", a time of marking and honoring losses during the year, held on an evening close to the winter solstice. I was never able to go, but I often think of what that service would be like, what I would want that service to be.

In my experience of church life there's always been lots of ritual space for joy and worship and a little bit for repentance and even every now and then the implication that it was okay to be angry at God (for a little while). But no space for grief, no space for people to gather with their accumulation of painful stories and sit with them together.

I noticed this absence first when family members of a high school friend were murdered, and felt it again the following year as I watched the violence in my hometown and across Kenya from cold, distant, Wheaton. I came back from Cambodia with sadness that I could never quite separate from my physical sickness. Accordingly, I found that the only prayer that made sense involved my body, in yoga. All of these sadnesses had their private place, but I longed - and long - for something shared.

On the longest night this year, my mind wanders among the stories I've heard from my clients in the last few months. There are a few that shocked me enough that I can remember specifics, but perhaps even worse are the painful situations so common I can assume them of everyone who sits down by my desk. I've found a lot of comfort in the past couple of weeks reading Breathing Space, the spiritual memoir of a Lutheran minister named Heidi Neumark in the South Bronx. She describes a women's Bible study saying:

I told them about the mother who stopped traffic to wash her son's blood off the street. The Bible study itself is a time to stop the traffic rushing through our days and honor what is sacred to our hearts...two hours that say, "Our grief is not just something to get over. Our grief is holy ground."

I long to hear that and see that in church more often.

Our grief is not just something to get over. Our grief is holy ground.

(not) busy

2010-12-12T21:52:00.003-06:00

This Advent I've been reading Richard Rohr's Preparing for Christmas: Daily meditations for Advent. Saturday's reflection included the following:

It seems that we tend to think that more is better...busyness is actually a status symbol for us! It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough - to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.

Every time I move to a new place I'm especially aware of my craving for busyness. In the initial days, weeks, months of getting settled into a new job and a new "family", of finding a new community, I find myself angling to be needed, anxious to be useful, to be somehow in demand. Free time can feel stifling and threatening rather than restful.

Realizing this week that I was actually a bit envious of everyone I know who is in the middle of finals was a particular wake up call. My nostalgia wasn't focused on the intellectual challenge and sense of accomplishment (though I do miss those things), but on the sense of having very important demands (or at least what I thought were very important demands) on all of my time. I realize how ridiculous that must sound to anyone who's currently living on too little sleep and too much caffeine while scrambling to get papers and exams done, but there it is.

I find myself needing the words of Isaiah: "...in quietness and trust is your strength".

food stamps IV

2010-12-06T19:34:00.002-06:00

So, where we last left my food stamps case my confused caseworker had called the wrong person to check up on my salary and decided that I was ineligible. I convinced him to talk to my AmeriCorps supervisor, and apparently the fact that she used "director" in her job title did the trick. I called him again the following day (so this is somewhere around Nov. 20) and he said I had been approved, but reminded me that the HRA (Human Resources Administration) had a full 30 days to formally respond to my application. Accordingly, my award letter didn't come until the 30th day, with my benefit card and PIN arriving days after that.

But it did come, and given the stories I hear every week about ineptitude and downright obstructionist behavior in that office, I don't take the relative ease of my application process for granted.

Now to get used to pulling out that light blue card when I shop for groceries. At the market on Sunday, showing up at the produce stand with the market's EBT dollars prompted the vendor to tell me how angry it made him that "other people" ("not you, of course - you look like you work your ass off") were using his tax dollars to buy food while wearing expensive North Face jackets and genuine Yankees jerseys.

Oh, where to begin with that one...

But, on a more positive note, since my previous food stamps post lamenting the lack of conversation between the foodie and anti-hunger movements I've come across two quality recent examples to the contrary: Divided We Eat, an article by Newsweek's Lisa Miller on food and class in the US., and an interview with anti-hunger advocate Joel Berg in the very foodie Edible Brooklyn.

advent

2010-11-28T19:30:00.004-06:00

2pm, Thanksgiving day and I was on my way to the grocery store in search a mop, milk, flour, a pie tin, creamed corn and pumpkin pie filling, having just gotten off the phone after asking my long-suffering mother for her scalloped corn recipe and tips for making pie dough. After getting lost enough to turn a ten block walk into something more like twenty, I found the Food Bazaar, and in it everything on my list (except for the pumpkin pie filling, which was of course sold out, and the pie tin because when I got back to my apartment Mark kindly pointed out that what I brought home was actually meant for cakes).

I also ran into the answer to the perennial question of where to buy candles for the advent wreath. Any store that serves a largely Mexican population has seven day candles, usually with brightly-colored pictures of Jesus, Mary or the saints decorating the glass. They also make them in plain colors.
I'm really ready for Advent this year. A week or so ago, after coming home from work as the sun was setting, I pulled out my yoga mat and hadn't been sitting on it for more than ten seconds before I started crying. The tears weren't because I was upset about anything in particular, but because I had finally given myself the space to recognize the sense of heaviness I'd been feeling. Nothing of particular significance had happened that day, and perhaps that was part of it. The thrill of learning a new place is wearing off. The routines in work and life that were reassuring a few weeks ago have started to feel mundane. I have to learn to hold on to the meaning and significance of what I do without the excitement. The difficulty of the situations my clients are in and the limitations of the help I can offer are part of the heaviness too. And, most basic of all, the shorter days and leaving work when it's already dark weigh on my spirit.

So I am ready for Advent. Ready for a way to mark time that both transcends and gives meaning to the rhythm of work-home-sleep-work-home-sleep. Ready to anticipate the arrival of something truly different, of a kingdom of justice and peace. Ready to celebrate the light shining in the darkness, both in the lengthening daylight after the solstice and in the birth of Christ.

Come, Lord Jesus.

water festival

2010-11-22T19:45:00.003-06:00

In some description of the TCK (third culture kid) experience somewhere (how's that for citing your source?) I remember a passing reference to how we TCKs experience the news in a less abstract way than our peers. It makes sense. I am better able to understand a riot or a prolonged drought because I've had personal experience, even if I've never been to the specific country whose tragedy is making BBC headlines.

But there's more to it than that. Being a part of a community that is spread all around the world means that sometimes things happen and I know I will be no more than a degree or two removed from the tragedy. Like the World Cup bombing in Uganda in July. Like the attack on a team of western medical workers in Afghanistan in August.

And then there are things that happen in places I have been, near and possibly directly affecting people I know and love. I've been following the stories about the stampede in Phnom Penh. Two years ago, I was there:

I got back to Phnom Penh just in time for the Water Festival. After being warned by pretty much every Phnom Penher I know (both foreigners and locals) about the dangers and discomforts of the 3-day holiday, I loved it and went all three days. The population of Phnom Penh doubles overnight and they shut off the scenic riverfront area to traffic (well, anyone not willing to pay a bribe) for a party. It’s a bit crazy. The crowds in some places are so dense you can't move (I definitely felt some opportunistic fingers trying my purse and pocket). But mostly its just fun - street food and vendors selling everything from locally made bamboo fish to cheap imported toiletries, row boat races on the river (and a 'tourism pavilion' for us white folks who get edgy in crowds) and fireworks and special lit up boats from the different government ministries and lots of concerts. After spending so much time in the last 6 months with all of this country’s problems, it was great just soak up Cambodians celebrating being themselves.

I'm doubting that anyone from my host family was there last night. They only went one day when I was there, and only to appease me. Like most city-dwellers, they preferred to stay home and watch the concerts on TV rather than mingle with the country bumpkins at the riverfront.

Still, it feels very, very close.

surreal II

2010-11-21T21:32:00.002-06:00

Here is the video. Sadly, they used only the sound from the interview in my apartment because apparently our cluttered dining room table couldn't compete with a wizard flash-mob on a busy New York street.

I know, I don't get it either.

The guy in the blue robes with the shaved head who shows up later on in the duel is Andrew, whose voice is the one you hear.

surreal

2010-11-18T20:31:00.003-06:00

So I got home from work today to find a video for the New York Times being shot in my apartment.

The video was about Harry Potter.

I'm not even joking.

I have since learned that:

one of my roommates used to work for the Harry Potter Alliance (she's not in the video - it features the head of the organization, who's staying on an air mattress in my living room)
"B roll" is extra footage they shoot to splice into videos when they edit
if current conditions continue, chocolate will be as expensive as caviar in 20 years (I checked. It's on the Atlantic. While demand for chocolate is increasing with rising wealth in India and China, farmers are abandoning cocoa farms because of the very difficult work and low wages -- lots of child slave labor ends up involved.)

So yes. The New York Times. At my dining room table.

Don't believe me? Here's a picture with Dumbledore.

stamps III

2010-11-17T22:40:00.005-06:00

This afternoon while I was at work I got a slightly panicky voicemail from my supervisor at the Market. Apparently my food stamps caseworker had just called asking her all kinds of questions about my eligibility for food stamps in relation to my AmeriCorps job (which is completely unrelated to my market job, which I explained to my caseworker in the interview). So... it might be awhile.

In the meantime, as I cringe at my budget spreadsheet and tap my foot in impatience, I've been pondering two apparently contradictory messages of the (admittedly fragmented) US "food movement".

A. Americans spend, on average, less than 10% of their money on food. This is very low, both historically and in comparison to other countries. And it does not reflect the true costs of growing food because cheap food does not guarantee a decent living for those who work in our food chain, address the environmental impact of agriculture, or accurately reflect the costs of growing food (since we subsidize oil and certain commodity crops). Therefore, food is not expensive enough.

B. One in 8 Americans (and 1 in 4 American children) is on food stamps. And there are millions more who qualify but aren't, for a variety of reasons, receiving food stamps or other nutritional assistance. Recently released USDA food security numbers for 2009 show that 1 in 4 US children live in a house that sometimes runs out of food. Therefore, for many, food is too expensive.

So within the "food movement" we have the locavores and proponents of sustainable ag saying we should pay more for our food, and the anti-hunger folks saying, essentially, that we are paying more than we can afford already.

I've been wondering why no one was talking about this contradiction, until today I found them...well...talking about it.

In the locavore corner we have Michael Pollan who says in a New York Review of Books essay:

Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How hungry is America? criticize supporters of "sustainable" agriculture...for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor.

...the "hunger" lobby has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby's support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill - a top priority for the food movement.

In his reply, Joel Berg (anti-hunger advocate with NYC Coalition Against Hunger) points out that his book does include serious criticism of current US farm policy, and that what he'd like from the locavores is proposals to help those who are already food insecure handle the costs of higher prices for food that more accurately reflect the costs of production.

As I run in both the local/sustainable and anti-hunger crowds, I'm trying to find a way to reconcile the two, something better than the anemic conclusions Berg and Pollan come to - that we can all agree that the food system is broken and we need to work together to fix it.

It seems to me that a reasonable place to start is by making sure folks in the food chain are paid a living wage. Pollan does a good job in pointing out the perversity of this when he observes in the contemporary US food economy:

an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as "Fordism": instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds pay their workers so poorly they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of non-virtuous cycle driving down both wages and the quality of food.

Many of the folks I screen who qualify for nutritional assistance (food stamps, WIC, school lunches etc.) work minimum wage jobs in the food industry, and don't get me started on farmworkers.

And in my own life? I'm excited to spend my EBT dollars at the farmers' market.

If I ever get them, that is.

service

2010-11-11T19:29:00.003-06:00

It is apparently not enough for AmeriCorps that we work full-time for very little -- we must also do additional service on some of the days regular employees have off. I was a bit annoyed to find out a week ago that rather than spending my Veterans Day in some state of relaxation or its opposite (house cleaning), I was expected to spend my free afternoon volunteering at a service for veterans at a nursing home.

However, one of the hidden graces of being a realist with a pessimistic/critical bent is that every so often I get shown up and thoroughly proven wrong by something I wasn't looking forward to.

This afternoon, after helping to anoint the social hall with cheap USA-themed decor, I sat down next to Fran (who, was once, among other things, a professional singer, Miss Hungarian-American, a tap dancer, an interfaith hospice minister, and the wife of a compulsive gambler) and her boyfriend Armand (whom Fran constantly told me was, unfortunately, stuck with her -- this when her eyes weren't welling up at how lucky they were to have each other). One of our first exchanges was as follows:

F: You're very pretty.

S: Well thank you, you're very sweet to say that.

F: [a little peeved] No I'm not! I'm honest.

After hearing about their lives (or what they could remember) and helping put mustard on their ham sandwiches, it was time for Fran and Armand to head back to their floor. But not before one of the other elderly veterans at our table (whom I had not interacted with) pulled over his wheelchair, reached under his sweatshirt, and pulled out this:

A plastic cup full of daisy plucked, I'm guessing with some effort, from the flower pots decorating the stage. He said, "Here you go sweetheart" and wheeled off.

I eat my earlier complaints about federal holiday service projects. Who couldn't use more afternoons of being told how attractive they are and being given flowers by strangers?

stamps II

2010-11-09T19:48:00.003-06:00

This is a game of "spot who's missing". Here's an advertisement for an event I considered going to this evening (and did not because it would have taken me 3 hours to get there and back):

"Food Stamped" is an informative and humorous documentary film following a couple as they attempt to eat a healthy, well-balanced diet on a food stamp budget...The event will kick off with a light reception at 5:00 pm followed by the 60-minute documentary debut. Thereafter, a closing discussion amongst Co-star Shira Potash and Montefiore physician participants in the Food Stamps Challenge will close the evening.

So...what's missing in this picture? Ah yes, here we have another conversation about hunger and anti-poverty measures without actual hungry and poor people. Instead, we use the short-term, voluntary experiences of deprivation of some well-meaning folks of means to start the discussion. I don't deny the value of things like the Food Stamps Challenge in raising awareness, but I wonder what their ultimate impact is if these experiences of food insecurity don't lead directly to interaction with people who are actually food-insecure. I have much more respect for initiatives like Witnesses to Hunger (where my friend Kyle is currently working) that let folks in poverty tell their own stories rather than having them told through outsiders or, even more removed, through outsiders trying to temporarily experience a taste of what it's like to be poor.

2010-11-04T20:09:00.015-05:00

A few of my favorite things, from the new place where I live (in no particular order and with apologies for the poor quality of the pictures):

This here is one of the reasons I chose this place - a well-equipped kitchen!

Another perk - something like a closet space! I think I have at least 4 times the square footage in this place as I did in the last one. I like being able to stand up most of the time, although my forehead is really looking forward to when I develop that sixth sense for where the low beams and pipes are.

Kenlee taught me the cheating way to take artsy-looking pictures...put the camera on the ground and see what happens. This picture features my space heater, which, like the sleeping bag on my bed, is oh so very important these days.

My desk.

Some reminders of good places I lived and the good people I've lived with.

A drying bundle of fresh lavender - a gift from a market vendor.

A cozy place to read.

Two sugar pumpkins rescued from being jack-o-lanterned at the market last weekend.

walking

2010-11-02T21:45:00.004-05:00

A decent measure of my spiritual state is what I spend my walk to work thinking about - what is so important that it surfaces as a theme for those few, uncluttered moments. All to often lately it's been a mental rehearsal of The Budget, and what may or may not fit into it, particularly (I'm sorry to say) what I can (or in most cases cannot) afford to wear. It's come down to one, small, three digit number to cover my groceries, Thanksgiving, clothing, and going out for the month of November. And I think about it. A lot.

I'm thankful for every moment of grace that interrupts that whirl of anxiety. Most recently, it was a passage from the novel Sophie's World. The book is the history of Western philosophy as told to a 14-year-old Norwegian girl.

A few days ago, I got a little reminder from that book. It describes pursuing mystical spirituality as "[consisting] of the simple life and various meditation techniques". I am far far from any sort of mysticism at the moment, but that phrase was enough to remind me that simplicity is something I am choosing as much as it has, for this season, chosen me.

stamps I

2010-11-01T19:17:00.004-05:00

In celebration of moving to a new place, in honor of recent events involving my checkbook, and in light of my October 26th post, I headed to the local food stamps office this morning.

9:40 am After checking in at work, picking up a book (good idea), shedding an extra jacket (bad idea), and grabbing my lunch (also a bad idea), I set off on the three-block walk I've often described to my clients to the Human Resources Administration office.

9:44 am I arrive, to see a line out the door and halfway down the street. I get in the queue and think about the irony of making people seeking help with food and healthcare stand outside in the cold (it felt like 31 degrees) to get it. I remind myself that I wanted the experience, and brace myself for some genuine participant observation. I also think about how much I'm going to wish I had kept that extra layer on.

9:59 am My section of the line is finally let inside, where I continue to stand on line (NY for "standing in line") for a good hour, reading my book and eavesdropping on my neighbors talking about why they won't be voting tomorrow ("you know they throw out half the ballots anyway") and the various failings of the HRA office.

10:03 am (Okay, so from here on the times are approximate, because by this point I've realized this just might not be the super-impressive traumatic-but-revealing participant observation experience I was expecting when I arrived.) I get to the receptionist, who gives me a green sheet of paper and tells me to take the elevators to the fourth floor and wait until my number is called.

10:04 am As I head for the elevators, a security guard stops me and says I can't bring food, and I must "go back around the corner and leave it in the 2nd office". The directions make no sense, and eventually another guard takes pity on me, and sends me to the elevators another way, under strict instructions not to open my lunch.

10:13 I arrive at the food stamps part of the office with the number 1049. There are no numbers on the signboard. No one has been called yet (the office has been open since 8:30). It feels like an airport because we're watching CNN sitting in cheap plastic seats waiting to hear magic words on the PA system.

10:34 The first number - 1030, is finally called. CNN is showing videos of one of it's anchors dancing.

11:46 My number is finally called. I go up to the counter where the receptionist gives my application a preliminary going-through. "Uh-oh, we have a problem", she says when she sees my income (which puts me over 130% of the poverty line, and thus makes single-no-dependents-non-disabled-not-elderly me ineligible). This is my cue. I whip out my copy of the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and a USDA opinion from 2001 which states that the AmeriCorps living allowance not be considered income when determining eligibility for need-based federal assistance programs.

She reads my document (dated in 2007) and asks me if I have anything more recent, because "our regulations are always changing". Umm...they're your regulations, right? She tells my case worker to go ahead and do the interview, and that they will "investigate" and see if my income really is excluded.

11:48 My interview starts. My case worker is an African-American man in his 40s. His desk is covered in piles of papers. He asks questions about my jobs, my living situation, my bank accounts. After awhile he sends me down the hall to be finger-imaged.

12:26 Finger-imaging = finger printing. It's one of the more controversial and most unnecessary parts of the food stamps application -- it doesn't cut down on fraud and makes applying for government benefits feel criminal. It's required for every New Yorker over 18 receiving food stamps (so I've had clients whose whole families are ineligible for food stamps because 19-year-old son who still lives with mom can't be bothered to go down to the office).

12:45 Back to my case worker. He goes over a few more things, tells me I'll hear back in one to thirty days, and, as an afterthought, prints me a receipt, which he "should do anyway", but apparently doesn't do often. I get him to put down his name and phone number too, so I can get in touch with him directly if I have problems with my case or disagree with his decision.

So, in summary: it wasn't as bad as I expected. I've heard plenty of stories of hostile, belligerent, harassed case workers and overwrought applicants, and I didn't see that. It was a busy day and I still not only turned in my application but also had my interview and was out within 3.5 hours.

BUT...it certainly was not as good as it could have been. I was at the DMV a month ago and can't help comparing the two experiences with local bureaucracy. The DMV was fully equipped for long lines. The staff were equally busy and impersonal, but the communication was clearer and the customer service more professional. The building was much cleaner and more comfortable.

And thus my food stamps case was born.

Also, now taking guesses as to how long it will take me to hear back in the comments section of this post.

"go gentrify the dark side, baby"

2010-10-28T17:44:00.002-05:00

It's one of the sad ironies of the real post-college world that if you are young and progressive, chances are you're working/interning for more or less no $$, and chances are that your only (urban) living options (short of mom and dad) involve moving in to lower-income minority neighborhoods. Thus some of the people most likely to be aware of (and troubled by) gentrification tend to be the ones who get it started, paving the way for the young professionals, who make things comfortable for the couples who treat their dogs like children, who provide business for the "dachshund spas and PBR-swilling butchers" (thanks to a particularly clever craigslist post for that one). By the time you see a white baby in a stroller, it's all over.

With all this in mind, I set out to find a more long-term living situation about a month ago. My office sits on the border between Bedford-Stuyvesant (historically African-American) and Bushwick (predominately Puerto Rican and Dominican), and my budget pretty much limited me to those two neighborhoods anyway. (You can rent a 2-bedroom apartment in some major cities for what it costs to rent a room in a shared loft in NYC. One candidate for governor is running under the umbrella of The Rent is Too Damn High Party. While his candidacy is not particularly serious, his issue and his facial hair certainly are.)

As I considered my options, I asked for input from a couple of my co-workers (both African-American and long-time area residents). My final decision came down to a place in BedStuy (where I was told that proximity to the precinct did not necessarily equal safety) and one in "the dark side" of Bushwick (so named because it is primarily residential/industrial, and not particularly well lit at night). I chose Bushwick, so, in the words of one of my advisors, I'm off to "gentrify the dark side, baby".

How do I feel about that?

Not as bad as I expected, for a couple of reasons. First, neighborhoods are always in flux. Bushwick traces it's written history back to a deal between Dutch settlers and the Lenape Native Americans, and has undergone English, German, and Italian incarnations, to name a few. A healthy response to gentrification is not trying to keep neighborhoods ethnically homogeneous, but ensuring that working-class neighborhoods remain affordable for those who grew up there. I'm proud to say that my organization was originally founded for this purpose and continues to work to ensure that low-income folks can live and work in North Brooklyn. Secondly, I'm living in one of the communities that a lot of my clients come from. I still disagree with the folks who are taking advantage of cheap rent in ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn only to sleep there while working, shopping, and basically living in Manhattan. But my situation is different. Since I started working I've walked through BedStuy to work most mornings, and will try to continue to walk from my new place in Bushwick (although anyone who's seen me outdoors in below 50 degrees is rightfully skeptical). I'm interested in being here. And finally - I'm living in a former yarn factory converted to loft apartments, so I'm not technically displacing anyone, except perhaps the previous, most likely hipster, residents.

A note on the building (as it is the likely source of future blog inspiration). It is. Incredibly. Hipster. Asymmetrical haircuts, cheap cigarettes, and big, unnecessary glasses everywhere (except my apartment, as far as I can tell). Apparently some of the residents actually tried to secede from Brooklyn (their complaint: the destructive economic forces of development) but failed to do so because they couldn't find a wealthy donor to buy the building and turn it over to the residents.

Yes, you read that right.

helping

2010-10-26T21:25:00.004-05:00

The scene: a planning meeting for a non-profit about an upcoming event to promote access to healthy food in one of New York's lower-income minority neighborhoods.

The characters: me, one of the other volunteers - a young woman we shall call "A" (mostly because I forgot her name), and Mark (who doesn't say anything, but he was there).

The exchange:

A: [to me] So, what do you do?

Me: I work for a small non-profit. Our clients are low-income job seekers and I screen them for public benefits like food stamps and Medicaid and help them apply if they qualify.

A: [excited] Oh! You've have to tell them that they can use their stamps at the farmers' markets!

Me: Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that myself! I'll be getting food stamps in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to using the Health Bucks program [NYC initiative that gives you $2 extra for every $5 of your food stamps you use at certain markets].

A: [taken aback] Isn't your organization ashamed that you have to use food stamps?

The message: Working to help poor people = good, more power to you. Sharing some of their lived experience...umm... [shuffle feet, look at the ground].

Once upon a time I guess I thought the problem of well-intentioned, wealthy outsiders "helping" the poor while remaining isolated in their compounds and 4-wheel drives was only a problem in the developing world. Surely those fighting poverty in the US faced fewer barriers of wealth, culture, privilege, safety, geographical proximity...surely they would actually know some poor people.

Wrong.

On slow afternoons in the office I've been reading the book All You Can Eat: How hungry is America? by NYC anti-hunger advocate Joel Berg. My favorite part so far was a chart comparing views on welfare and poverty in the political Right and Left. After highlighting different understandings of the causes of poverty, attitudes towards entitlement etc., the chart ends with "People who make poverty policy spend very little - or no - actual time with poor people".

This, of course, was in both columns.

"A" is no poverty policy-maker (thankfully), but she was in a low income community with the intention of helping. Yet I remain skeptical about how much "help" anyone from a privileged background can offer when they've never even considered the possibility of living a bit like the people they serve.

a granola in Times Square

2010-10-25T16:50:00.003-05:00

This past Saturday afternoon I set out to find something every bit as likely to exist as the Fountain of Youth: a pair of boots that are both cute and comfortable for under $80. My search took me to one of my least favorite parts of Manhattan - 42nd St/Times Sq/34th St./Herald Square. This area is perpetually clogged with foreign tourists excited to shop in stores they can't normally go to, and American tourists excited to shop in stores they go to all the time at home (but Old Navy in New York City is just so much more exciting!) It wasn't long before, boots or no boots (in this case, no boots), I needed to leave.

When Kat asked me how I was adjusting to the city, I realized that most days I hardly even think about it. I've tried to keep my everyday life relatively small. I can walk to work from where I'm staying now, and I limited my search for a new place to a 2 mile radius of my office (although something called "winter" might put an end to my pedestrian habit soon). The grocery store and laundromat are just around the corner. It is manageable. I've started to recognize people, and this afternoon a group of older adults hanging out on the sidewalk who I walk by every afternoon talked to me for the first time.

But then there are moments in downtown Manhattan or while navigating a subway station at rush hour that I do get overwhelmed. Two kinds of overwhelmed, actually.

The first is what I felt on my boot search, a downright ecclesiastical sense of futility when surrounded by thousands of people working (if they're lucky) jobs they (usually) don't enjoy to earn money so they can buy stuff (lots of it) to impress each other, and then start the whole thing over the next day (to what end?). In those moments, everything is so meaningless it hurts.

On the other end of the spectrum are the occasional encounters with strangers that remind me that every person is indeed a human being with a story. Sitting on a bus one evening, I watched a child's curiosity about an architectural model the man next to her was carrying turn into a conversation about community art and the future of Prospect Park involving a third of the passengers. It might seem insignificant, but in a city where everyone is so close together all the time yet trying to avoid interacting, seeing strangers engage is something special. In those moments, everything is so meaningful it hurts.

schlep

2010-10-22T18:20:00.004-05:00

Living in New York requires a few things: a fast-paced walk, the ability to avoid eye contact unless absolutely necessary, and a basic repertoire of Jewish words. This last one includes words like mensch (a good human being), kvetch (to complain a lot), and yenta (gossipy old woman). My two (Jewish) co-workers recently treated me to a five minute display of utter disbelief that I did not know what lox was. When I saw (non-Jewish) Mark a few hours later, I got the same reaction. (Since you probably don't know either, it is smoked salmon commonly eaten on bagels, as in [Brooklyn accent] "Get me a bagel with cream cheese and some lox").

But my favorite of the new words in my everyday vocabulary would have to be schlep: to drag or haul an object; to make a tedious journey (thanks, wikipedia). It's not like I didn't know the word before, but I do have a whole new appreciation for the toil it represents now that I have to hand-carry my whole life (my laundry to and from the laundromat, my groceries from the market...).

It's difficult to understand when one has access to a vehicle. Indeed, after a recent weekend in the Catskills involving a rental car, my heart sank when I got on the train back to the city and realized that I would have to carry home the basket of butternut squashes, 10 lbs of apples, jars of jams and chutneys, and bottle of wine that had seemed like such a good idea when I had personal, motorized transportation. Of course, that night there was a huge thunderstorm and I had to make a walking, above-ground transfer between subways to make my schlep all the more enjoyable.

But my best schlep yet would have to be this evening. This time next week I'll be moving into my new apartment (hurray!). My new room comes with a desk, so of course I needed a desk chair. I found one on craigslist, emailed the owner, and arranged a pick-up time. Only then did I think about how I would get it home. My options were:

Try to take it on the bus (at rush hour, and carry it the rest of the way home)
Take it on the subway - which, due to the fact that there aren't many trains in my part of Brooklyn, would mean going all the way to Manhattan, hauling the thing through a subway station and getting on a train back to Brooklyn (at rush hour, followed by carrying it the rest of the way home)
Just go ahead and carry it home.

Obviously I chose #3. I spent this evening carrying a reasonably sturdy office chair 1.6 miles from it's previous home to my current one. While designed for ergonomic sitting, there is no comfortable way to carry said piece of furniture long distances. I hope I looked as ridiculous as I felt.

But I did it. And returned my library books and purchased the bunch of kale I needed for my dinner from a farm stand run by local youth on the way. All this on a day that started out with me waking up 3 minutes before I had planned on leaving my apartment and managing to shower, look cute, and still arrive 5 minutes early for my meeting (although, to be fair, much divine intervention was requested and received with regard to the timing of my trains).

Now pardon me. My sense of accomplishment and I must go negotiate the purchase (and subsequent schlepping) of a 6 ft. lamp.

farmer

2010-10-21T21:07:00.005-05:00

There's a lot of hand-wringing in the sustainable agriculture/food systems/foodie movement(s) about the US's declining numbers of farmers. While most of our grandparents or great-grandparents had at least a backyard garden, the percentage of Americans with farming as occupation is now less than the percentage of the population in prison (which, of course, also says something about our criminal justice system). However, the decline in the number of farmers has seen a corresponding rise in employment in other areas of the food system, from the farmworkers who pick the tomatoes to the servers who put the bowl of gazpacho in front of you in the restaurant. (Full disclosure: a lot of this post is information gathered from Anna Lappe's presentation at the panel I attended this evening.)

But in the foodie world, it's all about the farmers. It appears that (for those with the education and means to be "foodies" in the first place) once you've made peace with your farmer (buying your produce from local, sustainable small-scale operations) you're off the hook. Cutting out all those involved in the industrial food system from planting to plate renders those millions just as invisible to those who profess a deep interest in food and agriculture as they are to those who never think twice when reaching for the Cheetos.

Social justice concerns were my entree into this whole "food" thing, so it's frustrating to see issues like pesticide protection, farmworker housing, safety in food processing plants, and compensation rates for farmworkers and servers (the two occupations not subject to minimum wage laws) given so little attention.

At a panel on local food this evening I asked the participants (a chef, community garden organizer, and author) what they thought were some of the most important worker justice concerns overlooked by the food movement. They mentioned the need for basic awareness of what these jobs involve (recommending the book Working in the Shadows: A year of doing the jobs (most) Americans won't do by Gabriel Thompson) and support for the campaigns of groups like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (and I would add the genius UFW campaign, Take Our Jobs). But my favorite suggestion was to work on broadening/shifting our definition of "farmer".

One of the most memorable dinner-table conversations of the year on the farm (significant not just because it was our first meal cooked by a certain five-star chef, although that didn't hurt) concerned what we, the interns, would actually call ourselves. The farm website, ATFP brochures etc. labeled us farmers, and yet an honest inventory of the work we did (weeding, harvesting, washing, packing and delivering produce) had us feeling much more like the farmworkers picking strawberries and weeding celery in the fields around us. By the end of the the mushroom-asparagus risotto (pictured here just because it was so delicious that I have a picture) we had resolved to call ourselves farmworkers.
Tonight, one of the panelists suggested the opposite. Why don't we use the term "farmer" to describe those who work the land. Simply owning or managing a piece of agricultural property does not make one a farmer. The decline in the number of farmers would certainly be less precipitous if we included those who spend the most time growing our food.

There's another possibility here too -- that producing food industrially has come close to eliminating the farmer. In Oxnard I noticed how infrequently the word "farmer" was actually used to describe anyone involved in agriculture. There were growers (landowners and/or managers) and farmworkers (those who planted, tended, and harvested the crops), but very few farmers. There were only a handful of men (and even fewer women) who either (in the case of the growers) took the time to know and work the land or were given the luxury (in the case of the farmworkers) of developing a sustained relationship with a particular place.

exploring

2010-10-07T19:29:00.007-05:00

There's nothing like having someone from my previous life come to visit to make me feel like maybe, just maybe, I'm starting to know this new place. Kat and I had one beautiful fall day together to explore the city.

We started out with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge The Statue of Liberty is in the background somewhere. I think we managed to block her entirely. Manhattan is on the right.

After exploring the South Street Seaport area (where I work at the market on Sundays) and walking by the WTC site, we headed to Central Park for a picnic...
...followed by a couple hours at an exhibit on urban agriculture at the New School. We then made a few purchases at a farmers market...
...before meeting up with Mark for a wonderful dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Greenwich Village. Getting to be the tour guide made me a feel a little more settled here. I was only completely unable to find one of the places we wanted to go, and only sent Kat to the far end of Queens instead of Manhattan once. I must be really getting the hang of this.

when I grow up

2010-10-05T17:19:00.002-05:00

Every now and then, usually following hours-long conversations about people and how they work, my mom will suggest that I might make a good therapist. I’ve never ruled it out as a possible third or fourth career (or, to be more realistic considering the rate with which I’m currently moving through occupations, twenty-somethingth), but I’ve also never really seen myself following the family line of work.

But, almost by accident and feeling very unprepared, I do find myself doing something very much like counseling. I have clients. I ask them questions about some of the most private parts of their lives (Are you pregnant? Who are you living with?). They know nothing about my life and yet give me intimate details of theirs (What’s your marital status? Do you have any monthly medical bills?). In our brief interactions we talk about very personal things: family and money. Some of the most difficult conversations are around the intersection of the two (Do you receive alimony? Are you paying child support?) They tell stories, a lot of which appear bleak and hopeless to me on the other side of the desk. There is a lot of repetition from one to the next. I offer what advice I can, but it never seems like enough in light of the situations my clients are faced with.

One of my cuter and more insightful childhood comments was my answer to the question, “What does your daddy [a psychiatrist who works in counseling] do?:

“He listens to peoples’ hearts”.

I was, of course, referring to the stethoscope that we would occasionally get to play with. I was also right.

If you had asked me at that same age what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have answered that I wanted to do what my mommy or daddy did.

And now, in a small and imperfect way, I am.

now

2010-10-04T19:13:00.003-05:00

(Warning - I also just posted this same piece on the Abundant Table blog)

Pulling on baggy work pants and rain boots this evening to take out the trash, I got hit by an extra-strong wave of farm nostalgia. My spaghetti sauce could use some fresh basil, my body could use a few hours of field work, and my spirit misses the company of my four sisterfriends.

Having boots on my feet also reminds me of a promise to update the Abundant Table community on my whereabouts post cross-continent move. After a roadtripping through some of the most beautiful parts of the US (you should have seen the look on the face of the woman selling tomatoes and cucumbers at the farmers market in Casper, Wyoming when I asked if I could pay for my selection in fresh California lemons and avocados!) and spending a few weeks resting and catching up with my parents at my aunt and uncle’s dairy farm in Lancaster, PA, I finally ended up in New York City a little less than a month ago. I just started my fourth week of working on the transition from the farm to the office, from the comfy world of flannel and rubber boots to the ambiguities of “business casual”, from “whenever we’re up til whenever it’s done” to a 9-5.

I’m doing a one-year AmeriCorps position with a community-based organization in North Brooklyn. For the first and final four months, my job is screening our clients (mostly low-income job seekers) for eligibility for public benefits (mostly food stamps and Medicaid). It’s a little like case work – talking to folks to find out what their situation is, helping them fill out applications, letting them know what offices to go to, and following up to see how things went. While the work itself is worlds different from the farm, I find myself continuing to wrestle with one of the fundamental questions posed at the Abundant Table: how to ensure that everyone has access to healthy food.

January-April things will look very different. My co-workers and I will be running a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assessment) center, helping our clients file their taxes for free and making sure they get all the credits and refunds they qualify for. I’m enjoying my supervisor and co-workers, my interaction with clients, and (ever the nerd) the challenge of learning the endlessly complicated (and dysfunctional) system of public benefits in the U.S.

But as I couldn’t quite handle a complete break with the world of farming and sustainable food systems (and in order to supplement the AmeriCorps stipend that leaves me eligible for many of the benefits I recommend for my clients), I found work once a week as a Market Hand at the New Amsterdam Market. The market is an exciting effort to re-introduce a public market (much like a farmers market, only with more of an emphasis on regionally-sourced prepared foods like cheeses and pies) to New York’s market district in the south seaport area of Manhattan. It’s also an exciting chance for me to interact with vendors, customers, and the odd farm apprentice, and occasionally talk my way into a free loaf of fresh bread or half a bottle of good NY wine.

My free time includes a shameful amount of getting lost, a (thus far fruitless) search for a permanent place to live, a good library, a church community like the Abundant Table, and an affordable place to practice yoga, and vicariously getting my Masters in Food Studies through Mark. I’m enjoying an incredible array of apples, slowly finding new friends, and the ever-fascinating diversity of New Yorkers (my walk 1.5 mile walk to work, for example, takes me from hipster-art-school land through a Hasidic Jewish community and past the projects).

This time tomorrow I’ll also be enjoying the company of a certain Katerina, which reminds me that though my room may be 7x9 (and yes, that measurement is in feet), I always love friendly faces from out of town. It helps with the nostalgia, you know…

the creatives

2010-09-28T20:27:00.005-05:00

There's nothing like spending what (unfortunately) probably amounts to more than an hour a day looking for places to live on craigslist to make you question your identity. My room hunting angst is only compounded by the fact that my job (which I'd like to be close to) happens to be in Williamsburg, the epicenter of the hipster world. Post after post of available rooms includes some sort of preference for "young creatives". A couple of times I have ventured a response to such post based on other merits of the living arrangement.

No response.

I work 9-5. According to craigslist, this officially makes me a "young professional", and unofficially makes me boring. And un-creative.

There is not much space (literally -- you should see how small the kitchens are!) in NYC for the domestic or living arts. The place I'm living now didn't even have a can opener or a cutting board when I got here. Yet I persist in my artistic attempts. This is a sweet potato apple lentil stew. Tonight's answer to all those "young creatives" on craigslist.
Dish features sweet potatoes and celery from DoReMi farm at the New Amsterdam Market, apples from the Union Square Greenmarket, Tropical Heat curry powder and chai masala (ginger, cardamom, cinnamon), along with butter, onion, garlic, lentils, diced tomatoes, and tomato paste from Walmart and the local grocery store.

individual

2010-09-27T21:58:00.002-05:00

There are a lot of things about New York City that are overwhelming. The movement, the activity, the noise...and the sheer number of people. And it's not just the number of people, there's a certain quality to them too, a tendency towards extremes. My theory is that the city is so big and there are so many things that you could be into, that many people choose to differentiate themselves by being really, really into whatever their thing happens to be.

But even with all diversity of hair styles, body art, accents, clothing, personal hygiene etc., I can feel myself starting to get a bit numb, developing an immunity to individuals and stories in the face of sheer volume.

This Jane Kenyon poem was a reminder:

Man Sleeping

Large flakes of snow fall slowly, far
apart, like whales who cannot find mates
in the vast blue latitudes.

Why do I think of the man asleep
on the grassy bank outside the Sackler
Museum in Washington?
It was a chill
afternoon. He lay, no doubt, on everything
he owned, belly-down, his head twisted
awkwardly to the right, mouth open
in abandon.
He looked
like a child who has fallen asleep
still dressed on top of the covers,
or like Abel, broken, at his brother's feet.

11th

2010-09-11T16:07:00.002-05:00

Getting off the subway a block or two from Ground Zero this morning, I kept thinking of these words from this Wendell Berry essay:

...we have not learned to think of peace apart from war. We have received many teachings about peace and peaceability in biblical and other religious traditions, but we have marginalized these teachings, have made them abnormal, in deference to the great norm of violence and conflict. We wait, still, until we face terrifying dangers and the necessity to choose among bad alternatives, and then we think again of peace, and again we fight a war to secure it.

complicit

2010-09-06T22:16:00.003-05:00

As I've moved closer to the people and processes involved in making the most basic material goods (food, clothing) in the past two years, the physical world has taken on a new weight. Driving past malls and outlet stores, the sheer volume of the stuff inside is overwhelming. I've had a little glimpse into the lives of those sewing and picking, so that in my more lucid moments I can't grab an appliance off a shelf without wondering how many hands were involved in making it, or pull a shirt off the rack without a peek at the tag to see where it came from.

Being a bit more aware sets me up for an exhausting series of mental gymnastics any time I make a purchase.

Today, for example, I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart. Already I’d had to do some justifying. Walmart is the Big Bad Wolf, up there with other dastardly corporations like Monsanto. They underpay their workers both here and overseas and force local operations out of business everywhere they go.

But…I needed a plastic storage bin. Target would have been my first choice, but it was out of the way and I have a sneaky suspicion my aversion to Walmart is partly a class thing (Target is, after all, where upper middle class folks by their Made in China).

On my list after the storage bin were a number of grocery items (since, as of Wednesday, whatever I eat will have to be transported home without the help of a car). I’d planned on patronizing a local grocery store, but did the impact of the extra gas from the trip outweigh the karmic good of supporting a local family?

So…I found myself grocery shopping in Walmart. Already feeling guilty, my calculating had just begun. How much more was I willing to pay per can of organic beans (and could I even justify beans in a can when the dried varieties were available)? Coffee: fair trade, organic, Rainforest Alliance…could I find all three? If I could buy non-organic brown rice in a bigger bag, did the plastic pollution I saved in any way cancel out the pesticides used in growing? How about salt – would going for the Morton’s be a capitulation to advertising or would choosing the cheaper Walmart brand create downward pressure on prices that often has consequences for workers and the environment? What size cans of crushed tomatoes should I buy – the smaller size (and waste packaging materials) or the larger size (and likely waste food, since I’ll be cooking for one)?

All this, and I get to the check-out aisle and realize I’d forgotten to bring re-useable bags.

At the end of that trip, at the end of a couple weeks of shopping to get ready for life and work in NYC, after so many tiny (and at the same time overwhelmingly significant) decisions, there is this:

A Short Testament
by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.

encounter

2010-08-30T13:12:00.004-05:00

One of the great pleasures of the past two weeks has been taking long walks in the evening on the country roads around my aunt and uncle's farm, smelling fresh cut hay and watching the sunset over the corn fields.

One evening I decided to try a new route. I passed churches and old barns and several roadside stands and was pleased to see two white roosters scratching around in one yard. Even more pleased when they started jogging in my direction (yes, I do miss my chickens).

Docile, gentle farm chickens, so well-behaved we let kids play with them.

Except that one of them started heading right for me and making me nervous. Raising, caring for, and (when necessary) disposing of 9 hens gave me no experience in dealing with roosters. A quick search for a branch with which to ward off the potential attack yielded only a couple of leaves. "Maybe he just thinks I'm going to feed him" I thought as I tossed the leaves in the rooster's direction.

Nope.

So I took off running (okay, sprinting) down the road, followed, at a speed I've never seen in a chicken, by the rooster, until I was several houses away and clearly no longer a threat.

I really hope someone happened to be looking out their window.

growing up

2010-08-25T22:07:00.001-05:00

Becoming (somewhat) grown-up and getting a (somewhat) grown-up jobs means obtaining some semblance of a grown-up wardrobe. And that means doing one of my least-favorite things: shopping.

For several years I've tried to avoid buying new clothes whenever possible. With a few exceptions for hygiene and safety (new underwear and running shoes), I've managed to clothe myself primarily with thrift store finds and the occasional "donation" from my friends' closets. I've chosen to do so for several reasons.

I disagree with the conditions in which most of what's on the shelves is made. I stopped buying new stuff my freshman year of college with a vague sense that the global clothing industry was problematic. Living with garment factory workers in Cambodia did not convince me otherwise.
I disagree with disposability. Following trends means buying new stuff as often as the industry wants me to. If I’m only supposed to wear it for a few months, chances are it's not made to last. Making new clothes is also environmentally costly.
I can't afford new stuff. And as it looks like I'll be either a student or working low-paying non-profit jobs for the foreseeable future, this is unlikely to change.
(This one was a surprise) I like this way better.

Just like I'm lucky that I don't like meat (it makes being a vegetarian so much easier), I'm lucky that I can't stand shopping. I credit this to my childhood. Every other summer my family would return to the US to visit family and friends, gain weight eating American junk food (okay, maybe that was just me), and stock up on what we needed for the following two years. This lent our shopping trips urgency and anxiety. Urgency (because if you don't get what you need from Old Navy now you won't have another chance for 2 years) and anxiety (because how, at age 11, can you be sure that your feet are done growing? and should you buy your jeans expecting that you'll lose the recently-acquired 5 lbs or not?).

But it was more than just the anticipation of long, boring days at the mall and frustrating decisions that made me dread shopping. It was the change I could sense in my spirit, the heaviness of feeling like I needed more and more new stuff that wouldn’t lift until I was back home. Kenya was no non-consumer Eden, but there were fewer options and therefore less anxiety.

In a way, my decision to stop buying new stuff in college was an effort to create a less-choice environment for myself. At first it was scary, and then it became an adventure (a pattern that recurs in my life every now and then). I can appreciate finding my bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding at a second-hand shop or inheriting a favorite outfit when a roommate moves out as gifts. Getting a pair of jeans I like from a Goodwill is a small miracle.

But. But. I start a new job in a couple of weeks and will need to be dressed professionally. Every day. I don’t often see quality dress shirts or suits in the racks at Salvation Army.

Once again, growing up means getting close enough to what was once black and white to have to taste the gray.

back to where I started

2010-08-18T20:01:00.002-05:00

I am back where I was almost exactly a year ago, back in rural Lancaster with the smell of dairies, baked oatmeal for breakfast, and candles in the windows of houses. I'm back to hearing stories of growing up on a farm and being peppered with questions about organic agriculture that I feel only slightly more qualified to answer after my California farming adventure. I'm back to the familiar feeling of living out of a suitcase and some boxes, of being between places and lives. I'm back to trying to picture what's next and acquire appropriate attire (here's to a smooth transition from a job where my uniform consisted of the same pair of muddy jeans and faded flannel shirt every day to something that will most likely require suits and daily showers!).

I'm particularly aware of being in transition and uncertain of what comes next, so it is appropriate that I spent the better part of my evening reading and thinking about a NY Times feature on "emerging adulthood", a new life stage to describe all of us mobile, "self-focused", relatively unattached 20-somethings. We're delaying adulthood (defined as financial independence, marriage, and having children...hmm) in favor of identity exploration and instability. Our lives are characterized by valuing change - moving and switching jobs often, living with romantic partners without being married, living at home... The author gives a nod to several of the forces shaping this trend, including changes in parenting, higher education requirements for jobs, changing sexual norms, but probably doesn't spend enough time on the one that looms largest right now: it's pretty hard to start your adult life if you can't get a job.

But there's a flip side of choice (and privilege) for some of us. I'm fairly certain grad school awaits me some time in the next five years and could make a reasonable guess as to the degree and discipline, but I'm in no particular hurry to get there. Even in this economy, I'm not in a rush to get my academic career started (though this is only Week 3 of unemployment - stay tuned).

It's not that I don't feel the strong pull of libraries and university campuses, and Being Able to Afford My Own Weekly Copy of the Economist is an income category I aspire to and take into consideration when applying for jobs. But I want to spend some time working. Exploring. Trying new things. I know I can do the books-and-writing-and-education thing, and I know I love that. But in even a cursory glance over the last five years I have to admit that the times I grew the most and felt the most challenged and alive were the times I spent doing things I doubted I'd be any good at at all: working as a camp counselor, living in a Cambodian slum, spending a year as a farmworker. Learning a new language. Singing silly camp songs in front of large groups of people. Raising chickens. Taking care of toddlers. Leading yoga classes. Cooking church dinners. The times I've spent realizing I have something more than my brain to offer.

So with that in mind, here begins the next adventure, which will land me (job or no job, hopefully the former) in New York City in a few weeks.

a story, and why I shouldn't move to San Francisco

2010-07-05T12:13:00.002-05:00

Every six months or so, when I’m feeling particularly special and original, I’ll spend a few minutes on the blog Stuff White People Like for a little dose of reality. There I am reminded that many of my favorite things (Taking a year off, Indie Music, Scarves, Being the only white person around, NPR, Vegetarianism, Yoga, and Barack Obama, for example) are, in fact not unique to me but are shared by many of my peers of a certain education level, class, political persuasion, economic status and yes, skin color.

I just happen to not run into too many of these other people and can therefore fool myself some of the time into thinking that I am the only one (or at least one of the only ones). This is why I shouldn’t move to San Francisco. I fear I’d lose my sense of identity in a place where organic gardening, fair trade coffee, making your own things, recycling and backyard chickens were passé.

All that to say I can’t resist the opportunity to poke a little fun at myself for the following story.

Food is hot right now. Stuff White People Like includes posts on Picking Their Own Fruit, Hummus, Expensive Sandwiches, Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops, Asian Fusion Food, Sushi, Breakfast Places, Wine, Microbreweries, Dinner Parties, Tea, and Organic Food.

Food is hot, so how’s this for a boy-meets-girl:

She is working on an organic CSA farm. He is a five-star chef and Healthy Eating Specialist at Whole Foods.

She is probably reading Barbara Kingsolver or Wendell Berry. He is probably reading Michael Pollan or Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

She can talk at length about cooking from scratch and the importance of soil fertility. He can talk at length about the origins of pretty much any cuisine. They can both talk your ear off about kale and agriculture in Ventura County.

She’s thinking about a career in development studies with a focus on food security or agricultural issues. He’s about to start a Masters in Food Studies.

Oh yeah, and they met at a farmers market.

True story. His name is Mark. And we share passions for World Cup Soccer, Cooking, People Watching, Camping, Pandora, and Intelligent Conversation, among other things. (Of these, only the World Cup and Camping are featured on Stuff White People Like. I checked.)

double take

2010-06-25T19:17:00.002-05:00

Another confession: One of my greatest pleasures is nearly causing traffic accidents by being places no young white woman is expected to be while doing things no young white woman is expected to be doing.

This afternoon as I was driving the farm Kawasaki (like an ATV) out to the field to do my harvesting I noticed a man driving by on the road lean his head out of his window and turn to look not once, not twice, but three times. It was the same look I got in Wal-Mart (yes, Wal-Mart, because sissy rainboots from Target just weren't going to do) when the woman at the check-out asked me why I needed big black rubber boots and I answered that I was a farm worker (for the record, I have since worn a big hole in aforementioned black boots). It was the same look I got in Cambodia when spotted squatting in the shade under my house hand-washing my clothes every Sunday afternoon. A number of chickens, dogs, and small children narrowly escaped injury under the moto wheels of the people who turned to stare. It's the same look I get any time I walk along the road in Nairobi (white women are, after all, expected to travel in the safety of their Land Rovers).

But the secret sense of pride I'm used to feeling is a little more mixed now. I'm starting to recognize that it's only because I'm so well-off that I can choose to live in places or do work that those who live/work there might not choose if given the option. I can dabble in life in a Cambodian slum (with the safety of the world's best med-evac insurance should I contract a life-threatening illness that my hosts deal with all the time), hang out in a garden in Kibera for an afternoon (and afterwards head to a US-style coffeeshop for a snack and a latte), or spend a year harvesting vegetables (with my longest day of field work being 8:30-5:00, unlike the 10 hours a day, 6 days a week worked by the immigrant strawberry pickers in the next field).

It takes a little of the thrill out of hearing guera (Spanish slang for blonde girl), barang (Khmer, meaning French person - three guesses who colonized Cambodia), or mzungu (Swahili for white person, with etymological roots in "dizzy" and "aimless wanderer") to think about it that way.

domestic

2010-04-07T23:28:00.008-05:00

Femivore. I can see my brother rolling his eyes. Here it comes, some cross between two of the things he understands least about me - my distaste for meat and my tendency to pontificate on gender issues in the name of feminism.

Close, but not quite. I ran into "femivorism" in a recent NY Times article describing women pursuing "self-sufficiency, autonomy, and personal fulfillment" in orienting their lives around being as involved in their family's food sources as possible (backyard gardening, composting, raising chickens, urban beekeeping etc.) These "tomato-canning feminists" are about more than just tasty, healthy food - their commitment is to reducing their impact on the environment and counteracting materialism as well, to making their homes places of production not just consumption.

It probably goes without saying that I resonate with that vision. When I'm honest with myself, I recognize that some of my moments of greatest contentment and joy have been hanging my laundry in the backyard wearing muddy work boots and an apron over my yoga clothes, taking a break from cooking a meal with ingredients I mostly either grew myself or bartered for at a farmers' market and trying to keep my curious hens out of the laundry basket. I love all the things I'm learning - how to maintain a compost pile, harvest onions, make cheese, cook with turnips and yes, even kill a chicken.

To back-pedal a little bit - I still love books and ideas. I will go to grad school (eventually). I confess that I often use a couple of hours of my day off to go to the library and read the Economist, and that one of the biggest thrills of the last few months was attending a local city council meeting. But it's also hard to picture myself being satisfied in the world of journal articles and computer screens and academic conferences without an equal measure of fresh air and growing things and recipes modified and embellished until they're unrecognizable. I want to honor the education I'm getting right now, and the skills of my mother and aunts and grandmother, all of whom were raised with some experience of feeding and clothing themselves and their families.

Wendell Berry writes

The callings and disciplines of the...domestic arts are stationed all along the way from the farm to the prepared dinner, from the forest to the dinner table, from stewardship of the land to hospitality to friends and strangers. These arts are as demanding and gratifying, as instructive and as pleasing as the so-called fine arts. To learn them, to practice them, to honor and reward them is, I believe, our profoundest calling. Our reward is that they will enrich our lives and make us glad.

So here I am, an equally avid student of the domestic arts as I was of the liberal ones. Living in Cambodia taught me that as a member of the most affluent, materialist society ever, one of the most important things I can do with my life is pay close attention to what I consume - to start living simply and maybe help others like me do the same. And I'm finding Berry's words to be true - not only is this a profound calling, it has enriched my life and made me glad.

Thanks to Sarah and Amy for doing photographic justice to life on the Farm!

complete

2010-03-30T00:40:00.004-05:00

Growing up I had an entertaining little book entitled You know you're an MK when..., including entries like "You can't answer the question "Where are you from?" and "You grew up with a maid". Somewhere in that list is (or ought to be) "You have strong views on the best way to kill a chicken".

My introduction to chicken killing was as at age six, peeking from behind a bush as my Dad swung a hen by its legs, set it down, and chopped off its head (this was a part of 3 months of training in the bush shortly after we moved to Kenya, which would prepare my parents for 15 years of umm...living in Nairobi). Despite how alarming the experience was for me at age six, I was thankful this morning that I watched.

Warning - what follows is a bit grim.

One of my hens got sick about a month ago and never really recovered. She lost a lot of weight and motor control, and I had noticed her deteriorating particularly in the last few days. This morning I found her upside-down in the coop, bleeding from where she scratched herself while trying in vain to get back on her feet. I've known for weeks that I would eventually have to kill this chicken, and this morning I knew it had to be today.

A visiting farmer friend dispatched yet another one of our sick chickens last week (yes, my chicken mortality rate is pretty dismal) by wringing its neck. After digging a hole and with verbal instructions from Erynn (who watched the last time - I was away from the farm that day) I tried it. I swung the chicken a couple of times and I screamed and dropped it and it wasn't dead. As Erynn noted, it didn't even look particularly fazed.

What followed was a grim discussion of various other chicken killing methods, as Kat, Erynn and I stood around the little chicken (who had ended up in her grave-to-be). We debated the merits of milk cartons, axes, and even the bag-and-exhaust-pipe, before settling on what I had saw my dad do 17 years ago.

We did it. I swung the hen by her legs for about 30 seconds to make her dizzy and still, and Kat held her down while I cut her throat with our sharpest knife (which, horribly, was not very sharp). I can tell the story with a little humor, but the truth is I was sobbing when it was finally done.

But I did it. I was involved in every part of that chicken's life - from choosing her at the feed store to ending her life when she was clearly suffering. As difficult as it was, and as much I hope I'll never have to do that again, it somehow feels complete.

intervention

2010-02-28T23:30:00.002-06:00

This morning I read a short blurb in the local newspaper reporting recent progress by scientists in genetically altering the Aedes aegypti to suppress the development of wings in the females. The modification would be spread through the males (whose wings are unaffected), eventually wiping out the mosquitoes, providing a cheaper, more environmentally friendly and equitable method of control than chemical sprays.

I have no soft spot for those female Aedes aegypti. They are the vectors of dengue fever, a horrible experience for the 50 million people who come down with it every year (and one that is sometimes fatal, especially for children). Two-fifths of the world's population is at risk (mostly in Southeast Asia and Africa) and there is no vaccine and no treatment.

So getting rid of this mosquito is a good thing, right?

The more I learn about the natural world and the intricate connections in ecosystems, the more hesitant I am to say "yes". More often than not when it comes to making drastic changes to any environment or population, intervention tends to beget more intervention. Dam a river for flood control and then spend decades and millions of dollars trying to restore local fish populations and prevent downstream beaches from eroding, only to realize that the sediment building up behind your dam will eventually force it to give way (resulting in a flood far more catastrophic than any the dam prevented). Refine wheat to create a whiter, "tastier" bread, only to find that the most important nutrients were in the parts of the grain removed during refining, and then spend millions figuring out how to fortify flour with the nutrients you removed (and come up with something as absurd as whole wheat white flour). Get rid of the pigs in your garbage dumps to prevent the spread of swine flu and then realize the huge volume of waste they disposed of and have a trash problem to deal with. Eradicate Aedes aegypti and...who knows? The question of intervention gets even more complicated when you consider the prior interventions that made these things necessary (settling on flood plains, creating cultures of waste, heating up the planet and expanding the habitats of disease vectors like Aedes aegypti). Are we so locked into patterns of working against nature (poison all the insects in a field) rather than with it (planting habitat for beneficial insect populations) that we can't stop the cycle of intervening?

confessions

2010-02-04T19:04:00.002-06:00

#1: I just gave antibiotics to livestock.

I dosed (actually, per the instructions of Pat at the feed store, double dosed) my chickens with Sulmet to prevent whatever illness is making one of them sick from getting to all of them. While I know heavy and indiscriminate use of antibiotics in livestock is a big problem (it's often used to make up for the effects of the unhealthy diets and unsanitary conditions animals are raised in, and it produces antibiotic-resistant bacteria), my poor sick hen is a little different. She likely has coccidiosis, which domestic birds get from contact with the droppings of wild birds (which assumes that your poultry has enjoyed the outdoors).

#2: Animal suffering really gets to me.

For years when people asked about why I was a vegetarian I made sure to distance myself from any animal rights connection. I didn't stop eating meat because I thought killing animals was cruel - I stopped because I didn't like meat. That's still the primary reason I'm a vegetarian - I prefer meatless meals (and I've been veg long enough that no matter how good the carne asada taco sounded at 2:30 am, my body will be sure I pay for eating it). I'm also increasingly convinced that eating fewer animal products (and that includes milk, eggs and cheese, all of which I love) is better for the environment and promotes a more just distribution of the world's resources. But recent events on the farm make me wonder if there isn't a little bit of aversion to animal suffering in the background too.

By "recent events on the farm" I mean a lot of exposure to animal suffering in the last week - one chicken crippled by some mysterious illness, another one sick, and a rabbit that got hit by a tractor in our field today. I've avoided all three because it's just so hard to watch.

As a kid I remember boycotting cartoons and seriously wondering if I could ever be happy again whenever one of my hamsters would get old and start to deteriorate. In high school I always felt ashamed when I had to excuse myself from watching a goat slaughtering as soon as the animal started to suffocate (which is to say I couldn't last through the first 30 seconds). While my friends ate raw kidney and marveled at the contents of the animal's stomach I'd sit a safe distance away trying to ward off the lightness on the edges of my vision. In Cambodia I could barely eat my way through a small frog because...well...it still very much resembled a frog. Now I find myself asking my housemates to do more of the chicken upkeep because it's hard to be around the ones that are in pain.

I don't like this about myself. It interferes with the self-image I try to cultivate of a strong, independent woman unencumbered by the need for rich-world comforts like toilet paper or a rodent-and-cockroach-free bedroom or food that no longer resembles the living thing it once was.

But there it is.

wither

2010-01-18T15:27:00.002-06:00

Whether it was a Freudian slip or simply another manifestation of my post-Cambodia struggle with homophones, I sent several people to a non-existent website this week. While trying to direct folks to an article called “Whither Wheaton: the evangelical flagship college charts a new course”, I recommended several people check out witherwheaton.org – an appropriate mistake, one friend noted, considering the amount I’ve complained about the College in the last 2+ years.

While it’s true that Wheaton may not have been the best place for me, and that particularly my junior and senior years I felt out of place in chapels, chafed at the narrow ranges of views permitted among professors and guest lecturers, and sought out ways to study off campus, I don’t want to see Wheaton “wither”, and realize that I’ll probably reflect back on the experience more fondly with a few years’ distance. Despite my frustrations and frequent tirades (of which my parents and roommates were the long-suffering beneficiaries), I never seriously considered transferring, and am deeply grateful for the friendships and opportunities Wheaton gave me.

Still, I can’t help wondering how much of who I am and what I think today is a reaction against Wheaton’s conservative side. I’m for marriage equality and think abortion should be legal. I think global warming is a big enough problem that I’m holding off on owning a car for as long as possible and I’m living on an organic farm that can’t exactly escape the accusations of “hippie” and “commune”. I’m secretly rooting for the public option in healthcare reform in hopes that it will slowly take over until we have a single-payer system (and my politics would generally make me a better European than American). Though I wish he hadn’t ordered the surge in Afghanistan, I am apparently one of the only white people not souring on Barack Obama(and I’ve been a fan so long that I got up at 4am and stood outside in Springfield in January to hear him announce his run for president). All of these things are open to debate and subject to change. Knowing I would have vehemently disagreed with all of this four years ago helps keep things in perspective!

Still, I have the sneaky suspicion that this wasn’t where Wheaton meant me to end up - most importantly because I consider all of what I listed compatible with my identity as a Christian.

Also, I no longer consider myself an evangelical. I happily shed the term for two reasons:

a) Why hold on to something so loaded with connotations of social, political and theological beliefs I don’t hold? (And, for the record, I suspect that few people who do not consider themselves to be either an evangelical or a fundamentalist who recognizes a distinction between the two.)
b) I no longer believe that Christianity has a monopoly on spiritual truth or the sole vision of the way the world should be, so the evangelism part of it no longer applies.

That’s easier to say in a blog post after I had the humorous experience of “outing” myself to a number of Wheaton professors and administrators during a mock interview for the Rhodes. We spent a good 10 minutes on my definition of social justice and how it related to my understanding of salvation (which, needless to say, did not come up in my actual interview). Nonetheless, I post this with some trepidation. We’ll see if it stays up after I get comments from my most faithful reader (hi Mom!).

room

2010-01-18T00:20:00.002-06:00

As I've read newspapers and browsed news websites in the past week, I've noticed myself consciously avoiding coverage of Haiti. I can't face the raw emotion of the pictures dominating the NY Times website or the only thing scarier than fatality and injury statistics - the fact that five days after the earthquake the situation is such a mess that there still aren't reliable statistics to give.

I haven't thought about Haiti much, and haven't really followed what's going on. Part of me feels bad about that, and part of me knows I don't have a choice. It's where my heart is right now.

One of my housemates asked earlier this week how I dealt/deal with exposure to poverty and deep human suffering. I think of it in three phases:

anger
Though kids my own age begging at the windows of our car in Nairobi traffic was an everyday occurrence, something snapped inside me one now-infamous Christmas Eve. My parents had started buying peanuts from street vendors and opening the paper cones to give them to street kids (so they wouldn't re-sell the peanuts to buy glue). However, no matter how long we were stuck in traffic and how hungry I was, I was never allowed to eat those peanuts - too much of a health risk. After we'd each opened our one Christmas Eve present I proposed a new system where we would buy juice boxes or something else that I was allowed to eat. When my parents nixed the idea, I stormed off in tears, unable to understand how they would give another child something they considered dangerous to their own. I started volunteering at a clinic in Kibera, and remember not wanting to eat when I'd get home, and feeling paralyzed by the knowledge of how many people could be fed with the $10 I spent on a CD or seeing a movie. My response started (as it probably does for every privileged person) on a very personal level, in the tender (and I would say holy) space before I learned to rationalize inequality. I felt above all angry.

guilt
I spent most of college moving my understanding of poverty from a personal, micro level, to the systemic. My classes taught me about debt and unfair trading policies and the mixed records of multi-national corporations, putting the images of poverty I struggled to deal with in context. The shift in scale only made me feel more overwhelmed by the enormity of the world's problems, and my complicity in its broken systems. I felt above all guilty.

something like healing
My six months in Cambodia swung me back towards the personal, and opened up a space for me to rest. I wouldn't have predicted that living next to a sweatshop would lighten the burden of guilt I felt for being a privileged white girl, but it did. Snapshots of poverty, like the images of disaster zones or the impressions of a walk through a slum neighborhood, don't tell the whole story. Becoming, in a very imperfect way, a part of the community I lived in in Phnom Penh taught me that - obvious as it sounds - suffering people and poor communities are more than the sum of their problems. I don't say this to minimize the violence, hunger, disease and exploitation my neighbors faced, and I realized they were far from the most destitute people - but there was a concentration of life in that community that went beyond the density of the people living there. Yes, many of my neighbors were poor, but they were also moto drivers and factory workers and cooks, young and old, brassy and shy and funny and considerate and blunt and creative. My strongest impressions a year after I left are of who they were, not of the difficulties of their circumstances.

Returning to the US and feeling again the temptation to be overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and helplessness at the world's problems, I offered myself some space: to not try and wrap my head around more than what could fit in my heart for awhile, to allow myself to feel pain and anger for the suffering of the people I know, but not to try and extend those feelings to every painful situation I hear about. Right now, that means there’s not much room in me for Haiti.

addict

2010-01-06T22:25:00.004-06:00

Sitting on the tarmac in Nairobi (plane air-conditioning off, toddlers screaming), I had plenty of time to anticipate the sinking feeling waiting for me when I touched down in LA. Much as I love where I am and what I'm doing right now, it's always a bit hard for me to return to the US without knowing when I'll be out of the country again. For a couple of months after I got back from Cambodia I would wake up every morning and have to spend the first few minutes of my day trying to find something exciting enough to get me out of bed. A bit of post-viral depression might have been involved, but I also sensed that the things I once used to hang my days on (I'm having lunch with so-and-so, or I'm getting a paper back - and yes, I am that big of a nerd) were no longer sufficient. After six months of constantly reaching for new words and tying my brain in knots around another culture, the safety and predictability of life in the US left me bored and unsatisfied. And as I've started to think about what I'd liked to be doing six months from now when my time at the Farm is over, I'm realizing that where I live and work (meaning not in the US) is almost as important as what I do.

Enter the Economist. Insightful as that publication is, reading it isn’t usually much of an exercise in self-discovery, but around Hour 4 of my marathon trip from Kenya back to the Farm in Oxnard, I found some food for thought on pg 85. An article entitled “The Others” explored the draw of choosing to be a foreigner, and gave me some words to start describing my addiction to anything not here.

The article described how being in a foreign environment can make the mundane “super real”, intensifying otherwise routine experiences and evoking, “the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration and irresponsibility”. Every night in Phnom Penh I’d be in bed by 9:00 (most of my family wouldn’t be asleep until 11:00), exhausted from the stress of biking through traffic, the elation of being called “granddaughter” for the first time, the difficulty of trying to learn a card game in Khmer. The range of emotions was so intense the first week I wasn’t sure I’d be able to handle 25 more.

I find myself particularly identifying with (and relishing) the last feeling mentioned – irresponsibility. Anyone who’s lived with me in the US knows that I’m always wound up about something (or lots of things) in this culture. Being abroad, even in places where the injustice that bothers me might be worse or more blatant, lets me relax because I don’t have to feel as implicated or responsible.

And then there’s the fact that living somewhere else is entertaining when not downright hilarious. Other cultures’ social codes can be “arbitrary and absurd” and “if you happen to stand outside of them, as a foreigner always does, then life can be a continuous comedy” – Kenyans with the need to shake hands with everyone in the room, Cambodians telling me I was fat before they even knew my name…

Part of my decision to go back to Nairobi last month was to start exploring what role that part of the world might have in my future. Rich as my time there was, and as much as I felt at home, I left increasingly convinced that the sense of boredom I sometimes get in the US isn’t due to homesickness but wanderlust. I’m addicted to being foreign.

the end of counting

2009-12-24T05:44:00.001-06:00

I was hoping it would rain at least once while I was here. I’ve missed the smell of the rain and not being able to hear anything else when it’s really pouring on a tin roof. I got my wish yesterday, in the form of a huge thunderstorm that turned the compound into a puddle, knocked trees down all over Nairobi, and left our electricity even more unpredictable than usual.

Except it’s not supposed to rain like that in December, in Nairobi or anywhere in Kenya. December is supposed to be warm and sunny and dry, the midpoint between the short rains in October and the long rainy season in March/April.

Any Kenyan will tell you that the weather is now impossible to predict. Farmers plant without knowing if there will be enough rain for their crops to mature, or if they’ll lose their seeds to flooding. Kenya’s pastoralist groups once had a sophisticated understanding of seasonal cycles, enabling them to predict droughts decades in advance and plan their movements to sustain their herds. But in the last two decades, the elders of these groups have reached “the end of counting”. It’s not just that some of their knowledge is being lost as young people move to cities and take on a more global cultural identity, it’s that a finely-tuned understanding of the environment developed over hundreds of years has been rendered completely irrelevant by changes in the last twenty or thirty years.

Here climate change is not polemical, abstract or debatable. It’s as tangible as the skinny Maasai cattle that are still clogging up Nairobi traffic months after one of East Africa’s worst droughts started to ease and the prayers of a whole country for rain in its season.

nairobi

2009-12-20T11:37:00.009-06:00

There is at least one question I can't come up with a satisfactory answer to no matter how many times I get asked it: "what was it like growing up in Nairobi/Kenya/Africa?" I usually launch into a little speech about how Nairobi is a modern city of nearly 5 million people (to dispel the myth that Africa is all villages and huts) in the Kenyan highlands (to explain that not everywhere in Africa is unbearably hot) with some infrastructure and crime issues (so yes, my experience growing up was still a wee bit different than yours'...water shortages and carjackings, anyone?). At that point I usually trail off and want to turn the question around - what was it like growing up in your hometown? It was home. It just sort of...was.

I don't think being back four and a half years after I stopped living here is going to make me any better at answering that question, but the last week has at least reminded me of one thing - this place is home.

A few of the things I didn't even know I missed that I've gotten to re-connect with...

1. the food mangoes, bananas, pineapples, perfect honeydew melons, mandazis, Fanta orange, Weetabix (always better here than in the US), Ethiopian food, and of course, the universal appeal of fried potatoes (featured here in bhajia form)

(note to aspiring artsy photographers with no actual skill...just rest the camera on some flat surface and shoot in the general direction of your subject)

2. the football
(particularly evenings like this one, when ManU loses 3-0 while Arsenal wins by the same margin!)

3. my family here
By far the most poignant reunion was with this woman, Jocinta, who was our househelper for fourteen years She told me she was so happy to have "her girl" home, and how pleased she was that I had gotten so tall and so fat. I was holding back tears the whole time and I think she was too.

4. the sickening feeling of approaching a riot. Not something I was hoping to relive, but such is life in Nairobi. Also wasn't looking to reconnect with equatorial sunburn, power outages, mosquitoes, or upset stomachs, but have failed on all counts.

5. the wildlife
exotic:

and not-so-exotic:

Our dog, Snoopy, who has been with two other families since we left and more or less didn't remember us. Oh well. At least we were able to tell her new owners that she howls when she hears scales played on the piano and that she'll doggy paddle in the air if you pour water on her head.

6. for lack of a better descriptor...street culture
We went to buy an internet modem and ended up hanging out with Father Christmas and this colonial character who makes an appearance in many Kenyan comedy sketches

Most of their routine was dancing

Hopefully this explains some things for those who have wondered where I learned my dance moves.

At some point in the last few years I convinced myself that I had not real home and was doomed to be a rootless wanderer, at least until the magical age of 30. While the latter part of that is probably still true, every time I laugh out loud at something that hasn't changed in Nairobi, I suspect the former just might be false.

consumer charity II

2009-12-02T00:00:00.001-06:00

Yesterday I wrote about some of the ethical complications I see in the conspicuous efforts of companies to tie buying certain products to charity donations. It’s probably not surprising that this isn’t the only US “giving” practice that makes me cringe.

On my way to and from visiting the Angkor Wat temples while I was in Cambodia, one particular village caught my eye. All the houses were made of the same green corrugated iron (which strikes me as impractical in a hot, sunny climate), but this didn’t make it stand out – groups like Habitat for Humanity and Tabitha make houses that look similar. What was special about that village was that in front of every house, placed close to the road for maximum visibility, was a sign with little American flags announcing the name of the donor whose funds had built the house. I wonder what kind of people really needed to know that their names would be displayed in a language none of the locals would be able to read in order to give money to construct a home.

I see this as an extreme example of common need in the West to make our giving personal. A more typical scenario is child sponsorship. For $30-35 a month I can provide a child with school books, basic medical care, and a nutritious lunch every day (or something along those lines). In turn, I get the child’s picture for my refrigerator and receive occasional letters from him or her.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a bad arrangement. Rather than just throwing money at big problems like poverty, underdevelopment, malnutrition or child labor, I get to know (or at least think I know) that my money is making life better for little Joseph in Tanzania.

Except it’s rarely that simple. The reality is that organizations like World Vision and Save the Children with child sponsorship programs often pool the money for sponsorship within a certain community – so I’m supporting Joseph’s village, not just Joseph. That seems fair. After all, it’s a bit offensive to think that Joseph is receiving more care than his playmates because I picked him out of a catalog of children. But even though the funds may be combined for community projects, child sponsorship organizations still use a significant amount of their resources facilitating and administering the connection between the donor and the sponsored child. If those resources could be going instead to providing more books or mosquito nets, at what point does sponsorship become more about me than about the kids?

Perhaps it’s natural for us to want a human connection in our attempts to do something to address the suffering in the world. And perhaps its better to use money connecting sponsors with kids than for that money to not be given in the first place (though I’m not convinced – perhaps a future post on that). But at least we can start by being honest about the importance of feeling good in our attempts to do good.

consumer charity

2009-11-30T23:58:00.003-06:00

This post deserves a bit of a “Sarah on her high horse” warning. Sometimes I say or write things not because I think I’ve got a particular issue figured out, but because I want to ask uncomfortable questions of myself and the world around me. With that in mind, then, one of the questions I’ve been asking recently is when the choices I/we make in the name of helping others are more about feeling good than actually doing good.

The advertisement sidebar on my Facebook page tells me that tomorrow Starbucks will be donating 5 cents of the cost of every drink to the (red) campaign. Money for people with AIDS in Africa – it’s a good thing, right?

Maybe. Leaving a discussion of the actual impacts of charity efforts like the (red) campaign aside for a moment, I wonder what they say about us as US consumers. To begin with, there’s the absurdity of using the donation of a few dollars or cents of the profits from a purchase to some worthy cause as an incentive to buy something. The obvious question here is – if you really wanted to help, why not donate the whole $15 cost of your t-shirt?

Okay, so maybe your t-shirt purchase isn’t so much about helping the poor, but if you’re going to buy the shirt anyway, isn’t it better to go for one that will support someone in need? Again, I want to say, “not so fast”. I wonder if by highlighting special opportunities to make particular ethical consumption choices, companies like Apple, Starbucks and the Gap aren’t distracting us from the fact that all our consumer choices have social, political and environmental ramifications in the developing world. Does a dollar or two given back to the communities in Lesotho where (red) t-shirts are made make up for the fact that what you pay for the jeans on the next rack is the same as what the woman who sews them in Cambodia makes in a month? Does a few cents donation from your latte do anything to address the environmental degradation of non-fair trade, non-organic coffee? Though it’s impossible to measure, does the good you do with the occasional contribution to consumer charity outweigh the negatives impact of the product you buy? Of all the non-charity items you get from those companies?

Perhaps my argument is not so much with campaigns like (red) themselves as it is with how the highlight the lack of a bigger conversation about the amount of stuff we buy, where it comes from, and how the earth and other people are treated to get them to us in the first place. At any rate, I don’t think hitting up Starbucks tomorrow will be my way of marking World AIDS day.

relative

2009-11-27T23:22:00.003-06:00

Traveling to central California for Thanksgiving is helping me put some things in perspective. First: what exactly constitutes "large-scale" agriculture. I thought the farms around ours in Ventura County were pretty big (often hundreds of acres planted in the same crops), but riding the train through central California with it's monocrop orchards as far as the eye can see has made me rethink.

And then there's my definition of rural. The Farm feels like the middle of nowhere sometimes. I can't comfortably bike to anywhere I'd want to go other than the beach, and we have no neighbors. But a few days in Mariposa County (population, I'm told, 17,000) has been instructive. For example, the following from the sheriff's report in the weekly local newspaper:

Nov. 16: There was a big dog versus little dog incident on Jones Street. A cat was up a tree on Silva Road.
Nov. 17: A cat was in a tree on Sullivan Road.
Nov. 18: Residents of La Rosa Road had bear concerns. A dog was in distress on Sixth Street.
Nov. 19: A horse was running amok on Cole Road.
Nov. 20: There was an out of control juvenile on Triangle Rd. Loose goats were causing destruction on Crown Lead Road.
Nov. 22: Juveniles were on the roof of Mariposa Elementary School. A raccoon was injured on Broadway in Coulterville. There were suspicious circumstances on Allred Road.

thanksgiving

2009-11-26T22:05:00.001-06:00

Today I bid a fond farewell to the game of “this time last year I was…” I had planned on spending my Cambodian thanksgiving eating roast chicken and maybe an apple pie with friends. Instead my only distinct memory of Thanksgiving Day 2008 is of waking up at 2 am and being flooded with relief seeing my dad walk in. The rest is a blur of that six days in the hospital in Singapore: IVs, the attacks on Mumbai and the take-over of the Thai airport on CNN, the cleaning lady who helpfully pointed out that my legs were the color of beet root, the nurses who were always trying to get me to take Tylenol (which, like pretty much everything I ate, I would throw up 15 minutes later) and the doctors who kept promising that my condition would dramatically improve in a day or two.

I spent the month of December reassuring people – that while I had been seriously miserable, I hadn’t been seriously sick, and that dengue would have no lasting effects, that I was fine and that what I experienced was far less dramatic than what most people picture for a med evac. I was so focused on trying to keep a brave face that the emotional force of it had to sneak up on me.

The truth is, I was rooting to be evacuated. Even before I got sick I was at the lowest point of my six month internship, tired and dreading having to balance host family politics in expressing my gratitude and saying my goodbyes. I felt a wave of relief when I heard that my platelets were just too low to stay in Phnom Penh, that I would be on my way to Singapore less than six hours after going in to the SOS clinic. I thought that because I had been so eager to leave Cambodia it wouldn’t hurt. I was surprised, then, to end up in tears trying to talk about the end of my internship, and to have recurring dreams that I was back in Cambodia but couldn’t find the neighborhood I had lived in.

While my fever was over before I got back to the US, dengue lasted longer. After a month of Harry Potter and West Wing I had recovered enough to function at school, but it was months before my physical energy caught up with the rest of me. My hair started falling out in earnest in February, in sufficient quantity for my mother to suggest buying a wig. If I pushed too hard during my last semester I would start to taste the same exhaustion that got me wheelchairs all the way back to Chicago.

Laying in my hospital bed a year ago, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to predict how I’d be spending this Thanksgiving – taking an Amtrak train to central California, with dirt still under my fingernails from harvesting veggies for Thanksgiving dinners for hundreds of people. I can only guess at what part of the world I’ll be in this time next year. But I’m thankful.

rhodes interview

2009-11-21T18:17:00.001-06:00

I finished up the Rhodes interview process this afternoon, and didn't get the scholarship. The interview process went okay. The other candidates were, as promised, interesting and engaging folks, and the tenor of the time with the selection committee was less intense than I had expected. The committee went out of their way to communicate that they wanted us to feel comfortable and relaxed and that the interviews themselves wouldn't be aggressive or combative. Friday evening was the "get to know you coffee", which went fairly well, and after which we drew times for our interviews the next day. The interviews themselves were only 20 minutes long. The questions I was asked were all insightful and fair, but it took me some time to be comfortable enough to answer well. They asked me about a range of subjects including the interaction between Christianity and feminism, the cause of the global financial crisis, my career aspirations, how growing up in Kenya impacted how I saw development and what I hoped to do, whose work I would like to model my own after, and what I thought of the relationship between organic standards and agribusiness, and what I thought of the Cambodian government's approach to rural development (promoting large-scale agriculture). There were also several questions about authors I had either not heard of or had heard of and knew the broad outlines of but hadn't read. At no time in the process did I feel like my having graduated from Wheaton or being a Christian was a liability, and the district secretary went out of his way to express how glad he was to see my application and how he hoped to see more from Wheaton.

I left the interview knowing that I hadn't nailed it and wouldn't be getting the scholarship. The group of candidates (11 of us) spent another few hours together before they did two brief call-back interviews with two of the other candidates and then announced their decision (one of the candidates who had been called back and another who hadn't).

While I'm disappointed (more with not feeling like I presented myself as well as I could than with the outcome), the process has been very valuable and I'm so glad I applied (especially considering my initial ambivalence about it). As I said in a text message I sent out to a number of friends afterwards, I've felt overwhelmed several times particularly in the last month by the amount of love and support I've received from my communities in the Chicago area, southern California, and around the world.

Thanks!

life as a duckling

2009-11-12T00:28:00.002-06:00

Here's a link to something I wrote about my time in Cambodia that recently got posted:
http://www.servantsasia.org/index.php/news/8-general/419-my-experience-of-entering-a-slum-as-a-learner

safe

2009-10-17T10:45:00.001-05:00

Last night was my first southern California earthquake, a magnitude of 3.2 with an epicenter in our zip code that had me a little freaked out in a room of unperturbed Californians. It started a conversation about the various disaster drills that punctuated our days growing up. We practiced two such catastrophe-readiness procedures at my school in Nairobi. One siren sounded to send everyone to the soccer fields in the event of a fire, and another prompted the intruder (aka terrorist – and this was even pre-9/11) drill, where the teachers would lock the doors and we would all be quiet and stay away from the windows. While my US friends got snow days off, we had riot days when violent student protests shut down the center of town and prevented us from getting to school.

As excited as I am that I’ll be back in Nairobi in less than two months, I also feel the rise of the familiar and unwelcome sense of fear. I remember the morning I woke up to be told that I had slept through hearing the guard in the compound next door screaming as he was tortured by thieves who returned three times over four nights (my brother heard the whole thing). I remember my heart racing at the gate of our compound every time we’d arrive home after dark, knowing that carjackers preferred to strike at that vulnerable moment. I remember on my last visit feeling helpless sitting in a matatu next to a man who was trying to steal my phone, knowing that if I called “mwizi” (Swahili for thief) he might be lynched in front of me. And I remember knowing that something had shifted in me when I cried myself to sleep that night for both my own fear and the poverty that drove the man next to me to attempt the robbery.

Growing up in Nairobi gave me a somewhat warped sense of personal safety. If I woke in the night to the sound of sirens or gunshots I would run my mind over each layer of security measures between my family and the outside world, from the hedge around our compound, the guard at the gate, the motioned-sensor lights, the bars on the windows, the multiple locks and bolts on the doors to the metal cage we built to separate the second story of our maisonette, and the panic button installed by my parents’ bed, ready to summon a truckload of private security guards. On trips back to the US I would struggle to fall asleep at my grandmother’s house in rural Pennsylvania knowing that only a single, simple lock separated me from the outside.

I still like to keep my car doors locked. I still watch the cameras and jewelry of my friends when we’re in a crowd and worry about carrying a bag that isn’t closed with a zipper. And I hate the thought of having to live that way, and knowing that I was one of Nairobi’s residents who could afford to be most insulated from the insecurity. This week I read an article on the recent rise in kidnappings in the city, with the targets being wealthy westerners but also middle-class Kenyans. It makes me ache.

unharvested time

2009-10-15T21:39:00.003-05:00

I spent today banished from the Farm, exiled by my housemates on account of an inflated sense of my own importance and a bit of an outburst yesterday (which probably had as much to do with sliding around in the mud in my tennis shoes on the ten acres as it did with feeling overwhelmed by work). I’d taken on a lot of the administrative responsibility for the CSA and was starting to feel like the veggies wouldn’t be harvested, boxed and delivered without me. So, since today was our biggest CSA day (with 18 boxes to get out the door), they sent me away for a day off the farm.

In this unplanned free time I came across two lines from Robert Frost's poem "Unharvested" that I had written in my journal:

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan...

I'm getting used to letting some of our crops go unharvested. There are partial rows of radishes and arugula that are approaching jungle thickness and a row of green leaf lettuce that has long since outgrown the size of anything I've ever seen in a store. But I'm finding it difficult to welcome unharvested time, to tell the internal voice that urges me towards productivity and efficiency to pipe down every now and then. I've all but convinced myself that rest and contemplation are only possible when I feel in control of everything that's going on in my life. So I'm thankful for days like today. I read for a few hours, spent some time on the beach (and even more time finding a beach where parking wasn't too expensive and there weren't aggressive squirrels), and left my computer at home. The world continued to turn, my chickens survived six hours of my absence, and 18 boxes of produce found their way home.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan...

resistance

2009-10-06T23:24:00.001-05:00

Some days I wish I had been blogging a year ago while I was in Cambodia, telling the stories that so often come to mind now when they were fresh (though, considering I only managed a handful of email updates in six months, this is probably wishful thinking).

Yesterday was the anniversary of one of my favorite of these stories. My "job" in Cambodia was to assist different organizations working to help poor communities threatened with forced eviction. The endangered community I spent the most time in was Dey Krahorm, a poor neighborhood on a bit of highly-valued real estate in downtown Phnom Penh who had resisted illegal attempts by the government and powerful business interests to bulldoze their community for several years.

In early October of last year, men hired by the company claiming (falsely) to own the land started hanging around outside Dey Krahorm's small community center, where many of the children took art classes, threatening to tear it down. So Dey Krahorm invited their neighbors and friends to a Musical Resistance Concert to be held the next day on the foundation of the community center, whether the building was standing or not.

And what a concert it was, featuring the traditional Cambodian music Dey Krahorm is famous for (it started as an artists’ colony), singing by members of a group of garment factory workers, and (by the far the most popular act), a performance by one of Cambodia's best breakdancing groups

The community center stayed standing, but Dey Krahorm's story does not have a happy ending. On January 24, 2009, the community was forcibly evicted to make way for a shopping center. Still, I can't help returning to the story.What a powerful example of resistance. In the face of violence and injustice, they threw a party.

chickens little

2009-10-04T23:30:00.005-05:00

In honor of the feast of St. Francis and the blessing of the animals today, two vignettes from my first venture into poultry raising (which began on Wednesday).

#1: The Sky is Falling

Steven Kellogg chose the right farm animal to have running around yelling that the sky is falling in his book Chicken Little. My nine chicks have seen fit on a number of occasions in their five day lives to act as though the world were ending. Usually this is brought on by nothing more serious than an adjustment to the cardboard and duct tape walls of their brooder or an attempt to move them temporarily in order to change their bedding. There was also the time during their first evening at the house when, with all nine sleeping comfortably in the appropriate donut shape around the heat lamp, I decided that maybe they wouldn't be warm enough after all and tried to replace the regular light bulb with a much higher voltage heat bulb. Not only did I take away their source of light temporarily (they began "crying" almost immediately), the heat bulb turned out to be too much for the lamp and both melted the plug partially into the extension cord and sent a couple of sparks into the brooder. So maybe the chicks have every right to be worried...

#2: Predator and Prey

The book Chickens in Your Backyard by Rick and Gail Luttmann advises the following with regard to chick diets: "You could feed them a few worms or bugs from the garden. They'll love it; in fact, they'll act like they're about to die of ecstasy." Sounds like fun. So yesterday I presented them with a dead fly I found while dusting a windowsill. They were unimpressed and returned to the business of pecking at the cardboard walls of the brooder and enthusiastically kicking shavings into their waterer. Today, Kat and I captured a moth, thinking live prey might inspire the appropriate ecstatic behavior. They showed mild interest as the moth crawled across the pine shavings, but when it started to fly around inside the heat lamp and run into them, they freaked out and ran to the other side of the brooder. So much for the chick-vs.-bug gladiator-style entertainment I was hoping for...

And finally, the blessing from tonight's ATFP liturgy:

Almighty and everlasting God, Creator of all things and giver of all life, let your blessing be upon all these animals. May our relationships with them mirror your love, and our care for them be an example of your bountiful mercy. Grant the animals health and peace. Strengthen us to love and care for them...

good, better, best

2009-09-26T16:31:00.005-05:00

A warning: this post is only for people who are interested in at least thinking about how their food choices affect the environment. I try to avoid being preachy about lifestyle decisions, and have been scolded a time or two for pontificating on the merits of certain choices, so if you aren't interested in environmental issues, now is the time to check Facebook. I'm going to say that some choices are better than others. You have been warned.

With that out of the way...My understanding of what making eco-friendly choices in terms of food has been complicated considerably in the last month or two. To start with there is...

Good: Organic
A lot starts with reading food labels. "Natural" doesn't mean anything because it isn't regulated by the government; USDA certified organic does.

Why organic is good: For produce to be certified organic, it must have been grown without the use of synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, bioengineering, sewage sludge, or irradiation on land that has been chemical-free for at least 3 years. The inputs and pest control measures allowed for organic growers are much less detrimental and disrupt surrounding ecosystems less. For example, where we live on the Oxnard plain there are hardly any birds at all because we are surrounded by conventional farms that basically nuke everything in their soil (good bugs and bad bugs alike), meaning there is nothing for the birds to eat (except, ironically, the crows, who attack our crops).

Why organic is complicated: While USDA regulation of "organic" labeling has made it possible for consumers shopping at a supermarket to have some window into how their food is grown, it only deals with a limited part of what goes into farming: inputs. "Organic" says nothing about the distance produce travels, the scale on which it was grown, or the labor practices involved in growing it. I just finished reading Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (by Julie Guthman) which looks at the industrialization of organic growing. Companies like Earthbound Organics can grow single crops on hundreds or thousands of acres (not good for the environment) using the same - often exploitative - contract labor as conventional growers and still get the organic label, as can many of the makers of US soy milk who import organic soy beans from China (using a heck of a lot of oil). Bottom line: to quote Guthman - "I am not convinced...that organic agriculture as it is currently constructed provides a trenchant alternative to the interwoven mechanisms that simultaneously bring hunger and surplus, waste and danger, and wealthy and poverty in the ways food is grown, processed, and traded." Not all produce with the organic label is of questionable merit, but the label doesn't tell you enough to make a good choice.

Better: Local
"Local" generally means grown within 100 miles of where you eat it, and people who try and eat only local foods (like Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Vegetable Miracle) are "locavores".

Why local is good: Because food is coming from closer, less fossil fuels are burned getting it to your plate. For the same reason, it will (usually) be seasonal rather than being shipped from another hemisphere where it is currently spring. Eating local also often builds community because the best place to buy local foods is a farmer's market (although Whole Foods is sort of getting into sourcing locally...and charging higher prices - though that's not new). What labeling doesn't tell you when you pick something up at a supermarket, connecting with a local farmer might.

Why local is complicated: I'll admit, until this morning I had never heard anyone take a shot at local. I nearly fell into the cabbage I was weeding while listening to the KCRW (local NPR affiliate) show "Good Food" when the segment "Are locavores getting it wrong?" came on. The guest being interviewed was James McWilliams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. His critiques of local? Eating strictly local ignores the complexities of agricultural and environmental impact on a global level. Less fossil fuels may indeed go into shipping a tomato from a warm climate than are used in growing them locally in hothouses in colder climates (although this makes me question not the virtue of eating locally but the idea that one needs a fresh tomato in the middle of winter...) But his biggest point is about meat. One can eat locally and organically and still be eating meat. Which brings us to...

The best: eating vegetarian

Why eating vegetarian is good: According to McWilliams, meat production produces 1/5th of all greenhouse gases, consumes 70% of the water in the western U.S. and accounts for over half of the nitrogen fertilizers used in the U.S. Even local, grass-fed, organic, sung-to-sleep-with-a-lullaby cows need 8-10 acres of land each...less than ideal on a planet with a growing population and shrinking arable land. Also, only 40% of a cow is used in meat production, and a significant amount of energy is used disposing of what doesn't get eaten. The bottom line: the energy savings for the average American meat eater giving up meat once a week are equal to the energy saved by eating locally for the whole week.

Why eating vegetarian is complicated: I suppose if eating vegetarian is best, eating vegan is probably bestest(*sigh*). That could ruin my wonderful discovery that what I'm already doing was the best thing to do! I'll keep you posted.

failures of imagination

2009-09-20T23:58:00.004-05:00

Some days, more things happen than others. Today, for instance, I:
1. bought a ticket to go back to Chicago for a long weekend
2. was nearly run over by a frightened deer while hiking
3. remembered something important that I had started to forget.

This time last year I was in the midst of my introduction to active non-violence - reading Walter Wink, releasing balloons outside of a prison, watching "A Force More Powerful", attending events with names like "Musical Resistance Concert"...and learning about my own violence.

When I'm immersed in social justice-y work (working on an organic farm and trying to get healthy produce available to people regardless of income, for example), its easy to group my world into good and bad people. Last year, the bad people were Cambodian government officials ordering political assassinations and forced evictions, and everyone involved in perpetuating social and environmental injustice in the garment industry. This year, it's the government-agribusiness alliance that ensures that the most accessible food in the US is unhealthy for both land and people and everyone involved in keeping farmworkers politically marginalized so that they remain a cheap, mobile source of labor.

When I started learning about non-violence, I expected it to focus on empowering the oppressed, letting the "good" win, punishing the bad guys. I recognized in the tactics for countering violence efforts to force the oppressors to recognize the humanity of the oppressed, for the men with crowbars to look the women guarding their homes in the eye and feel some sort of empathy.

What I was unprepared for was that this has to be reciprocal. That true non-violent conflict resolution required the oppressed and their allies look in the eyes of the company thugs and military police with their batons and recognize something shared humanity and feel some sort of empathy. That I would have to start dismantling my carefully constructed categories of "good people" and "bad people". That I had a lot of violence to deal with within myself.

I found two portions of Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" particularly challenging. I wrote:

The first passage gives the thoughts of an on-the-run Catholic priest walking through the Mexican jungle while a man he knows will betray him rides his mule beside him:
“But at the center of his own faith there always stood the convincing mystery – that we were made in God’s image. God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex. He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out, and God’s image shook now, up and down on the mule’s back, with the yellow teeth sticking out over the lower lip, and God’s image did its despairing act of rebellion with Maria in the hut among the rats. He said ‘Do you feel better now? Not so cold, eh? Or so hot?’ and pressed his hand with a kind of driven tenderness upon the shoulders of God’s image.”

God was the pastor, but he was also the pastor’s son, imprisoned for trying to stealing a necklace from a woman on a moto, and the guard at the prison, asking bribes for every movement, every scrap of food. God was the journalist and his son leaving the gym on Friday evening, and something resembling God drove by and shot them both – 5 bullets taking two lives.

I choke on those words. In this country where the injustice present in every society is done so openly, it’s so easy to know who to hate. I can feel that in myself as I sit on my bicycle in traffic behind yet another Lexus SUV with an RCAF (Royal Cambodian Armed Forces) license plate shuttling its well-fed occupants around as they plunder their own people. I can feel it in my body even as I type these words.

Greene’s priest continues to reflect on the power of all human beings being made in God’s image with the following words:

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality of God’s image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

My world is once again littered with failures of imagination, with big categories I put people in and label "enemy", categories that I use as excuses to ignore "the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth...". I have a long way to go. There's a lot of my world that needs to be complicated by the gray - the honest acknowledgment of the tensions of my own life and choices, and willingness to see those same tensions in the lives of the people I disagree with.

But at the center of my own faith has always stood the convincing mystery - that we were made in God's image.

thesis

2009-09-13T15:51:00.004-05:00

Thesis statements rarely come to me while I'm sedentary. I'll admit that, in a near complete reversal of the correct order, I usually write my papers and then figure out what I've argued and stick in a thesis sentence just before I hit "print", but the few times I have done it the right way, the sentence that ties the whole thing together has come not while seated in front of a computer or with pen and paper in hand, but while I was on a run or walking to class or at some other inopportune moment.

So, naturally, one of the basic ideas that unifies the last year of my life came while I was pedaling around Phnom Penh one day in August. I remember repeating it over and over under my breath so I wouldn't lose it as I sweated my way to my favorite cafe:

Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

Things were starting to make sense to me last August. I wrote:

Most Westerners do not perceive affluence as a problem because we have successfully mentally dissociated it from the oppression and injustice it causes and perpetuates. What we need first is to start to see these relationships. Living in my neighborhood on HNGR has been an exercise in that regard. Many of the linkages and relationships that are obscured by distance in the West are in plain view in my community. The woman who sews the underwear I buy in the US lives in my house. My trash goes in a bag that is tied up and thrown across the street into the pond in the middle of the community, and as the flood season progresses, we’ll all be walking in that water. I think really knowing where we are ought to be a fundamental Christian discipline – knowing where our tomatoes come from and where what put in the trash can ends up, knowing the local growing seasons and where our shower water goes. What we learn, and perhaps more significantly what our affluent insulation makes it impossible for us to find out, should raise questions about our lifestyles.

Distilled: Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

I was reminded of that little mantra this morning while in a Sunday school of sorts - a multi-generational congregational discussion of "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" over a feast of local origins. An older farmer from the area talked about how the book had inspired him to start asking where his food came from - approaching managers in butcheries or grocery stores to inquire about the origins of their products, getting answers like "Peru", "somewhere in the U.S." and most commonly: "I don't know".

There have been a lot of moments in the past month that have captured what we're doing here. One of them was a recent farm staff meeting over brunch, where we went around the table describing where the food we were eating came from - friends' gardens, farmers markets, our own land...

There was also a lot of Trader Joe's in there. We've made no Barbara Kingsolver-style goal of perfection, but its a start.

Know where your stuff comes from, and know where it goes when you're done with it.

go look at the other blog.

2009-09-02T22:33:00.004-05:00

Once again, I'm re-directing to the ATFP blog, for which I am a regular Wednesday contributor. This particular installment involves fighter jets, chemical warfare, and shotguns...all things I don't usually discuss in much detail, so it's worth a look.

itchy feet. home for Christmas

2009-09-01T23:02:00.000-05:00

On December 3rd, 2008 I returned from my last international adventure weak enough to be met with a wheelchair at the door of the plane. Though I highly recommend this as the speediest way of negotiating customs, I was not in the best shape. Still, even after the rather unpleasant and abrupt end to my time in Cambodia, as the plane touched down at O'Hare my first thought was, "Oh no. I don't know when my next plane ticket out of the U.S. is!" For the first time I could remember, there wasn't the assurance of some sort of trans-continental trip in my future.

I lasted almost 10 months like that.

At 22, my carbon footprint is probably big enough from all my air travel that I could use no other form of transportation than a bicycle for the rest of my life and it would still take several planets to sustain Earth's population if everyone lived like me. But for the moment, I am unrepentantly excited to have just spent more than I can probably afford on a plane ticket home for Christmas.

I told you I would!

2009-08-26T23:46:00.003-05:00

There's a first time for everything. After more than two weeks of living at the farmhouse, I finally did something resembling FARMING today!

This last an hour or two, and then degenerated into a contest to see who could throw an over-ripe zucchini the farthest. For more pictures and narrative, see the ATFP blog.

After all that was over -- another first. While preparing a refreshing cucumber-cantelope-yogurt-mint-honey-dill beverage, I snuck a sliver of cucumber, and realized it was still warm from growing and being in the sun.

green moment

2009-08-23T23:21:00.008-05:00

One thing that I love about my new home and housemates (and come to think of it, pretty much everyone I've lived with in the last three years, but hey, I've heard there are people who don't live like this) is our collective efforts to live a bit greener/lighter/more sustainably. Part of our vision for this farmhouse is for it and how we live in it to encourage other people to make some green lifestyle changes of their own. To this end, we've been making a lot of signs lately...

We have a sign about recycling:

We have a sign about composting:

We have a sign telling you what vegetable scraps to save so I can make soup stock with them before composting them:

We have a chore wheel (nothing particularly eco-friendly about it, I just made it this evening and thought it was cute):

And then there's this one:

This afternoon I overheard a funny interaction around this particular instruction. Julie, the ATFP collective spiritual director, and her family have been around the house a bunch in the last few days getting the house ready for the first Sunday evening worship service. On the way to the bathroom, Julie's four-year-old daughter anxiously asked, "Is there going to be pee in the potty already? I don't want to go!"

Thinking about it, "if it's yellow let it mellow..." is really quite a paradigm shift for anyone recently potty trained. Conserving resources means re-thinking some of the cleanliness rules of childhood for me too...fewer showers, anyone?

so I thought I'd be spending a year in D.C....

2009-08-20T14:48:00.002-05:00

[Note: This post is identical to one I just did on the Abundant Table Farm Project blog which is where you can meet my four wonderful housemates/sisters/friends, and where we plan to document our farming adventure!]

While I won’t start the story of what brought me to the Abundant Table centuries ago, it does begin on the other side of the world. After growing up in Nairobi, Kenya and three years at Wheaton College outside of Chicago I chose to spend six months doing interning in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as part of my major in International Relations. Though the focus of my work was on land rights and non-violent resistance to forced evictions, I found situations closer to home captured my attention as I began to understand the dynamics of the Cambodian community I lived in. My host family were garment factory workers in a poorer neighborhood sandwiched between two sweatshops. Systems of production and consumption and the infrastructure that supports them that had been largely invisible to me growing up in more affluent neighborhoods became very obvious. I started to think much more about where things came from (did I really want to eat the morning glory picked in the contaminated marsh behind our neighborhood?) and where they went (what would I throw away when I knew the trash bag was tied up and thrown in the pond in the center of the community?) My new neighbors and I dealt daily with the consequences of not only these local systems, but also a supply chain that stretched thousands of miles – back to my neighborhood in Chicago and countless other U.S. communities. The factories that the women I lived with worked in were producing clothing for stores in the U.S. like Gap and Old Navy where I had once shopped.

While the factories did provide jobs with relatively decent conditions and brought economic growth, it came at a significant price. The chemicals emitted from the factory behind my house were eating through our metal roof, and many of my friends and neighbors began experiencing unemployment as soon as the U.S. recession again. As I returned to the U.S. for my final semester at Wheaton, awareness of the unsustainable relationships between producer communities such as the one Cambodia and consumers in my Chicago suburb guided the lifestyle choices I hoped to make after graduation, but had little impact on my post-graduation job search initially. Trying to eat locally/seasonally, fostering face-to-face relationships between producers and consumers, living mindfully of my environmental impact, and being a part of a spiritual community committed to social justice were things I hoped to fit around work in research or advocacy in Washington, D.C. When the Abundant Table Farm Project description came my way, I was caught off-guard by the opportunity to take 11 months to focus on those themes. At first, spending a year working on an organic farm/CSA in southern California was so different from what I expected to be doing that I couldn’t even bring myself to read the entire internship description. It sounded too good to be true, a possibility that would distract me from my job search. Obviously my self-restraint was less than absolute – I did allow myself to open that email again, and five or six months later, I’m enjoying the beginning of many good things, starting my post-college life on the opposite side of the country than I expected to be and in an occupation I never would have predicted for myself, yet somehow in just the right place.

the vegetannual

2009-08-14T18:55:00.007-05:00

Last December as I lay waiting for my legs to return to their usual color and my hair to fall out (thank you, dengue fever), I broke up long hours reading Harry Potter and watching West Wing with forays into Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (a singularly frustrating read in Chicago in the dead of winter). Kingsolver documents a year of her family's experience eating locally - only food that had been grown and produced either on their own farm or within 100 miles. One of the recurring images in the book is the vegetannual, "an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest".

I remember thinking that this would only be an enjoyable experience year-round if one happened to live in southern California, where most things can grow most of the time, and the seasonal restrictions in more temperate climates would not apply. And sure enough - here is the list of what is currently being planted on a corner of the 10 organic acres I'll start working on next week: yellow, green and burgundy beans; ruby, romaine and butter lettuce; arugula, spinach, basil, cilantro and parsley; cucumbers; 8 ball, geode and crookneck squash; gold, red and candy striped beets; fennel, zucchini and edible flowers. A lot of the conventional farms around here are currently planting strawberries.

All this is a testament to two things:

1. The gorgeous Mediterranean climate. Most days (all year, or so I've heard) temperatures are in the 60s and 70s, kept in check by the ocean. It actually reminds me of Nairobi - eucalyptus, jacaranda and mimosa trees, bougainvillea, hibiscus plants...A local told me yesterday that this is God's country, and I believe it.

2. Some of the most fertile soil in the world. According to the farmer (Paul), whose family has worked on this land for just over a century, the soil is sandy loam, a combination of sand, silt and clay that traps organic material while allowing water to run through. This area wasn't always the best agricultural land - it was once too salty and alkaline to grow anything but sugar beets, but artificial drainage has pulled the water table down and made the Oxnard plain ideal for farming.

So much for the vegetannual...

first thoughts on the farm

2009-08-14T00:08:00.004-05:00

I know that I have successfully moved to California now that not only my own mail, but also my father's have followed me to the little mailbox on an obscure rural road by an avocado orchard. Since arriving at the Abundant Table Farm Project I have (among other things):

- Biked to and along the pacific coast highway to try and find the beach and meet the Pacific Ocean. It's unfortunately farther away than I had been told. There is the small matter of a US Navy base between the farm and the beach (they, however provide lots of low flying aircraft and strange pulsating lights for our entertainment). I did eventually get to the beach.

- Experienced my first farming "injury"...a bee sting in the avocado orchard, which turned into Katerina's first opportunity to use her extensive first aid training. Remedy: flick stinger out with a credit card, thus the middle finger of my left hand was saved.

- Cooked zucchini at most meals. We have more than our household of 5 can handle, and we don't even start farming until next week.

- Received the strong impression that this is internship is not a particularly realistic introduction to life in the real world of adulthood. The five of us interns have received ample quantities of hugs, affirming words, and homemade soaps and have been practically tripping over people wanting to give us food, furniture, and office supplies. The house has a hammock, an awesome little dog, and we were told today by our landlord that if, like the previous tenants, we feel inclined to ride our skateboards through the glass doors, we may do so!

All in all, good things to come!

join the farm

2009-08-09T21:13:00.005-05:00

Now that I have successfully thwarted the efforts of the laws of physics to limit the amount that will fit in a carry-on suitcase, I have nothing to do but be excited about the next 11 months. Okay, that and cry through my breakfast. (This always happens when I say goodbye to my family, and is made all the more dignified by the fact that I am the only one in my family who ever cries in public).

But in celebration of the exciting things ahead - a little bit of what I'll be up to:

living and working on an organic farm in southern California with four other interns as part of the Abundant Table Farm Project
enjoying the produce we grow and helping start a CSA (www.jointhefarm.com) so other people can too
learning about "environmental sustainability; organic, small scale agriculture vs. industrial agribusiness; community health and access to unprocessed foods, especially as it relates to disadvantaged communities; immigration and labor issues"
recovering from four Chicago winters by living a bike ride from the Pacific ocean, right off of Highway 1...I hear it might be kind of nice out there

On my list of things to get done before heading out was to take this picture, the equivalent of the "back to school" shot:

For the story of the stylish headgear, see an earlier post. Impressive corn featured here is on my uncle's dairy farm (and, as my cousin said, "there's nothing organic about it!").

And yes, the hat is in my suitcase.

"you a real white girl?" and other tales

2009-08-08T20:33:00.013-05:00

To paraphrase (or quote?) my mother, I'm excited about being able to 'live forward' again soon. The last eight months have been about processing and finishing -- recovering from dengue, processing HNGR, finishing college, wrapping up my jobs, sorting through and packing up both my belongings and family memories, saying goodbye to Chicago (in the summer! not a good idea...better to wait to the depths of February), saying goodbye to friends, and soon family too. I'm excited to know I will be living in one place for the (seemingly) long span of 11 months, and to start living forward again, to dig in to stay.

The last week has been particularly transitory. I've spent at least a night in each of five states (and will make that six in a week and a half on Monday). Still, it's been a rich time. In no particular order, I have enjoyed:

1. Dirt bike lessons from my brother. I promise I was riding just like in the video after 5 minutes. Oh, and the bike is for sale.

2. Finding and playing two pieces of music composed by my grandfather who died long before I was born
3. Packing made somewhat bearable by listening to the wonderful documentary series Five Farms. They followed five American farm families (dairy farmers in the Northeast, an African-American hog farmer, a Hopi farmer, an organic farm in California (!) and a farm in Iowa) for a year and produced 5 hour-long shows, each with a specific theme, corresponding roughly to some point in the growing season. The shows are about both agriculture and the people themselves and their stories (think Ira Glass on a farm minus a bit of the sass).

4. Packing made even more bearable by friends who brought me homemade spinach and Parmesan pizza and wine, or showed up to meet up one last time in Chicago.

5. Taking the scenic route from North Carolina to Pennsylvania via a camping trip in Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia, planned entirely by my brother. Non-essential items like plates and pancake syrup, of course, didn't make it. We ate these with our hands, along with ripe-to-bursting white farmstand peaches.

The camping was great except for being awakened repeatedly in the night by the rummaging of an unknown small animal around our tent. The next morning we discovered not one, but four acorns 'buried' under our tent.

6. More than my fair share of Bush's baked beans. My meat-and-potatoes Mennonite family doesn't always know what to do with a vegetarian, but they try!

7. Hearing stories from both sides of my extended family.

8. And finally...One afternoon my brother and I were perusing the Goodwill fashions when I heard three women talking in Cambodian in the aisle next to me. I got up my courage (I haven't spoken Khmer to any native speakers in person since the end of November) and greeted them in Cambodian. One spoke a bit of English and her first response was "you a real white girl?" They proceeded to ask me (in Khmer) if I had a husband yet.

Ah, yes...

the lot

2009-08-07T20:55:00.004-05:00

The news that I'm going to be spending the next 11 months working on an organic farm has elicited a range of responses from the adults in my life. Of late the tone has been a mix of amusement and incredulity. I'm at a family reunion of sorts, and of the assembled 10 aunts and uncles, I know that at least seven grew up on farms (though only two chose to farm themselves). Of the many stories they've told from their childhoods in Lancaster County, the following was one of the most interesting.

Among the more conservative Mennonite congregations, being a pastor or some other part of the church leadership was not something one aspired to or discerned a particular calling for. When a new pastor (or bishop, or deacon) was needed, nominations would be gathered (3 from each member) for who from the congregation would be chosen as the pastor on a Wednesday. Any candidate with at least 3 nominations would be examined by the elders for character and leadership capacity, and the following weekend the church would be assembled for "the lot". In my grandfather's case, two men from the congregation proceeded past this vetting process. Two brand-new Bibles (there was some discussion as to whether these actually had metal clamps to seal them shut) were taken by the elders to the back of the church, and a piece of paper was slipped underneath the front cover of one Bible, after which both were closed. Someone else who had not seen which Bible contained the slip of paper stood the two Bibles on the pulpit in front of the congregation, and the candidates, in descending order of age, chose one of the Bibles (usually, but not always proceeding in order from right to left). They then waited for the bishop to come and open the Bibles to see which of the two God had chosen, by means of the lot, to be the pastor.

When my grandfather was chosen by the lot to lead his small church, the changes for the family included switching cash crops from tobacco to tomatoes and moving the radio to the attic (where it could only be turned on for the World Series).

Group 78

2009-07-16T12:13:00.004-05:00

Last August I started training for the Angkor Wat half-marathon, waking up at 5 am to run a few miles as the sun rose. My favorite loop was around Phnom Penh's riverfront, circling overly-manicured parks where hundreds of people gathered daily to walk, do aerobics, learn karate and practice traditional Chinese sword and fan dances. In a few kilometers my running buddy and I could get to most of the city's tourist attractions: the Royal Palace, the National Museum, the big casino, the home of Phnom Penh's elephant... The end of our run would take us back behind the National Assembly and by a little community called Group 78. The village of wooden homes, some of them with plastic tarps for walls seemed out of place surrounded by the homes, offices and gardens of the wealthy, one of the last remaining pockets of working class residents in downtown Phnom Penh.

Group 78 will most likely be evicted tomorrow. Under Cambodia's 2001 Land Law, the residents are legal owners of the land after occupying it for more than five years. However, like many other communities along the riverfront, their land has been turned over to a local developer and the police are preparing to chase the people from their homes. After the Land Law was put in place, the World Bank began funding the LMAP program to title all the land in Cambodia. At first glance, this should be good news for poor people who, in theory, should have tenure security and be able to harness the value of their land. Things have not always turned out that way, in this case because in order to ensure the cooperation of the Cambodian government, the World Bank has promised to keep its mitts off any disputed land (like Group 78). In all likelihood, these people will lose their homes and their jobs tomorrow in the name of "improving" the Phnom Penh.

a hat to farm in

2009-07-13T22:34:00.003-05:00

I think God and my parents are getting a particularly good set of laughs as I trip and fall my way around trying to be an adult. The most recent irony involves a certain hat.

When my family first moved to Kenya, we spent three months camping in the bush in an orientation program (to prepare us for 15 years of living in one of Africa's most modern cities...yeah). In the American tradition of gearing up to go to intense places like Africa, my parents bought matching hats - dark khaki, synthetic, floppy broad-brimmed things with black strings and those toggles (like you use to keep a stuff sack shut) to keep them on your head, ensuring that they were the dorkiest things ever. I complained about those hats for years at every sports day and game drive when my dad would pull his out. There was a succession of variations on the fisherman's hat, none of which I approved of and which were eventually lost to various theme park rides and other misadventures, ensuring that the original hat persisted.

While I haven't seen that hat in a few years, it came up again a few days ago. As I look forward to starting work on the farm in a bit more than a month, I'm running into the fact that I don't have good work clothes, and I don't have the money to buy them. My parents generously volunteered one of those original hats for the purpose.

I just might have to do it.

chips on a hot dog bun

2009-07-04T12:31:00.006-05:00

In honor of the Fourth of July and the annual awkwardness of being the only non-meat eater at a barbecue, and in recognition that I'll be spending the next year thinking about it, learning about it and...umm...growing it...the first of some reflections on food.

My family had a tradition of marking the day we moved to Kenya - September 1st. Along with making a cake, we would make a list of the things we were thankful for, specifically related to living where we were. One of my entries on the list perhaps foreshadowed something. I thanked God for all the wonderful fruits and vegetables.

As a child I would eschew hotdogs at cookouts and instead happily load a bun with chips, ketchup, mustard, and lots of relish. I refused to eat drumsticks, stuck to white turkey meat at Thanksgiving, and religiously pulled apart bacon strips to remove the lines of white fat. My parents weren't thrilled with the idea of my becoming a vegetarian, so I waited for an opportune moment (when they were jetlagged and exhausted in Heathrow Airport - not a particularly ethical strategy) to ask if I could quit eating meat my senior year, and they agreed. They had no recollection of this conversation when I brought it up again (surprise), but by that time I was determined to quit eating meat, and so they relented under the condition that I prepared my own non-meat sources of protein. This, of course, did not happen. I interpreted this aggreement to mean that I would open my own can of baked beans now and then, which was unacceptable to my mother who had been a vegetarian once upon a time. She started making lots of lentils.

All this to say, I am not a virtuous vegetarian. As I learn more about the ecological and environmental consequences of industrial meat production, along with the health benefits of eating vegetarian, I'm more convinced that it is an important choice, but unlike most vegetarians I know, I'm not really giving anything up. One of the most difficult things about my time in Cambodia (up there with major illness/med evac) was eating meat at (almost) every meal.

Unlike meat served in the US, what showed up in my bowl in Phnom Penh very much resembled the animal from which it came. No energy was ever put into removing the bones of anything we ate, be it fish, mammal or amphibian. One evening my host grandmother enthusiastically served me what she called "leg of the pig soup"...and sure enough, there it was, bristles and all.

Walking past cases of meat in US grocery stores now, it strikes me how much effort is put into disassociating what ends up in your cart or on your plate from what was once walking or swimming around. This goes for non-meat items as well. While a sign may tell you that your grapes came from Chile, quality standards and the modification of food crops to maximize shelf life and delay ripening mean that the impact of the location something was grown is seldom evident in the taste or appearance of the food.

So I'm going to farm for a year, and perhaps learn way more than I ever wanted to know about those fruits and vegetables.

introduction

2009-06-27T22:25:00.001-05:00

It feels a bit strange to take up blogging again during what is undoubtedly the least eventful time in my life in a couple of years. I can think of only two particularly story-worthy events in the past two months:

A bat flew into my bedroom. A vague association in my mind between bats and rabies made me abandon both my normal tolerance for vermin and my usual desire to deal with unpleasant things myself rather than asking for help (in other words, I crawled under the covers and called my dad). During this conversation the bat left my room and proceed to nearly meet its watery end in our kitchen sink. Gross, I know. These things aren't supposed to happen in the United States.
My purse was stolen from the trunk of a locked car. Before I went out that evening I thought "Well, in case my bag were to get stolen, I shouldn't have anything unnecessary in it" and proceeded to remove a $5 pair of headphones. I wish my intuition would be a little more specific next time and spare me having to buy new glasses. Again, these things aren't supposed to happen in the United States.

Other than these two memorable and not particularly pleasant occurrences, life is predictable enough to make me very much miss the relative chaos of my average day a year ago. It would be nice to get caught in a monsoon rainstorm with a flat bicycle tire kilometers from home or head off on the back of a motorcycle to a protest or a Buddhist celebration or the filming of a karaoke video or something.

I spent part of my five hours of jet lag and anxiety in Bangkok before flying to Phnom Penh last year re-reading Letters to a Young Poet, and remember focusing on one particular quote:

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

Somehow I expected that such poetry would be called for while living in an urban poor neighborhood. There were certainly days when rice and sweat and rodents were distinctly unpoetic, but seeing the riches in that community was never very difficult. Rilke's challenge is much harder for me now, doing jobs that aren't very challenging and living in suburbia.

But, in the anticipation of more interesting things to come in a few weeks, and as a way of trying to stay present while I'm here, I decided to jump the gun on my next adventure and go ahead and write.

so welcome