forward thinking

Really great BBC slideshow about buses that provide mobile internet services in rural Rwandan communities that lack electricity. More impressive to me than the physical technology, is the vision/leadership/planning behind the effort. The person directing this a young Rwandan professional who recently completed his masters in Engineering at Cornell and has returned to join the faculty of Rwanda's state school for science and technology.

a not so royal secret

Well, it used to be a "secret" that Royal Caribbean cruise lines leases a beautiful private beach on the north coast of Haiti. Until the late 1990s or so the company's brochures and customer service agents said that the water-sports focused port-of-call was on "an island in Hispanola" - never mentioning Haiti out of fear (I assume) that revealing the real location could be bad for business.

The Haitian government complained about the cover up to the media and now, if you scroll down on the company's description of the place, it does say the beach is in Haiti. Strangely, they have changed the spelling of the area's Kreyol name - Labadi - to the more Anglo-phone friendly Labadee .... and then gone ahead and made their misspelling a registered trademark. Can you imagine a tourist firm changing the spelling of Paris to Pairiss or London to Lundone and then copyrighting it? I wonder if Haitian school children should worry about misspelling on their geography quizzes out of fear of being sued for copyright infringement.

The annual lease and passenger entry fees are the single biggest source of tourist revenue in Haiti. In the Caribbean region attracting tourist dollars is the lifeblood of economic development. Advances in neighboring Dominican Republic demonstrate what "could-have-been" in Haiti where there was promising growth in tourism in the late 70s/very early 80s. A couple years ago I met a middle-aged woman in Chicago who said that when she was in her 20s she had gone to Port-au-Prince on a cruise. Back then Club Med had a location just an hour up the coast from the capitol. But political instability combined with fear surrounding the early discovery of HIV/AIDS in Haiti contributed to a sudden collapse of the tourist market. Since then, further deforestation, infrastructure decline and ongoing lack of political leadership make you wonder whether revival of tourism is anywhere on the horizon.

Royal Caribbean's expanding presence in Haiti offers some hope - but it's not without its caveats. It's totally surreal the first time you drive from dusty Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second largest city, and pass through the zone of lush trees where Royal Caribbean's fenced off compound comes into view. (Reforestation of that part of the island was a company initiative) Through the tall chain link/ barbed wired fence you can catch glimpses of floating climbing "glaciers" and trampolines, fancy boats for ferrying passengers, more than two dozen new jet skis, and lots of other big-kid water toys. I met one North American woman working in Haiti who received special permission to meet up with some cruising family members. She said that the bartender admitted that he was not Haitian at all...but rather a company employee who stayed out of site on the cruise ship until they arrived in port where his job is to pose as a native. I suppose it would be tragic if someone had to deal with slightly accented English when ordering a rum punch. It makes me wonder if foreign investors think the only way to make Haiti attractive to tourists is by taking away anything authentically Haitian...that would be a real tragedy.

During our visit to the Labadi area in April, my friend G and I listened to the sound of construction crews working through the night on a barge located in the middle of the bay. The owner of the hotel said they are building a second pier so RC can bring two boats into port on the same day. According to this article in yesterday's Miami Herald online, it's actually a 55 million dollar investment that also includes a roller coaster and beachfront expansion. USAID is giving money for training of tour guides and The Clinton Initiative is trying to build private sector support by rallying business leaders in South Florida.

progress

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/health/research/25aids.html?hp

a whole lot of money

Really liked this image from Information is Beautiful (follow the link or click on image to enlarge) showing relatively how many "billions" of dollars are spent / given / needed / earned for everything from annual financing of the Iraq War to Walmart's revenues/profits to how much is needed save the rainforests to the cost of the Beijing Olympics. No sources are included...but it's still pretty cool. The site includes all sort of interesting visual representations of different kinds of information.

On the theme of a lot of money, check out Sprout, a new all-organic restaurant opening soon in my hometown. No matter how much they miss me, I doubt mom and dad are going to take me for a $120 entree on my next visit home....

reading notes - 1

"When a movement for liberation inspires itself chiefly by hatred for an enemy rather than from the vision of possibility, it begins to defeat itself. Its very motions cease to be healing." - Susan Griffin as quoted by Denise Ackerman in After the Locusts Letters from a Landscape of Faith

on livin' patiently in Green Acres

I am coming to the end of my first full weekend in Ithaca. It's been harder than I expected to settle back into this funky little college-town community.

I can’t say that I have ever gotten into living in Ithaca the way that I expected to when I first moved here to start grad school. As a relatively-outdoorsy/into the arts/ foodie/ academic person with some distinct granola tendencies (e.g. continual ownership of Birkenstocks since my freshman year of high school) - who also grew up with Chicago winters - I thought I would totally fall in love with Ithaca. I have not. There are many moments and even entire days when I really really really like it here...but it’s definitely not love. (Nothing like my love of Charm City!)

Granted, people say that the key is to spend a summer here when the weather is perfect, the undergrads are gone and there is time to really enjoy/explore the beautiful landscapes. But I’ve always been in Haiti during my summers and have yet to experience a wine tour or sailing on/swimming in/biking around Cayuga Lake. Maybe that would push me over to the pro-side.... but I kind of doubt it.

Lately, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit making lists of reasons why I’m justified to feel discontent in my present situation. I don’t think that Ithaca is a good fit for this stage in my life – it’s a great town for college kids / a great town to raise kids / a great town for individuals who want to live life their own way without anyone bothering them about it...But those people aren’t me.....I’ve thought of a dozen different plans for how to spend as much time in the coming year as possible outside of Ithaca.

My negative thought cycle was disrupted a bit when I read the blog of some friends from undergrad who very recently lost their 1-month old son to a congenital heart condition. In their heart-wrenchingly honest posts, they share of their desire to live fully in these days of grief and to not hide from what they are meant to feel/experience /learn. While I would never dream to compare the shallowness of my discontent with the depth of their grief, it certainly spoke to me.

The authors of Compassion: A reflection on the Christian life talk about “the discipline of patience” as “entering actively into the thick of life.” This active patience “requires us to go beyond the choice between fleeing and fighting. It is the third and most difficult way....Patience involves staying with it, living though, listening carefully to what presents itself to us here and now..... Essentially impatience is to experience the moment as empty, useless and meaningless. It is wanting to escape from the here and now as soon as possible.”

I read those exact same words during a low point in Haiti – when I wanted to escape from the crazy activity around me, when there seemed to be too much pain/suffering happening all the time, when I couldn’t find any space to be alone. Now I am re-reading them at the start of a season when I can’t seem to make enough stuff happen in a day – when I can go an entire day without seeing someone I know, when all I have to do is sit behind a screen, think and type, but when I really do have freedom to do what I want when I want. My struggle to be actively patient in the absence of busyness/chaos/distraction feels like an entirely new challenge but is actually rooted in some of the same deeper issues as my struggles in Haiti.

Last Saturday, I was walking down a tree-lined path to the university’s apple orchard - past silos, barns and a guinea foul farm - when it dawned on me that this might be the only season in my life that I will spend in a place like this – where my daily commute takes me through an arboretum and a wildflower garden, where I live in a trailer park across from a farm stand with fresh local produce, where there are hiking paths and waterfalls in every direction. I started to list all the things I want to experience before I leave Ithaca...and then unfortunately gave in to humming the theme song from Green Acres for the rest of my walk back from the orchard.

To help keep me patient and focused on the present, I’ve started taking photos of uniquely Ithacan scenes during my walks to/from campus - we will see how long I keep it up. One of these days I’ll upload them for you to see. Until then, just know that you can keep Manhattan and give me that countryside!

a new (aademic) year’s resolution

”I shall not go out on weekends in Collegetown” That was the conclusion I came to this Saturday morning when I thought back on the previous night out with some friends from my program at one of two clubs where grad students tend to hang out.

Let’s face it, being out after midnight in a college town when you are 30+ is guaranteed to a) ignite your maternal instinct as you watch severely under-clothed girls stagger around on high heels, b) offend your olfactory system as something always smells like urine and c) just plain make you feel old. The most memorable point of the evening was when my indisputably hot friend (who is a year older than me but easily mistaken as being up to a decade younger than her actual age) and I were quite directly told that we are "past our prime" by a guy who couldn’t be much past than the 21-years-of-age minimum to enter the place. (Granted this is just after it had become obvious that his attempts to hit on her were not going to succeed).

While I know resolutions are made to be broken, I do anticipate that my “nightlife” this year is going to be limited to low-key dinner/game/movie nights. That's not really dramatic given that I hardly qualify as a party girl....but I am feeling a bit nostalgic for the excellent live music and fairly regular chances to dance (with people my age) in Port-au-Prince! Ce la vie!

on gettin it done

Coming back to Ithaca and really (really!) trying to launch this last leg of my Phd, I am looking in every nook and cranny for a little inspiration/motivation. So, I just changed my desktop wall paper from a beautiful scene of the Peruvian mountains to a picture of this chair. Now, while I am currently partial to orange and am a sucker for good design, I would never say the chair comes anywhere close to the beautify of the landscape it replaced. The chair represents something else - just getting it done.

You see I found this chair over 4 years ago in a resale shop in Chicago - back when my trailer rennovation was still just a dream. The Crate & Barrel chair was in great condition and a crazy lot less than CB price. However it was covered in a rather unforunate washed out pastel patterned fabric with a couple of fairly obvious stains. Being the perfectionist idealist wanna-be crafty hipster type that I often am, all I could see was a fantastic DIY opportunity. I bought the chair and stuck it in the uhaul trailer for our eastward journey.

Well, of course I over estimated / over idealized things a bit. My mother and I did an incredible amount of work on the house in a very short 2 week period. We found the snazzy orange fabric before classes started. I was more confident thatn ever that the finished product was going to look great in my living room. But, alas, the DIY reupholestery project never really got off the ground. Sometime in my first semester of year one, I got a how-to video out of the public library and managed to remove two panels of fabric from the back and side of the chair. After that, the lightly soiled, naked-backed chair spent 3.5 years sitting in the corner of my Ithaca bedroom. More than once the thought of sending it to a professional upholesterer crossed my mind - but I always pushed it aside as too expensive and not as personally gratifying/skills building as the DIY route.

When I moved back into my trailer about a month ago, there was the chair sitting in the corner. I found myself staring at it as I laid in bed trying to get to sleep or when i got up in the morning. It bothered me....a lot. As I looked ahead to a crazy year spent finishing the single biggest project I've ever undertaken, I couldn't stand to have this monument to unfulfilled idealist intentions being in the same room where I was going to dream/ have nightmares about moving on from my Phd. So a week ago, I did it - I picked up the phone book, found the name of an upholsterer, made a call or two - and the next thing I knew a lovely mother of three with a relatively economically-priced home-based reupholstery business drove by in her blue minivan and whisked the chair away. Yesterday, it came back,looking exactly as I hoped it would 4+ years ago when I stood in that second-hand store in the Windy City.

It got done. I didn't do it myself. Rather I finally recognized that I really needed some help and that sometimes help is more than worth the money/death of ideals/humility/not getting to be known as the DIY-cool kid that it costs. There is a pretty obvious life lesson here for a procrastinating perfectionist idealist as she prepares to finish her PhD. In the days and months (but God willing NOT years!) ahead I am going to have to re-evaluate the motives behind my plans and intentions. I am going to have to ask for a lot of help from a lot of people with skills in my areas of need (FYI-I am including the americano-making baristas at Gimmee Coffee and Mandible Cafe in this category). I am going to have to pay some costs that I'd rather not pay.... but all with the hope that the final product will be timely, relevant, of excellent quality.... and testimony to the value of fostering and sustaining community (It takes a village, right?).

On that note, better stop telling long-winded stories, and better start getting it done on my data analysis plan. I don't think there are too many consulting disseratation writers out there - at least none who I could afford on my graduate stipend. Ideal or not, the actual writing of a PhD dissertation is a definite DIY project.

on faith

Coming home from Haiti, I've started reading After the Locusts: Letters from the Landscape of Faith by Denise Ackermann, a South African theologian. I originally ordered the book because I saw it has become part of the required reading for the Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) program at my undergrad. I sill consider, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life, one of the required readings from my HNGR season a decade ago as one of the books that most shaped and continues to reshape my worldview/theology.

After a season of ups and downs in Haiti that tested my understanding of what faith is supposed to look like and at various moments fostered a deep sense of discouragement, Rev. Ackermann's description of faith resonates deeply.

Faith is validated by the faithfulness of the God in whom we trust. It lives in a triangle of longing, hope and reality..... Hope is not religious optimism. It is tough minded perserverance in dire times because we believe in God's promises and we know that faith without hope is simply not possible. Reality focuses our hope. Clear-sightedly we see the hunger, pain and suffering around us. We also note the courage and care and dare to hope that the hungry will be filled with "good things." Being involed with theology means drawing on our faith, our imagination, our experience and our longing to know more about God and translating this into words and actions.

marvelous news from malawi

When I visited Malawi in July I was struck by the hopeful/positive attitude shared by many of the people I encountered. I thought it was just my perception of things in contrast to the widespread discouragement in Haiti....but today's NYT features an article about declining global child mortality rates. It showcases Malawi's effective efforts to build a network of community health workers that reaches families in rural zones. Through these and other efforts, under 5 mortality has been halved over the last 2 decades.

I've chosen a vocation where the news is not always so good... all the more reason to share it when it is!

but is he special enough?

Although he was not named head of USAID, Paul Farmer is now the deputy special envoy to Haiti - "assisting" Bill Clinton in his special United Nations appointment focused on Haiti. Exactly what that role is, no one can say...probably not even the envoys themselves. It's easy to be cynical and chalk this up as another bureaucratically driven attempt to make it look like something is being done about a situation (Haiti) that no one has any real clue about what to do about. But I've gotten really tired of being cynical - so I think I might try being hopeful instead...not naive, but a a little hopeful that Paul Farmer, someone who has done a lot of good for lots of people in Haiti and other corners of the world (not that I or anyone else always agrees with how it is done), can manage to facilitate a little more good with this extra title after his name.

Peru - buen provecho

Peru - making music

Peru - urban planning

Peru - colorful cultures

Peru - natural beauty

change in plans

Apologies for the extended silence. Over the last month, I ran away to Peru and joined a folkloric music and dance troop with my fellow Cornell Nutrition PhD candidate SK. I promise to update you on our latest adventures once we get back from our tour of Scandinavia and the Western Antilles....or perhaps after I finish settling back into my house, setting up the internet and figuring out at least some kind of routine here in Ithaca, NY. Hasta luego!