Guilty as Charged

Just when I think this blog serves somebody besides myself, this irreverent post provides a hard look in the mirror:

http://stuffexpataidworkerslike.com/2011/04/11/44-blogging-for-the-folks-back-home/

Sustainable Brains

The main reason for last month’s trip to Ladakh was to visit Edie’s teenaged son, who was spending a special semester at a great school called SECMOL. The inspiring program brings together a handful of kids from the States and about 40 kids from Ladakh, housing them at a solar-powered, composting-toileted, springwater-supplied campus. The Americans who apply for this opportunity are chosen for their potential to grow through seeing a new culture, studying a new religion, and experimenting with new ways of lessening their footprint on the plant. For the Ladakhi kids, the critical requirements for entry are all of the above, plus having failed their 10th grade exams.

Unfortunately, lots of Ladakhi kids qualify for this last requirement. Exams in India are given in English and Urdu, languages rarely spoken in most Ladakhi villages. Especially in the public schools there, opportunities to practice anything except the local tongues are rare. So the SECMOL kids who come from nearby may even have done themselves a favor by not passing their exams, as they are now exposed to English and critical thinking and public speaking and a bunch of other nutrients.

Among SECMOL’s many cool rituals is Conversation Hour. Every afternoon, two or three Ladakhi students are matched with someone from “outside”—perhaps an American their age, or one of the international volunteers that seem to pass through regularly. The suggested topics and partners switch often, resulting in a refreshingly deep and wide cross-cultural exchange.

After Conversation, just as the sun’s last glow disappears behind the tall ridges on the other side of the Indus River, the dinner bell rings. Games of soccer and cricket are wrapped up. Anyone braving a bath has long since pumped themselves a bucket of water and hurried through the nippy ritual.

Now the center of gravity shifts to the dining hall, a large open rectangular space that unlike other rooms at the school is designed to be used after dark. There are no floor-to-ceiling windows here. We sit cross-legged on dozens of large rugs, attacking full, steaming plates of the evening meal. Everyone’s attention is focused on a stage at the front of the room.

One student, the designated master of ceremonies, stands to announce the evening’s lineup. In turn, other students then take to the stage, usually without notes. Their speeches last roughly five minutes, and cover topics as diverse as the economics of solar power and the moral value of friendship. The only noise is the sound of quiet chewing as the audience tunes in to the speaker’s message. The MC shushes the occasional murmur in response to a laugh line or a controversial point, and then, when the speech is finished, encourages questions from the floor.

No speaker escapes the comment round. What strikes the visitor is the patient fielding of the questions. These are teenagers up on stage, and yet there is no squirming, eye-rolling, can-we-get-this-over-with manner. Likewise, the questioners take their role seriously. They’re not afraid to challenge a speaker. Just as often, their feedback serves to rescue someone who has lost the thread, or to tease out bigger ideas from a thin presentation.

Generally the subjects are presented through a cross-cultural lens, meaning that students are constantly reflecting on what’s unique to Ladakh and how they feel about that. It’s no wonder that the local kids come away with a new pride in their heritage. Visiting students find themselves asking whether or not they have a culture. Everyone who passes through this successful school seems to develop at least one new brain.

Get Over It!

You have to love air travel in India. A veg meal is one of the standard options—no need to pre-order. Hitting turbulence gives people at the rear of the plane license to shout epithets at the captain. And attendants apparently are allowed to treat customers like rival siblings:

Passenger: Orange juice, please.
Attendant: I’ve only got coffee and tea.
Passenger (irritated, each word pronounced slowly and distinctly): Can you just get me a fruit juice? (In Thailand this request would be couched as a hint.)
Attendant (while moving along, bordering on sarcastic): The inconvenience is regretted. (No suggestion that anything can be done about this issue.)

My only other trip to India was many years ago. Memories of similar peculiarities began to flood back. This time I was on my way to meet my friend Edie, whose son is studying in the northern district of Ladakh. We planned a ten-day stay in that dry, mountainous part of the country, which is also sometimes known as “Little Tibet.”

Just before getting ready for landing, the cabin was fumigated, protecting India from unidentified Thai pests. The inconvenience was regretted.

Mind Games

Jip is mostly happy most of the time these days, but her moods do malfunction now and then, often at a moment’s notice. The caregivers and I are used to the big swings. We each have our special techniques for coaxing her out of a funk. Sometimes we team up and do a kind of triangulation therapy.

Take yesterday morning, for example. Upon overhearing words heat up between Jip and the woman who was on duty, I deliberately cranked up the volume on some music that I guessed Jip wouldn’t want to listen to right then. She promptly directed her frustrations at me instead, until the silliness of the whole situation hit her after a minute or two. Jip began giggling as I turned the music back down. The laughter cure.

Yesterday a new technique grew out of something I was reading to her from a website aimed at people with her disease. Jip’s attention had been wandering, which she usually shows by interrupting to ask how many blankets are covering her legs or to request that somebody close the windows (I don’t think she’s really cold, but ensuring that she isn’t has become a sort of reset button for her.) Then I described one of the site’s simple brain strengthening exercises—you say a word, then think of another one that begins with the last letter of the one before. Jip amazed me with how quickly she went from being fussy to being engaged.

Check out the words that came to her mind as she played the game happily for the next few minutes: Toddler, Reptile, Elephant, Totem, Marmalade, Egret, Telephone, Eggplant, Thailand, Dump, Papaya, Absorb, Bowling, Golf, Foolish, History, Yogurt, Tamarind

Occasionally she would revise her first choice for a follow-on word, rejecting it as “too easy—the words should more than one syllable.” Good clean fun.

Some Shortages Would Make Us Creative

A recent newspaper article, about demand for energy in a post-Japan-tsunami world that might be reluctant to develop nuclear power, prompted this letter to the editor:

What is the reason to satisfy the world's insatiable need for affordable and plentiful energy? And is there a need really? Yes, there's a huge appetite, true, but need...?

Our Western civilization reminds me of compulsive shopaholics, who often perceive as needs what really are their own addictions. If tomorrow we will find a new cheap source of energy, we'll just use it up to build bigger houses and cars and TVs, and making our existence messier and more complicated.

Don't get me wrong, I'm guilty myself and could agree that indulging in exuberant excess could sometimes be gratifying. But let's not forget that a plentiful society lacks motivation and breeds laziness, while real challenges, like energy shortages when and if we face them, would awaken our creativity.

Overcoming challenges—unless they are too extreme, of course—makes people happier then plentiful life. It looks like we really don't need plentiful energy; we just need to learn how to use wisely what we've got. So far our civilization used up precious natural resources and enormous amount of energy to build mountains of waste. Plentiful energy would continue us on the same path. Some shortages would make us creative, and perhaps even turn our lives into simpler and less cluttered ones.

I have to say the writer speaks my mind.

Supermoon

Five American cousins are in town, visiting from Beijing, where they’ve been living six months and where the temperature hasn’t been above sweater weather the entire time. Before they arrived, we had corresponded about their visit to Thailand, particularly about what to pack. I advised bringing only short sleeves, flip-flops, the minimum. March is traditionally one of the hottest, driest months of the year here, so no need for jackets or umbrellas.

You’ve already guessed that I’m now backpedaling wildly, trying to explain Southeast Asia’s weird cold and wet streak. The least lame of the many lame excuses I’ve come up with is the SUPERMOON! Maybe you also read about this last Saturday, when the full moon cozied up about as close as it ever gets to the Earth, leading naturally to all kinds of predictions of weirdness to come.

Sure enough, two days ago here a quick but drenching downpour flooded Bangkok in record time, making everyone I know at least two hours late to work. Last night an earthquake in upper Myanmar led the bosses at work to activate the call tree to make sure everyone was OK. We’re all wondering what today will bring.

No need to worry about the cousins. They pretty much ignored my packing suggestions. Not that we didn’t believe you, they said. Bodies that are used to wearing fleece just need a little confirmation before they make the big leap to the tank top, and vice versa.

Well-Timed Mozart Requiem

Bangkok offers a surprising amount of good classical music. Not so surprisingly, the auditoriums are rarely full. I’ve never had trouble getting a ticket to anything I’ve wanted to see. Once I even bought a seat ahead of time and was told a few days later that I would get a refund, maybe because they didn’t sell enough in advance to make the performance worth giving.

When I noticed this week that a group of college students was putting on Mozart’s Requiem at the Siam Society, I figured there was no need to arrive early. Wrong! Standing room only! Nobody was turned away, but plenty of people had to listen from the lobby.

To be sure, the singers from Mahidol University did a great job. The soloists were especially superb, projecting their lines to the rafters as if Latin were their first language.

Beyond the musicians themselves, another explanation for the packed house might have been the tsunami in Japan. The concert was of course scheduled before last week’s disaster. But the powerful music, along with lyrics like “Grant them eternal rest,” and “Let the perpetual light shine upon them,” was therapeutic for many in the audience.

Going to Burma/Myanmar

I’m thrilled to finally have the chance—tomorrow!—with my pop!—to visit that exotic and bizarre country just to the west of Thailand. Before we get too down and dirty with the details, which I’ll post on hipbelt, holybasil’s sister site, let’s take care of the name issue. Is it Burma, or is it Myanmar?

I’d been inclined toward the former—y’know, stick with what you grew up with and all—until I read recently in a travel book written by a woman who grew up there the following paragraph:

Myanmar has always been our country’s name in our language, but the British called it Burma and thus it was known to the international world… Because the military changed it, the name of Myanmar was unacceptable to many people, mostly those Western countries who insist on continuing to use Burma. My view is, the military government did not get the name out of a hat and that actually it was the British who did so when they used “Burma.” They probably confused it with the name of the majority race, the Burmese.

Her line of reasoning makes some sense to me. I realize that the choice is more political than linguistic—the U.N. has been using Myanmar, while Aung San Suu Kyi’s party prefers Burma. What do most people on the street use? We’ll see when we get there. Very excited!

Let’s Run That by the P.R. Dept First

I ate horse urine eggs for lunch last weekend at a restaurant. They weren’t really what I thought I had ordered. Jip cracked up when she heard about it.

The name comes from an old wives’ tale about how pickled eggs are prepared. They are indeed preserved in a special brine, which admittedly gives the finished delicacy a slight ammonia odor. But horses and urine have nothing to do with the process. You’d think some marketer would’ve come up with a jazzier label by now.

The story of how they ended up on my plate starts with my fondness for Thai salads. People here eat an endless variety of them, all symphonizing the five S’s of Thai cuisine: salty, savory, sour, spicy, and sweet. I never go wrong with these flavors. Whenever I think I’ve tried the last and most delicious combination, along comes a new salad that nobody has mentioned before.

Sometimes in restaurants I just order at random from that section of the menu. Last weekend, though, I had a craving for fried egg salad. At a place where the offerings were written in a stylish-and-hard-to-read Thai font, I scanned the list looking specially for the word “egg.” When I found it, I didn’t see the word for “fried.” Instead, “egg” was followed by what I thought said “pee.” Then there was another word that can mean lots of things—come, horse, chair, dog—depending on its tone marker. I can never remember which is which.

That mishmash of language didn’t make sense, so I asked the waiter about it. He answered too quickly for me to understand everything he said, but I asked for the dish anyway. I guessed that he was describing the egg’s color, or that maybe Thais use the same word for “pee” that they use for “yolk.” Besides, food here is pretty cheap. If it’s really terrible I can always bail and start over.

The salad contained the kind of egg that I’ve always heard called “thousand-year-old.” This gourmet treat—prized throughout Asia—on its own isn’t my favorite food. But it tasted OK when blended with the marvelous five Thai S’s. I ate the whole thing and went home to tell Jip what I’d had for lunch. Actually, I still wasn’t really sure what I’d had.

“Horse piss egg!” she laughed.

Guess it’s time to memorize those tone marks.

Diversionary Tactics at the Border

When Thai and Cambodian politicians have needed a wag-the-dog distraction in recent years, they’ve trotted out an old debate about who owns which parts of the border area that surrounds a 1000-year-old clifftop temple. Sadly, this past week the armies also got involved, trading fire and accusations about who shot first.

The dispute has many layers. Closest to the surface at the moment are the opportunities it offers for embarrassing the Thai prime minister at a time when he is weighing which month to call elections this year. He is accused by all parts of the domestic political spectrum of not being patriotic enough… “homeland security,” and all that nonsense.

Cambodia’s prime minister, meanwhile, has seized the chance to call for U.N. arbitration of the issue. He knows he’ll prevail if the Security Council gets involved. International rulings on this subject have consistently gone Cambodia’s way. In 1962 the International Court of Justice awarded the Angkor-era temple itself to the Khmers; a 2008 Unesco decision made the escarpment a World Heritage site.

All of this tempest in a teapot would be just so much politics as usual if it didn’t force, as it has since Friday, the evacuation of villagers living nearby the temple. Several people are dead as a result of shelling. Tourism revenue in the area has evaporated. There are even reports that one wing of the monument was damaged by gunfire. So needless!

Don’t Try This at Home

Near the wok and on the dining table in Thailand you can nearly always find a bottle of fish sauce. It’s salty, smelly, and indispensable. High-quality “naam pla,” as it’s called in Thai, comes from fresh fish that are allowed to ferment for more than a year. The resulting reddish-brown brew is high in protein and lots of other good stuff.

Most Thai food wouldn’t really be Thai without fish sauce, and so by extension most Thai people wouldn’t really be Thai without it. The stuff is so essential to life here that apparently sometimes it gets used for purposes it wasn’t designed for.

A colleague at work and I found ourselves caught up recently in that most ancient of male pastimes, the trading of injury stories. I described the time when I gashed open a toe while walking around the refugee camp in flip-flops; no clean water was handy so the Cambodians suggested that I pee on it. My friend countered with a childhood tale of a bad burn; his auntie reached for the bottle of fish sauce and gave him a good squirt.

A Thai doc confirmed for me that this home remedy, while still used by some well-meaning parents, is counter-productive. Fish sauce may indeed contain all the essential amino acids required by the body for growth and regeneration, but only if consumed—not applied topically.

Skype and Jip

We find it hard to remember life before Skype. Jip loves the video chats especially. Even though she can’t see the people on the other end, their comments about what she and her surroundings look like add a dimension to the conversation that delights her.

Now that we’re set up with wi-fi at home, we can skype from wherever Jip happens to be in the apartment. Not long ago we chatted in bed with some Seattle friends. My Chicago family took a guided tour of our place as I carried around the laptop and its built-in camera to various rooms. Sitting at our kitchen table, we were able to revive an annual tradition of ours by joining a holiday party that was going on halfway around the world.

Skype’s conference calling ability also works wonderfully with Jip’s random association ability. If we’re talking to someone who reminds Jip of someone else, we can spontaneously add the someone else to the call for a wild three-way conversation.

At the risk of showing my age, I recall what it was like to make international calls back when Jip and I used to work in the refugee camps. The little town where we lived had one only phone capable of dialing abroad, at a cost of several dollars per minute. The phone’s owner, never imagining that anyone could need to talk longer than seven minutes, had attached a timer to the phone so that it automatically cut off after that long.

I can definitely understand why Skype is now the largest international voice carrier. For much less than we spend on in-Thailand calls, we use the service roughly every other day, whether it’s to instant message, quickly check in with a relative, or conference among people who live in four different time zones. Send me an e-mail if you’d like to meet up on Skype!

China in Perspective

Now and then you come across factoids about China’s population that give you pause—percentage of the planet, number of cities with more than a million people, ratio of infant boys to infant girls. The trouble is that by themselves these stats can be unwieldy and hard to get a handle on.

Recently I saw a blurb that put China’s numbers in the context of other countries. To me the comparison below is easy to digest, and therefore more stunning than the raw numbers. Courtesy of James Fallows’ blog:

If Americans want to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, all we have to do is imagine moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians.

China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now.

Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute.

Here in Thailand (which is geographically about three-quarters the size of Texas but has a population about three times as large), these numbers feel familiar. Measured either in number of square kilometers or number of people, twenty Thailands equal one China. In other words, population density here and there is about the same.

Arable land is perhaps the biggest difference—Thailand’s percentage is twice China’s. As a result the Thais have for a long time been the world’s leading exporter of rice. The Chinese produce about ten times more of it than Thailand does, but for a long time have struggled to feed themselves. Tremendous challenges indeed.

What's Up?

Something is definitely up. We don’t usually get music floating in the windows from some hard-to-pin-down direction in the middle distance. But today there it is, the same sort of gentle tune that plays on quasi-public holidays like International Workers’ Day.

I make my way to the mall, thinking I’ll be in ’n out after a short errand and maybe a quick bite. But traffic is worse than usual for a Saturday morning, and when I get there the place is packed… with little people waving balloons. Not a free seat anywhere at the food court.

At the top of the escalator somebody has planted a big bounce house; a few tiny, smiling heads trampoline up above the roofline every few seconds. Dozens more heads just like them are moving that direction, all slurping or quaffing or gobbling. I take shelter on the margins of the fanfare, where a new mom is also parked, watching the middle distance, nursing a newborn.

Finally the penny drops. The second Saturday in January. Loads of free gifts, games, and food for kids. National Children’s Day! I love this.