mwanamume mmarekani katika tanzania

more notes from a magical island

2010-08-08T08:27:00.007+01:00

Swahili time. No, it's not a euphemism for "chronic lateness," but if you've spent much time in developing countries you'd be forgiven for making that assumption. ("Filipino time," "African time," and other such expressions all carry that connotation.) Swahili speakers really do have their own timekeeping system, which is simply Western time offset by six hours. So saa moja asubuhi, one o'clock in the morning, is 7:00 am; conversely, saa saba mchana, seven in the afternoon, is 1:00 pm. The photo above is of the most prominent clock tower in Zanzibar's Stone Town, and it was taken just after 3 pm. Most Tanzanians are equally conversant in both, and I've noticed that they seem to use Western time exclusively when speaking in English and Swahili time exclusively when speaking Swahili.

Why this crazy dual system, you ask? As I mentioned before, Tanzania has the typical equatorial schedule of sunrise at 6 am and sunset at 6 pm year-round, so Swahili time is like a running total of the hours in the day (or night). I've noticed that when I think in Swahili time, particularly in the morning, I feel a bit more urgency. (Saa mbili- two hours of daylight gone already and I haven't done anything yet!) It certainly makes sense for a preindustrial society, where daylight is all-important for doing almost anything.

Zanzibar's referendum. I just returned from another week of fieldwork in Zanzibar, and Stone Town was plastered with posters urging people to vote "yes" on a referendum that occurred last Saturday. In a previous post I mentioned Zanzibar's troubled electoral history; in recent times, the ruling party has eked out narrow wins over the main opposition party in elections marred by violence and allegations of tampering. The referendum was on a proposal for a Government of National Unity, in which the party that wins October's elections would get the Presidency and the Second Vice-Presidency the runner-up party would capture the First Vice-Presidency. Almost all of the posters I saw were for the "yes" side. The poster above says "Zanzibar Referendum 31 July 2010 / Choose Yes / A Yes Vote is a Vote for Zanzibar." The bottom of the poster below says "They all said yes! What about you?"

The referendum passed handily, with (not surprisingly) the most fervent support in areas dominated by the main opposition party. The Zanzibaris with whom I felt at liberty to discuss the referendum seemed pleased and guardedly optimistic about the result. However, a newspaper article I read back on the mainland expressed concern that voters were poorly informed about the referendum and that many had been intimidated into voting "yes" by discourse suggesting that voting otherwise was wishing chaos and instability on Zanzibar. I don't know how true that is, but gee, underinformed voters and demagogues questioning the patriotism of dissenters... good thing that doesn't happen in America!

[By the way, if any Zanzibaris happen to find my blog, I want to stress that I have no opinion about this referendum, the CCM or CUF, other than wishing a fair, peaceful and democratic process for Zanzibar. And that last comment about the U.S. is sarcasm- our politics are in a very sorry state indeed.]

But wait, isn't Zanzibar part of Tanzania? I haven't gone into detail about this before, but for those who are interested, here's a quick primer. The modern nation of Tanzania was formed by the union of the former colonies of Tanganyika and Zanzibar during the wave of African independence in the 1960s. That union has persisted to the present day, and it gives Zanzibar a status somewhere between a semiautonomous region and a nation-within-a-nation. The best analogy I've come up with so far is Scotland's position in the UK since 1999, when the Scottish parliament came onto the scene. Zanzibar's government has jurisdiction over "non-Union matters," while the national parliament (with a more-than-proportional share of Zanzibaris) controls defense, monetary policy, and the other usual suspects.

There are perennial rumblings about independence for Zanzibar, but I think the islands are too entwined with the mainland for that to be a realistic possibility in the near future. As different a place as this may be, I find a lot of uncanny parallels with American politics. There is an ongoing debate over how big a share of the national pie Zanzibar receives, with one side shouting "Zanzibar only has 3% of the population!" and the other shouting "it doesn't matter, we're equal in the Union!" Americans have been struggling with that one since the Constitutional Convention. The mainland is also a favorite whipping boy for Zanzibaris and a frequent target of blame for the archipelago's woes, in a way that will sound vaguely familiar to anyone who's heard someone rail against the evils of Washington, DC. I will readily admit that I don't have data to back this up, but I suspect that the relationship, far from being exploitative, redounds to Zanzibar's benefit. But even if that is the case, the question is always whether nationalist dreams trump material benefits. To quote our own President, that's a question far above my pay grade.

thievery in tanzania

2010-08-01T13:07:00.004+01:00

Last weekend I made my first trip to Dar es Salaam's sprawling Kariakoo market, the largest in Tanzania. For block after block, merchants line the streets selling fruit and vegetables, cheap Chinese-made manufactured goods, kitchen utensils of dubious quality, suitcases, shoes, underwear, and all other necessities of life. A surprising, perhaps disconcerting, number specialize in long-bladed knives, which are usually presented in a haphazard pile on a mat by the side of the road. Kariakoo's crowded streets and passageways make it a perfect environment for pickpockets, so I came prepared. I left all plastic cards at home, stashed my phone at the bottom of my backpack (which was secured to my torso with a sternum strap), and brought a modest sum of cash under my clothes in a money belt, with less than $10 worth of Tanzanian shillings left in my wallet.

It didn't take long for my presence to be noticed. Within minutes of stepping off the daladala, and still on the outskirts of Kariakoo, I felt my leg briefly make contact with another pedestrian as we walked past each other in opposite directions. He called out for my attention and pointed to his leg, and I immediately thought, with some annoyance, that I was in for some bullshit claim that I had hurt him. As I watched with bafflement, he proceeded to scuff his foot on the ground, as if to suggest that I had just stepped in something and needed to wipe my foot off. I knew I hadn't stepped in anything, and it flashed through my mind that this was probably some bogus helpfulness intended to serve as a distraction--enhanced by the kinetic distraction of scuffing imaginary dog crap from my shoe. While this was happening, I sensed someone else at close range in my peripheral vision and felt something brush my right leg. Instinctively I clamped my hand over my right pocket and my wallet inside, and I whirled around in the direction of the second guy. As they both melted into the crowd, I hustled on my way, my wallet still safely inside my pocket. The whole thing probably went down in about two or three seconds.

The rest of my visit to Kariakoo passed without incident, and I returned home with all of my money, having been neither successfully robbed nor enticed to buy anything. Although the apparent pickpocketing attempt was unsuccessful, and although the sum of money I stood to lose was trivial, the experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and I made little effort to interact with anyone at the market.

Tanzania's U.S. government-assigned crime rating is "critical." I've been told by a knowledgeable person that the "critical" rating usually belongs to countries where gangs of armed bandits roam the streets with impunity. As my dear readers should know by now, Tanzania has no such gangs of armed bandits; in fact, violent crime against foreigners is extremely rare. But petty theft against Westerners is so overwhelmingly common here that, according to whatever grim calculus our government uses to decide these things, it adds up to roughly the equivalent of armed bandits in the streets. I see two related reasons for this, the first an indisputable fact and the second a little more speculative: (1) Tanzania is very poor, with a per capita GDP of just $1,416 per year. (2) Tanzania, I suspect, has more mainstream tourist appeal than most similarly impoverished countries. Few countries in Tanzania's income bracket can boast a roster of attractions comparable to the Serengeti, Mount Kilimanjaro, and Zanzibar, which draw backpacking college students and rich celebrities and everyone in between. Egypt is one African country with more blockbuster attractions than Tanzania, and it has staggering numbers of tourists to match, but the average Egyptian is over four times wealthier than the average Tanzanian. So I would hypothesize that it's the combination of severe poverty and abundant opportunities for theft that contribute to Tanzania's crime problem.

The other oddity about crime in Tanzania is that those who make their living from petty theft do so at great physical risk. For reasons I don't know and wouldn't care to guess, Tanzania has developed a culture of vigilante justice against thieves. If someone is caught in the act, witnesses will often yell out "mwizi!" (thief) and a crowd will converge to beat the criminal to a pulp. There is a story in circulation on the Peninsula about an American man who was tackled by a mugger while jogging and relieved of his wedding band. (As is almost always the case in these incidents, like the attempted carjacking I mentioned in the nightswimming post, he was acting against official advice by running alone in an area known to be unsafe.) When he recovered from the initial shock, he started to chase the assailant, drawing the attention of onlookers. The thief was beaten within an inch of his life and then hauled off to jail. The story goes that the American felt so bad for the thief that he located the jail and bailed him out.

The whole thing raises some interesting ethical quandaries. I could imagine presenting this scenario to an ethics class. The thief has full knowledge of the risks, and he initiates the first act of violence, if only violence against property. The victim of the theft could recover her property by making a ruckus, which will result in a high probability of serious physical violence against the thief and, let's say, some small but non-negligible probability of death. The victim knows she would be seriously inconvenienced, but not irreparably harmed, by the loss of her assets. The thief could be a polished professional or some guy desperate to feed his kids, the victim doesn't know. What, if any, ethical obligations does the victim have toward the thief? Discuss.

***

And what better blog post could I choose than this one to announce that my parents are coming to Tanzania! The clock is running down on my internship, and I have two weeks of fun planned for afterward. For week 1 I will be joined by the lovely Kate, of Cameroon Peace Corps fame, and for week 2 Mom and Dad will join the traveling posse. As usual, you can expect a preview before the trip, followed by little to no posting during my actual travels, followed by lots of pent-up posts afterward. As Kate would say, yewaaaaaa!

the food blog

2010-07-26T20:09:00.005+01:00

There are some people who can take pictures of food and make it look appetizing, and who enjoy posting those pictures on the internet. My friend Lindsey - to this day the only person whose friendship I owe completely to blogging - puts up pictures on facebook that I occasionally feel tempted to use as recipes. Suffice it to say that I'm not one of these food-picture-taking people. I feel about as comfortable taking a picture of my plate at a restaurant as I would feel, say, attending the Republican National Convention. But my faithful readers deserve to know about what I've been eating in Tanzania, so with apologies for my food photography skills, I present, for possibly the only time, Shawn's food blog.

Ugali. We begin our tour with the shapeless blob of starch you see on the plate above. Shapeless blobs of starch are common as staple foods in Africa, and Tanzania's version is known as ugali. Largely flavorless but undeniably filling, ugali serves as a sort of gustatory canvas for sauces, vegetables, and for the fortunate, meat. It comes in two main types, corn and cassava. Both are nutritionally marginal and are what an economist would call "inferior goods," but the cassava-based stuff, pictured above, is especially looked down upon. Which is really too bad, because I find it tastier than its maize-based sibling. If you were at a roadside restaurant in Dar es Salaam and craved the repast pictured above, you'd want to order ugali dagaa, ugali and sardines. The usual formula for a meal name is the name of the starch followed by the name of the protein, with no conjunction in between; thus wali samaki is "rice and fish" and chipsi kuku is "chips [fries] and chicken."

Instant coffee. Coffee lovers, weep. East Africa may produce delicious coffee beans, but from what I can tell, most of them are exported elsewhere. Instead in our office we have the product pictured above, which I drink out of desperation. In my normal life I take my coffee black, just like Dad taught me, but this stuff requires a hefty dose of powdered milk and sugar before I will consider drinking it.

Chipsi mayai. I don't know if there's a term for comfort food in Swahili, but chipsi mayai (the latter word is pronounced like "my eye!") certainly fits that bill. The name means "chips and eggs," and it's really just a mass of precooked french fries glued together with eggs. It reminds me a little of the omelette spaghetti I enjoyed in Cameroon. The specimen above is topped with shredded vegetables, and on the side of the plate you can see a pile of salt and a some pilipili (chili peppers) in case you want a little kick. It's also good with ketchup, though be warned that the Tanzanian stuff is watery compared to good ol' Heinz.

Ndizi nyama. This may be my favorite Tanzanian dish so far. Ndizi nyama means "bananas and meat," and it consists of beef cooked in a tomato-based sauce with bananas. Not plaintains, mind you, but real, honest-to-goodness bananas. I haven't tried making it myself, and I can only assume that they use slightly underripe bananas to prevent the finished product from becoming chunks of beef floating in fruit puree. In the other segments of the plate you can see some greens and maharage (beans), which are common side dishes.

Machungwa. It's not my most photogenic moment, but I wanted to illustrate the proper Swahili technique for eating machungwa (oranges). The oranges here are absolutely delicious, and they're sold in abundance by the side of the road anywhere you go. They are delivered sliced in half, often with the rind partially peeled away in an artistic-looking fashion. Rather than peeling and eating--a procedure I personally don't much like owing to sticky hands and that bitter white layer--people squeeze and slurp the juice and pulp. You probably lose some fiber this way, but it can't possibly be worse than drinking it from a carton.

night swimming

2010-07-24T12:52:00.003+01:00

By now I’ve been through the process of moving to a new place and fitting together all the pieces of a new life many times. Sometimes those pieces come together easily and seamlessly, and other times the process is long and fraught with difficulty. For the most part, Tanzania has been easy. For about my first month, though, there was one serious conundrum: how to get my normal dosage of exercise.

Four factors conspire to make working out a challenge for me here. The first is my commute, which can take up to an hour depending on traffic. The second is the daily rhythm of light and dark: Tanzania is on the typical equatorial schedule of sunrise at 6, sundown at 6 all year round. The third is the abundance of crime on the Msasani Peninsula, where I live (more on that in a moment); combined with the first two factors it means that there is rarely a time during the week when I’m home and it’s safe for me to run or ride a bike. The fourth is a shortage of options. There is one gym that I know of on the peninsula, and it charges the equivalent of $15 per workout—not really a sustainable solution for an intern’s budget. I have splurged and gone a few times, and I discovered that access to the place is controlled by a fingerprint scanner, which may explain why it costs $15 to get in. It’s the first time I’ve ever used such a device, and it frequently malfunctions, requiring a staffer to override it. This high-tech absurdity is right at home on the Peninsula.

Just as I resigned myself to returning to the U.S. flabby and out of shape, I discovered Funky’s. I struggle a little to explain what the place is to my friends, but “multipurpose family fun center” is a serviceable description. Inside its floodlit interior of its walls, Funky’s has a basketball court, an inflatable castle, a skateboard park where the teenage children of U.S. government personnel hang out, and a fast food chain that bizarrely uses Native American imagery in its advertising. More to the point, it has a 25-meter pool with lap lanes that stays open until 10 pm every night. It’s not the world’s most pleasant pool, to be sure—the underwater lights combined with the paint job give it a sickening, metallic blue-green glow. The lights themselves remind me of the headlights of an 18-wheeler closing in. Usually I have the pool to myself. Occasionally I overlap with a British woman, and we’ve exchanged pleasantries a few times, but an activity that keeps your face in the water most of the time doesn’t really lend itself to socializing. Once in a while there are some teenagers of ambiguous nationality hanging out in the water too. (Not to worry, Mom, there is always a staffer watching the pool from the sidelines.)

The process of getting to Funky’s is not ideal either. Even though it’s within a 10-minute walking distance of where I live, a taxi is a must after dark, especially because the route passes a pair of abandoned apartment buildings that act as a base for muggers and carjackers. While I was in Zanzibar the first time, there was an incident where an expat woman and her 14-year-old son were (unwisely) driving with their windows down, and two carjackers sprang on them as they stopped at the intersection near the abandoned buildings. The attempt was foiled when the mom bit one would-be carjacker’s arm hard enough to draw blood as he reached for the keys, and the son kicked the other guy in the junk as he opened the passenger side door. Though the attempt was unsuccessful—kudos to mom and son for being total badasses— it was a good reminder to everyone not to let their guard down around here. I always keep the doors locked and windows up, and I usually ride to Funky’s with the American expat community’s favorite cabbie, a guy who goes by the name of Smoker.

It took a while for me to figure out how an underpaid mzungu can get exercise in Dar es Salaam, but Funky’s is now a treasured part of my routine. I'll be glad to return to the U.S. in something better than awful shape, and my night sessions at Funky's are a useful reminder that when there's a will, there's always a way.

fun (?) with swahili

2010-07-20T20:51:00.004+01:00

Warning: this is going to be one of the dorkiest blog entries that I write all summer, so if you don't fancy hearing my armchair linguistical musings, you have my full permission to skip this one. Now, for whoever's left, on with the dorkfest!

The Lion King. Now’s as good a time as any to share that many of the African-sounding words in Disney’s The Lion King come from Swahili. A few of the characters’ names are Swahili words, including Simba (lion), Rafiki (friend), and Pumbaa (the root of a verb meaning “to be foolish”). Hakuna Matata is a real Swahili phrase, and it means something pretty close to “no worries,” though most Swahili speakers seem to prefer the equivalent expression hamna shida. Word about the movie has apparently gotten out among the street peddlers in Zanzibar, because hakuna matata usually one of the first things they trot out to tourists. The movie is not consistent throughout, though. While studying Swahili back in the States, I was a bit disappointed to learn that the opening call and chant in “The Circle of Life” is not in Swahili—it’s Zulu.

Onomatopoeia. One of my favorite Swahili words is pikipiki (motorcycle) and I loved it even more when I learned of its onomatopoeic origins. Apparently pikipiki is an imitation of the sound that old-school motorcycles used to make when people revved up the engine. Similarly, the village of Bububu on Zanzibar draws its name from the sound of old steam locomotives on the island’s first railway. Some Swahili words of older vintage that I suspect of being onomatopoeic are mbwa (dog), chafya (sneeze), and miayo (yawn).

Loanwords. Like many languages, Swahili is loaded with words from other languages. The big sources of loanwords that I’m aware of are (in decreasing order of importance) Arabic, English, and Portuguese. But as tends to happen with loanwords, many have gotten mangled to suit local pronunciation, with frequently charming results. This happens because while we’re all born with a lot of linguistic flexibility, our ability to form certain types of sounds atrophies quickly in childhood if those sounds aren’t present in our native tongue. This is why so many Filipinos struggle with the “f” sound, why many native Spanish speakers have to throw in a vowel before an English word beginning with “s,” and why it’s so difficult for many English speakers to master the rolled r’s and guttural sounds in other languages.

Swahili speakers really don’t enjoy ending words with consonants, so most English loanwords have an extra vowel—most frequently “i”—tacked onto the end. Therefore, a taxi driver will give you a lifti to your destination, and if you pay with a large bill you’ll collect your chenji. While traveling you will surely stay at a hoteli, but hopefully you’ll avoid the hospitali and the kituo cha polisi (police station). I and many of the Americans I know have started using some of these words even in conversation with each other, and it’s a running joke that if you’re at a loss for a Swahili word, adding “i” to an English word is a reasonable guess. I even hear lots of Tanzanians throwing in some extra i’s when speaking English—the word “just” seems to be tricky because it frequently becomes “justi.” Sometimes the letter “u” serves this function as well: you can call your friends on a simu (from SIM card) and indulge in some cold aiskrimu. Occasionally, Swahili goes the other way and deletes a final consonant; “r” is a frequent victim, giving the language a Bostonian touch whenever one plays soka or enlists the services of a dereva (driver).

Placenames. I always enjoy learning placenames in a new language because I think it provides some clues to a culture’s sense of geography. I was especially intrigued by the Swahili names for countries and continents. This is pure speculation on my part, but I imagine that one can get a sense of people’s evolving mental map of the world based on how Swahilified different placenames are. The name for Europe, Ulaya, seems pretty much unintelligible in terms of any European term for the continent, so I would guess that Swahili people had some awareness of a large land mass to the north before European infiltration took place. Portugal was the first arrival on the scene, and its name looks similarly obscure: Ureno. I learned from the Swahili wikipedia that the name comes from the Portuguese word for “king,” and it originated when Vasco de Gama and other explorers announced that the King of Portugal had sent them. By the time we get to England, Uingereza, we have a name that’s clearly derived from the real European name but still a bit garbled. The real johnny-come-latelies, like Marekani and Kanada, have names that sound pretty much like their English name with a Swahili accent- and once in a while, an extra vowel at the end.

how i learned to love world cup soccer

2010-07-15T18:40:00.003+01:00

The story goes that when I was a little sprout, my parents brought me down to the playing fields near my future high school on the opening day of the local youth soccer league to see if I wanted to play. I'm told that I watched the proceedings for a couple of minutes, turned to Mom and Dad and said, "no thanks."

My feelings about soccer changed little over the two decades and change that followed. I confess that before this summer's tournament started, I learned that the Philippines did not even try out for the Cup and took that as further proof that the Philippines and I were made for each other. I watched the Team USA's opening match, against England, with a rowdy group of Americans on a big outdoor screen here in expat-land. I could barely pay attention during the game, and I expressed incredulity when it ended in a draw and everyone went home. What kind of game is fine with not even having a winner?

Yet being in Africa for the first World Cup ever on African soil made a convert even out of me, as I secretly hoped it might. Tanzanians are passionate about The Beautiful Game, and even though the national team did not make the Cup, it was still the talk of the country for the last month. Since watching soccer was the only way to have a social life here for most of June and the first part of July, I resolved to make the most of it. I watched Cameroon play Denmark - two disparate countries I visited a span of 19 days last year - from a roadside dive bar packed with Tanzanians. The atmosphere was raucous, the Konyagi (a gin-like Tanzanian liquor) freely flowing. A smattering of vuvuzelas, uhhhh, enlivened the festivities. (You think they're annoying on TV?) In spite of myself, I started enjoying it. I also had the honor of providing real-time updates by text message to a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers in Cameroon, who were stuck without electricity when the demands of all those TVs blew out the grid in the extreme north province. Sadly, after Cameroon's opening goal I had no further good news to share with them.

I was on safari in Mikumi for the U.S. team's elimination at the hands of Ghana. I watched that match the way I imagine the majority of people on this continent watched it: standing, huddled around a 22" screen. The only TV at our resort was in the staff quarters, and they graciously accommodated our group of Americans. By that point, the continent's hopes for World Cup glory were pinned on Ghana, and the pan-African solidarity was palpable here. When the Ghanaians scored, the place erupted in jubilation while the Americans fretted. Well, all but one of the Americans. The prettier half of "Elawn" was rooting for Ghana, owing to her two years working there after college. Traitor.

After Team USA's elimination I pivoted quickly to rooting for Ghana as the sole remaining represenative of Africa. I witnessed their heartbreaking loss to Uruguay in a quieter setting: at home with my American host dad. It's hard to sustain the claim that soccer is not an exciting game after such a match. When Asamoah Gyan's late-game penalty shot deflected off the crossbar, my heart hit the floor. Somehow, in the span of just a few weeks, I'd come to care about soccer.

My conversion hasn't just been about the game itself, of course. Shakira's "Waka Waka" and K'naan's "Waving Flag" are now indelibly etched as part of the soundtrack of my Tanzanian summer. (Funny that it took Coca-Cola to bring forward a World Cup anthem that features, you know, an actual African.) I have also had the pleasure of reading How Soccer Explains the World, which certainly doesn't live up to the promise implied by its title but still offers a lot of great storytelling. Most of all, I have appreciated the way the World Cup has enabled me to interact with Tanzanians on - pardon the expression - a more level field than almost any other topic. There are a lot of things that can get in the way of mutual understanding across cultures, but not many of them apply to soccer. Nelson Mandela, whose country hosted the Cup so well, grasped the power of sport to unite and reconcile. I am starting to see what he was getting at.

there's something about tanzania

2010-07-11T11:16:00.003+01:00

Apologies, dear readers, for my long absence. I spent the last week doing another round of field work in Zanzibar, and both time and internet access were once again scarce. I have a little bit of a backlog of topics to write about, so look for posts in the coming days about how I learned to love the World Cup, some more musings about Swahili, and what I do for exercise in Dar es Salaam. Surely they will all be as fascinating as always.

Among the countries in its East African neighborhood, Tanzania is something of a model citizen. As I mentioned in my first post, Tanzania has an enviable record of peace and stability. Its résumé of large-scale armed conflict is breathtakingly short. There was a short war with Uganda in the late 70s, and before that one would have to reach deep into the colonial era to the Maji Maji Rebellion in 1907. Contrast that with the troubled histories of many of its neighbors: Uganda (see Amin, Idi), Rwanda (self-explanatory), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (site of the bloodiest, most hellish and least-known war of the 21st century). Kenya, Tanzania's closest relative, teetered on the brink of mass electoral violence while a man of half-Kenyan ancestry was mounting a successful campaign for President of the United States. Tanzania has won plaudits in the international community for successfully absorbing refugees from its neighbors' conflicts. Tanzania's term-limited presidents have regularly left office voluntarily, and the current President, Jakaya Kikwete, is by all accounts sincere, competent, and well-liked.

Tanzania's record is all the more remarkable given that its boundaries are no less of a colonial fiction than those of any other African country. In most African countries, it is often said, people identify first and foremost with their tribe and ethnic group and little, if at all, with their country. Tanzanians, in contrast, really think of themselves first as Tanzanians. In fact, it is considered bad form here to make a fuss about or inquire too extensively into someone’s ethnic heritage. One of my coworkers, a Muslim from the north, is married to a Christian woman from the middle of the country. This fact obviously gives him pride, but he is also quick to emphasize how unremarkable such a pairing is in Tanzania.

Tanzania's cohesiveness is, more than anything else, a product of public policy. In that first entry I also briefly mentioned Julius Nyerere, the founder and first president of Tanzania, still known and loved as mwalimu (“teacher”). Nyerere launched a program of African socialism known as ujamaa (“familyhood”). In economic terms, ujamaa was an unqualified disaster, a fact that Nyerere ultimately recognized and that drove him from office. Still, Nyerere managed somehow to build a Tanzanian national identity, glued together with his promotion by word and policy of Swahili as a national language. “The policies didn’t last,” a senior official at the Embassy observed to me and some other interns, “but they were in place long enough for something to gel.”

There is one big caveat to everything I've said so far, and that is Zanzibar. I will save a discussion of the archipelago's complicated relationship with the mainland for another time. But its last two rounds of elections, in 2000 and 2005, were marred by violence, most notably a massacre of protestors in 2001. On political freedoms and human rights, the islands compare unfavorably to the mainland. Zanzibar's independence from the Sultanate was born of a bloody revolution in 1964, which killed and drove out many of the formerly powerful Arabs and South Asians. Among those who fled was the family of young Farouk Bulsara, whom the world would later come to know as Freddie Mercury.

There are two great ironies built into this contrast between Zanzibar and the mainland. The first is that Zanzibar, unlike the mainland, has significant competition between the two major political parties. Part of the mainland's political stability is, arguably, thanks to the overwhelming advantage of Kikwete's party in what we Americans call "party identification." Zanzibar, however, is close to evenly split, and "party ID" there has deep roots in historical power relationships and grievances. It's a useful counterexample if one is tempted to lazily equate liberal democracy with competitive elections.

The second irony is that in my experience, Zanzibar is a safer and gentler place than the mainland. In Stone Town, I regularly walk from place to place alone, after dark, with a laptop bag over my shoulder. I can do this without fear, while in Dar any two of those three things together would be inviting serious trouble. The welcoming spirit I have felt everywhere in Tanzania is especially strong in Zanzibar.

Both the mainland and Zanzibar are slated to have elections in October of this year, and Zanzibar's current president (again, explanation to come another time) is term-limited. Zanzibar's troubles are far from insoluble, and I sincerely hope that this will be the breakthrough election that sees a peaceful and untainted process. Zanzibaris have been waiting a long time for this, and they certainly deserve it.

happy birthday, america

2010-07-02T19:37:00.008+01:00

The Fourth of July comes early to the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania: June 30 and July 1 this year. Through my "Embassy connections" (read: living with State Department interns), I was fortunate enough to attend two events on back-to-back days. The first was a community barbecue on the grounds of the Embassy itself, and the second was a swank party on the lawn of the Ambassador's house.

Of course, both of these invitations came at a price. At the barbeque, I bartended on behalf of the Marines-- who apparently are in charge of supplying these events with social lubrication-- while the Marines were busy doing this:

I imagine that being on an Embassy detail as a Marine would be a little like being an airline pilot: grinding boredom on a day-to-day basis, with a tiny but ever-present risk of things suddenly becoming really stressful. (Keep in mind that the Embassy in Tanzania was one of the two that was bombed in 1998.) Those Marines do know how to have a good time, though-- here's one busting a move later in the event:

Later, naturally, came the fireworks.

In exchange for my ticket to the Ambassador's place, I accepted what was possibly the most awkward task I have ever been given. I and two other interns served as "pullers" for the receiving line... or in my preferred description, our job was to "manhandle the dignitaries." Our job was to watch the receiving line for people who were monopolizing the attention of the Ambassador, his wife, and the Deputy Chief of Mission, and as politely as humanly possible move them along. We lurked nervously in the background, careful not to stand too close to the pathway lest anyone think we might be bigwigs who needed greeting. As Tanzanian government officials, leaders of NGOs and international organizations, and ambassadors and consuls from other countries shuffled past, we debated the exact length of the delay required before a dignitary triggered a "pulling." I subscribed to the fire department theory of pulling: ideally, our services would not be needed at all. For a very long time it looked like we wouldn't need to jump in, but then two older white women were yukking it up for an awfully long time while the line built behind them. I stepped up -- too suddenly, according to my fellow pullers, a verdict supported by the flash of bewilderment on the ambassador's wife's face. As soon as I and the talkative guests were clear of our hosts, I smiled, apologized, and explained the task I had been given. Much to my relief, they both burst into laughter. One introduced herself as Sister So-and-So, and they told me that they belonged to the Maryknoll order. I had "manhandled" a pair of Catholic nuns.

After that, we were free to enjoy the event. Many of the Tanzanians congratulated us on our 234 years of independence, which I found quite endearing. The party had a lot of nice touches, including a welcome speech in English and Swahili by an American boy and a Tanzanian boy. Here they rehearse before the guests arrive:

There was also time for a little intern family portrait. Unfortunately Yvon, whom we call mzee (elder) owing to his advanced age of 32, is missing. Still, it's a pretty good looking group, if I do say so myself:

Hope everyone has a wonderful Fourth!

my first safari

2010-06-28T06:04:00.011+01:00

Located just 300 km southwest of Dar, Mikumi National Park is a poor man’s Serengeti: a great option for those short on money, time, or both but who still want to see some of Africa’s most majestic animals. I went there for my first Tanzanian safari this weekend, joining a motley group of ten people connected in various ways to the U.S. Embassy. Half the group left on Friday afternoon in an Embassy car, while the poor schmucks who have to work a full day on Friday (yours truly included) got up at 5:00 on Saturday morning to take a taxi to Ubungo, Dar’s fearsome main bus station. We arrived in time to join the rest of the group for lunch and then set out for an afternoon game drive.

Our sweet ride: it’s a little embarrassing how excited I was by our vehicle- a triple-decker, open-air affair that resembled something out of an amusement park ride.

Impala: the most underrated of the savannah animals, in my humble opinion, the lovely impala is abundant enough to be hardly noticed after the first few minutes of the safari. Female impala travel around in harems consisting of a few dozen females and one lucky stud, while the rest of the males prowl around in big groups of bachelors, waiting for their opportunity to fight for their shot with the ladies. The females do get their say, rejecting a suitor if they’re not sufficiently impressed with the length of his… horns.

Giraffes: the giraffe is the national animal of Tanzania. Giraffes are held in the kind of reverence Americans reserve for bald eagles, and killing one brings a stiff prison sentence. The giraffe’s Swahili name is twiga, and many businesses try to burnish their image by invoking it, from the Twiga Cement Company to a cell phone promotion called “Twiga Time.” In the interest of preserving the giraffe’s dignity, I won’t post any pictures of the attempted giraffe seduction that we witnessed. The male giraffe was sniffing around the object of his attentions, trying to catch a whiff of the telltale hormones that lady giraffes produce when they’re in heat. A couple of times he appeared to be, errr, assuming the position, but then she demurred and walked a few feet away. From there the process repeated itself. We didn’t stay long enough to find out if he finally got lucky, but apparently this is all part of the ritual.

Wildlife/scenery overload: This was our first sighting of elephants, and you can also see impala in the foreground and wildebeest in the background. Not long after, this elephant family provided us with an equally photogenic late-afternoon stroll:

Later we saw another group of elephants giving themselves what appeared to be a dirt bath. They would grab some dirt with their trunks and fling it over their heads, sending a dust cloud over their backs. In this picture you can see the one on the far left in mid-fling:

Our guide explained that this is the elephants’ way of keeping themselves cool. Given that this is winter in the highlands—the night was cool enough for us all to put on long-sleeve shirts—they must be throwing tons of dirt on themselves during the hotter parts of the year. We stayed and watched these elephants for some time, and after a while we got complacent about the amount of noise we were making. The elephant on the far right expressed his displeasure by facing us head on, fanning his ears, and apparently getting ready to charge. It was a bluff, just like what grizzly bears usually do when they feel threatened (this was not my first reminder of Alaskan wildlife during the safari), but it was a little bit disconcerting nonetheless.

For the trip home, the five who came in the embassy car went back the same way, leaving the rest of us to wait for a bus at the roadside by the park entrance. We grew increasingly nervous as bus after bus barely slowed down, the driver making a downward motion with his hand signaling that the bus was already full. (As an aside, speeding vehicles colliding with wildlife is a huge problem around the park, as the grisly photographic display of roadkill in the visitors center will attest. Several dozen speed bumps along the highway have not solved the problem, so the authorities are beginning to send out traffic patrols to crack down.) Many Tanzanians work in Dar during the week and then head home for the weekend, meaning that the buses coming back from the sticks are always jammed with people on Sunday. Then by sheer luck, we saw some familiar faces: a Canadian couple with whom Elana and I have played frisbee was leaving the park in their own car. They only had three empty seats, so we sent Elana with the two other group members we deemed most likely to freak out. The two of us who remained were soon rescued by some kindhearted strangers, a guy from Northern Ireland and his English wife. Unfortunately for them, the traffic coming back into Dar was much worse than anticipated, so they followed England’s drubbing by Germany via text messages from their friends.

I’ll conclude with a self-portrait of our merry band. With me in the front row are intern housemates Jasmine and Hammad, and in the back row next to my head you can see the other half of “Elawn.”

dispatches from the house of peace

2010-06-21T06:28:00.002+01:00

*New nicknames: my fellow intern, Elana, and I were inadvertently given a Brangelina-style combined nickname by our overtired DC boss: “Elawn.” The last time I was part of a combined nickname I was on the Danvers High track team, when Chris Abram and I, the only two freshman distance runners, were combined into the fearsome “Abramspowers.”

*Strangest thing I’ve seen a street vendor selling in Dar es Salaam traffic: an aquarium full of water and fish, balanced precariously on his head. It was unclear if he was trying to sell the entire aquarium or individual fish. Runner-up: laminated, wall-sized maps of East Africa.

*Tanzanian fashion: if you’re sporting a necktie, apparently the style around here is to tie a big, fat knot so that only a little more than half of the tie’s normal length hangs down the front of your shirt. I’m intrigued, but I can’t say I plan to adopt this fashion myself. It seems especially ill-advised if you have the slightest bit of a gut, since the tie acts like a big arrow pointing right at your extra poundage.

*I get evicted: the American family with whom I was staying has temporarily kicked me out of their guest room to make way for grandma, who is visiting until the end of the month. I’ve moved into another house—also a fortified mansion in expat land—with the other half of “Elawn” and a bunch of Embassy interns. The living/dining room is big enough to hold a wedding reception, but there’s barely any furniture and no decorations in the whole place. Nice.

*Big daddy: within a matter of days I will become an uncle, and then in November I will become an uncle again. Interestingly, Swahili makes a distinction in my relationships to my two future nephews. To young Michael, my sister’s son, I will be mjomba, or uncle. To young Bradley, my brother’s son, I will be baba mkubwa, or “big father.” In Tanzanian families, the father’s brothers are also considered “fathers,” and the mother’s sisters are also considered “mothers.” Since I am older than the father-to-be, I am baba mkubwa, while our youngest brother will be baba mdogo, or “little father.” Those who know our family will find this very amusing since "little father" could eat father and big father for lunch.

how to say "hi" in swahili

2010-06-17T17:03:00.004+01:00

The most delightful aspect of Tanzanian culture that I have seen so far is the greetings. Whether you’re meeting someone for the first time, seeing your officemate in the morning, or approaching a stranger on the street for directions, it’s absolutely mandatory to exchange greetings, and failing to do so it the quickest way to distinguish yourself as an obnoxious foreigner. And while one greeting is a necessity, more greetings are better. While in Zanzibar, we traveled around the island with a government official who is a master of the craft. He can fire off a succession of greetings so quickly it practically gives the listener whiplash. This guy also appeared to know everyone on the island. No sooner would we stop at a police checkpoint on the road (the checkpoints are as ubiquitous as their purpose is inscrutable) than he would practically leap from the car and commence greeting, laughing, and backslapping with the cops.

A standard formula for greeting someone is habari _____? Habari means “news,” and the blank can be filled with lots of different things depending on the situation. Options include habari gani (how are things?), habari yako (how are you?), habari yenu (how are y’all?), habari za kazi (how’s work?), habari za nyumbani (how’s home?), habari za safari (how was your trip?), habari za leo (how’s your day?), habari za asubuhi (how’s your morning?)… you get the idea.

Though the possibilities for asking someone how they’re doing are nearly endless, the answer is always some variation of “good.” Acceptable replies include nzuri (good), njema (good), salama (peaceful—in other words, good) or safi (literally “clean,” but in this context, good). No matter how bad things are, things are good—“even if you are about to die,” according to my Swahili tutor. If your house just burned down or you lost your job, the time to bring that up is later in the conversation, not during the greetings. If things are really good, you can add the word sana to your reply, and if things are merely a little bit good, you can add the word tu. Another way to exchange greetings—actually, the first way most visitors learn—is for the first person to say hujambo? (literally, “you have no problem?”) and the other to reply sijambo (“I have no problem”).

Go ahead and laugh, but Americans basically do the same thing. Europeans enjoy mocking us for using “how are you?” as a substitute for “hello,” and most of the time we really only expect to hear some variant of good, well, or fine. I was once in a bookstore in the Philippines and found a guide to American culture written for prospective immigrants and visitors. Thumbing through this book was an immensely educational and eye-opening experience, and I recommend it if you can get your hands on such a book. The book cautioned would-be visitors to the U.S. not to interpret a casual “how are you?” as an invitation to discuss how their house burned down or they just lost their job.

A special, extra-respectful greeting reserved for one’s elders is shikamoo, to which the elder replies with a marahaba. Neither word has any other usage in Swahili, though I read that shikamoo is derived from “I hold your feet” (nimeshika miguu yako is my possibly erroneous translation). Some people claim that the terms originated as an exchange between slaves and masters, but their use today is widespread enough that no such associations remain. I have found that being greeted with a shikamoo by a foreigner is often a source of delight for the recipient. I share office space in Dar with a Tanzanian woman who is old enough to have teenage children, and I once asked her if shikamoo was appropriate or called for in professional settings. “Yes!” she replied with a laugh. “You should be greeting me with shikamoo every day!”

I have also waded, gingerly, into the world of slang. Someone near to my own age could be safely greeted with a mambo?, a vipi?, or a mambo vipi? I wouldn’t try any of these on somebody who is old enough for a shikamoo, since I imagine that would be like approaching an elder American and going “whasaaaap?” Slang replies include poa (roughly translated as “cool”) or, my favorite, freshi (from the English word "fresh"). I’m told that the better your slang greeting, the lower the fare you are quoted by a taxi driver is likely to be, so I have an economic as well as a cultural incentive to learn more.

I see two main virtues to the Swahili greeting system. Once is that the greetings, even if they’re formulaic, make every interaction a little friendlier. The other is that they put a little speed bump on the pace of interaction. With our frantic pace of life in the U.S., it’s easy to blow right past people with our heads completely wrapped up in our own business. If culture demands that you exchange a greeting, or preferably two or three, it’s that much harder to let those opportunities for connection go by.

when the lights went out

2010-06-13T11:21:00.002+01:00

On December 10, 2009, the lights went out across Unguja Island, the main island of Zanzibar. A power outage is usually not a noteworthy event on Zanzibar, as the island’s electricity supply comes from an aging, decrepit undersea cable from the mainland, and the mainland has plenty of power supply issues of its own. This time, though, the power didn’t come back on for 3 months.

The outage scarcely made a ripple in the international media. Thousands of tourists continued coming to the island blissfully unaware of what was happening, since the nice hotels all had diesel generators to keep things running 24/7. Only the buzzing chorus of hundreds of generators in Stone Town would have clued a well-heeled traveler in to what was going on.

For everyday Zanzibaris, however, the blackout was a calamity. It’s enormously costly to run an entire hotel on diesel, so lots of local workers were laid off—a hard blow for a place where tourism is the main industry. The layoffs happened at both small establishments struggling to survive the blackout and large resorts under pressure from headquarters to cut costs. As the blackout dragged on, many educated workers with the means to leave abandoned the island, a small-scale incident of what the development field calls “brain drain.”

At home, the biggest problem was not the lack of electricity but the lack of running water as the island’s water pumps stopped working. Open any World Bank or UN report about water, and you’re likely to read about the enormous burden that gathering water places on people, especially women, in areas without an adequate water supply. In a sense, the blackout turned back the clock on Zanzibar’s economic development. It forced people to divert time, energy, and resources that they otherwise could have spent working or caring for their children to figuring out how to get enough water for basic needs.

The impact on people’s health, naturally, was awful. Communities around the island suffered deadly outbreaks of cholera. A study of an earlier, month-long blackout on Zanzibar found that the blackout significantly reduced birth weights (a key marker of infant health and nutrition). We still don’t know exactly what the impact of the long blackout will be, since the youngest babies who were in utero for the blackout still have not been born, but it seems likely that this generation of children will suffer lifelong problems because they were unlucky enough to pass that critical window of development in a time of crisis. Another issue I heard about over and over again was stress. Mental health gets hardly any attention in development circles—heck, we hardly consider it a “real” problem in the rich countries. But the stress of the layoffs, the disease, the lack of water, and the uncertainty of when it would all end will probably affect many Zanzibaris for a long time to come.

There are plans in the works to help prevent similar blackouts in the future, from a new undersea cable to large-scale public generators to keep electricity flowing to the grid. I also got the sense that the blackout has sparked interest in renewable energy sources on the island, which would be one of the best possible legacies of this tragedy. For the time being, however, there is little standing in the way of a repeat of Zanzibar’s awful season in the dark.

notes from a magical island

2010-06-06T15:57:00.003+01:00

The name alone sounds like something out of a fanciful children’s story: Zanzibar. After the Lost finale I thought I had permanently lost my ability to believe in magical islands, but Zanzibar is making me believe all over again.

In addition to being a tropical paradise, Zanzibar is a cultural melting pot. Strategically located along Indian Ocean trading routes, Zanzibar has seen wave after wave of foreign influences, including Portuguese, Arab, Indian, and British. While the continent was being carved up among European powers, Zanzibar was colonized by the Middle East. More accurately, it became a part of the Sultanate of Oman, and the Omani Arabs liked it so much that at one point the Sultan’s court was moved here. As a result, Zanzibar’s historic Stone Town has a decidedly Middle Eastern feel, and the overwhelming majority of Zanzibaris are Muslim. They are also among the friendliest and most laid-back people you will meet anywhere. Even the most assertive of the street vendors are pretty genial, and I regularly walk around Stone Town with my laptop bag around my shoulder. That says a lot about how safe it is here, given that in Dar I was feeling a bit of the post-mugging PTSD from Cameroon.

Magical island or not, I am here for work and not for play. One component of my internship is helping implement a survey in Zanzibar, and I’m here with a nice little research team consisting of an American consultant hired by headquarters (Sam), a Zanzibari consultant (Fadhil), my co-intern for the summer (Elana), and yours truly. The pilot interviews went amazingly well, but for the last few days we’ve been bogged down with a lot of back-and-forth with DC about revisions to the survey instrument. As a result, we’re several days behind schedule and antsy to get going in earnest. That said, I can’t complain too much about the work environment. Most days we’ve set up shop in a hotel restaurant/bar with a killer view of the Indian Ocean, and the other night I had my first-ever conference call in a hookah lounge.

This has been my first time interacting in a significant way with a conservative Muslim society. While strolling through the narrow streets of Stone Town, you can frequently hear the call to prayer from a nearby mosque or children singing at an Islamic school. Most Zanzibari women wear some kind of headscarf, and a sizable minority wear the full burqa, with only their eyes showing. To avoid offending the locals, tourists are advised to keep their shoulders covered and not to show too much leg anywhere outside of the beach. During Ramadan, I am told, it is difficult to find food anywhere in town during the day.

Unfortunately, the enchantment came to a crashing halt the other night. I met a Zanzibari woman who just came home from a year of teaching Swahili in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant. She is a friend of Elana’s, and she and her husband joined us for a visit Zanzibar’s famous night market. Smart and charismatic and bursting with energy, she gave me a few rapid-fire, impromptu lessons as we strolled around the lamp-lit stalls selling seafood and sugar cane juice and Zanzibar “pizza.” Elana told me that she would be working as a secondary school teacher here for a shockingly small salary, and I asked Elana if she plans to do any individual tutoring on the side, since I have a tutor on the mainland but not on the island. Elana had already asked on my behalf, but the response that as a man, I wouldn’t be able to see her unless Elana or another woman accompanied me. I was even more astonished to learn that the day we saw her was her first outside the house in the week since she’d come back to Zanzibar (though to be fair, she’d been receiving dozens of guests at home). I don’t have much insight about how she feels about any of this and I don’t want to project my opinions onto her, but it depresses me to imagine what kind of opportunities even a woman of her caliber is routinely denied.

I’ll be here for at least another week, so more pictures and stories to come soon!

bursting the expat bubble (daladalas, y'all)

2010-05-31T14:37:00.012+01:00

If any of my gentle readers are under the impression that I’m living a rugged life in Tanzania, we should probably begin with some clarification of my living situation. What you see below is the view of the Indian Ocean from the second floor hallway of the fortified mansion I live in here in Dar es Salaam.

I have dropped in on the comfortable life of an expat, living with an American family in embassy-owned housing with a small army of guards and housekeepers, all courtesy of you, the U.S. taxpayer. It sounds a little excessive on paper, but I know that if I were in the same situation as my hosts—living here for the long haul with young children—I would want some level of security and insulation too. Especially given that I live on the only street in the country singled out for special mention under “Crime” on the State Department’s website on Tanzania… though that’s probably has more to do with selection bias than anything else, given how many American diplomats live around here.

This is my first real experience with this kind of expat life and its odd combination of privilege and inconvenience. There are moments when it’s almost possible to forget that I’ m in Africa. On Friday evening I was drinking at a yacht club with middle-aged British men, on Saturday I chased small kids around a French-style café with SUV-driving American soccer moms. Even in expat-land, though, it is never long before the fact that I’m in Africa reasserts itself, whether it’s in the potholed moonscape of the local roads, my near-total lack of exercise options, or the restrictions on my freedom of movement that I must accept for safety reasons.

I realized early on that I could probably go this whole summer without exposing myself to a single foodborne illness or sweaty, overcrowded bus ride—and that’s just not my style. So on Sunday, I made my first concerted effort to pop the expat bubble. I met up with a friend of a friend whom I’d only met once and headed outside of “Dar” for a refreshing hike in the Pugu Hills, 2 hours southwest of the city. We arranged a guide through a small resort whose owners take the Soup Nazi approach to reservations: the website urges even would-be day hikers to book in advance and “spare us and yourself the unpleasant experience.”

As is so often the case, the real highlight was not so much the hike but the experience of getting there. We had to take three different daladalas (minibuses), all overflowing with people and stuff, including in one case a stainless steel commercial sink. The directions to this place involved getting off the daladala “at the petrol station,” walking 1 km and taking “the second dirt track,” and asking a local where “Bwana Kiki’s place” is (bwana is Swahili for Mister). Needless to say, there were a few miscalculations and wrong turns along the way. During the long ascent on foot, we really started to feel like we had made a clean break from Dar. I imagine that plenty of foreigners make their way up to the hills, but we still attracted much curiosity for the people we passed by, most of whom greeted and welcomed us. I got to practice many different Swahili greetings, which will surely be the subject of a blog post all their own at some point in the summer. I am always a little camera-shy before I feel like I understand the culture of picture taking in a place, but these boys obligingly asked me to take their picture on our way back down:

Unfortunately, I look godawful in the couple pictures that were taken of me, but hopefully this will give you a sense of the scenery during the actual hike:

Happy Memorial Day to everyone back home!

karibu!

2010-05-27T14:14:00.003+01:00

Welcome to my revived and rejiggered blog! (More geographically appropriate profile picture coming soon.) The last time I posted, I promised that if I ended up somewhere sexy for my MPA summer internship I would bring the blog back. Well, countries don’t get much sexier than Tanzania: the home of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the islands of Zanzibar, and the plains of the Serengeti. I will be here for the next 12 weeks interning with a development organization, and then for two weeks after that I’ll be cutting loose and exploring this fine country as a tourist.

In case you aren’t familiar with this part of the world, Tanzania is a Texas-and-a-half-sized, Wisconsin-shaped country just south of the Equator and west of the Indian Ocean. Though its neighbors include some of the most troubled African nations in recent times— Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others— Tanzania is a model of peace and stability. It produced one of the more benevolent leaders in Africa’s postcolonial history, Julius Nyerere, whose picture still adorns offices here in Dar es Salaam 25 years after he left power. Nyerere is often credited with forging a single Tanzanian identity out of the country’s many ethnic groups, but his socialist economic program (ujamaa, or “familyhood”) has been blamed for decades of economic stagnation. The country’s name reflects the merger of two separate former colonies: Tanganyika, the mainland; and Zanzibar, the heavily Arab-influenced islands.

Unfortunately, one topic I will not be able cover in as much detail as I would like to is work. Several weeks ago I mentioned the blog in an e-mail to my supervisor at headquarters (which is in the U.S.), and I asked if there were any policies on this kind of thing. I offered, depending on their preference, to put some kind of disclaimer in the masthead that the blog reflects only my personal views, or even to not mention the organization by name. The response was that she’d have to check with the lawyers, and I haven’t heard anything about the subject since then. Maybe it was one of those “better to ask forgiveness than permission” moments, but my plan is not to refer to my employer by name and to avoid discussing anything that would reveal who it is. Of course, many of my dear readers will already know, and if you don’t know but are curious, just ask. My living situation is a dream: I am staying in the guest room of an American family with adorable children and a yellow lab on the relatively swank Msasani peninsula.

Mwanamume mmarekani katika Tanzania, by the way, is Swahili for “an American man in Tanzania,” and karibu means “welcome.” It’s the Swahili word I have heard most often in the last three days, and it certainly describes the way everyone so far has made me feel.

signing off, for now

2009-07-27T21:26:00.002+01:00

Gentle readers,

When I started this blog, you may recall, I wasn't sure if my life in the UK would be interesting enough to support a regular blogging habit. Eleven months and 47,000 words later, I'm happy that this worry was unfounded. Some thanks are due for the non-boringness of my year. In particular I'd like to thank the University of Cambridge with its endless oddities; Ryanair and easyJet with their cheap European air travel; and my former employer (frequent flier miles), the U.S. Treasury (2008 tax refund), and my favorite Peace Corps volunteer for facilitating my Cameroon trip.

But now, as I turn my sights to the Garden State, I feel a change in the air. While I always reserve the right to change my mind, I'm not planning on keeping up a regular blog at Princeton. I like the idea of keeping this site as a sporadic travel blog, as I did with my Israel trip-- though I may be grounded for quite some time. (I realized, as I deplaned at Logan, that for the first time since college I don't know when my next flight will be.) There's also the possibility that I will be somewhere very interesting next summer, as my MPA program at Princeton requires all of us to complete a summer internship. Those who followed my Philippines blog may recall a certain Congressman's daughter; she just graduated from the program I will soon start, and last summer she did her internship in Sudan. I can't say that blog-worthiness will be a major factor in my internship search process, but if I do end up someplace sexy, you will certainly hear lots about it.

So I will sign off, for now, and say thanks to all of my readers and commenters for making all of this writing worthwhile. And in the unlikely event that this leaves a blog-shaped hole in your heart, let me know- I have a few others I can recommend!

graduation weekend dispatches

2009-07-19T23:04:00.003+01:00

Grantchester revisited. Among the items on the Cambridge tourist to-do list that we missed when my family visited in January is the walk to Grantchester. This may sound familiar to longtime readers with sharp memories. Grantchester is a tiny village a few miles up the River Cam where the poet Rupert Brooke once hosted future members of the Bloomsbury Group—including John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and Bertrand Russell—for tea and civilized conversation. Today Brooke’s old home and orchard are a teahouse that preserves some of the memory of that group.

After my parents and I arrived back in Cambridge for graduation weekend, the Grantchester walk was first on the agenda, but unfortunately the appointed day did not turn out quite the way I might have hoped. Contradicting an observation I had made earlier in the trip that thunder and lightning are rare in Britain, the afternoon was spotted with thunderstorms and pouring rain, with spells of cold drizzle in between. Dispirited by the weather and feeling a touch of pre-departure depression, I felt like calling off the walk, but my parents were game to face the storms, mud, and cows. The teahouse and surrounding orchard would usually be jammed with people on a summer afternoon, but for at least part of the time we were the only people sitting outside. In the end I was glad we went—the hot tea, conversation, and visiting a fun old place helped to restore my mojo for the festivities to come that evening.

Latin lessons. After changing into some dry clothes, we headed to Emma, where I had organized a graduation-eve formal dinner for Development Studies classmates and their families. The countries represented included China, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Austria, Germany, and Greece. We had pre-dinner drinks in the cloisters by the college chapel and then moved on to a cozy upstairs room with lots of portraits of dead white men in wigs. I was incredibly grateful that Dave, a member of the catering staff who we always prayed would be the one quarterbacking our MCR dinners, was overseeing things. Dave did throw me one surprise, though: shortly after we were all seated, he came over to me and asked if I wanted to recite the College grace. I think my initial response was on the lines of, “uhhhh… I don’t speak Latin, Dave.” He showed me where both pre- and post-dinner graces were printed in the program and we had a 30-second dress rehearsal. I remember exactly two things from the third of a year of Latin I had in seventh grade (and any Latin scholars in the audience are welcome to correct me on this). First, the letters more or less always make the same sounds, unlike in English; second, it’s pronounced more or less the way a native English speaker would expect. With that slender bit of background knowledge and Dave’s confidence, I read out the grace without any obvious stumbles. I don’t know if the same could be said for my pronunciation, but I doubt anyone in the room had the slightest idea what I was saying. If you're curious you can check out the graces, with translations, here.

Pull my finger. Graduation, like so many other things in Cambridge, is steeped in formality and 800 years of tradition and takes little note of the way the rest of the world prefers to do things. There are lots of graduation ceremonies on different throughout the year, and the timing of any particular student’s graduation depends a lot on the idiosyncrasies of his or her course. There are no go-out-and-get-‘em speeches. Graduates shuffle through their small piece of the all-day ceremony by college, so I wasn’t even with my Development Studies classmates. My required outfit included a tuxedo, a white bow tie and bands (which made me feel like I should be trying somebody for witchcraft in 1690s Salem), a black gown, and a big black hood lined with blue silk draped over my back. I knew little about the ceremony going in and warned my parents not to expect much.

What I did know was that I was going to have to hold some guy’s finger. (Eight hundred years of solemn tradition, building up to… a fart joke?) Each college appoints one of its fellows as Praelector, and from what I can tell that role involves presenting the graduating students and enforcing the dress code. Rumor has it that if one of us students commits a wardrobe infraction, our college Praelector is fined… in bottles of port. Anyway, the graduates from each College march into a fancy old building known as the Senate House, and their Praelector extends a hand to the first four graduates in the phalanx. As each graduate holds onto one of those fingers, the Praelector leads the group forward and gives a brief testimonial, in Latin, to their learning and morals and their fitness to proceed to the degrees which they are to be awarded.

Now comes the really weird part. Picture, at the center of this grand assembly, a fairly senior man or woman sitting in a fancy chair and dressed in a bright red cape lined with white fur. This is (rarely) the Chancellor, Prince Philip; or (less rarely) the Vice Chancellor; or (usually) a deputy of hers, often the Master or President of a college. Our caped MC was the Master of Magdalene College, and the outfit combined with his kind face and round glasses gave him the appearance of a clean-shaven Santa Claus. After the Praelector’s testimonial, each individual graduate’s name is called, and each in turn kneels on a cushion in front of the big chair and extends his or her joined hands as if in prayer. It looked a bit like we were being knighted, minus the part with the sword. The presiding officer then clasps the graduate’s hands and formally confers the degree, in Latin. The new graduate rises, taking extreme care not to trip over the gown in the process, and gives a bow before exiting stage right.

Amazingly, the least ceremonious part was the paper diploma. After all of these traditional flourishes, I was expecting a huge piece of parchment with Latin calligraphy and perhaps a wax seal. Instead, what I got was a piece of 7x10 paper that looks like something I could have easily printed out on a home laser printer. It certifies, in English, that I attended the Congregation of 18 July 2009 and only later gets around to mentioning that I was awarded a Master of Philosophy degree. The mode of presentation was no more dramatic: we received our diplomas inside a plastic sleeve from an usher as we exited the Senate House. Like most of my friends, I opted to get a wooden University of Cambridge frame—partly because I fear that no one will believe it’s a diploma otherwise, and partly because I fear that one day I might accidentally toss it out with some old bank statements.

This has probably sounded a bit snarky, and there certainly was plenty of joking all around about the sillier aspects of the ceremony. But like many other things here, I think Cambridge’s odd approach to graduation is best approached with an open mind, a sense of humor, and a healthy dose of respect for eight centuries of history. And most importantly, after the red capes and Latin incantations we all get to walk away as Cambridge alumni—which is really, really cool in any language.

“we have not become more concerned with men than profit”

2009-07-10T23:33:00.002+01:00

Edinburgh – I’ve left the farm, but I suspect it will be days before I can close my eyes without seeing kale or beetroot leaves. On my last day, Uwe took me on a walk to the far corner of the property that they are renting. At 80 acres, the entire farm is far bigger than the area under active cultivation, and I had not even seen most of it prior to this eleventh-hour tour. Uwe told me that before they moved here, their landlord kept a herd of sheep. Their dream is one day to buy the land from him, in partnership with ten or so other families, and divide it into a series of small family crofts. This sort of thing is happening in small pockets all over Scotland, Morven later told me.

If my hosts achieve their dream, the transition of the land will be rich with historical symbolism, because it will represent a small-scale undoing of one of the sorriest episodes in Scotland’s history. I hadn’t even known about the Highland Clearances prior to this trip, but a brief mention of it in a travel book caught my interest, and while browsing a used bookstore in Inverness I found a paperback history of the subject. In brief, the Clearances were an era of forced depopulation on a massive scale, leaving most of the Highlands’ people to scratch out a miserable existence on the coasts or leave their homeland for good.

The story of the Clearances begins after the Battle of Culloden in 1745, when English forces had their final triumph over Jacobite rebels from Scotland. I passed the battlefield on my way from the airport, and I later read that the Queen had just paid a visit there, which is another indication of just how much old passions have cooled. The battle’s immediate aftermath, however, caused a seismic shift in Scotland’s political system. Under the historical clan system, people lived on small farms under the protection of a hereditary chief (ceann), and were ready to fight for the clan at the drop of a hat. (Interesting aside: In his most recent book, Malcolm Gladwell advances the argument that feuding between extended families in the American South trace back to the Highland culture that early settlers—many undoubtedly expelled during the Clearances—brought with them.) The victorious English saw to the demolition of this system and stripped the clan chiefs of much of their traditional power.

Gradually the chiefs transitioned from their old role as patriarchs-cum-warlords to being little more than neutered landlords. Their kinsmen-turned-tenants had no legal rights. At the same time, England’s wars, its new industrial wealth, and its growing population led to exploding demand for meat. A new breed of sheep, the Great Cheviot, seemed perfectly made for the Scottish highlands. Entrepreneurial Englishmen and Lowland shepherds saw an opportunity to make a tidy profit, and they set about persuading the chiefs that selling or leasing their land for sheep farming would be far more lucrative than the present arrangement. Most chiefs took the bait, and over the ensuing decades, thousands of Highlanders found themselves evicted in the name of "Improvement."

There were protests, to be sure—a large one took place in the town closest to the farm—but the Highlanders lacked leadership, were forbidden from keeping weapons after Culloden, and still felt an attachment to their traditional chiefs, so these bits of rebellion were easily quashed at musket-point. An especially cruel new proprietor set fire to all of the homes on his land, one with an elderly, bedridden woman inside. Some of the expelled were "generously" offered new plots of poor land on the coast, a few found work fishing, but most simply had to leave the country. If you’re in the U.S. or Canada and you have ever met anybody whose last name begins with "Mac," there’s a good chance the Clearances had something to do with that. Thus, if Morven (herself a "Mac" by birth) succeeds in transforming former sheep pasture into a series of family farms, things will have come full circle.

Explaining why he wrote this history, the author of The Highland Clearances notes that "we have not become so civilized in our behaviour, or more concerned with men than profit, that this story holds no lessons for us." I wholeheartedly agree. Viewed from a purely economic perspective, the Clearances were an "improvement": they converted Scotland’s land to a higher-value mode of production and facilitated its transition from an agrarian to an industrial country. In the long run those who emigrated probably found their livelihoods improved, again in a purely economic sense. This is, of course, an extremely impoverished mindset—but I believe it is the same mindset that has guided a lot of modern-day development policy in poor countries. I think the analogy is especially relevant to trade, which mercilessly demolishes long-standing ways of life even as it enlarges the GDP of countries rich and poor. The point is not that economies shouldn’t change, shouldn’t industrialize, or shouldn’t trade—by all means, they should do all of those things. The point is that what happens in the transition matters too. Scottish farmers didn’t need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of their chiefs any more than African farmers need to experience hunger and homelessness at the hands of a First-World technocrat with a Structural Adjustment Program.

Those who advance the purely economic worldview often cite the thought of a Scotsman who once taught here in Edinburgh: Adam Smith, the "father of economics." In what may be the most celebrated sentence in the most celebrated economics text of all time, Smith wrote in his Wealth of Nations that people acting in their own self-interest within a market system often promote the larger social good, as if guided by an "invisible hand." I don’t know if any of those who perpetrated the Clearances had read Smith, but I suspect lots of them really did believe that what they were doing was for the larger social good. Here’s the rub, though: Smith also believed that benevolence and social cohesion are foundational to a properly functioning society. The "invisible hand" is not an unlimited license to be selfish; it only works its magic in a world where people have a certain level of decency and concern for one another. The Highland chiefs failed on that count, and I think that we too are failing Smith’s test today.

On that cheerful note, I am off to Ireland to meet my parents for a brief tour of the ancestral land before returning to Cambridge with them for graduation. I doubt there will be much time for blogging, so watch for a roundup in a little over a week’s time.

dispatches from the farm

2009-07-05T23:22:00.003+01:00

Ross-shire, Scotland – In my first 72 hours as a WWOOFer I have harvested potatoes, built trellises for peas, picked strawberries, collected and packed eggs, fed hogs, pulled weeds, and witnessed the beheading of two hens. I am here for a little over a week on a family farm in a moderately isolated patch of the Scottish highlands with Morven, my super-energetic hostess, her builder partner Uwe, their two adorable children, a fellow WWOOFer from Germany named Katrin, and a massive complement of four-legged and winged friends. Somewhere in my head a treatise tying my observations here with the history of the Scottish highlands is simmering—would you expect anything different from me?—but for now, here are a few tidbits from my first days of WWOOFing.

Childhood flashbacks. My mom has a stash of anecdotes from my childhood that she brings out whenever she needs to embarrass me in front of somebody (new girlfriends, etc.), and one of her favorites is the Children’s Barn at Endicott Park. I can’t say this of all of her stories, but I actually remember and can attest to the truth of this one. Anytime my parents would take me there as a wee lad, the smell of the animals would overwhelm me and I would commence gagging. Memories of the Children’s Barn came roaring back on my first morning as Katrin and I stepped into one of the henhouses, feed bags in hand, and the fetid smell of birds and their shit filled my nostrils. As an adult, fortunately, I have the self-control needed to preserve my dignity in the presence of animal smells. Nonetheless, I was grateful when the feed was distributed and we could move on to the less stinky task of collecting, inspecting, brushing off, packing, and labeling the hundreds of eggs that those odiferous birds put out each day.

Paydirt. I know that I’m not working with a statistically significant sample here, having never WWOOFed anywhere else, but I really feel like I have hit paydirt with this farm. We WWOOFers get to share dinner and occasionally bedtime stories with the family, and the kids (ages 6 and 4) are awesome, even when they’re climbing on my back while I’m trying to weed. Morven has only been running this farm for a year and change, but she’s very good at integrating WWOOFers into the rhythms of the farm, finding useful and varied tasks for us to do. Thanks to Katrin, I don’t have to sort hundreds of eggs or face the hungry hogs alone. The farm offers great views of mountains, the nearby loch (lake) and distant firth (fjord). Daylight lingers well past 11 pm, as expected in a place on roughly the same latitude as Juneau. Slowly but surely, I can feel contentment settling in.

How I spent my Fourth. On Saturday night the WWOOFers got to tag along to the local ceilidh (KAY-lee), a traditional Scottish dance held in a community hall a few miles from the farm. Tickets went for £8 apiece, but Morven bartered for our entry with the strawberries we had picked earlier in the day. I’m actually quite experienced at this kind of dance, thanks to contradancing at Williams, but it was challenging without a caller to yell out the next steps. It was the Fourth of July, but the only way I could find to honor my homeland was consuming Budweiser in its trademark red, white, and blue cans, which Uwe generously kept coming throughout the evening.

Mooching x 4. To get up here I flew from London to Inverness, the “Capital of the Highlands,” and before catching my train out of town I stopped for lunch at a Spanish restaurant, drawn in by its Cruzcampo sign. (You may recall my preoccupation with Cruzcampo beer during that weekend in Seville.) There I happened to meet Richard and Frances, a recently retired Scottish couple who took a keen interest in what I’m doing here and who live in a tiny hamlet about twenty minutes north of the farm. They gave me their phone number and offered to show me around if I had any free time—which it turns out I did, earlier today. They treated me to a driving tour of the area and brought me along to a barbecue at Frances’ sister’s house. Thank goodness Sarah Barracuda is back in the news, because it allowed my new friends to bring in the “guess what—Shawn has lobbied Sarah Palin!” factoid, and I was able to regale the crowd with Alaska-talk. (As an aside, if she does stay on the national scene for a while, the silver lining for me is that I’ll be able to get that much more mileage from my “Don’t look at the governor’s legs!” story.) In a surreal turn, my hosts’ son-in-law was born in the Philippines, and I heard a brief snatch of Tagalog at the dinner table between him and his Italian mother. At some point it occurred to me that I was engaging in fourth-degree mooching. I got to the UK in the first place by mooching off Bill Gates’ money; I’m in Scotland mooching off Morven et al (though this is the least moochy step given that I’m working for them); my afternoon out was a mooch off Richard and Frances; and the barbecue was a fourth degree of mooching off their extended family. It’s pretty much as far off the tourist grid and into “real life” as you can get, and the experience made me grateful that I answered the siren call of Cruzcampo back in Inverness.

dispatches from the british road

2009-06-29T21:29:00.006+01:00

The Wild Wild West. It always impresses me how the most fun and memorable travel experiences seem to pop out of the less glamorous aspects of a trip. After spending our Sunday at an eccentric environmental boondoggle known as the the Eden Project and then on a gorgeous hike along the coastline, we headed toward the hostel Stella had booked for the night. They had a firm check-in deadline of 9 pm, but we had plenty of time. I drove, Stella navigated. As the roads narrowed and other cars grew fewer and farther between, Stella's instructions became equally sparse. After a very long spell on the same winding road without a word from my copilot, I asked for an update on our progress, and Stella informed me that she was no longer sure we were going the right way. I pulled over and looked at the GoogleMaps printout with the directions to our hostel, and any doubts about Stella's navigational abilities quickly went away. I gazed in disbelief: almost a full page of instructions with no route numbers or street names at all, just turns and distances. The map portion was equally unhelpful: our route meandered through a cobweb of unnamed back roads. Only the occasional intersection was labeled with what I could only assume were the names of some very, very small villages. Where there are no street names or numbers, I quickly realized, Google is of little help.

There was only one way to connect the directions with real life. Each intersection we came upon had a signpost with the mileage to various villages, and some of the names matched up with places on the map. Thus, at the next junction, we picked the name of a village we knew was in the right direction and headed toward it. (I should stress that I'm using the word "village" only for want of a better term- often there was no sign of a church or pub, just a handful of country homes around a junction.) Many of the roads were only inches wider than our tiny rental car, and the overgrown brush on either side whipped the doors and side view mirrors. At times we encountered bogglingly steep grades and curves that had me praying no cars were coming in the other direction. Other stretches had tree cover dense enough virtually to block out the light of the late-evening sun. Eventually we came to a place called Portloe, with stunning views of the ocean far below. An elderly man with a hairy neck and long, caramelized fingernails was having a smoke outside of the local inn. The "No Vacancy" sign left me scratching my head as to who the hell takes their vacations out here. We asked him for directions, and within a minute I could tell he hadn't even heard of where we were going and was just interpreting our map for us. ("Take this road and follow your nose until you get to Portholland," he intoned in a vaguely Irish-sounding accent.) By this point it was past 8:30, so I extricated myself from the conversation as politely as possible, rolled up the window and continued on.

I don't know when it happened, but sometime before Portloe, we started having fun. It was a ridiculous, completely unexpected challenge. The scenery was amazing, and we laughed at our predicament and at the ludicrousness of tourism in this kind of place. We rolled into the Boswinger YHA hostel at 8:52 pm. "I was wondering if you were going to make it," said the teenager working the late shift at reception. I asked him if there was a pub around, and his smile told me that I was silly even to have entertained the idea. We did have a lovely walk, though, among some cows and the distant sound of surf and the fading light of a long summer evening:

Fun with Placenames. One of the fun little bonuses of being a Bay Stater in England is seeing the places that many of the towns in Massachusetts are named for. Up until now I hadn't noticed any underlying relationships within the names, except for the one-off correspondence between the two university towns named Cambridge. In Southwest England, though, I got a whiff of a pattern: I found Dartmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Truro, Barnstaple (yes, that's a "p"), and St. Dennis. If you're not from Massachusetts, or if you share my home state but aren't particularly observant, these are all the names of (or are close to the names of) towns on or near Cape Cod. Given the geographic similarities, I can certainly see the Cape reminding the early British colonists of Cornwall, so I doubt it's a coincidence.

And on an entirely random note, here's my nominee for the most deprived-sounding region of England: junction 14 on the M4 motorway leads to the towns of Hungerford and Wantage.

Wales. I had never been to Wales before, so Stella agreed to add it on at the end so that I could get my card punched. The Welsh language is alive and apparently much more viable than Cornish; the road signs turn bilingual as soon as you cross the border, and at least one radio station was utterly incomprehensible. Though the capital city of Cardiff is close to the border, we decided to pass on it due to concerns about traffic and testimonials to its relative unWelshness.

Instead, we headed for Caerphilly Castle, which is now right in the middle of a Cardiff suburb of the same name. When it was built in the 1200s, the castle was not only one of the world's largest, it was also at the cutting edge of castle technology, with a "concentric" design featuring multiple moats, walls, and battlements. The castle was built to defend Gilbert de Clare, an English lord, against Llewelyn the Last, the last Welshman to rule Wales. (Incidentally, Clare College in Cambridge is named for one of Gilbert's daughters, who saved the college from an early financial ruin.) Shifting alliance quickly destroyed the rationale for the castle's existence; it was left to rot and pillaged for stone until an early-twentieth-century restoration project. Here's a shot of the castle, with its very own leaning tower on the right side:

A Special Mention. I will conclude the tale of our road trip to the Wild West of Britain with an acknowledgement of another very special companion: Michael Jackson. The UK is also mourning the King of Pop (as is Vietnam, I'm sure), and it was a nostalgic treat to hear his old hits on the radio mixed in with the trashy dance music that generally fills the airwaves here. RIP, Jacko.

pirates and palm trees: this is england?

2009-06-27T19:35:00.004+01:00

Penzance – I have made it to Penzance, and yes, there are pirates. I am at the end of Cornwall, the long finger of land that is Britain’s southwesternmost extremity, on a road trip with my regular traveling companion (and fellow WWOOfing enthusiast) Stella. We originally had a larger posse, but due to a confluence of events—including an unexpected rash of centipede hatchings that is keeping a biologist friend in lab for the weekend—it’s just the two of us. Cornwall has a reputation as a place apart from the rest of England, and there’s no better testimony to that fact the bizarre and alarming existence of palm trees here. And just as Salem, Massachusetts has embraced and profited from its witches, so has Cornwall’s largest town capitalized on its pirates. We unwittingly timed our arrival here with Mazey Day, Cornwall's traditional midsummer festival, and there are pirate costumes and skull-and-crossbones banners aplenty. The local pop music station goes by the name of Pirate FM.

Pirate antics aside, Cornwall is as serious about its regional identity as anywhere I have seen in the UK except for Scotland. The Cornish flag—a vaguely pirate-like white cross on a black field—is much more popular than the Union Jack, just as I saw far more of St. Andrew’s cross in Edinburgh. At the Mazey Day festival, vendors sell cards featuring doctored photos of Gordon Brown and Barack Obama holding oversized pasties, the region’s culinary gift to the rest of Britain. As we drove in toward Penzance, we heard a Pirate FM DJ interview a representative of the Cornish Language Partnership at its festival booth. The government-funded Partnership tries to preserve the Cornish language by offering courses in it, much like in parts of western Ireland where state subsidies are trying to keep Gaelic from disappearing. We stopped by their booth and picked up their free “Cornish for Beginners” brochure. Despite my enthusiasm for languages, this kind of enterprise strikes me as a fool’s errand. As my Cameroonian friends reminded me not long ago, people will talk the way they want to talk, and one can no more hold back that tide than command the waves to halt.

Speaking of waves, we also took an expedition out to Land’s End, the point where Britain finally surrenders to the Atlantic. Once you get past the tacky and overbuilt tourist facilities, it’s a marvelous landscape of cliffs, blue water, and rolling heath:

quintessential cambridge experience #4: may week

2009-06-20T22:16:00.004+01:00

The pinnacle of the social year at Cambridge is May Week-- which, as you should expect by now, is not in May and lasts considerably longer than a week. I've discussed the Cambridge institution of May Balls before, but here's a quick refresher, which I have lazily copied from my February 15 blog entry and pasted here:

"If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges... and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world."

I attended two May Balls this year, one at my own Emmanuel College and the other at Jesus College, which I chose because lots of my Development Studies classmates are there. The timing was less than ideal, as they fell on back-to-back nights, but I know many May Ball warriors with far more exacting schedules than mine. To get a sense of what's involved in one of these bacchanals, pour yourself a glass of champagne and enjoy this photographic tour of the Emma May Ball, with the appoximate time each picture was taken.

7:45 pm: Dinner. Many balls offer "dining tickets," which allow you to start off your evening with a multi-course meal a la Formal Hall, for about £30 extra. Despite the general consensus that dining tickets are not worth it, given the copious quantities of food at no extra charge for the rest of the night, I decided to indulge just for the Emma ball.

11:oo pm: Texas hold 'em. Casino games are a May Ball staple. There's no real money at stake; instead, everyone gets an allotment of chips at the door, and those who are successful at poker, routlette or blackjack can cash in their chips for chances to win prizes like plasma TVs or plane tickets. Our poker game coincided with a port tasting in the same room, and James (to my right in this picture) was close enough to the port table that he could refill our glasses simply by swiveling around, not even needing to stand up. Needless to say, the decline in my poker performance was steep and severe-- no plasma screen TV for me!

12:30 am: Cornershop. Any May Ball worth its salt has a main stage with bands playing throughout the night, plus performances elsewhere on the college grounds by comedians, hypnotists, a cappella groups, and dancers. As I discovered at Williams and in Anchorage, these smallish venues tend to bring in bands that are either struggling to make it or washed up. Headlining the Emma ball was a British-Indian group called Cornershop, who are well past their prime and still coasting on the strength of their 1997 hit "Brimful of Asha." These one-hit wonders made the mistake of not saving their one hit for the end of their set, so shortly after the "Asha" was empty, the tent where they were playing nearly was too.

1:15 am: Dodge 'ems. Another essential part of the May Ball experience is carnival games and rides, which range from bumper cars (called dodge 'ems in Britain) to strength tests to ferris wheels. I had a car to myself, and after a full-speed collision with a car containing two of my friends, my butt got enough air that even the dodge 'em guy looked impressed. During the round after us, a piece of the ceiling came off and landed on some poor fellow's head, bringing back memories of that awful Boston tunnel accident. Fortunately this guy was fine- he needed some help out of the car, but I'm pretty sure it was because was blotto before he got in, not because of a concussion.

2:30 am: Hookah. The Ball brought in our friendly neighborhood purveyors of hookah and created a magical little space to chill under the branches of an ancient tree. For the uninitiated, a hookah (often used interchangeably with shisha) is a Middle Eastern water pipe used to smoke flavored tobacco. You can't see most of the pipe in this picture, but Ev (on the left) has the stem in his hand, and in the foreground you can see the blocks of charcoal that heat up the tobacco. At this point in the night, having somewhere to sit and relax was crucial, and I think the key to a successful May Ball is having lots of activities for different energy levels.

4:00 am: Silent Disco. I can't say I fully understand the appeal of Silent Disco, but apparently it's all the rage in Europe. Instead of grooving to the tunes supplied by a DJ, you get a personal set of headphones, which provide a small selection of channels with different types of dance music. When a particularly catchy song played on one of the channels, I would lift my headphones for a moment and could hear scattered people singing along amidst the sound of shuffling bodies and shoes.

5:50 am: Assembling for the "Survivors' Picture." Every May Ball has a "Survivors' Picture" for those who make it all the way to the end. There is also usually some modest breakfast food; Emma had gooey chocolate croissants from the Italian cafe across the street. After the picture was taken I walked home, slept for a few hours, and got ready to do it all again the following night at Jesus College's May Ball. What a life!

quintessential cambridge experience #3: bumps

2009-06-15T14:09:00.006+01:00

This time of year is heavy with ritual in Cambridge, and among the finest of those rituals is May Bumps, a multi-day series of boat races on the River Cam. Every college at the University fields boat crews, as do the medical, veterinary and theological schools and Anglia Ruskin University. Both terms, “May” and “Bumps,” need some clarification. They “May” part is easier to explain: as in the case of May Balls, it’s a relic of an earlier time when the academic year was structured differently.

“Bumps” refers to the way in which boats—each with eight rowers plus a coxswain, who steers and yells out commands—advance in the rankings over other boats. The races are not timed, and as will be explained momentarily, many of the boats in a given division will not even race the entire course. In the Bumps, success is only about rank, and the way you improve your standing is to overtake (“bump”) the boat ahead of you. Roughly 18 boats race at a time, and prior to the starting cannon they line up in the order determined by the previous day’s rankings (or previous year’s, if it’s the first day), with about 1½ boat lengths of space between each one. If one boat bumps another, their race is over; both pull over to the banks to let the rest of their division go by, and on the next day’s race they swap places in the order. It’s also possible to “overbump”—if the 2nd boat bumps the 3rd, and then the 4th boat bumps the 1st, the latter two will swap places during the next go-around. At the end of several days of racing, the top boats in the top men’s and women’s divisions are crowned as “Heads of the River.” However, any boat can earn a bit of glory by winning “oars,” awarded to crews that bump other boats on four consecutive days.

The official May Bumps program claims that 15% of the University participates. It sounded unrealistically high at first blush, but then again it seems plausible that 15% of my friends and classmates are rowers. Though it is a great Cambridge experience, I never felt especially tempted to join a boat crew, perhaps because it’s famously demanding on participants’ schedules and sleep-wake cycles. I really enjoyed watching the races, though—a lot of people come out, and it’s a nice atmosphere. Here are a couple of the Emma boat crews with MCR members:

The Men's II boat- MCR friends Kevin and Pat are the two rowers on the far left.

The 4th-ranked Women's I boat. Fellow Ephs Catherine and Maggie are 2nd and 4th from right.

i meet bill gates

2009-06-13T10:22:00.006+01:00

Bill and Melinda Gates were in Cambridge yesterday to receive honorary degrees, and they generously gave most of their morning to a Q and A session with about 200 Gates Scholars. The whole affair was organized almost down to the minute and had the feel of a protocol-laden diplomatic reception. Prior to the Q and A session, those of us on the Scholars Council were lucky enough to have about 15 minutes of mingling time with the Gates in a separate room. At one point we were standing in two circles, one around each of them, and I was in a position to hear both conversations. Bill was holding forth to me and a few others about the most effective treatments for malaria, while Melinda asked questions about life at Cambridge and whether we identified more with our colleges or as Gates Scholars. I thought it was an interesting testimony to their yin-and-yang approach to the foundation, which would come out in the Q and A session to come. Then there was a group photo, which I'll hopefully be able to post once I get it (we weren't allowed to bring our own cameras to any part of the event).

I joked to one of the Council members that it would probably be the only time in most of our lives when we would cause a hush to fall over a crowded room, but that's exactly what happened as we took our seats at the front of the hall a few minutes before the Gates arrived. They both gave a brief introduction to the work of their foundation, with Melinda expanding on their philosophy that "all lives have equal value" and Bill giving a rather abstract, Buffett-esque reflection on capitalism, wealth, and the failure of the market to account for the interests of the poor in medical research. Then they began taking pre-selected questions from Scholars in the audience. The first had to do with how Bill identifies which new technologies have the most promise. With a hat tip to luck, uncertainty and randomness, he predicted that robotics will be the next big, lifestyle-changing technological frontier.

The most interesting part of the exchange, though, was on the subject of their philanthropic work. Somebody noted that Warren Buffett wants his donation to the Gates foundation to be entirely spent down within 10 years of his death, and asked if the Gates would like their Foundation to live perpetually on an endowment or be spent down in the same way. Melinda was very adamant that they don't want the Foundation to live forever, in part because they don't know if their priorities will still make sense in a hundred years time. She then delivered the zinger of the day: "who knows what the big problems will be in 100 years-- maybe it will be climate change, maybe it'll be something the robots are doing."

Bill Gates strikes me as a hardcore utilitarian, and he said the new initiatives they consider is evaluated against the opportunity cost of their bread-and-butter vaccination work, which saves lives at the rate of about $2,000 per person. Of course, that spurred a lot of later discussion--mostly of the lighthearted-but-with-sober-undertones variety--among the Scholars about the tradeoff between funding our studies and saving children's lives. My living allowance alone, about £9,000, could have saved 6 or 7 kids, to say nothing of my tuition and fees. Of course, this kind of brutal analysis can be applied to just about anything, and you can very quickly destroy the rationale for everything you use money for that's not writing a check to UNICEF. (This is part of the reason I'm not a utilitarian.) I'm not convinced that Bill Gates personally believes the scholarship to be a good tradeoff, and he conceded that it's about the only thing that they do without a quantifiable impact.

It also occurred to me that the Gates Foundation is perhaps the closest thing a large, rich-world institution can get to being a "Searcher" in the Bill Easterly terminology of Planners vs. Searchers. Beyond keeping to their focal areas of global health, development and education, I really don't sense any methodological or ideological commitments. Melinda spoke to the Foundation's willingness to make risky bets, seemingly referencing a remark she made earlier about how Bill "bet the company" on Windows. (She worked for Microsoft before they were married.) One of the lesser-known aspects of their philanthropy is $100,000 micro-grants to scientists pursuing unproven avenues of research, which allow those scientists to see if the research is promising enough to seek bigger funding from other sources. According to Bill, if even one of their reviewers rates a research proposal as his or her favorite it gets funded, no questions asked. I think they are genuinely focused on what works, constantly on the lookout for innovative new ideas, and guided by the evidence. Bill Gates' thought process may sound rather bloodless, but it sure as hell works: the ruthless discipline that made him the world's richest man is now being turned against the problems facing the world's poor. If I were malaria, I'd be scared.

easter term dispatches

2009-06-04T09:26:00.005+01:00

I meet Bill Gates Sr. Bill Gates père made his annual trip to Cambridge this week and addressed 140+ Gates Scholars following (surprise!) a big dinner at Wolfson College. He’s on the left in the slightly blurry shot above, along with the president of the Gates Scholars Society and the Vice-Chancellor of the University. (As an aside, the “Vice” part of her title is just a technicality; the official Chancellor is Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, who has little involvement with the day-to-day administration of the University.)

The members of the Scholars Council were also invited to a luncheon with Mr. Gates and the other Trustees, but the seating arrangement and the late arrival of the VIPs conspired to prevent me from actually talking to him. Fortunately, he also attended a symposium in the Gates Room where a few scholars presented their research, and I managed to snag about 45 seconds of conversation during one of the breaks. It was about enough time to thank him for the note he sent me back in November and ask him a question about the Gates Foundation’s advocacy work in DC. We were standing, somewhat awkwardly, near one of the Gates Room’s two Macs. If it ever bothered him, he must be over it by now. He’s a giant of a man—I had to tilt my head upward at a pretty significant angle to make conversation—and at 83, he shows no sign of slowing down his activities with his son’s philanthropies.

The formal hall scoreboard. Following the brouhaha over my post about Cameroonian English, it was nice to see one of my blog entries get picked up in a friendlier environment. I just discovered that my “Ode to Formal Hall” was excerpted several months back on this website, which advocates for greater adoption of Oxbridge-style college systems at universities.

At the time I wrote that ode I had six college formals under my belt, and though I never had a numeral target, I’m proud (??) to report that I now have 18 conquests: Emmanuel, Peterhouse, Churchill, Christ’s, Trinity, Newnham, Homerton, Hughes Hall, Pembroke, Queen’s, Robinson, Magdalene, St. John’s, Gonville and Caius, Jesus, Darwin, Corpus Christi, and Selwyn. An MBA friend of mine is close to hitting up all 31 this year, but I don't know of anyone else who's in the same range.

During the above-mentioned luncheon with Bill Gates Sr., I was seated next to the provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust, who is basically the Cambridge-based CEO of the Trust. He also happens to be the president of Wolfson College, where the larger dinner with Bill Gates Sr. was held. He’s retiring next year and told me that “you have no idea how disconcerting it is to see your job advertised in the newspaper.” At one point during lunch the topic of my proclivity for formal halls came up, and I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if the Wolfson dinner should count, as it wasn’t technically a college formal. He told me, with a chuckle, that he didn’t think it should count and that I would have to come back another time. So I guess I have to take a ruling from the president of the college concerned as definitive, and the scoreboard remains at 18.

i am a cliché: an essay in two parts

2009-05-28T10:37:00.005+01:00

Part 1: WWOOFing. "Man, we are such clichés!" proclaimed an e-mail I received from my friend Stella, who was a member of TeamParis and ¡TeamSevilla! She was referencing this New York Times article about "a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer." She and I are both contemplating spending a few extra weeks in Europe after we leave Cambridge under a program called WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), which enables volunteers to work on organic farms in exchange for free room and board. I currently have WWOOFing plans in the works for Scotland and France in July. I'm motivated less by disdain for industrial agriculture than by the opportunity to stay in Europe longer on a small budget, to practice my language skills and experience these countries outside of tourist hubs, and to live out my longstanding Tolstoy-influenced farmer fantasy. "If WWOOFing in America has 'as much bohemian cachet as backpacking through Europe,'" Stella observed, quoting the article, "then we must be getting cachet up the wazoo for doing it in Europe!"

That article alone would have been enough to make me feel like a cliché, but it came right on the heels of further evidence that farming is all the rage among the bohemian liberal arts crowd. Last week I had a phone date with my former executive director from Alaska. She had recently visited her alma mater, a liberal arts college in the Midwest, to deliver a talk to students in her capacity as a distinguished alum. I don't remember if she told me this in response to my plans or if she volunteered this information, but apparently tons of the students she met are planning on putting down their books and taking up their hoes this summer too. And this is at a college where, I am told, odors from a nearby turkey farm waft through campus with some regularity--not the ideal environment to inspire would-be farmers, I'd think.

Interestingly, both my former boss and the Times article point to a common culprit for this surge of agricultural enthusiasm among the youngsters: Michael Pollan. He wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma, which certainly ranks among my favorite books in recent memory. Pollan's philosophy on food includes eating more plants; avoiding processed stuff (or as he calls it, "edible foodlike substances") to the maximum extent possible; eating locally and seasonally as possible; and eating animals that lived in something approximating a natural environment, as opposed to a factory where they live in cages while being force-fed government-subsized corn. (It's not just what you eat that matters, Pollan says, but what "what you eat" ate.) Pollan's gift for storytelling and ability to weave together politics, ecology, and personal morality make him the kind of author who inspires disciples and not just readers. So maybe I am a cliché, but hopefully I am also part of a groundswell in a generation that will demand that we develop a more environmentally sane system with which to feed ourselves.

Part 2: Stuff White People Like. It has probably not escaped your notice that I am white, in the demographic sense of the term. But apparently I am really, really white in the cultural sense of the term, as described by that great arbiter of what constitutes urban, upper-middle-class white culture: stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

You already know I am thinking of joining those corporate ag-hating liberal arts students on their unpaid stints on organic farms, but consider also that I am studying abroad for my graduate school education in a country with free health care and lots of opportunities for traveling. Prior to coming here, I worked as an advocate for low-income people at a non-profit organization in Alaska. In my free time I hung out with my gay friends, ordered movies from Netflix, watched the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, hosted dinner parties, tried learning Spanish, and spent time outdoors with my gear from REI and LL Bean. Also while in Alaska, I dated a half-Asian woman with a gifted, multilingual child; we watched Juno and attended an ugly sweater party together, and had a difficult breakup. Oh, and did I mention my love for coffee, local beers, wine, hummus and sushi?

If this has offended you, I apologize--but that would suggest that maybe you're a "white person" too.

proof i was in cameroon!

2009-05-24T21:37:00.005+01:00

I'm happy to report that the photographic record of my trip to Cameroon wasn't completely lost in the mugging on that last night in Douala. As I mentioned, Kate didn't really take any pictures (with the exception of a couple post-mugging shots at our guesthouse), but Lisa, a Peace Corps volunteer and one of our Mt. Cameroon hiking companions, did get some group pictures during our trek. I shamelessly copied them from Facebook, so here you go: rare, long-lost photographic evidence of my time in Africa:

Me, Kate, Elyse, and Lisa, pre-climb in the town of Buea. Mt. Cameroon, half covered in clouds, is behind us.

Day 1, partway up, post-rainstorm. Buea is visible in the background, and on a clear day you could see Douala in the distance off the top-left corner of the picture. We did see the city lights from our first cabin.

The team at 4,095 meters! Kate had originally wanted to perform one of her signature cartweels to celebrate at the top, but the small space at the summit, preciptious drops on all sides, high winds, and stupefying lack of oxygen recommended otherwise.

here come the agnostics!

2009-05-19T13:38:00.004+01:00

Anytime I walk into a bookstore, there are three sections that have a kind of gravitational pull on me: travel, politics, and religion. (Sorry, literature. Sorry, science.) The travel section is always a happy place, but I've found myself increasingly turned off by the shrill debates in the latter two sections. You can tell just from perusing the covers that the politics section consists mainly of two factions of people calling each other stupid--think of the Ann Coulters vs. the Al Frankens. In the religion section, outside of the study Bibles and scores of fluffy spiritual books, you have more of the same. On the one side we have the so-called "new atheists," headlined by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and on the other side, we have a new cottage industry of pro-religion writers proclaiming the stupidity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. There's always been lots of money in God; now there's money in godlessness too.

Nowadays if people ask me about my religious stance, I usually describe myself as "culturally Catholic and metaphysically agnostic," meaning that I still identify with my Catholic upbringing but can't honestly sign onto belief in anything supernatural. Even in my uber-Catholic days, I think it was always the ethical dimension-- the social Gospel, Dorothy Day, St. Francis -- that kept me going. And let's be honest, the politicization of Christianity by the Republican Party has put a real bad taste in my mouth. And I'm the first person to point out that the fact that hypocritical politicians want to legislate sexual morality while approving government-administered torture has no bearing on whether God exists or Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead.

That said, I don't put much stock in the "new atheist" crowd either. The main complaint of Harris and Hitchens, at least, seems to be that religion makes people do awful things to each other: see 9/11, the Inquisition, etc. But I think if human beings had evolved to be irreligious instead of religious, we would still be killing and be doing bad things to each other. We would just find non-religious justifications for doing so. (When I made this point to my brother, he directed me to this awesome South Park segment. Other than some blood & guts there's nothing too offensive...unless you happen to be an atheist who takes him/herself far too seriously.) The real problem, I think, is the human lust for power, property, and control; religion has just served as the most convenient justifying idiom for most of history.

So when I wandered into the Cambridge Borders recently, I was amazed to find a third strand emerging in the debate: the agnostics are in on this book-writing thing too! Books such as In God We Doubt and After Atheism are offering up a fascinating propsect: agnosticism as a defensible position, rather than a refuge for those wishy-washy folks who won't commit one way or the other. I've often felt like religious and irreligious folks alike treat me as if where I am now is just some kind of "phase" or transitional state, and before too long I'm going to come down on one side (theirs, naturally) over the other.

But what if agnosticism can be a home, and not just a hotel room? In this column Mark Vernon, the author of After Atheism, proposes that one can be a "principled agnostic." He makes the distinction between (i) "whatever" agnostics, who don't really care for the debate; (ii)atheistically-inclined agnostics, who tend toward nonbelief but think we can't know for sure that God doesn't exist; and (iii) religiously-inclined agnostics, who don't believe that settling the God question is within our capabilities but see something of value in religiosity. Vernon thinks that "principled agnosticism" makes the most sense for those in camp (iii); personally, I tend to waver between (ii) and (iii). Unlike Vernon, I don't think religion deserves credit for Bach or benevolence any more than it deserves blame for terrorism and war.

I doubt that the "principled agnostics" are going to win lots of converts. But perhaps they can rescue us from this inane debate between the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens camp and their critics? Science only knows.

how they learn us at cambridge

2009-05-12T17:10:00.005+01:00

Way back in early October, 54 bright-eyed Development Studies grad students packed into a seminar room to meet and mingle with our new professors and classmates. I don't remember much of what the profs said during their remarks, but I do distinctly remember an acerbic lecturer warning us not to expect any "spoon-feeding." I doubt anyone was expecting to be spoon-fed, and his comment might put a harsher spin on the teaching system here than it deserves. However, I've come to realize that the spirit of his remark runs through many of the things that make Cambridge different from my experience of higher education in the U.S. It would be an exaggeration to say there's a "sink or swim" mentality, and the atmosphere is collegial, but it's true that you're on your own here to a much larger extent than I've seen back on my side of the pond.

Back-loading. There's tons of variation among courses--as I will discuss later--but in most cases it's possible to go an alarmingly long time in Cambridge without doing any work. Most of the Development Studies classes here are year-long, and I didn't submit a single thing that counted for a grade until January. One of my classes is evaluated solely by means of a 3-hour exam later this month. (No pressure or anything!)

The philosophy seems to be that as a student, you're responsible for disciplining yourself to work even when deadlines are very distant. This has suited me just fine, as I can generally keep my procrastination under control, but for the undisciplined it poses major problems. Largely gone are concepts like midterms or problem sets, which provide incentives to study consistently and, if needed, a signal that one needs to ratchet things up before it's too late. We do have unassessed essays for some classes, with "supervisions" conducted by PhD students, but these do not necessarily resemble the work on which we'll later be evaluated. During a recent round of gathering student opinions in my capacity as student rep, the lack of feedback was the new #1 complaint, especially among non-native English speakers. To be fair, though, I'm not sure how much of this is a function of Cambridge vs. the U.S. and how much is a function of grad school vs. undergrad.

Resources. One of the starkest differences between small, uber-friendly Williams and big, impersonal Cambridge is the availability and ease of access of academic resources. It takes a certain amount of forethought, savvy, and competitive instinct to get the books you need here. At Williams I remember getting reading lists for my classes, buying the appropriate books at the bookstore, and receiving chapter- or article-length readings bundled together in course packets. Nobody seems to buy their books here--it would break the bank if I tried--and we don't get those handily photocopied course packets. You get the reading list, which often contains more readings than any human being could possibly digest in a year, and then it's you and the library.

Or should I say, libraries. This year I have used the Mill Lane library (Development Studies and a few related fields are housed there), my college library, my friends' college libraries (thanks guys!), the economics library, the geography library, the law library, and (cue dread-inspiring music) the University Library. The absurd monstrosity-- or is it a monstrous absurdity?-- that is the UL probably deserves an entry of its own sometime, so I won't get into detail now, but let's just say that any day in which I learn that a needed book is only at the UL and can only be used in the UL reading room is a sad, sad day.

I should probably mention at this point that there is little to no communication between the professors assigning the readings and the librarians selecting, buying, and stocking the books. The Mill Lane Library by now has many copies of the most sought-after Development Studies books, and usually one copy is not allowed to be checked out, so if you come after the stampede you're not completely screwed. Cambridge is huge enough that the risk of a book on a reading list being completely unavailable are practically nil. But you might have to bike across town to an obscure departmental library, or get your bud to check it out from his college.

Of course, there are mitigating factors and coping strategies. Nobody does all the reading, and for essay-based classes you can do well by intensively reading on your essay topics and getting a glancing familiarity with the other pockets of literature. For exam-based classes, any sane person gets in a reading group to benefit from some division of labor.

Anonymity, Accountability, and Feedback. My experience in the U.S. was that professors generally know the identity of the students whose essays and exams they were grading, and professors have a huge amount of discretion in assigning grades. The system could hardly be more different here. We submit all of our work anonymously, marked only with an individual student number; each exam or paper is graded (or "marked" as they say) by the instructor and a second "reader" whose identity we never know. All marking happens at the end of the year, so in many cases several months elapse between submission deadlines and marking. Somewhat irritatingly, we don't even get marks on individual exams or essays--students receive only an average mark for each class. And to top all of that off, all of the exam and essay questions, student responses, and marks for the entire year get shipped off to be scrutinized by an "external examiner" at a peer institution, such as a Development Studies program at Oxford or Sussex.

I can see the merits of this system: more objective evaluation of student work, greater uniformity of standards, external accountability for the department. Because this system severs the link between the professor-student relationship and grading, I imagine there's less grade inflation here, though I've never really been persuaded that grade inflation is such a big problem. Yet I think there's probably too little mercy mixed in with the justice. Sometimes a professor might have knowledge of mitigating circumstances, and I don't know that the occasional bit of accommodation for that is always a bad thing. The system also seems to suffer from a gaping lack of transparency--which is a troubling hallmark of this university at every level.

Variation among courses. There are huge differences in work routine and lifestyle between PhD students (who often have something that approximates a 9-to-5 job) and MPhil students such as yours truly. There is also tremendous variation between MPhil courses. Some require dissertations; some don't. Some treat the dissertation like a year-long class; others block off a few months at the end just for dissertation writing. Some are wrapped up by June; others go to September. Some have year-long classes; others have different modules each term.

The upshot is that there is much less of a shared academic experience across different programs. There have been times when I've been crazed with deadlines and some of my friends have been sitting pretty, and vice versa. On balance, I think this kind of variation is probably a good thing--let a thousand flowers bloom. I do think it militates against a broader community spirit, though. It's one of the reasons why Cambridge occasionally makes me think of the way some of my friends who have lived there describe New York City: vibrant and active, with limitless social activities, but with a strong undertow of isolation.

I don't know how all of this sounds to outsiders, and I'm sure a lot of what I've described seems crazy. Now that I've been here for a while, I realize more and more that in a multilayered, complicated and crusty place like Cambridge, there is often a strange rationality to the absurdity. If you bang your head against the wall enough, you can reach a point of acceptance and even appreciation for the odd ways of Cambridge.

life, smørrebrød, and the pursuit of happiness in denmark

2009-05-05T11:23:00.009+01:00

Some pictures and musings from my time in Denmark with my good Gates friend Talia. It was likely my last weekend jaunt to a new country, sad to say, as I reach the limits of Papa Gates' munificence.

Danish Patriotism. From my limited pre-trip reading about Denmark, I learned about the Danes' remarkable levels of patriotism, marked above all by gratuitous flag-waving. The Danes did not disappoint. As we exited customs and immigration at the Copenhagen airport, there was a throng of people awaiting their friends and relatives, about half of them with Denmark's red and white banner in hand. In one of Copenhagen's spacious city parks, we spotted a group of young adults lounging with an evenly spaced phalanx of Danish flags around their picnic blankets. City buses and street vendors, like the one pictured above, also show their national spirit. (By the way, just to the left of the bushes in the picture you can see Denmark's most undeservedly famous landmark, the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbor.)

I tried to figure out what accounts for the Danes' patriotic streak, and I wonder if it has something to do with the country's small size and its tendency to be thrashed around by the broader currents of European history. One of many fascinating episodes was an early and short-lived experiment with Enlightenment-style political liberties, led by King Christian VII's personal physician, who made himself de facto ruler as his boss descended into schizophrenia. During World War II, Denmark folded relatively quickly in the face of a Nazi invasion, but the resistence movement did manage to smuggle 90% of Danish Jews into Sweden. Today the country continues trying to find its voice among the much bigger players of the European Union.

Minor Obsessions. Talia's petty obsession for the weekend was sandwiches (more on those later); mine was spotting Sweden. Copenhagen is at the far eastern end of Denmark, separated from the Swedish city of Malmö by a narrow channel. We got a good long look at Malmö from the air during an aborted landing, a go-around and a successful landing, but I wanted to see it from the ground. This isn't as easy as that map might suggest, but I did spot Sweden from a train station and then from the clock tower of Copenhagen's city hall, pictured above. Sweden now joins Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Jordan among the ranks of countries I haven't actually visited, but have looked into while standing in another country.

Damn Hippies! During our meandering walking tour of Copenhagen, we happened on a ragtag protest proceeding through the streets. Most of the protestors were disaffected-looking young men, and they paraded behind a tractor rigged up with a stage and a sound system. It didn't take us long for us to figure out what they were after–legalization of marijuana–and where they were going–the same place we were headed, the bizarre social experiment known as Christiania.

In 1971, a previous generation of disaffected young adults broke into an abandoned army barracks in Copenhagen and declared it to be the "free state" of Christiania. Politically and culturally, the founders of Christiania were pretty similar to the hippie counterculture in the United States. Christiania continues to exist in a strange quasi-legal limbo: its residents pay no taxes and have created their own currency, but Christiania's streets are regularly patrolled by police, mostly to crack down on drugs. Mainstream Danish attitudes seem to vary from mild resentment to amused acceptance, but it's clear that despite calls to "normalize" Christiania, no government has yet found it to be in its political interest to forcibly dismantle it. Talia and I spent a little bit of time walking around and checking out Christiania's small shops and street art (taking pictures inside is forbidden).

My visceral reaction to Christiania was very negative, and its intensity surprised me. On paper, my politics probably look a lot like those of a Christianian: I'm all for decriminalizing pot (though I won't touch it myself), I'm for peace and environmental protection and all that hippie stuff. Resentment of authority is part of my makeup. However, I found the smug self-righteousness of Christiania to be too much. It made me reflect on what I would have been like if I'd grown up in the '60s. I suspect that I would have hated Nixon and the war, and idolized MLK and RFK, but there's no chance that I would have been a flower child. I also wonder if this is part of what turned me on to Obama- in some ways I see the same combination of liberal politics and conservative temperament in myself that I see in him.

So why are they so happy? I can't say that I discovered the secret to the Danes' remarkable levels of happiness, but I did collect some clues. The pastries can't hurt, and neither can smørrebrød, the popular open-faced sandwich composed of a slice of rye bread and all manner of delicious toppings. (Above, I prepare to chow down on three smørrebrød with curried herring, shrimp and eggs, and bacon with a liver-mushroom paste. The Danes may be known for being happy, but they're not particularly famous for being healthy; Lonely Planet goes so far as to say they "make the Scots look like Jane Fonda!")

On a more serious note, Talia and I both observed a quality of Danish life that is rare in cities of Copenhagen's size: trust. Even in Denmark's largest city, people regularly leave bikes unattended and unlocked. Most restaurants offer outdoor dining, but since it's still a little chilly at this time of year, they also provide all patrons with blankets, as you can see in the picture above. Running off with a blanket or two would be child's play, but there's no indication that anyone does. There is a downside to this kind of social cohesion–consider the Danes' reputation for xenophobia–but I was struck by the realization that, if I lived in Copenhagen, I don't think I would have a whole lot to worry about.

hi, i'm majoring in water

2009-04-30T09:37:00.006+01:00

Earlier this week a professor who taught at Williams while I was there (I never had him) wrote a provocative takedown of graduate education in the New York Times. I've written before about some of the problems he identifies-- hyper-specialization being the main one.

I mostly agree with Taylor's diagnosis of the problems, though I think they're less relevant to the hard sciences and than they are to the humanities and the social sciences, and they don't really apply to professional schools (medicine, law, etc.). However, most of his solutions strike me as wishful thinking. I would love to see tenure go away, but it seems like one of those institutions, like the Electoral College, that only a major crisis with dislodge. I think he also vastly overestimates the potential of teleconferencing and the internet; there are just too many advantages to flesh-and-blood interaction. Solutions 4 and 5, modernizing the dissertation and preparing grad students for something other than academic self-replication, seem like the most realistic ideas and the ones most likely to make an immediate difference.

It also occurred to me that we still need increasing specialization; it just can't be the be-all and end-all. To some extent, creeping hyper-specialization is an inevitable consequence of the expansion of human knowledge. John Maynard Keynes engaged with a much wider swath of economics than contemporary economists (with a few exceptions) partly because there was a lot less economics to know back then. I think what academia needs are better and more creative ways of managing the necessary tension between interdisciplinarity and specialization. Our stodgy system of rigid departments and neglected interdisciplinary programs goes too far in one direction; I suspect Mark Taylor's "complex adaptive network" with "problem-focused programs" goes too far the other way.

Tomorrow I'm off to my weekend in Copenhagen, or as the Danes call it, København. I've read that the Danes are the happiest people on Earth, according to survey data, so maybe I'll learn a thing or two about what makes them so cheery. I bet it's the pastries. Støked!

a response to my critics re: "not the queen's english"

2009-04-25T13:26:00.004+01:00

I had intended to suspend the blogging and focus on schoolwork for a while, but it's come to my attention that my "not the queen's english" entry was reposted on a Cameroonian website and has generated a lot of pretty heated commentary- including accusations of ignorance/stupidity/idiocy (which I don't really mind) and racism (which I do). Some of the commenters expressed hope that I would respond, so here I am.

First of all, I want to assure my critics that I intended no disrespect toward Cameroonians, and I regret that I have offended some readers. I believe that many of the people who wrote comments have misunderstood the spirit and intent of my post. But taken out of context, I can see how what I wrote in those few paragraphs came across as inflammatory and condescending. There are also parts of the post, the "Special English" paragraph in particular, that in retrospect I should have worded differently.

The reference to the "Queen's English" was obviously the source of a lot of misunderstanding (see posts by Afrika/Unitedstatesofafrica, Samm, oyibbao, and Atanga Belmondo). As commenter Steve Jackson pointed out, I am not British, but American, so I myself do not speak "the Queen's English" either. I meant "Queen's English" as an ironic rhetorical device, not as any kind of statement of how people "should" speak, and certainly not as any kind of statement of a pro-colonial attitude. I do not see language in terms of better or worse, right or wrong. I agree with commenter oyibaao's observation "language is a means of communication that is influenced by time, place, and events." To borrow a phrase from the Bible, language is for people, not people for language.

So why would I write about differences in the way Cameroonians and I use English? As commenters Caitlin, Ras Tuge, Steve Jackson, Le Chiffre, and facter all surmised, the main motivation was humor. I write about this stuff because it’s funny—not in the sense that I am mocking Cameroonians or viewing myself as better than they are, but because language differences are one of the great sources of humor in travel. On this blog, I have written about the differences between British and American English here, here, and here, and about New Zealanders' accents here. In my previous blog, I wrote about differences in the way Americans and Filipinos use English. I was no more trying to insult Cameroonians in the post under discussion than I was trying to insult Brits, New Zealanders, and Filipinos in those other posts. If more Cameroonians had a chance to visit Britain or the U.S.—and I regret that so few have that opportunity—there would be things they would find funny about the way Brits and Americans speak. And I can assure you, Reex Flames, that during 3 weeks in Cameroon I was the subject of plenty of mockery because of my speech, dress, and all of the other things that make us different from each other. But I was a guest in Cameroon, so I don’t think I have any right to complain.

I think a lot of commenters missed that some of the humor was directed at me and at Americans. As commenter Caitlin correctly remarked: “To me it comes across that the author is laughing at himself for his assumption that he'll be able to communicate in an English-speaking country when in fact the type of English may not be anything like his own.” I also made reference to the “ugly American” stereotype: the tendency of Americans who speak only English to assume, absurdly, that if they just speak slowly and over-enunciate enough that non-native speakers of English will understand them. As I said, the “Special English” paragraph was not the best written, but I was merely pointing out the irony that "ugly American" English has some similarities with the version of English spoken in Anglophone Cameroon. I emphatically was not suggesting that the pace or lilt of Cameroonian English is evidence of stupidity—though I can see how it might have come across that way in the original post. (In fact, I was grateful that people spoke English slowly to me so that I had a chance of understanding them.) Just speaking for myself and my own background, I am glad that, as commenter facter put it, we Americans “can joke about ourselves.”

I wanted to highlight the excellent point made in different ways by Naneh, Reex Flames, nadine, and routine, about the multilingualism of Cameroonians. I came away impressed by how many languages Cameroonians speak, especially because I come from a culture that (sadly) does not put much value on learning other people's languages. I am a little bit embarassed that I only speak English fluently, though I have enough French, Spanish, and Tagalog to get by. The average Cameroonian is far ahead of me on language abilities.

I also appreciated Papa Mama's point (even if it was made in a sarcastic way) about the internet leveling the playing field between people in different parts of the world. Papa Mama points out that the internet enables Europeans and Americans to be exposed to the thoughts of Africans. To that I say, amen and hallelujah. I am grateful that we are able to have this dialogue, which in earlier times would have been impossible, and I hope that we will be able to learn something from it.

Finally, I strongly object to the insinuations made by Reex Flames (for which, to be fair, Reex Flames later apologized) and Unitedstatesofafrica that I went to Cameroon with fantasies of “helping” or “making a difference” by bringing the light of my Euro-American brilliance to the Africans. If you read more of my blog or talked to me about development efforts, you would know that I am very skeptical of arrogant Western attitudes about helping lower-income countries. My motivations for traveling were to learn about Cameroon and Africa, and to spend time with a special someone. As a few commenters pointed out, I was writing for my friends and family, and I had no intention of offending a whole bunch of Cameroonians. But since I did, I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify and continue the discussion.

one more

2009-04-22T20:37:00.002+01:00

Kate has posted her final round-up on our trip. I second her assessment that our blogs complement each other well. (That just sounded pretty self-congratulatory, didn't it?) It seems that I pick up stuff she doesn't even notice anymore, such as the minutia of Cameroonian culture and hygiene, and she picks up stuff I don't notice anymore, like how it feels to climb a reeeeally big mountain. Unfortunately our time as a traveling duo is over for now... though there are other potential plans in the hopper!

every country by 35?

2009-04-21T22:02:00.002+01:00

If you think I'm a voracious traveler, check out this guy. But hey, I've been to Chad and he hasn't, so I've got something on him!

And now, back to my regularly scheduled reign of terror.

closing thoughts on cameroon: mamoudou's question

2009-04-19T14:53:00.002+01:00

This will be my last post on Cameroon, apart from directing you to Kate’s posts on our trip, which she is now unrolling. In fact I’m going to take a short break from the blog altogether, since my adventures have put me in a bad spot with schoolwork and deadlines. I am embarking on what I only half-jokingly refer to as a 2-week “reign of terror”—an all-out academic effort that will consume most of my waking hours. On the bright side, next time you hear from me I will likely be enjoying a (hopefully well-deserved) weekend in Copenhagen. You could say that the Danish capital is in some ways the anti-Douala: clean, safe, sedate.

I cannot for the life of me remember who told me this, but somebody remarked recently that the worst tragedy of global poverty is that it’s an enormous waste of human talent. Warren Buffett, of all people, has made a similar point: “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you'll find out how much this talent is going to product in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling thirty years later.” I’m not sure that wasted talent is the worst thing, but Cameroon did introduce me to several amazing human beings who are being blocked and held back from their full potential by the poverty of their country. It’s stories like theirs that help keep me motivated to do what I’m doing, even in the midst of an academic reign of terror.

One was John, a young teacher in Kate’s town. John is very smart (his proficient English is self-taught, from a dictionary no less), quietly determined, and wise beyond his years. He’s exactly the kind of male role model you’d want for kids, boys especially. He’s visibly impatient with the corruption and inefficiency that are rife in Cameroon. I learned that he would like to attend a three-year teacher’s college in Maroua, which would open up lots of career opportunities for him, but it’s not affordable. I asked him how much it would cost, and I felt a lump in my throat as I realized that the enrollment fee and 3 years' tuition comes to approximately the amount of CFA that I withdrew on my first trip to the ATM in N’Djaména.

I also met Mamoudou, who runs a small development NGO (non-governmental organization) and is of Kate’s local “counterparts,” in Peace Corps lingo. He won funding from the U.S. embassy through an extremely competitive process to provide fuel-efficent stoves to local households. It’s the kind of effort that is needed on a larger scale to help curb deforestation and desertification in Cameroon’s North. Mamoudou has lots of ambitions, but the funding is hard to come by. As we sat in his modest home, he told me about what he was doing, and then he turned the tables on me. Hearing that I am in a Development Studies program, he asked me for my definition of development. Wow, I thought—this guy goes right for the jugular. Later, he asked what I was going to bring back with me from Cameroon. Among other things, I told him that I was going to tell people about him. He struck me as the epitome of a “Searcher” in Bill Easterly’s terminology—the kind of grassroots innovator who is needed for real development to happen.

In studying development it’s easy to fall into the trap of “problematizing” the people development is supposed to benefit—in other words, seeing them in terms of unmet needs and deprivations rather than possibilities. John and Mamoudou are salutary reminders of why that mindset doesn’t work. Yet it’s also impossible for me not to feel a little bit of grief for the thwarted ambitions of the world’s Johns and Mamoudous. I’ve met enough gifted people in my life to know that they’re everywhere. Perhaps the best response I can think of to Mamoudou’s first question is that the task of development is to set them free.

on arguing, protocol, and nose-picking

2009-04-18T12:10:00.003+01:00

I would be slacking in my bloggy duties if I didn’t provide some kind of commentary on what I experienced of Cameroonian culture. Certain professors of mine at Cambridge would never forgive me if I didn’t preface these observations with the caveats that these are broad generalizations, that there is lots of cultural diversity within Cameroon, and wocka wocka wocka. On we go.

Confrontation. In at least one sense, Cameroon’s culture is the opposite of an Asian culture—namely its high tolerance for interpersonal conflict. I would frequently observe Cameroonians engaged in what appeared to be shouting matches, but Kate and others assured me that that’s just how they roll. A Peace Corps volunteer I met on our long train ride has taken the idea of being integré to the extreme on this score. In dealing with railroad employees, fellow passengers, and the assorted vendors and hustlers associated with the rail system, I watched him adopt the same kind of brash, confrontational, in-your-face attitude that he and other PCVs attribute to Cameroonians.

But the strangest thing about the Cameroonian approach to conflict is how quickly it can all be turned off. A Cameroonian can seem to be chewing you out one moment and acting like your best friend the next; it’s as quick as flipping a light switch. Here again, the culture seems to be the opposite of what I’ve experience of Asian cultures, in which personal slights can linger in the atmosphere for a very long time. When Kate and I arrived in Limbe, we tried to explain the location of our hotel to our cabbie—who, you should be unsurprised to hear, had never heard of said hotel. He repeatedly claimed that we would have to pay him extra because the hotel was located inside a botanic garden that charged an entrance fee; we knew that it wasn’t. We went through several rounds of him arguing with us, his face lit up with rage, interspersed with bizarrely friendly questions and commentary about the town, Kate’s post in the Northern Cameroon, and other topics.

Protocol. Cameroonians are big on protocol. This is the kind of principle that one typically discovers in the breach, and we had a couple of educational but mildly unpleasant encounters with Cameroonian protocol.

Prior to our arrival in Maroua, a northern transport hub where we spent the night of my birthday, Kate received an invitation from a fellow PCV who happens also to be a Williams grad. We were invited to share a (non-alcoholic) hot beverage, the name and significance of which I forget but which has something to do with a Muslim holiday, with the sister of the lamido from Kate’s town. A lamido is the traditional local chief in Northern Cameroon, and you can read about Kate’s fascinating run-in with the local lamido here. (I’m not really addressing gender issues in Cameroon here, primarily because Kate does a really nice job of it in her blog.) We arrived to an elaborate welcome from members of the princess’ household and then the princess herself. As we sat waiting on a mat and darkness fell, a creeping sense of unease set in. Hot-beverage-whose-name-and-significance-I-forget (HBWNASIF) doesn’t take that long to hear up; it was becoming clear that, contrary to her invitation, the princess had something fancier in mind for us. With birthday celebrating plans in the hopper, other errands to do, and an early wakeup the next morning, we were not prepared for a multi-hour commitment. Perhaps no self-respecting princess would have guests over only for HBWNASIF, and perhaps the real import of the invitation would have been something a real Cameroonian could have deciphered. We were caught completely off guard. Austin, the Williams alum PCV, extracted us from the situation with all of the diplomatic skill he could muster. The parting was friendly and Kate and Austin promised a return visit, but I worried that the incident may have set Kate father back with the lamido and his family.

A big part of Cameroonian protocol is letting people know when you’re entering their territory. Roadside ID checks are a standard part of most any bus trip, and Lonely Planet advises travelers who are going off the beaten tourist track to announce themselves to the local lamido or fon (as they are called in the South). During our biking/hiking trip on the Ring Road, Kate and I spent two nights in the village of Missaje (mee-SAH-jay), which does see a trickle of foreign tourists but is still the kind of place where two people can eat out for less than $1. By our second night, it became clear that we had been noticed. At the local watering hole, an intoxicated but well-dressed man who said he was a journalist struck up a conversation with us. He offered to present us to the local authorities. He was just looking out for us, he said, because an introduction would make things easier later on in the event that we were “subpoenaed.” He was sloshed and obviously full of shit, but the whole encounter still felt ominous. Kate calmly and politely explained that she lived in Cameroon and understood the custom, but that we were leaving first thing the next morning and it was too late at night for anything to be done in any case. He backed off—but not before obliquely slighting Kate’s character—and we finished our drinks and got out of there. To smooth things over, Kate suggested we give our journalist friend a final “greeting” before we left. He responded with extreme friendliness, as if nothing had happened. There’s that on/off switch again.

Just for Fun. On a lighter note, my picks for:

Grossest Cameroonian habit. Flagrant, public nose picking. And sometimes eating.
Strangest appropriation of Western food. Spaghetti omelets, which are on offer at omelet shacks in most sizeable towns.
Best way to get tipsy while meeting your Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin C. Top Pamplemousse (grapefruit soda) with whisky (sold in 50 mL plastic sachets).
Funniest placenames. Bum and Dumbo, both in Anglophone Cameroon.
Best Cameroonian Slogan. “On est ensemble”—roughly translated as, “we’re in this together,” and the best way to signal solidarity with your travel mate in the event of drunk journalists, biting ants, muggings, derailed invitations to drink HBWNASIF, and other mishaps.

the joys (and otherwise) of cameroonian transportation

2009-04-15T21:12:00.001+01:00

This is one of those posts that really would have benefited from pictures, so y’all will have to use your imaginations for this one. Developing country transportation is a surefire source of aggravation, terror, and hilarity, and Cameroon’s system gave us plenty of all three.

Train. Unless you’re up for days in a bus on awful roads—and you really don’t want that, as I will explain below—the overnight train from Ngaoundéré to Yaoundé is the only way to get from Cameroon’s North to the rest of the country. Here’s that map again to refresh your memory:

If all goes according to plan—which it usually doesn’t—the trip is supposed to take about 16 hours, lasting from 6 pm until 10 the following morning. The freight trains that use the same tracks are notorious for derailing, which means delays for the passenger trains. That didn’t happen to us, but our train did grind to a halt around 4 a.m. because, we were told, the engine gave out. I went back to sleep, hoping that when I woke up things would be moving again… but well after 7 am we were still sitting in the same place, waiting for a replacement engine. We finally rolled into Yaoundé around 2:30 in the afternoon—which really isn’t all that bad, considering that trips of up to 30 hours are not unheard of. Throughout the ordeal, I marveled to myself that this is Cameroon’s Amtrak, their most sophisticated form of ground transportation, the aorta linking North and South. Yikes.

Taxi. In the North, “taxis” consist mostly of jumping on the back of a motorcycle, so we didn’t get in any bona fide yellow cabs until we reached Yaoundé. Unless you want to pay through the nose for a depo (a taxi all to yourself), you have to share a cab with other passengers, which means finding a driver who is headed roughly in the direction you want to go. A majority of the time, what happened was as follows: the driver would slow down and pull over, we would shout where we wanted to go, the driver would give us a look like it was the stupidest thing he had ever heard, and then he would speed away.

Another difference from developed-country taxis is that there is no presumption that the driver knows where your destination is, and he usually will not admit it up front if he doesn’t. On a Sunday morning in Yaoundé, after dropping in on a depressingly un-African Mass, Kate and I got in a taxi and requested the Musée Afhemi. Lonely Planet told us that the museum was located in a residential neighborhood, but it didn’t provide a precise street address. Once we were in the right area, the cabbie pulled over and described what we were looking for to a guy on the street whom he seemed to know. The man’s face lit up in recognition as he told us that there were white people “like this” while pounding a first into his open palm—a Cameroonian gesture meaning “a lot.” White people “like this”—it must be the local tourist attraction! The driver brought us to the house, we paid him, and he drove away. The whole thing felt slightly dubious, but Lonely Planet did say the museum was in an old residence, so we rang the bell. A blonde coed answered the door and, after a moment of utter bewilderment, explained that the house was full of study-abroad students from Pennsylvania. At that point Kate and I gave up on the Musée Afhemi and went for a beer at the local watering hole.

A couple of our cabbies, however, deserve a gold star. In addition to our post-mugging rescuer in Douala, a cabbie from the Anglophone town of Kumbo deserves mention. Kumbo was the jumping-off point for our mountain bike tour, and one of the Peace Corps volunteers from a neighboring village came up to lend us her bike and helmet. We met her and David, a Kumbo-based PCV and good friend of Kate’s, at the local restaurant/bar. After a meal and a few rounds of Cameroonian beer, we crammed the bike and ourselves into a taxi with a hatchback for the ride back to David’s house. In the darkness and in our beer-addled state, the helmet got left behind. The following morning, David and I started asking around among the cabbies in the central square to see if anyone had heard about the stupid foreigners who left a bike helmet in a taxi. Within two minutes, we heard a honking from behind us, as our cabbie from the previous night pulled up, helmet perched on his dashboard. David slipped him some CFA and we were ready to go.

Bus. Of all modes of transportation in Cameroon, I found the buses to be the most terrifying. The bus companies predictably cram in more people than the vehicles are designed to hold. There are almost never seatbelts, and the drivers speed along over rutted or dirt roads like madmen. (Hilariously, the inside of buses in the Anglophone region usually list rules such as “No Fighting” and “No Vomiting.”)

To make matters worse, there is a widely held Cameroonian superstition that wind blowing in one’s face causes illness, so most Cameroonian passengers will insist on closing the windows no matter how suffocating things get inside. Kate and other PCVs make a point of grabbing a seat with control over a window, and usually they can negotiate a small crack with the other passengers to let some air in. During our ride from Yaoundé to Bamenda, we sat behind a woman who had a baby and seemed especially perturbed about the whole window situation. During a rest stop she asked us, in all seriousness, “Could you please switch seats with me? I don’t want to lose my baby.”

Scariest of all, for me, was the prospect of our night bus ride from Bamenda to Limbe. Kate informed me that night bus drivers occasionally turn the headlights off—a misguided attempt to save gas?—and that as a result of such behavior, one bus in the North had rear-ended a flatbed truck, decapitating the first few rows of passengers. This was right after she booked us two seats in the second row of the bus. Thanks for that, Kate, thanks a lot. As it turned out, our night bus trip was one of the tamest I experienced. The driver had the headlights on the whole time, as far as I could tell, and there actually were (gasp!) seatbelts. I know seatbelts don’t offer much protection against decapitation, but I slept soundly.

thoughts from a mugging

2009-04-14T13:04:00.004+01:00

So I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that on my last night in Cameroon we got mugged in Douala, and I lost my camera and with it all of my pictures from the last three weeks. The good news is that Kate and I are both safe and sound, and the muggers didn't even make off with all that much loot from me.

For the morbidly curious, here's how it went down. On Saturday night I took Kate out for a celebratory thanks-for-being-my-tour-guide dinner at one of the nicer restaurants on Boulevard de la Liberté, one of Douala's main drags. Ironically, during the course of dinner we looked over and reminisced on the 200+ pictures that I had on my camera; Kate hadn't taken any pictures on hers up to that point. The restaurant was only a few blocks from where we were staying, so although it was late, we bypassed the taxis waiting out front. We were probably more than halfway home when, on one of the quieter stretches of the sidewalk, a tall and built man in sunglasses charged toward me saying "give me money" in English. I had encountered similar approaches before -- panhandlers are aggressive in Douala -- so I didn't immediately think much of it, though the man's physical presence and smart dress should have been a tipoff. He grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go, repeating his demand, while we just kept walking forward and firmly refusing. Then at least two other goons appeared from the woodwork and started grabbing me too. They didn't bother with Kate, probably because she obviously had nothing on her. Shit, I thought, this is for real. I handed the first guy my wallet as another relieved me of my watch and my camera. (Longtime readers: I'm also sad to report this was the Mongolian wallet that I won at a conference in Manila and that was later lost and returned to me by an honest cabbie.) I struggled to get out into the street as Kate pleaded "c'est tout" (that's everything), but they continued restraining me, ripping my shirt in the process. In fact I had a money belt tucked far down in my shorts, which contained my passport and a larger wad of cash than the pittance I had in my wallet. I think that one of the muggers knew or at least suspected that I had more. By then a taxi driver had seen what was going on and stopped in the street; Kate opened the door and I tore myself away from the muggers and got inside. We returned to our room for the night, shaken but unharmed.

Things certainly could have gone worse, and part of the reason they didn't was that I was prepared for the possibility of being mugged, notwithstanding our bad decision to forego the first opportunity for a taxi ride. Peace Corps volunteers are technically not supposed to go to Douala, and those who have seem to have gotten mugged with a regularity that would be comical if it wasn't so sad. I've never heard of such incidents turning violent, but they do contribute to the city's poor reputation. I should have left the camera in the room, but I was smart enough to take my driver's license out of my wallet, knowing that it would be one of the more disruptive and annoying things to have to replace. When traveling in sketchy areas I carry a wallet even when I have a money belt as a matter of policy, in order to have something to give a potential mugger.

I came away from the incident vowing that "I got mugged" would never be the first sentence or even part of the first paragraph when I tell people about my time in Africa. I had been hoping to finish the trip with a clean bill of health and safety -- perhaps to affirm my competence as a traveler, to help change people's ideas about Africa, to prove something to my parents, who knows -- and I did make it 98% of the way through without incident. It sucks to lose my pictures and a little bit of my pride, but above all I'm grateful that Kate and I came away unscathed, and I have a newfound appreciation for places where I can walk around at night without fear.

I also want to emphasize that, other than the assholes we had the misfortune of meeting on Blvd. de la Liberté, everyone else we met in Douala was welcoming, kind, and helpful. We left Limbe with the intention of arriving in Douala before nightfall, but it was already dark when we arrived in the neighborhood where we were staying, and we had some trouble finding the guesthouse. Two white people, obviously lost, with big backpacks, in downtown Douala-- not a good scenario. Yet the folks we met on the street went out of their way to help us; one woman who knew of our guesthouse walked with us until we found our destination. Many of them were clearly educated professionals. Douala's place in Cameroon is a bit like New York's in America; it's not the political capital but it is the economic powerhouse, the place you go to make something of yourself if you're strong enough not to get your ass kicked by it. The mugging makes me sad for the vast majority of decent peole in Douala more than for myself.

dispatches from the volcano

2009-04-10T18:11:00.005+01:00

Limbe, Cameroon - I'm down to about 48 hours left in Cameroon, and it feels like I've been here forever. I realized with some surprise that if I put the countries I have visited in order of the time I have spent in each one, Cameroon would come in 4th place, behind the US, the Philippines and the UK. We're wrapping up in the humid beach town of Limbe, stuffing our faces with delicious grilled fish, fried plantains, and ice cream after three challenging days of hiking on Mt. Cameroon.

By now I am used to the fact that the culture of backpacking is different in developing countries than in the US, so it came as no surprise that we had to hire a guide and porters to carry our stuff on Mt. Cameroon and that Leave No Trace would be a foreign concept. So while it was still a little difficult to be shorn of my independence and to see trash lying all over the campsites, I was more or less able to tune that part out and just enjoy the mountain.

At over 13,000 feet, Mt. Cameroon provided me with a new personal record for altitude. Happily, I had no altitude-related complaints apart from the expected shortness of breath-- though I'm sure that if I were administered a math test at the summit I would have done poorly. For me, Mt. Cameroon's most appealing feature is its spectacular variety of landscapes: its base is wrapped in rainforest mixed with the occasional cultivated plots, which gradually gives way to grassland dotted with scrubby trees. The mountain's upper ramparts are scarred with craters and lava flows from its many eruptions (most recently in 1999 and 2000), though fortunately the summit is easily accessible.

We made the trek with a couple of Kate's Peace Corps friends, in addition to our required complement of guide and porters. Apart from a few wipeouts and an attack of biting ants at our second campsite, everyone emerged from the trip unscathed and probably a few pounds lighter. I will have buckets of pictures to post once I get back. But for now, my turn at the internet cafe is running out and the grilled fish are waiting...

not the queen's english

2009-04-05T14:17:00.001+01:00

Bamenda, Cameroon – “English-speaking,” I have learned, is a relative term. When we first arrived in Bamenda six days ago, I was excited to be in a region of Cameroon where language would be less of a barrier to interacting with the locals. Then we went out to Bamenda’s most posh restaurant—we’re still talking fluorescent lighting and 3,000 CFA ($6) entrees here—and I got a reality check. After spilling some Top Pamplemousse (Cameroon’s delicious homegrown brand of grapefruit soda) on the table and floor, I went back to the bar to ask the bartender for some napkins. My initial request was met with a look of incomprehension. I gradually simplified my question to just “napkins?”, but that didn’t work either. I finally got the message through by miming a spilling beverage and wiping motion.

The majority of people in Anglophone Cameroon don’t speak the Queen’s English in their daily lives. The true lingua franca is Pidgin, a blend of English and local languages that is incomprehensible to a speaker of standard English. To give you a small taste of how different it is, prior to our mountain bike trip along the Ring Road I asked one of the local Peace Corps volunteers for a short primer on asking for directions in Pidgin. I was told that “which way to Ndu?” would be translated as “wu side Ndu de?” The word “side” does come from the English, but as you can tell, the meaning of the word is a little bit different than the sense we are used to.

That said, most of the Cameroonians I have met in this region can speak and understand English fairly well, as long as you adopt what the Peace Corps folks call “Special English.” Special English entails speaking very slowly, enunciating clearly, eliminating contractions, and introducing a bit of a lilt to one’s voice. It’s funny, but this seems to be the one place in the world where the stereotypical “ugly American” way of speaking to the locals—i.e. speaking more slowly and loudly, as if the listener were stupid—actually works. I’m told there is one volunteer in this region who has got Special English down so well that now he can’t turn it off, even when talking with other Americans. I’m pretty bad at Special English, which means that even here, Kate does most of the talking with the locals.

Some of the importations from English are downright hilarious to American ears. Whereas in the north of Cameroon I would be addressed as “nassara,” here I am “white man.” “White man” is a unisex and even a plural term; thus Kate is also “white man,” as are the two of us together. In almost every village we biked or hiked through, children would shout to us from the roadside; at one point we got shouts of “WHITE MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN” in stereo from both sides of the road, the kids apparently competing to see whose lungs could hold out the longest. Another of my favorites is “I will beat you” (that’s “beat” in the sense of “smack around,” not “defeat”), which seems to be the preferred idle threat among children and Peace Corps volunteers. Cats are referred to as “pussy,” and a kitten is “small pickin’ pussy” (“pickin” somehow means “children”). But my favorite local phrase of all is “you are welcome”—Cameroonian hospitality in action.

the crab sorceror and the human zoo

2009-03-31T10:12:00.002+01:00

Bamenda, Cameroon - Greetings from Bamenda, the heart of Anglophone Cameroon. This town is referred to as "America" by Cameroon's Peace Corps volunteers, much to the chagrin of Courtney, the PCV who is posted here. Bamenda won this moniker thanks to its relatively high level of development and the abundance of businesses named after American cities and places. There was one spot named after Boston just a few steps away from a hair "saloon" (as they call them here- no whiskey or shootouts as far as I know) called "Yankee New Look." I think the significance of that combination is probably lost on most Cameroonians. It has been quite a transition in just a few days from the desert north to the busy francophone capital city to the red-earthed, grassy, English-speaking northwest.

But for now I'm going to rewind the clock back to our time in the North, since I have quite the backlog of things to write about. During our time in Kate's town, we took an overnight side trip to Rhumsiki, a town near the Nigerian border with some gorgeous mountains. Our guide brought us in to see the Crab Sorceror, a local spiritual leader believed to have power to foretell the future. In addition to predicting the quality of the harvest for the community, he offers his services to visitors for 1,000 CFA per question. His method is as follows: he speaks to a crab in the local language, asking it to do a good job for his guests, and then poses the first question (as translated by our guide) to the crab. He places the crab in a clay pot filled with water, sand, and pieces of wood that represent the different locations of the visitors' life. The crab gets a few moments to do its thing beneath a lid, and then the crab sorceror reads off the answer from whatever the crab is up to in the pot when the lid is lifted. We didn't ask, but the crab sorceror provided enough information for us to conclude that Kate and I are going to be married, that the matter will be settled in a year and a half to two years, and that we will have a daughter, a son, and a daughter. (P.S. - Kate is not particularly eager to have kids. P.P.S. - The crab sorceror only gives out good news.)

I found our encounter with the crab sorceror noteworthy not so much for what he predicted, but for how the whole experience felt... or how it didn't feel. In my Philippines blog I complained about the tourism in some of the poorer regions of the country being a kind of "human zoo." I often encountered situations that felt undignified and degrading to the local people and cultures, driven by sheer economic desperation and the need for tourist cash. But the crab sorceror experience did not have that "human zoo" feeling to it, nor did our visit to the chief with 50 wives, even though my blog about it may have been a bit sensationalistic.

I thought about why that might be and discussed it with Kate, and she made a really good point: the local people are more in charge of their destiny here. We really are their guests, and we play by their rules. The morning after our meeting with the crab sorceror, Kate and I went on a hike around Rhumsiki, and as we were descending a woman was climbing the trail with a bundle of wood on her head. Our guide promptly ordered us to get off the trail and let her pass. We would have done it anyway, of course, but I was impressed because I would have expected/feared that we, the rich white people, would have been allowed/expected just to steamroll right over the daily life of our hosts. That's the kind of mentality that human zoos are made of, and it has been refreshingly absent during my time in Cameroon.

technicql [sic] difficulties

2009-03-27T15:26:00.004Z

Ngaoundere, Cameroon - Just a quick post to let everyone know I am alive and well, but the blogging is proving to be more difficult than anticipated. The internet is pretty slow most places, sometimes blogspot wont even load, and the keyboards are arranged a bit differently than old QWERTY. So I cant promise much of anything before I get back to the states on April 13- but there will be lots to share then. Everything so far is going great- and I got a boubou for my birthday!

marshmallow peeps, nassaras, sacred poop, and the man with 50 wives

2009-03-24T14:42:00.000Z

“Marshmallow peeps? Are you serious?” I was in my parents’ house in Danvers for a brief stopover en route to Africa, and I had to sort through and repack several boxes of stuff that I was ferrying to Kate and a Peace Corps friend who works in the same town as her. (I know, Danvers isn’t exactly on the way, but the insane rules of my frequent flier program required me to tag the US before my free flight to Africa.) Apparently living in the Sahel can make you crave weird things, because Kate’s friend’s parents had sent along several boxes of marshmallow Peeps. Knowing that the fragile sweets would be demolished in my checked luggage, I saw no better option than putting them in my carry-on bag, even though that would require me to handle my backpack with kid gloves for all of my 13 hours of flying and my 10-hour layover in Paris. Kate got an embarrassing goodie too, but I feel too much loyalty to her to divulge what it was here. Mysteriously, the peeps arrived in Africa completely intact, but the British chocolate bars that I brought along for Kate got warped during the journey.

About 60 hours after I left Cambridge for Heathrow, I landed in N’Djamena. The capital and largest city in Chad has a single runway, which is used for both civilian and military flights. As the plane descended, I was struck by how little artificial light I could see. It reminded me of the description for one of my development courses at Williams, which reflected on the image of those world-at-night maps and the contrast between the brightly lit and dark regions of the world. All of the thirty-odd passengers from my flight crowded onto a small bus on the runway, which failed to start, so a second bus showed up to bring us to the terminal. “Salut, chef” (hi, chief) said the man who checked my yellow fever vaccination certificate. The lights in the terminal flickered as I waited in line at passport control. Welcome to Africa. As promised, Kate wore her loud green pagne from International Women’s Day for my arrival. It was quite possibly the best airport reunion ever.

The following day we had a brief tour of N’Djamena with the car and driver Kate had hired, and around noon we headed for the nearby border with Cameroon. The exit process from Chad was needlessly elaborate—we were shuffled through three separate rooms and subjected to three rounds of friendly but repetitious questioning—while the lone Cameroonian official we dealt with seemed peevish. I was worried for a moment that he thought something was wrong with my visa, and then it slowly dawned on us that he just couldn’t make sense of our passports. We ended up pointing out our names, passport numbers, expiration dates, and everything else he needed to know. He recorded the information by hand in the wrinkled pages of an enormous notebook—there was nary a computer to be seen on either side of the border—and we were on our way.

Our first stop in Cameroon was Parc National de Waza, the star of Cameroon’s relatively decent national park system. With the car, driver and a local guide, we got off to an early start and looked for animals in the dusty landscape. We got a great up-close view of giraffes, damalisks, enormous pelicans and all manner of birds, and a very distant view of some elephants—not in camera range, unfortunately. During the drive back to Kate’s town, we stopped in to visit a rather unusual tourist attraction: the compound of a local chief who has 50 wives and 113 children. For a modest fee of 5,000 CFA francs (a little less than $10), one of the chief’s sons gave us a tour, and at the end we got a picture with the chief himself. Having never seen polygamy firsthand, I felt very strange shaking the hand of a man with 50 wives. In Cameroon’s mostly Muslim and animist North, polygamy is fairly commonly practiced. As the chief’s son explained, each of the fifty wives gets four “rooms”—which are really more like small, freestanding huts—including a kitchen, a bedroom, and two rooms for storing millet. In a ritual that I didn’t completely understand, even with Kate’s help filling the gaps in my French, they keep a sacred cow on the grounds whose blood and feces are smeared on 14 jars representing each of the current chief’s predecessors. Our tour guide also explained that the rules of succession dictate that the second son of the first wife take over upon the chief’s death, since custom regards the firstborn son as insufficiently intelligent for the job. (Naturally, Kate enjoys reminding me of that one.) Our driver later told us that the tour guide, being a modest and discreet man, never told us that he himself the heir apparent. The guide was clearly accustomed to foreign visitors, acknowledging the conflict between le modernisme and his way of life and also hinting that things are gradually beginning to change.

The warmth and friendliness of Africans is a well-worn stereotype and a staple of travel literature, but I have indeed found Cameroonians to be incredibly welcoming. The term for white people/foreigners here is “nassara,” and when we walk around Kate’s town we reliably hear little children shouting “Nassara! Nassara! Bonsoir!” (good evening). I sometimes refer to myself as the super-nassara to distinguish myself—unfavorably, of course—from Kate, who actually lives here, speaks the language and wears the clothes. Kate brought me around and introduced me to some of her favorite locals, including Bouba, the energetic and incredibly motivated secretary-treasurer of the microfinance institution she works with; and her tailor, who vociferously praised Kate’s virtues and promised to make the outfits for our wedding.

It was neither the first nor the last time the questions and assumptions about me and Kate were flying. I watched with fascination as Kate explained to one of her female neighbors, who is part of a polygamous household, how marriage and household affairs are different in the United States. Among other things, she described how she would choose her own husband, how there would be no dowry and both families would contribute to the wedding, and how the husband would help with shopping and chores around the house. Kate also had a bunch of Cameroonian friends over for dinner, and I appreciated the chance to be part of a small and unobtrusive object lesson in how things can be different by helping her with the cooking and cleaning.

No illnesses or serious problems with the heat to report yet—so far, so good. I find the main difficulty is that my stomach doesn’t enjoy absorbing the volume of water my body requires to stay hydrated. We have a few more days in the North before the long trip to Yaoundé, so hopefully I will have a chance to post again before then.

cambridge to cameroon

2009-03-17T23:19:00.006Z

“Given your travel schedule during term, you must have something really intense planned for the break,” a fellow Gates Scholar said to me the other night. Indeed I do. Friday night begins my first trip to Africa, which will include a very brief stay in Chad followed by three weeks in Cameroon. It’s a little embarrassing to admit around here, but I’m not going for any concrete academic, research, or professional reason—though I’d like to think it’s about something more meaningful than vacation. It will be interesting to see how the things I see will react with all the academic stuff that has been sloshing around in my brain for six months.

I have been dying to go to Africa for years. Quite coincidentally, Cameroon was my intended country for study abroad my junior year in college until my plans ran up against a parental veto. This time, it’s a confluence of opportunities that is bringing me there: lots of saved frequent flier miles from Alaska, a long break between Lent and Easter terms (someday I will share my theory about why the breaks are so long here), and the chance to travel, not with a local, but with the next best thing. Which brings us to…

Dramatis Personae. My personal Virgil—no, better make that Beatrice—for my Cameroonian adventure is Kate, a friend I met in DC a couple years ago through my former hunger fellow housemates. She is now about seven months into a Peace Corps posting in l’Extreme Nord, the northernmost region of Cameroon. Kate has been keeping a blog about her experiences, which you can check out here: http://katewithdreadlocks.blogspot.com/. I don’t know if she’s planning on posting or staying unplugged while we travel around, but perhaps if she does write you will be able to get a second (read: better-informed!) perspective on what I’m writing about.

It’s also possible that I may meet up with Will, a hunger fellow friend and my roommate/co-worker during my first stint in Alaska. He’s now a freelance writer and journalist working in Lagos, Nigeria. Depending on his work schedule he may come southeast to Cameroon and join us for the climb up Mt. Cameroon. And while I’m plugging friends’ blogs, here is Will’s: http://willconnors.com/.

The Country. Most of you have probably never given much thought to Cameroon, so here’s a really quick primer. Cameroon is located in West Africa, right near the Equator and the Atlantic Ocean. Here’s a map courtesy of Wikipedia (hint—it’s the red one):

Cameroon is often described as “Africa in Miniature” because it has a nice cross-section of the climates and peoples of the continent. The far north is semi-desert, the southeast has rainforest, the northwest is grassland, and the coast is crowned with the highest peak in West Africa, the unimaginatively named Mt. Cameroon. Cameroonians practice Christianity, Islam, and traditional religions; they work mostly as farmers, in the oil and mining industries, and in the informal sector. Cameroon has gotten more than its share of colonial oppression, having been colonized in whole or in part by Germany, the UK, and France. The French influence predominates in most of the country, two of the regions bordering Nigeria are anglophone.

The Itinerary. Lots of details will be forthcoming, of course, but here’s a general sketch of what I’m doing. I will be landing in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, which is right on the border with Cameroon. (Coincidence #2: in my 7th grade French class we were all assigned a report on a francophone country, and mine was Chad. I remember that experience primarily for introducing me to the existence of millet.) My reason for flying into N’Djamena is practical: despite being in a foreign country, it’s a whole day’s journey closer to Kate’s PC post than any international airport in Cameroon.

After crossing the border, we’re basically working our way south. Here’s a map with some placenames on it, courtesy of French wikipedia:

In the extreme north—or Cameroon’s chimney, as I occasionally think of it—we’ll visit a national park with big animals, see Kate’s town, go hiking among some freaky landforms near the Nigerian border, and celebrate my birthday in the bustling metropolis of Maroua. From there we will travel south to Ngaoundéré, briefly check out the sights there, and commence a 12-plus-hour overnight trip on a rattling train to Yaoundé, the capital. I am told that Yaoundé, owing to its altitude, enjoys relatively pleasant temperatures.

Next we make a beeline for Bamenda, in the grassy, western, English-speaking part of Cameroon, which is the jumping off point for a multi-day bike trip. We’ll be pedaling along a Ring Road from village to village, including some with great names like Wum and Bum, and crashing with Kate’s Peace Corps friends who are stationed along the way. Following that, we’ll rest our rubber legs in the beach town of Limbe, and maybe connect with Will if he makes it down, before mounting an expedition up Mt. Cameroon. I’ll wind up in Douala, Cameroon’s largest city (and by all accounts a hot, sweaty, godforsaken place) for my flight out.

Needless to say, this itinerary is subject to change.

The Weather. I haven’t spent much time in hot climates lately, so I’m a wee bit apprehensive about how my body will react. Kate informed me of her plan to bring to bring along extra Oral Rehydration Salts for my benefit. This was about as reassuring as hearing somebody say “don’t worry, there will be ambulances waiting, and the hospital is nearby!” I have also been checking in with weather.com from time to time, and one day the conditions for N’Djamena were as follows:

Can’t say I have ever seen “sand” in the forecast before.

The Mom Worry-O-Meter. I was pleased to learn that this trip actually rates lower on the Worry-O-Meter than my Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia trip. I, however, believe the travel gods are smiling on my trip, mostly because "Africa" by Toto was (rather incongrously) played at the bop after our St. Patrick's Day themed formal at Emma last night.

I don't know when my next opportunity to post will be, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's not for a week or longer. However, I'll be back with a report on the first leg of my trip as soon as I am able!

"keen" on the uk

2009-03-14T15:49:00.009Z

Occasionally I need to remind myself that here at Cambridge I am living in a fantasy world. To paraphrase/possibly butcher an old cliché, these are the good old days that I'm going to miss later on. It's like I get to relive the best features of college life, but as a full-fledged adult with a few years in the "real world" under my belt and all of the increased confidence and self-possession that comes with that.

For the most part, my preemptive nostalgia hasn't had much to do with the fact of being in England. As I have observed before, cross-cultural immersion is not the point of my being here, and it's hard to imagine myself feeling wistful at the prospect of leaving this country, in contrast to the way I felt as the end of my time in the Philippines drew near. But at a restaurant during my weekend in Seville, something strange happened. After a couple days of not hearing any British accents, I overheard a group of British tourists talking at a nearby table, and I felt a completely unexpected surge of fondness. Despite being in the Cambridge bubble, I think a little bit of this island has been seeping into me after all.

Another funny moment came a few weeks ago when I spent the day in London to get a visa for my upcoming trip to Cameroon. In the middle of a long walk to meet a friend for dinner, I had a lip-bitingly full bladder, so I stepped into a Starbucks for relief. At the back of the shop a man was waiting outside the entrance to the men's room, and I asked him, completely un-self-consciously, "Is this the queue for the toilet?" It was remarkable not just for how easily the British idiom spilled out, but also because "toilet" -- as the preferred term for restroom -- was one of the British English terms I have most vehemently resisted. (It just sounds too graphic to my American ears.) I've also become an ardent user of the word "keen," which can refer to both a state of mind ("I'm keen to go to the formal") and a personality characteristic. ("She's really keen" conjures up a generally overenthusiastic person.) Still, there are still a few areas of language where I refuse to budge; I don't think I can ever refer to the 26th letter of the alphabet as "zed," for instance.

My interactions with Brits have been almost entirely smooth, but occasionally there have been reminders that this is a different culture. Lots of these experiences have revolved around the different definitions of politeness and courtesy that operate here. To take a small example: I was at the women's rugby match versus Oxford, and I was standing at the railing in the upper stands. A woman behind me asked, "excuse me, would you like to sit down, please?" A very civilized and quintessentially British way of making such a request, and I promptly complied, but to my ears it sounded, well, passive-aggressive. Another time I had a study group meeting with some classmates in the seminar room where our class is held. One of the administrative assistants came in and said something along the lines of, "some political science people want to use this room, heh?" Again, I knew she was being polite (by not phrasing the request as a command, or even as a request for that matter), but it just rubbed me the wrong way. Why can't you just come out and say it, I wanted to ask.

I'm down to my last few days and my last essay before I check out of here for a while. Stay tuned for a preview of my upcoming Africa travels!

in (limited) praise of british food

2009-03-09T15:32:00.004Z

As my consistent readers have probably noticed, I've been really mean to the Brits on the subject of food. But in the interest of fairness, and in looking on the bright side of things, I thought I would present a few of this island's culinary strengths. Or failing that, things that they do better than Americans.

Beer. It's not exactly food, but beer is as good a place as any to start. I have to admit that before I came here, the thought of drinking room-temperature, minimally carbonated beer was mildly repulsive. But now I would consider it sacreligious to chill Old Speckled Hen or another fine English ale, because that would destroy the more subtle flavors that come out at warmer temperatures. For the sake of international comparison, I should note that I never caught on to the Filipino custom of drinking beer with ice, so score one for the Brits.

Cheese. The UK does not have quite the cornucopia of cheeses offered by its neighbor on the other side of the Channel, but it does have some great homegrown varieties. My favorite is Stilton, an English blue cheese that has taken up permanent residence on my refrigerator shelf. One of the things I love about formal hall at Emma is that there is always a cheese course after dessert. When we go to formal swaps at other colleges and there isn't a cheese course, it just confirms that Emma is the best college ever and the rest are all second-rate. Why do Americans eat so much of this "pasteurized processed cheese food" crap when there is so much of the delicious real stuff to go around?

Potatoes. The humble spud is such an essential part of the British diet that it's not surprising that Brits have seen more possibilities hiding inside the homely tuber. One concept I will certainly bring home with me is the "jacket potato" (or simply "jacket"), which is really just a baked potato freed from the tired old formula of butter, sour cream, and occasionally bacon. The baked potato is a great canvas for so many other kinds of protein: chili, tuna salad, baked beans, Stilton and grapes. One of my American friends here was a devotee of the jacket potato stand in the market square for all of Michaelmas Term; he was on a first-name basis with the owner and measured time during his day with reference to his potato break. Apparently, though, you can get too much of a good thing... he has switched to soup during Lent Term.

Really huge breakfasts. You may have thought the US had a lock on conspicuous overeating. You thought wrong. Because really, are two eggs, sausage, hash browns, and coffee an adequate breakfast? No sir, that's just the beginning: add a grilled tomato half, some bacon, a big scoop of sauteed mushrooms, baked beans, and two pieces of toast, and then you're getting a proper English breakfast.

Fish and Chips. If nothing else, a country better be good at making its own national dish, and on this front the Brits deliver. Fish and chips are reliably edible no matter what back-alley pub you find yourself in. I've also developed a taste for fries with a healthy sprinkling of malt vinegar. According to my brother, it seems that Rhode Island is the only one of the old colonies to have adopted that fine practice, but I will be taking this one back with me too.

Less-loved animal parts. I ate a dish consisting mostly of oatmeal and sheep organs, and I liked it, and I've deliberately eaten it again. 'Nuff said.

seville pictures

2009-03-03T23:04:00.010Z

A few pictures from the long weekend in Spain:

¡TeamSevilla! members Stella and Matt in front of the Giralda, one of Seville's most famous landmarks. The lower two-thirds of this tower was once a minaret. When Seville came under Christian control, the attached mosque was torn down and Seville's Cathedral built over it, but the minaret was incorporated-- over Muslim protests-- into the new structure. The omnipresence of the Giralda in the skyline became sort of a running gag during the trip; we even spotted it from the Roman ruins in Santiponce (see below) and from the window of the plane as we took off on our flight back to England.

The Alcázar.

Me in the Alcázar. I'm facing into the room where Pedro El Cruel/Pedro El Justiciero threw that dinner party for the rival of his ally Sultan Mohammed V, which ended in the dinner guest's beheading.

More Alcázar awesomeness. I warned you, I took lots of pictures of this place.

Yet more Alcázar awesomeness.

¡TeamSevilla! at the Plaza España.

Seville's bullfighting ring. We were out of season for el toreo, so we had to settle for a tour of the ring. This lady had a very endearing Spanish lisp and equally endearing bad English. I came away understanding a little better why bullfighting is a target of the animal rights crowd--whatever you can say about its cultural value, it's a pretty cruel practice. At some point I should probably also mention that we enjoyed some lovely flamenco dancing, though the venue was a little too dark so my pictures didn't come out.

Tile work at the Roman ruins in Santiponce, 8 km northwest of Seville. It's amazing to contemplate all of the layers of history that can exist in one place. It reminded me a little bit of what it felt like to be in Jerusalem, though unlike Jerusalem the major currents of history no longer pass through Seville in the 21st century.

Another running gag: my alleged obsession with Cruzcampo beer. I will admit, it's not bad and very drinkable, but somehow my love for Cruzcampo became a recurring theme that took on a life of its own.

¡TeamSevilla! takes the alcázar

2009-02-27T18:57:00.005Z

Seville, Spain -- It may not be the most opportune time academically, but I´m spending a long weekend in the south of Spain with four wonderful Gates people. ¡TeamSevilla!, as I affectionately call our posse, consists of the group that went to Paris in November minus one. (By the way, I love the fact that the characters ¡ and ñ have their own buttons on keyboards here.) In the less than 24 hours since landing, we´ve largely adjusted our lifestyle to the rhythms of Andalucia, which basically means doing everything late: 10 am is wakeup time and 10 pm is dinnertime, and so far we have had every meal alfresco. Midday temperatures top out in the high 60s, so it´s not exactly sweltering, but compared to Cambridge it feels glorious.

The timing of this weekend is also a little bit strange because next week I have final exams for the French class that I have been taking all year. So after adjusting my brain to Spanish, I will be hurriedly switching back to French. The oral part of the exam will consist of me making a 5 minute presentation to my class au sujet du Cameroun on Wednesday, and I´m a little bit afraid I might inadvertently throw some español in there. The Spanish has been coming back with relative ease, and I´m feeling like the stereotype that Spanish is an easier language has some truth to it.

By coincidence, three of my courses at Cambridge have been turning to the subject of Islam in the last week or so, so it´s quite interesting to be here in what was the northern outpost of high Islamic civilization. Today we visited the Alcázar, a glorious hodgepodge of palaces and gardens whose showpiece building was constructed by Muslim artisans in the employ of Mohammed V, the 14th-century sultan of nearby Granada, for his buddy the Christian King Pedro I. Pedro was known as Pedro el Cruel or Pedro el Justiciero (the dispenser of justice), depending on whom you asked, and he had a colorful life to say the least. His father was quite the philanderer, leaving Pedro to compete with a slew of half-siblings, some of whom he unfortunately had to dispatch to keep his grip on power. Later, when Mohammed V was briefly deposed, Pedro lured his friend´s successor over for a dinner party at the Alcázar, where he captured the illegitimate Sultan and his retinue. Mohammed V was restored to his throne and received his rival´s head as a gift from Pedro I. Hey, at least the Christians and the Muslims were getting along back then. But the gory history aside, the Alcázar is a magnificent place, and it provided me with what must have been the most shutter-happy hour of my life.

Stay tuned for more on Andalucia, and hopefully some good pictures when I get back to the UK.

wraps, cambridge, and the scale of my competence

2009-02-22T23:08:00.004Z

Not that long ago I received an e-mail from a nice young lad from the Williams College class of 2011. To fully convey the horror of getting an e-mail from an '11, I told my Cambridge friends who graduated from Williams in '08 to imagine receiving an e-mail from somebody from the class of 2015. This young, young sprout e-mailed me on the advice of the Williams chaplain, who remains one of my favorite people on Earth. My ego hadn't been this tickled since, a year or two after graduation, I was informed that I still had a "following" at Williams after I left.

This sharp, fresh-faced child is now in charge of WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus), the campus food salvage program that I ran for most of my time at Williams. WRAPS was the first domino in a series that led to my job in Alaska. This distant successor of mine, who was almost certainly born after Ronald Reagan left office, is hoping to expand WRAPS in some interesting new directions and wanted advice and some background on the history of the program.

As I offered my recollections of the founding and expansion of WRAPS to this charming lad, who had yet to be conceived when I began my schooling, it led me to reflect on how different my identity is at Cambridge than it has been anywhere else. I realized that the core of my "extracurricular" life has always been community service and activism, from Williams right on through to Alaska. Somebody reading my resume might be puzzled to discover that in late 2008 I suddenly decided to stop trying to feed the hungry, save Darfur, and teach English to immigrants, and instead got into planning dinner parties and serving as treasurer for an overprivileged posse of grad students. There's a possibility that I might be getting involved with the British version of food banking, but that's the only hint of my old pastimes and may not pan out anyway.

I have a few theories on why this is. Theory #1, the Happenstance Theory, is that there is no real underlying reason at all: I just got sucked into doing what I'm doing early this year and thus there's no time for anything else. I certainly never would have set out to be an MCR social secretary, but I was a "keen" participant in early events and was recruited by the outgoing committee, and that was that.

Theory #2 is the Poverty Lobe Exhaustion Theory. Since I spend all of my studying/class time thinking about poverty, underdevelopment, etc., all the room in my brain for that stuff is taken up and therefore I need to do something different with my personal life. There could be something to this, but it's inconsistent with my last two years in Alaska, so I don't find it convincing.

Theory #3, the most sophisticated explanation and probably the one that makes me look best, is the Wendell Berry Theory. My grad school admissions essays and fellowship applications of yore often referenced Wendell Berry, the author-farmer-environmentalist who wrote that "our understandable wish to save the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence." In other words, if you're going to try to help, you better know what the fuck you're doing.

When I encountered Berry's thinking in an environmental studies course at Williams, it immediately resonated with me; Berry helped me understand why I instinctively shied away from the kind of activism preferred by many of my peers in favor of locally grounded projects like WRAPS. Even my Save Darfur activism had a specific local goal: divesting Alaska's Permanent Fund from firms that are bankrolling genocide. My most successful projects in Alaska had laser-focused objectives, such as helping community organizations and tribes access federal dollars for summer feeding. You can see why the work of Bill Easterly, the economist who thinks that grand development plans are doomed to fail, is also attractive to me.

The Wendell Berry Theory suggests that I'm not doing any community service or activism at Cambridge because I know that I don't know or understand this community enough to be of much service to it. This may not be the right attitude to project at, say, a job interview... but I think it is one of the emerging core values of my still-young -- younger than that kid from Williams! -- career.

mid-lent term dispatches

2009-02-15T16:34:00.003Z

The atmosphere in Cambridge has been noticeably different during Lent Term, the middle third of the academic year. It seems like everyone is hunkering down and working much harder, yours truly included. Certain Michaelmas Term luxuries, such as attending lectures for classes I am not taking for credit, are now largely a thing of the past. At least eastern England at this time of year is damp, cold, and gross, so it doesn't feel like we're missing anything.

An unpleasant class. One of the changes in format in our program during Lent Term has been semiweekly student-led seminars. Last week a classmate from Sudan conducted a seminar that was supposed to be about NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and civil society in Sudan. As many of you know, I was an activist with Save Darfur while I was in Alaska. My Sudanese classmate is a very pleasant guy, but occasionally he has made comments that have made me bristle. During his presentation, he spent relatively little time on the topic and mostly tried to debunk what everybody knows is going on in the Western part of Sudan.

He used many of the tropes that the Sudanese government uses to defend itself, including:
(1) referring to Darfuris are "rebels" and never once using the word "civilians";
(2) asserting, without evidence, that the Janjaweed militias are a "myth";
(3) cataloguing crimes and abuses perpetrated by employees of international organizations working in Darfur--which undoubtedly have happened--while never mentioning the hundreds of thousands of murders and rapes in Darfur, the millions of refugees streaming out of the country, or the burned villages;
(4) suggesting that the Darfur atrocities have been fabricated by some kind of Western activist-government-media conspiracy against Sudan.

As far off the mark as I think he was, I didn't know if challenging him directly on the facts during class would be the right approach. Perhaps fortunately, I didn't really have a chance, because he went on long enough that there was very little time for Q and A. From talking to some other classmates afterward, I got the sense that everybody knew the score. One recommended that I look at it as an "anthropological experience." I don't know if I will try talking to him about it in a less public setting, or even if it's worth doing so. If my German classmate were a Holocaust denier, I don't think I would bother trying to reason with her. The best approach I can think of for now would be to say something like, "that's not how I understand the situation in your country at all-- I'm just interested to hear more about where you're coming from?"

Cambridge has balls. Luckily even in the middle of Lent Term it isn't all work and no play. On Friday I attended the somewhat misnamed Springball at Churchill College. Springball is a very early preview of Cambridge's famous May Balls. If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges, mostly during one week in mid-June (they were in May a long time ago, hence the name), and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world.

Churchill's Springball is nowhere near that level, but it's a pretty crazy party nonetheless. I went with a large posse of Gates people, many of whom are at Churchill, and we stayed from 8 pm until the bitter end at 3 am- which is very early by Cambridge ball standards. The food was generally pretty bad (surprise!), though I was a big fan of the donut stand. Activities included multiple concerts and dance floors, sumo wrestling in big padded suits, massages, an inflatable obstacle course, karaoke, and laser tag. I lost one of my cufflinks in the ball pit, and one of my friends -- who worked the second half of the ball in exchange for attending the first half for free -- miraculously found it at the end of the night and got it back to me.

You will surely be hearing more about May Balls, as I'm going to be attending two. One is an Oz-themed ball at Jesus College, which is where many of my Development Studies classmates are. The other is, obviously, Emma's ball. Fortunately I have no part in the planning of our ball, which got some bad publicity recently for a poorly chosen and subsequently withdrawn theme: "Empire." I didn't find the theme all that upsetting, and I do believe the intent was to "reflect the style and fashions of both Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and the diverse countries and cultures with which Britain was then entwined," but I'm irritated that the committee was so politically tone-deaf.

The contrast in subject matter above is not lost on me, and on Saturday I talked on the phone with my friend Kate, whom I'll be visiting at her Peace Corps post in Cameroon in late March. We shared a laugh over how a sentence like "I lost my cufflink in the ball pit" could be so completely foreign to her day-to-day life. Though I'm completely immersed in it right now, I am sure that Lent Term in Cambridge will seem alien to me too when I'm where she is.

le week-end en suisse: fondue, trains, and beer in plastic cups

2009-02-10T10:11:00.007Z

I'm not going to lie-- Geneva is a snooze. Take a city in a country obssessed with order and stability, and make it the world's capital for order and stability, and what do you expect to happen? But I had been warned of this by various people, including Cheryl, the friend I traveled to Geneva this past weekend to see. A little bit of backstory: Cheryl and I met several years back in DC thanks to a mutual friend who noticed that Cheryl had done a Fulbright in the Philippines and I was about to do the same. So I knew going in that this wasn't going to be Carnaval, and shortly after I landed I explained (reassured?) Cheryl that my motivation was 95 percent hanging out with her and 5 percent seeing Geneva.

That's not to say we didn't have a whole lot of fun. Cheryl took me to some unexpectedly grubby places that served beer in plastic cups, we ate fondue by the lakeside, we had a minor scrape with the law for riding a night bus around 3 a.m. without a valid pass. We meandered around the city and a charming suburb called Carouge. Aimless wandering is not my usual travel mode, but I really enjoyed it.

We also went to a film festival that, quite coincidentally, was showing lots of Filipino movies. The film we saw was a fictionalized documentary of a Filipino "reality" show that shamelessly moves in on a family in the aftermath of the murder of the oldest son. The movie had a lot to say about the artificiality of television, the mutual manipulation of the family and the TV crew, the schadenfreude of the viewing public, and the Philippines' complicated views on homosexuality. Parts of it were deliriously funny. After the first 20 minutes, which were almost entirely footage of people bawling, I leaned over to Cheryl and remarked that "this is either awful, or brilliant, and I can't decide which." The verdict: brilliant. I feel bad saying it, but neither of us were expecting that level of sophistication in a Filipino film. The audience received it well and had a lively Q and A afterward with the director, who had flown in from Manila.

On Sunday, thanks to efficient high-speed Swiss transportation, the two of us plus another friend of Cheryl's got to see a fair bit of the country. Through some Swiss friends, Cheryl got her hands on all-day rail passes that were valid anywhere in the country for just 30 Swiss francs apiece(about $25). I don't know if I have ever been to another advanced country that suddenly and completely switches languages part way through. Most of the country speaks German, but the Western quarter (including Geneva) speaks French, about a tenth of the population speaks Italian, and a few places speak some language I'd never heard of, called Romansh. Even the trains seem to obey the invisible linguistic borders; at some point between Geneva and Bern, the screens inside the train announcing the next stop switched from French to German.

We spent a few hours apiece in Bern (pronounced "bearnn"), a small and picturesque capital city overrun with fountains and clocks, and Luzern (Lucerne), which I had expected to be bumpkin-land but was surprisingly slick and urban instead. A short selection of photos:

Wall of the Reformation, Geneva. The city is proud of its role in the Reformation and was for a time the home of John Calvin. Among the figures honored on this wall is Roger Williams.

Cheryl and me in Bern. Yes, I am pretending to take a bite of her head, because at the top of this fountain is a statue of a guy eating babies. Apparently there is something sick and twisted hiding beneath that placid Swiss psyche...

Swiss timekeeping at its finest.

This tower is part of the 14th-century wooden Kapellbrücke (chapel bridge), which is Luzern's most famous landmark. Again, stereotypes about the Swiss are confounded: instead of taking the shortest route across the river, the bridge zigs and zags. The shop called "Joe's Souvenirs" (I am not kidding) inside the tower was also a rude awakening.

cambridge gives wen the bush treatment

2009-02-05T14:19:00.005Z

I don't think this was as well covered in the US media as Monday's snowstorm in the UK (really people? does the whole country need to fall apart over a few inches of snow?), but a strange thing happened in Cambridge on Monday. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was giving a speech here about the global economy after meeting with Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. Toward the end of the talk, a heckler in the audience called Wen a "dictator" and threw his shoe at him. My knowledge of the Chinese government is pretty limited, but my understanding is that Wen is at the helm of the Chinese bureaucracy, while the President, Hu Jintao, is the head of state. Throwing shoes at government leaders, of course, has a history going back at least as far as... the month before last, when President Bush got the same treatment in Iraq.

I didn't manage to get a ticket to his talk, so I wasn't there to witness the event personally. It should go without saying that the incident reflects poorly on Cambridge as a place for a free and civilized exchange of ideas. What was most interesting to me, though, was seeing the reactions of my Chinese and non-Chinese classmates, primarily through the flurry of facebook commentary that followed. The general reaction among the non-Chinese students was bemusement, similar to the way I think most young Americans reacted to Bush's "shoeing." The act was violent but posed little real threat to the speaker; the primary source of the gesture's force is its breaching of the deferential treatment usually accorded to heads of government.

Chinese students reacted quite differently. Here is a passage from a comment written by a Chinese Development Studies classmate of mine: "Apparently, this lad is just one of the young people here who are ignorant about the history and reality of China, yet filled with blind ideologic passion. If you hate Communist Party, you have no idea how much the Party has evolved. If you love a free Tibet, you are ignorant about the brutal and ruthless theocratic regime of serfdom once ruled by Dailai [sic] Lama, the 'smiling budda.' If you hate China, yet you chose the wrong person to make this 'heroic' move, whom happens to be probably the most respected and beloved leader in China, across all age groups. It can only be viewd by Chinese as an insult and humiliation, which put shame on the guy himself, which I don't care, but also cast shadow on this great University." A Chinese friend of his remarked that it was "a shame to Cambridge." My friend later added: "I just reviewed the video and found that Wen made very sincere bows to the audience, saying 'this is not a courtesy. This is my due respect for knowledge, teachers and professors, as a humble student. ' What a shame for this scum showing up today, humiliating this great university."

I bolded certain words in those passages because I think they point to something very, very vital about Chinese and other East Asian cultures that a lot of Westerners fail to understand, to everyone's detriment. I wrote about the importance of avoiding shame and "losing face" in Filipino culture in my previous blog-- almost three years ago to the day, in fact. This economy of honor and shame is linked primarily with the self and one's family in the Philippines, but in China it's also very much tied up with national identity. So throwing a shoe at the Chinese premier is committing a certain kind of emotional warfare even against our Chinese friends. I seem to recall that a few years back, early in Hu Jintao's presidency, the White House declined to host a full-fledged state dinner when Hu came to visit Washington and a lot of Chinese people regarded it as a deep insult. I'm not saying that Westerners always and everywhere need to do whatever it takes to avoid hurting China's pride, but we've got to start understanding this stuff better, especially as China continues its climb as a world power.

I have found many of my own preconceived notions about my Chinese friends to be wrong. Recently one of our professors lectured on development and the media, and naturally media censorship in China was a topic of discussion. I think I had been expecting, or perhaps wishing, that I was attending class with some young Chinese Patrick Henrys or Tom Paines. That turned out not to be the case. While not necessarily endorsing the current state-run media, they presented a nuanced view of government control that gave nods to stability and gradualism. I was similarly surprised when a Vietnamese friend (again 3 years ago this month) expressed some gratitude that the communist government there keeps a lid on things, while the democratic Philippines has been rent with political unrest and violence. I realized that in my ideology I might have more in common with the George W. Bush of his second inaugural address than I care to admit.

keynes' cambridge

2009-01-31T13:47:00.002Z

I'm not usually prone to thinking that it might have been cool to be alive for another era of history. I know that my brother Casey (yes, the one recently pictured with the giant bee) considers himself to have been born a couple centuries past the time that might have suited him best. I guess I just like 80-year life expectancies, affordable long-distance travel, and instantaneous communication too much.

Yet being here occasionally makes me pine a little bit for the Cambridge of the first half of the 20th century. To be sure, lots of nasty stuff was happening in the world -- wars, the Great Depression, etc. -- and this university town, while somewhat removed from the real world, has never been completely insulated from it. I probably would have eaten at the soup kitchens that served the students of the day, and I certainly would have seen lots of my classmates forced to interrupt their studies and never come back. Still, I have gotten a few tantalizing glimpes into the kind of ferment that was going on here in that era, when the intellectual giants of the day rubbed shoulders and students followed their preferred gurus around to pubs and fireside seminars. Cambridge just isn't like that anymore, and I'll get to why I think that is in a minute.

The figure I most associate with that era is John Maynard Keynes, the economist I mentioned in my post about walking to Grantchester. In case you aren't familiar with Keynes, he's best known for the view that an increase in government spending is sometimes needed to get national economies unstuck from a self-reinforcing trap of high unemployment and low demand for goods and services. It sounds like common sense today (witness a Republican president's declaration that "we're all Keynesians now"), but it was revolutionary at the time, when it was believed that the appropriate government response to a depression was to balance the budget by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. You can also see why Keynes, who has always been controversial and a source of deranged anger on the political right, is suddenly a very popular thinker again.

What I'm thinking about here, though, is less the content of Keynes' theories than the kind of intellectual he was. Here was an economist who associated with philosophers and novelists and biologists, who concerned himself with the big issues of the time. He was a bon vivant, married a Russian ballerina, and was compared to God with some regularity with colleagues. (Interestingly, Keynes himself regarded the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as "God.") It seems to me that academia was both more personal and more connected with the real world then. I am always struck when I hear lectures from some of the older economists at Cambridge, who are not old enough to have known Keynes (he died in 1946), but who did know many of the people in his circle early in their academic careers. I get the sense that they are talking about old friends; there is a spirit of collaboration, camaraderie, and purpose that comes though the nostalgia of these old Cambridge dons.

Don't get me wrong -- there is still plenty of that at Cambridge today. For a lot of reasons, though, this no longer feels like the place for heroic intellectual inquiry followed by a trip to the pub with friends. For one thing, Cambridge has seen the same kind of explosion in clubs, activities, sports, and whatnot that most campuses have seen in the last few decades, combined with the parallel entertainment explosion in TVs, computer and video games, movies, iPods, etc. All very, very good things in and of themselves, but as a byproduct we seem to have developed a variant of the "Bowling Alone" problem. Life here is fragmented. I heard one of those old Keynesians observe, a little wistfully, that "it's hard to get people to come to evening seminars these days." Why talk about the pressing issues of the day when movie theaters, salsa dancing, and Nintendo Wii beckon? Again, I would rather have my technology than not have it, thank you very much-- but all of this progress is not cost-free.

But there's another reason why I think there are no more Bloomsbury Groups, and it also has to do with fragmentation of a different kind. My perception of academia is a long-term trend toward hyperspecialization: the rewards and prestige accrue to people who make their name in smaller and smaller slices of human knowledge. Whether or not a particular line of inquiry has any relevance in the real world doesn't necessarily matter. Interdisciplinary programs like Development Studies are chronically under-resourced, and often have to fight for survival, in this kind of environment.

This trend plays out differently in different disciplines, but I think economics is one of the worst affected. Economics seems to be on a one-way track toward increasing levels of abstraction and mathematization. Methodology trumps content, conceptual innovation trumps social value. I enjoyed Freakonomics, but I think it has helped unleash a monster. The decision procedure for economics grad students is no longer "think of an important/interesting thing to study --> figure out how to gather and process data," now it's "find some data --> think of something sexy to do with it." Keynes pondered how to end the Great Depression; a Freakonomist thinks about how to spot cheaters from sumo wrestling scores.

So there aren't many Keyneses anymore; Amartya Sen might be the best we have today. (I have mentioned him before in my description of formal hall at Trinity College and hopefully will write more about him at another time.) I have all but ruled out an academic career for myself, and the thought of getting a PhD fills me with consternation. It wouldn't have been such a hard question in Keynes' Cambridge.

the fulbright lives!

2009-01-28T15:05:00.006Z

I've been in essay-writing mode pretty much since I got back to Cambridge, and in the process of writing one of those essays I made a rather unexpected discovery. The essay in question was for my class on Globalization, Big Business and Developing Countries, which I mentioned in my ode to Peter Nolan. The topic was whether large firms in developing countries could "catch up" to their multinational, Western-based rivals, and I wrote on Jollibee, a Filipino fast food chain that has trounced McDonald's in head-to-head competition. Fast food in itself is not a topic that I get especially excited about, but Jollibee does appeal as a David and Goliath story, and one of the things I have realized in this course is just how similar the dynamics of business are across different industries. Here's my brother Casey with a statue of the Jollibee mascot at the restaurant next to my former apartment building (sorry Casey, I cropped you out of the photo for the version I put in my essay):

At one point in the paper I needed some statistics on migration from the Philippines because I was discussing Jollibee's strategy of targeting its overseas stores in locations where there are lots of Filipino expats. Instead of going on a tedious search for the data I needed, I decided to cite my own paper from the Fulbright. (The Development Studies program is actually keen on us citing our own previous work.) And in the process of googling my own paper, I made a pleasantly unexpected discovery: my paper has been cited in several articles and books. I wrote it explicitly for a policy audience, rather than an academic one; before I left Manila I presented it to a bunch of government agencies and NGOs and then assumed it disappeared into the memory hole after that.

This finding did make me feel a pang of regret for not trying to get some version of the paper published in a journal, especially because one of the academics who used it had e-mailed me while I was in Alaska and said he thought I could get it published. (I felt even worse at the beginning because I thought I remembered him offering to help me with that, but I checked our e-mail correspondence and found that he hadn't actually offered any help, just his opinion that there was publishable stuff in there.) I should mention that sending the paper isn't as simple as its sounds; it would have required several days of work. There wasn't really time while I was still in the Philippines, and I did think about resurrecting the project from time to time while I was in Alaska, but when would I have had the time then?

At any rate, I'm happy that my report has been useful to somebody. I always thought my year in the Philippines was an enormous success as a cultural exchange and pretty indifferent as an academic venture, but this tips the balance a little more in the positive direction for the latter.

krakow and auschwitz

2009-01-22T22:04:00.010Z

Some pictures from Trevor's and my trip to Poland last weekend:

Clock tower in Rynek Główny, the main square in Krakow. I found the pace of things in Krakow to be pleasantly relaxed, despite its being one of Poland's largest cities; even on a weekday morning there is an unhurried feel to the downtown area. It was easy to forget at times that Poland is not a "First World" country, but every now and then we'd get a reminder: a standing-room-only van ride, a clunking Soviet-era train with doors that sprung open while the train was in motion and toilets offering an unobstructed view of the snow, errr, whizzing by below.

Me with JPII, Wawel Hill. Prior to his election as pope and his change of name, Karol Wojtyła was archbishop of Krakow, and his old city still palpably misses its favored son. His former apartment is now part of a museum filled with his personal effects and gifts he received from foreign leaders. And despite my long drift from religion, I still found myself caught up in it; John Paul retains an extraordinary pull on my imagination.

"Booze": this English version of the menu at Chata restaurant doesn't sugarcoat it. Trevor and I liked this restaurant so much we came back to it our second night in Krakow. (We're pretty sure the waitresses thought we were there because we dug them, judging by their giggling. Really, we just liked the food.) Polish cuisine is quite delicious. My favorite: warm Ewe's milk cheese topped with cranberries. We also enjoyed "bison vodka," a version allegedly made from the grass that the bison feed on in eastern Poland. Each bottle comes with a long blade of grass floating in the drink, a bit like the worm in a bottle of tequila.

"Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work brings freedom), the notorious gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp. The block buildings of the camp now house a series of museums, some curated by individual countries and others devoted to specific topics related to the Auschwitz and the Holocaust. We both felt like we had ample historical background on the Holocaust -- at least half of the photos in the museums I recognized -- so it was more about being there and soaking in the dreadfulness of the place than amassing lots of new facts. Auschwitz is about an hour and a half from Krakow, either by standing-room-only van or clunking-Soviet-era train, in the small and eerily serene village of Oświęcim (osh-VYEN-cheem). Auschwitz itself is shockingly small; most of the slaughter happened about 3 km away at the industrial-sized execution and cremation chambers of Auschwitz II, better known as Birkenau.

Me at Birkenau-- it just doesn't seem right to smile in a picture at a Nazi concentration camp. Much like our day in Stonehenge with its brooding clouds, our day in Oświęcim seemed to provide the perfect weather for the setting: cold and still, crystalline with an ominous fog. In contrast to Auschwitz, Birkenau is largely being left to rot. Behind me is a series of rusting barbed wire fences and a series of chimneys watching over the ruins of destroyed wooden bunk houses.

In case anyone was in suspense, we did go clubbing (cue Trevor's techno beat). One of our nightspots was this place, called Prozak. I have video, but am certainly not going to post it on this blog, just in case Trevor decides to get into politics someday.

notes from auld reekie

2009-01-13T22:58:00.007Z

Almost as soon as the rest of the family headed back across the pond, Trevor and I were on a plane to Edinburgh (pronounced ED-in-bur-uh). As compensation for being the family's and Trevor's tour guide, Mom paid for my flight and even gave me an allowance for our travels. Edinburgh is a delightful city: visually striking and gritty, intellectual, chronically inebriated, reasonably cosmopolitan and yet thoroughly Scottish. You are far more likely to see St. Andrew's Cross flying than the Union Jack, even in a city that has historically been more loyal to the crown than most of Scotland. On the same latitude as Ketchikan, Alaska, Edinburgh has the kind of low winter sun that I remember from my time in the last Frontier.

Encounters with unexpectedly good Scottish food. At last I had my first encounter with haggis, Scotland's famous dish of sheep organs, oatmeal, and spices boiled in a sheep stomach. The stomach was not included as part of the presentation on my plate, which was probably for the best. To my surprise, the haggis was not bad, not even merely tolerable, but quite tasty. Which is a good thing, because next week Trevor and I will be eating haggis again. Our next MCR formal commemorates Burns Night, an annual fete honoring Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet. As is customary, the haggis will be paraded into the hall while one of our Scots reads Burns' poem "Address to a Haggis." See how much of it you understand.

Edinburgh takes to the streets. Edinburghers love their outdoor festivities, and we stumbled on not one, but two large public gatherings during our weekend. One was a road race, which warmed my runner's heart, and the other was a street protest against Israel's military actions in Gaza. The protesters were numerous and quite vehement. I'm certainly no fan of Israel's response to date, and I can understand why Scots might be particularly disposed to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but the whole event oozed hyperbole and unwarranted moral clarity. George W. Bush's mirror image.

Scottish politics. Scottish-English relations are tamer these days than when William Wallace was fighting Edward Longshanks, but things are still in a state of remarkable flux. I was floored to learn that Scotland just got its own Parliament in 1999, after almost 300 years of being ruled exclusively from London. We visited the new, ultramodern Parliament building, which sits across from Holyrood Palace, the Queen's home when she's in town. (We didn't visit Holyrood, but Trevor did leave his mark; as we stood outside the gates he dropped his Coke can, which was summarily swept under the gate and onto the Queen's front yard by a strong gust of wind.) Scotland's Parliament only has authority over certain, "devolved" areas of government, but it was nice to see signs of a new budding of civic consciousness. In general, I was surprised by how kindly the Scots I met spoke about England. Some -- and I should probably note that most of these conversations happened in pubs after many beers -- took great pains to emphasize how much influence has traveled from north to south and not just in the other direction. Those age-old antagonisms are more like sibling bickering or collegiate rivalry than a blood feud, and Scotland's incredibly violent history seems to be receding in the face of prosperity. Below, Parliament and Trevor, Coke can still in hand.

pictures from the family trip

2009-01-11T23:16:00.009Z

Lately my blogging habits have been rubbish, as the Brits would say. My little bro Trevor is staying here for a while longer, and I'm gearing up to write about the weekend we just spent in Edinburgh, the gritty and feisty capital of Scotland. But for now, some pictures from my time with the whole family:

Beefeater tour guide, Tower of London. This guy served 22 years in the army for the honor of showing tourists around London's capital of decapitation. "No, children, I am NOT a postbox!" he said, alluding to the royal insignia that appears on the chest of his uniform and also on mailboxes throughout the country.

The London Eye. Much like Paris' Eiffel Tower, this onetime eyesore and "temporary" structure has become a much-loved and essential part of the cityscape.

Big Ben, Parliament, and the River Thames, as seen from the top of the Eye.

The sibs outside Buckingham Palace, the Queen's main residence. I have found myself puzzling a lot during the last two weeks about the monarchy and its continuing role in British life. While Trevor and I were looking at the Scottish crown jewels in Edinburgh,* I asked a question of an attendant that must have come across as particularly ignorant. I realized then that I just don't have the cultural wherewithal to appreciate what all of this means to Brits... or at least that it's going to take a lot more effort for me to understand.

Mom and Dad at Stonehenge. The stones themselves were strikingly non-mysterious and non-mystical. The drive over was probably more memorable. Kudos to Dad for driving a standard with his left hand from the "wrong" side of the road!

Ancient, Medieval, Modern: Bath Abbey looms over the Roman baths in... you guessed it... Bath.

*If you're confused, yes, England and Scotland have the same Queen... but Scotland had its own, separate monarchy until 1603. That year, the Scottish King James VI succeeded to the British throne, uniting the monarchies as James I of England. He was on the throne for the Gunpower Plot (remember Guy Fawkes?), and it's for him that Jamestown, Virginia was named.

london calling

2009-01-04T23:25:00.003Z

London -- Before Lent Term gets underway in Cambridge, I am spending a week around England with the full nuclear family: Mom, Dad, two brothers, one sister, and our newest addition, my sister-in-law. We have peered through the gates at Buckingham Palace, toured Churchill's underground WWII bunker, looked down at the Thames and Big Ben from the London Eye, minded the gap on the Tube. Given what's to follow, I should state at the outset that we're having a wonderful time, but it's just more fun to write and read about the "bad" experiences. "We went to the Tower of London, learned a lot!" just doesn't make for good blogging, you know?

Encounters with bad British food, vol. ii. On our second night in London we had dinner at a pub just a few hundred meters from Trafalgar Square. By then I think everyone was beginning to catch on to the fact that the UK has somewhat different standards of service and convenience than the U.S., but it still came as a surprise that we had to walk up to the bar to order our food and that the waitstaff were not exactly falling over themselves to clear the previous party's dirty dishes. But so far we had been lucky with food, particularly with a delicious dinner on the first night. That luck would come to an end at this particular pub. All four of the guys ordered "sausages and mash"--known more colorfully in the British culinary lexicon as "bangers and mash," as if you didn't already have enough to smirk about with all of the guys ordering sausages. One of my brothers declared it to be the worst meal he had ever eaten. I wouldn't go that far, but the sausages were mushy and bland, the potatoes clearly of the instant variety, and the gravy utterly devoid of taste. The ladies' meals didn't go over much better, and we ordered a pizza when we got back to the hotel.

Jack the ripoff. By far the worst tourist attraction I have seen to date in the UK is the Jack the Ripper walking tour. As far as serial killers go, Jack the Ripper has a more terrifying reputation than he deserves. He killed five prostitutes in 1888, and his notoriety owes more to the conspiracy theories swirling around the killings--more than one involving the royal family, naturally. The tour started off promisingly enough, with our apparently quick-witted guide getting regular laughs from the group. By the time we got to the site of the first killing, however, it begin to become clear what we were in for. The temperature was near freezing; the guide rambled, repeated himself and frequently went off on tangents; and nearly 45 minutes had passed before we moved on to killing #2. To make matters worse, there was nothing to actually see along the way, as most of the important Ripper-era buildings are gone or now house reputable establishments such as banks. We had been out for nearly two hours, going ever deeper into deserted East End neighborhoods, when we finally bailed out, leaving about ten poor souls to listen to the rest of this guy's yammering. By this point most of us were delirious with cold and finding ways of entertaining ourselves and each other on the sidelines. I didn't feel too bad, because I have little patience for people--whether they're teachers, conference speakers, or Jack the Ripper tour guides-- who show so little effort to assess and respond to their audience's level of interest and engagement.

Krakow preview. My youngest brother, Trevor, is staying for an extra 11 days beyond the rest of the family. He is enjoying this longer sojourn thanks to the Winter Study term at Williams, which he is using for an independent project (already written before he even boarded the plane) on WWII in Europe. I am putting him on a train to France during my first week of class, but on the surrounding weekends he and I will enjoy two parentally-subsidized trips to Edinburgh, Scotland and Krakow, Poland. There will surely be many fantastic experiences on these trips, but somehow what my little bro has latched onto is the idea of going clubbing in Krakow. The idea has found its way into almost every conversation about his European tour (always accompanied by his rendition of a techno beat: nnnnnn-TST nnnnnn-TST nnnnnn-TST), and it now feels absurdly over-anticipated... which will surely add to the hilarity of whatever actually does happen.

more odes, and my upcoming homecoming

2008-12-15T13:53:00.006Z

"The Chick is on my Disk": An Ode to Kiwis. I am pretty sure that in my adult life I never had the occasion to meet any Kiwis (New Zealanders) prior to coming here. I was missing out, I have since discovered. New Zealand has a strong presence in the Emmanuel MCR, belying a population size that is microscopic in global terms (4 million). The Kiwis I have gotten to know here are incredibly fun and easy-going people, and they have one of the world's most entertaining accents. Kiwis sound a lot like Australians, except that they tend to swap around some of the vowel sounds; i's sound like e's and e's sound like i's, for instance. The president of our MCR is a Kiwi-- I call him "Mr. Prizedint"-- as is one of my co-social-secretaries. During one of our committee meetings, my co-social-sec informed our prez that "the chick is on my disk," which of course meant that the check was on his desk. You can also watch the first minute of this to get another humorous illustration courtesy of Flight of the Conchords, the Kiwi comedy duo that did that silly French video I posted a while back.

"Remorseless": An Ode to Peter Nolan. I would be remiss if I did not pay tribute to one of my favorite Cambridge characters. Peter Nolan is a professor at Cambridge's business school, a leading expert on Chinese industry, and the main lecturer for a Development Studies course I am taking on big business, globalization, and developing countries. His course is open to several different MPhils, so his lectures usually pack in a couple hundred people, but he's so good that it's well worth the lack of personal interaction.

Standing in front of a lecture hall, Professor Nolan looks less like a business expert more like a beatnik poet in a blazer, with a wild mane of silver hair, a perpetual five-o-clock shadow and a deeply corrugated brow. As he lectures he paces back in forth across the front of the room, as if he's formulating his arguments as he goes along, and occasionally gazes off somewhere far away as he's making a broad point. His most endearing feature is his wealth of Nolanisms, including his tendency to call everything a "two-edged sword" and to regularly use emphatic adjectives such as "intense," "enormous," "fantastic," and my personal favorite, "remorseless." I didn't realize I become a leading Peter Nolan impressionist until one of his later lectures this term, when he referred to "this two-edged sword of capitalist globalization" and at least a half-dozen of my classmates looked at me with smirks on their faces.

Professor Nolan is one of two people in the Development Studies faculty whom I would call "big idea people": professors who, in addition to presenting the gamut of theories in their particular field, have their own grand theory that they subtly or not-so-subtly try to inculcate into their students. Professor Nolan's basic shtick is that, for better and for worse, most of the innovation and dynamism in the global business arena comes from competition among a small number of big oligopolistic firms in each industry. The "two-edged sword" metaphor is a favorite of his because he seems to believe that globalization is both really, really good and really, really bad, and that there's no contradiction in affirming both stances. I will probably come back to this subject with my own thoughts in a later episode.

Back to the States. I am heading back to Massachusetts for Christmas on Thursday, so I don't know if I'll have a chance to post again before then. I am already trying to de-program certain bits of British vocabulary that I have picked up here that will make me sound ridiculous at home: "queue" and "keen" and "trousers" to name a few. I am looking forward to it, for all of the usual reasons, and also because I find that returning to one's home country after some time away brings many revelations.

ode to mill road

2008-12-07T22:22:00.006Z

When I have occasion to explain to somebody how far from the center of Cambridge I live, I usually give them this metaphor: if Cambridge is the solar system, and you take King's Chapel as the sun, I live a little bit past Saturn. There are plenty of people who live farther out in the sticks than I do, but I still have a pretty hefty commute to most places. That's the downside of my living situation.

The upside is that I get to live half a block off Mill Road, which is Cambridge at its most multicultural and bohemian. Mill Road is roughly two miles of nonstop restaurants, shops, bakeries, cafes, pubs, and small ethnic grocery stores of every variety. It has banks, hookah bars, a thrift store, churches, a mosque, and a cemetery. Here is a true story from Mill Road: after purchasing Filipino beer at the Chinese grocery, I walked past the Polish grocery to a French-themed, Moroccan-owned cafe, where a cute Lithuanian barista serves me Costa Rican coffee. It's the kind of place that would make Thomas Friedman pass out with excitement. A friend suggested I should send him this anecdote and perhaps it could be the basis of a new book. The World Is Mill Road?

My favorite Mill Road haunts include Carlos' Kebab King, where a garrulous Turk serves up delicious £3 falafel, and CB1, which claims to be the world's oldest internet cafe. (The name comes from the first three characters in the postal code that covers this part of Cambridge.) CB1 started mixing coffee and e-mail in 1995, and during the Mill Road Winter Fair this weekend they displayed some of their original computers in the window. The one on the far right is the original Apple Macintosh, which I remember from my elementary school days:

The above-mentioned Winter Fair was a great way for Mill Road to strut its stuff, and the chronically busy sidewalks were even more jammed with humanity than usual. During the fair, as I walked over the railroad bridge that roughly bisects Mill Road, I happened on a scene that captures the spirit of the neighborhood beautifully. There was a band of about 50 or so t-shirt clad people of all shapes, sizes, and ages playing drums and other percussive instruments. There was a small crowd gathered around, with hippies and church ladies and little kids boogeying to the music, and bubbles floating through the air. It sounds ridiculous as I type it out, but I loved it. Mr. Friedman: the Mill Road theory of world peace?

ode to formal hall

2008-12-03T19:02:00.016Z

I have complained about bureaucracy and kvetched about overcommitment, but as Michaelmas Term '08 draws to a close I thought I'd focus on the positive and pay tribute to some of the things that make Cambridge special. The first installment of a multi-part series: an ode to formal hall.

Each and every one of Cambridge's 31 colleges have some version of formal hall, which is a regular, highly ritualized multi-course dinner. I've already described formal hall for you once, but at the time I didn't appreciate what a central feature of Cambridge life it is. No joke: I eat an extravagant, sumptuous, Thanksgiving-sized meal here at least once per week. Every college does it a little differently, and the character of formal hall is a little window into the soul of a college. Some colleges hold formal hall quite often, others quite rarely; some require academic gowns, others do not; some seat the fellows (i.e. teaching faculty) of the college at an elevated "high table," others are more egalitarian; some have their own port and a cheese course after dinner, other's don't; some have multiple elaborate graces in Latin, others have a pithy two-word blessing. Most colleges have pre-dinner drinks and post-dinner parties in other spaces on the college grounds.

I would guess that the majority of Cambridge grads go to formal hall at their own college with some regularity, and it's also possible to attend other college's formal halls either by getting a friend to bring you as a guest, or through "formal hall exchanges" between colleges. Some M.Phil students set the ambitious goal of dining at all 31 colleges during their year. I haven't adopted that goal for myself, but I have been to six so far, so I'm on track to hit up more than half of the total by the end of the year. Here's a photographic tour of five of them:

Newnham is one of three all-women's colleges at Cambridge, but they sure seem to import a lot of guys for formal hall. There was much fodder for stereotyping: the hall itself reminded me of a wedding cake, and after the final grace the head of the college delivered an unusual pep rally-style speech about what a great term it's been. I went with four of my Development Studies classmates, two of whom are members of Newnham.

Trinity is among the oldest, wealthiest, most prestigious, and most traditional of the Cambridge colleges. I ate my dinner with a large group of fellow Gates Scholars under a looming portrait of Amartya Sen. Sen is a former master of Trinity College and Nobel Prize-winning economist/philosopher whose thought is the basis for one of the courses I've been taking this term. Some of his most pathbreaking work has been in the area of famine, and the obvious irony did complicate my feelings about our opulent feast. I suspect that's just how Professor Sen would like it.

Churchill is a relative newcomer, founded in 1958. Named for the former prime minister and styled as England's MIT, Churchill has a large male majority, but only because of its emphasis on engineering and other high-tech fields. Churchill is also one of the more secular colleges. The pre-dinner grace is just two words: benedictus benedictat. ("May the blessed one give a blessing" or something like that.) After dinner, the students traditionally raise a rather sedate toast "to the Queen," followed by a rambunctious toast "TO SIR WINSTON!"

Peterhouse is the oldest college in Cambridge, and the fact that they've had eight centuries of practice doesn't mean the food was good-- in fact, it was pretty awful. The hall is entirely candle-lit and reminds one of a medieval castle, which I suppose is pretty close to the truth. As the fellows were filing out at the end of the meal -- a ritual obliging the students to stand in silence -- somebody knocked their long bench over, sending it tumbling to the stone floor with a tremendous thud. As soon as the door closed behind the last fellow, the hall erupted in repressed laughter.

And last but not least, the best college, Emmanuel! We have "MCR formals" every other Monday, which means that we pack the hall with grad students and have some kind of theme dinner and after-party. I really do feel that Emma has some of the best food around, and the formal dinners always conclude with a cheese course and a glass of Emmanuel College port. (Yep, someone bottles it just for the college.) As one of the new MCR social secretaries, I'm now the one responsible for coordinating the MCR formals. But that's a tale for another post.

my second expat thanksgiving

2008-11-28T19:08:00.003Z

My second Thanksgiving outside of the U.S. of A. certainly lacked the ambassadorial zeal of my first. I was in the Philippines for Turkey Day '05, and I took it as an opportunity to share a bit of American culture with my coworkers. The biggest challenge, as some of my dear readers may recall, was finding a turkey. Filipinos don't have much use for the bird, so I had to travel to a supermarket in a well-heeled part of Manila where the Americans tend to congregate.

No such heroics this time, perhaps because Americans are a dime a dozen in Cambridge and my raison d'être here isn't primarily about bridging cultures (though I suppose that can be part of it too). I was thankful to be invited to a party that someone else was organizing, and thankful that for the first time in four years I was not the one responsible for the turkey. I shared Thanksgiving with about fifteen Americans and a couple of curious non-Americans. We were mostly Williams and Harvard kids, and we space in which we convened is one those delectable Cambridge oddities: John Harvard's room. The founding benefactor of Harvard University was an Emma guy, and each year some lucky Harvard grad gets chosen through an elaborate selection process to live in what was allegedly his room.* Actually it's more like a suite, with a large wood-paneled living room, a kitchenette, a bedroom, and a guest room. The only drawback is that there's no bathroom... in fact, you have to go down the stairs and across the courtyard to get to one, just like in the good old days. But the big perk of being the "Harvard Scholar" is getting an entertaining budget for the year, and ours has been particularly good about spending hers on entertaining.

I volunteered to bring mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup, and I committed a small act of blasphemy by purchasing Canadian maple syrup, which was all that was available at Tesco. (I wonder if Big Maple has some kind of protectionist racket going....) I tried to atone by buying a bottle of California red to bring for the festivities. The food was great and the conversation lively, though somehow it felt a lot less like Thanksgiving than any other Thanksgiving I've had... including the one in Southeast Asia. We put a little bit of a Cambridge twist on it by having a glass of port with our pie at the end of the night.

While we're on the subject of thanks, I'd like to thank all of you for reading! While I like to tell myself that this blog would still be worth doing even if nobody was really reading it-- since in that case it would basically function as a journal, which isn't a bad thing to keep-- getting the occasional posted comment or mention of the blog in an e-mail or phone conversation helps me to stay motivated. Hope you all had a lovely holiday!

*There's reason to believe the provenance of the Harvard room, like so many other cool stories around here, is bunk. Like the story about the undergrad who demanded "cakes and ale" from an astonished proctor during an exam and cited an obscure, 400-year-old, never-revised university statute saying that gentlemen who sat for exams in excess of three hours were entitled to request cakes and ale. I wish that one were true!

mail from bill gates sr.

2008-11-26T19:29:00.004Z

We're getting into that gnarly part of the term these days, which is why the quantity and quality of my postings have been going downhill lately. Apologies for that. It seems like everyone here is in treading-water mode for the last couple weeks of lectures, and then there will be lots of essay writing before we all disperse for Christmas.

Anyway, for now I thought I'd share a remarkable piece of mail that arrived in my "pidge" (a.k.a. pigeon hole, i.e. my mail slot) last week. It was a very personalized letter from Bill Gates Sr., the father of the philanthropist and Microsoft founder, in response to a thank-you note that I sent in October. I thought it would be in good form to thank the guy who is paying my bills this year. I wrote the letter with Bill Gates fils in mind, though in retrospect it probably could have read equally well as a letter to Bill Gates père, and in some ways it's more appropriate that way. The elder Gates is famous mostly for being the father of his son, but he was a high-powered lawyer and pillar of the Seattle community before retiring to help run the Gates Foundation.

As mentioned in the letter, Bill Gates Sr. does visit Cambridge every spring, and as an officer of the Scholars Council I'll probably be in a good position to interact with him. Everything I've heard from the other scholars suggests that he's just a terrific man. Bill Gates Jr. is rumored to be planning a visit to Cambridge in 2010 for the tenth anniversary of the scholarship, which would mark his second visit here since the program's founding. It's also rumored that former scholars (I'll be one of those by then) will get subsidized tickets to fly back to Cambridge for the festivities. But then again, it could just be one of those legends that tend to percolate around here...

more election updates

2008-11-20T18:20:00.002Z

Alaska voters, in the end, opt for accountability. Good on 'em, or should I say us. My personal contact with Mayor Begich was pretty limited, since most of our advocacy was on federal and state-level policy, but I count myself as an admirer and I think he will do a great job.

And on the less-important elections front, I ended up winning the development studies student rep position after all, in spite of my efforts not to advance my own candidacy. The other new rep is a Brit and is also 26 years old, which I think puts us a couple years past the median age of the group. (Probably not the mean, though-- there are a few 30-somethings in the mix.) In any event, I was sorry not to see any developing country representation, but I'm flattered by the election and will give it my best shot. So my trifecta of positions is complete, and one of them is already giving me serious headaches. As my dad pointed out, I've had many models of professional and civic overcommitment, including Dad himself and my former boss from Alaska, so I'm proud to carry on the tradition.

mental health break (7th-grade knowledge of French helpful)

2008-11-20T18:16:00.003Z

If only my trip to France went like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hrUGFhsXo

My favorite line is "bonjour, mon petit bureau de change."

quelques dépêches de Paris

2008-11-16T19:27:00.007Z

I just got back from a trip to Paris, and I really should be doing work... but writing about Paris just seems so much more fun than writing about the development of the state in post-colonial countries. So here we go:

General impressions. We had a crew of six Gates Scholars, three guys and three ladies. I endured repeated insults as the "old man" of the group throughout the weekend, mostly because Europe has decided that 26 is the age when one no longer merits free museum admissions, discounted train fares, etc. We took the high-speed train that goes through the Chunnel and connects London and Paris in less than three hours. It's all so easy it's a little hard to believe that you've gone to another country. Physically, Paris reminds me of nowhere as much as Washington, DC, which is perhaps not surprising because the latter was designed by a Frenchman. Both cities feature wide boulevards, with diagonal streets criscrossing the grid, and long parks that afford clear lines of sight between the major landmarks.

Bad art at Versailles. We spent the better part of one day at the palace of Versailles, the absurdly opulent home of a succession of roman-numeraled Kings named Louis. Versailles is best known for the Galeries Des Glaces, the mirror-lined hall that hosted the signing of the peace treaty that ended World War I. Being a French monarch entailed living in some pretty sweet apartments but also giving up any vestiges of personal privacy. Even royal births and deaths were witnessed by crowds of spectators filing through, to ensure the legitimacy of the line. Versailles is currently hosting an exhibition of the works of the modern artist Jeff Koons, whose work consists mainly of kitschy sculptures. So as we walked through the royal apartments we were treated to such masterpieces as a statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles the monkey, giant balloon animals, and a bust of the artist himself. I love modern art and I'm all for subversion in art, and I might have enjoyed some of his stuff in a museum, but I found the exhibition to be pretty irritating, especially given the otherwise very earnest curation at Versailles. I asked our tour guide about the exhibit and she briefly rolled her eyes, so I was glad to know I wasn't the only one who felt that way. This is my favorite picture of the weekend:

Other staples of Parisian tourism. OK, I really should do some work, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking from here on out. We paid an evening visit to the Louvre, which stays open late two nights per week and offers steeply discounted admission (and just as importantly, smaller crowds). Here's me and Mona, who is remarkably small in person and has something that looks like an altar and a communion rail around her:

On our last morning we went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, which dominates the city much more than I had imagined. It has to be one of the most recognizable structures in the world, but I found that the closer you get to it, the more alien it appears.

We finished with a walk down the Champs-Elysees and the perfect conclusion, a stop into Notre Dame:

from the less-important elections desk

2008-11-12T23:30:00.004Z

Elections are in the air in Cambridge, and it's not just because of the latest round of regime change in the U.S. (and New Zealand!) After a not-so-suspenseful election, I am the new treasurer of the Gates Scholars Council, which organizes all of the social events, speaker series, publications, and other services provided to and by Gates scholars. I won this post through a Soviet-style election in which I was the only candidate, which was true of about half the Council positions. However, I did win convincingly over RON ("re-open nominations"), who is an option for every office. In my case, RON went down 95 to 1. RON got at least one vote in every race, leading me to believe that either (A) each of the new Council members has at least one archenemy or (B) somebody is making a statement for electoral competition.

After another, only-slightly-more-suspenseful election, I am also one of three Social Secretaries for the Emmanuel College MCR this year. I say only slightly more suspenseful because although there were four candidates for the three slots, one of them chose not to submit a "manifesto" (Cambridgespeak for a candidate's statement), which is tantamount to running for president and not campaigning. The planks of my platform included an Emma community service day, an Iron Chef-style cooking contest between graduate houses, and more opportunities to interact with Master Richard Thomas James Wilson of Dinton and other college muckymucks.

A third election is underway for two student reps to the Development Studies committee. I'm not really interested in this one and did not nominate myself, but someone put my name in. There are ten candidates, and unfortunately only one of the ten represents a developing country. The rest are mostly from the North America, the UK, and the Netherlands. Not to be ungrateful to whatever kind soul(s) nominated me, but I did not vote for myself and am hoping that I will lose. As an aside, I have a colorful tradition of occasionally not voting for myself... there is one particularly embarrassing story from my childhood that my mom likes to bring out if she feels that some embarrassment is in order.

In other news: I'm going to Paris! I'm taking the high-speed train to the City of Lights tomorrow night with a small posse of Gates people. Updates on our très excellente adventure to come soon.

scoundrels!

2008-11-10T09:28:00.003Z

i. Guy Fawkes -- The night after the election was Guy Fawkes night in England. If you've seen V for Vendetta, you may recall that the character "V" wore a mask modeled after Guy Fawkes, and you may also recall a little rhyme that starts out like this: "Remember, remember, the fifth of November / The Gunpowder Treason and plot / I can think of no reason the Gunpowder Treason / Should ever be forgot."

The objective of the plot in question was to assassinate King James I and blow up the Houses of Parliament in London, in response to the anti-Catholism of the Crown and the government. It failed, and the conspirators were executed. Fawkes was not the ringleader of this band of 17th-century Catholic terrorists, but he was the one caught with the explosives, so it is his name that has gone down in history.

Naturally, Fawkes is remembered here as the villain, not the hero, of 5 November. Today Guy Fawkes night is marked with fireworks, bonfires, and burning effigies of Fawkes. By now the night has lost most of its original political content and is basically an excuse for pyrotechnics and merrymaking. I attended the festivities in Cambridge, still in an exhausted stupor from the election all-nighter. It's a pretty big production here, with roughly 20,000 people crammed onto Midsummer Common and all manner of carnival rides, games, and booths. When you're so engrossed in university life, it's easy to forget that people actually live in Cambridge, so I was glad to share in a local and national tradition.

ii. Oliver Cromwell -- Craving some solitude on Saturday afternoon, I hopped a train for a short trip to Ely (EE-lee), a small town two stops from Cambridge on the northbound line. (The intermediate stop is a conspicuously landlocked placed called Waterbeach.) Ely is famous primarily for its magnificent cathedral, which I did visit, and slightly less famous for being the home of Oliver Cromwell when he launched his political career. If you're not familiar with Cromwell -- and I believe most Americans are not -- he's thought to be part of the reason why the Founders of the U.S. initially avoided a strong executive under the Articles of Confederation.

A half-century after the Gunpowder Plot, Cromwell and his associates actually did succeed in killing the King--this time for being too Catholic. He was a member of Parliament and a devout Puritan who thought King Charles I was introducing a little too much pope-ish stuff into the liturgy and suppressing religious liberty. Cromwell became a leader of Parliament's army during the English Civil War and was one of the signers of Charles' death warrant. The country had a brief period of commonwealth government under an ineffectual Parliament, which Cromwell eventually dissolved, making himself "Lord Protector." He wielded near-absolute power for five years until his death. His son Richard took over before a brief spell before England reverted to the old monarchy under Charles II.

I visited Cromwell's house in Ely, which is now a museum. In various rooms you can try on period dress (with helmets!), vote on whether Cromwell was a hero or a villain (roughly 50/50 according to monthly tallies), and view a bizarre replica of Cromwell on his deathbed. Probably the most memorable part of the visit was a book I saw in the gift shop, called Oliver Cromwell's Warts. The double-entendre refers to both the Lord Protector's moral failings and the actual warts that dotted his face. The book jacket provides a wealth of gee-whiz facts about Cromwell, including a claim that he "once attended a party covered in poo." I would love to know that story, but "poo" was not listed in the book's index, and I didn't have time to look the hard way.

One gee-whiz fact about Cromwell that I can verify is the undignified fate of his earthy remains. Since he died before the reinstated monarchy could bring him to justice, Charles II had him exhumed and then posthumously hanged and beheaded. His head eventually came back to Cambridge, his alma mater, where it was reinterred at Sidney Sussex College. This plaque commemorates the occasion. It is said that only the Master of Sidney Sussex and a couple other college bigwigs know the actual location of the head, but I suspect that's a bit of Cambridge lore -- of which there are many -- that might not withstand scrutiny.

the election from over here

2008-11-06T15:02:00.003Z

I haven't said much about the presidential election in this blog, but it has obviously been on my mind every single day I have spent here. The level of awareness and knowledgability about the election among my non-American friends and classmates has been amazing, and I have been startled by how much everyone feels is at stake for themselves and their countries. They have watched the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin SNL clips, editorialized in student newspapers, and followed this fall's debates. Even before I left the States, I knew that the outcome of this election would have an enormous impact on how non-Americans would react to me. The last six weeks have proven that I was not only right, but underestimated the impact.

Yesterday and today, I have been getting high fives and congratulations everywhere I have gone. For the first time in my adult life, there's some serious cachet in being an American in Europe. And I don't think the enthusiasm is excessive. People here are realistic, as I believe I am, about what Obama's election means. Nobody believes he is a messiah, or that he won't make mistakes or always take the course that will make him popular abroad. America's image has gotten so bad under the Bush administration that merely the repudiation of the last eight years is itself a huge relief. There's a recognition, voiced by Americans and non-Americans alike, that President Obama will have very little to work with given the poor economy, the debt, and our military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But above all, I think people are just impressed with who Obama is. I don't think the phrase "American dream" will be used in an ironic way here anytime soon.

I spent election day in a weird state, full of nervous energy but mentally in a fog. It was the first time I can remember since high school when I worked out twice in the same day, with a swim in the morning and a run in the afternoon. Most polls on the East coast didn't close until 1 a.m. GMT, but luckily I had some evening entertainment to keep me distracted: a James Bond "Casino Royale"-themed formal dinner at Christ's College, to which Emma's MCR was given an allotment of tickets. After that it was back home to change out of my tux and then to the college, where I was hosting the election night party in the MCR.

I stayed up until 6 a.m. with a small but hardy band of Emma folks who wanted to hold out for the speeches. I thought John McCain was incredibly gracious. He could have dodged the momentousness of the election, but he embraced it. Unfortunately, his supporters were ugly, and I think it bodes ill for the Republicans if this is what's left of their rank-and-file. I also thought President-elect Obama's speech was great. I expected I might cry, and I did tear up at one point... I'm a little embarassed to admit it, but it was when he told his daughters that they could have a puppy in the White House. I guess it was a combination of the overwhelming significance of our first black president, my sense that the "moral values" that I subscribe to finally carried the day, and a tender moment that tapped into my own ambitions for fatherhood.

The news wasn't all good-- the loss for marriage equality in California and the congressional races in Alaska put a damper on my glee. But on the most important battle, for the first time since I gained the right to vote, I feel like the good guys won. I am proud and thankful to be an American every day, but today there's just a little bit of extra relish.

quintessential cambridge experience #2: punting on the cam

2008-11-01T10:41:00.009Z

Punting has to be one of the most preposterous modes of transport ever invented. Among ways of getting from Point A to Point B that are faster and easier than punting are: walking, swimming, somersaulting, and doing that inchworm dance. Punting, one might say, is the ultimate celebration of British inefficiency.

And yet we do it and love it; it's THE activity for tourists in Cambridge. So what is punting, you ask? It consists of guiding a big, awkward wooden boat (a punt) along the river by pushing an enormous pole into the earth at the bottom of the river. It's only possible on an tiny river like the Cam, which can't be more than 20 meters across at its widest and is so calm that standing on the shore it can be hard to tell which way it's flowing. The mighty Mississip it ain't.

Last Sunday I went punting for the first time with Shannon and Christoph from my MCR and Christoph's girlfriend Miriam. I led off as "punter," and it only took a few minutes for me to tell that I was way out of my element. The punter stands precariously on the stern of the boat and tries desperately to maintain forward motion, not crash into the bank, and not fall in the water, while the passengers laugh at his/her misfortune. I did have one scary moment where the pole got momentarily stuck in the mud at the bottom of the Cam and I almost stayed behind with it-- there was a gasp from the rest of the group as I crouched down to steady myself.

Things got better when I had one crucial realization: you need to treat the pole primarily as a rudder, not as a motor. Pushing off the bottom of the riverbed is all well and good and easy enough, but the placement of the pole in between pushes makes the difference between smooth sailing and drunken zigzags. We punted along a famous stretch known as "the backs," a collection of neatly manicured lawns, ancient colleges and chapels, and numerous bridges. Everyone took a turn at the helm, and I'm sorry to report that the two Germans far outshone the two Americans in the punting department. A few pictures of the experience:

Along the Backs.

Christoph and Miriam with the "bridge of sighs."

Shannon and me with King's Chapel, which is Cambridge's most famous landmark.

matriculation

2008-10-27T16:41:00.008Z

I have a backlog of quintissentially Cantabrigian experiences to report to you on, so I begin tonight with Matriculation. It's one of those wonderfully tradition-encrusted institutions of Cambridge life, and it marks the official beginning of membership in one's College. I've never read any Harry Potter books, but there were lots of elements of the experience that made me think of Harry Potter. (Quick review: Cambridge has 31 colleges, and each grad student is affiliated with one of them, more for housing and social life than for academics. Mine is Emmanuel College.)

The ceremony began with a group photo in the front court of the College, in front of the chapel. We were required to look respectable--dark suits for gents--and wear our academic gowns, which are a must-have unless you're at one of those "modern" and "progressive" colleges. Before the big group photo, I organized a smaller photo of the eight new Williams people at Emma this year. Unfortunately, the chapel is totally washed out in the late afternoon sun, but you can at least see the silly robes they make us wear:

Observant family members may notice that I'm wearing the "Nana tie," which just happens to be the Emmanuel College colors, pink and blue!

So, now the Harry Potter-esque part. The kernel of the Matriculation ceremony is signing your name in a big book as the Master of the College and the Graduate Tutor look on. Before they started calling us upstairs, we received very specific instructions: we were to write our full names, undergraduate institutions, and places of birth. For those born in the British Isles, that meant the "historic county" of birth--which led to puzzlement for those born in London, which has apparently devoured a lot of historic counties around it. Those born in the U.S., Canada, and Australia wrote our birth states or provinces, and everyone else was supposed to just write the country. A Russian student asked if that meant the country as it now exists, or as it existed at the time of birth, and I'm not sure if she got a satisfactory answer.

The head porter called us upstairs in alphabetical groups at five-minute intervals, whereupon we were ushered into an opulently furnished room with lots of portraits of dead Emmanuel fellows on the walls. We signed a bunch of papers that said we would uphold the values of Cambridge, pay "due respect and obedience" to the vice-chancellor and the university, and all that jazz. The Master, Graduate Tutor, and the book were in the next room at the head of a very long table, and the dean of the college called us in there one by one.

Finally it was my turn, and as I started writing in the book, the Master asked how many names I had. I informed him that, regretfully, I only have three, but it was my understanding that his full name is rather impressive. (His wikipedia page identifies him as "Richard Thomas James Wilson, Baron Wilson of Dinton GCB.") We chatted briefly about how I was getting along, and he congratulated me and said, "you are now a member of the College, and will be for the rest of your life." For some reason, I thought of that kid from The Sandlot going "FOR-EV-ER. FOR-EV-ER."

Naturally, when everyone has signed the book, a lavish evening of drinking and eating ensued. The end.

stephen hawking: "totally overrated"

2008-10-21T20:56:00.005+01:00

I enjoyed this bit of cheeky student humour from Varsity, one of the Cambridge University newspapers. The story is about the announcement of a gigantic bronze sculpture that is being planned to honor Stephen Hawking, the famous Cambridge theoretical physicist who has been almost completely paralyzed by ALS for decades:

The sculpture has sparked debate amongst students. One finds Hawking
underserving of such a tribute: "He seems totally overrated when compared
to, say, Newton." However, a graduate student commented that "he deserves
much more than a paltry 10ft statue."

I passed by Professor Hawking on the street this weekend, which I suspect is the closest I will ever get to having contact with him. As you can imagine, he's one of Cambridge's most famous characters, and he seems to inhabit an intellectual universe that the rest of us can only guess about. You can read his account of his astonishing life with ALS here.

in search of "development"

2008-10-19T15:56:00.004+01:00

So you've probably noticed that my blogging has been quite sporadic, and the reason is one that I predicted when I started: my life here makes lousy blogging material. An illustration: last night somebody asked me what I did all week, and I found myself totally at a loss for words. I think I said something about lots of reading and then changed the subject. From time to time there will be lots of scintillating travel blog material as I trot off elsewhere in the UK and Europe, and to Africa (more on that later...). In the meantime, I think the only way for me to keep up my blogging mojo is to share a little bit about what I'm reading, writing, and thinking about at Cambridge. I will try to keep it interesting, and if anyone out there feels inspired to respond or question, please fire away.

First, a little bit of background. My program is an M.Phil in Development Studies, and if you don't know what "Development Studies" means, you're in good company-- I encounter a lot of puzzlement from fellow Cambridge students, usually those in the sciences or humanities. The type of "Development" in question is not the development of children, nor is it much concerned with nonprofit fundraising. In this case, "Development" refers to the project of raising standards of living in the non-industrialized countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The development project really began in the churn of world events after the Great Depression and World War II. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were established to provide funds for reconstruction and to prevent another collapse in the worldwide financial system, respectively. (The extent to which both institutions have since drifted from their original missions is a fascinating topic in itself.) The success of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led and -financed effort to rebuild Europe after the war, made the idea that rich countries could help poor countries grow their economies seem attractive and realistic. In his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry Truman called for "a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas." As usual, there was a large dose of enlightened self-interest mixed in with the benevolence: aid would become a potent Cold War containment strategy as the U.S. wooed developing countries away from the Soviet sphere of influence.

Sixty years later, it's amazing how many of the fundamental issues surrounding development and international economics remain unresolved. Our current international financial crisis has loomed in the background, and sometimes taken center stage, in most of the lectures I have attended so far. John Maynard Keynes (the economist I mentioned in last week's tea-drinking episode, and one of the fathers of the above-mentioned World Bank and IMF) wrote a lot about the causes of the Great Depression, and substituting a few words you could make him sound like he was writing about what's going on right now. Karl Marx is enjoying a bit of a renaissance as well. I'm happy to be in grad school right now for job market reasons, but it also seems like I've come here at the perfect time to revisit all of these great political-economic-philosophical debates.

I should also mentioned another, more contemporary debate that has attracted my keen interest--to the extent that I suspect whatever conclusions I arrive at for myself will heavily influence what I do with my working life. In this corner we have Jeffrey Sachs: economist, UN advisor, friend of Bono, and the man that I once said was "who I want to be when I grow up." And in this corner we have Bill Easterly: economist, critic of Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, who was essentially chased out of the World Bank for his contrarian opinions. To boil them down to one sentence apiece: Sachs believes that we already know what needs to be done to achieve big development goals, and what we need is more money, more effort, and more willpower from the international community. Easterly believes that big development plans are doomed to fail, and that the people who really make development happen are not the "planners" but the "searchers" who experiment on the ground and find smaller-scale solutions that work. You can see why the Sachs view wins on emotional appeal and is more likely to be embraced by the development "industry," but in a lot of ways I find Easterly more persuasive. The planners vs. searchers dichotomy is a little bit artificial, of course, but I have a feeling that someday I will face career decisions that will present some variation of this question-- and I want to be ready to make the choice when that time comes.

fresher's week dispatches

2008-10-12T14:52:00.005+01:00

A financial bailout. So far I have been able to avoid the worst of what Cambridge's bureacracy can dish out, but I had a close call on Thursday. After getting out of my morning lecture, I hustled down to the Language Centre to sign up for a French class. The enrollment hours were brief and deviously inconvenient, and the place was jammed with people when I got there. Finally I made it to the front of the line and explained my dilemma. The class cost £100, payable by cash or cheque, but I couldn't come up with the payment that day. I had signed up for my bank account the previous week, but they hadn't sent me my chequebook yet. I had deposited my Gates stipend at my bank on Monday, but it takes cheques at least four days to clear in the UK, so I couldn't withdraw cash from the ATM. Knowing that my situation was not my fault and that lots of new Cambridge students must be in a similar boat, asked if I could reserve a spot in the almost-full class and pay at one of the later enrollment days, emphasizing all along how committed I was to taking the class.

To paraphrase the response: "not a prayer, buster-- come back when you have the money." Crap. I knew that the class was going to fill up, and it was now or never. A few moments of desperate haggling and attempts at negotiating failed. However, I was in luck-- there was another Gates Scholar in line behind me, whom I've known since we interviewed in Annapolis in February. She spoke up and offered to front me the money; she had gotten to Cambridge long before I had and consequently had a chequebook. I gratefully accepted and paid her back as soon as my cheques arrived, enclosing my repayment in an effusive thank-you note with a promise to buy her a cocktail at next week's Gates dinner cruise on the Thames.

If I had been shut out of the class, it would not at all have been an atypical experience for a Cambridge student. There are just so many uncoordinated moving parts around here, so many offices and institutions that don't talk to each other, so many delays intersecting with deadlines. Most people manage to scrape by, but you do hear the occasional horror story, and my missing out on the class wouldn't have been so bad in comparison to other possibilities.

A stroll to Grantchester. On a much happier note, this weekend I rounded up a posse to walk along a footpath on the River Cam to the tiny hamlet of Grantchester. The village is home to a teahouse known as The Orchard, which once played host to a remarkable group of friends. For the half-decade preceding WWI, The Orchard was a hangout for a subset of the Bloomsbury Group-- including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, the poet Rupert Brooke, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, they became friends before most of them had done their most significant work. Keynes is of greatest personal interest to me, as an economist with whom I have a lot of intellectual sympathy. (Hint: he's pretty much the boogeyman among the "just let the market run its course and everything will be fine" set.) I'll close with a shot of some contemporary Cantabrigians following in their leisurely footsteps:

4 glasses of wine + orientation

2008-10-08T13:52:00.005+01:00

After a week in Cambridge I am just beginning to wrap my mind around the innumerable ways in which the whole approach to education here is different from what I am used to in the U.S. It will take several posts to digest and share my thoughts, but I'll start with one of the most interesting features of Cambridge life -- the college system -- including a "not in Kansas anymore" experience from the other night.

This thing called "The University of Cambridge" is basically an administrative shell for an unruly collection of institutions, including 31 self-governing colleges, various academic departments and committees, and a wide assortment of other entities (such as the Gates Cambridge Trust). As our Gatesian elders warned us during the Lake District trip, navigating this often baffling system is one of the primary challenges of our lives here and an excellent education unto itself.

For grad students such as yours truly, the 31 colleges exist primarily as centers of residential and social life. The colleges vary widely in personality, age (ranging from 31 to 724 years) , wealth (£8 million to £700 million), and student body composition (grad vs. undergrad, male vs. female, home vs. international). Reflecting the pious history of the university, six colleges are named after Jesus or God in some form (Christ's, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Jesus, Trinity, and Trinity Hall). Other colleges bear the names of monarchs, clergy, famous alumni (Darwin), and political figures (Churchill).

When I was applying to Cambridge, I had to rank my top two college preferences. At the time I didn't know any of them from Adam -- from Adam's College? -- and frankly didn't feel up to sorting through the morass. Luckily, I had a lazy but defensible way out of making a real decision. For historical reasons I won't bore you with, nearly all Williams alumni at Cambridge are at Emmanuel College. Indeed, "Emma" is a veritable Williams-in-exile, typically with about 20 Ephs in residence at any one time. The current crop consists mostly of 07's and 08's, and I actually knew a few of the former the last time we shared a campus. And Emma just happens to be a great college for lots of other reasons-- it has a rich historical pedigree (founded 1584) without being snooty or overly traditional, it's centrally located, reasonably wealthy, has very pretty grounds, and is neither too big nor too small. Of course, it seems that everyone at Cambridge believes their college to be the best college, so maybe it's just the brainwashing setting in.

Now, say you were a college administrator and you had to put the following activities in a suitable order: (A) dance party, (B) introductory remarks by college bigwigs in an auditorium, (C) multiple-course dinner with multiple courses of wine, and (D) cocktails. In America, surely, the order would be BDCA. Apparently that's not how it's done in Britain, though, because on Monday night we had all consumed at least four servings of alcohol before the bigwigs spoke.

The evening began with the cocktails, followed by the first MCR* formal hall** of Michaelmas Term.*** The food was actually quite good, and we were served a glass of wine with almost every course: white wine with the appetizer, red with the main course, port with dessert. The Master**** of the College said grace in Latin before and after the meal. I was seated next to a very sweet Scottish girl who, sadly, I had a very hard time understanding due to her accent and the horrible acoustics. Her failure to touch her wine led to quizzical comments her friends on the other side of the table, and I watched in amazement as she put away three glasses in rapid succession and then continued our conversation without missing a beat.

Once we were, ummm, warmed up, we proceeded to the auditorium for welcoming remarks from Master Wilson, the Senior Tutor*****, the Head Porter******, and the president of the MCR. All of the speeches were actually quite funny and entertaining... but it could have just been the wine. The Head Porter, who bears a striking resemblance to Terry Bradshaw, was particularly funny. Finally, at the end of the evening, we proceeded to the Old Library (where we started with the cocktails) for a 90s-themed bop******* under the eyes of the dead white guys whose portraits hang on the walls.

And yes, you read that right: all of this happened on Monday night. Apparently the idea that most of one's drinking should be done on the weekend is an American invention too.

Vocab:
*Middle Combination Room (MCR): refers to the social organization for the grad students and the grad students themselves as a unit, in addition to the physical room where they congregate.
**Formal hall: a sumptuous multi-course dinner, eaten by candlelight in formal dress and academic robes.
***Michaelmas Term: October to December.
****Master: like a college president. Ours is a member of the House of Lords who has worked for Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
*****Senior Tutor: an academic who oversees the welfare of grad students in the college. Ours is a chemist, and it seems like an odd feature of the UK system that he has to spend some of his time assigning us rooms, but that's how it works.
******Porter: no equivalent in the US system, porters are responsible for security, locks, mail delivery, and otherwise keeping the gears turning.
*******Bop: dance party. I didn't need a footnote for that, I just wanted to use seven asterisks.

lake district recap

2008-10-03T13:08:00.005+01:00

I am back in Cambridge for the madness of "freshers' week" after a fun but soggy few days in the Lake District. A few thoughts before I return to the more mundane tasks of assembling my life:

The Scholars. I traveled with 100-odd Gates scholars, most of them freshly minted like me, but there was also a number of returning scholars doing multi-year degrees who served as our chaperones/tour guides. I referred to them as "the elders" until I realized that I am older than most of them; one, in fact, is younger than my youngest sibling! For those not familiar with the program, the Gates Cambridge Trust can theoretically support scholars from any country except the UK. Our group was roughly half Americans, but it included students from countries ranging from Canada to Zambia to Croatia to Malaysia.

Poets and opium-heads. Our Lake District amusements included orienteering in the rain, hiking in the rain, kayaking in the rain, visiting a gingerbread bakery in the rain, and touring the former home of the great poet William Wordsworth in the rain. Wordsworth's house began its life as a pub and hosted a number of colorful men of letters as long-term houseguests. Sir Walter Scott, who tried his best to be polite but could not abide by the Wordsworths' teetotaling and twice-daily consumption of porridge, would sneak out the window of the guest room each morning to get a proper English breakfast and a pint of beer before his hosts woke up. Another guest, Thomas de Quincey, penned Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, possibly launching the addiction-memoir genre that has more recently given us Augusten Burroughs and James Frey.

Encounters with bad British food, volume 1. On the way to the Lake District, we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch. We were each issued the kind of lunch you carried to school in 3rd grade: a sandwich, a bag of "crisps," a juice box, fruit, and some "biscuits," all in a brown paper bag. The first unusual thing I noticed about my tuna sandwich was that it had corn in it, which seemed odd but wasn't a dealbreaker. (The Subway chain has stores here, and it has corn in its lineup of vegetable toppings.) A few bites in, however, I noticed a taste that was vaguely familiar, mildly unpleasant, and definitely out of place. I puzzled aloud about the taste until a nearby scholar, an Irish woman, filled me in on the mystery ingredient: margarine. Tuna salad, white bread, corn, and margarine-- yuck. Fortunately, the names of the crisps and the biscuits provided some comic relief. The flavors of crisps included "Ready Salted" and "Prawn Cocktail," while my cookies carried the appetizing name of "Digestives."

The family name. Perhaps as some kind of karmic compensation for elementary school taunts about my last name, the Powers name won me an unprecedented degree of cachet with the Gates crowd. A few of the returning Gates scholars who organized the trip told me that they were eager to meet me because of my name. I accepted the compliment as graciously as I could, but mentioned that my name couldn't stand up to that of one of my Alaska friends, Dan Stellar. The name Daniel just sounds like a winner all around, and when combined with a last name that's a synonym for "awesome," it's pretty much impossible to compete.

hello goodbye

2008-09-28T14:12:00.004+01:00

I made it, and this may be my last chance to post for the remainder of the week, since I'm leaving tomorrow for a Gates Scholar retreat/orientation in the Lake District of northern England. The retreat is a chance for the Gates folk to bond for a few days before the term officially starts, not to mention visit a beautiful corner of the island where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others went for inspiration.

To make Cambridge any cuter, I think you would have to tear the whole place down and rebuild it out of candy. I arrived by bus -- called a "coach" here if it's a long-distance trip -- to a scene of people lounging and playing football on the lush grass of Parker's Piece. (Parker's Piece, I have since learned, will play a starring role in my daily commute.) The town's winding, narrow, frequently-name-changing streets are packed with shops, restaurants of every ethnic variety, and centuries-old churches and academic buildings. I'm living in a house of eight people on a residential street, a bit of a hike from most of my other buildings of interest, but that should get better once I have a bike. I have met two of the housemates so far, an Italian and a Brit, who by pure coincidence are both studying aerospace engineering.

Unfortunately, I have been thwarted so far in most of my efforts to piece together the logistical elements of my new life. I am still without an e-mail password, a bike, a "mobile", a "chequing" account, an academic gown, a key to most of the buildings at Emmanuel (my college), and various other critical things-- mostly thanks to my having arrived on a weekend, but also in part because of Cambridge bureaurcracy. Trotting off to the Lake District for a few days won't help matters either, but I will at least have Friday and maybe part of Thursday before things really get hectic.

Given my seeming preoccupation with border security, I would be remiss if I didn't discuss my customs/immigration experience. I had a layover in Dublin, and the Irish immigration officer spent a total of about 0.01 second glancing at my passport, remarking that I was moving on to the UK, stamping it, and sending me on my way. At Heathrow, much to my surprise, I didn't pass through immigration or customs at all, presumably because of the EU common travel area. Much different from my '05 experience, when I was doing the opposite-- a layover in Heathrow en route to Dublin-- and I had what felt like a long Q-and-A session at both airports. If I didn't already have a shiny student visa, I might have been disappointed about not having a stamp to commemmorate my official arrival in the UK.

That's all for now... there's been a lot coming at me, so hopefully I will have my head more in order on the far side of the Gates trip. More soon!

pictures: south dakota to chicago

2008-09-17T21:05:00.014+01:00

Attempting to cook breakfast in high winds. In the background, our teepee.

In the foreground, the model of the finished Crazy Horse memorial. In the background, actual progress to date. (See that little spot of sky that will eventually be between Crazy Horse's arm and his horse's mane? You could put a 10-story building in there.)

Looking presidential.

Badlands sunset.

Adorable Badlands critters.

Clark Griswold Awards I: Wall Drug.

Clark Griswold Awards II: The Corn Palace, in transition from its 2008 to 2009 version.

Clark Griswold Awards III: The Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN. We're between his legs, to give you a sense of scale.

The crew at Monoma Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in downtown Madison. We got an impromptu tour from a talkative Gambian (not to be confused with Zambian) man who worked at the parking garage. Seeing my Alaska license plate he announced, somewhat improbably, that Sarah Palin is his "shining star." To my chagrin, in the days since then I've realized he has lots of company.

Me with the Chicago Powers clan by "the bean" in Millennium Park.

pictures-- alaska to montana

2008-09-13T01:51:00.020+01:00

Danvers, Massachusetts / Mile 5,883 -- Sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Here's the just a teeny sampling of pictures from the first leg of the trip (more to come later-- unfortunately it's a little tedious uploading these to blogspot and getting them to stay put):

Feeding fry bread to Obama at the Alaska State Fair, Palmer

This is more or less what the Alcan looked like for the last two hours before the Canadian border.

The border: I am in Canada, Sam is in the U.S., Elise is in some kind of legal black hole.

Roadsize hazards in the Yukon: buffalo!

Liard River Hotsprings, BC, in all of their stinky glory

The Athabasca Glacier, which is along the road connecting Jasper and Banff National Parks

Lake Louise, Banff. The picture really doesn't do justice to the freaky blueness of the water. But I love how it looks like me, Elise, and the boat were photoshopped in.

I still like my "leaning piles of tiramisu" analogy. Left, pretty Banff scenery + me being a jackass. Right, a delicious dessert.

Our final morning in Banff.

The Continental Divide in Glacier National Park (Montana).

Along Going-to-the-Sun Rd. in Glacier. If you have a magnifying glass, you can see my car in the lower left.

Cheyenne graves at Little Bighorn (added in 1992 if I'm not mistaken).

the magical mystery tour's hard day's night in suburban chicago

2008-09-08T05:55:00.002+01:00

Niagara Falls, Ontario / Mile 5,273 -- It has been an eventful few days, so I’m going to breeze over a lot… several Midwestern states may get short shrift. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan: sorry, guys.

But I did want to report on our weekend in Chicago, which, as expected, was one of the major highlights of the Great American Road Trip. We stayed in the suburb of Highland Park with my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Robin, and cousins Rachel (10) and Aaron (6). Kevin and I have managed to cross paths several times in the last year with weddings and football games and such, but I don’t get to see the rest of the family very often. Rachel and Aaron are adorable and precocious kids and great fun to be around. I viewed the Chicago leg as family time and didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what we might do, but we did check off a fair number of sights within the Windy City, including an night at a couple of jazz clubs, a walk around Millennium Park, and a trip to the top of the Sears Tower.

On our second and final night we enjoyed an evening of refined suburban debauchery. Just steps from Kevin and Robin’s house is an outdoor concert venue known as the Ravinia, where almost every night during the summer the locals spread blankets out on the lawn and enjoy food, booze, and live music. On Saturday, a Beatles cover band called American English provided an eerily perfect imitation of the Fab Four, and in period dress and hairdos to boot. Along with a bunch of Kevin and Robin’s friends, we ate, drank, and danced the night away. At one point Elise expressed amazement that Kevin and I come from the same stock, and she remarked that I have an “inappropriately funny” family, a comment that I took with tremendous pride.

Unfortunately, Samantha had to bail in Chicago—something about having to work on Monday, I didn’t really understand—so now it’s down to me and Elise. After getting our state-visitation cards punched in Indiana (at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) and Michigan (old town Lansing and riverwalk), we arrived tonight at Niagara Falls, the first place on our route since Glennallen, AK that I have already been to. The falls were not part of the original plan, but Elise had never been and wanted to see them, so here we are. Tomorrow night we descend on Williams College and crash with my brother, and then Tuesday the Great American Road Trip finally comes to an end.

the clark w. griswold jr. awards for excellence in roadside attractions

2008-09-05T05:28:00.002+01:00

La Crosse, Wisconsin / Mile 4,382 -- Just so you know that our trip hasn’t consisted entirely dour and depressing stuff, here’s a few of my favorite screwball attractions from the last couple of days, all of them worthy of National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Wall Drug. The Paris Hilton of roadside attractions, Wall Drug is famous for being famous. At one point it really was just a drug store. Its notoriety began when the owners, struggling with lousy business during the Great Depression, starting giving out free ice water to passing motorists. Since then it has grown into a tourist monstrosity, with dozens of stores and restaurants, mechanical dinosaurs, fountains, photography exhibits, and a player-piano-type contraption with all the instruments of a bluegrass band. Its notoriety rests mostly on the Wall Drug billboards that litter I-90 in both directions. (I saw one as far back as Montana.) The amateurish billboards advertise Wall Drug’s offerings of cowboy goods, 5-cent coffee, free donuts for Vietnam vets, and often just the glory of Wall Drug itself. The place is incredibly tacky, but you have to give it props for marketing genius. If it’s not in every business school textbook in the country, it should be.
The Corn Palace. Erected to the greater glory of corn, the Corn Palace is a multi-purpose civic center in Mitchell, South Dakota, that has been decorated every year since 1905 with murals made almost entirely of corn. Each year, the murals follow a different theme, and the corn artists are currently transitioning to 2009’s theme of great American attractions. (Naturally, the place of honor belongs to the Corn Palace. Mount Rushmore comes in second.) How dominant is the Corn Palace in this community of 15,000? On the front wall of Mitchell’s City Hall, located right next door Corn Palace, is a large billboard advertising the hours of the Corn Palace—presumably so that it wouldn’t need to take up precious space on the palace itself.
The Jolly Green Giant. As was the case in Wyoming, we did not spend a night in Minnesota and had no planned stops there. Since I-90 passes through a fairly uninspiring band far south of the Twin Cities, we were hard-up for a roadside attraction that would allow us to claim to be visitors to the Gopher State. Luckily, the travel gods arranged for us to get low on gas right around the wonderfully named town of Blue Earth, home to a 54-foot likeness of the Jolly Green Giant. We took some pictures with His Jolliness, and we also found an exhibit commemorating the completion of I-90. Much like the transcontinental railroad, I-90 was built from two directions at once, meeting on a gold-painted stretch in Blue Earth that was meant to evoke the golden spike. I was shocked to learn how recently the interstate was completed: 1978. We further burnished our Minnesota-visiting credentials by once again reading the state’s history from Lonely Planet, listening to A Prairie Home Companion from Samantha’s iPod, and listening to John McCain’s acceptance speech live from St. Paul.