thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...