Now that I´ve got my next step figured out and I´m sort of beginning to look towards the end of all this I´m trying to pick apart my experiences and how I´ve changed. I suppose all of this will be much more evident once I´m back in the US, back home, and can see the experience in the context of my reality before I left. If that makes sense.
Culture shock is such a strange experience and so so dangerous. There´s the initial bit which seems harsh, but isn´t anything to what´s gonna come. The food´s weird and you like it or you don´t, jet lag, language issues, altitude and weather, figuring out how to interact with the people you´re now living and working with. All of this, for me, has always been vaguely exciting and wonderful. Even when it sucked and I had diarrhea like crazy and didn´t understand how water stuff worked, it was all just an adventure, something I knew I would adjust to. This happened here, in Berlin, in Oxford, and it will happen again in Thailand. This is the easy part.
The real culture shock, what I think of when I think of culture shock, comes later and slowly but surely and makes life really hard. It comes when things stop being novel and you speak enough of the language to get yourself around. When you´re settled with your family and the differences stop being interesting and you have to start reconciling them to your own boundries, cuz like it or don´t we all have boundries that can be stretched but cannot be ignored. It comes when the stomach cramps continue after 3 months and you start to get sick of finding hairs and rocks and bugs and eggshells in your food. it comes when you´re tired of reporting your whereabouts and when you´ve had enough of missing what´s going on around you. It comes when you have laughed at yourself one too many times.
Here, my lowest point was after New Year´s when a member of my family had taken advantage of me, work was not going well, and I had just about had enough of so many things that were hard to stomach like lack of concern for safety, cruelty to the poor and to animals, machismo, and the postal system. I wrote frantic emails trying to find some sort of insight, some game plan to make everything less difficult. I got the support I needed and made it past that point but nothing´s easy.
Reverse culture shock is something I´ve never really experienced. A friend of mine had a wicked time after her junior year abroad and I just didn´t get it. This time, I have a feeling it will be different.
Having lived in England for a year, I think I learned some really important things about living in a cross-cultural environment. Oxford was deceptive, at first. We speak the same language, the food´s not THAT different and on the whole I understood what was happening around me. So I thought. It is exactly because the languages are essentially the same that I missed the fact that we could say the same things but mean something completely different. That social interactions were subtly different, that expectations were not the same. I loved Oxford, but that was a slow and gentle lesson in what it is to live outside of your home culture.
So much change has taken place in me in these months in Cochabamba. I´ve learned so much, language, about microcredit, about being an outsider and about my own boundries. I´m interested and a little scared to see what happens when I go back home.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Friday, April 13, 2007
Mollieisms: The Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games
A winner of an article. Today from the NY Times. There´s so much going on here, I don´t even know where to start.
I love love love the idea of anyone calling Spielberg the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games, that is just too amazing for words. I love a Chinese official (Zhai Jun) referring to anyone boycotting the 2008 games as "either ignorant or ill-natured." I love the idea of pressuring China to take action in the Darfur situation by getting them where it hurts, their Olympics. I love even more that it appears to be working.
Oh Hollywood, oh China, oh Mia Farrow...whatever works to create action in the Darfur situation I´m all for and this is incredible. What though, I wonder, would we do without the Olympics?
This, truly, is diplomacy at its finest.
Darfur Collides with Olympics, and China Yields
By HELENE COOPER
Published: April 13, 2007
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.
Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.
Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.
China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.
Groups focusing on many issues, including Tibet and human rights, have called for boycotts of the Games next year. But none of those issues have packed the punch of Darfur, where at least 200,000 people — some say as many as 400,000 — mostly non-Arab men, women and children, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced, as government-backed Arab militias called the janjaweed have attacked the local population.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has repeatedly refused American, African and European demands that he allow a United Nations peacekeeping force to supplement an underequipped and besieged African Union force of 7,000 soldiers who have been trying, with dwindling success, to restore order in the Darfur region.
“Whatever ingredient went into the decision for him to go, I’m so pleased that he went,” Ms. Farrow said in a phone interview about Mr. Zhai’s trip. She called the response from Beijing “extraordinary.”
In describing Mr. Spielberg’s decision to write to the Chinese leader, the filmmaker’s spokesman said that while Mr. Spielberg “certainly has been aware of the situation in Darfur” it was “only recently that he became aware of China’s involvement there.”
During a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Zhai called activists who want to boycott the Games “either ignorant or ill natured.” But he added, “We suggest the Sudan side show flexibility and accept” the United Nations peacekeepers.
During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.
In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. “If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick,” the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.
National pride in China has been surging over the coming Olympics, with a gigantic clock in Tiananmen Square counting down the minutes to the Games, and Olympic souvenir stores sprouting all over with the “One World, One Dream” Beijing Olympics motto.
In public, Bush administration officials have been relatively restrained in welcoming China’s new diplomatic zeal.
“We have indications at this point that the Chinese are now taking even a more aggressive role than they have in the past,” Andrew S. Natsios, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan, told a Senate panel on Wednesday. “I think they may be the crucial actors.”
J. Stephen Morrison, a Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he had been warning Chinese officials that Darfur and the Olympics could collide, to no avail.
“I’ve been talking to them and telling them this is coming, this is coming,” Mr. Morrison said. “I told them, there’s an infrastructure out there, they need to feed the beast, and you’re in their sight.” Before, he said, “they kind of shrugged.”
But there is growing concern inside China that Darfur is hurting Beijing’s image.
“Their equity is to be seen as an ethical, rising global power — that’s their goal,” Mr. Morrison said. “Their goal is not to get in bed with every sleazy government that comes up with a little oil.”
It remains unclear if the Hollywood campaign will work — China has not agreed to sanctions yet. But there is also plenty of time between now and the opening ceremony of the Olympics Games in Beijing next year, and more plans are afoot in the activist camp.
On Feb. 10, in an open letter on his Web site addressed to “Darfur activists and advocates,” (translations of the letter are available in Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, according to the Web site), a Darfur activist, Eric Reeves, promised what he called the “full-scale launch of a large, organized campaign to highlight China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.”
“It’s time now, to begin shaming China — demanding that if the Beijing government is going to host the Summer Olympic Games of 2008, they must be responsible partners,” Mr. Reeves wrote.
One possibility that activists are weighing: trying to get Olympic athletes to carry a replica of the Olympic torch from Darfur to the Chinese border.
I love love love the idea of anyone calling Spielberg the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games, that is just too amazing for words. I love a Chinese official (Zhai Jun) referring to anyone boycotting the 2008 games as "either ignorant or ill-natured." I love the idea of pressuring China to take action in the Darfur situation by getting them where it hurts, their Olympics. I love even more that it appears to be working.
Oh Hollywood, oh China, oh Mia Farrow...whatever works to create action in the Darfur situation I´m all for and this is incredible. What though, I wonder, would we do without the Olympics?
This, truly, is diplomacy at its finest.
Darfur Collides with Olympics, and China Yields
By HELENE COOPER
Published: April 13, 2007
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.
But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.
So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.
Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.
Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy.
China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.
Groups focusing on many issues, including Tibet and human rights, have called for boycotts of the Games next year. But none of those issues have packed the punch of Darfur, where at least 200,000 people — some say as many as 400,000 — mostly non-Arab men, women and children, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced, as government-backed Arab militias called the janjaweed have attacked the local population.
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan has repeatedly refused American, African and European demands that he allow a United Nations peacekeeping force to supplement an underequipped and besieged African Union force of 7,000 soldiers who have been trying, with dwindling success, to restore order in the Darfur region.
“Whatever ingredient went into the decision for him to go, I’m so pleased that he went,” Ms. Farrow said in a phone interview about Mr. Zhai’s trip. She called the response from Beijing “extraordinary.”
In describing Mr. Spielberg’s decision to write to the Chinese leader, the filmmaker’s spokesman said that while Mr. Spielberg “certainly has been aware of the situation in Darfur” it was “only recently that he became aware of China’s involvement there.”
During a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Zhai called activists who want to boycott the Games “either ignorant or ill natured.” But he added, “We suggest the Sudan side show flexibility and accept” the United Nations peacekeepers.
During closed-door diplomatic meetings, Chinese officials have said they do not want any of their Darfur overtures linked to the Olympics, American and European officials said.
In an e-mail message on Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington warned anew against such a linkage. “If someone wants to pin Olympic Games and Darfur issue together to raise his/her fame, he/she is playing a futile trick,” the spokesman, Chu Maoming, wrote.
National pride in China has been surging over the coming Olympics, with a gigantic clock in Tiananmen Square counting down the minutes to the Games, and Olympic souvenir stores sprouting all over with the “One World, One Dream” Beijing Olympics motto.
In public, Bush administration officials have been relatively restrained in welcoming China’s new diplomatic zeal.
“We have indications at this point that the Chinese are now taking even a more aggressive role than they have in the past,” Andrew S. Natsios, the Bush administration’s special envoy to Sudan, told a Senate panel on Wednesday. “I think they may be the crucial actors.”
J. Stephen Morrison, a Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he had been warning Chinese officials that Darfur and the Olympics could collide, to no avail.
“I’ve been talking to them and telling them this is coming, this is coming,” Mr. Morrison said. “I told them, there’s an infrastructure out there, they need to feed the beast, and you’re in their sight.” Before, he said, “they kind of shrugged.”
But there is growing concern inside China that Darfur is hurting Beijing’s image.
“Their equity is to be seen as an ethical, rising global power — that’s their goal,” Mr. Morrison said. “Their goal is not to get in bed with every sleazy government that comes up with a little oil.”
It remains unclear if the Hollywood campaign will work — China has not agreed to sanctions yet. But there is also plenty of time between now and the opening ceremony of the Olympics Games in Beijing next year, and more plans are afoot in the activist camp.
On Feb. 10, in an open letter on his Web site addressed to “Darfur activists and advocates,” (translations of the letter are available in Chinese, Arabic, Swahili, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian, according to the Web site), a Darfur activist, Eric Reeves, promised what he called the “full-scale launch of a large, organized campaign to highlight China’s complicity in the Darfur genocide.”
“It’s time now, to begin shaming China — demanding that if the Beijing government is going to host the Summer Olympic Games of 2008, they must be responsible partners,” Mr. Reeves wrote.
One possibility that activists are weighing: trying to get Olympic athletes to carry a replica of the Olympic torch from Darfur to the Chinese border.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Llama Chronicles: Bunnies and Matzoh
Happy late Easter to all!
I was not nearly as exciting this holiday as I have been for past holidays.
In Bolivia, Semana Santa is a big deal and involves a lot of exciting stuff. Thursday night everyone visits twelve churches and eats a mountain of api (sweet hot drink made from maize, it´s purple and white, very pretty) and pasteles (fried dough with cheese inside and powdered sugar on top). Friday, there are twelve traditional dishes which get cooked up in a frenzy that takes almost all day and then are eaten to the point of making people sick. Saturday there are these processions all over the place, the one I saw was in Villa Tunari in the Chapare, everyone walks a few minutes and then stops and the priest does a station of the cross and everyone starts walking again. Full band, very loud. Then there´s SUNDAY itself. Actually, not much in particular seems to happen on Sunday, roast lamb is traditional for lunch and I suppose people sometimes go to church, but I was out and about Sunday and not much of anything seemed to have been happening. I guess everyone had feasted and prayed and processed themselves out. All of these things happen and I did exactly none of them. My largest Bolivian experience during all of this was being denied a beer in a restuarant because serving alcohol was prohibido. Oops.
I did, however, run away to the jungle for a day with my friend Meghan, we swam and ate fish, and slept and got eaten alive by mosquitos. No creatures jumped on my head and I only got a little sunburned. It was a great get away for a night.
On Sunday I went to visit my Bolivian family and was force fed salteñas for a couple of hours. It was very nice to see them. Then off with my housemate Steve to the Shermans´ easter egg hunt party. I can´t remember if I´ve talked about the Shermans before. Becky and Joe are a lovely couple with two lovely children who are in Cochabamba as Maryknoll missioners. We are connected by a sort of family relationship and they have taken amazing care of me since I got here, from taking me to lunch during my first week here, to Halloween, to sending me to Steve when I was about to go crazy with the family, and most recently, inviting me for Easter at their house. It was a great event with more gringos than I ever see in one place and lots of little kids running around. Bonus was that Becky´s aunt and mom were in visiting and it was lovely to see her mom again having met her before right before I left the states.
I was not nearly as exciting this holiday as I have been for past holidays.
In Bolivia, Semana Santa is a big deal and involves a lot of exciting stuff. Thursday night everyone visits twelve churches and eats a mountain of api (sweet hot drink made from maize, it´s purple and white, very pretty) and pasteles (fried dough with cheese inside and powdered sugar on top). Friday, there are twelve traditional dishes which get cooked up in a frenzy that takes almost all day and then are eaten to the point of making people sick. Saturday there are these processions all over the place, the one I saw was in Villa Tunari in the Chapare, everyone walks a few minutes and then stops and the priest does a station of the cross and everyone starts walking again. Full band, very loud. Then there´s SUNDAY itself. Actually, not much in particular seems to happen on Sunday, roast lamb is traditional for lunch and I suppose people sometimes go to church, but I was out and about Sunday and not much of anything seemed to have been happening. I guess everyone had feasted and prayed and processed themselves out. All of these things happen and I did exactly none of them. My largest Bolivian experience during all of this was being denied a beer in a restuarant because serving alcohol was prohibido. Oops.
I did, however, run away to the jungle for a day with my friend Meghan, we swam and ate fish, and slept and got eaten alive by mosquitos. No creatures jumped on my head and I only got a little sunburned. It was a great get away for a night.
On Sunday I went to visit my Bolivian family and was force fed salteñas for a couple of hours. It was very nice to see them. Then off with my housemate Steve to the Shermans´ easter egg hunt party. I can´t remember if I´ve talked about the Shermans before. Becky and Joe are a lovely couple with two lovely children who are in Cochabamba as Maryknoll missioners. We are connected by a sort of family relationship and they have taken amazing care of me since I got here, from taking me to lunch during my first week here, to Halloween, to sending me to Steve when I was about to go crazy with the family, and most recently, inviting me for Easter at their house. It was a great event with more gringos than I ever see in one place and lots of little kids running around. Bonus was that Becky´s aunt and mom were in visiting and it was lovely to see her mom again having met her before right before I left the states.
On Monday night some friends of mine had a Seder, which was really exciting for me, Catholic girl that I am. As the youngest of the group I got to open the door for Elijah and participated in the non-jewish contingent's plot to steal the matzoh, the plot was successful. Thank you to everyone who educated me up through high school, I was very helpful describing the plagues. The event was great and my friends did a great job setting it up. Bolivia is not the easiest place on earth to try to put together a Jewish holiday.
In other news, the looming problem of my future was solved last week when I got hired by the American Refugee Committee to work with their brand new microenterprise development program with women and youth in camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. Now I will be home in early July and off again for a whole new adventure at the beginning of August. If anyone knows anyone in Thailand or, you know, anything about Thailand, let me know. I can find it on a map and I like pad thai but that´s about it in the way of my knowledge. An extra-big thank you to those who were pulling for me and offering support in the way of references, prayers, and happy thoughts.
So, yes, I hope you all had great Easters with lots of joy and chocolate and everything else. I hope everyone is doing well. I miss you all, and that´s true because I reviewed my email list yesterday. Write when you can and know someone in Bolivia is thinking of you!
LOVE!
Mollie
In other news, the looming problem of my future was solved last week when I got hired by the American Refugee Committee to work with their brand new microenterprise development program with women and youth in camps along the Thai-Myanmar border. Now I will be home in early July and off again for a whole new adventure at the beginning of August. If anyone knows anyone in Thailand or, you know, anything about Thailand, let me know. I can find it on a map and I like pad thai but that´s about it in the way of my knowledge. An extra-big thank you to those who were pulling for me and offering support in the way of references, prayers, and happy thoughts.
So, yes, I hope you all had great Easters with lots of joy and chocolate and everything else. I hope everyone is doing well. I miss you all, and that´s true because I reviewed my email list yesterday. Write when you can and know someone in Bolivia is thinking of you!
LOVE!
Mollie
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