Swahili lesson:
Unataka kuchuliwa? = Do you want a massage?
Tulia, samba! = Easy, lion!

Sarah Exports the Peace Sign

I’m still in Kinshasa. I missed the earthquake in the East by a matter of days. Somehow, I forgot to factor natural disasters into the list of possible dangers. Here, in the capitol, my bad education continues. Over the past week I’ve met with high school girls, college students, parliamentary officials, women’s groups, a local private television station, and a priest. My list of fragmentary knowledge grows. Here are a few examples:

There is a culture of NGOs in Congo which have been described as the New Colonialism. The only people with jobs in this country are those
working for NGOs.

Every other vehicle in this smog choked city belongs to the UN. They have a sweet set-up and they do nothing. They do nothing. They know where rebel groups are located. They know everything about the Interhamwe’s whereabouts and doings. But instead they just act as a fat parasite, leeching like every other outsider who has their hand in Congo’s honey pot.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are offering Congo a huge chunk of change so they can get at the resources. Congo’s belly is swollen with oil, as it turns out. So if you know Congo only for its diamond mines, well this puppy has resources beyond belief and EVERYONE wants some.

On the equally frustrating social scene I’ve learned that many of the rape victims in the East are ostracized because people in the village believe that they are cursed, or even that they somehow asked for it. Across the country there is a huge problem with sexual violence and general oppression of women. The high school girls I talked to told me that their teachers are always trying to get them to sleep with them and often their grades depend on it. And the real frustrating part is that when violence and oppression is the norm and there is also a huge problem with impunity many women don’t even think about their rights, or that there really is such a thing as women’s rights. I’m really glad I’m not a radical feminist because I’d likely get all, “I’m GOING TO CRUSH SOME SKULLS!!”. And I am wildly angry, but I have met a lot of women who are trying to re-educate people about some pretty basic human rights issues. So, there is at least faction attempting to influence basic awareness.

If I come back to Congo again I have been asked to appear on a local private television show, they are going to have a special program. Yeah, hilarious and possibly a disaster, but in any case we’ll get that shit up on youtube.

Barring any last minute disasters, I will fly out of Kinshasa on Sunday and be back in SF the 16th. It’s so strange here and I’m really going to miss it. The traffic is the worst. I’ve never had so many near misses in my life, and he roads themselves are really just a series of kiddie pool sized pot-holes. There are vendors of everything, in fact they stand on the side of the street and hold out puppies to passing cars, Puppies. They sell crocodiles in the market and I also saw a monkey just tied to some log. We have been lucky to have electricity and running water almost every day. Often power lines get cut and stolen to be sold. I ate a pile of caterpillars, they tasted good. Oh, crocodile tastes like fishy chicken.

Okay, I think that covers the basics for now. Oh, here is a Konono #1 video so you can see what Kinshasa looks like:

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Map of Martinique, by the CIA.

My life was untroubled by the existence of Martinique until Daily announced his intentions of living there for eight months in order to research his dissertation. As his degree relates to French Colonial History the presumption was that Martinique was formerly a French Colony, which is correct, but it never would have occurred to me that it remains an actual part of France to this day. Like its Caribbean neighbor Guadeloupe, Guiana (not where Jonestown was) in South America and Reunion (which produced Miss France) near Madagascar, Martinique belongs to the Overseas Department of France. Each place is treated, to my understanding achieved through little effort, similar to various states here in the U.S., with direct representation in France’s government. Unfortunately this also means that they use the Euro which, if you haven’t noticed, is kicking the dollar’s ass these days.

Understanding that our friend was stranding himself in a foreign country where he knew no one Aaron and I began to discuss the possibility of selflessly throwing ourselves into the tropics in the dead of winter to visit. Phone calls to the MVP Gold representatives of Alaska Airlines were made, long slogs discussing logistics complex enough to cause mere calculators to explode in confusion, and a flurry of modern communication ensued between the States and the tiny island of Martinique. Miracles were performed and so it was set in stone that Aaron and I would journey from our comfortable northern climes and descend into the sun-soaked paradise at the beginning of February. Then the flights were changed and we accrued an additional leg and a couple of extra hours.

Suddenly I had gone from a routine entrenched spoil-sport to a globe-trotting member of the international jet-set. This required renewing my passport and finding some way of ensuring I would not be fired or evicted from my home. The gears were set in motion and the pieces fell into place as effortlessly as, eh, whatever the metaphor would be in this case. I even went so far as to borrow a French phrase book from a co-worker who jabbered foreign at me one afternoon without any provocation, assuming that she owed me for this grievous offense. The fact that I hardly cracked the book open during the first couple months of its occupation in my life can only be explained by revealing a complicated series of tragedies and misadventures inspired by Greek myths. With time running out I began mumbling phrases in mixed company and adjusting to the red-hue my cheeks assumed.

However feeble my attempts at incorporating a second (or third, I suppose) language, my research into the place I would ultimately see was first-rate. Martinique subsists on the French government but this economic aid does not mean there is no industry on the island. Tourism accounts for most employment as it requires a large service sector, and there are agricultural exports such as sugar-cane and bananas; the former is mostly dedicated to to the production of rum, for which Martinique is renowned. During the hurricane season of last year, tho, the island lost its entire banana crop. This disaster was followed closely by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake which caused one death (heart attack, I believe) and some destruction. Statistics available were slightly out of date and deviated slightly source by source but unemployment seemed to hover around 28%– higher perhaps this year due to the bananas being destroyed. So far as I understood it I would soon be traipsing through a tropical wonderland where they make a lot of booze and no one has a job, standing out like an albino, speaking the wrong language and probably wearing some garish garb with the mistaken idea that everyone on the island thinks hawaiian shirts and linen pants are the best way to combat the heat and humidity. The only available evidence that Martinique was not an impoverished death-trap like Haiti or Jamaica was that my pale-face friend was able to wander around on his own with no horror stories beyond every yard in his neighborhood being patrolled incessantly by enraged guard-dogs.

After being disappointed with the available literature on the internet (the Martinican tourist site focuses mainly on rum and food) I found a blog written by a British woman named Lindsay who is currently living on the eastern side of the island teaching English to school-children. Her experiences furthered my understanding of what was to come: flying cockroaches the size of baby birds; Dengue Fever. Fortunately she did vouch for the existence of food in supermarkets which could be stir-fried which implied that, were I to escape any untimely demise by insects, disease and kidney-thieves, I might be able to eat; that there would be seafood available (I’m that kind of vegetarian) was a given. Didn’t check into the mercury content of the Caribbean, tho. Her travails with cat-calling lecherous old-men in town seemed unlikely to cause me any problems, for which I was grateful. Maybe if I were blond.

Mount Pelee Erupts, 1902

There are also volcanoes, or at least one. Mount Pelee sits above the town of Saint-Pierre along the northern coast. The city had been the original capital of the island, referred to historically as the Paris of the West Indies, until 1902 when an eruption obliterated the town along with close to 30,000 inhabitants. In under ten minutes. Despite the tears it was exciting to be able to travel to the rebuilt Saint-Pierre where excavations allow you to poke around ruins looking for petrified babies and heads.

Except transportation seemed to be a tricky deal. The towns are separated by large swaths of heavily forested mountains. Car rentals seemed pretty cheap but testimonials suggested attempting to drive alongside the locals was invitation to heart attack because they are all insane. There’s no railroad and the country seems to lack a cohesive transit system beyond an unofficial bus known as a taxico: Large vans or small buses that run normal routes between two cities and just picks people up on the side of the road– you scream in foreign to get out wherever you need to get out and the driver decides how much you’ve cost him.

So what I knew before going: A small island populated by French speaking blacks, guard dogs, mosquitoes, giant flying cockroaches and my friend Daily. It would average 85 degrees during the day and maybe 75 at night with a breeze and the humidity would be high. It would be expensive due to the fact that not only is the island on the Euro but almost everything has to be imported. We would be at the mercy of a ramshackle public transportation system or mercenary cab drivers. If the hurricanes don’t kill you the next earthquake or volcanic eruption probably will. There may be thousands of impoverished people whetting knives waiting for feckless whitey. Then we found out we had booked our trip for Carnaval week.

At least this was more than many people knew when conversation came round to my imminent leaving. Of those who had any idea the place existed most could only recall it floated around somewhere in the Caribbean: It’s one of the lower islands in the Lesser Antilles which cut the Atlantic from the Caribbean close (geographically speaking) to Venezuela. Fewer understood that it was French, not just culturally but politically. One person, I discovered days before taking off, had actually been there before and suggested I take a rum distillery tour. The idea of being hung-over in a tropical climate made less sense than me being in a tropical climate.

None of this really explains how a small island in the Caribbean close to Venezuela became an overseas department of the French Republic, but since my return I’ve asked some questions and done some reading. Wrong order of events, of course, but something of the history: (more…)

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Here in the west coast, the youngest outpost of civilization the world knows, there is no collision of the past and the future. It is undeniably a modern place where the culture, the technology and the culture operate in a particular harmony of now. You would have to travel east to find any example of the gulf of time, to Boston where Paul Revere lies at the Granary Burial Ground down the street from a Radio Shack improbably manhandled into the basement of a three hundred year old brick building. Philadelphia is home to Elfreth’s Alley, the longest continuously inhabited street in America. You can walk down the cobbled street lined with narrow homes before turning the corner onto a busy street lined by boutique galleries. Travel farther east and you find the most severe dissonance of all, Japan, where the most advanced vending machine ever developed will sell hot coffee and cold soda to people living in houses that have stood since the middle ages.

But that’s just part of why Japan is a curiosity for the world. Somehow the ancient and the modern blend into a mysterious whole of wafer-thin cell phones and shinto shrines. Just as in San Francisco where internet use in coffee shops in as ubiquitous now as seeing two old men silently wage war across a chess-board once was ten years ago. Cafes have long been a place for the cutting edge, from the social rejects who became Bohemians to the folkies and art-fags who exhibited their talents and personalities in the corners and on the walls. Somehow it’s less an surprise to see two people sharing a table yet completely absorbed in the separate world of their laptops then seeing a cluster of people debate the merits of cubism or a person quietly reading a book of poems over a cappuccino. If advertisements are hip to the trend laptops are flooding the world, leveling the playing field for people everywhere, but it’s still hard to imagine the saffron-robed Dali Lama checking e-mail.

Odd as it may seem recent efforts by a disparate cluster of people have made the internet a reality for an ancient people normally considered to shun the modern era and the trappings that come along with it. Since the Chinese absorbed Tibet in 1950 a large immigrant population has found homes in the northern mountains of India. Many found placement in Dharamsala where a population of over 100,000 Tibetan exiles now live and who have been working to rebuild their shattered community since the Dali Lama arrived at the end of the 50’s. It’s a small city in the harsh frontier where running water and electricity can’t be relied on so much as hoped for on any given day. Yet somehow it is here that a major technological coup has taken place.

Israeli ex-patriot Yahel Ben-David came to visit a friend who was on a spiritual quest and found himself leaving behind his high-paying position with a Silicon Valley linux firm to begin life anew among the refugee population. Finding the plight of the Tibetan people unconscionable Ben-David began to formulate a method of providing some service to help them advance beyond subsistence. He knew networking so he scoured the city for old computers, fax machines, modems, phones– anything linux oriented that he could take apart to rebuild. Over time he began to have prototypes which he would have to take back to Israel in order to test; India originally forbid open wireless networks. He introduced his ideas to others, he accepted donations of old parts from abroad, he waited.

And when India finally opened a limited amount of bandwidth for WiFi he was ready, manually placing his first antennae that same day. They sprung up in trees, off balconies, from the spires of buildings and the roofs of temples. Adjustments, repairs, re-placement, checks, tests– day by day searching for the signal and trying to keep the monkeys from fucking everything up. Then there was the wireless mesh. From his efforts there is now a grid of over thirty satellite relays spreading a blanket of connection over Dharamsala, reserved exclusively for the Tibetan people. Temples and schools host the server computers and the antennae and a small fee for maintenance, everything operated from the Tibetan Technology Center, housed by the venerable and long-standing charity the Tibetan Children’s Village. Now the kids, some of whom are third generation exiles, can learn network administration and web design along with their culture, traditions and history.

It’s not perfect– they had to block porn sites almost immediately because the network couldn’t support the interest and Tibetan script isn’t something that keyboards recognize just yet– but the Wireless Mesh Project has effectively provided internet access to over two thousand computers in Dharamsala alone by recycling technology and sharing knowledge. The relays operate on solar panels making them more reliable then any of the utilities provided by the local government. When one tower drops there are others all around keeping the signal strong. Something has been created in a rural Indian mountain town that hasn’t been effectively achieved in the heart of Silicon Valley by industry leaders. There’s been efforts to improve upon the technology- a telephony expert has travelled from Australia to work on incorporating VoIP connecting settlements spread out along the Indian/Tibetan border- and it has spread to other refugee communities. The Dharamsala mesh has been joined by three others all built and maintained by a team of Tibetan and foreign geeks. The exiles hope this window to the outside world can help them grow economically (there’s unfortunately talk of developing call-centers like in other Indian cities as well as online cultural curiosities for sale ala’ arrowhead necklaces and turquoise statues off the res) while strengthening their connection to their history and displaced communities. As the Chinese have repeatedly made attempts to destroy anything historically Tibetan in the occupied land ancient texts have been smuggled out where they’re being preserved digitally and passed from computer to computer. There’s hope that becoming a presence online can help bring the plight of the Tibetans back into the public-eye and exert pressure politically without having to deal with any Beastie Boys. The hard work seemed to pay off with Boingboing writer and globe-trotting internet personality Xeni Jardin introducing the world of NPR to the world of Tibet online.

Not everyone is pleased. Soon after an article was published about the wireless mesh project a DDoS attack temporarily disabled the network; although the evidence wouldn’t stand up in court (or courts without executions taking place on the roof) it does suggest the attack originated in China. So after struggling with bitter cold, savage mountain winds, poverty, out-dated technology and primates Ben-David and his band squared off with monkeys of another breed. Fortunately friends have been made around the world, the global computing community seems pretty on board.

If we were still living in a world where Tibet was like the opening of “The Golden Child” you would have trouble believing someone named Oxblood Ruffin installed encryption software for the Dali Lama but we’ve left that and debates about Cubism behind. Hackers and phreaks have found common cause and it seems the roots of Hacktivism can be traced to the implementation of The Great Firewall of China. In addition to helping set-up and secure the Tibetan grid there have been concerted efforts to tackle the Chinese directly. Applications such as Torpark, which randomizes the IP address visible to a network administrator while encrypting the user end of the signal, and methods of encryption such as steganography which hides sensitive data within, eh, insensitive data are now out there helping people achieve something very basic– an unrestricted access to information. In the states this is some big-money shit, this is an entire industry that works with budgets that use the world billions. In Tibet it took a sense of what was right, some left-of-center thinking and a way of keeping the damn monkeys from fucking shit up.

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Tonight Frontline aired an episode about the man who blocked a short column of tanks during 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre. It’s currently blowing my mind– maybe it’ll blow yours too.

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There’s a side porch on the third floor of my apartment in between my hovel and that in the rear of the building. On the ground underneath the bench decorated with Parisian landmarks lay three peeps– the disgusting yellow (traditionally) marshmallow chicks that plague Easter baskets– alongside a can of spray varnish. This is not the project of anyone I live with but, out of respect, I carefully hunker down a safe distance from them to smoke a cigarette out of the wind.

A cereal box had been employed to prevent the newly varnished peeps from damaging the floorboards, some variety of Safeway O Organics product that have been increasing in popularity over the past couple of years. Poor people– they hear that organic foods are the thing to do, so right and so correct, but they don’t know anything about what that means or what it entails. Lucky for them Safeway discovered this niche and has provided “over 150 exclusive organic items” for purchase. Now you can get your box of organic cereal and you’ve done your part– no need to worry about any of the messy agricultural or transportation or distribution or economic implications involved. Look, the express aisle’s open and there’s no line.

Mildly offensive– as offensive as it is amusing– but nothing to start setting fire to shit over… or is it? On the back panel of the box there’s a colorful depiction of South America. The earnest copywriter who landed this contract entices: “Take Organic Living on the Road”. There’s an invitation for me, the viewer, to take advantage of “naturally beautiful eco-friendly vacation destinations…” next time I’m traveling abroad. The recommendations? The Dominican Republic, The Galapagos Islands, Chile and Brazil.

Nothing to special about the D.R.– just one more place with Club Med sanctuaries for Mr. and Mrs. White 1st World to play in the tropics for pennies on the dollar. Chile doesn’t seem too wild although there’s a suggestion that Easter Island is the most remote inhabited island (which is actually Tristan da Cunha) that calls into question the overall validity of my cereal box encyclopedia. Then the real head-scratching begins when you look at Brazil:

Travel through stretches of unexplored rainforest, islands with pristine tropical beaches and endless rivers.

As tempting as it may be to send tourists into the uncharted wilds of the Amazon some latent ethical gland prevents me from willfully pursuing a life as a death-dealing travel agent. It’s not only a bad idea for the personal safety and well-being of idiots booking vacation but it also seems a little less than eco-friendly to have a bunch a shorts and Tevas clad goofballs tramping around the flora and fauna, or that which is left after the clear-cutters came through.

The absolute worst crime against humanity perpetrated by the Safeway Cereal Conglomerate is, by far, best exemplified by their interest in the Galapagos Islands:

…the Galapagos Islands have rich natural history and unique plant and animal life that make it a mecca for ecology enthusiasts.

You’re then invited to scuba dive into the unique plant and animal and swim with sea lions and penguins. For years scientists have been concerned about the unique Galapagos environment being affected by flotsam and jetsam drifting in from us civilized folks the world over. Now the sea turtles and weird blind critters found only here have to contend with idiot eco-tourists alongside castaway nets, Coca-Cola cans and leaky outboard motors.

Poor people– they just don’t know what to do. We’re supposed to eat healthy and, lo and behold, you can now get salad at McDonald’s! How tasty and nutritious and once or twice a week on your lunch break at your McJob you can feel like you’re doing something positive. Unfortunately current laws do not allow me to smash these people in the face with handy bricks while shouting “Stop eating at McDonald’s you stupid fuck!”. (more…)

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