mcmasterchef

MC MC down with the D o' C

2007-12-10T16:38:00.000-05:00

My brain is leaking out with my sinuses right now in the course of my first confrontation with red-blooded American germs since returning to the States, so this may be a decision I will someday look back upon with total bewilderment, but I've just signed on to enter the glamorous world of the Washington D.C. intern this coming January.

All jokes aside the work sounds great and the only downside would be that the stipend for full-time works out to about half the federal hourly minimum wage, which means approximately .. 120% of my monthly income will be devoted solely to apartment rents. But this was actually, believe it or not, the better-paying of the two options potentially available to me at the moment, in addition to offering what seems like a really good work environment and the chance to do some real research (which will hopefully spill over into this blog). So it's crushing debt ahoy! for me. Good thing I, uh, didn't blow my entire post-JET savings on seven weeks of round-the-world travel.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to celebrate with tissues and more OJ-and-lemon juice.

Friday Flickr: Cascade

2007-11-30T21:55:00.001-05:00

Fall's not quite gone yet.

Take My Budget... Please

2007-11-27T22:41:00.000-05:00

Secretary of Defense Gates made a speech at Kansas State University the other day, and if you have the time I would suggest reading or listening to it (links via SWJ). In it he made a rather unusual plea: Give The Other Agencies of US Government Some Money Too.

What is not as well-known, and arguably even more shortsighted [than the "peace dividend" defense and intel cutbacks following the end of the Cold War], was the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist, and communicate with other parts of the world – the “soft power,” which had been so important throughout the Cold War. The State Department froze the hiring of new Foreign Service officers for a period of time. The United States Agency for International Development saw deep staff cuts – its permanent staff dropping from a high of 15,000 during Vietnam to about 3,000 in the 1990s. And the U.S. Information Agency was abolished as an independent entity, split into pieces, and many of its capabilities folded into a small corner of the State Department.

...[P]ublic relations was invented in the United States, yet we are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals. It is just plain embarrassing that al-Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the internet than America. As one foreign diplomat asked a couple of years ago, “How has one man in a cave managed to out-communicate the world’s greatest communication society?” Speed, agility, and cultural relevance are not terms that come readily to mind when discussing U.S. strategic communications.

...Despite the improvements of recent years, despite the potential innovative ideas hold for the future, sometimes there is no substitute for resources – for money.

Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities. Consider that this year’s budget for the Department of Defense - not counting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan - is nearly half a trillion dollars. The total foreign affairs budget request for the State Department is $36 billion – less than what the Pentagon spends on health care alone. Secretary Rice has asked for a budget increase for the State Department and an expansion of the Foreign Service. The need is real.

From this we can reasonably conclude that the Secretary is a regular reader of WhirledView. Or, if not that, that he at least realizes, unlike his predecessor the famous bureaucratic infighter, that a successful US national strategy requires cooperation, coordination, and if not parity of resources then at least a balance less skewed than what we have now, between the critical agencies of US government.

I would strongly recommend MountainRunner's commentary on this speech as well. He mentions a report from Senator Lugar's office, "Embassies Grapple to Guide Foreign Aid" (.pdf) which he excerpts here in the bulleted points:

Not only has State's piece of the pie shrunk, but its leadership has, according to the report, become muddled. From four of the nine summary findings:

From the field, it is clear that we have failed as a government and as a community of international development supporters to agree on either the importance or the content of a foreign aid strategy...

Overall agreement between headquarters and the field on foreign assistance is at low ebb and communications have been complicated rather than improved by the State Department’s efforts to provide strategic direction...

Field complaints about the [new foreign assistance function headed by the Director of Foreign Assistance] at State focus on the lack of transparency, the weeks of extra paperwork, the differing priorities between post and headquarters, as well as inconsistent demands, but the underlying, only sometimes unspoken, fight is about money...

USAID may be viewed as the neglected stepchild in D.C. but in the field it is clear that USAID plays either the designated hitter or the indispensable utility infielder for almost all foreign assistance launched from post...

The last bullet is important as we see USAID working closely with the military in Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the contested spaces. This stepchild is a core function of our mission to deny sanctuary and to counter ideological support for terrorism and insurgency. In this, the report notes the importance of the institutionalization of collaboration between the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and USAID in terms of cooperation, funding, mission, and leadership. But to really move this requires leadership that's not apparent in State.

Mountainrunner wonders in his conclusion whether "Gates [is] speaking out of turn or is the Bush Administration having Gates speak for the President?" My guess is former, since as he points out there's little evidence of any coordination with Secretary Rice on this (and Bush himself appears these days to be focused mostly on 1) attempting to maintain some appearance of relevance, nevermind the realities; and 2) trying to convince everyone that actually, General Petraeus is really The Decider.) But you do have to sort of wonder what an administration a few real adults in charge from the beginning would've turned out like.

Oh well.

Update - Much more at WhirledView here.
[x-posted]

Friday Flickr - Libraries Are Excellent

2007-11-16T19:59:00.000-05:00

I'm still adjusting to life back in the States on some levels but one of the best things about it is definitely having access to English-language public libraries again. I've been really lucky to live in places with some very nice libraries, and when I passed through Boston on my way home back in early October I took this shot of the BPL, one of my favorite spots in the city. They had a pretty good exhibition of U.S. World War Two propaganda posters on display while I was visiting, too.

The Joys of the Job Search

2007-11-12T19:16:00.000-05:00

This is sort of Helpful.

This is really Not Helpful.

I've sent off about 10 applications in the past two to three weeks, and so far have received one response, informing me that the internship position for which I had been applying was actually eliminated two years ago.

Sunday Reading Open Thread

2007-11-11T12:55:00.000-05:00

Book I recently finished: Six Days of War by Michael Oren.

Acting about three years too late on a recommendation of praktike's, I now can claim to know a very small amount about the Middle East conflict. The history was very thoroughly reported, but I probably need to read more on Nasser and Israel to appreciate it all. This is a conflict I'm more inclined to defer to others on.

Book I'm currently reading: The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind.

Now that I'm living in the States and have access to English-language libraries again, I'm trying to catch up on several of the big political books to have come out in the past couple years. I'm liking this one better than The Price of Loyalty for the broader scope, although the prose is maybe a little too Esquire-esque. I'm about four chapters in at the moment and most of it is familiar from other sources by now, but he's putting together a pretty good narrative so far.

Book(s) I recently bought: Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan's Military Economy by Ayesha Siddiqa and Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam by Zahid Hussain.

I got tired of recommending the first one on Pakistan threads while having to caveat that "I've heard it's good, but haven't read it myself yet", so I bought it. And then they hooked me with that free shipping deal for the second....

What are you reading?

[x-posted]

Friday Flickr - Tuol Sleng Prison

2007-11-09T17:31:00.000-05:00

Friday Flickr for this week is from my trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Formerly a high school, Tuol Sleng ("Hill of the Poisonous Trees") was renamed "Security Prison 21" by the Khmer Rouge and used to conduct interrogations and torture prior to detainee's ultimate elimination. One of the methods used there was water-boarding. Somewhere between 17,000 and 20,000 people were imprisoned at S-21 between 1975 and 1979. When S-21 administrators ran out of room to bury those detained and later executed at Tuol Sleng, they began removing them to Choueng Ek, outside the city center.

Today Tuol Sleng is a museum dedicated to the victims of the Khmer Rouge's genocide against the Cambodian people.

For photographs of victims taken by the prison administrators, please visit this site.

Pakistan Open Source Intel Links for the Day

2007-11-08T19:31:00.000-05:00

The Pakistani military's website has a forum. Members are supporting Musharraf about 60/40 in the poll there right now.

A Flickr group.

The New York Times is looking for submissions.

Pondering Pakistani People's Political Participation

2007-11-06T15:12:00.000-05:00

Ahem.

It has taken me a while to make my way through the commentary about Pakistan pulsing through the 'net in the wake of Musharraf's imposition of military rule, but after a few days I've managed to do so and put together some thoughts of my own.

My undergraduate studies took a rather roundabout course. After a semester-long independent study on the Cold War my final year of high school, the closest thing I had to a regional specialization was Soviet Russia; however, having taken Japanese as my language then, I ended up selecting East Asia as my "regional track" in Boston University's International Relations program. I then proceeded to largely ignore both those areas and ended up taking courses mostly on China, after having finished a fascinating course on Chinese culture and domestic politics my freshman year. Then my senior year, after first reading Charlie Wilson's War and Ghost Wars (thank you Blake for the recommendations!), I got hooked on South Asia and political Islam under the teachings of Prof. Hussain Haqqani. This does not make the job search process go easier, let me tell you (my cover letter: "Will generalize on various subjects in exchange for pittance and a health plan").

The advantage of this all though is of course the chance to make connections between the subjects. One lesson from my studies of Chinese politics that has stuck with me is how "civil society" groups — religious bodies, environmental advocacy organizations, women's groups, etc — represent real foundational blocks in a participatory democracy, and how in the absence of democracy they can potentially serve as channels for citizens to seriously challenge the priorities and policies of the authoritarian state government (Prof. Robert Weller's Alternative Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan was a formative introduction to this idea).

In societies where an autocratic government imposes limits on political participation — by banning, for example, the establishment of rival political parties — even ostensibly innocuous and apolitical gatherings of individuals can potentially offer an platform for organizing the aspirations of the unrepresented. Democratic transition in Taiwan was heavily dependent on these voluntary groups' participation, and the Chinese Communist Party, observing this, has sought to curtail the organization of independent groups and NGOs on the mainland out of the fear that a similar process would depose them from power (thus, for example, the officially-endorsed and -incorporated "Patriotic Religious Associations" all practicing religious leaders are required to join). It's my understanding that many Middle Eastern leaders have been suspicious of the Muslim Brotherhood and other faith-based service organizations out of the fear that they too will end up serving as the framework for popular opposition to their continued autocratic rule.

So, in authoritarian societies where political participation is circumscribed, protesters may take the path of least resistance and channel their energies into groups that the state either doesn't have the power and / or the inclination to totally shut off.

Pakistan's General Musharraf is telling Western audiences that he's made his recent power play in order to shore up his ability to confront the terrorists, but the days following the coup have shown his biggest priorities to in fact be a crackdown on members of the judiciary, political opponents, and the independent media. Today the New York Times reports:

General Musharraf invited Islamabad’s diplomatic corps to his official residence on Monday to brief them on the situation and on his reasons for declaring emergency rule. But two Western diplomats said the encounter only reinforced concerns that General Musharraf was more focused on vanquishing his political rivals than on fighting terrorism.

At the meeting, the general primarily railed against his political opponents, with special venom reserved for the Supreme Court. When asked by a diplomat to describe specific plans to crack down on terrorists, General Musharraf gave only a vague answer.

“He effectively dodged the question and turned to the military presence in the room and asked them to organize a briefing for ambassadors,” said one of the Western diplomats. “It wasn’t very clear in terms of what was actually being done.”

The second Western diplomat said: “There was serious concern that terrorism and security was not front and center. What was really amazing was him going on and on and on about how bad the judiciary was.”

This is not Pakistan's first military clamp-down by any stretch, but Ahmed Rashid writes that "[n]ever before in Pakistan's sad history of military rule has a general so reviled invoked martial law to ensure his own survival".

It's remarkable — particularly given the hand-wringing fears about Pakistan's imminent Islamization should Musharraf exit the stage, a notion which Musharraf himself has of course been happy to encourage —the degree to which Islamist parties in Pakistan are not actually all that popular at the polls. Hilzoy summarizes: "[I]f we are worried about what would happen if Pakistan held democratic elections, then it seems like a good idea to focus on the support enjoyed by actual political parties. Here the polls are unanimous: none that I'm aware of has Islamist parties enjoying more than the 11% support that they received in the 2002 elections." As the Taiwan example might suggest, this is not to say that such a political victory would be impossible: Joshua Hammer, in a much-noted piece in the Atlantic Monthly, explains that

[t]he nightmare scenario for U.S. policy makers—and one reason they remain heavily invested in Musharraf—is an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. A tide of anti-American sentiment, some analysts fear, could bring to power Islamists, who would give free rein to the Taliban, spread nuclear technology to rogue states and terrorist groups, and support the mujahideen in Kashmir.

There’s no doubt that Islamists have grown in numbers and prominence in Pakistan since 9/11. In 2002, six fundamentalist parties formed an alliance called Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, or MMA, and rode a wave of anger at the American-led war in Afghanistan, taking 53 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly and forming the third-largest bloc in the parliament. The alliance won outright control of the provincial assembly in the North-West Frontier Province, and it now governs Balochistan in a coalition with Musharraf’s ruling party. During the weeks that I spent in Islamabad earlier this year, the MMA repeatedly flexed its muscles in noisy protests—weekly demonstrations against legislation offering further legal protections to women, rallies against the government’s razing of illegal makeshift mosques that have sprung up throughout the city. The demonstrations brought out hundreds of police officers and paralyzed traffic in the city for hours.

Moderate Muslims in Pakistan are worried about the Islamists’ rising profile: Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the Quaid-e-Azam University physics department, told me that the university has been “taken over” by Islamist fervor—more hijabs in the classrooms, more prayer, and “no bookstores, but three mosques with a fourth under construction” on campus. Hoodbhoy, a highly regarded nuclear physicist and a critic of military rule, told me that an Islamist takeover of the country, either by outright domination of the electoral process or in conjunction with a radical Islamist general, “is a real possibility.”

Hammer, continues, however, by reinforcing Hilzoy's statistics when he explains that

despite their clout in parliament and their seeming strength on the street, the Islamists are not widely popular: Their parties won only 11 percent of the vote in the 2002 elections (gerrymandering gave them a share of seats far greater than their numbers). Even in their stronghold, the North-West Frontier Province, they polled only 26 percent. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the MMA’s growth is its abysmal record of governance: In the North-West Frontier Province, which the alliance controls, social services are disintegrating. Unless anti-Western sentiment reaches sustained and unprecedented levels, the Islamists seem highly unlikely to muster enough votes to gain control of parliament in the next decade.

Pakistan actually has a number of pretty well-established secular political parties, but because of their potential to challenge his power it is they, not the militants or the Islamists, who Musharraf is targeting in his crackdown. Joshua Kurlantzick writes at The New Republic:

[Y]ears of a political vacuum under Musharraf meant that young Pakistani democrats, exactly the type of people the country needs to escape its feudal past, could not organize or build grassroots movements. When Musharraf finally agreed to allow greater political freedoms this year, the only politicians who could move into the vacuum were two feudal dinosaurs, former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto. Neither are paragons of democracy: Under Bhutto, Pakistan suffered an endemic of extrajudicial executions and torture, while Sharif was dismissed as prime minister for alleged massive corruption.

The only thing to add here is none of this began with Musharraf. Pakistan has never really had a chance to develop an effective governing class because whenever they've strayed from Army orthodoxy, coups have thrown them out of power. Having a weak and frequently corrupt political establishment serves Pakistani Army interests by offering easy pretexts for intervention and ready handles for less public manipulation when military rule is not overt. What to do if you're a Pakistani citizen who's fed up with this state of affairs? The Islamist program's appeal is not a special mystery, here.

The Chinese Communist Party currently has the power and the inclination to restrict independent religious organizations within the Chinese state (although even they have been forced to permit a burgeoning network of environmental NGOs). Musharraf, lacking in electoral legitimacy, presiding over a state whose economy and institutions are teetering on the edge of failure, and whose military predecessors have historically embraced Pakistan's Islamic identity as a strategy for overcoming ethnic and economic divisions in the face of a powerful and hostile Indian neighbor, does not have the means to do so. While I imagine it's fairly unlikely he would effect an about-face and embark on a program of Islamization to match a predecessor like Zia-ul-Haq, I find it even less likely that he will find the means to launch a more concerted effort against Afghan and Pakistani Taliban forces in the tribal areas, even assuming he retains the desire to do so.

Out of concerns for their own power Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani military establishment have retarded the development of the mainstream Pakistani political parties and weakened other institutions either through design or neglect; they simultaneously lack the means and will to confront separatist and terrorist movements which use the religion of Islam as a means of mobilization and organization. With other avenues of political participation restricted, Pakistan's gradual radicalization should not be unexpected. These groups' power will continue to wax, rather than wane, so long as Musharraf continues to cling to power, with serious strategic implications for America. While I don't want to overstate the degree to which the U.S. is able influence this process now — the military is deeply entrenched in Pakistani politics and will remain so for the forseeable future, as Hammer's article relates — I agree with Kurlantzick that it's time to recognize that our the perpetuation of Musharraf's rule is not serving our interests. Unless the political process is opened up through his removal, I think we can expect to see Islamist-based parties play an ever-growing role in Pakistan, and to the degree to which they cooperate and sympathize with groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban that is going to be that much more of a Bad Thing.

Ok, back to job applications now.

Friday Flickr - Kunchi Time

2007-11-02T11:23:00.000-04:00

Two blog posts in as many days! I'm on fire here!

To celebrate I'm inaugurating a new feature — yes, that's right, I'm going to go ahead and call it a feature. It's going to be Friday Flickr™®©℠☃*, and it's going to mean one picture, selected from my photostream, posted right here on this very blog. In the event that I run out of interesting photos of my own maybe I'll link to other people's as well. We'll see.

* - Ok, possibly other people have discovered this serendipitous bit of alliteration before me, but I can't be bothered to Google it right now.

Anyhow — Friday Flickr for November the 2nd, 2007 is going to be a picture of my favorite float from Karatsu Kunchi, which I am missing right now. Besides being a massive three or four ton float, it was also featured on the Masterchef household Halloween pumpkin this year (there would be pictures of that instead, but I have a backlog of about 100 pictures from Cambodia and Zambia I still need to upload to Flickr first).

This is the helmet of Minamoto Yorimitsu, also known as Raikou, being partially devoured by the oni Shuten Doji, on the first night of Kunchi 2006.

Chinese Lessons

2007-11-02T11:07:00.000-04:00

Thanks to a recent bulletin at the Small Wars Journal I caught notice of an article in the latest issue of the Joint Force Quarterly, a publication of the National Defense University for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The primary topic of this issue is China. There are a lot of interesting pieces to check out there, but the one that first caught my eye was one by Martin Wayne titled "Five Lessons from China's War on Terror" (pdf).

While I think the simmering conflict in Xinjiang has gotten more press since I first started studying it in the fall of 2004 (probably thanks to the handful of Uyghur detainees at Guantanamo, not my term paper), it is still a fairly obscure region — one which I was lucky enough to travel through recently while taking the long way home from a two-year teaching stint in Japan. I don't speak a word of Uyghur and two and a half weeks was not nearly enough time to really get beneath the surface level so I can't claim any authority as a field researcher — if you want to see my pictures from that trip, though, they are available on Flickr here and here.

Anyhow, the thesis of my old paper was that the Chinese central government has, historically, enacted a number of discriminatory or inflammatory policies which have alienated the Uyghur population in Xinjiang and which, if continued, have the counterproductive potential to actually increase the appeal of militant Islam for some members of the dispossessed minority. Dr. Wayne's article, and to some extent my own travels in Xinjiang, seem to challenge some of those ideas. Xinjiang today appears — and I should stress the "appears", because again I have not spent enough time there nor do I have the fluency to accurately judge for myself —stable. It seemed to me that much of this stability has actually come from a growing Han Chinese population with a vested interest in reaffirming Xinjiang's status as part of China, and in conjunction with this in-migration the co-opting or commodification of several centers of Uyghur life. (Witness for example this classic sign at the Id Khah mosque in Kashgar — China's largest, and a major tourist destination for Han Chinese and Westerners now, like many other places in Kashgar, although there are still large local crowds at Friday prayers — or read the caption I excerpted from the Xinjiang Museum in Urumqi's exhibit on minority cultures.) Since the 1990s, Beijing has devoted a tremendous amount of effort to keeping Xinjiang in its place as a part of China, and thus far it seems they have succeeded. Violence has diminished and development continues apace.

Wayne identifies five aspects of the Chinese government's actions in Xinjiang, which he says hold lessons for understanding "the nature of China today and ... crafting more effective counterinsurgency policies". They are, in brief:

The "targeting of indigenous support" for insurgency and cutting local links to broader jihadist movements
Acting "early, forcefully, and comprehensively", using a graduated mix of security forces
"Crafting meaningful security" through a comprehensive campaign in the areas of education, religion, economics, and governance
"Countering the insurgency from the bottom up", by using "society-centric" warfare — holding groups accountable for the actions of their members
Enabling counterinsurgency for the purpose of stability through "seemingly infinite political will" on the part of the regime

Now, I don't deny that there are lessons to be learned in these points, but after going through a summary of each one Wayne does not offer any sort of conclusion in which he evaluates just how good an example these lessons might be or even what, specifically, the lessons behind these strategies are. (He does have a forthcoming book on this subject, which presumably does expand on this, but it's also $125, so those of us without academic expense accounts will just have to make up our own for the time being.) He never draws any parallels to American counterinsurgencies in Iraq or Afghanistan, and it's possible this is deliberate. While I think he actually does a very good summarizing of Uyghur grievances and Beijing's methods, I am concerned that, with the absence of a concluding analysis that looks to the future, Xinjiang's continued stability, as a result of these policies, seems to be assumed by the writing. While violent Uyghur separatist aspirations do appear pretty minimal right now (and I should note that I think their chances of success, should they re-appear, are probably slim), it seems to me that some of the lessons enumerated above are actually potential de-stabilizers over the mid- to long-term, and (if this is indeed what Dr. Wayne is suggesting) I'm not sure to what degree our military establishment should be emulating them in its own counterinsurgency policies.

The "early, forceful, comprehensive" action in the first point describes, according to Wayne, the PRC's quick build-up of "forces capable of moving down the spectrum of violence — away from military actions in favor of paramilitary and then police forces more capable of moving in society". The "Four-in-One Defense" draws upon the People's Liberation Army; the paramilitary People's Armed Police; the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corp (a chain of farms, prison camps, and Han immigrant work groups established under Mao to ensure a loyal population); and the Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang, which today compromise a full 50% of Xinjiang's population, making them the largest ethnic group in what is officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The entire third point of Wayne's article, "crafting meaningful security", is the vaguest, but the examples he gives seem to me more like a recipe for rebellion than stability: purging the local military of "not only of those suspected of separatism but also of ideas considered separatist"; pairing throughout government Han Chinese and minority officials where "[t]he key to knowing who holds the power at each level ... is looking at which post is controlled by the Han"; "education primarily in [Mandarin]", the content of which is "controlled by the party-state, and [with] spies and informants ... believed to police classroom compliance"; "mosques and other religious settings [likewise] infiltrated and monitored for political dissent by security forces"; and "pervasive ethnic discrimination" where "the most materially developed towns have the largest percentages of Han". I have to acknowledge that it is possible that overpowering tactics like this might be effective, but Wayne in his very first point says that "[e]ven the most brutal force can achieve ephemeral tactical victories, yet strategic effectiveness is ultimately achieved through political measures that deeply reshape society". Unless he's suggesting that Beijing is reshaping society so totally that the Uyghurs will become permanently marginalized and as a result quiescent, I'm at a loss as to how these tactics are going to bring about long-term political reconciliation and stability. I'm hesitant to make future predictions about where China or the Uyghurs is headed, but should violent instability return to Xinjiang these would seem to me like number one candidates for protest.

As for the notion of "society-centric warfare", this appears to me to be essentially a combination of 1) collective punishment; and 2) state corporatism. Functioning as the former, Wayne explains how

In Xinjiang ... every grouping of society is held accountable for its rank and file. The region's government, as well as prefectures, villages, neighborhoods, and families, are responsible for their members. Employers, especially those directly controlled by the government, must account for their employees. The limited opportunities for moving or for obtaining new employment in Xinjiang throughout the 1990s greatly facilitated this strategy. Consequences for failing to prevent problems or respond appropriately range from stigma and stern warnings from the seemingly ever-present security forces ... to loss of employment (to which the entire family's housing, health care, and income may be tied) and perhaps worse. Some families reportedly have been threatened by security forces if a husband, father, or son failed to turn himself in after an incident of unrest.

China practices the state corporatism function regularly through controls on the establishment and activities of non-governmental organizations, most notably through the "Patriotic Religious Associations" practicing Chinese priests and imams are required to join in order to gain the privilege of preaching to and representing their respective faiths. This divide, coopt, and rule is strategy is potentially effective (the British certainly were fond of it, weren't they?) but also has the consequence of legitimating and entrenching community divisions. I've written previously in my other huge-senior-year-term-paper that this has produced some challenges to integrating Europe's Muslim communities, and more directly related to Xinjiang Dru Gladney has written a lot on how Uyghur identities are being constructed in opposition to mainstream Han Chinese society, the most recent bit of which I've read being Chapter 10 in his book Dislocating China. So again, this "society-centric" policy is something which seems to be working ok now, but I think has the potential to come back and bite Beijing badly in the future — just as it may in Iraq today.

Wayne's final fifth point is a good one, which is that "the prospect of unrest in Xinjiang shook the regime's veneer of stability and catalyzed government action with the full if uninformed backing of the Chinese people ... While the Communist Party's concern is for self-preservation atop the state, the state must produce the perception, and perhaps the reality, of internal stability". But while economic successes and very gradual political reform may buy continued acquiescence to CCP rule in the east for the time being, I don't know the extent to which that will work in Xinjiang (or in the east, for that matter). Wayne says that "like peoples elsewhere in China, the population of Xinjiang increasingly if grudgingly bought into the idea that stability across China leads to a better future. Acceptance of this vision of Xinjiang benefitting from increasing incorporation into China undercut passive support for insurgency and drew Uyghurs and Uyghur society into active stabilizing roles in governance, business, religion, and education." I can't argue with this — it certainly seemed that way when I travelled through Xinjiang over this summer — but I do wonder whether the Uyghurs will continue to buy in for the long term, given the number of intrusive policies they are subject to and the highly uneven distribution of this "better future" in Xinjiang. It also raises the question — which Wayne does raise in his final paragraph — as to what will happen in Xinjiang and throughout China if the country's growth slackens and the promised future benefits remain out of the grasp of the majority.

I really am interested in reading Dr. Wayne's full book, if I can ever manage to get a copy to do so, and would be very curious to see more analysis of Chinese policies from scholars better-versed than I in the intricacies of counterinsurgency strategy. Right now though, I'm not finding myself convinced by Dr. Wayne's article that China's actions in Xinjiang are in fact keys to "crafting more effective counterinsurgency policies", at least not through their emulation. After a period of spiking political violence in the mid-1990s Xinjiang has entered a fairly quiet stage, but I think it is still too early to say whether this will last or whether Chinese policies will actually provoke a more serious challenge to Beijing's authority in the future. We'll see.

DOD to the Rescue!

2007-11-01T16:17:00.000-04:00

Rough week. Not only has the State Department lost the talents of Karen Hughes, it also lost control over the security contracts to guard its diplomats and convoys. The New York Times says:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates agreed to the measure at a lunch on Tuesday after weeks of tension between their departments over coordination of thousands of gun-carrying contractors operating in the chaos of Iraq.

Mr. Gates appears to have won the bureaucratic tug-of-war, which accelerated after a Sept. 16 shooting in central Baghdad involving guards in a Blackwater convoy who Iraqi investigators say killed 17 Iraqis. Military coordination of contractor convoys will include operations of not only Blackwater, formerly known as Blackwater USA, but also those of dozens of other private firms that guard American diplomats, aid workers and reconstruction crews.

What the article doesn't say is how control is being transferred and what, exactly, "military coordination" is going to actually mean. Prior to this announcement the (currently leader-less) State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security — which manages embassy security details all over the world, and which oversaw the Blackwater contract since control over the non-military aspects of the Iraq mission was transferred to State from Rumsfeld's CPA in 2004 — had already, in response to the Blackwater incident, proposed some fixes. They include the "establishment of a 'go team' of embassy security officials to 'proceed as soon as possible to the scene of any weapons discharge to gather information and material and provide an analysis of what happened and why, and prepare a report'", as well as "[a board to] review all incidents involving contractor use of deadly force, injury, death or serious property damage and recommend to the ambassador whether force was justified", among other ideas like cultural training and increased compensation for Iraqi families who suffer from contractors' mishaps. To what extent any of these measures will be implemented under the DOD's watch is not at all clear from the Times article. But R.J. Hillhouse at The Spy Who Billed Me reminds us that the Pentagon actually already has its own system for overseeing the activities of most of its contractors — which is, hire another contractor to do it for them:

Department of Defense security contractors are already coordinated through a single, DoD entity, the Regional Operations Centers which track movement of security convoys to make sure they and the military don't trip over one another. Most likely this existing mechanism will be expanded to monitor Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp convoys for the Department of State and this would raise some interesting questions since its known that BW and TC also provide security services to the CIA under this contract.

The US Regional Cooperation Offices are outsourced through a recently renewed $475 million contract to the British firm Aegis. Aegis is run by the infamous old-school mercenary, Tim Spicer.

I recommend reading the full Washington Post story linked in Hillhouse's post above, but essentially one of the responsibilities included in the Aegis contract is conducting regular threat briefings for and tracking the movement of DOD contractors. Why is the US military outsourcing the oversight of its outsourcing? Probably because the military's procurement and contracting officer corps is overstretched and under-prepared for the task at hand as it is:

An independent panel has sharply criticized the Army for failing to train enough experienced contracting officers, deploy them quickly to war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan and ensure that they properly manage billions of dollars in contracts to supply American troops in the field, according to officials briefed on its findings.
In a wide-ranging report to be made public on Thursday, the panel said these and other shortcomings had contributed to an environment in Iraq and Kuwait that allowed waste, fraud and other corruption to take hold and flourish. ...
[T]he six-member panel, appointed in August by Army Secretary Pete Geren, levels a stinging indictment of how the Army oversees $4 billion a year in contracts for food, water, shelter and other supplies to sustain United States forces in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. The panel also blames senior Army leaders for not responding more swiftly to the problems, despite warning signs like severe shortages of contracting officers in the field. “The Iraq-Kuwait-Afghanistan contracting problems have created a crisis,” the report states.
Congress and investigating agencies like the Government Accountability Office have in recent months assailed the Army for what they have described as a war-zone procurement system in disarray. ...
The panel’s report, which runs about 100 pages including supporting documents, recommends increasing the number of Army contracting officers by about 25 percent, or 1,400, in coming years. It urges the department to improve training and to start young officers in the procurement corps soon after they join the Army, not after seven or eight years of other duties, as is common now.
The panel argues that the procurement corps, now dominated by civilians who balk at being sent to a war zone, must be trained to be an expeditionary force, just as Army combat forces train to deploy quickly for yearlong tours to Iraq,

I do think unity of effort is a key aspect of a counterinsurgency campaign (John Nagl makes points along these lines in Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, as I recall), so to that extent having all the guns rolling under one command makes sense; and it's one of the realities of our day that the United States seems to increasingly hand these kinds of responsibilities to its military rather than its diplomatic services (on this subject see, among others, a recent WhirledView post, Andrew Bacevich's New American Militarism, and Dana Priest's The Mission). I agree with the Mountainrunner article I linked above that problems with Blackwater in Iraq really reflect more the failings of its contracting customer, which is to say the US State Department and more broadly the US government as a whole. If State doesn't recognize the damage being done to US-Iraqi relations by hard-rolling contractor convoys, it's really not Blackwater's business to hold back just for the sake of the broader national mission, which is not what they are being paid for, unless its client demand that of it. State and other US government agencies are presumably being paid to execute a coherent campaign to fight off the Iraqi insurgency and rebuild the country, and their failure to rein in contractors (potentially even when that means greater risk to US diplomats and others serving there) has been detrimental to our mission in Iraq. But it's pretty evident that the Pentagon has not exactly covered itself in glory in the area of contractor oversight either.

If Secretary Gates and General Petraeus are going to take their new power over State's security details and the recommendations of this contracting panel and try to forge some kind of coherent program of oversight for the many private firms to whom the US government has devolved portions of its responsibilities in Iraq, then maybe we will see a more coherent strategic effort. But switching one Department for another on Blackwater's billing invoices is not going to be enough.*

* Ok, possibly Blackwater still sends its bills to State under this new arrangement, I don't really know. Maybe they have direct deposit. It's mostly beside the point.

[x-posted]

Huế

2007-10-27T20:31:00.000-04:00

Travel pictures are slowly but surely being added to Flickr. Check it out.

Hope no-one sees me / Gettin' freaky

2007-10-23T16:16:00.000-04:00

Japan: getting weirder since I've left? Discuss.

Counterargument: this is not a new story.

Thoughts on Charity and Government

2007-10-23T00:11:00.000-04:00

Ezra Klein makes what I think is an important point, which allows me to make a rare statement elaborating a bit of my own loosely-defined personal political theories. Ezra:

Charity is good for the giver and, generally, good for the receiver. But it's not what you build your society upon. It's not reliable, or predictable, or particularly targetable. Indeed, very little philanthropy actually goes into the areas that social policy focuses on. And that's because it's not supposed to. Charity, rather often, is a way to demonstrate virtue or compassion. Social policy, at least in theory, is a way to try and fix a structural problem. The two cannot be swapped in for each other.

I've been an active supporter of the charity Habitat for Humanity for going on seven and a half years now. I have probably personally hammered nails, painted walls, or shoveled dirt at the sites of over 70 or 80 homes across the United States (and the world), and have worked with many of the future homeowners and hundreds of other volunteers in the course of doing so. I've donated a good bit of my own money to the cause as well, although I'm still at the stage in my life where donations of time and labor are a lot easier for me to make than monetary ones; having made such an investment at this point, though, it's reasonable to assume that those financial contributions will increase as my means to make them does.

I think Habitat does a lot of good work. And I am proud of the work I have done with it: through my efforts families have been able to achieve home ownership when they might otherwise never have enjoyed that stability that my fortunes have afforded me since birth. Habitat has offered a crucial hand up for these people and their lives have been impacted by it, just as those of the volunteers who work with them have. Developing a spirit of civic volunteerism is another important aspect of charity work, as I've attempted to express before. Private, non-governmental charitable groups play a very important role in policy-making, by advocating for issues and energizing constituencies to participate in the democratic political process. Living in politically apathetic Japan for two years made me realize how rich U.S. society is in that regard.

But the simple fact is that Habitat, for all its lofty vision, is not going to house the world on its own, one family at a time. There was an immense impact for every family whose home I have helped build, but on the national scale these are tiny changes — even more minuscule on the global scale. While charities may lead attention to an issue, ultimately I think broad changes, at the structural level as Ezra correctly seeks to place them, in major social policy areas like affordable housing, education, the environment, and health care, can only be effected by an agency as powerful and far-reaching as the government. And the fact that I do think it is just and proper for the government to be directed towards those goals is a major reason why I am not a conservative.

Bacevich on Niebuhr

2007-10-17T16:57:00.000-04:00

Bad timing for my recent stopover in Boston means I missed hearing this in person, but Professor Andrew Bacevich's lecture last week at Boston University, "Illusions of Managing History: The Enduring Relevance of Reinhold Niebuhr", is available for listening online. I recall the Niebuhr section in the "Ideas on American Foreign Policy" course I took with him as being somewhat inscrutable at the time, but Bacevich's lecture touches on a number of themes also present in much of his recent writing. From the BU Today writeup:

Bacevich, a conservative thinker who has become a harsh Iraq war critic, said Niebuhr stressed that history is not a simple narrative of good battling evil, and with American leadership, eventually triumphing around the world. Instead, Niehbuhr emphasized “the indecipherability of history” and warned of “the false allure of simple solutions.” And, said Bacevich, referencing the Bush administration’s push for invading Iraq in 2003, such an allure was particularly dangerous when the solution reached for was a military one.

“Egged on by pundits and policy analysts, [they] persuaded themselves that American power, adroitly employed, could transform the Greater Middle East,” said Bacevich. “The paths of progress,” he continued, quoting Niebuhr, “have turned out to be more devious and unpredictable than the putative managers of history could understand.” Bacevich warned also that a continuing failure to heed Niebuhr’s admonitions would tempt “further catastrophes.” And he didn’t point fingers only at Washington. In the final minutes of his lecture, Bacevich examined the struggle in Iraq from a cultural point of view. Specifically, he said, it was the American expectation for ever-greater material abundance that has led to an inherently expansionist foreign policy, such as our addiction to foreign oil and the bloody entanglements needed to ensure an unfettered supply of the fuel.

The current war in Iraq, Bacevich argued, was debased not just by delusional and arrogant foreign policy leadership, but by “the moral dissonance generated by sending soldiers off to fight for freedom in distant lands when freedom at home appears increasingly to have become a synonym for profligacy, conspicuous consumption, and frivolous self-absorption.”

The latter section particularly echoes arguments made by William Appleman Williams and Charles Beard, two historians whose work Bacevich cites in his book, The New American Militarism. I'll have to see if I can't dig up my notes from senior year to see what additional points we might have covered then on Neibuhr — I think the reading itself was a handout, as I don't spot The Irony of American History on my current shelves (which I am now reunited with after two years away in Japan). The follow-up Q&A session at Bacevich's talk, unfortunately, is not included in this audio, so I'm left wondering how the debate went afterwards.

Otherwise unrelated but continuing with the where-are-my-former-professors-now theme a little bit further, Professor Husain Haqqani, current director of BU's Center for International Relations, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on Pakistan recently: here is Video Part One and Video Part Two (Windows streaming formats). I've yet to watch the videos fully for lack of a good connection, but his prepared testimony can be read here (.pdf).

There And Back Again

2007-10-07T14:58:00.000-04:00

America is doing just ok. I caught up with some professors in Boston, had crepes at the place in South Campus and blueberry muffins at Dunkin Donuts, and am now back home in Indiana and settling in a bit before launching the Great Job Search.

I guess it's a little after the fact now, but I'm beginning to upload pictures from my trip — a slow process since 1) there are over 580 of them to sort through; and 2) we still just have dial-up in the house. So catching up on the news and blogs will also take a while. But you can see the first installment of pictures, from my three days in Beijing, now.

Under African Skies

2007-09-27T03:36:00.000-04:00

... but not for much longer. I'm back in Lusaka now, after hitching down for three sun-and-wind-beaten hours in a battered old Japanese pick-up with wooden floorboards and the little voice chirping a warning announcement whenever the truck turns left. Hitching is definitely the way to go in Zambia, although all successes in that department are owed to Laura's skills. Since leaving Livingstone (we took a river cruise on the "African Princess", which was ok, but didn't get us nearly as close to the wildlife as the safari boat we were supposed to have taken -- the bus brought us there late so we took the free drinks as consolation prize), I've been spending the past several days out in the village in Zambia's Mkushi district, Central Province, where I spent a relaxing time laying about, straining to keep up with Laura on the dirt biking trails, tagging along for fish pond inspections, and playing with her dog, Winston. Life as a Peace Corps volunteer out in the bush is a much more challenging one than that of a JET teacher in Japan, but Laura has made a pretty nice home there, and it was good to be able to visit. (Oh, and I did get my bag back.)

Now I'm off to London, for a five-hour layover, and then Boston, where I hope to run into a few former professors at BU and enjoy some New England fall weather. I may or may not make a detour down the coast to New York City on the Chinatown bus, not sure at this point, but I am about out of money by now so I don't think I will be delaying the return home to Indiana for too much longer.

I hope everybody's been taking good care of America in my absence.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume

2007-09-17T07:32:00.000-04:00

I have made it to Zambia, alive and intact. The trip from Bangkok was, to put it mildly, a hellish nightmare of epic proportions. The minibus from my Bangkok guesthouse to the airport got stuck in traffic, of course, but I made it there with over two hours to spare, so I had a leisurely check-in and even had time to buy a barbecue chicken nikuman from the Family Mart (!) there in the departure terminal. My bag, I was told, was going to be checked straight on to Lusaka, so I said goodbye to it, and then went through security. I used some of my last Thai baht on a scoop of gelato and some Thai cooking spices for Laura (my friend here in Zambia). Then I sat around at the departure gate with a huge hoard of Thai university students on a tour and a bunch of Brits for a bit before getting on around 9:30 in the evening.

Etihad Airways, the national carrier of the United Arab Emirates, is pretty fancy flying, with soothing sand-colored carpeting and something like 500 channels of movies and tv programs and video games in the seatbacks. The flight was fairly full but I ended up with a row to myself, although two people later moved to join me when their handsets weren't working. I didn't sleep, but ended up watching the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie (all three were on offer, but I'd only seen the second one once before, and felt I needed a refresher; it made more sense the second time around) and an incredibly strange German movie, "Deepfrozen", which started out as what could've been a quirky romantic comedy about a very socially awkward man living in a nowhere village delivering frozen pizzas, who falls for an exotic young girl who's a rock groupie whose van breaks down outside of town ... but then people start dying, and maybe she killed them, but in the end maybe he did it, except he probably couldn't have? And she rides off in a limo with James Brown. Very bizarre, and not quite what I was expecting going into it. Anyhow, I didn't sleep, so when we touched down in Abu Dhabi it was around 3:00 AM Bangkok time -- I had been up for about 20 hours at this point. I staggered into the waiting lounge, where I bought a cherry danish that tasted exactly like America, and also some water. I sat around for about an hour and a half waiting to board the plane, which I eventually did; it was 2:00 in the morning local time and my flight was scheduled to be leaving at 2:30.

At this point I did get a chance to stretch out on two seats against the side and fall asleep -- I think it was at least a half hour, but couldn't have been more than an hour, because at around 3:00 (six AM in Bangkok, or almost 24 hours since I had woken up there the previous morning) I was awakened by the captain announcing that there was mechanical trouble with one of the engines, and they were de-boarding the plane on account of repairs that would take at least four hours. So me and the other passengers dragged ourselves off and back into the terminal, where four beleaguered Etihad employees were rebooking the entire flight. The lucky ones heading to Johannesburg, they put up in a hotel there in Abu Dhabi and onto a flight the next morning; but since South Africa wasn't my final destination, and since that delay would mean missing my morning flight to Lusaka, they told me they were going to put me a taxi for Dubai, have me take an Emirates Air flight to Johannesburg at 10:00 AM, and then have South African Airways put me on an evening flight for Lusaka that should have gotten me in around 8:00 PM on the evening of the 14th. Ok. They gave me a voucher for the taxi and a white sheet of paper with my FIM ("Flight Interrupt Manifest") details on it that would get me on the necessary flights, and sent me on my way. So I passed through United Arab Emirates customs at 4:00 in the morning and stepped into the cab that arrived shortly after for the drive to Dubai.

The taxi wasn't actually marked as such, and the car was quite nice; a luxury model of some sort, with video headrests a dashboard covered in displays. The effect was marred by the seatbelts, though; as I fastened in, it felt like they had cut roughly through the seat fabric to put in the buckle. We pulled out onto four lanes of smooth, perfectly unblemished, perfectly empty tarmac laid down by legions of sweating South Asian migrant workers, the driver gradually bringing up the speed as we cut through the desert on an orange-lit ribbon of highway. Wide awake from the frigid air conditioning and my brain having reached the point where dead tiredness turns over into vivid wakefulness, we passed palm trees lining the highway, unseen lights out in the desert, two large mosques lit with neon green, and a Dunkin Donuts. The rear window had some sort of glaze on the glass that caused the sodium-burning h ighway floodlights to twist into writhing tendrils as we passed beneath, the car beeping politely as we cross the 120 kilometer speed limit threshold. After a hundred kilometers or more, we entered the shelter of the high glass skyscraper towers of Dubai, many under construction and topped with cranes perched like birds greeting the dawn.

Just before six in the morning we pulled into the loading zone at the airport, where I attempted to explain my situation at the Emirates counter. They were confused, of course, as was I, but the guy took my piece of paper and told me to wait there until nine, when he'd let me know if there was room on the standby waiting list for me to get on this flight to Johannesburg. I didn't dare lie down on the couches, for fear I wouldn't wake up -- so I sat there, freezing in the air conditioning as my body functions started shutting down. After an interminable wait, I went back to get a ticket and my magic piece of paper again and sprinted my way to the flight, where I boarded with a legion of South Africans returning from holidays in the UK. By this point, my brief hour of rest aside, I had been awake for close to 30 hours, and in transit for about 16.

But -- I got stuck in a center seat next to a large woman and a German backpacker and didn't sleep any on the eight hours down to Johannesburg. I watched movies, I played video games, I ate snacks, I listened to the Swiss flight attendant flirting with the South African girl in the seat in front of me, I tried to sleep as hard as I could, but when we touched down in South Africa I was still awake. Unbelievable.

Now, when I got my ticket from the Emirates guy, he gave me back my special piece of white paper from the Etihad people and said, "They're going to try and take this from you at the gate, but don't give it to them, you need it in Johannesburg". He was right -- the people at the gate in Dubai insisted, and even though I was skeptical when they said that Etihad should've put me in the system and I shouldn't need it in Joburg and that they needed to keep this copy, I was exhausted and just wanted to get on the plane, so I wrote down my FIM number and gave up the sheet. This was of course a mistake, since when I got to the international transfer desk in Joburg the rather unfriendly South African Airways people -- who were supposed to be putting me on an evening flight to Lusaka at Etihad's expense, since I had missed the one I was scheduled for that morning -- said that I wasn't in the system and without the paper they couldn't do anything, and that Etihad should've given me two FIM papers for the two flights. Oh, and the Etihad people there had already left for the day, so I needed to come back at 7:00 in the morning. Exhausted, defeated, and at this point about ready to just go to sleep there in the queue, I gave up and checked myself into a very posh airport hotel at $185 a night and crawled into the softest bed ever. It was seven thirty in South Africa, past midnight in Bangkok, and I had been in transit for 26 hours and awake for the better part of 40 -- a new personal record, as my previous best was only 27.

I still woke up at the crack of dawn though -- I'm more jetlagged in Africa than I've been on the rest of the trip, since it's actually seven hours time difference from Japan. I went back to the airport and found the Etihad offices and talked to the guy there, who was pretty helpful, and who got me on the morning flight to Lusaka. I'm still confused as to who exactly I should be blaming for all this -- Etihad for not giving me enough FIMs, Emirates for taking the one I had, South African for being no help at all? -- but whatever, I made it on the flight and to meet Laura, albeit a full 24 hours later than I should've. And I got a UAE and South Africa stamp in the passport out of it too. My bag, of course, did not make it -- I have no clear idea where it is at the moment; either somewhere in Abu Dhabi floating in the aether, or otherwise in Johannesburg with the pallet of other peoples' luggage from my flight who also were missing bags when we disembarked. So right now I've got one pair of clothes, my camera, and my iPod to my name; but I imagine the bag will show up eventually. I gave them Laura's cell phone number here and with luck it will turn up, but Lusaka is not an especially happening town so we decided not to sit around and wait for it after the first day; yesterday we hitchhiked 472 kilometers south to the town of Livingstone on the border with Zimbabwe, home of Victoria Falls and a museum dedicated to the famous explorer.

Zambia is more expensive to travel in than Southeast Asia, because most travellers here are rich Anglos on safari, but this morning I went to the falls and had breakfast on an island looking over the plunge, which was quite cool; this evening we're taking a riverboat and going looking for big game. We've actually already seen zebras and giraffes, wandering through the grounds of the hotel that hosted the breakfast (which is actually within a national park, and which was full of rich old tourists). After two more days of activities here -- horseback riding, bungee jumping, and canoeing are all possibilities I think, although I'm not sure what we'll end up doing -- we're going to hitch back north to Laura's village, where things will be considerably more sedate; there's an agro-forestry workshop and some fish farming she's doing, and otherwise we will probably be taking it easy for the week there.

It was immensely stressful getting here but I am here now and, missing bag aside, things are going well. Africa!

Out of Asia

2007-09-12T21:50:00.000-04:00

Angkor: wow.

Also, bicycling around Angkor: wow. I went through four and a half liters of water and I'm pretty sure I sweated it all out again.

The road from Siem Reap to Bangkok did not take 14 hours as I had feared, but the six it took to get to the Thai border were some of the worst roads I've crossed over; possibly even worse than Mongolia, since you can't just drive off onto the side on account of the fact that it's all surrounded by rice fields. Still, I made it here to Bangkok in about 10 hours, and this evening head to airport for to begin what will probably be about 24 hours of flights. The only good thing to say about this route is it will give me what will probably be my life's only stopover in Abu Dhabi, for about two hours anyhow.

On to Africa!

Cambodian Crossing

2007-09-10T05:25:00.000-04:00

Well, the suit turned out pretty good.

From Hoi An I took a trip down to see the memorial at My Lai, which was as you might expect something of an emotionally draining visit. I was the only visitor so I got a personal guided tour from an earnest young woman who took me around the reconstructed house foundations where the hamlet once stood, and I stood by the ditch where Lieutenant Calley's soldiers cut down 107 civilians. (Its banks have been reinforced with some molded concrete now, which I think maybe detracts -- slightly -- from the impact... but, still.) Probably the most emotional part was watching a short documentary they showed which featured the helicopter pilot, Hugh Thompson, who stopped to rescue 10 civilians and who returned 30 years later to meet two of the survivors. On an otherwise very dark day, his courage and humanity were inspiring, and it was very moving watching these (now quite old) women thank him for an act that was at once amazingly brave and also very simply the right thing to do. I can only hope the United States continues to be able to produce men (and women) of his heroism.

I came back to Hoi An to catch a bus south to the small beachside port of Quy Nhon, once home to a large US and South Vietnamese military base, where my father was stationed. Today the city is one of Vietnam's quieter beachfronts, with few foreign tourists (who mostly go further south, to Nha Trang) and many fishing boats plying the bay. It appears there's nothing left of the old base -- not only have things been stripped away and recycled, but the area where it once stood has actually undergone some major redevelopment, with hotels and a supermarket / shopping mall and a wide flat boulevard lined with trees where the airstrip once ran. After an evening shower, I took another walk along the beach in search of a seafood restaurant this evening and passed a large segment of Quy Nhon's young male population out playing soccer or volleyball in the sand; many young kids were out with there parents as well and I was fairly bombarded with "hello!"s until it got too dark for them to notice I was a foreigner.

It's been planes, cars, boats, motorcycles, and many, many buses thus far this trip so for a change of pace I took the train from Quy Nhon to Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City -- which made for a very slow pace, as it turns out. I was in a narrow berth with six bunks with about an inch slab of padding on each; I was on the top bunk which meant I had about two feet of head clearance, so I spent most of the trip lying around, dozing, reading, listening to the iPod, and eating Oreos. We arrived in at around 9:00 in the evening and I took a taxi to a place that actually ended up being the most expensive place I've stayed at in Vietnam, $17 for a double. It wasn't as nice as the place I stayed at in Quy Nhon, either, which was a nice beachside backpacker place run by a friendly Kiwi expat; but still, I can't complain all that much.

---

Although I'm sure Saigon has some hidden charms, I got the hell out of dodge the next day, with yet another bus ride, this time over the border into Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh. My first evening I took a short walk and had a dinner of delicious hot and sour soup before returning to my (very budget) guesthouse by the lakeside. Then the next morning I took a motorcycle out to the Killing Fields, which are maybe 15 minutes ride outside of Phnom Penh.

As we pulled down a dusty dirt road that led to the grounds, I heard the loud echoing of monks chanting broadcast over a PA system, mingled with jangly Cambodian music ... perhaps coming from a restaurant nearby, I'm not sure where exactly, but it made for a strangely appropriate soundtrack to wander around the place. The "fields" are actually dotted with copses of trees, and paths leading under them pass by many sunken depressions, their bottoms filled with small pools from the high water table (the land here is flat and low, formed from alluvial silt from the mighty Mekong River, whose bay once split Vietnam and Thailand into two separate peninsulas before filling in to form Cambodia) -- these were the mass graves, some of which have since been excavated. Along the paths there were still tattered scraps of clothing fallen from the many victims. A tall monument, maybe 30 feet in height, stands a short walk from the entrance gates, with arching spires and intricate carvings in the Cambodian temple style; the glass walls inside house a column of human skulls, victims who were brought here after being imprisoned in S-21 prison, interrogated, tortured, and finally disposed of.

The prison, which I visited that afternoon, was once a high school, with yellow paint still on the pitted concrete walls and rusting bars covering the windows. The rooms where they kept prisoners were mostly bare, with the occasional metal bedframe on which the interrogators worked. A torrential afternoon monsoon rain came down as I was passing between buildings and so I spent some time looking at pictures of the many men, women, and not a few children who passed through this place. I bought a book about the Khmer Rouge regime, and how Pol Pot's group effectively kidnapped and decimated Cambodian society after their overthrow of Gen. Lon Nol, which I'm reading now. I studied Cambodia a bit back in college but feel I need to refresh myself on the history some more. "Madness" is too simple of an explanation for what brought these things about but it's hard to think otherwise.

---

Now I'm in Siem Reap, home of the mighty temples of Angkor Wat, for what will hopefully be a big change of tone. After yet another very long bus ride from Phnom Penh this morning, I arrived around three o'clock and was immediately set upon by the most voracious crowd of tuk-tuk drivers I've had the misfortunte to encounter yet. I was the only single foreigner on the bus (there was one Brit couple who had thought to book a ride to their guesthouse ahead of time; the rest were all locals) and so I ended up literally pinned and surrounded by about twenty guys waving signs as soon as I got off the bus. I finally broke off with one of them, whose "free" ride to my choice of guesthouse turned into $1.25 when I passed on his offer to drive me around the temples tomorrow. Instead I'm going to rent a bike from the place where I'm staying and head out at the crack of dawn tomorrow to try and fit in as much as I can... I have to book it to Bangkok by the 13th for a flight out of Asia so unfortunately I don't have enough time to take a more leisurely survey of the area.

And here comes the monsoon rains again.

Hello from Hoi An

2007-09-03T22:43:00.000-04:00

The van that came and picked me up for the tour of Halong Bay stopped at several, increasingly tonier-looking, hotels on the way out of town, with the last stop being for an Australian woman who was at the Hanoi Hilton (not the one John McCain stayed in). With the exception of me, three Australians, and one South African, our group of a dozen was entirely Asian; several were actually Vietnamese, one Korean couple, and one older Japanese couple. I appeared to be the only obvious backpacker amongst the group; most of the rest looked to be in their 30s at least. Our tour guide was a young Vietnamese lady named Han, which like the Han in Hanoi means River. We drove out of town, threading our way through the scooter-filled streets and coming out into the countryside. We passed through ricefields dotted with ancestral shrines and small villages with concrete walls moldering in the tropical climes and narrow colonial-style houses. Water buffalos crossed the road at a few points. After an hour or so we made a rest stop at a tourist trap / market -- gotta pay the gas bills, I guess. After about twenty minutes we got back on the bus and continued uninterrupted out to Halong Bay, which was another three hours or so drive.

All manner of tour boats crowd around the docks at the entrance Halong Bay and after our guide bought us tickets we boarded one, a spacious double-decked craft titled the Haiphong 2, and broke our way out of the clot of ships to head out into the bay. We had a lunch of spicy tofu, cucumber slices, tasty prawns, and ginger chicken with rice as the boat cruised through open water. Chatting with the other English-speakers about my travels in Southeast Asia, the Australian lady mentioned that she was "dying to see the Killing Fields", which I thought was a pretty strange choice of expressions, given the circumstances. Midway through lunch we were amongst the islands, which are large limestone protrusions rising out of the water. The name in Vietnamese means "dragon descending", which according to legend is what thrust the rocks upwards like they are today. We cruised amongst the islands at a leisurely chug, and around 3:00 came to a large one, where we disembarked and entered a fairly sizeable above-water limestone cave. It was cooler inside, but even then you couldn't escape the humidity; I was soaked by the time I made it back to where the boat had docked. After that we crossed over to where several floating platforms had been lashed together to construct farm cages for fish, prawns, and mussels; it was here that we got our chance to kayak. I ended up paired with one of the older Australian guys, and we paddled around a few of the nearby islands for about 40 minutes before coming back to the boat. We finished with a leisurely boat ride back to the dock and then three hours in the bus back to Hanoi, where I got in at 9:00 and had a dinner of pho noodles while watching a pair of Vietnamese brothers whack each other which chopsticks. A nice tour, though I personally would've taken more time in the kayaks and less on the boat.

---

Sunday morning I woke up early and spent a few hours on the hostel's computer attempting to figure out how to sign up for Skype service so that I can attempt to call come for cheap; it's pretty popular with the backpacker crowd here, and I've almost figured it out I think. My taxi out to the airport got me there with time to spare, as my flight on to Hue was actually delayed for an hour and a half -- though that did give me time to charge my iPod in the departure lounge and eat a lunch they provided for us (still just an inflight meal, though). I spent the flight reading the English language weekly paper, the main piece being an article on a woman who at the age of 15 had worked running supplies along the trail to Vietnamese fighters in the south. Most of it was devoted to her rapturous rememberances of the time she got to meet Ho Chi Minh. The flight was only about an hour and when we arrived at the small Hue airstrip and walked off the plane, a bus carried us fifty meters over to the terminal where we picked up our luggage. I took a taxi to the hotel I was planning on staying at, which worked out fine this time -- think that scam is mostly a big city thing, as this one was a fair metered ride.

I checked in and then took a walk across the river to see the old imperial citadel of Hue, which had crowds of Vietnamese families out and about, since I think they waived the admission fee in honor of Vietnam's Independence Day, which was Sunday -- Hanoi was festooned with flags all over during the few days I was there, but I didn't see any big celebrations. The citadel is crumbling and ruined thanks to fierce fighting between Vietnamese and US forces back in the 1960s, making it look much older than its 200-some years; large portions are open grassy fields, broken in place to place by old flagstones. Reconstruction is underway in some places, but I liked the ruined feel -- my timing was just right at the golden hour of sunset, and I got some good pictures that I'll be uploading when I get back.

I had dinner in a Hue restaurant, the Tropical Garden; wicker lampshades and candle light illuminated the open-air dining area, with a thatched roof and wooden lattice walls surrounded by plants and greenery. Waitresses in imperial purple ao dais brought me a succession of six courses, starting off with a souple of beef and noodles with a slight lemony tang, and finishing with some sort of fish pate wrapped in banana leaves (which you're not actually supposed to try and eat, I learned) and a plate of pineapple, watermelon, and dragonfruit. A quintet of traditional Vietnamese musicians played short pieces while I ate. It's the fanciest meal I've had in a while and the whole thing set me back maybe $15.

---

As nice as Hue was, I decided to carry on, so yesterday I woke up at 7:00 and caught a bus to Hoi An, which is about three hours drive south. We passed several muddy brown rivers with sampan boats anchored to the banks, and large nets strung out over the water to be lowered down for fishing when the tide rises. Arriving in Hoi An, we got the hotel hard sell, stopping at several places for commissions before I finally got a chance to break out on my own. The place I found is one of the best I've stayed in yet, with a nice little double room, with big ceiling fan and hot water, all to myself for only seven bucks.

I had a lunch of sweet and sour pork and mixed fruit smoothie and then walked around the historic Old Town, which is closed to car traffic and full of old sulfurous yellow buildings and preserved architecture that blends Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese styles. Formerly an important trading stopover for merchants from Hainan island and Japan, there are several clan assembly halls and old merchant houses open to the public for a small fee. The nicest home I visited was still being lived in after seven generations, despite regular river floods which, as you could see marked on the walls, had once come as high as the ceilings of the first floor -- must've been at least eight to ten feet. It was full of old furniture, including some wooden plaques with mother-of-pearl-inlaid Chinese characters, each "brushstroke" formed in the shape of a bird in flight.

For dinner I went to the Ba Le Well restaurant just as it was getting dark, setting myself down at a low red plastic table in an open white room as several other Vietnamese families dined around me. In the back room, past the small shrine lit with red Christmas bulbs holding three tiny cups of rice wine set atop cans of Heineken, several generations of extended family bustled back and forth at work in the kitchen. An old great grandmother wandered down the stairs at one point, watching me eat with idle curiosity but saying nothing. A middle-aged woman in purple top decorated with rhinestones spelling out the name 'Cindy' showed me how to eat the spread in front of me, which included a large plate of greens, skewers of satay pork, fried spring rolls, and rice paper wrapping with a peanut and chili dipping sauce. Delicious stuff, and one of the best meals I've eaten in Vietnam yet.

Hoi An's other attraction besides history is its legions of custom-fit tailor shops, and after a break for a cold drink, I browsed around yesterday before finding a place that is going to make me a fully tailored suit for $53 -- whether that's a great deal or a big rip-off I don't really know, but I'm off for the adjustments now, so we'll soon see!

Next Stop is Vietnam

2007-08-31T04:41:00.000-04:00

The roads out of Beijing weren't nearly as clogged as they had been coming in the previous night and I actually got to the airport on Friday too early to check in. When I did after about an hour of sitting around, I only got to sit around more in the boring-est airport gate ever (no shops, no food, not even a free plug to recharge my iPod at). On the plane I sat across the aisle from one of China's famed Awful Phlegmatic Old Men, who rearranged the contents of his sinuses every twenty minutes or so through the course of the flight and bossed at the stewardesses. I was also unable to avoid the bad Hong Kong teenage-pregnancy drama (she's the spoiled daughter of a rich lawyer, who's furious! he's the son of a poor laborer! can they make a life when they run off together?) on the in-flight entertainment because they actually broadcast it over the PA system. I got some subtler entertainment in Guangzhou, where we stopped for a connection, as everybody stampeded off, pushing past the two hapless girls checking our onward tickets, in order to reach... closed emigration desks. The officers showed up eventually, but further delays there meant I didn't get a chance to burn my last renminbi at the cafes in Guangzhou airport, which looked to be considerably nicer than Beijing's.

Flying into a strange airport somewhere in Asia late at night definitely ranks up there with my least favorite past-times. When I saw my flight from Beijing wasn't scheduled to get into Vietnam until 9:20, I made arrangements with the hostel I'm staying at here, an Aussie outfit with pretty good referrals online, to pick me up at Hanoi airport. Unfortunately, when I got through customs (the immigration officer gave me a sort of smirk when he looked at my passport... getting old, or maybe just scruffy) and out into the terminal, there was no one there.

In the course of flying out of Beijing I had hooked up with another guy, a fellow ex-English teacher (in his case, Seoul) from New York City named Greg who as coincidence would have it was going to the same hostel in Hanoi. We wandered around the small terminal for a bit in search of a payphone that we could use to call the hostel and have them send someone out; but the only phone kiosks were trying to sell us SIM cards for cell phones we didn't have, and none of the "helpful" tourist information desks would let us use their phones. So we bit the bullet and decided to try a taxi.

Pretty much everything that the guide warned us about ended up happening. After cutting our way through the crowd of touts, we picked out a guy with a shiny new minivan who assured us he could take us straight to where we wanted to go. "How much?" I asked. "Metered!" he replied. Well, no worries then. Except that a minute after pulling out he explained that we would need to pay $2 per person for a ticket to get on the highway. Unless we would prefer to pay him $20 flat without the meter? This is a ride that shouldn't have cost us more than $12 or so, but the other fellow I was traveling with got him down to $18. We cruised through the oh-so-important ticket gates without stopping.

Well, we passed through the dark on the highway into Hanoi. After about 15 minutes we entered the city proper, and shortly afterwards we pulled up in front of a hotel. A young Vietnamese guy came to the door, "Hanoi Backpackers' Hotel?" he asked in English (most people here speak it, it seems, at least if they have something to sell you), flashing a fading business card with the hostel's name and address on it. Except that.. this pretty clearly wasn't the place. Lonely Planet explicitly warned of copycat hotels paying airport taxis to take unsuspecting guests to an overpriced imitation, so we weren't about to get out the cab. Not that we would've been in danger or anything -- just resoundingly ripped off. I attempted to get the cabdriver to tell us what address we were at -- it clearly wasn't the one on business card the guy was waving in my face -- while Greg insisted to them that we weren't staying here. "The main hotel is full, we built a second place!" the guy with the business card said at first. After a minute or two it became, "We moved!" Then, after a few more futile tries, "New name!" Yeah, right. We weren't buying it, and eventually the cab driver, who was not a particularly good actor, made a show of "confusion" and wanting to check the address we had first showed him again. Eventually we extricated ourselves and left the fake hostelers to the rest of their evening, and our cabdriver pulled out a cellphone to call the real place and get directions. He took us there in about five minutes and we grudgingly paid him the $18 (he hadn't exactly earned it), then checked into the hostel, which the missed pick-up aside has been great.

All part of the adventure!

---

Hanoi is a very pretty city, thanks to the French colonial legacy; lots of old ochre-yellow buildings, tree-shaded boulevards, and a lake near the Old Quarter where I'm staying. Unlike China, where the car is taking over, here most people still get around on two wheels -- Yamaha and Honda scooters fill the streets, with two or three people clinging to the back as they zip around. (Coming in from the airport, I saw one with a huge load of roses, easily four feet by four feet, bundled on top of the back of one; another, carrying several sacks of miscellaneous junk, had a woman crouching down on the running boards between the driver's legs as they hurtled along the highway.) They're cheaper and many times more numerous than car taxis (not to mention more persistent), so I've already taken a ride on a few of them -- it's mildly terrifying but also a fun way to see the streets.

Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, which I had been planning to see, was unfortunately closed for Friday; so I'm 0 for 2 on my Embalmed Former Communist Leaders checklist. I did pass by the front of the monument, which is massive and which has huge red-and-yellow-starred flags lining the ground. Ho himself apparently expressed wishes for a simple cremation, but I suppose the party knows best. I went to a few sights here, including the old French prison where John McCain, along with several other downed American pilots, was imprisoned during the war. They still have his flight suit there, in addition to the guillotine used by the French colonial regime on Vietminh insurgents prior to their victory in the north. I also checked out the Temple of Literature, where old Confucian students got their doctorates engraved in stone stelae mounted atop statues of turtles. Lunch was at a nice little cafe near the market district; if nothing else, I can thank the French for introducing cafe culture. They even have Orangina! My last stop this afternoon was the Army Museum, full of captured French and American war materiel and lots of exhibits about the Vietnamese wars; heavily slanted to match the official line as you might expect, but still interesting.

This evening I wandered around the lake area for a bit and bought a pair of cheap flip-flops, then went to watch roi nuoc, or Vietnamese water puppets. The show was about an hour and full of traditional music and vignettes of Vietnamese village life, interspersed with mythical creatures and a few ancient legends. Most of the puppets were not too elaborate in their decoration but they could perform some pretty clever tricks with them; it was a fun outing.

---

Overall my first day in Vietnam has been pretty good, the only exceptions being the initially unfavorable introduction and the humidity, which as you would imagine is omnipresent. Tomorrow I'm going to go out to Halong Bay, an inlet full of towering limestone pillars and caves; the trip should take the full day, and I think there is a bit of kayaking involved in addition to a boat cruise. I also got a flight on to my next stop, Hue; I'll leave for there on Sunday afternoon and the continue south with stops in Hoi An and Quy Nhon over the course of the next few days.

For now, though, it's time for shower number three of the day.

Yakshimusiz

2007-08-27T08:23:00.000-04:00

("Hello" in Uyghur.)

After many long hours on the road I have finally found rest in the cool grape trellis-shaded oasis of Turpan. While the rest of Xinjiang has actually not been nearly as hot as I had expected, Turpan sits in a desert basin that is the second-lowest elevated point on earth, and my bus passed over flat, baking rock desert for several hours on the way here.

Turpan is considerably more touristed than other places I've visted in Xinjiang, even more so than Kashgar was. If the "Aisu Kohii" (Ice Coffee) signs in Japanese in the hotel I'm staying at weren't enough of a clue, there are some very persistent local touts, suggesting tours and hotels and this and that as soon as I first stepped off the bus. One of them, a younger Uyghur fellow with great English skills, showed me to / followed me to the hotel where I actually wanted to stay and then further in search of an internet cafe yesterday; I finally managed to extricate myself and this morning opted to set off on my own instead. I'm sure I would've had a fine time with him, but I'm just not ready to surrender my independent traveler status yet. The backpacker cafe attached to the hotel rents aging single-gear bicycles and I took one out for an hour, taking a leisurely (if slightly wobbly) ride down through the back streets of the Uyghur old town to arrive at the Emin Minaret, a lovely piece of Islamic architecture dating to the 1700s with lots of intricate brickwork and geometric patterns appearing in and out of the shaded halls.

After that, I took a cab to the ruins of Jiaohe, an old city perched on top of a leaf-shaped mesa surrounded by narrow canyons. Homes built into rock outcroppings and thick mud-brick walls give the surviving ruins the appearance of Luke Skywalker's Tatooine home after a particularly thorough stormtrooper attack; it was definitely worth the trip, and while Turpan has several other surrounding sites on the standard tour, I was fine with my limited solo foray. Afterwards, I lounged around and finished Guns, Germs, and Steel, my reading material for this trip (and one of the best books I've read) during the hottest part of the day, and then took a walk through the local bazar where I bought some samsas (fatty mutton pockets; mostly fat, in this case). There's a grape harvesting festival going on in Turpan (home of Xinjiang's most famous vines; walking through the Uyghur quarter to the minaret again this evening, I passed several walled courtyard homes with huge racks of grapes hanging, freshly harvested), with some traditional Uyghur dancing going on in the city square last night. Somehow I don't think traditional Uyghur dancing usually involves fireworks and light shows and choreographed fountain displays, though, and in any case the crowds were too thick for me to push my way close enough to see anything. Maybe this evening, or maybe just more relaxing.

---

It's been three days ago now, but I was successful in flagging down a bus for the long haul across the Taklamakan desert, through no help from the people at the actual bus station in Niya though. A big orange sleeper bus passing through the traffic circle pulled over at my desperate wave and after confirming that they were stopping in Korla, I hopped on. As I did so a small chorus of "hello!"s came from the Chinese and Uyghur students laid out in the racks of beds, three rows of two bunks all the way to the back of the bus. After paying one of the guys by the door I clambered up onto a narrow bunk just behind the driver. It took some careful positioning; those bunks weren't really made for someone my height. But it definitely made for an interesting way to travel.

Soon after pulling out of Niya we entered the desert. In order to prevent the sand from encroaching on the highway cutting through the miles and miles of dunes, the Chinese engineers who built it constructed well stations along the way, with long stretches of drip irrigation hoses feeding a shielding barrier of shrubs along either side of the road. The sky was still gray and the horizon hazy, though not as thick as it had been in Hotan two days before; the dunes stretched on to the edge of vision. I didn't see any desert bandits, although I kept an eye out the whole trip. The driver's cassette tapes of Uyghur pop music blared in my ears from the speaker next to my head. A young guy with features that looked almost Persian played card games with his girlfriend in the bunk across from me. We passed, in a quick flash, a large blue cargo truck whose front end was completely smashed in, in front of which it looked like someone had set up a picnic lunch. We passed a well worker in a conical straw hat and orange safety vest, out checking irrigation lines in the dusk.

The bus bounced along over undifferentiated stretches of desert as it gradually got dark. We stopped for dinner at a rest area where I got a highly over-priced (almost $1.50!) plate of noodles, meat and vegetables the Uyghurs call laghman (think ra men). Some of the students who had seen me board earlier called me over and we chatted while I ate, they sipped scalding tea, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "True Lies" played in dubbed Chinese in the background. They were young, probably high school age, on their way to the technical school they attended. Where was I from? How did I like Xinjiang? What about the food? What did I think about China's development? How about those Olympics, eh? After a while there we boarded the bus again and I began to doze in the darkness, coming to full wakefulness at the blare of the driver's horn every now and then to see the flares of oil pumping stations out in the distant desert. We arrived on the outskirts of Korla near 3:00 AM Beijing time (1:00 AM Xinjiang; I'm on a weird hybrid where I wake up early, eat lunch and dinner late, and end up ready for bed by what's really only about 8:00 PM local time) where I luckily caught a waiting taxi to a rather down-scale hotel. Despite the late hours, people were still coming and going; the girls at the desk, thoroughly amused by my complete inability to speak any Chinese without the aid of a phrasebook, gave me a room for 80 yuan; pretty near a deal (the cheapest I could find in Niya had been a double for 100, or about 15 dollars), except that it turned out to be a three meter by three meter cube with adjoining shower / toilet corridor.

---

Saturday I woke up to my alarm and the room attendant pounding on my door; she and a guy with a clipboard came in, inspected something in my bathroom, and left. I showered and headed out to see a bit of Korla. Korla is a modern city, considerably more Chinese now than Uyghur, but it is also much cleaner and nicer than Urumqi and not nearly as big or sprawling as Beijing. I wandered past some storefronts selling appliances and plumbing fixtures before finding an internet cafe, where I made contact with Michael of The Opposite End of China blog, who is a very nice guy and whose sun-dried tomatoes looked very nice if any of you readers happen to be a Chinese restaurant owner looking to stock some. I am not, but he still very graciously arranged to meet for lunch. I met him, as well as Bruce, a Scottish guy teaching English there, and his chihuahua, for spicy pumpkin and pepper dumplings. After some phone calls, arrangements were made to meet at a shaded spot down by the riverside. There were awnings and raised platforms set up at which to relax and eat roasted chicken -- except that, according to the lady who came by and asked us for 30 yuan for the privelege of sitting there, that the guy who usually made the chicken had ran off with all the money and now there was none. Whoops.

The rest of Korla's English-teaching expat community was a small group of about 10 in all; they were all very friendly and welcoming considering I really didn't know any of them. I'm guessing they probably don't get too many visitors. Some people went swimming, I relaxed in the shade; after a few hours there, we went back to the city, where the Tarim Oil English Association, a group of about ten Chinese folks working in the oil company offices with an interest in improving their English, took us all collectively out to Mongolian hotpot dinner at the local "Fat Cow" restaurant. It was delicious stuff, and we were all sweating from the steam and the spices. After that I parted ways with the Korlans and headed back to my hotel, and then caught the bus here to Turpan on Sunday.

---

Tomorrow I take the bus back to Urumqi, where I will maybe do a bit of shopping for Uyghur music video CDs (I've been watching enough of them on the buses, I ought to bring back something to show for it; but if you want to see some now, check around on The Opposite End of China blog, where Michael's posted several). I fly back to Beijing on the 29th, and then on to the jungles of Nam on the 30th, where I finally get to start putting my Larium to work.

Khosh!

The Silk Road Is In Need of Some Road Work

2007-08-22T09:03:00.000-04:00

At least the section my bus went bouncing along over for 10 hours today sure was. I'm in the small Uyghur oasis town of Hotan, formerly a jade crafting and carpet weaving center on the silk route, this evening just kind of dusty and low-key. The driver laid on the horn every time we passed trucks carrying big tankers of gasoline, Uyghur families on donkey carts, minibuses and motorcycles. Stretches of desert were interspersed with stands of slender beeches lining the oasis towns we passed through on the way from Kashgar. My seat companion was an older fellow from Suat (mispelled?), Pakistan ("the Switzerland of Pakistan", he tells me) travelling with four Pakistani lawyer friends to Hotan. We chatted a bit and watched pirated Jackie Chan movies and Uyghur music videos over the bus DVD player. I got into Hotan at around 5:00 local time and after two failed attempts managed to find a place that would take me; should've bargained harder for my double, which is of dubious quality, but it was only about 15 bucks for the night really. A friendly Uyghur bus cop helped me figure out the schedule for the bus to Niya, an even smaller oasis town further down the road that I'm checking out on the recommendation of a fellow traveler; if I make it there, I will check out the local Mazar tomb, then take the cross-desert highway bus the following day (Friday) to Korla on the other side of the Taklamakan. Let's hope for no sandstorms.

Karakul Lake was a mixed experience. We left in the morning on Monday and made it to the bus station with plenty of time, partly because the bus sat around and waited another 15 minutes after it was supposed to go to see if it could fill the last two empty seats. We picked up a Kyrgyz fellow in a suit and felt hat at a gas station and then headed southwest for the mountains. The scenery was gorgeous, red rock canyons and huge alluvial sand fields. I was unable to enjoy it fully for two reasons: one, some French guy had taken the seat by the window that opened, so I wasn't able to get my camera out past the glass (the seat was actually mine by the tickets we had, but no one sits in their actual ticketed seats in China anyhow); and two, I had made the mistake of chugging half a liter of water in the morning and reached near-bursting point about an hour into the trip. I was getting close to doing something drastic, like hijacking the bus, when we finally stopped to let some local guy off at a compound out in the cliffs, and I took the opportunity to sprint out and enjoy a solid minute of blissful relief. Anyhow, after that, I was able to enjoy things much more, despite the lingering head cold; the Lord of the Rings soundtrack makes a particularly good companion to the Ghez river canyons, if you happen to be passing that way yourself some day.

We arrived at Karakul Lake at around 11:30 local time and began a walk around the edge. Again, the towering snow-capped mountain faces made for beautiful scenery; but the high elevation also made hell for my already beleagured sinuses, and I was light-headed and headachey from the altitude. Kyrgyz nomads live in this area, renting out yurts to tourists, and we walked through their herds of yaks and camels as we started to circle the lake counter-clockwise. After a bit the two Israelis split off in the direction of one of the mountain base camps, where they were planning on camping for a few days; Miguel (the fluent guy from Michigan) and I had a late lunch of extremely hard bagels and rice with stewed vegetables with a local Kyrgyz family. It was getting on four by this point, and he decided to carry on around the lake; I was still winded, sick, and tired, so I opted to just head back towards the road where the yurts were and call it a day.

It took me about another two hours of stumbling through the marshy grass surrounding the lake to get back to the yurts, where I bargained a bit with the local guy and got myself a meal and a bed for 30 yuan. By this point I was feeling mildly feverish and about ready to crash, so it was all I could do to stay up and exchange a few pleasantries with the German couple (one of them Chinese-German) also staying in my yurt. They seemed pretty suprised that I had come up there already being sick, which I guess was a hint that it wasn't the brightest move on my part.

I passed out almost instantly after finishing the meal but woke up at midnight from a full bladder again and never got back to sleep the entire rest of the night. I was cold despite piles of covers; the "bed" (blankets on the yurt floor, which was the ground) was hard and digging into my back no matter which way I turned; my head was throbbing; I think I may have been hyperventilating a bit. Not the best sleep of my life... I think I got two hours, four hours tops.

On the plus side, let it be said that no matter how freezing and miserable you are, the stars over Karakul Lake at midnight really are gorgeous.

I came back to Kashgar early yesterday morning by catching a ride with a Kyrgyz guy in a pickup; there was supposed to be a bus, but it didn't end up coming before he did, and I just wanted to get the hell out of dodge so I was willing to pay the 60 yuan he was asking. I came back to my hotel and collapsed for a few hours, then gave the ticket queues another lunge for the bus to Hotan today. I know travelling as long as I am, I'm going to have good days and bad; the beautiful scenery notwithstanding, Monday was pretty rough. But this is a marathon, not a sprint, and I'm hoping for good things in Niya tomorrow. Till the next oasis.

Kashgar

2007-08-19T07:57:00.000-04:00

We boarded the plane to Kashgar at dusk to the tunes, in my ears anyhow, of the Black Hawk Down soundtrack. One of the tarmac safety officers rode past my window on a bicycle as we pulled out of the gate. An hour and a half later my flight arrived at around midnight Beijing time, which is officially the same thing as Xinjiang time, even though Xinjiang is actually two hours behind Beijing. The taxi drivers demanded 40 yuan for a ride to the hotel that should've been 10 by the meter. I split the cost with a backpacking girl from Columbia studying Chinese in Shanghai. The hotel, the Chingi Bagh, has cheap dorms in various states of disrepair. My roomates include an Orthodox Jewish couple from Israel and a guy from Michigan who's currently 10 weeks into a trip all over China. Kind of puts my trek to shame, but then he is fluent in Chinese. Last night we were joined by a guy from Switzerland. There's a sitcom pitch in here somewhere.

Kashgar is a much nicer city than Urumqi. Less overdeveloped, less polluted, less sprawl. Uyghurs outnumber Chinese and not the other way around, although a giant statue of Mao still looms over the People's Park square (the People's Park has a entry fee to get inside). Much of the old city is in the process of being torn down but there are still plenty of back alleys, kebab street vendors, men with sun-creased faces and white skullcaps sitting in the shade of trees and noon, and women in headscarves and veils to give the city a Central Asian, rather than a Chinese, feel. The sights -- the Id Khah mosque, the Abakh Khoja tomb, and the Sunday Market -- do have a well-worn tourist trail running through them though; French and Chinese tour groups nearly outnumbered the Uyghur men and their sons herding in their cows, fat-bottomed goats, donkey carts and even one or two camels at the livestock market this morning. It's rather sad to see, though of course I'm a tourist here as well.

I successfully managed to wedge my way to the front of the queue at the bus station so tomorrow I will be heading west up the Karakorum Highway to Lake Karakul, where I will probably be spending the night in a Kyrgyz yurt. I've managed to catch a bad sinus headache / head cold in the past day or so but copious amounts of water, Emergen-C powder, and garlicky Szechuan noodles from the traveler's cafe at the base of our hotel will hopefully be enough to hold it at bay. Gastro-intestinal status is currently rated at 75% of optimum levels, and hopefully holding.

Will check back again either when I get back into Kashgar, or otherwise from Hotan, my next stop along the Southern Silk road.

Wild West China

2007-08-17T03:48:00.000-04:00

I'm in Urumqi now. Urumqi is kind of reminscent of Ulaan Bator, in that is is big and sprawling and dusty and sort of a pit. But it's my gateway to the rest of Xinjiang, so here I am until this evening, when I catch a flight down to Kashgar on the rim of the Taklamakan. I spent the flight over here from Beijing watching a young Chinese girl and her father read old Garfield comics in Chinese. Most people in Urumqi are Chinese, although there are still young women in head scarves and old men in fur hats and street vendors selling nan bread and fruit to remind you that this isn't the coastal provinces any more.

I hiked a section of the Great Wall on Tuesday. I now have the utmost respect for any Mongolians who tried tackling that thing. The section our group of twenty hiked up to was remote and partially ruined, but free of Chinese tourists and commercial reconstructions. There was one guy selling drinks at a watchtower, but having just scrambled up there with the weight of two liters of water and a camera bag myself, I couldn't argue too much with the five yuan he was asking. This small bit of entrepreneurism notwithstanding it was a good hike and a good way to celebrate #24.

This morning I checked out the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum, which was definitely worth seeing, although maybe not for the reasons intended. I did see the Loulan Beauty, and some presentations of native culture and dress, but the biggest eye-opener was the exhibit captions.

Covering an area of 1.66 million square kilometers, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is a treasure land in the northwestern bordering region in our motherland with vast land and richly endowed recourses. The extended Silk Road linked the eastern and western civiliations. Being situated deep in the hinterland, it conceals the deep secret of the converged ancient civiliations of the world.

Xinjiang has been the multi-national homeland from ancient times. Forty-seven nationalities live here today, among them 13 brother nationalities, such as Uyghur, Han, Kazak, Hui, Khalkas, Mongolian, Xibe, Tajik, Uzbek, Daur, Manchu, Tartar, Russian, etc. have lived in Xinjiang for generations. For a long time, they have been cooperated as one family to build and safeguard the borderland. Under the glory of the nationality policy of the Party, precious traditional cultures of various nationalities have received effective protection, inhertiance, and development. In the historical process of the Development of Western Regions, various nationalities are more united to construct together a harmonious society. We hold this exhibition of Display of Xinjiang Nationality Custom to represent the gorgeous conditions and customs of the 12 ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, and to show the splendor of the beautiful rarity of treasure house of Chinese national culture.

Right. That's a direct quote from the "Preface" to the minorities exhibit. Pretty bold stuff for a museum where the only real Uyghurs evident were the stone masons tiling a room under renovation on the second floor. Most plaques were along similar lines; Xinjiang has always been a part of China; every minority group in Xinjiang works together; everything is going great and that's the way everyone wants it! Nice and subtle stuff. There was also an exhibit on the Communist revolution and Xinjiang's role in that, although I noted they didn't bother including English translations for that section. Ahem.

And then there's this, seen on a woman's t-shirt yesterday:

War is Peace
Oceania

Man, this place is wierd.

Addendum - The Great Firewall is blocking me from viewing my blog (whoops, should've taken down that link to my paper on Xinjiang, maybe) but obviously not from the Blogger posting infrastructure. I can probably still read comments through this, but there's always e-mail if you want to get in touch directly.

The Adventure Begins

2007-08-14T06:56:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, in what in retrospect may appear to be a rather drastic move, I left my home of two years in Karatsu, Japan, and launched myself into the beginning of an eight-week trek through Asia and Africa. After saying my last goodbyes and sitting on a China Air flight for two and a half hours, touched down mid-afternoon in China's capital city of Beijing.

The pollution has, thus far, not been as bad as I was initially dreading (I gather it's worst in the winter, when everyone turns on the heaters). 2008 Olympics ads are everywhere and there's plenty of construction and demolition going on all around. My hostel is a bit of a backpacker trap but is located down a relatively authentic-looking hutong so there's a bit of character to the area, if not necessarily the place itself.

My time in Beijing is limited -- just two full days, really -- so I'm getting a much abbreviated look at it and "Chinese" China; today I joined the throng to see Tianenmen and the Forbidden City, and baked myself on the cobblestones while taking pictures of Mao's portrait and old imperial roofing tiles. I don't think I'm going to be able to upload those pictures till I get back (I'm shooting RAW format, which usually requires post-processing before I can upload it to Flickr; there is a photo CD-burning place across the seat so I might check that out tomorrow). The palaces were also not too different from similar edifices I've viewed in Japan, Korea, or Mongolia; of course, this is where all those architectural designs originated from, so I'd say it was worth seeing. I did not manage to see Mao's body on display.

I have yet to eat any actual Chinese food (unless you count a self-heating chicken-and-rice box for lunch today), having dined out for two nights in a row at two different Uyghur restaurants in the area. Both were good (and spicy) so I think I'll do fine in terms of finding things to eat when I head west on Thursday. The language barrier, on the other hand, is still relatively daunting. I've sort of learnt some numbers, but haven't really been forced to muddle through yet, as I've only been to the touristy places. Of course, when I reach Xinjiang, I'll have to pack away the Mandarin phrasebook and break out the Uyghur one anyhow.

Tomorrow I am taking a hike along the Great Wall through a tour company a friend of mine recommended; it should be a small group and we should be going to a pretty remote (unreconstructed and uncrowded) section of the wall. Hopefully should be a good way to celebrate my 24th birthday.

Internet service at the hostel here is free as long as you can stand the impatient murmurings of the people queued up waiting to use it after you. I've probably abused my priveleges for long enough so I'll check back again next time.

Packing List

2007-07-27T03:31:00.000-04:00

Hiking bag; Karrimor lightweight sleeping bag; waterproof bag cover; rain jacket; rain pants; day pack; camera bag; hiking boots; canteen; water bottle; collapseable cooking tins; lightweight long-sleeve athletic shirt; money belt; cash; tickets; passport photos; Aquarius powdered sports drink mix; bandannas; "Beetle versus Stag Beetle: Eternal Rivals" washcloth; Eskay hat; dust mask; hand wipes; Larium; Mosiguard DEET bug spray; first aid kit (pepto-bismol tablets, anti-diahrreal meds, allergy meds, motion sickness meds, bandages); flashlight; universal plug adaptor; bungee cord; alarm clock; pocket swiss-army knife; nail clippers; 4 AA batteries; two tubes of SPF 50, one tube of SPF 30 sunscreen; aloe vera gel; sunblock chapstick; Neosporin; Ibuprofen; tiger balm to keep the leeches at bay; black 30 GB iPod; two Muji spiral-bound notebooks; pen; Beijing map; East Asia map; Lonely Planet: China; Lonely Planet: Vietnam; Lonely Planet: Southeast Asia on a Shoestring; Lonely Planet Central Asia and Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebooks; Canon EF 50mm 1:1.8 II lens; lens cleaner cloth; camera battery charger; Canon Kiss Digital N SLR camera (not pictured); 2.5 GB worth of memory cards.

What am I forgetting?

Catching Up

2007-07-22T22:14:00.000-04:00

Went to Tokyo last weekend, got wet. Typhoon #4 of the season did some damage further south, on the opposite coast of Kyushu from where I live, but up at the capital all we got was constant rain. Not a whole lot to show for the trip other than a new pair of 20000-yen hiking shoes for my grand tour this summer; I was hoping we could at least see a few die-hard cosplay kids in Harajuku, but they were all in hiding apparently. This is a shot of Asakusa Shrine, on the first, mercifully rain-less evening; I last visited here seven years ago as a high school exchange student.

Now I'm busy preparing to leave Japan again. Had my last classes, and my last day of work, and now I have a full week to clear out my apartment and another two weeks after that to say goodbye. Finally got in touch with the Vietnamese embassy so I should have my last visa squared away by next week. Will try to write more later, but I have about 5000 items in my newsreader to catch up on, people to see, and an apartment to scour, so it may be a while yet.

Problems In Pakistan

2007-07-04T06:48:00.001-04:00

Pakistani General Pervez Musharaff's bad summer just got worse:

A long-simmering standoff between the government and a radical mosque in the heart of the Pakistani capital exploded into a vicious street clash on Tuesday, with a dozen dead and more than 100 others injured.

For over 15 hours, paramilitary forces and bandanna-clad Islamic fighters manning positions in the Red Mosque traded automatic-weapons fire. At least three female students at a religious school affiliated with the mosque were killed, as were an army ranger and a Pakistani photographer who was caught in the crossfire.

The leaders of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid), brothers Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdur Rashid Ghazi, have been in open opposition to Musharaff's rule for some time now, demanding the immediate introduction of sharia law and issuing fatwas against the Pakistani government and its ministers. Students at the associated madrassah seminary have been carrying out vigilante attacks throughout the capital, and the government had intended to shut the mosque down along with others it says were built on illegally-seized government-owned land. Aryn Baker, a reporter with TIME Magazine, was at the mosque conducting an interview on the broader subject of Islam in Pakistan when the clash began and brings a first-person recounting of the mosque occupants' fervor under fire.

For the past six months the clerics of the Red Mosque madrassah complex, which houses about 7,000 students, have openly defied the government, calling for the establishment of Islamic law throughout the country. Students and teachers from both the men's and women's schools have embarked on a vigilante anti-vice campaign in the capital, shutting down video and music shops for being un-Islamic. Twice now, the female students have abducted alleged prostitutes, saying that if the government doesn't cleanse the capital of sin, they will. "A man goes to medical school and becomes a doctor," says [interpreter and student Umma] Aman. "We go to a madrassah, so we must practice Islam. But the government is not letting us. How can we just sit down and allow this to happen? We must act on God's will, not our own desires."

At the moment it's not clear whether Pakistani forces will attempt to storm the mosque or whether some negotiated stand-down can be reached. Musharaff's position is already tenuous since his dismissal of former Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry in March, which has brought widespread protests from lawyers, journalists whose reporting was being baldly censored, and opposition parties, prompting many observers to mark his days as numbered.

Writers like Stephen Cohen and Hussain Haqqani, among others, have argued that Musharaff enjoys continued US patronage under the "There Is No Alternative" banner; that only a Pakistan under the firm grip of its military establishment can keep the Islamist movements from grasping control of the state's nuclear trigger. As Ahmed Rashid writes in his Post op-ed,

Musharraf promised the international community that he would purge pro-Taliban elements from his security services and convinced the Bush administration that his philosophy of "enlightened moderation" was the only way to fend off Islamic extremism. But Pakistan today is the center of global Islamic terrorism, with Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar probably living here.

Instead of confronting this threat, the army has focused on keeping Musharraf in power -- negotiating with extremists, letting radical Islamic students set up a base in Islamabad and so forth. Meanwhile, to spook the West into continuing to support him, Musharraf continues to grossly exaggerate the strength of the Islamic parties that he warns might take over his nuclear-armed country.

The question of whether to govern as an Islamic state, as opposed to merely a state for Muslims, has been a continually contentious one through Pakistan's troubled history, as Cohen's The Idea of Pakistan elaborates at book length and as the supporters of the Red Mosque demonstrate today. But it's worth recalling that the MMA coalition of Islamist parties has only enjoyed limited electoral success; this, together with the widespread public protests in support of Justice Chaudhry, may suggest that moderate Pakistani civil society isn't totally gone yet. Ungoverned tribal border zones, crime and drug trafficking, collapsing educational infrastructure, separatist movements in Baluchistan and the Pahstun tribal areas; all these forces and more combine to threaten Pakistani national integrity, bringing a #12 rank on Foreign Policy's index of Failed States.

An unelected autocrat like Pervez Musharaff is not going to be able to hold it together forever. Instead, observers like Rashid conclude, "the United States would be far safer if it pushed for a truly representative Pakistani government that could marginalize the jihadists, rather than placing all its eggs in Musharraf's basket." This summer isn't over yet.

[x-posted]

Where In the World is MC MasterChef?

2007-07-02T05:21:00.001-04:00

So, for the first time in recent memory I've managed to reach a sort of balance between work duties, blog and book reading (just started a book on post-colonial Africa, The State of Africa, which I'm hoping can help offer at least a general primer to a continent I find myself reading more and more about lately), and spending time with friends... which must mean it's about time to upend it all again. At the end of this month my contract with the Karatsu City Board of Education will finish — I'll save that story for another day — and I will return home to the land of the free and the home of the brave shortly thereafter. I have no job waiting for me and no clear sense of how I'm going to be able to make the transition from Japanese children's entertainer / occasional English teacher to young international relations professional — good luck for me will be managing to find an unpaid internship in D.C. some time next spring, since I don't have the master's degree and two or three year's working experience in government most think tanks seem to expect from their paid research assistants. What I get for spending my college summers working in a carpentry shop, I guess.

If I sound apprehensive about the whole taking the next step thing, well, major life transitions have never been a strong point of mine. But I do have a plan, of sorts, for a round-the-world return trip. After staying on in Japan for a week or two after my contract is up, I will then fly off mid-August to finally visit a long-delayed goal of mine, Xinjiang. This part of the world held fascination for me when I first began studying it senior year of college in part because of its remoteness — it's still hard to believe I will soon be kicking up dust in the deserts of western China. I'll be relying on the phrasebooks for both Uyghur and Mandarin, so as much as I'd like the chance I'm not sure how much I'll be able to connect with the local Uyghur peoples — though that may be just as well as it's my understanding that the PRC administration is clamping down hard on those who speak to foreigners about any of the controversies I studied in the course of writing my paper back in college. Right now I plan on visiting the cities of Urumqi, Turpan, Kashgar, and Korla (as well as a few smaller oasis towns along the way, probably) while skirting a counterclockwise circle around the Tarim basin over the course of about two weeks. Yes, I will be packing lots of sunscreen.

Assuming I don't meet an untimely end lost in the desert, I will then be flying back to Beijing and then south to Hanoi, taking another week to make my way overland to Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City; I've yet to work out an itinerary for this part of the grand tour yet, but many JETs have recommended Vietnam highly, so I'll be seeing what it has to offer (besides dengue fever). From HCM City I plan on crossing into Cambodia, visiting both Angkor Wat and the memorials to the Killing Fields if possible. Then it's border-hopping again, on to Bangkok, from which I will fly out to Johannesburg, South Africa (by way of the United Arab Emirates), and then connect for a flight inland to Lusaka, Zambia. One of my best friends from college currently lives in the Zambian bush as a volunteer with the Peace Corps, and I'll be spending another two weeks riding elephants, going on safaris, and farming fish there. A full month and a half after saying sayonara to Japan, I'll finally touch down in Boston late September, where I'll try to pay a visit to a few old professors before heading back home to Indiana and trying to figure out what to do with myself now. The whole ordeal promises to be both exciting and exhausting.

Depending on my ability to find internet access along the way, this blog will either be updated semi-frequently from the road for the benefit of friends, family, and the occasional outside reader; or otherwise not at all. So if reading about other peoples' vacations bores you to no end, you can probably safely ignore this space for the next two months or so (if you haven't been doing so already). When I get back, depending on my success in the Washington D.C. job market, I may be able to give more attention to other, more interesting topics; but if not, there are plenty of other interesting reads out there.

Once Upon A Time in the Steppes - Part Four

2007-07-01T05:49:00.000-04:00

Read Part One // Read Part Two // Read Part Three

After finishing our lunch at the horse camp and throwing our bags into the bus we hit the road... or more accurately hit the dirt that was currently serving as road. We were heading the ruined monastery of Ovgon Khiid, where one of Mongolian Buddhism's founding figures, Zanabazar, once fled from rival armies. The guy chose a pretty good hiding spot, as we had to cross several horizons' worth of empty desert before coming across the rocky masses that sheltered the remnants of the shrine. The main temple ruins were apparently further back along a rocky, scrub-lined valley, but we contented ourselves with peeking inside a few of the contemporary shrines that a local family had been restoring since 1994. We were looking to get to Karakorum, site of Chinggis Khaan's old capital city, before evening, so we left the desert behind and eventually found our way to a road heading back eastwards.

We stopped twice along the way; the first time was at a massive ovoo next to the road. One of my favorite sights during our travels, ovoo are cairns of small rocks and blue silk banners which dot the Mongolian roadsides, mountaintops, and other spiritually important locales. We saw dozens during the course of our trip. Custom is to circle the ovoo three times (or, if driving past, honk in recognition), adding a lose rock from the ground to the pile if one is free; we took the opportunity to throw the blessed rice we had received from the shaman back in Darkhan while wishing for good fortune and safe travels.

Our next stop was for a mother and daughter from Holland who had apparently forgotten to circle their ovoos, and whose touring van had caught a flat out in the middle of nowhere. We invited them into the bus along with their translator, driver, and the affronting tire. We chatted for a while before arriving at around six in the evening and dropping them off in Karakorum, their destination and ours. Modern Karakorum is a small town with a Soviet-era flour factory and not much else; there is, however, the large Erdene Zuu Buddhist monastery, Mongolia's first. When we arrived it was closing, however, and the wind had kicked up strong, sending us and the small herd of baby goats hanging around outside the walls running for cover. We planned to come back the next morning, and retired to a ger camp and short drive away on the edge of town, sheltered by some nearby mountains and with a river running nearby.

The gers, as usual, were cozy, and that night after dinner the camp offered entertainment in the form of a small concert inside the dining tent; one old man playing the morin khuur (horse fiddle), one performing khuumi (throat singing) and one young girl in a purple leotard performing a cringe-inducing contortion act. After the concert, we were offered a chance to try the instruments ourselves firsthand, which was cool. (They did not suggest we try the contortions.) We finished the evening with some card games in our gers; outside it had gotten even colder, and the crackling wood stove was a welcome tent-mate.

The next morning we woke up to .. snow! As I mentioned before, we had been told to expect all variety of weather during the Mongolian spring, but as cold as it got during our R&R I didn't really expect to be enjoying snowclad hillsides in the middle of May. The snow meant we could forget about hot water in the ger camp, so showers were out that morning; it was pretty enough that nobody complained, though. After a quick breakfast we hiked up one of the low mountains next to the camp, to see a monument at the top commemorating three great kingdoms in Mongolian history: those of (if my notes are right) the Hunus, the Turks, and Chinggis Khaan's own Mongolian empire. I need to learn more Central Asian history; if anyone out there reading this happens to have recommendations for a good introductory primer on the region, feel free to drop a note in the comments.

After winding our way down the hillside past more snow-covered ovoo, we left our ger camp and went to see Erdene Zuu. The monastery's walls (capped with a hundred eight stupa crenelations) were built from the remnants of Chinggis' capital, of which nothing now remains save for two turtle-shaped cornerstones that once marked the outer boundaries of the city. I have to admit that Erdene Zuu, while housing some beautiful art and architecture, didn't really capture my attention in the way some of our other travels in Mongolia did. Though I'm not given to religious sentiments in general, I personally find the worldly withdrawal of Buddhist ritual monasticism an unsatisfying response to the "life of suffering" they see around them. As visually interesting as the confusing array of religious symbolism present in their art may be, I can't help but wonder how much reassurance lay-practitioners really derive from the thought that the monks whom they supported through tithing and donations have now passed on to enlightenment while they remain behind. It's not really for me to judge, I guess, but it all felt very ornate in an otherwise very barren land. Anyhow, we left the monastery and stopped on our way out of town to see the second surviving turtle rock — which was up on the mountainside quite a ways from the first, suggesting Karakorum's large size in its day. We ate a lunch of sausage and cucumber sandwiches in the van as we bounced along listening to a tape of Mongolian pop balads, travelling back in the direction of Ulaan Bator.

We weren't done with our travels yet, though, as we had one more stop planned: Khustain National Park, home of the Mongolian takhi, also known as Przewalski's wild horse. We arrived after several hours of driving and settled into the ger camp there, figuring we would go out to see the horses after dinner; we got word, however, that the wind was picking up and a nearby herd was likely going to start moving, so the best time to go seem them would be now. The takhi are true wild horses, genetically distinct from domesticated breeds or feral horses (domesticated horses that have escaped human captivity and gone wild). Short, stocky, and sandy-colored, they had vanished from their natural habitats until reintroduction programs begun in the 1990s started reintroducing them to Mongolian national parks like Khustai. The herd or around a dozen we saw, grazing at a distance of several hundred yards away (too far for my lens zoom to get a good capture, I'm afraid), had several pregnant females amongst it, and Khustai alone now has over 150 of the animals living in its area.

We saw some horses of the domesticated kind up close after dinner that evening, as two local cowboys were offering the chance to go on a dusk ride for something like two dollars per person. Though not as free ranging as our first experience — we went out in small groups of four and spent the entire ride tethered close to our two guides, so no unscheduled departures for me this time — it was still nice to ride out under clear night skies.

The next morning we had an early breakfast and made the drive back to Ulaan Bator, where our R&R officially concluded. We planned to return to the care of the national HFH offices for a few farewell ceremonies before our late evening flight out, but Batbold the national coordinator was busy in meetings for the moment so we stayed with our tour guides a little longer. We checked into the same hotel we stayed at our first night and got two rooms to store our bags in, then left with the tour bus to downtown UB in search of an internet cafe. There we filled our some surveys for HFH Mongolia and said some tearful goodbyes to our guide and translator, Ogi... until she came back some twenty minutes later, off work, and offered to show us around one last time at the national Natural History Museum that some of us had hoped to catch sight of while we were there. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, as we had to meet Batbold for lunch soon afterwards, but we managed to see most everything on display — lots of unlucky stuffed animals, both native to Mongolia and otherwise, and one large exhibit of dinosaur bones, Mongolia's claim to international paleontological fame. No cast replicas either, these were the actual bones dug out of the Gobi rock — including, under protective glass case, the famous fossil of the protoceratops locked in combat with a small raptor. Pretty cool stuff, although unfortunately we took no pictures. After that we did say goodbye to Ogi, and went by cab to meet Batbold for a quick lunch.

Then it was shopping time — an hour and a half in the Ulaan Bator State Department Store. I'm guessing shelves have improved considerably since Soviet times, as almost all floors were filled with shoppers stocking up, as we were, on souvenirs, food, and gifts. Mongolia HFH evidently didn't have their own t-shirts, so I had to buy a general Mongolian flag one for myself, as well as a patch for the old hiking bag; I also brought back after much deliberation a horse fiddle for Ms. Riddarfjarden, who is a cello player and quite fond of their sound. Though still half-full from our late lunch, it was then time to head on to our thank-you dinner at ... yes, Mongolian barbecue! Although technically, speaking, it's neither, it was still pretty delicious. We also received thank-you certificates and met with one of the Mongolia HFH national affiliate's board members and his young son, who really didn't want to be there with us, even when bribed with ice cream. The rest of the HFH folks were very appreciative, though, and it was a nice meal, albeit a little rushed at the end as we had one more sight to see.

The national Tumen Ekh ensemble performs traditional Mongolian dance, songs, throat singing, moriin khuur, and more contortionists. It was a great performance.. so suffice it so say I was extremely frustrated when my camera battery died off five minutes into the performance. You'll just have to trust me when I say it was impressive, I suppose. After that we took a drive up to Zaisan Memorial, which I was able to briefly capture thanks to five minutes of quick battery-charging in the bathroom after the concert. A large hill overlooking the whole of Ulaan Bator below, Zaisan on that evening was swarming with recently graduated high school students, wedding parties, and other folks out enjoying the panoramic views; we made quite a few friends with the younger kids, whose English put our shogakkusei here in Japan to shame. The monument, dedicated to Russian-Mongolian friendship, had some pretty classic Soviet-era murals too. Eventually we made our way back down and regretfully headed back to the hotel to pack up and leave UB behind.

We took off from Ulaan Bator at around midnight and touched down in Seoul at around four in the morning local time. There we dragged ourselves through customs — just a tip, if you buy duty-free alcohol in Chinggis Khaan International Airport, remember your receipt if you don't want to run afoul of liquid carry-on rules when you transfer in Korea — and collapsed onto the waiting couches. I stayed up while the others napped, and watched the airport wake up around us; I had just enough energy for a last-minute run to the Dunkin' Donuts on the far side of the terminal for some jelly-filled fuel before it was time to board again at around 7:30. From there it was a short flight back to Fukuoka and the breaking of the fellowship; my Fearless Leader duties discharged with everyone back safe and sound, I caught the train back to Karatsu and began the task of catching up on about two week's worth of sleep.

---

Ok, so, now it's retrospective time. While two years living in Japan may have reduced the number of Habitat trips I organize on a yearly basis considerably from its peak in college, I think I can say that my Fearless Leading skills have not been totally dulled from disuse. While I know there were instances where I could've handled things better, for the most part I think I was able to stay calm, flexible, and on top of most problems that cropped up, both beforehand and during the trip. I can say that I don't think I would've been able to pull together all the disparate components of the trip and kept things organized and on a relatively smooth course had I not had the experience of leading similar (if not always as complex) excursions back in the states. While my team members said some kind things about my leadership afterwards, the truth is it was the Mongolia HFH and Darkhan affiliates who made our time as rewarding as it was, and my role was largely that of a facilitator for those experiences, a role which I find myself happy to play. I have worked with a lot of Habitat affiliates — over two dozen at least — in my years of volunteering with the organization and Mongolia HFH was definitely one of the best I've ever built with, in terms of providing real, rewarding work for its Global Village team participants. I would highly recommend it, and Mongolia, to anyone as a destination worth exploring.

I recently read this post on the slacktivist blog about the rationales behind mission trips and other service programs; although our team was independent of any church affiliation and the group a largely areligious one, I still think this example (speaking of a hypothetical trip to build a schoolhouse in Haiti) would apply to our excursion as well. Speaking to the question of, "couldn't we use the money on service programs some better way", he writes:

But the point of these mission trips is not only to get the school built. That's part of it, but it's not the only goal. The mission trip is also designed to give the American youth group a tangible, visceral stake in the fate of the Haitian community. This is vital for the people in Haiti too. ... It's unlikely that the youth group, the church, or any other given community here would raise the same amount of money without the personal stake of the trip itself.

The purpose of the mission trip is not exclusively to change the Haitian community where the school is to be built. Part of the purpose of the trip is also to change the young Americans who are going there, and to change the community that sends them. Part of the reason for such trips is to nurture a sense of empathy, of solidarity, and an ethos of service -- to create and maintain the capacity to care whether or not children in Haiti have a decent place to go to school, and to create and maintain the desire to help.

It's a big world, and there are no shortage of problems in it. Mongolia is a big country, with its own share of problems as well. I hope that our team's contributions — over 600,000 yen worth, once I get the last of the donations sent along — can be used as a seed for future investment in affordable housing in Darkhan, and I know that there are two families there who now have strong, decent housing in part thanks to our efforts. I have to think that counts for something, but I also know it's not enough to stop there. If my work as team leader, and the far more critical work of the local Habitat employees, guys like Baynaa and Batbold, has helped spread the message that the people of Mongolia are worth caring about, then I think I can consider this trip an accomplishment.

Hopefully there will be more to come.

Once Upon A Time in the Steppes - Part Three

2007-06-22T03:37:00.001-04:00

Read Part One // Read Part Two // Read Part Four

Ok, here it is, late as usual; part three of my Mongolian travels.

Sunday morning was gray and cold as we woke up, but sleeping an extra hour helped make up somewhat for the late night of partying it up at "Club Scorpion". Baynaa, Bob the translator from our first tour around Darkhan, and our driver Baatar met us with the van at nine. With Sunday off, we had made a plan to visit Amarbayasgalant Khiid, an old Buddhist monastery and shrine west of Darkhan. After first stopping at the grocery store to pick up bread, sausage, and cheese for a picnic lunch, we drove for about an hour before turning off paved road onto a dirt track. After fording a few small streams — one big lesson learned from our trip in Mongolia was, "cars that you would not necessarily assume to be off-road vehicles, can in fact be used as such" — and driving on for about another hour, we reached the monastery complex at around noon.

Amarbayasgalant is one of Mongolia's greatest architectural treasures, having survived the advent of the Communists in 1937 with only about a quarter of the complex's temples destroyed. It was built by the Manchu emperor in the 1730s, and as such shares lots of stylistic similarities with other Buddhist temples I've visited in Korea and Japan, though the red ochre walls and wooden roofs gave it a distinctive look of its own. Restoration work supported by UNESCO aid and visitors' fees has been ongoing since 1975 and about 70 monks currently live there, one of whom showed us around the halls.

After we walked around the main temple complex Baynaa and Bob told us we would be driving further back in the valley to where a collection of stupas was perched on the slope. We left the monastery complex at the valley center, and bounced across the fields in the van. As we approached the stupas we started to pass through stands of birch trees, which stretched out northwards towards the mountains. It was gorgeous countryside for a picnic. We forded a small river running between the birch forest; the stupas were in sight cresting the hilltop ahead of us.

We started to ford another river up ahead... and sunk to a stop.

There are a lot of things to worry about when you're leading a group of eleven people on an international volunteering trip. And I did no shortage of worrying this trip. But there we were, stuck in a river in the middle of nowhere, and I have to say I wasn't worried. Yes, our back wheels were sunk six inches under the riverbed. Yes, after we all carefully tiptoed our way out onto the riverbank on a log (that water was cold) to reduce the weight, and sat back to watch our driver give it a second try, all that produced was a big froth of bubbles and some smoke from our equally submerged tailpipe. Still: not worried. Yes, the monastery was by this point a loooong walk away, and who knows how long it would take us to get back to Darkhan. But you've just got to figure this sort of thing happens a lot in Mongolia, and Baynaa, our driver Bataar, and Bob were clearly doing their best to figure out some sort of solution. So: sit back, relax, enjoy the scenery, and trust the locals to know what they're doing.

Deliverance arrived in the form of four monks (two older, two young boys) in a battered old Russian jeep. We were lucky, since we could've been waiting there for hours; instead it was more like twenty minutes. They happened to be on their way up to the stupas, where there was another small quarters for them, the caretakers. Fishing a rope out of the back of their jeep, we tied it to the front of our van and they lurched forward — only to have the rope fly off with a snap as it broke. Undaunted, Baynaa and Bataar then sprinted up the hill to the monk's house, coming back with a six-foot steel cable that they once again set about securing as we watched and shared some cookies with the two young monks-in-training. With a lurch, a groan of the cable, a splash, and a cheer from us onlookers, the van came free! And so we climbed pack in and carefully made our way up the hill after the monks, coming to a stop next to their house just a few yards away from the stupas and another small shrine.

We celebrated our escape with a picnic lunch of dried fruit, delicious sausage and cheese, and at this point very crumbly bread. Afterwards one of the monks, a middle-aged fellow who had learned English during a four-year stay in Switzerland, showed us inside the shrine where we admired the paintings and icons. We then hiked up a ways further above the stupas, getting a view of the valley below.

Eventually it was time to head back; the monks accompanied us down, but this time we all got out before the van attempted the river crossing and it went over without a problem. We spent the four hours back playing twenty questions, and had a late dinner at about nine in the evening.

The next day we were back to work, with me on the first house. We started the morning doing some insulation work, filling the cracks between the wall tops and the wooden frames at the roof's base with cut up cement bagging. It was a bit of a slow day, getting back into the work routine, but in the afternoon we began installing "shipu", which is the Mongolian word (actually borrowed from Russian) for the big red fiberglass shingles that formed the house's roof. In the evening we visited a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet, the "Texas Cafe"; I would not necessarily have expected to be eating tex-mex food in Mongolia, but the place itself had all the touches of a US steakhouse chain and the food turned out to be pretty good. In the evening we came back to the hotel and I watched some Mark Wahlberg-is-a-crazy-stalker movie with the others. Bad, extremely bad.

Tuesday was our last full day of work, and I spent it working on the second house. The wind was kicking up dust so we were invited inside the family ger, where we all sat around the stove in a circle watching Celine Dion music videos on the small television and making roofing nails, Mongolian-style — cut out a circle of rubber from some old strips of tire, place a bottle cap on top, and pound a nail through the cap and rubber to complete it. We got a pretty good system going between the five of us, and the morning passed quickly; that afternoon I got back up on the roof and helped install more shingles with the construction supervisor Ghana and Chotto the homeowner. We broke early at around four and took a trip to the local "black market", where the others bought clothes and I watched the locals play billiards outdoors. We had another dinner at the Texas cafe, and I spent a while in the local net cafe attempting to catch up on e-mail before preparing to head back and pack up for our departure the next day. That, at least, was the plan.

So, remember how I said that going to a club in Mongolia was an interesting experience, but that it wasn't necessarily one that I was keen to repeat ("how-did-I-get-myself-into-this" interesting, not "boy-this-is-fun" interesting)? Well... so much for that. Because one disco outing is just not enough, it somehow happened that we were to go clubbing again on our last night in Darkhan — not my idea, I can assure you, but Baynaa and the other Habitat folks seemed enthusiastic when the suggestion reached them. So enthusiastic, in fact, that it became pretty clear they expected that we would all be going again, despite the fact that many of us (me included) were tired and would prefer spending the night packing and preparing for our last morning in Darkhan. Well, being the responsible leader that I am, I went along anyhow, and so got to hear that stupid "Hot Like Me" song, which the Mongolian nightclubs apparently love, for the hundreth time that trip. The club was in what looked like could've been a big observatory dome, except that the floor was ringed by blacklit booths and instead of a telescope there were poles and more strobe lights. The entertainment, besides the bad dance music, was a guy with a shock of dyed blond hair who, if I understood this right, was the winner of "Mongolian Idol" or whatever the equivalent is — though he most just MC'ed rather than any singing. I passed on the dancing and the drinking and sat and squinted some more. I also talked a bit with our driver Bataar, and Baynaa. Baynaa told me he thought I would be a good manager some day. I'm pretty sure he meant that as a compliment so I'll take it as such. This club, like the other one, finally shut down at midnight, at which point we all staggered back to the hotel, where I finished packing, washed some socks in the sink, and finally got to bed at about one in the morning.

The next morning we woke up early, hauled our bags downstairs, and had our last breakfast at the Urtuuchin Hotel. I initially thought we would have to check out entirely, but it turned out we were going to come back for lunch before leaving for UB again, so we piled all of our bags in one room and settled the minibar bills. As we loaded into the van at around nine another dusty pall was hanging in the air — the wind had picked up, strong, and tan clouds obscured much of Darkhan as we drove out to the homes we had helped build for the last time.

Our first visit was at Chotto's house, where we piled out into the dust storm. We were quickly invited into the family ger, where we saw that we weren't the only visitor — a stocky older man with a big moustache, brilliant orange tunic, and classic Mongolian hat was perched on a stool at the seat of honor opposite the low entryway. He was, it turned out, Chotto's elder brother, visiting from Ulaan Bataar. He was also, incidentally, a bo — a Mongolian shaman. We sat and visited with him for a long time, as he talked with us, asking us about our experiences and thanking us as his brother looked on shyly. Some of our talk was appropriately cryptic as well, such as his personal message to me that "you should ride a camel". At one point he produced a marmot-skin bag, from which he offered us each a handful of blessed rice, which we were told to scatter at a shrine on our travels to bring good fortune, a nice gift to be sure. I have to say having tea with a shaman was a first, and meeting this fellow an experience to remember; definitely not the kind of thing we would've been able to see without the connections we made through our work with the Habitat families. Finally we had to say our thanks and depart for the other home, as it was approaching eleven by that point.

Our stop at Ghana's house was somewhat briefer, which was sort of too bad since I had spent most of my time with the crew over there. But the hospitality was equally warm; we took shelter from the dust inside their home, which had just been installed with a door and windows. Inside, Ghana, who is a chef, presented us all a "Thank You" cake, and we celebrated with frosting-covered slices, and a bottle of vodka which we mercifully decided to save until some other time. Far too soon time was up and we had to say our goodbyes; then it was back to the hotel to pay our bills, grab our bags, and have lunch with the Darkhan affiliate staff. With many thanks, we finally said our last goodbyes to our hosts and packed ourselves into the van next to all our bags, heading towards UB and our R&R.

We arrived there four hours later at the offices of our tour guides, where we met our new driver, an older fellow named Bagi, and translator and guide, a friendly middle-aged woman named Ogi. We passed our bags into the large green Korean tour bus and said our goodbyes to Baynaa and our awesome driver Bataar; they were heading back to Darkhan. We, meanwhile, were heading west to the "Little Gobi" region (not the Gobi desert proper, which is further south and which we would've had to go to by plane), for camping, horseback riding, and other sights.

I notice that I haven't said much about the Mongolian road system yet, which is definitely worth a mention now. In a word, it is bad. It is also, rather frequently, nonexistent. This is not necessarily unexpected in a country with the lowest population density in the world, but still, it made for some rough travel. Infrastructure is something those of us lucky to enjoy it should all seriously appreciate; distances that on paved US highways would've taken perhaps two hours, tops, instead took five or six. The road we travelled on westward from Ulaan Bataar is Mongolian's longest, I believe, and at regular points we swerved off the cracked and potholed surface to follow dirt tracks running parallel — which were there, we soon saw, on account that in several places unfinished drainage ditches split the road surface entirely, forcing you to go off and around. Some day Mongolian road crews may come along and finish those, but I'm pretty sure we spent more time off the road than on; although the tour bus was roomier than the trusty van we came down from Darkhan in, it did not have a lot going for it in the shock absorber department, and our hiking bags would go flying up from the back on regular intervals as we hit a particularly deep bump. Again: it doesn't take an SUV to go offroad. But, there are some times when it might be nice.

As for rest stops, forget it — it was the great outdoors for us when nature called. We made a few brief stops but mostly continued pushing on until late in the night, snacking on bread and dried fruit and watching the steppes roll by. Eventually it got dark, and cold, and we huddled up in the seats in an attempt to catch some sleep; it was after eleven when we finally pulled off onto a long dirt road that finally led us (after a few wheel-spinning stops in the sand) to our ger camp. After unloading we split up into our gers, which were warm and cozy thanks to the fires roaring in the central stoves; we skipped dinner and I fell straight asleep after making the rounds to distribute water bottles to everyone. It was a pretty exhausting day.

The next morning I woke up to the cold — the fire had eventually gone out during the night, and the temperature had plummeted from what we had been experiencing in Darkhan. We were told to expect crazy weather in the Mongolian spring, and we ended up experiencing more or less everything during the two weeks there — dust storms, dry heat, brief rain, shivering cold. It actually stayed cold for the entirety of our R&R period, so it's a good thing I had warned everyone to prepare for it beforehand — up till that point, nobody had thought we were going to actually need our coats and long-sleeve layers, but we had a use for them in the end after all. We had breakfast at the ger camp's "restaurant tent" and met a fellow from Denmark travelling with his father; they had come all this way by rail, amazingly enough, and were continuing on to Lhasa, with the goal of taking the new Himalayan train line recently completed by the Chinese. After chatting with them for a while and warming up on hot tea, we headed out to the windy edge of our camp, where a line of horses were hitched up to two posts. It was horseback riding time!

Ms. Riddarfjarden, with whom I went horseback riding for the very first time ever in New Zealand this past January, was very clear about what I should say when it came time to saddle up, to the point where we practiced several times beforehand: "What are you going to say when they ask you if you've ridden before?" "No, this is my first time." Having gone riding enough times herself to be wary of letting on any experience, for fear of being saddled with an ornery steed, she was adamant that I was not to end up bucking around on any half-tamed beasts. In which I was in full agreement. When it came time to saddle up, however, nobody bothered to ask me anything, and I barely had time to ask "is this a nice horse?" before they had me mount up on a ginger steed with a buzz-cut mane. "Yes", they assured me, he was. Ok, well, we'll see.

Mongolian horses are shorter and stockier than the retired racehorses we rode in New Zealand, which helped mitigate most of the feelings of being perched precariously high above the ground on a semi-intelligent creature that I had felt then (mostly during the times when we went cantering along the rocky riverbeds). They are also, we were warned, shy — don't make loud noises, don't use flash photography, we were warned, unless you want to go flying over the horizon. Duly noted, we assured them. "If your horse takes off, just don't fall off, we'll catch up to you eventually", I half-jokingly told everyone, not wanting to think about what we would do if we had a medical emergency out here in what appeared to be literally the middle of nowhere (the handful of gers where we had spent the night aside), a long and bumpy six hours' drive away from UB. Loaded up with my camera, backpack full of Fearless Leader emergency supplies, and bundled up in jacket, pants, and bandanna, I can't say I quite matched our Mongolian cowboy guides for style, but it was still pretty cool riding out onto the flat open plain around our camp. Four or five of them rode along with the ten of us, teaching us a bit of horsemanship along the way — "giddyup", for the record, is "chu" in Mongolian.

We loped our way across the plain for a while, easing into the saddle. Our horses had just been roped in from a larger herd that was roaming around the plains next to the camp; not wild, I guess, but there were too many of them to have individual names. Mine was handling all right thus far; as one of the last to saddle up, I was towards the rear of the pack. We came to a small stream and began to cross; most of the rest of them were already on the other side when mine stopped for a leisurely drink. I let him go at for a bit, but not wanting to get left behind, I tugged on the reins after a bit and urged him up the bank, muttering "chu!" to him and leaning forward as I tried to catch up. And, well, "chu" he did — off we bolted.

I am told by those who saw the whole thing that it apparently looked like I knew what I was doing. Back straight, head high, reins in hand, whoosh, there I go. Which is good to know. In fact, I was mostly just busy trying not to fall off. My horse sped past the main group, onwards and, it became swiftly apparent, upwards, as he started to head up a hill up ahead. "Pull on the reins!" people shouted after me. "Easier said then done when you're bouncing along at full gallop with a backpack full of first aid kit and a camera bag slung around your side!" I did not respond back, since, as I said, I was too busy following my own advice, keeping both hands gripped firmly on the saddle pommel and working on priority number one, Not Falling Off. "That hill is rocky", I thought to myself. "So what?" my horse thought to itself, and kept going. "There goes another one," our cowboy guides thought to themselves, and one took off to rescue me. Fortunately, however, the hill started to work in my favor as the horse had to slow down enough to the point where I could risk letting going with one hand and hauling back on the reins. He slowed some more, which was good because at about this point one of my feet bounced out of the stirrups. Finally — and when I say finally, I mean, "after possibly a minute or two at most from the start of this all" — he stopped. The young cowboy who had taken off after me pulled up and jumped off, steadying us.

So, uh, yeah, I spent the rest of the morning tied to his horse.

But it was cool. The jarring ride notwithstanding, I think I am starting to develop a taste for horseback riding. My new guide friend even let our horses sprint some towards the end of it — mine appeared to be the most excitable of the bunch, as most of the rest were content with strolling along at a reasonable pace (once actually just up and sat down at one point). I think if we had had more time, we might have gone further into a stretch of desert visible at the edge of the plain, but as it was we were out there for over an hour and I would've been happy to spend an hour more. Except when I got off I found myself bow-legged as hell and intensely sore... but still that was ok. After dismounting, saying our goodbyes to our guides, and wobbling our way back to camp, we had lunch in the ger restaurant and packed up to hit the road, or at least what road we could find.

There's still a good bit left to tell so I'll have to stop here and conclude with part four when I can find the time.

Once Upon A Time in the Steppes - Part Two

2007-05-30T04:29:00.000-04:00

Read Part One // Read Part Three // Read Part Four

I woke up Monday morning dry, my throat parched until I chugged the remaining half-liter of water I had left standing next to my bedside. This was to be the norm for our two weeks in Mongolia — the high elevation (about 600 meters, or 2000 feet, average where we were; the national mean is about 1500 meters / 5000 feet) and cloudless skies meant essentially zero humidity and throats sucked dry overnight. Pretty much the exact opposite of Bangladesh, where we were wading through the air last year, but I did eventually get somewhat used to it, albeit only after first coming down with some sort of throat cold on the second or third day of the trip that lasted through the first week. In any case, that first day I rolled out early — 6:45ish — on account of an open window curtain and spent the morning mentally pacing before sitting down to the hotel breakfast at around 8:00, which was sausages and vegetable soup. It was good, and we were able to load up into the vans reasonably close to on time afterwards, leaving for the work site around 9:00. When the vans arrived we met Ogi, a young woman who would be our translator on-site; she was a former student of Baynaa's, she explained, although she didn't look like she could've been more than two or three years younger than him (apparently Baynaa taught English for a time at the local college before working with Habitat). We travelled to the first worksite, where we got a safety orientation from the construction supervisor, Ghana (#1), and met the homeowner, who was also Ghana (#2). Then we went to the second site and met a third Ghana (#3), who was another construction supervisor, and the homeowner on the second site, who we called Chotto even though I'm fairly sure that's not how we were supposed to be pronouncing his name. Both sites were about a ten minute drive apart from one another, on the southeast edge of town in a rundown district of shacks and gers. Chotto's house was near what had once been Russian military base, which was completely torn down to rubble after they left in 1992; he was tall with very Slavic-inclined features, in contrast to Ghana #2, whose wide face and ponytail made him look like he could've easily been one of the Khaan's riding buddies, if it weren't for the camouflage work pants.

At this point we were waiting for a load of sand to arrive from the nearby factory, so before starting work we took a short trip around to a nearby Habitat "neighborhood" where we could see what the finished houses would look like. We visited one, which belonged to a former construction supervisor; it was pretty cozy inside, I have to say. We returned from that to the first worksite and set about hauling concrete blocks out around the edge of the foundation, shoveling sand and clearing rocks. At around 10:30 I got called away with Baynaa to make a run to the grocery store for tea break snacks. The store, Darkhan's largest supermaket, was seriously better stocked than the place I shop at here in Japan... I would make this same trip every morning thereafter and get to enjoy the giant bust of Lenin looking over me from the wall as I checked out with my bag full of Korean snack cookies and Russian biscuits. Afterwards we swung by the hotel to order lunch (unprepared for this, I had to guess at random the first time) and then stopped by the Habitat offices, where I got to watch Baynaa argue with an elderly guy about something related to mortgage payments (Habitat homes aren't free; homeowners contribute the initially third of the money from their savings, with the remaining two-thirds being paid by donations and the local affiliate; the mortgage payments after the receive the house, which continue for about five years, help go towards the financing of more homes). At least I think they were arguing — Mongolian is a pretty guttural language and it can sound pretty harsh when you have no idea what they're saying (which, in my case, was more or less all the time). We returned for tea as the sand arrived, and after a short break we started mixing the cement for the walls.

I've done a lot of different unskilled construction tasks in my seven years with Habitat but masonry was a first this time, so that was fun; the local workers got us started at the corners and then more or less let us go to it ourselves, slapping down a trowel full of cement and dropping the blocks into place. What was not fun (well, it was kind of fun, but definitely not easy) was mixing the cement in the old bathtub by hand, which I didn't do that at that point but did several more times before the trip was over. It is seriously heavy stuff, and a great way to throw out your back if you're not careful; of course, the Mongolian guys churned through it like butter, but I've learned not to try and compete with the local talent. Everybody pitched in and we had a good time, but after lunch break I think we were all feeling the burn. In the afternoon we split into two teams to start working on the second site as well, which we would continue to do every day afterwards. In the past I have seen people get very attached to the house they're working on in these situations, and I wanted to avoid cliquishness, so I did my best to rotate people around and give them a chance to work with everyone on both houses; for the most part, I think this was a success. By 5:00 a full day of carrying concrete blocks and mixing cement was definitely catching up to out-of-shape us, and we went back to the hotel to call it a day. After an embarrassing miscommunication on my part at first, we went down to dinner at 6:00 with the HFH Darkhan office staff, who had all come to welcome us. Afterwards I relaxed with some card playing and then called it a night around 11:00.

The next day was more blocklaying in the morning, up to the final tenth row — two days and we had finished the walls, which was pretty amazing to see. We continued after lunch by filling the cracks in the blocks with cement, which was fun and comparatively easy work. On the way back in the evening we stopped at the supermarket for more shopping, and ran into a WorldVision puppet show taking place outside — there seems to be a fair amount of NGO activity going on there, as we were sharing the hotel with a pair of older dentists (one from Wisconsin, the other Mississippi) who were also in town for two weeks pulling teeth. In the evening some people went to the nearby internet cafe, others watched tv — we actually had an amazing array of international channels, with the BBC news, HBO movies, National Geographic documentaries, and weird Russian MTV music videos all on regular display. (I did see one cool hip-hop video though, so if there happen to be any Russian readers out there who know the song by the guy wearing the 1920s newsie-style cap rapping with his two bandmates and then taking up the guitars to rock out, all the while interspersed with Soviet historical stock footage, please let me know what the song's called in comments here.) In a way this was kind of unfortunate, as it tended to cause people to lounge around in their rooms rather than visiting with each other, but down time is important when you're stuck travelling together with a group 24/7 and I wasn't about to push it.

Our third day we continued sealing cracks inside and out along the walls and also began mixing a special kind of cement — this one with rocks in it! — that we laid as a cap around the walltops and also as a slab on the floor where the stove would sit. We had a good morning of work and then after lunch went to visit an elementary school in Old Darkhan. The school was one of Darkhan's smaller but we got a chance to visit one class, which was (if I understood this right) a group of second-graders. The kids were, of course, adorable — after we played a few games and sang some English songs with them, they sang back to us in Mongolian, breathlessly recited some poems, and of course asked us loads of questions. Besides the free English class we brought donations of school supplies from our students back in Japan, who loaded us down with all the cute Engrish notebooks we could carry. After about an hour of visiting we said our goodbyes and returned for a little bit of work on the houses, nailing together some beams that would become part of the ceiling. We ordered dinner at the appropriately named "Nice Cafe" — by this point everyone was ready for a break from the hotel menu, which we were eating from breakfast, lunch, and dinner — afterwards and had dinner with Baynaa and our drivers there.

Thursday we began plastering the exterior walls with a seal of two inches or so worth of cement; slap a trowel full of cement onto a flat board, smack it against the wall, and sort of shimmy it upwards in an attempt to keep it from all falling off again in a clump before sanding it smooth with a wide circular motion of the board. This took a while for us all to get the hang of, and we had to do a few walls a second time the next day; by lunch time I was pretty exhausted. There was to be no rest for the weary, though, as after lunch I and every other guy working with Habitat Darkhan got called away for some seriously heavy lifting. Together, the fifteen or so of us managed to haul off a (rough guess) one-ton water tank and a two-ton shed, using nothing more than some scaffolding, wooden poles, and brute force: it was a pretty amazing process to watch as everybody threw in their opinion on the best way to heave these things into the back of the aging Russian dump truck that had come to transport them to a new area where HFH Darkhan would be building another neighborhood of Habitat houses. When I finally left some two hours later, the shed was hanging off the back of the truck suspending by a single metal cable.. but they're pretty resourceful guys there in Darkhan, and apparently they did finally manage to get it to their destination, somehow.

Friday morning we had something of a minor catastrophe involving laundry service at the hotel — clothes went missing initially and then after three days the bill turned out to be something on the order of twenty-five dollars for a load (the charge was per item, not per load; apparently laundry is a fair luxury in Mongolia, as we later found there were no public laundromats anywhere), which was not what we had expected, to put it mildly. People were, not surprisingly, not happy by this, but then it looked like maybe the poor bellboy who had taken the clothes might be the one who would have to pay when people refused. The whole thing was an awful miscommunication from the start and definitely not good times, but I think in the end we did manage to come to some sort of solution where we were not going to be taking six months of this poor boy's salary on account of the fact that we didn't get our clothes back on time. After that we washed our clothes in the sink. Again, not a pleasant situation, and one I was glad to be done with. We continued plastering through Friday afternoon; on the first house they were already working on roof frames, but the second site went a little slower. In the afternoon, we made a visit to a poor area of Old Darkhan, to see the kinds of shacks many Mongolians have to live in, which was hopefully an eye-opener for all of us.

Saturday morning we said goodbye to two of our team members, as both P. and Ms. Riddarfjarden were unable to stay for the full two weeks and had to catch a flight back to Japan that evening. They drove back to Ulaan Bator after a visit to the work sites in the morning to say goodbye; checking out was a little rushed and I didn't think to give them money from the group fund to help pay for their meals and such in UB, but otherwise they got there and back home fine. After they left we continued with yet more spackling; by this point in the week we were all dragging, and we were a hot and dirty bunch at lunch time. We broke early at around four and had dinner at the Nice Cafe again. That evening was the social highlight of the week — yes, that's right, we went to the disco in Mongolia. Some of the more enthusiastic team members ended up inviting just about everyone — homeowners, Habitat families, hotel workers — so it ended up being quite a crowd that rolled into Club Scorpion that night. I could say that I had a great time dancing and partying it up with the Darkhan folks... but the truth is I hate dancing and I spent most of the night sitting in a corner squinting into the glare of what seemed to be about a thousand blinding strobe lights while bad techno boomed around us. Everyone else did seem to have a good time though, so I sucked it up. It certainly was an experience, although not necessarily one I was keen to repeat.

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This is running long so I'll save the aforementioned stuck-in-a-river-in-the-middle-of-nowhere story for Part Three, in which I also hope to finish recounting our second week of work, our three days of R&R bouncing around in a bus all over Mongolia, and my experience on horseback.

Once Upon A Time in the Steppes - Part One

2007-05-21T08:42:00.000-04:00

Read Part Two // Read Part Three // Read Part Four

It has been two years since I organized and led a Habitat for Humanity volunteer trip. What was once regular practice — one of the dominant themes of my college social life, actually — has been relegated to anecdotes and memories during my two years expatriation in Japan. Last year's trip to Bangladesh offered a brief building fix, but then as participant rather than leader; it was enjoyable in its way, but also not what I had been used to. I doubt anyone would've predicted it during my quiet high schooler days, but three years in a position of responsibility with the Boston University Habitat organization definitely has changed me — for all the stress involved, I'd still rather be Fearlessly Leading. The unpredicted complications in the run-up to our departure were many, but "then I spent two hours wading through the Japanese post office bureaucracy" or "the correspondent bank in New York didn't have enough account information to forward our $2000 of tour money to the bank in Mongolia" doesn't make for a very thrilling travel narrative... so I'm going to begin at our date of departure and simply note that, for me anyhow, the adventure had already begun a good while back. I had booked (and re-booked) tickets, sent long exhaustive e-mails, collected donations, corresponded with our hosts, fought with my Board of Education, and chipped in about $5000 of my own money in the hope that I would eventually get it back (I did, eventually). Now it was time to actually make it happen.

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We left from Fukuoka International Airport on the evening of Friday the 27th; we had originally planned to leave on a flight the following Saturday morning, but that waitlist never budged. Golden Week, four national holidays in the span of seven days, is probably the busiest travel season in Japan outside of maybe New Year's, and apparently a lot of people were heading to Seoul to stock up on kimchi and Yon-sama t-shirts. Luckily for the eleven of us, we were able to get onto a flight late enough in the evening that no-one would have to take off work Friday in order to make it to the airport. I caught the bus with Ms. Riddarfjarden and Erin and got to Fukuoka around 6:30; everyone else was there ready to go, so I handed out passports and tickets and we checked our bags through to Ulan Bator. The airport was pretty empty that evening so I had figured we would have no problem; but after delays changing money, having to repack a bag with all of our liquids, and there being only one grumpy guy at the emigration counter, the plane was starting to board by the time we finally got through, hot and tired. We were able to relax on the quick plane ride over, though, and got into Seoul around 10:30 in the evening. I had booked rooms at the Incheon Guesthouse, and although our initial attempt to call and have them come pick us up failed — nobody spoke English on the other end — we did get help from the airport information services. Two vans showed up not long after, whose drivers did speak English, and they whisked us away to the guesthouse, which like the one I stayed in on my trip to Busan in February, was located in a large apartment tower complex. Even so, it was pretty nice, with a kitchenette and everything — probably meant for longterm stay, I guess.

Our flight on to Ulan Bator Saturday wasn't until the evening as well so we had almost a full day to kill in Seoul; we slept in and lounged around until around 11:00ish at which point we dragged ourselves down to check out and see the city. The guesthouse drivers took us back to the airport, where we all checked buses and took one in to Anguk in Seoul, about an hour and a half away — with the plan being that some people would split up but that we would all be meeting back at the airport no later than 6:00 PM. One person split off in Anguk to meet a friend and the rest of us had a delicious Korean-style lunch; Korean food continues to be one of my favorites, especially for eating in groups. After that about half of us split for walk the Insadong street arcade and window shop at art stores, and the other half (with me included) headed to Gyeongbokgung Palace. It's Seoul's largest and grandest, until the Japanese got to it — twice, once in 1592 and then again in the 1890s. The city has crept up around it but it's currently being restored and several of the buildings are still quite impressive; also cool were the "royal guards" stationed at the gates, whose costumes visitors were able to try on. I didn't have time to see the War Memorial Museum (I was apparently the only one who wanted to go) so I'm going to have to come back to Seoul some day and check that out (and go on a DMZ tour).

The two groups met back at around 4 and we caught the bus back to the airport — although the ride was pretty jarring ("he's driving this bus like a taxi" was how Ms. Riddarfjarden described it) we did get there exactly on time, at 6:00. Unfortunately, we then proceeded to have a small panic over the fact that J., who had gone off to meet her friend, was not back yet. After several pages over the airport PA system I finally told the others to head up and start checking in, but not to leave without me and J. — I don't know what would've happened if she hadn't made it back in time, but I was not about to leave anyone behind, so it probably wouldn't have been anything good. She did finally make it there by 7:00, having missed the bus and taken an $80 cab in order to get there about 45 minutes before our plane was to depart. We got through security fast, I dashed into an electronics store to buy a universal plug adaptor, and then onto the plane we went! This was probably the most stressful moment of the trip, and it did introduce a bit of tension in the group, but ultimately luck was with us.

The flight was almost empty so I attempted to nap a little bit, but no luck; we arrived into Ulan Bator at around midnight on Saturday after a three and a half hour flight. Our first taste of Mongolia was pretty bland; the immigration hall was small and the process slow (not helped by the fact that ours closed right as we got to the front). When we did get through our bags were waiting for us, and outside so was Batbold and the rest of the Habitat team, with the van and car that would be our team's transportation for the week and a half we would spend building with the Darkhan Habitat for Humanity affiliate.

Batbold greeted us with a friendly smile and an accent that (like most Mongolians) was very Russian-sounding to my ears; he mentioned that English has only been a popular language of study since 1992, when Mongolia gave up Soviet-style socialism. We piled into the cars and strapped our bags to the roof to head off into night for our hotel in central Ulan Bator; I sat up front wedged between Batbold and the driver and we chatted through the drive. I attempted to learn a bit of Mongolia and learned that "thank you" is very hard to say (what we eventually learned sounded something like "bar-shlah", and whether that was even close I'm still not sure — a lot of tricky gutturals and blends in Mongolian). I also learned that, incidentally, tomorrow was apparently the first ever emissions-reduction day in Ulan Bator (on account of the bad smog) and maybe we wouldn't be able to drive anywhere? But we'd figure out something. (Last year in Dhaka, oddly enough, there was a similar sort of case, except that in that case it was striking opposition parties blocking the streets.) We did get to our hotel, the Amure, at around midnight, and collapsed into several rooms.

The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel (sausages and some sort pancake blobs which were better than that sounds) and then an orientation session with Batbold and Baynaa the Darkhan Affiliate Development Officer (who would be our host and my counterpart in Darkhan) in the hotel. Batbold was funny and did a very good job explaining Habitat, its mission, and its programs in Mongolia, particularly for an audience like ours where most people had not worked with HFH before. More than one wit had remarked to us before we left that "you're going to build houses for nomads?", but the reality is that since the end of socialist control and the resumption of free internal migration within the country after a seventy-year freeze, urbanization has increased rapidly as the population seeks jobs in cities like Ulan Bator and Darkhan. Over half the population lives in the cities now, where unemployment can be as high as 40%, and limited building resources (materials are often imported from China), aging and overcrowded Soviet-era housing, and high loan rates make home ownership very challenging for a lot of Mongolian families. HFH Mongolia has been in operation since 2000, with three Affiliates (building new houses) and another five Program Centers (renovating older houses) throughout the country. To date they've built 575 new houses and renovated 110, with goals for 800 this year. Two of those, we would be helping complete, and our group's donations (over $6000 worth) would go towards the construction of several more.

After our orientation we hit the streets of UB — side streets, on account of the aforementioned traffic restrictions, but it didn't turn out to be too much of an inconvenience for us. Ulan Bator was looking very dusty and very post-Communist; lots of drab concrete and industrial decay, but also interspersed with new construction, SUVs on the streets, and some pedestrians in chic European fashion. Unlike poor Bangladesh, Mongolia appears to be a developing country that actually is developing, however unevenly, thanks to the influx of Western assistance post-1992 and the commodities industry boom. We joined the ranks of millionaires after converting all of our team money into tugrug notes (a little over 1000 to the dollar) and used that to go on a short shopping trip at a local grocery store where we stocked up on bottled water. From there we made a side stop at our tour guides' offices to pay for the R&R portion of our trip, which we would be taking for our last three days in-country, and then crammed ourselves into a very tight van for the three and a half hour drive to Darkhan.

Although the legroom situation didn't get much better, the scenery did — we gradually left behind the dusty pall of UB and came out under the huge blue sky Mongolia is famous for. I've never seen a landscape quite like it before — huge expansive plains and hills stretching out from the potholed highway, dotted every now and then by a ger camp or a herd of cows, horses, or goats. Baynaa later said that, in summer, it all turns lush and green, but with spring only just beginning in Mongolia (we saw a few small patches of snow) the grasses were mostly tan and sparse. We stopped at a highway diner and after discovering the joys of open-pit toilets enjoyed a hearty meal of lamb burger and rice with ketchup... and got to check out the Mongolian high police outfit as well on some of our fellow diners, which is very Red Army-esque: military-style cap, white T-shirt with field jacket, black combat boots. I paid for lunch from the biggest bag of money the little boy next to the register had ever seen, and then we hit the road again.

We arrived in Darkhan at around 4:00 and checked into the Urtuuchin Hotel, which would be our home for the next week and a half. As I was one of only two guys on the trip (story of my Habitat career, to be honest) there wasn't much doubt as to who my roomate would be; the rest of us paired off and stowed our bags, then went down to the hotel restaurant to place orders for our dinner that evening before heading out for a tour of the city with Baynaa and "Bob", a member of the Darkhan HFH board, English translator, and teach at the local 800-student Darkhan College, which I gathered is a hospitality university. In the course of placing our orders, we met a Korean couple (the husband of which I believe was there on a mining contract?) who were either a little crazy or a little drunk or possibly both; in any case after we explained what we, a group of 11 young foreigners, happened to be doing here in Darkhan, they insisted on giving us one of every tugrug note (T10 on up through T20,000). The orientation that morning had mentioned our giving gifts to the locals — generally, it's preferred that we do it through the Habitat organization, so as to reduce dependency and potential pressure on future GV teams — but nobody told us what to do if someone was trying to give a gift to us. We eventually established that they didn't want to give us this money (it was worth at least about $35) as a donation but rather a "souvenir" to remember Mongolia by. After several protestations that Darkhan HFH could use this money much more than us — which were emphatically brushed aside — I finally caved in and took the money, which I promptly offered to Baynaa as soon as we got outside. After going back in to talk to the couple some more, he returned and said "this is your problem", which was worth a laugh at that point. So we took the money.

After this little episode we got in the van and car (which were a lot roomier now without the luggage) and took a short tour of the city, visiting a hill topped with a Buddhist stupa monument that overlooked both the old and new sections of town; another hill across the road featured a statue of a rider playing the horse fiddle. Darkhan has only existed since the 1960s, when it was planned and built by the Russians as an industrial town — the name means "blacksmith" in Mongolian. Today the population is around 100,000, and most of the Russians have gone home; a lot of industry has closed down but there is still some left (they pointed out a thermal power plant, sheepskin factory, and a few machine factories on our tour). We went back to the hotel and visited an internet cafe before dinner, which was good. Exhausted, I headed to bed soon after that, and so ended our first full day in Mongolia.

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In the next part, I'll talk about our first week of work; our visit to an elementary school; and getting stuck in a river in the middle of nowhere. Excitement abounds!

Big Sky

2007-04-01T01:12:00.000-04:00

This place has gone dormant on account of I don't really have time to keep up with blogs at the moment. My contract with JET will be ending this July and although I've got a good idea of the places I plan on traveling through on my round-the-world return, I do not as of yet have any job for when I get back to the States. I'm dividing most of my time between the wonderful Ms. Riddarfjarden and Habitat for Humanity; this May I will be leading a team of eleven volunteers to build homes under the big sky of Darkhan, Mongolia. There will be plenty of pictures and maybe a travelogue or two when I get back but for now you can see the details — and donate to the cause, if you're so inclined — here.

All for now.

"The reward... may be.. SURVIVAL!"

2007-01-19T03:14:00.000-05:00

I'm not ashamed to admit that one of my most prized possessions is a circa 1962 U.S. Civil Defense fallout shelter water storage barrel, which I inherited from the Boston University Physical Plant (where it was sitting around unused in the paint shop) during my time working as a carpenter's lackey there; there were apparently tons of them left in the old National Guard Armory Building on campus prior to its demolition and subsequent replacement by the shiny new Student Village housing complex, and while most of them were junked I managed to pick up this one. It makes a great end table with a piece of plywood on top, but is unfortunately not too suitable to shipping overseas to my current home of Japan.

In lieu of that, I will have to feed my fascination with Cold War ephemera via this wonderful collection classic U.S. Civil Defense filmstrips (and also general Cold War-era reels), found at the Internet Archive thanks to a tip at Lawyers, Guns, and Money (the "House in the Middle" spot highlighted in that post truly has to be seen to be believed). Watching this stuff, I think it's not too hard to see why we got the 60's.

Adventures in Middle Earth, Part Two: South Island and Back Again

2007-01-15T07:11:00.000-05:00

Part One is here.

So; having crossed over to the South Island on the day after Christmas, we had at that point eight full days left in the country, the last of which we had to finish up in Auckland by 4:00 in order to return our car and prepare for our early flight out on the morning of the 3rd. Aside from our first days in Auckland, we had yet to stay in the same place two nights in a row, and despite a good time in Waitomo were still feeling like we were spreading ourselves too thin; the prospect of more or less everything had been closed from Christmas Eve through Boxing Day also contributed to the thought that our remaining time here in Middle Earth was, shall we say... precious.

With this in mind during the course of our ferry ride across the Cook Strait we decided to plant ourselves down in a good-looking place for at least two days in order to take part in some more of the many adventure tourist activities New Zealand has to offer. A promising candidate appeared in the form of Kaikoura, a small little crayfishing town on a peninsula jutting out from the northeast coast of the South Island that has turned itself into a center for whale-watching, fur seal-watching, dolphin swimming, and other aquatic activities. Only a short drive from Picton later we were there, and looking around found ourselves a very comfortable backpacker's hostel, The Albatross, which at one point served as the town's Post Office and telephone exchange (the huge post office safe vault door is still there in the common lounge). The friendly proprietor set us up in the special "Turkish-style" dorms — again, all to ourselves! —where curtains shelter each bunk. We stayed in a number of nice places during our travels through Enzedd but this was definitely one of the nicest, hence the direct recommendation (for what it's worth) here. Also, the Subway sandwich man there in Kaikoura is extremely friendly as well.

Well, dolphin swimming turned out to be booked out for the next week, but as the Lonely Planet did warn us of that we weren't too set back by it. Instead we decided to go horseback riding, another first for me, but not for Ms. Riddarfjarden who was looking forward to the chance to go riding again. Accompanied by our guide Linda and a very energetic dog named Zack, our two mounts, Madam and Winston ("Winnie") took us along a path in the shadow of Mount Fyffe, over some rocky riverbeds and around several acres of land. The horses were well-behaved, which was good, because I mostly concentrated on staying upright (especially when we tried some bone-jarring trotting; now I know why cowboys were always so ornery, as sore as that left me). It's weird to be riding something that you don't need to guide precisely along, but rather is an intelligent animal that knows where to go and how to watch its footing on its own. A neat experience, and something I'd be interested in trying again I think.

We returned to town and took a long (and hot) walk along the rocky peninsula tip on whose edges the seals regularly bask; then it was back to the Albatross for a refreshing shower (and much-needed laundry run) and a late dinner at a local seafood restaurant that also, it must be said, did a delicious rack of lamb. The live cover band playing made a few questionable selections but all in all it was a nice finish to the day.

With dolphin swimming booked out we decided we might as well bid our farewells to Kaikoura and carry on; having already made reservations in Christchurch for New Year's Eve, we resolved to cross over to the other side of the island, before doubling back again for our reserved night there. A four-hour or so drive through Lewis Pass took us over the spine of the South Island and to the West Coast, where we made a short drive northward to the Punakaiki "pancake rocks", surf-pounded stacks of limestone that jut out into the Tasman Sea. Heading back south, we stopped in Hokitika, a major jade-working town that was unfortunately almost entirely closed for the holidays. We did chat with a few fellow backpackers in our hostel whose car problems were even worse than ours (a hare had apparently jumped into, and subsequently shattered, their windshield, temporarily stranding them there) and who had enough stories about Australian spiders to make me reconsider just how badly I want to see Coober Pedy anytime soon (well, I still do.. maybe in winter, though).

There was a nice little "grotto" of glowworms on the edge of town that night, far fewer than in the caves of Waitomo but still very beautiful (when the other noisy tourists left it, that is). We also spotted a possum, "New Zealand's number one enemy!", hiding there in the dark. We saw nocturnal critters of a different type the next morning when we visited a local zoo (things are open, finally!) and saw a couple of... cute, whuffling little kiwis! Any comparisons made to fluffy footballs just begging to be kicked will be omitted from this public recounting for the sake of decorum. But they were cute.

So the main reason we had come to this side of the island was not the chance to see kiwis, but rather — glaciers. Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers lay just a little further south of us, only about a half hour apart from each other, and I was keen to go hiking as we could — helicopter tours and serious mountain climbing expeditions are all available there but I figured a day to take in the walking trails that skirt the terminus at each would be plenty. Unfortunately, by the time we reached Franz, it was raining steadily with no signs of let-up, forcing us to take stock of our plans and consider whether we wanted to stick around and wait out the rain.

The forecast we got from two German girls who attempted to proposition us for a lift — "anywhere but here" —was not encouraging; it had been like this for several days and many of the tracks and trails were closed from the rain. In a testament either to their hitchhiking skills or our extreme decent-ness, we told them we would have to think what our next move was going to be but if we were going to leave, we would stop by their hostel and offer them a ride our way. It continued to rain through lunch and we finally settled on taking a short walk up to Sentinel Rock overlooking the tip of Franz Josef glacier. It lightened a little during this part and we were able to make out a bit of the glacier; soaked but having at least seen something, we decided to cut our losses and head back to Christchurch early, bump up our reservation there by one and use the extra day elsewhere. Fox would have to wait for another time. The German girls back in town thanked us but said they weren't planning on going as far as Christchurch; that and a delay for filling up the gas tank meant that just as we were leaving Franz Josef town... the sun broke out!

45 seconds or so of deliberation and we swiftly resolved to wheel around and head for Fox as fast as we could, hoping to beat the next downpour. Hiking our way through light mists, we made our way up the scree-filled canyon that the glacier had gouged out over the past century, coming within only a few hundred meters of a massive wall of blue ice that was truly awesome to see. Someday I'll have to back and see it under clearer skies, but I'm very glad we were able to see what we did. Then it was back across the Southern Alps again, along the twisting slopes of Arthur's Pass, a long mountains drive but, it must be said, a beautiful one to make in dusk-light. We pulled into Christchurch late in the evening (after passing through another pounding rainstorm on the outskirts, that, unfortunately, would follow us for the next few days) but found our reservations welcome and waiting for us. No energy for dinner — straight to bed.

We had a nice big brunch in a downtown Christchurch cafe; still raining, and cold, we went to check out the Air Force Museum for a change of pace. We spent a good deal of time there, marveling at what a different experience it must've been to be a far-flung citizen in the service of the British Empire back in the first half of the 20th century — and discussing the crucial national defense issue of which is cooler, jets or helicopters. Opinions on our committee differed and final judgement was postponed pending further study. By the afternoon as we left it had cleared off — though still cold — so we were able to walk through downtown Christchurch, passing by the famous cathedral as well as some pleasant botanical gardens that seemed to be having some kind of UFO problem. For dinner we splurged on some Mexican, which sadly does not seem to be found for cheap anywhere outside of North America. It was good (and spicy) though.

The next day was New Year's Eve and we decided to press back up north, reaching Picton in a few hours and catching a ferry north back to Wellington. This experience was considerably livelier than our crossing south a few days back; four to five meter swells had the boat churning and rolling for most of the three hours, sending things rolling and flying all over in the cabin lounge and most of the passengers to the seasick bags in short order. I managed to keep my feet pretty well and shut down the panic impulse as best I could whenever I saw the ocean surface rolling out underneath the side porthole across the room; the ferry crew seemed fairly blase about the whole thing so I passed the time listening to their conversations and skimming the Lonely Planet for ideas to fill our as-yet-unplanned New Year's Day.

We finally made it into Wellington and yet more pouring rain. Driving around in search of a place to say it soon became apparent that our decision make reservations for the holiday had been a good idea — except that we had made them in Christchurch, and had bumped them up to the 30th, so now we were out of luck. We finally made it back to the hotel we had spent Christmas in and got the last room in the house, a spacious triple well worth the NZ$99. We had good Indian food for dinner but did not end up staying out to midnight with the rest of Wellington's population; which was too bad, but we were also pretty soaked and tired as well.

2007 dawned gray and rainy, but we had a goal — see Mount Doom! Tongariro National Park in the center of the North Island is home to Mount Ngauruhoe, which played the role of Mordor's fiery mountain in Lord of the Rings. We reached it by noon, and while it was still cool and misty (leaving comparisons to the screen version, not to mention clear photos, somewhat hard to make) we were able to get in a good hour or so of hiking along the rocky scrub desert that surrounds its flanks. Unfortunately no orcs in sight, but it was something.

We stopped in the small town of Turangi, ate Chinese takeout, and slept the night in a crowded dorm before alighting early the next morning for Auckland. There we spent our last day in country doing a bit of grocery shopping — my fennel needs have been unmet here in Japan thus far — and returning the car after securing a spot in a backpackers and a shuttle bus out to the airport at the crack of dawn the next morning in order to make our 9:00 AM flight. We saw Borat in theaters (since we figured it's doubtful it'll be making it here any time soon) which was admittedly funny albeit extremely cringe-inducing... which I guess is mostly the point. Then it was off to bed for the last time in New Zealand.

The flight on to Hong Kong was as long as the one down, but starting off in the morning when we were still awake helped make it more bearable; the reasonably good selection of movies (except Miami Vice, which was as awful as The Departed was good) helped too.

By the time we made it to HK we were pretty tired, though, and with a full 24 hours layover we needed a place to spend the night. We found one in Chungking Mansions, a "backpacker ghetto" whose unique character which the Lonely Planet alternated between praising and warning against. Unfortunately we were too busy dodging touts to catch any pictures of the place; the most immediate comparison I have was the building in downtown Dhaka we changed money in during my trip to Bangladesh last May, an urban experience like no other I've had to date; this is probably partly due to the fact that many of Chungking's tenants appeared to be immigrants from South Asia, including (judging from the writing on a number of the storefronts) Bangladesh itself. The bottom floor was given over to all manner of shops, mostly serving this immigrant community, while the above 16 floors were packed with all manner cheap flats, budget guest rooms, and flophouses. We wandered through for a bit, finally prying off the last and most persistent tout; picking a place more or less at random out of our guidebook, we went up to check out the Osaka Guesthouse, and when the young African man on duty — who didn't look to be more than a teenager — called in the manager, who should he be but our persistent fellow from downstairs. Well, the place wasn't bad and it certainly was cheap, so we took it, and proceeded to stretch out and nap.

Our failure to reset the clock for local time meant that nap lasted a good deal longer than we had intended, and we ended up stepping out near midnight onto the streets of Kowloon, Hong Kong, which made for an interesting visual tableau of the kind I imagine most people associate with my current home of Japan; very Blade-Runner, in parts, our Mansions most especially included. We didn't stay out too very late, stopping at a 7-11 for some snacks and doing a bit of window shopping in the closed Nathan Street storefronts.

The next day we took a tram line up a very steep ascent to the top of Victoria Peak, where thick haze brought south by prevailing winds from mainland China obscured what the guidebook assured us was probably a very impressive view of Hong Kong. We got lunch in a very crowded restaurant — we were seated at a table with other patrons, something that I had always been advised to prepare for in Japan but which to date has never happened to me here — and then made our way back to the airport for our 1:00 flight home. Another stopover in Taipei, touchdown in Fukuoka, and a pass through Japanese customs (Inspector: "Do you speak Japanese?" Me: "Uh, sukoshi." ["a little"] Inspector: "What's in this box?" Me: "Omiyage." Inspector: "No drugs?" Me: "No." Inspector: "Ok, thank you." *waves us through*). An hour on the train and then it's home sweet Karatsu, with the first day of the new semester waiting for me the next day.

It's hard to wrap something like this up with a neat conclusion but I think it's fair to say that New Zealand is one of the most beautiful places I've travelled to; and there is also far too much there to fit into a mere two weeks. If you can go, do, but be sure to take good care of it while you're there, because I plan to go back.

(But my next stop is... Mongolia.)

Adventures in Middle Earth, Part One: The North Island

2007-01-14T06:42:00.000-05:00

So... New Zealand. You look at a map and say to yourself, "Why, it's just straight south of Japan here... when am I ever going to be this close again?" And while you might be right that traveling to the Land of the Long White Cloud from the United States would be a very long endeavor, the fact is it's not all that short of a trip from Japan, either. You are flying more or less half-way around the world ... it just happens to be the other, other half. Something to remember for the next time I leave the northern hemisphere.

There were no direct flights — at least no cheap ones — to Auckland from our end of Japan so we went through Hong Kong. We packed everything into my yellow hiking bag and took the train up to Fukuoka, where we just managed to make it out to the international terminal and through security and to our gate right as final boarding was being called. Part of the delay was due to the check-in lady spending a good 20 minutes trying to figure out a way to seat my traveling companion, the lovely and for the purposes of this blog post momentarily pseudonymous Ms. Riddarfjarden, and myself together, which she was ultimately unable to do for the first leg of our journey. Instead I ended up pinned against the window by two Japanese salarymen until we stopped off in Taipei, Taiwan for a short layover. There we got out to stretch our legs in a very dingy looking airport lounge before returning for the remaining two hours or so to Hong Kong; having arrived at HK's shiny new airport we had a good seven or eight hours to pass until our next flight on to Auckland.

We had some Chinese food, debated the merits of shelling out 40 bucks for a shower and nap cubicle (which we ultimately passed on), wandered all over the concourse, and reveled in airport bookstores that actually had things in languages we could read. (Thank you, a hundred years of British colonialism.) Finally we were let onboard our 11-hour redeye to Auckland, although the cabin crew's insistence on feeding us dinner — it already felt like past midnight for us, and was 9:00 Hong Kong time — kept us up a good while longer. Cathay Pacific gives you a toothbrush and toothpaste in a little complimentary toiletries set, which you would think is a nice touch until you actually taste the toothpaste, which is vile. Be forewarned.

We finally touched down in Auckland the next day and passed through New Zealand customs, which is probably the most serious I've experienced in my travels to date — they take their "100% Pure" slogan (and their agriculture industry) pretty seriously. They did not, however, bother to open our bags. After changing some money we caught a shuttle bus into the city center where our hostel lay, a bus driven by a slightly manic old lady. I think my only major instance during the trip of not being able to penetrate the Kiwi accent was when she asked for 30 dollars for our tickets.. I'd claim sleep deprivation but she also almost drove off while another guy was still getting out of the bus so maybe just crazy will suffice. Our host at the B&B, an Indian woman whose name I don't recall, was as friendly and welcoming as the bus lady was intimidating and weird so we were able to do a good bit better after that. Total travel time, from out our door to falling onto the bed in Auckland — probably about 26 to 27 hours.

Fortunately they made the place inaccessible for a reason: it's too gorgeous a country to let all the rest of us go mucking it up. I suppose I shouldn't lavish too many superlatives — I'm sure there are hidden problems and issues that my short two-week passage left me oblivious to, and the weather for one was not exactly pristine for the full duration of our trip (I was dubious of this whole "summer in December" claim to begin with... it was warm, but the season having only just started, we were still in jackets or at least long sleeves most of the time) — but I did feel like New Zealand had a number of the qualities (a diverse range of culture and ethnicity, raw natural beauty, housing insulation) that I miss living here in Japan.

We saw a bit of that in our first two days in Auckland; after a recovery nap we walked through the Ponsonby area and the "K Road", which took us through several neighborhoods that reminded me of the outskirts of Boston in my days there. We had some tasty Malaysian food for our first meal in the country and explored a bit of the central Queen Street downtown area before making our way back to our B&B for the first night. The next day we returned to Queen Street, walking down its sloping length to the ferry port at the north side of the city to take a ferry across to the slightly tonier suburb of Devonport on the far side of the harbor. It dumped down a bit of rain at this point and then cleared off again, which it would continue to do frequently during the course of our trip. At Lonely Planet's recommendation we did a walk of two old fortified volcanic hills, Mt. Victoria and North Head; failing to heed our B&B host's recommendation from the morning to be careful of the sun, I got burnt. The old tunnels were cool, though, as were the (still unexplained) mushroom-capped vents on top of Mt. Victoria.

We returned to our place to look at car rentals and arranged to rent one through the recommendation of our host; from what we could tell it would be the cheapest option available and she did seem pretty nice. The wisdom of this approach was put to a bit of questioning the next morning when we were picked up in the car we would be driving, a mid-90s Nissan Sunny that pretty clearly would not be charging up the Southern Alps any time soon. The price was right, though, so we went with it; it took us a while to find our way out of the city but we eventually made it onto a scenic highway lined with jungle flora right out of Jurassic Park, which lead out west towards Karekare Beach, where the movie The Piano (which I haven't seen, but Ms. Riddarfjarden had) was filmed. Gorgeous rock formations and dramatic surf.

After a stop there we carried on northward to Waipoua Forest, where huge kauri trees grow; we got there just an hour or so before dusk, it taking longer to wind our way over the Northland hills on a single-lane highway than we had initially planned (this would the story of much of the first part of our trip, until we had to admit that the country is a good deal bigger than we'd planned and started adjusting our plans accordingly). The forest was nearly empty of fellow hikers though, and some of the trees were massive — the most breathtaking being Te Matua Ngahere (Father of the Forest), its trunk over 5 meters in diameter. Amazing.

By the time we had left the forest it was nearing darkness (which meant it was going on 8:00ish) and we stopped, more or less by default, in the tiny town of Opononi, which featured a closed gas station, closed restaurant, closed takeaway fish-and-chips place, and one open youth hostel, the "House of Harmony". We were able to get a dorm all to ourselves, the only other folks there being a Swedish couple (named Rodriguez?) in one of the other rooms. Dinner-less, we munched down a few crackers and raisins and called it a night.

The next day we made a U-turn and headed back down south, past Auckland and into the central part of the North Island. Our destination was Rotorua, a thermal hot springs area full of steaming lakes, volcanic vents, and the occasional geyser. Again, unfortunately, the driving took longer than we had hoped and we ended up getting into the city in the early evening, by which point many of the lake walks we had hoped to see were already closed; one option still open, though, was Tikitere: Hell's Gate, the English name coming from a visiting George Bernard Shaw. It was gray and rainy but that might've helped contribute to the blighted atmosphere.. plenty of bubbling pools and sulfurous gasses and other cool features that spread out over several acres of land. You could only imagine what the early Maori would have made of such a place.. surrounded by forest, it certainly felt like an otherworldly place. The abrupt death of Ms. Riddarfjarden's camera further contributed to a sense of forlorn-ness, but that might've just been the rain.

After getting dinner, it was going on 9:00, and we made it to the Kiwi Paka Youth Hostel just in time to have them switch off the reception room lights in our face. Turning around quickly, we snagged another dorm bedroom to ourselves in the Planet Nomad backpackers about ten minutes before it too would've closed the doors, luck that carried over the next day (Christmas Eve) when Ms. Riddarfjarden's camera spontaneously recovered from its earlier demonic possession — although our early 7:00 AM departure meant we missed out on recovering our $6 blanket deposit as the manager wasn't up yet when we attempted to return them. Having felt like we had been spending too much time getting from place to place and not enough time seeing the places themselves, we were keen to get an early start so that we could make it to Waitomo, an area to the southwest full of caves where we hoped to try some "black-water rafting" or similar adventures.

This time we did make it to our goal, with plenty of time to spare. There we took an abseiling adventure down 150-meter-deep Nathan's Canyon, with a friendly guide by the name of Jason. This was the first time I had ever tried anything like that and I'm pretty sure I managed to conquer whatever lingering fears of heights I may've had with it — I was a little unsteady at first but by the end I was pretty sure that the whole experience was one of the best things we did in NZ. When he tells you all it takes to stop yourself is hold your right leg out straight, it's hard to believe, but sure enough it works — we slid down slowly but surely through a deep crevice there in the hills, its sides lined with all manner of green creepers and ferns that served as home to the small glow-worm larvae that are Waitomo's other claim to fame. It being daytime, we couldn't see them there, but after going down a second time and having fun all over again, we went back to take a boat tour through the caves below that passed under cave ceilings illuminated by a constellation of thousands of glow-worms, whose soft shining light (reminiscent of a firefly's) attracts the even tinier insects they feed on. Beautiful.

We left Waitomo a little after 2:00 that afternoon and drove on to Napier, a town on the far east coast of the North Island that was almost totally leveled in an earthquake in 1931; when it was rebuilt, the popular Art Deco style was used in many buildings, giving it a unique architectural flavor. We got a place to stay in "Toad Hall" Backpackers (attached to the Willow Art Gallery) and dinner at "Hell Pizza" in the same building — their "Mordor" special, one of many diabolically-themed offerings, was pretty good. Much of the rest of town was closed for the holiday, though, so all that was left was to pick up a few groceries and return to the hostel for the night.

Christmas morning we were awoken with a present from the hostel proprietors — a rather nice calendar of New Zealand art. We breakfasted on grocery store pastries and took a walk along the Napier beachfront; everything being closed for Christmas morning, though, we didn't linger for too long before getting into the car and pushing south to Wellington. On the way, we made a detour to visit what is billed as the longest place name in the world: Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu. There's a sign there, and some sheep. Nice.

It was a good bit of driving (probably four or five hours) down from Napier to the southernmost big city on the North Island, and we were pretty tired when we pulled into windy Wellington. We parked the car and checked into the Cambridge Hotel, where we had made advance reservations, mindful of the holiday. Going back to pull the car closer to unload our bags, we found that it was... dead. The engine would grind and the dashboard flicker, but nothing turned over, no matter how much we revved the key. And unlike Ms. Riddarfjarden's camera, it was not going to be reviving any time soon; not wishing to ruin our Christmas evening, we resolved to worry about it tomorrow, and got good Chinese food and didn't worry about it.

The next morning, the car persisted in not starting, so we attempted to call the local rental branch — considering that the major national rental outfits have their branches primarily in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, and Picton (the port on the other side of the Cook Strait, at the top end of the South Island), this was about as fortuitous a breakdown as we could've hoped for; anywhere else and we probably would've had to call an auto breakdown service and wait out whatever repairs it took.

As a rule I loathe the car rental process — my number one cause of stress during my times running Habitat build trips back in Boston — so I suppose the response we got could've been much worse. Although the guy who came out to meet us was initially convinced it must've just been a drained battery (how we could've drained it in the five minutes it took us to walk into the hotel to check in, and back, I'm not quite clear) and he did indeed succeed in jumping the thing. He let it run for 10 minutes or so, gunned the gas a couple times, and shut it off; it promptly refused to start. He jumped it again, and after admonishing us to "let it run for 15 minutes", took off. Not wanting to chance things, we sat in the car for a half hour — so much for seeing anything of Wellington before we caught the ferry at 1:00 that afternoon — and let the battery "charge".

Completely unsurprisingly, once shut off the engine once again failed to respond to any attempts at starting it up. To his credit, the guy was pretty fast about getting us a replacement, an older Toyota model that despite its age ('94, I think) seemed to handle hills a good bit better than our recently departed Nissan; it lasted through the rest of the trip with no apparent problems. We made it onto the massive Bluebridge ferry south with only about a half hour to spare, but it was a pretty smooth journey and we were able to relax a bit over the next three hours onboard and plan out our adventures in the South Island.

... Which will be a story for next time. Until then, the full album of pictures is here; the South Island installment will be forthcoming shortly.

Oh, right, the blog

2006-12-18T05:02:00.001-05:00

So I'm spending my Christmas (and New Year's) in Middle Earth this year. It's impossible to make any kind of travel plans for New Zealand because every square meter of the island are covered in everything you could ever possibly want to do. I mean, all of it. Do I want to see this unbelievably gorgeous mountain, or the one over there? Do I want to go horseback riding on the North Island, or the South Island? What about kayaking? Caving? Bungie jumping? Do I want to see Mount Doom, or Moria? It's freaking impossible I'm telling you.

I'll carry on somehow though, I'm sure, and assuming the orcs don't get me I should be back to tell the tale. Unless I decide to just stay there and become a sheep farmer instead, in which case you would all of course be welcome to come visit any time.

Happy holidays, everybody!

"I'm Not Even Supposed to Be Here Today!"

2006-10-13T09:56:00.000-04:00

Where I'm supposed to be is Xinjiang, midway through a two-week trip out West, getting myself hopelessly lost in the desert. Unfortunately my employers, in their infinite wisdom, put the kibosh on my vacation request, so instead I'm here hanging out with the fourth-graders. Who've recently taken to calling me "Johnny Depp-sensei". Which is itself kind of amusing, but also not quite what I was hoping for at this particular point in time.

I have about 18,000 items waiting in my Bloglines reader from the past two months of internet inattention, but I am going to try and slowly plug myself back in to the news again. And there was much rejoicing!

In Case Anyone's Wondering

2006-09-05T06:42:00.000-04:00

I've taken a bit of a vacation from the internet for the past month or so. School is starting now, so it's liable to last a little while longer, until I get back into the usual routine. I'll be back eventually.

A Habitat Story

2006-08-10T03:14:00.000-04:00

Another one from my turn at the SagaBlog:

Back in elementary school, I went to a small, private Montessori school in Bloomington, Indiana. Fourth through sixth graders all shared one classroom, with about thirty students in all. Moving into a huge public middle school afterwards was a difficult social adjustment, but Montessori was a great learning environment. One of my classmates, two years below me, was a girl named Kelsey. Her father was a professor at Indiana University (as was mine), and her mother was from Africa. Which would've been unremarkable except that this was 1994 and she was from Rwanda.

Estimates range from 800,000 to well over a million killed in the Rwandan Genocide, primarily ethnic Tutsi people at the hands of organized Hutu militias. From Wikipedia's article on the topic:

Ordinary citizens were called on by local officials and government-sponsored radio to kill their neighbors and those who refused to kill were often killed themselves. "Either you took part in the massacres or you were massacred yourself," said one Hutu, rationalizing an ambivalent mixture of regret, fear, and shame at being forced to kill Tutsis.

Most of the victims were killed in their villages or in towns, often by their neighbors and fellow villagers. The militia members mostly killed their victims by chopping them up with machetes, although some army units used rifles. In some towns the victims were forcibly crammed into churches and school buildings, where Hutu extremist gangs massacred them.

Being all of eleven at the time, the full scope of this probably only vaguely registered with me at the time, but we were all definitely aware of it to some extent because Kelsey's mother was in the local paper (someone we knew was famous!) for her efforts to reunite with her family back in Rwanda. We had fundraisers at school to help her raise the money to travel to the refugee camps, searching for the scattered remnants of her family. I remember it took several trips, but she eventually was able to reunite with her mother. After some time — the details are blurry with time by now, but I think it must've taken over a year — she was finally able to secure a visa for her mother and her brother, who I believe were the only survivors in her family.

I first volunteered with Habitat for Humanity in high school; my school had a chapter and, on the suggestion of one of my favorite teachers, a sponsor of the club, a few friends of mine and I went out one Saturday to lend a hand on the house of a young woman named Jennifer. I don't remember exactly what I did that first time (I think I worked on the porch, and maybe some of the interior walls), but it was fun enough that when, later that year, the Unitarian Church that I attended at the time (that's another story) sponsored the construction of two houses out on the north side of town, I decided to go join them again. And whose house should I find myself raising the walls on my first Saturday morning there, but my old classmate Kelsey's uncle and the wife he met in the refugee camps of Rwanda some four or five years prior. And let me tell you, that was pretty cool.

Every weekend after, I dragged myself out of bed at 7:00 on a Saturday morning to drive out and take part in construction from start to near-finish: driving nails, putting up siding, drywalling, painting trim, running wiring all over the house with an old retired electrician my grandfather's age, and more. It was amazingly fun, and rewarding — and, as a teenager youth with your usual modicum of adolescent angst, also good for adding a little broader perspective to life. I continued my participation with Habitat on into college, where my constant involvement made it one of the defining aspects of my life at the time; it remains one of the things I miss most from home.

There is a Habitat for Humanity Japan affiliate, although it acts primarily as a coordinating and support service for groups taking Global Village trips to nearby countries in the Pacific. Volunteer organizations like Habitat are hard to find here in Japan; the word, ボランティア, is not native to the language and as I understand it normally carries connotations of group civic responsibility and shared sacrifice, like when my students are told to go out en masse to pick up trash along the roadside for an hour or so at school. That's good and important and all; our New Horizon third year textbooks have a unit on volunteerism, but there as well, the activities described are officially-sponsored (school groups with a partner family in Nepal — why oh why did they change it from Bangladesh this year??? I could've done a great lesson with that..) — not from grassroots.

There are a number of possible explanations for the relative absence of individual civic volunteerism in Japan. There are the obligatory references to Japan's "group culture", and the widespread influence of religious groups (Habitat, which is officially an ecumenical Christian organization, gets most of its volunteers and support from church groups, although everyone is welcome) in American social life, which Japan lacks. There's also the notion that these things are the responsibility of the government authorities, and not the general populace.

But there's also real legal impediments to the growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In a 1999 article in the magazine Pacific Affairs entitled "Wither Japan's Environmental Movement? An Assessment of Problems and Prospects at the National Level", Robert J. Mason writes:

Perhaps the largest single obstacle facing NGOs is the difficulty of obtaining tax-exempt status. Indeed, 90 percent of all NGOs in Japan lack such status. To receive tax-exempt status, an NGO must be officially recognized by the government as a "public-interest corporation." Eligibility conditions for such status are not precisely specified by law, but what is generally required are either capital assets of about U.S.$ 2.5 million (¥300 million) or membership numbers beyond the reach of the vast majority of environmental organizations. What constitutes a sufficiently large membership base is decided by the ministry with which the NGO is affiliated. All public-interest corporations must be chartered by a government ministry, which will have a significant say regarding such matters as the group's activities and board membership. In short, the process is time-consuming and the requirements, while not clearly defined, can nonetheless be rigid and restrictive.

By comparison, registering an non-profit in the United States is a matter of filing a couple of forms with the IRS, which looks them over to ensure that the organization matches at least one of the large list of existing categories of charity — a process which usually only takes a couple months at most, and which is not meant to allow government or bureacucratic control of the groups. (In the UK, there's a Charity Comission, which as near as I can tell does pretty much the same thing; Canadians, Aussies, and Kiwis will have to give me a hint as to how your system works here.)

So, why are my students freezing away in dilapidated old buildings while the bureaucrats at the city hall stay warm and cozy? One possible answer is the equally underdeveloped state of Japan's volunteer organizations. A democratic government that truly represents the needs and concerns of its citizenry depends on civil society groups — churches, environmental groups, and other volunteer organizations where people associate together based on shared interests and goals — to transmit the concerns of the people to the authorities outside of the election cycle, as well as to hold them to them when it comes time to vote. So not only am I having an awesome good time when I volunteer with Habitat — I'm doing my part to keep democracy strong at the same time. And they usually have free donuts in the mornings too!

Taiwan and South Korea achieved peaceful transitions to democratic governance in the 1980s after small local religious and environmental organizations banded together to create a national movement capable of articulating a demand for reform and accountability of the government to the populace. The Chinese Communist Party — with good reason — fears just such movement today. And Karatsu — well, I'll be waiting.

Got more time to kill? Check out this site, which offers a longer article on NGOs in Japan and offers more comparisons to how they operate versus those in the U.S. For other articles I've come across relating to the broader topic of civil society, check out my del.icio.us shared bookmarks on the subject.

寒いですね

2006-08-09T03:41:00.000-04:00

I originally wrote this post for the Saga JET communal blog, based on some thoughts that I've been turning over in my head for a while here. I'm not sure if they've really been fully expressed here, but it's a start. The post is reproduced below.

If I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I'm not always sure about the degree to which my presence as an ALT here in Saga really makes a major difference in the lives and learning of my young students. I think that it might be doing something, perhaps in subtler ways than I can easily discern, but even with that thought it's not clear how much of it is directly connected to me, as opposed to any other friendly gaijin plunked down in my spot. I do think, though, that my being here has definitely had an effect on me, which I suppose is at least something.

Smack in the center of the sweltering Saga summer (say that five times fast), it may require a powerful stretch of the imagination, but if you'll recall it was only six or seven months ago that we were all sitting around, shivering in the biting Siberian-tinged air, tethered to the warm envelopment of the kotatsu. That is assuming we were at home; in the half-century old concrete hulks that serve as schools here in Karatsu, there was no respite. Except that, as a teacher, I could get away with wearing a heavy jacket, and retreat between classes to hover over the space heater in the shokuinshitsu to thaw my hands; unless they could think of an excuse to come visit a teacher for a few minutes, my poor sailor-suited students had no such escape.

I think it was probably the unreasonableness of teachers who would yell at students who dared to put on gloves or scarves in the frigid classrooms that was the most maddening aspect of it all, but almost equally galling was the thought that here I was, in one of the richest nations in the world, and they can't even manage to heat their children's schools! Aside from the basic issue of social priorities, the cold also had clear and demonstrable effects on the students' ability to learn and function — namely, they were too busy shivering to be bothered. It did give me an opportunity to teach the words "central heating" and "insulation", but that didn't really do much to solve the problem.

One day I expressed some of this frustration to one of my JTEs; her sympathetic response was "Yes, that's true... but Japan has no oil." At the time I think I was pretty dismissive of this idea: they appear to have enough energy to keep the city hall and the goddamn 7-11's warm, so I think there might be a little more to it than that. I still think that's the case — and tomorrow I'm going to make an effort to explain why I think these priorities might become distorted in the Japanese system —but I have to admit that her comment has stuck with me and, in a way, made me reconsider — or at least reassess — some of my assumptions.

I was born into an era of American supremacy. Although I was alive for its last few years, I have no memory of the Cold War, and my formative young adult years during the 1990s were ones where the American model appeared to be ascendant and essentially unchallenged. By virtue of my birth I have been extremely lucky in the opportunities available to me — the JET program's shared requirement of a college degree means we have all been extremely lucky, relative to the majority of the rest of the world today. In raising me I think my parents made a real effort (one I hope I'm able to emulate, some day) to ensure that I would be aware of and grateful for these gifts, and I've tried to do my part for others less fortunate, to date principally through volunteering with Habitat for Humanity during my four years at college. But surrounded by the social and physical infrastructure of the world superpower — clean water, cheap energy, good schools — it's hard not to take some of it for granted. The Japanese don't have abundant natural energy reserves, or a globe-spanning navy capable of stabilizing shipping lanes, or the world's biggest economy. The United States does, and while it doesn't explain the whole story about why my students are expected to suck it up and deal with freezing, uninsulated, unheated schools, I think it might well have more to do with it than I initially recognized. And if this is coming from the world's second-richest economy (even if we are living in one of its poorest sub-divisions), what about the rest of the world?

The implications of this are challenging. One of — if not the — best things I've done in my life has been my work with Habitat for Humanity. While I recognize that the elimination of substandard, poverty housing across the globe (as Habitat aims to do) is a goal far greater than anything I'll ever be able to achieve, I know that I have personally contributed my sweat and money and effort towards build an affordable home for over fifty families across the United States. However small the scale, that has made an undeniable impact for those families, helping them achieve a baseline of stability and opportunity, and I'm grateful for the chance to have been a part of it. (Building a house is, incidentally, also tons of fun.) But my experience in Japan, and on my trip to Bangladesh this past Golden Week on a Habitat Global Village trip, has shown me the great degree to which poverty can be relative. I don't think it diminishes the real need of poor Americans, but this gap between the U.S. standard of living and that of other countries may mean I have to reassess my assumptions. What constitutes a "simple, decent" home in the United States is drastically different from one in Haluaghat, Bangladesh, and one in Japan.

What's difficult about this is the accompanying notion that the world cannot, in fact, afford for all of its peoples to enjoy the standard of living that I as an upper-middle class American was born into thinking as "fair". And not just unaffordable in terms of monetary economics but also the natural resources that build and fuel that economy. To take an extreme example, China has been developing at full tilt for the last couple decades, the authority and legitimacy of the Communist Party largely dependent on continued economic success, and it still has huge masses of rural poor in its center waiting for their turn. Personal automobile ownership — a symbol of the American Dream if there ever was one — is growing, which is liable to raise demand for energy even further. China's growing hunger for energy reserves has driven up prices worldwide. All this development has had horrific environmental consequences, poisoning China's rivers, stripping its mountainsides, and polluting its air — and ours. An attempt by the whole world to bring their standards of living up to those of America, barring some miraculous discovery of cheap, clean energy, would probably have seriously negative consequences for the future.

America got there first — but can anyone else join us?

Open Source

2006-08-08T09:22:00.000-04:00

Radio Open Source has just done a show based on a topic I suggested a month or two back. The issue is China's rise: how is its growing energy resource consumption shaping its presence in developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, and what implications that has for U.S. foreign policy. The conversation takes a number of interesting tacks beyond my initial topic proposal, and features commentary from Thomas Barnett and others.

This was my comment on the show:

I wasn't able to listen to the show live (time zone differences pretty much rule that out) but I've heard it now. Very interesting discussion, ranging over quite a broad range (I wrote a senior term paper on the Uyghurs, so they're a bit of an interest of mine as well). Glad to see I was able to squeak in my question before it went to air.

For me the two most interesting points raised during the program were Thomas Barnett's suggestion that given China's mercantalist program of relatively shallow, extractive relations with countries in L.America, Africa, and the M.East, and their limited ability to spawn broader economic development, they will increasingly be seen in those countries as the negative face of globalization. A number of the China/Africa articles I've collected in my bookmarks suggest such reactions are already beginning, particularly in cases where cheap imported Chinese labor is supplanting locals.

Equally important I thought was John Pomfret's response to my question, where he suggested that the Chinese global ruleset (to use a Barnett-esque turn of phrase) was essentially undefined, outside the basic bottom-line business of business. I would subscribe to Dr. Barnett's later comment, where he says that we have come to the conclusion that dictatorships are not viable long-term solutions for development; that's actually part of the reason why a rival "Beijing Consensus" cocerns me, since I think a country with as many unaddressed internal weaknesses as China (whose long- or even mid-term stability I am unassured of) is not a particularly good model for world-wide emulation, at least as long as it retains its current autocratic and form.

Suggestions for August are open, so if you'd like to see Christopher Lydon and his future guests tackle another topic of interest to you, do drop them a note.

This Week in Private Military Contacting

2006-07-29T00:46:00.000-04:00

Here's a collection of articles on issues related to private contractors that passed through my RSS newsreader over the past few days:

• The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has halted a high-profile children's hospital construction project contract in Basra, after contractor Bechtel (they of the ill-fated Big Dig) overran costs by %150 and lagged over a year behind schedule. Bechtel, which subcontracted the job out through several layers of companies, blamed security concerns for the problems.

Bechtel estimated that as much as 50 percent of its expenses on the project were overhead costs, which were paid with American money separate from the $50 million construction contract.

David Snider, a spokesman for the United States Agency for International Development, the State Department agency in charge of the project, said that technically, Bechtel’s contract was not being terminated because the contract did not actually require the company to complete the hospital.

“They are under a ‘term contract,’ which means their job is over when their money ends,” Mr. Snider said. So despite not finishing the hospital, he said, “they did complete the contract.”

A confidential report commissioned by the development agency criticizes it for failing to properly account for all of the costs of building a functioning hospital. The agency is likely to face further criticism as it seeks additional money to complete the hospital as part of an Iraq reconstruction program that has increasingly come to be seen as overpriced and ineffective.

As the article mentions, this follows the Army Corps' cancellation last month of another large contractor, Parsons (which happens to be the other main partner in the Big Dig, actually) after it failed to complete several prison facilities and hospitals in a timely or cost-effective manner.

• The Virginian-Pilot of Hampton Roads has an extensive six-part series on local firm Blackwater USA, which has become one of the highest-profile private military contractors today. Lots of good content here - its founding, its leadership, its experience in Iraq and post-Katrina New Orleans, and more. Check it out.

An image of strength is vital in this muscle-bound business, and Blackwater is a top dog in its field. In a decade, the company has grown from a sketch on a scrap of paper to a superstar in the rapidly expanding universe of the private military industry.

It's a controversial arena, deeply divided by an international debate over the growing use of hired guns. Blackwater has been a lightning rod in the middle of it all since March 31, 2004, when the company's name became linked with the grisly image of charred American corpses hanging from a bridge in Fallujah.

None of that has hurt the bottom line. On any given day, Blackwater has as many as 3,000 security contractors working in far-flung hot spots and some 500 paying clients in Moyock - learning to crash cars, shoot targets, board ships, storm schools, rescue hostages, bust down doors.

At Blackwater, one thing is perfectly clear:

There is big money to be made in a world full of bad news.

• California Representative Henry Waxman and the House Government Reform Committee have released a new report on waste and corruption in Department of Homeland Security contracting procedures. The Washington Post gives the outlines:

Lawmakers say that since the Homeland Security Department's formation in 2003, an explosion of no-bid deals and a critical shortage of trained government contract managers have created a system prone to abuse. Based on a comprehensive survey of hundreds of government audits, 32 Homeland Security Department contracts worth a total of $34 billion have "experienced significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement," according to the report, which is slated for release today and was obtained in advance by The Washington Post.

The value of contracts awarded without full competition increased 739 percent from 2003 to 2005, to $5.5 billion, more than half the $10 billion awarded by the department that year. By comparison, the agency awarded a total of $3.5 billion in contracts in 2003, the year it was created.

Among the contracts that went awry were deals for hiring airport screeners, inspecting airport luggage, detecting radiation at the nation's ports, securing the borders and housing Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Investigators looking into those contracts turned up whole security systems that needed to be scrapped, contractor bills for luxury hotel rooms and Homeland Security officials who bought personal items with government credit cards.

While many of those problems have been disclosed, today's report is the first comprehensive survey of the government's own investigations into contracting mismanagement in the domestic war against terrorism.

"Every dollar that is wasted on a contract is a dollar less that could be used to make Americans more secure," said former department inspector general Clark Kent Ervin. "This kind of abuse constitutes a security gap all its own in America's defense." [my emphasis added]

For a broader examination of the Bush administration's use of private contractors in Iraq, Katrina recovery, as well as homeland security, check out the House Reform Democrats' Dollars, Not Sense: Government Contracting Under the Bush Administration.

• Finally, at the blog MountainRunner, a review of the book "A Bloody Business".

Kirishima National Park

2006-07-20T04:10:00.000-04:00

Please Insert COIN

2006-07-13T08:13:00.000-04:00

Eric and the Armchair Generalist have beat me to the punch on the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, but if I may risk a bit of redundancy, I'd like to finish off this draft on the subject that I've been kicking around for about the past week.

Cobra II

For starters, I recently (actually about two weeks back by this point) finished Cobra II, by New York Times reporter Michael Gordon and retired Gen. Bernard Trainor. Despite being over 600 pages, it moves along at a fast pace, giving a thorough accounting of the planning and execution of the military's campaign for Baghdad from vantage points both on high and close to the ground. (This NYT article from last March contains a number of the highlights; the authors also spoke about their work at the Council on Foreign Relations.) Some of the episodes therein have already been related at book-length detail by other embedded reporters — Rick Atkinson with the 101st, David Zucchino on the "Thunder Run" through Baghdad — but Cobra II does seem to cover the whole length and breadth of the invasion, from initial planning cycles to the regime's fall (Gordon and Trainor make use of the Iraqi Perspectives Project to add details of Saddam's egregiously misdirected war planning) and finally Bremer's arrival and disbanding of the Iraqi army (-- I'd like to see an equally dense overview of the Coalition Provisional Authority's actions in Iraq, but I guess we'll have to wait a while for all of it to come out).

The book is packed with operational details — if anything, the addition of a cast list to the several pages of maps at the front would've been a helpful aid for readers like me who sometimes have trouble keeping straight the many characters and units involved in a big military ensemble like this. Gordon, who was embedded with land war commander Gen. David McKiernan's command during the conflict, provides plenty of perspective from the halls of the Pentagon and CENTCOM's Tampa headquarters, although White House decisionmakers (save Rumsfeld) are generally absent from this DOD-centered narrative. Of course, that absence from the Iraq mission is probably in no small part due to Rumsfeld's insistence that he and he alone would be in command for the Iraq operation; his famous bureaucratic power player's skills for seizing control are amply on display in the book's early pages as he shuts out State and CIA, and wears down his generals (viewed as too conservative and risk-averse to accept the new logic of "transformation") into producing a plan that conforms to the SecDef's vision of modern war. As much as Rumsfeld might like to deflect responsibility, understanding as he did "that there was political value in being able to stand at the Pentagon podium and say that the Bush administration was implementing the military’s plan," his fingerprints are quite clearly present throughout the entire process, from discussions of initial force size to the raw logistics of deployment to the forces advancing on Baghdad ("Blue Force Tracker" and other revolution-in-military affairs network technology allowed the SecDef to closely track the war's execution, but with no corresponding icons for the fedayeen irregulars that would prove the main center of enemy resistance, it produced a distorted view of the conditions on the ground that reinforced Rumsfeld's view of his generals as overly conservative and cautious) through to the premature "off-ramping" of units not yet deployed as soon as Saddam's collapse appeared assured.

As for Gen. Tommy Franks, who Andrew Bacevich slammed in a review of the CENTCOM commander's autobiography American Soldier (which I'll confess to not having read), Gordon and Trainor's portrayal of him is if anything even less flattering than that of Rumsfeld. Franks might've been a fine artillery officer and no doubt has some real skills in directing fire, maneuver, and military logistics, but in Cobra II's pages the overall commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom displays a dismissive attitude towards the political future of post-invasion Iraq and a lack of responsiveness to his junior officers' ground situations. Having reached Baghdad and toppled the regime, he and his civilian superiors in Rumsfeld's office are already quite ready to congratulate themselves on a job well done, pack up US forces, and leave, expecting (and hinging their planning on) a "'Wizard of Oz moment' ... After the wicked dictator was deposed, throngs of cheering Iraqis would hail their liberators and go back to work under the tutelage of Garner's postwar organization and it teams of advisers attached to Iraqi ministries — in some cases, no more than a single individual." Well, things didn't quite work out that way.

Impediments to Innovation

After finishing Cobra II I next picked up John Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. While Nagl does discuss the techniques of counterinsurgency employed in both those conflicts, the real focus of his study is the extent to which the British and American armies who fought in those two wars were learning institutions. In order to process individual-level innovation into organization-wide changes in behavior, successful learning institutions must promote suggestions from the field; encourage subordinates to question superiors and policies; question the basic assumptions of the organization at regular intervals; bring high-ranking officials into close contact with those on the ground; and developing standard operating procedures from local innovation rather than central dictate.

The questions aim at determining not just whether an army is interested in the collection of data — promoting suggestions from those engaged in combat — but, far more important, whether the institution is willing and able to apply the information to create change in procedures, organization, training, and thinking about conflict. ...

The most critical aspect of the learning process is not the innovator ... [t]he key to organizational learning is getting the decision-making authority to allow such innovation, monitor its effectiveness, and then transmit new doctrine with strict requirements that it be followed throughout the organization. (my emphasis)

Nagl's assessment is that, despite some bright spots (such as the Marines' Combined Action Platoons) the US Army was not an effective learning institution during either its early advisor phase or later combat phase in Vietnam. Its strong organizational culture — Nagl quotes Eliot Cohen describing its core as "[t]he preference for massing a large number of men and machines and the predilection for direct and violent assualt" — prevailed in the war's aftermath as well, as counterinsurgency lessons were shunned in favor of a reorientation towards the Fulda Gap and conventional AirLand Battle against the Soviets. Conventional warfare continued to define the Army's institutional identity post-Cold War as well, with the majority of the officer corps embracing the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, rather than a mixed political-military counterinsurgency doctrine of minimum force. Having failed to prepare as an organization for this kind of war, the results are not entirely surprising: "For Franks," Bacevich concluded in his review of American Soldier, "war is a matter of engineering—and generalship the business of organizing and coordinating materiel". By and large Gordon and Trainor's portrayal in Cobra II accords with this. Their narrative stops shortly after the fall of Baghdad, but in the book's epilogue they offer a retrospective on the errors of commission and omission that served to produce the deteriorating situation we face in Iraq today:

American troops themselves were quick to identify the nature of their [unconventional] enemy... [b]ut the American war plan was never adjusted on high. Tommy Franks never acknowledged the enemy he faced nor did he comprehend the nature of the war he was directing. He denigrated the Fedayeen as little more than a speed bump on the way ot Baghadad and never appreciated their resilience or determination. ... Once Baghdad was taken, Franks turned his attention elsewhere in the belief that victory was his, never realizing the irregulars he maligned constituted the real military center of gravity, on that had not surrendered.

More important, Rumsfeld failed to heed his own counsel on defense planning. From the day he returned to the Pentagon as George W. Bush's defense secretary, Rumsfeld unscored the need to be prepared for the unexpected. ... Success depended on agility: the ability to adjust the battle plan in the face of threats that could be neither predicted nor forseen. Yet Rumsfeld was so confident of the validity of the prewar plan that he questioned the need to deploy the 1st Cavalry before Baghdad fell. Just a week after Baghdad was seized, the White House, Defense Department, and CENTCOM were focused on withdrawing troops and replacing them with less capable foreign troops instead of deploying the assets that would be needed to hedge against new threats.

With these impediments to innovation at the highest levels of command, an analysis using Nagl's methodology would, I think, have to conclude that the US military's learning abilities during the Iraq invasion and early occupation period were, at best, mixed.

Lessons Learned?

Nagl's book does make clear that there is always a learning curve in counterinsurgency operations, even for militaries accustomed to small wars, like the British in Malaya were — every such conflict is different, and policy can't begin to adapt until errors are first recognized, which will take time even under optimum circumstances. Three years into Iraq, it does appear that the U.S. military establishment is beginning to seriously develop a counterinsurgency program. The biggest sign of this is the recent redrafting of the Army's 20-year old doctrine for counterinsurgency, willfully abandoned after Vietnam but now approaching completion under the guidance of Lt. General David Petraeus (whose conduct in this regard was highly praised during his time in Iraq) and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who commanded the 1st Marine Division in the invasion. Although the work has yet to be published officially, the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News has a copy of the advance draft, and Fred Kaplan gave it a run-down in Slate this past weekend.

I haven't had time to read through the thing but expect to do so during my summer vacation here sitting around the Karatsu City Board of Education. It's not the only sign of an increased attention towards counterinsurgency, either, as there have been a number of articles in the past week or so on the military's efforts to apply lessons from Iraq to the development of counterinsurgency capabilities. There's a story from the Christian Science Monitor and a similar piece in the LA Times describing a two Marine training simulations, one at Quantico and another out in the California desert. David Axe relates the operations of the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, whose staff has increased more than three times over (to 130) since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The FAS Secrecy News blog offered a handful of recent Marine Corps publications on counterinsurgency as well.

Assuming for the moment these reports accurately reflect a real shift in the organizational culture of the military (and more specifically the Army, as the Marine Corps has always been much more comfortable with this stuff, since its early organizational culture was greatly influenced by the "small wars" it was tasked to fight) and a new appreciation for the difficulties and importance of effective counterinsurgency, the question I suppose is whether this is all too late to make an effective difference in Iraq. Lt. General Peter W. Chiarelli, currently the number two American commander in Iraq and who overseer of the Haditha investigations, recognizing the importance of relations with the civilian population, is increasing scrutiny over damage and deaths inflicted by coalition forces. But the Post article again emphasizes the cost of these belated changes in the way the military conducts itself in Iraq:

Chiarelli long has been concerned that the U.S. military was inadequately prepared to conduct an effective counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. He also included thoughts about how better to prepare troops and commanders, the official added.

"You've got to prepare for the fight you're in today," said a second defense official, summarizing Chiarelli's findings on the military's inadequate training for counterinsurgency operations. "It's totally different" than fighting in Iraq two or three years ago, he said.

The Army, for example, tends in its training to emphasize using heavy firepower against the enemy, although classic counterinsurgency doctrine teaches that soldiers should use the minimal amount of force necessary to accomplish the mission.

Also, the Army early in Iraq tended to focus on killing or capturing insurgents, although counterinsurgency doctrine teaches that the best way to deal with an insurgent is to persuade him to change sides or to desert. Also, in contrast to a spate of cases of the abuse of detainees, counterinsurgency theorists recommend treating captured fighters well, to encourage them to desert and to persuade others to give themselves up. Above all, people are seen as the prize in the war, not as its playing field.

It took the British over four years to turn around their conduct of the war in Malaya towards a successful counterinsurgency campaign. They are hardly parallel cases, but perhaps the appointment of more generals like Lt. Gen. Chiarelli and the development of new doctrines and training methods will have a positive effect on operations in Iraq. I think there is little doubt, though, that the cumulated errors of their predecessors have left them with quite a hole to dig back out of.

Don't Wanna Study Counterinsurgency No More

As Eric and Armchair Generalist both noted, Kaplan's review of the new counterinsurgency docs suggested that one of the main questions we should take away is whether the US can ever successfully wage counterinsurgency warfare, and therefore whether we should really even try. Matthew Yglesias picks up Kaplan's question, and concludes that no, we probably shouldn't. He might well be right that the "incompetence dodge" is a distraction from the overwhelming difficulty of these operations but like Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, and Money and my two fellow bloggers here at American Footprints I find it hard to totally buy into. Administration incompetence is on ready display in Cobra II (and appears to be the focus of Thomas Ricks' forthcoming Fiasco), and I think one of the book's clear messages was that the results of the Iraq invasion were not necessarily guaranteed from the start, that there were points very early in the operations and the post-war transition where choices were made. Even given the tremendous difficulty of successful counterinsurgency, I don't think that failure was inevitable from the start (whether things can truly be turned around at this late stage, when figures like Rumsfeld continue to exert sway over the process, I really can't pretend to know). And even were it inevitable based on the military we had assembled in the spring of 2003, I think that Iraq is no more likely to be the last insurgency the U.S. military will ever face than Vietnam was. To end then, I'll conclude by agreeing with the Armchair Generalist, quoting Farley:

"Whether we're just bad at counter-insurgency or the task is impossible doesn't matter all that much, because we shouldn't fight wars we're unlikely to win. But this strikes me as an unproductive and potentially disastrous way to argue against intervention. " That's the point here. Like it or not, counterinsurgency operations are going to be a facet of current and future wars, just as they have been in the past. It's vital that we master this kind of military warfare, if only to avoid the many mistakes ("thousands" according to SecState Rice...) that we've seen in Iraq over the past few years.

[x-posted]

"I'm like a rough diamond that just needs a little polishing, that's all"

2006-07-02T08:41:00.000-04:00

So the other day I'm in Fukuoka (big city north of Karatsu) on my way to a concert at the Indian restaurant (kind of cool, but to tell the truth I prefer my sitar as delivered by Dan the Automator and DJ Shadow remixes) when I notice this Japanese woman on the street with bleach-blond hair and pink highlights at the tips. It's a pretty wierd look, even for the Japanese, who do like their fashion wierd, so I'm reaching for my camera in my bag to try and get a shot when all of a sudden she's standing there in front of me asking if I speak Japanese. "Uh, a little bit," I answer (no, not in English), and so she proceeds to explain that she and her friend (a guy who appears in short order) are students at a fashion school. Ok, that explains the hair. And they have a show on July 25th. Ok. And would I be willing to be a model for them?

Well, that was certainly a first, but unfortunately the 25th is not a weekend, so I had to pass (but not before getting flustered and asking "Really? No, seriously?" a couple times). I'd like to say that it was my keen sense of fashion (Habitat shirt, natch) that brought me to their notice, but as one of my other friends on the way to the same concert later said he was asked to star as well, I have to admit that it was probably my exotic gaijin good looks that did it. It's a shame, since having already starred in a promotional film for the city of Karatsu I could've been well on my way to a lucrative career in token star-dom.

I better enjoy this stuff while it lasts.

Children At War

2006-06-21T03:59:00.000-04:00

Peter W. Singer, Brookings fellow and author of Corporate Warriors, has a book out detailing the emergence of another new kind of non-traditional conflict actor: child soldiers. A quick read at just over 200 pages (excluding the notes and appendices), like his previous work, Children at War functions as more of a broad backgrounder than a detailed policy prospectus. As someone with only a passing awareness of the phenomenon prior to checking out the book (although Singer points out that child soldiers can be found in conflicts around the world, from Palestinian suicide bombers to Colombian rebels to the fourteen-year old Afghan sniper who inflicted the first U.S. combat casualty in the War on Terror, Africa still remains the global epicenter for the use of children in war, and a gap in my studies thus far), I found it to be an interesting summation of the various factors that contribute to and result from what Singer describes as the "child soldier doctrine". Two articles from last year by Singer and a recent online chat at the Post do a pretty good job of covering his major points, if you'd rather not tackle it book-length.

The spread of this doctrine can have profound affects on the conduct of wars, as Singer elaborates:

As a new source of fighters, children multiply the potential military capacities of groups that choose to adopt the child soldier doctrine. This eases the difficulties groups often face in force generation, thus increasing the likelihood of rebellions and wars. Children's recruitment also allows a proliferation of armed opposition groups with weakened or nonviable ideological bases, which would have prevented their survival just a few decades ago. Moreover, the way in which child soldiers are used means that those conflicts are inherently "messier," featuring atrocities and attacks on civilians. At the same time, child soldier group leaders consider children's lives cheaper. Subsequently, they deploy their recruits on the battlefield in a manner that leaders to a higher casualty ratio.

The ultimate result is that, when children are present, violent conflicts tend to be easier to start, harder to end, and greater in loss of life. They also lay the groundwork for conflict recurrence in following generations.

Singer identifies widespread social disruption born of disease, poverty, and state failure, together with the proliferation of inexpensive and comparatively simple small arms, as underlying causes of the child soldier phenomenon: the former provides the pool from which child soldiers are drawn, and the latter enables them to fight despite their having not yet reached maturity or (generally) receiving much in the way of training. On the demand side, as noted in the quote above, the use of child soldiers — unpaid and poorly equipped, frequently 'recruited' through abduction, and bound to their commanders through traumatizing abuse and raw intimidation — lowers the barriers to entry for "conflict entrepreneurs", who are less interested in seizing political control of a state or maintaining a popular ideology than in exploiting chaos and conflict to profit from commodity and criminal trades.

Given these incentives for conflict actors unconcerned with the rest of the world's moral approbation — the soon-to-be-tried Charles Taylor, for example — is what can be done about it. The last several chapters of the book attempt to address this question, looking at prevention (a challenge, since as Singer asks rhetorically, "how can one shame the shame-less?"; while international law is fairly unanimous in condemning the use of child soldiers, enforcement and prosecution remains spotty), rehabilitation (a long and complex process of demobilization, counseling, and gradual social integration), and also the unenviable task of crafting a combat doctrine for armies confronting child soldiers in war, where your enemy is capable of both wielding an AK-47 to deadly effect and evoking sympathy as a young victim of abuse. Units that come into conflict with child soldiers invariably suffer serious blows to their fighting morale, with higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression. The use of non-lethal weapons, firing for shock effect, and the targeting of adult leaders offers some solutions for commanders that can minimize enemy casualties while still reducing their threat to friendly forces.

Singer outlines some potential long-term solutions in the first of the above-linked articles, points which are repeated at greater length in the book:

* Increasing investment to head off regional conflicts and outbreaks of disease, including the AIDS pandemic.
* Offering greater aid to special at-risk groups such as refugees and orphans.
* Making the recruitment of children a war crime and prosecuting offenders in international criminal tribunals.
* Reducing profits by sanctioning any firms or regimes that trade with child-soldier groups (including even American firms, such as those that traded with the Liberian and Sudanese governments).
* Providing increased aid to programs which seek to demobilize and rehabilitate former child soldiers.
* Helping to curb the spread of illegal small arms to rebel and terrorist groups who bring children into the realm of war.

"In each of these areas," Singer concludes, "U.S. action has fallen woefully short." It's an ugly, disheartening, immensely challenging issue to confront, but Singer's book makes a clear case that unless we attempt do so, the theft and exploitation of the childhood of tens of thousands will continue largely unabated, with serious consequences for both the conduct of war and the endurance of peace throughout the world.

[x-posted]

Fukushima

2006-06-13T07:05:00.000-04:00

Fukushima is a small island at the edge of nearby Nagasaki prefecture, to the south of us. At one point, there was an operation of some kind there -- possibly coal mining, although we didn't find the mine entrance -- now long since abandoned. Three hours of biking the back hills of southern Saga prefecture got us there, although the onset of summer had unleashed the undergrowth in such force that most of the complex was buried away from our eyes.

We Need Kiss

2006-06-03T06:42:00.000-04:00

So after thinking it over for a while and skimming some camera review sites I recently decided that the time has come for a camera upgrade. I held of on actually making the purchase for a while, but this weekend I talked myself into finally going through with it, hence:

The Canon Kiss Digital N is identical to the Digital Rebel XT or 350D models sold in the USA and Europe, respectively, with the exception that it has a much lamer name, and a band of young kids wearing KISS makeup in the ads for it.

Other than that it seemed like a pretty good camera, so today I went in and plunked down about 110,000 yen for one, together with a gig's worth of memory.

Eh, won't be needing this...

Contents

I bought the Canon kit lens, which could prove to be a mistake at some point given that many people on Flickr appear to be less than complementary towards it. As may be, I've never taken a photography class in my life and still have only a vague notion of what I'm doing, so for the moment I decided to spare my bank account the impact of a high-class lens and instead stuck with the default package.

With luck, I will someday be able take the kind of pictures that might actually begin to justify this thing's cost. Here's a start — you can be the judge.

A Trip to Saga's Dirty South

2006-05-29T08:25:00.000-04:00

Well, Kobe was nice enough, although I don't have much to show for it beyond a sheaf of handouts and a few new elementary school lesson plan ideas. I saw a little bit of the city, but only in the course of heading out to dinner in the evenings — as the guides suggested, it looked like a nice city for living, with a strong nightlife and plenty of nice restaurants to choose from, but didn't as much to offer for the visitor as your Kyoto or Sapporo or what have you.

Far more exciting was the Sunday after I returned, when I took a trip to Kashima City to participate in the 22nd Annual Gatalympics. Kashima sits on the southern coast of Saga-ken, with huge mud flats (Japan's largest) stretching out as the Ariake Sea's tides recede — a product of one of the world's greatest tide differentials, with low tide at about six meters below the high point. Every year they have an annual "Mudflat (gata) Olympics", with locals, exchange students (there were even some Bangladeshi folks studying at Saga University) and a crowd of us ALTs mucking about in all manner of games. Saga gaijin came out in force, which the crowd of photographers there clearly loved; my event was the "World Cup", where I was roped together with four other JETs as we made a mad lunge to grab a replica of the real deal placed in the middle of an expanse of mud before some forty or so others made it there first. We didn't quite make it, but we had already been playing around in the mud for a good hour or so waiting for the event to start, so no one really cared. I was too covered in mud to go near my camera for most of it, but the whole thing was a filthy blast, and I'm still cleaning the stuff out of my ears.

Off to Kobe

2006-05-23T08:41:00.000-04:00

Got a recontracting JETs conference to go to Wednesday — Friday, although I'm doubtful that there will be much new beyond the latest iterations of the "do your best" and "everyone's situation is different" speeches that are standard at all these things. At least I'll have a chance to see the city, which Lonely Planet tells me has recovered quite nicely from the quake a decade ago. Assuming I don't spend the entire time locked in a meeting hall, I should be back with some pictures at least.

Also, I graduated college a year ago today. Huh.

China's 'Floating Population'

2006-05-19T05:12:00.000-04:00

As part of its ongoing five-part series on life in rural China, NPR had a story the other day that should serve as a reminder that the US isn't the only one with migration issues these days. In China's case, though, it's not international but rather internal borders that poor rural laborers are crossing, in the search for the kinds of jobs that might allow them to achieve the standard of living the past two decades of development has brought to many of their coastal-dwelling countrymen. Men and women like Wu Dexiu, profiled in the NPR piece, are major components in the engine behind that development, as they leave behind home and family to join the 'floating population' of low-paid migrant workers filling factory and construction jobs in the big cities.

The book I was given to read on this topic back in college, Strangers in the City, is currently sitting on my bookshelf back in America, but I do have a copy of China's Minorities on the Move here with me, which, while focusing specifically on the travels of non-Han Chinese minority groups, also contains some information relevant to the broader phenomenon of the floating population. Increasing productivity of farmland has brought about a large rural labor surplus, and economic development remains by and large concentrated in the coastal provinces, creating disparities of wealth that provide strong incentive for rural-to-urban internal migration. As Robyn Iredale and Fei Guo write in their introductory overview in China's Minorities on the Move,

Mobile rural and other populations are voting with their feet to seek out the superior opportunity structures and social advantages that urban and richer rural areas provide. Wide spatial variations have emerged in China in the process of economic reform, partly as a result of the government's economic policies and its emphasis on developing the east coast.

The quasi-legal status of these migrants comes from the lingering legacy of the PRC's hukou system. Together with the danwei (work unit) and Food Ticket systems, hukou permits effectively halted individual mobility by tying food, housing, work, and basic social services like healthcare and education to one's official place of residence. The hukou system was implemented to control urbanization following the rural collectivization process and the famines of Great Leap Forward, in which poor rural Chinese fled the countryside to the cities in search of food and jobs. Having recently visited Bangladesh's capital of Dhaka, I can begin to appreciate on an anecdotal level the effects of runaway urbanization in an impoverished country, with overcrowding and pollution posing a heavy strain on the state's already limited ability to deliver services to its citizenry. (The serious challenges presented to CCP rule by China's deteriorating environment is something I intend to write on separately soon, having just finished Elizabeth Economy's excellent book on the subject, The River Runs Black.) Attempts like the hukou system to freeze the urbanization process carry with them their own costs and challenges, though, and its gradual breakdown has reopened many of the issues it was set up to forestall. "Urban residents", China's Minorities on the Move notes,

have come to enjoy social welfare, security, health care, pensions, housing, and other social infrastructure provisions that are far superior to those in rural areas. ... Increased access to information and better communication now means that rural people are becoming very conscious of the inferiority of services that they are able to access, and many leave for urban areas where they hope to improve their quality of life.

Rather characteristically of the PRC's reforms to date, the emergence of private markets for housing and employment has opened new opportunities for social mobility, while the legal framework for accomodating that mobile population continues to lag behind. Education and other government services still remain tied to one's official place of residency, resulting in situations like Mrs. Wu's, whose teenage daughters continue to live in their home village with their grandparents, seeing their mother and father at best only three times in a year.

The PRC has sought to shed many features of its welfare state, devolving considerable enforcement and governance responsibilities from the central state bureaucracy to local-level authorities, but the persistent disparities of living standards between rural and urban China and the state's lagging ability to provide for the needs of a mobile population will require deft handling on the part of CCP leaders if they are to ever bridge this gap. Although it has yet to resolve the disconnect between the hukou legacy of stationary social services provision and its newly mobile labor force, the CCP does appear to be using slightly less blunt tools of leverage in its effort to cope with migrant flows these days. According to this piece from UPenn's Wharton School (via YaleGlobal), the government's recent increases in farming subsidy incentives combined with the persistently low wages offered to migrant laborers — the article notes that, on top of the absence of a social safety net, "[s]ome studies indicate that in the last 12 years, migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta have seen their monthly salaries go up only 68 yuan. If inflation is taken into account, migrant workers' income has actually declined" — may have been enough to prompt a slowdown (and maybe even some reverse flows) in the number of individuals seeking work in the cities, enough that many coastal factories are actually starting to see persistent labor shortages.

In January 2004, the first year of the labor shortage, the government issued new rules to extend the land contract time for farmers in order to improve productivity. Many migrant workers then left their jobs in cities and went back to their villages. Also that year, farmers received additional subsidies from the central government because of a short supply of grains. Over the past three years, the central government has stepped up its efforts to help farmers by lowering taxes and improving their incomes. [-- Although note that in reducing these taxes, the government is also reducing a major source of revenue for local governments; check out this Jamestown Federation brief for more on the problems this causes - mc] All those measures have helped narrow the income gap between farmers and migrant workers. As a result, says Zhong [Naiyi, a researcher at Shanghai Institute for International Studies], "it pays better to stay with" farming.

The article suggests that this process has the potential to challenge China's status as a low-cost manufacturer — which could threaten the country's rapid economic growth (and the Communist Party's legitimacy, which is now closely tied to it) should its workforce fail to make the transition to more value-added processes. But the rural labor surplus remains massive: something on the order of 150-200 million people. It's hard to imagine that farming can possibly absorb all of them, no matter what kind of incentives the government tries. Should urban worker wages rise, as the Wharton piece suggests they eventually will should coastal manufacturers continue to face local hiring shortfalls, I would expect the short-term attraction of government-subsidized farming to diminish and the movement towards the cities to renew — which, if the Chinese economy begins shifting away from labor-intensive sweatshop manufacturing to more human capital-intensive higher value services, only promises to compound existing labor surplus problems.

The "Enemy of the State" Effect

2006-05-13T07:31:00.000-04:00

Being detached from American society for an extended period of time makes it hard for me to easily evaluate news like this, as heavily mediated as my impressions of life back in the States right now are, but I think cyberpunk SF author (and oddly-slow-and-deliberate-public-speaker for a writer of such fast-paced, intricate works) William Gibson is definitely on to something regarding the question of why U.S. public opinion might be ambivalent about the Bush administration's NSA programs despite their Orwellian overtones, dubiously usefulness, and tenuous constitutionality.

Speaking on Radio Open Source, Gibson says:

I've been watching with keen interest since the first NSA scandal surfaced. I've noticed on the Internet that there aren't many people who're really shocked about this. I think that what's going is that our popular culture, our real sort of 'dirt-ball street culture' teaches us from childhood that the CIA is listening to all of our telephone calls and reading all of our email anyway.

And I constantly see that as a response in sort of the 'lower discourse' of the Internet, people saying, "Oh, they're doing it anyway." In some way our culture believes that, and it's a real problem, because evidently they haven't been doing it anyway, and now that they've started, we really need to pay attention and muster some kind of viable political response, but it's very hard to get some people on board because they think it's a fait acompli.

This is something I've run into in conversations as well myself, the most recent instance being a debate with some Saga JETs about the various allegations contained in John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in which the author purports to have been hired by a mysterious woman working for the NSA for the purpose of tricking/bribing/threatening the leaders developing countries into taking on massive debt in order to fund infrastructure projects that enrich his American corporate masters... or something along those lines. I have yet to read the book and found his appearance on Radio Open Source less than thoroughly convincing, but Perkins' apparently misinformed or otherwise willfully misleading account of just what the NSA actually does namely signals intelligence and technical surveillance, not covert operations, assassinations, or James Bond auditions should already be a big red flag in regards to his credibility.

People who get their knowledge of intelligence operations solely from Hollywood — who surely must be happy to have a new, even more super-secret agency to supplant the old CIA clichés — might be forgiven for thinking this is nothing out of the ordinary, though, which as Gibson says poses problems when you're trying to make the case that the President and his administration have overstepped the bounds of normal and acceptable practice.

Back from Bangladesh

2006-05-11T06:28:00.000-04:00

Ok, ok, so no, I was not eaten by any tigers, nor was there any romance by the riverside — it's just taken me a while to find the time where I can sit down and recall the full two weeks of my trip. I doubt I'll be able to do it much justice now, but I'd better try before it gets buried under the daily grind of Ken and Demi. So without further ado, here is another installment of "MC MasterChef's Travelogues Across Asia". If you feel like cutting straight to it, the pictures are here.

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The start of May is "Golden Week" here in Japan, also known as "the only time the Japanese ever allow themselves to take a holiday from work besides New Year's". It's a block of three or four national holidays all in the span of a week, and many families take the opportunity to take a trip to Tokyo Disneyland, the temples of Kyoto, the beaches of Okinawa, or some other attraction during this time. Being blessed in my JET contract with twenty paid vacation days and the mercenary work ethic that allows me to burn through them all without guilt, I took a full two weeks to go visit that hot-spot of tourism... Bangladesh.

I went with a group of nine other JET teachers from my home prefecture of Saga, plus one young Japanese woman who was a friend of our team leader. The eleven of us spent the first couple of months of this year fundraising for our trip, and brought with us over $5000 in donations, which is about enough to build five solid homes in Bangladesh, including all materials, construction costs, and administration.

I took the bus up to Fukuoka International Airport early Saturday morning on the 22nd, where the full group met up and made our way to the plane. Oddly enough, there weren't an abundance of direct flights from Japan to Bangladesh, so we ended up going through Kuala Lumpur on Malaysia Airlines; on the way over, our layover was about six hours in KL, so we just hung around the (quite nice) airport, although the return trip gave us almost a full day to wander around the city.

No matter how far I'm going, air travel always seems to consume the whole day, and this was no exception: we arrived in Dhaka past midnight, which felt like about 3:00 AM back in Japan. We queued through immigration and picked up our bags, then stepped out into the muggy night air to face a crowd of men hanging around idly on the opposite site of high iron gates that shielded the taxi drive-up from the onlookers. We milled about uneasily for a few minutes, not sure what to do, before the HFH Bangladesh Volunteer Coordinator, whose name was Sanjay, showed up with two vans to whisk us out of there and off to our guest house for the night. As we hurtled down the nearly empty Airport Road, heat lighting rumbling overhead. Soon enough we were turning into the tree-lined Banani District, part of the upscale foreign and diplomatic quarter where most of the citie's better guest houses stand. I vividly remember passing a young Bangladeshi woman — alone as she was, at that time of night, I imagine she may have been a streetwalker — draped in a sari, standing in the shadows of a tree, with huge dark kohl-rimmed eyes staring back as our van passed.

Our first morning in Dhaka was devoted to changing money — not an easy process, as all of us had brought big blocks of yen, which the first place we went to either had no interest in or otherwise wasn't able to accomodate. Eventually we were able to get the cash taken care of, after which we went to visit the national Habitat Bangladesh offices. Besides adding another Habitat t-shirt to my ever-growing collection, I gained a bit more information about the country, which I'm really only broadly familiar with in the context of its separation from Pakistan back in 1971. A riverine country, floods and other natural disasters have taken a heavy toll on Bangladesh's development, as has serious corruption and governance problems and an increasingly dysfunctional political process — our departure from Dhaka to the Haluaghat affiliate where we would be building was delayed by several hours because opposition parties had called a general strike in an attempt to destablize the sitting government, which partisans often enforce by force . According to the briefing they presented to us, 70% of the country lives in substandard housing, of which 35 million are children. While NGOs and microcredit assistance programs are very active in the country, and the garment industry has found some success as a lost-cost exporter, its per capita income is only $440 a year, and most other indicators are not much better. If that wasn't enough, a lot of the wells dug in the past to provide clean water for the countryside turned out to have significant levels of arsenic and other heavy metals in them — it was going to be bottled water for us, but the Bangladeshis didn't all have that luxury. Put it another way: the picture of Dhaka above is taken in what is supposed to be one of the nicer parts of the city.

By early evening the roads had opened up and we were able to begin the three hour drive to the affiliate of Haluaghat. We passed some pretty amazing scenes on our way up, some of which I was able to capture despite our driver's break-neck speeds. Bangladeshi rules of the road can essentially be summarized as "everybody yields to the biggest, noisiest, fastest vehicle". It was chaotic as hell and there were a couple points where we were bearing down on a huge oncoming TATA Group heavy truck a little too fast for my liking, but amazingly the system seemed to work: rickshaw drivers really would pedal to the side of the road, and slower trucks would let you pass, and we did make it through the whole two weeks without any accidents, although sometimes I wonder how. After four hours or so of driving we arrived late at night at our guest house in Haluaghat, which was part of a hospital compound just outside the center of the market town.

Our first day of building began the next day, Monday. There were two work sites, both a ways further out into the fields and villages around Haluaghat, and I worked a bit on the first one before switching mid-week; I wanted to mix groups around to get a chance to work with everyone, but people quickly became attached to their worksites and didn't want to move. Had I been leading the trip, I think I would've made a greater effort to mix people around, but oh well. I only got the story behind the first family. They owned their own land and were living in the parents-in-law's home, and sought to move out to something more spacious and more sustainable than the tin shack they were all living in. The father-in-law and the husband of the family were both masons, so they did most of the bricklaying work while we carried bricks, wetted them down (to aid in the setting of the cement) and shovelled big piles of dirt and sand into the house to fill up the foundation and raise the floor. It was good sweaty work, of the kind that I've been increasingly desperate for during my extended time here in Japan, although late in the afternoon our labor was interrupted by a swift storm that blew up almost out of nowhere, forcing us to scramble to bring everything in before the rain came. I'm not sure if scrambling to scrape, shovel, and brush up a huge pile of drying grain into baskets while storm winds whipped up around us and the family's children all scurried to help was my favorite moment from the entire trip (and it might have been, now that I look back on it) but it certainly was an exciting way to finish a work day. We sat out the storm on their old porch and then walked back to the vans, it being too wet to do any more bricklaying for the day.

That evening we had our welcome ceremony at the local Tribal Welfare Association. The people living in the Haluaghat area were not ethnic Bangladeshis, but rather a tribal people known as the Garos, with their own distinct culture and language; as you can probably see in the pictures, many people had facial features far more reminiscent of Southeast Asia or the South Pacific than the Indian subcontinent. Not too many of them were Muslim, either, which means a lot of the cultural cautions we had been prepared against didn't actually end up applying. The welcome ceremony was pretty nice, although the master of ceremony's repeated exultations for us to welcome the next dancing group "with a big clapping!" were a little overbearing thanks to the speaker set up right next to our heads. Ah but they meant well.

The second day unfortunately was not so good — despite their having a special chef there for us at the guest house and using bottled water for everything from drinking to brushing teeth, something snuck its way down my digestive track and had me pretty well out of commission for the better part of the day, and decidedly off potato curry for the rest of the trip. I went home from the work site at about eleven, and slept until the others returned at 4:00. It sucked, because I really wanted to be working, but in the end that was it for me — and several others, like our team leader Aine, were not as lucky when they came down with stomach bugs later in the week which lasted several days.

Fortunately, after sleeping most of the day I was well enough in the evening to join the rest of a group in an excursion into town, wandering around the marketplace at Haluaghat's center. Being a gaijin in Japan sort of prepares you for being an object of attention, but Bangladeshi curiosity towards visiting foreigners is if possible several of order of magnitudes greater than what I get here in Karatsu — we drew stares everywhere we went, and when one of our group stopped to buy a pair of sandals a crowd of twenty to thirty people congregated outside to watch. We were the first Global Village team to visit the Haluaghat affiliate, and if we weren't the first foreigners to ever visit, we were certainly a rare enough appearance to merit intense interest from anyone who saw us. It could be a little off-putting, although I don't think it bothered me quite as much as it did some of the others — I never felt ill will from the crowd, just maybe a few flickers of claustrophobia at moments. I can't imagine what they must've thought about us.

Wednesday morning we went to visit a local school rather the usual build; Aine and a few others had collected large donations of pencils, notebooks, and other school supplies, and so we went to deliver that and see school life in Bangladesh. The school was a Catholic one — apparently the Portuguese came through here, way back when, and a few were still around — serving all grades; we only visited the primary school part as the secondary school students were testing during the time. Many classrooms had over sixty students to them (although that may of been the entire grade, I think) and as the headmaster told us, many came to school without basic supplies or even breakfast. They were luckier than many of their peers, though, in that they were recieving some kind of education at all; many Bangladeshi kids their age were already working, and there were regular swarms of them around the second work site, where I went after lunch. They worked alongside us carting bricks and shovelling sand — actually, they directed us on what to do, more often than not — and they also went mad whenever you pulled out a camera, so I had to be sneaky if I wanted a picture of something other than a crowd of kids pressing up on my camera. Still they were fun to work and play with, and a few older ones even spoke a bit of English.. in the interest of internationalization, we taught them how to count in Japanese too.

By the fourth day we were well into the rhythm of the work site, although our site had another break in the morning when a representative from another NGO in the area came to visit — word gets around about our visit — and asked if we would be interested in seeing their project. We took a break from building and drove a ways to a nearby village, where this group — I never got a name, although they suggested they were somehow affiliated with the UN — was working on improving agricultural techniques and developing artisan skills. About this time the sky opened up and dumped down several thousand gallons of rain, which meant we weren't able to see much of the facilities, but we did get an opportunity to sample some delicious, delicious chutney, which we bought about 20 jars of between the five of us. The rain blew off and we headed back along the dirt road to our build site... or should I say, the formerly dirt, now squelching mud road. This was one of the few situations where an SUV might've actually been useful, as our little minivan got itself stuck in the mud right behind a huge truck. Our driver must've done something awful to his transmission spinning his wheels trying to get out, but eventually with enough shoulder power we were able to shift the thing out, returning mud-splattered but triumphant to finish the rest of the day at work.

The next day was a solid work day — we pounded the floor level with a big cement block-tipped bamboo pole, then threw on more dirt, then pounded it flat again. Splashing bricks with water to help set the cement was also immensely enjoyable work. The next day was our final on the site, working till around 1:00, taking our farewell pictures with the family, and then returning back to the guest house to pack and prepare for the farewell ceremony, again at the Tribal Center. This time we performed a song and dance for them — "We All Want to Say Dhonnobad (Thank You) To You", to the tune of "Yellow Submarine" — and of course there were also plenty of dances for us to welcome with a big clapping. The whole thing lasted till the power cut out — not sure if that was intentional or not, but at a good two hours long, it was about time by then — after which we split up to do a "homestay" that evening. I ended up staying with two other guys and Sanjay at the house of the Haluaghat affiliate director, so homestay is perhaps overly generous — basically it was a bunch of sitting around, talking, and drinking, till far too late in the evening for me. I think everyone was pretty drained by this point, and having just bid our farewells it was a little difficult to play guest for the evening, but being in a big group I was able to let the others do the talking and excuse myself early (11:00ish) for bed. The next morning we woke up, loaded our vans, and made the drive back to Dhaka — which went allright, except for our late start and the radiator on our van blowing out on the freeway about ten minutes from our guest house. Good thing we had all those cases of bottled water...

We had about four days to travel on our own, and Sanjay had earlier recommended a tour of the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world. Bangladeshi tourist infrastructure is fairly marginal, so we all agreed that a trip downriver sounded like the best option available to fill our last few days of travel. We met our tour guide that evening in Dhaka and paid about $300 apiece for a two night, three day cruise down through the forest and back. The next day a quick early morning flight on a 20-seater prop plane took us to Jessore, from which we took a big bus another hour or so south to the large port of Khulna, where we boarded our boat for the cruise.

I kind of like the sensation of being contained in the separate world of a ship at sail, and this was quite a nice one to be spending time on, although there was a bit of cabin fever — probably inevitable given that we'd been spending the past week or more together as a group already. The cruise downriver took us all the way to the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, where on the second day we took a smaller skiff out down one of the side rivers deeper into the forest. No man-eating tigers — maybe just as well, as they kill about twenty people a year, and we had no desire to add to the tally — but there were plenty of mangroves, mudskippers, birds, and (from a distance too great for my camera) deer and monkeys to see. We went back to the boat for the lunch, then went out again to hike through a grassy area and onto a big white-sand beach for frisbee and driftwood cricket. The Sundarbans were quite beautiful, and it was a nice relaxing end to the build — although of course the trip wasn't over just yet.

Our third day we boated back to Khulna, and spent a night in a hotel there — not a very restful one, as by my estimate I got only about four hours of sleep, at best. We departed at 5:30 AM for Jessore and from there flew on to Dhaka, where we went back to our first guest house, got two rooms to drop our stuff, and — after a mere hour nap, in my case — hit the town. Unfortunately, I had only a vague notion of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to see, so I was much less successful in my explorations than some of the rest of our group who went off separately — basically, I rode around in a succession of taxis, pedicabs, and rickshaws in an attempt to find things, and ended up missing most all of the attractions Lonely Planet had promised me were around there somewhere. It was fairly frustrating — especially since some of the other groups came back with the lungis, spices, and cricket sets I had wanted to buy myself (well, maybe not the cricket set), and the only market I ever managed to find was one for sheet metal, which wasn't quite what I had in mind for a souvenir. In the end I had to admit defeat, took brief refuge in the Dhaka Sheraton cafe — a surreal island of wealth and air conditioning near the center of the city — and returned to our guest house empty-handed. So much for my day in Dhaka. There was no catching up on sleep either, as soon enough we were packing up and taxiing to the airport for our midnight departure. The music from Star Wars as we boarded the plane — Luke Skywalker's theme, specifically — was a nice touch but didn't help all that much; I'm kind of hazy on the flight so I might've dozed a little bit, but I doubt that I could've slept for much more than one or two hours of the whole six-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur.

We had almost a full 20 hours to kill in KL before our second midnight departure in a row, so there was to be no rest for the weary here. I calculated at one point that, by the time I set foot on the plane that evening, I would've gone 64 hours on somewhere between six and ten hours of sleep — although the later number was almost assuredly too generous, and it was probably closer to the former. The KL airport air conditioning was far too cold to allow any comfortable sleep on their benches (I had packed my jacket in my checked bag back in Bangladesh) so it was out to explore the city for me. KL was a marked contrast to the squalor of Dhaka — Malaysia may still be developing, but you wouldn't guess it from downtown Kuala Lumpur, which hides whatever poverty there might be there very well. Had I been a little more coherent, I would've liked to have explored it more fully, as it seems like a pretty interesting place — certainly far more multiethnic than Japan, and at least as cosmopolitan in appearance as a big city like Fukuoka or Nagasaki. Sitting in the huge KL Petronas Towers mall, I was actually very strongly reminded of America — not just because of the shops and the money on display, but also the (comparatively) diverse crowd and the fact that Malaysia fashion sense appears to be much less... uh, agressive than what you're liable to see wandering around the commercial hot spots of Japan. Of course, two hours of waiting around in a mall for the rest of my group to finish and my prolonged sleeplessness had me teetering a little bit on the edge by the end of it — mall culture is pretty disturbing even under the best of circumstances, and I was thoroughly horrified with it all by the time we escaped to dinner at the revolving restaurant at the top of the KL Tower. My appetite was pretty near gone and I was too stressed and exhausted to enjoy it, so I'm afraid it was a bit of a sour finish to the trip... finally we made it back to the airport for our flight home to Fukuoka, which I was able to sleep a little bit on, I think. Eight or more hours later, I made it home to Karatsu, where I collapsed and slept until around 9:00 PM.

I had some high hopes for this trip, and in honesty I'm not sure I can say they were totally met, although I've done this enough that I know I can't really expect every build I go on to be "the best one ever". It certainly did feel much different building overseas than it does back home, though; our biggest contribution to the process there was clearly our substantial donation, rather than the raw unskilled labor of shifting dirt and bricks, which obviously Bangladesh has a fair amount of to spare already. When you're nailing two-by-foors and installing windows and fastening hurricane strapping, you physically know your being there is contributing something to the process of improving people's lives... that feeling was slightly less evident here, although there was still enough work to go around that we could end the day good and sweaty and sore.

Being conspicuously, consciously wealthy relative to the rest of the local population was another fairly constant discomforting factor during my time there that probably had more to do with it being my first visit to a developing country than it did my work with Habitat (although doubtless a volunteering trip had me more conscious of it than travelling through by backpack would've). The priveleges of American birth is something I'm often aware of living here in Saga — I've actually been meaning to write more about it on here — but in Bangladesh you could rarely ever shake the sensation of being the rich (charity) tourists. A mere four bucks or so (more precisely, 250 taka) bought us buffet lunch at a fancy Indian restaurant with gated entry, guards, and a good dozen or more waiters (despite the fact that the buffet was self-serve). The feeling of being filthy rich was one of the subtle differences between building back at home and volunteering in a developing country that gave me this sense of, "we can't possibly be doing enough here".. the raw poverty of Dhaka and the remoteness of the Bangladeshi countryside limited my ability to take great satisfaction in a job otherwise well done. Habitat for Humanity is not set up to — realistically, cannot — help everyone in the world, but the limited state of development in Bangladesh made it harder to celebrate our accomplishments at the end of the build; there was clearly so much more that needed to be done. I do believe that helping individual families is worth doing, if for no other reason than to make a difference in some people's lives, and for having at least tried, but there's clearly much more to overcome in a country like Bangladesh than what I'm used to back home. Our visit to the school apparently inspired some of the students and teachers there to start their own volunteer group, though, so there's still hope for improvement, however incremental it might be.

All in all it was quite the trip, and I'm sure I'll be digesting its impact on me more as time passes. There's already talk of a trip to Nepal next year, although if that's the case I may not be leading it after all.. which would be sort of a shame, since, as fun as being a HFH participant is, I miss being Fearless Leader most of all. That's far in the future for the moment though, and for now I'd better stop here before this gets any longer.

Out Like A Boy Scout

2006-04-21T04:37:00.000-04:00

I'm off! With luck, I'll return with a picture of a Bengal tiger or two, and with even more luck, those pictures will be taken from a distance.

Bang On!

2006-04-19T06:23:00.000-04:00

Things've been busy lately. The new academic year started about two weeks ago and classes are now getting up to speed at all my new schools: two middle schools, one elementary, and one small school out in the hills that combines both in one complex. I haven't formed any really solid impressions yet as most of my experience thus far has been the obligatory じこうしょうかい (self-introduction) lesson. Let me tell you, any interest you thought you could wring out of your life tends to look decidedly less so after the seventh or eighth iteration. Also, my answer of "none" to the inevitable "What sports do you play?" question continues to kill me with the middle school boys. My friend Joe suggests just lying, but based on my performance on the field today when I joined some of the seventh grade boys at soccer during recess, I doubt I'd be fooling anyone.

Of course, I'm waving good-bye just about as soon as I say hello, because I leave for Bangladesh this Saturday with a group of about a dozen other Saga JETs for a Habitat for Humanity Global Village trip. Volunteering of this kind isn't common practice in Japan — see the previous note about civic participation — but as part of our efforts to raise funds a couple of us got in the local paper, which means pretty much everyone here knows about us going and for the most part is very impressed that we are. Not so impressed that they volunteer to donate some money towards our trip, but, y'know, it's the thought that counts.

This will be my first visit to a country outside the developed world, my first visit to South Asia, and my first Habitat build outside the United States. It will also be the first Habitat trip I've gone on in about four years where I wasn't taking a leading role. I'm not really sure what to expect, but I think it'll be an interesting experience. Our first week will be devoted to building, and will include a home-stay and visit to a local school; then we have several days to travel on our own. I'll probably be taking a river tour through the world's largest mangrove forest, the Sundarbans. Wikipedia promises man-eating tigers, although apparently the group that visited Bangladesh last year didn't run into any. I've got my malaria meds and shaved my head down to the shortest it's been since about two years old — not, uh, entirely on purpose, but oh well — and all the other travel necessities pretty well squared away, so all that's left is to debate with myself whether to invest in this baby before I depart or to stick with my trusty, albeit poorly-endowed-in-the-zoom-lens-department Canon G6. Either way I should return with plenty of pictures, stories, and hopefully no intestinal parasites.

Kyushu Cup

2006-04-08T23:00:00.000-04:00

The largest concentration of ALTs in the prefecture here is in the capital, Saga City — a number of them actually live together in a big apartment block, which I'm sure makes for a much different experience than what I get up here in comparatively remote Karatsu. I don't think I really envy them — college dorm life wasn't an experience I look back upon with any especially fond memories — but for better or worse they do seem to have a much tighter-knit community than Karatsu does.

Thus events like the 2006 Kyushu Cup, a tourney of ALT amateur soccer teams from across the island (and one group from the tail-end of Honshu, Yamaguchi-ken) that Saga had the privelege of hosting this weekend. Of course, this was not amateur as in "anybody who'd like to get out and have some fun kicking the ball around" amateur, but rather more like "expat sports players from around the world, unite!" amateur, so I was there strictly as a specator (and vendor of snacks for Habitat for Humanity fundraising). It was also an occassion for an attempt at some sports photography, although I'm afraid my meager zoom lens capability prevented me from capturing anything too dramatic, like, say, a goal. This is maybe just as well, considering Saga's home-turf advantage proved insufficient to forestall the onslaught from champions Fukuoka-ken, resulting in a somewhat dispiriting fourth-place finish. Oh well — as the Japanese say, otsukaresamadeshita, everybody!

Hanami

2006-04-04T05:33:00.000-04:00

A group of us ALTs took a trip to the nearby Nagoya Castle ruins in Chinzei (from which Hideyoshi launched his invasion of Korea, way back when) at the start of the month to view the flowers, but it was overcast the whole day and I didn't get many good pictures out of it. This is from a short solo visit to Karatsu Castle the other day, where I ran into some students and many groups of Japanese out picnicking, drinking, and taking in the sakura blossoms.

Planned Obsolecence: Not Just For ALTs Anymore

2006-04-01T06:32:00.000-05:00

Japan is famously neurotic when it comes to sorting trash. You can certainly see why they might be picky about it — large landfills are hardly viable in a country this small and mountainous, so sorting out burnable or recyclable trash is going to be a necessity if you want to keep from being buried in a landscape of discarded Gundam figures and CC Lemon bottles. "Oh, isn't Japan such a clean country?" people back home sometimes remark. It's probably true that the bigger cities have a certain futuristic concrete-and-glass sterility to them — certainly compared to the couple of big European capitals I've visited (my most vivid memory of Paris back in 1995 will probably be the trash cans, lids sealed shut with trash piled atop everywhere you went, on account of Algerian elections-related-bombing fears) But unfortunately out here in Saga, one of nation's smallest and poorest prefectures, the recycling ideal set forth in the legal codes is not always exactly matched in practice. I sometimes get the sense that environmentalism here is often imbibed but not really 'digested' — it's there in the official slogans, but not as much embraced at the popular, individual level. It may not be a case of people not caring so much as a relatively weak tradition of civic participation in Japan, where people expect the bureaucracy to handle these matters (I think I see similar attitudes in regards to Japanese education, poverty, and housing standards, among others). Whether that's the case or not, I can say with fair certainty that 'clean' is not the first word I would use to describe the state of the Japanese environment today.

For one thing, many key pieces of infrastructure are displaying serious signs of age — I doubt if any of my school buildings are younger than twenty years old at best, and one of them I know to be over fifty. Insulation is but a distant memory (even in a lot of newer homes and apartments) and central heating, while found in the city hall and all the convenience stores in town, is not to be had in any of Karatsu's various halls of learning. (Of course, the kids are allowed to bundle up over their uniforms during the winter when all that air from Siberia descends down upon us, right? *Hollow laugh.*) I've even made a hobby of exploring ruined buildings in the area, products of a decade-long recession and the ongoing emptying of the countryside as the diminishing population concetrates increasingly closer to the larger urban centers.

More directly related to the trash issue is the fact that, given the choice between complicated, expensive sorting of one's refuse and a quick drive out into the countryside, it's not really especially surprising that many people opt for illegal dumping. While I shouldn't make sweeping generalizations about the whole country, I do know this isn't limited to Karatsu or its rural surroundings: I remember hiking along a road through the hills of Kyoto on a visit to my girlfriend in college once and passing refrigerators, microwaves, even a car, all chucked off the side of the road. Nor is it just the larger items: Karatsu's beaches, river and canals are regularly littered with trash of all varieties. Of course, not everyone dumps: those with the space just pile it up on their porch or in their yard. My neighbor for one has four refrigerators piled up under his awning, among other items, which would probably run about $45 a piece, were he or she to pay the disposal fees. Not surprisingly, ALT apartments tend to become crammed full of junk, as their continuously revolving roster of occupants pass their old and abandoned possessions onto their successors rather than pay for their disposal.

Now while this is all problematic — and I don't want to pretend the problem is unique to Japan, as you're liable to see the exact same sights out along the rural roads of South-Central Indiana — there is also the compounding factor that the Japanese people, frankly, buy a lot of junk. That junk in turn is consistently over-packaged: you have to be swift at the konbini if you want to forestall the near-automatic wrapping of your purchase, no matter how tiny it may be, in some sort of plastic bag. (Even then, some sort of universal convenience store code requires your sales clerk to affix a little sticker with the name of the store on it, just in case your delicious onigiri be mistaken for a competitor's, I guess.) Personal electronics — cell phones, DVD players, game systems, et cetera (although not as much personal computers, from what I've seen) as you might expect, are ubiquitous, even among families living in houses that I would normally be volunteering to tear down and build anew with Habitat were I back in the states. Used cars tend to be extremely cheap in Japan, because hardly anyone buys them, preferring the newer models. Basically, it seems as though, in the process of developing post-WW II on the strength of American consumption, Japan adopted the consumer society ethos to an even greater degree.

I think a lot of JETs living here in Japan tend to write off the strange or unusual practices of the Japanese (and since familiarity with Japan or Japanese is not a requirement for employment with JET, there is rarely a shortage of these to react to) as being just a matter of "the way they do things here" or "who the Japanese are"; in this they are not infrequently aided by Japanese people who would like to assert their nation's cultural distinctiveness. In matters such as this one, I think this attitude often overlooks the degree to which the Japanese state bureaucracy's regulatory decisions — whether consciously or not — have contributed to certain behaviors and disincentivized others. Charge high inspection fees for cars as they advance in age: people buy a new one every few years. Institute complicated, expensive trash disposal procedures: people dump their fridges in the woods or stack them up next to their house for years.

Require $2000 tests for old electronics items in the name of avoiding electric fires, while allowing an exception for their export, and you'll drive domestic second-hand retail shops out of business and their products either 1) into the junkyard or 2) into the export market — and, incidently, force Japanese consumers to pay for newer models instead. For a country that built its post-war recovery on the strength of a protectionist export-led growth model, this doesn't come as all that surprising of a move — although in this case it appears as though there is some confusion as to what will now be exempt from the law, as the ministries backtrack in the face of a big public outburst against it. If it does in fact go through, however, I imagine we can expect to see even more televisions and VCRs out there along the roadside in the years to come.

Better Stuff I've Written Elsewhere

2006-03-25T23:17:00.000-05:00

Uyghurs
>> Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Pakistan
>> A Pakistan Primer

Political Islam
>> Citadels of Jihad

>> Clash of Identities: Integration, Islamism, and the Question of Europe's Muslims

Private Security Companies
>> Soldiers of Fortune 500: Corporate Warriors and the Rise of the Private Military Firm

>> William Gibson Watch

Obligatory Introductory Post

2006-03-25T23:01:00.000-05:00

Allright, so I've been living in Japan for over seven months now, teaching with the JET program. I told myself I would set up a personal blog when I got here, but evidently I took a little longer getting around to that than I planned. Since graduating from Boston University last May, my blog-reading dropped off precipitously until a couple months back, when I got back in the habit of regularly reading — if not writing — blogs.

It remains to be seen whether this will prompt me to write more now or not, and what if anything I'll write about. If nothing else I can use it to share some photos from my adventures, and maybe the ocassional vignette of life here in Japan. I might also include more serious international relations/politics-related commentary that for whatever reason doesn't quite fit at American Footprints, where I also occassionaly write thanks to the continued generosity/benign neglect of my host there, Praktike. To the right you can see some recent items from my del.icio.us bookmark feed, in case you're interested in what I'm reading around the web.