domestic

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

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

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

#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

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

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

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.