Bogota is Beethoven

Bogota is in the middle of a big cultural event called Bogota is Beethoven.  It’s the first of its kind, and apparently they will alternate from now on with the Bogota theater festival (which I believe is Latin America’s biggest live theater event), such that in two years they’ll have Bogota is Mozart.  Anyway, as I understand, the event consists in inviting major orchestras from all over the world to perform Beethoven pieces.  They also broadcast a few of the concerts live on the city’s public TV network.  So this Holy Week, as we were on vacation at my father-in-law’s farm in rural Santander, we were treated to the fifth symphony, the second, and an overture from Fidelio.  In particular I enjoyed watching a Hungarian orchestra perform the Ninth Symphony, with the Bogota opera choir doing the chorus work.  It was an amazing collaboration between people from different parts of the world, and truly showed the unifying power of a shared cultural canon like Classical music.

In short, I was really proud of Bogota during this event.  Especially because I could enjoy the best of its cultural scene without actually being there to deal with the actual people who live there!

Funny video to promote responsibly-produced products

This is a video a buddy sent me to promote the Rainforest Alliance certification seal.  When you buy products with this seal, you can be sure that they were produced in a responsible way that was good for people, places, and ecosystems.  I know that labelling has its downsides, and some people are skeptical of such labels.  But at least for the Rainforest Alliance, I can vouch for its soundness.  The certifiers really cover all the bases so that products that receive the seal are economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable.  My wife and I have worked with people going through the process, and it is rigorous.

In fact, I am considering applying for Rainforest Alliance certification for a small coffee plantation I'm slowly and erratically setting up on my father-in-law's farm.  I probably won't in the end, just because the area is too small to justify it.  But I have the guidebook and checklist that the Alliance gives to coffee growers to implement sustainable practices, and I'll definitely be following many of its directives.

Last round of shout-outs

I've often disparaged various aspects of modern technology and globalization, and I still believe that it's a shame that silly memes like Gangnam style are much more likely to propagate themselves across the globalized world than are important philosophical insights or basic literacy.  But I do appreciate certain technologies that, at least in my personal case, have really improved life for me (and I hope for those people I affect, as well).  I have a Skype number that allows people from my home country to make direct calls to my cellphone at little charge to them.  I can share my ideas and convictions with anyone who cares to listen thanks to my blog.  And now, after successfully financing part of an agronomic experiment that I hope will benefit farmers in one corner of Colombia, I have been convinced of the utility of crowdfunding.  So even if I continue to poke fun at the Gangnam Styles and the Can I Haz Cheezborgers of our modern existence, I also must acknowledge the potential of global communications to work good in remote corners of the world.

Of course the technology that enables crowdfunding would accomplish nothing were it not for the generous people who donate to a cause they find worthy.  Here is the final batch of shout-outs to the amazing and generous people that have donated to our achira experiment:



Mary Walsdorf is a world traveler—most recently February in Myanmar—and a grade school teacher in the Chicago Public School system. Generations of students bear her stamp—a love of reading and the ability to do it well.

Martin Mahoney is an amateur actor when he isn't fixing computer and technical problems at Northwestern University.

Dru Alejandro works at the US State Department, having just finished a stint in the Consular Section of Monterrey, Mexico.  He is a voracious (at times even undiscriminating!) reader and is generally game for doing anything.

Chidi Osuji is a talented engineer who lives his life with a mixture of piety, irreverence, an open mind, and a love for good food.

Nicholas Kryczka is an intrepid traveler, an enthusiastic teacher of US history, and soon to be a PhD student of history at the University of Chicago.

Bobbie Johnson is an old hand in writing and publishing, having worked in areas as diverse as school textbooks, children's literature, and scientific articles.

Erica Plut is an expert on religions and moral education, has managed fecal functions at high altitude without toilet paper, and currently dedicates herself to the challenge of raising well-adjusted, unpretentious children in the midst of the high-voltage Silicon Valley landscape.

Adventure in Peru 7: Cuzco is cold

Cuzco is cold.  I live in a highland town in Colombia at about 9000 feet altitude, and Colombians call this the “cold lands”, but it’s not really cold.  It’s in the high 60s Fahrenheit during the day, and maybe in the 50s at night.  On rare occasions, in the dead of January at like 4am, the temperature might get close to freezing.  But if you’ve got a well-designed house, the warmth of sunny daytime stays on into the night.  In short, my home in Colombia is not sweltering and tropical, but it’s not quite fair to say it’s cold.  Especially when compared to Chicago’s -15 F stretches most every winter, or these Scandinavian babies who sleep outside with no problem, highland Colombia is a very mild climate.  I have known people, myself among them, who have felt more cold in Bogota or in our town than in a Midwestern winter, simply because houses in Colombia usually don’t have heat.  But again, if your house is more or less cozy and enclosed, you won’t feel that cold.

Cuzco, on the other hand, seemed to me a biting, brutal cold.  At night it took me almost an hour under many layers of wool covers and a down comforter just to stop shivering violently.  And given the scarcity of oxygen in the city’s high altitude air, you’re left with the awful choice between putting your head under the covers, so you’re warm but feel like you are suffocating, or peeking out of the covers to breathe well yet freeze.  Consequently, I spent the first night in our hotel between fears of suffocation, delirious high-altitude dreams, trying to arrange myself so just my mouth was outside of the covers, and shivering.

Okay, so that’s the bad part.  After that first night or so, one arrives at a tenuous peace with the cold and the altitude (and the gastric issues brought about by a new cuisine), and though you never feel completely stabilized unless you’re there for longer than we were, you can enjoy the cultural wealth of Cuzco.  It reminded me a lot of my town in Colombia, just some 1500 feet higher, a bit drier, often warmer during the day, with a larger population, and with a better-maintained colonial and even pre-Hispanic architectural heritage.  There are slums on the hillsides.

 

Charming little nooks and colonial details in the city center.

A very well-maintained and restored main plaza.

 

Ramshackle walls and old buildings that are falling down.

Murals of Peruvian history

 

And socialist realism-style homages to workers at the Ministry of Labor

Negotiated coexistence between colonial majesty and modern-day needs.

 

Magnificent churches built on Inca ritual and civic sites.  This is Santo Domingo monastery, I believe, built above the huge Inca gathering space of Qoricancha.

Here are the Inca-era foundations that line many central alleyways. 

It seems their system relied on round, uncut stones at the very base, topped by precisely-chiseled squarish blocks on top.  I assume all this had some earthquake-related reasoning behind it.

This is the famous 12(?)-sided stone that was cut to fit perfectly with surrounding stones.  The tourists passing by are an important 20^th-century addition to the city’s architecture.

 

In other alleys of the center, you can see a more standardized stone-cutting and –joining process that I assume is post-Conquest, and then a much sloppier Spanish-style foundation that is light on stonecutting and heavy on use of mortar.

Here is the central patio of our charming hotel, the Qorichaska. 

I don’t believe it’s an old construction, but it maintains a colonial style.  I imagine the city requires some such mimicry for new construction.  Here, for example, was a building in progress, that followed a roughly colonial look, and incorporated internal rain gutters—hence the break in the roofline just above the overhanging eaves.

The first thing they do when you get to your hotel is to give you coca leaf tea, which should help with the headache and nausea and fatigue of the high altitude.  I had thought we wouldn’t have much difficulty with the altitude, living as we do in a high-altitude city of our own.  But apparently just those 300 or 500 extra meters really make a difference.  So as soon as we got in and had our tea, they told us to take a nap in our neatly-arranged rooms.

 

But best of all in Cuzco, after many days of sampling delicious Peruvian fare, was this rich, greasy, fresh-baked pizza.  I was thrilled to see it—you don’t get much good pizza in Colombia, unless you go to a really high-end place.

My list of things to improve life in the US

I've been thinking a lot about my homeland of the United States, and some of the problems that plague us as a nation.  Suburban sprawl, obesity, dependence on cars, unhealthy eating, addiction to television, crazed gunmen.  When I was younger I used to get frustrated by these things, especially because they seemed to be problems that I didn't create, and that in fact I tried to avoid through my lifestyle choices, but that were nevertheless prevalent in our society, and that came to affect me despite my doing the right thing.

More concretely, I felt (and still feel, to some extent), that many of the worst problems in the US are a result of a bourgeois, suburban consumerist culture that leaves people feeling alienated and disconnected from reality and healthy human behaviors.  This was especially frustrating for me, because if my interpretation is correct, then my living in a way that shunned irresponsible consumerism was the correct choice, but my countrymen by far preferred to make the wrong choices in life.

At times, they even made me pay for their sins.  Case in point the Columbine school shooting:  two alienated kids from a wealthy suburb in the sprawling West (a desert where most people shouldn't have even been living in the first place due to lack of water) shot up their classmates.  The aftermath involved frantic demands for action, but since the wealthy suburban areas that tend to be affected by such tragedies wouldn't have accepted the dehumanization and stamping out of their children's civil rights entailed by heightened security measures, those who paid for the sins and neuroses of the wealthy were large urban school districts, where up to that point no such school shootings were occurring.  In my particular case, 4200 students had to file through only three entrances every morning at my high school, because the Chicago Public School system had decreed that all students should pass through metal detectors, and my school had only three detectors (which didn't really work anyway).  As had often happened in our country, dysfunctional wealthy whites vaguely conscious of the unsustainable, precarious nature of their lifestyle made the (disproportionately low-income, dark-skinned) urban populace into their whipping boy so as to feel somehow safer, somehow absolved.

Anyway, I was bitter for much of my adolescence and young adulthood about these things--the prevalence of social problems in the US despite seemingly common-sense solutions to them, the arrogant refusal of mistaken people to accept the wrongness of their decisions and lifestyle, and especially what I saw as the urban-suburban divide that at once kept me out of many of the problems I saw, but also kept me from contributing to their resolution.  Today I am less bitter, and simply want to help.  I've realized first of all that all of us are people and compatriots, and that if some people suffer from a problem, even if it isn't my fault, I and everyone else must play a role in solving the problem.  Furthermore, I've realized that these problems aren't limited to a suburban, thoughtless bourgeois "them".  School shootings, obesity, psychological problems, addiction to television, lack of exercise--these things are increasingly affecting urban, small-town, and rural communities, and not just the much-maligned suburbs.

So today I was musing on what I might propose to help resolve some of these problems.  I have recently been watching lots of Malcolm X speeches and interviews, and I re-watched Spike Lee's film based on the great leader's autobiography.  If there's something I admire most about Malcolm, it is the gradual evolution he underwent, which led him to realize that the problems of blacks and everyone else in the US wouldn't be solved simply by pointing out the injustices that whites had long perpetrated.  He never ceased to identify and call out what he saw as the roots of our country's problems, but he gradually came to speak in terms of everyone, white and black, working in communion to solve them.  Not to compare myself to Malcolm, but I am no longer satisfied to righteously condemn the flaws that others commit.  I want to be part of the solution.  So here goes my list of priority actions we can all take to make life better for everyone:

• Get rid of your television.  You'll feel less insecure, scared, neurotic, violent, judged, judgmental, sluggish, greedy, and impotent without the constant barrage that TV levels at us to make us feel these negative things. 
• The best way to get rid of the television is gradually.  First I'd recommend cancelling your cable subscription (which will save you money, too).  That way you'll still have TV sets in the house to watch the occasional movie.  Hell, get a Netflix subscription, and then you'll just watch a movie or two a week, and they'll be something you choose, instead of whatever junk is on the TV.
• Next you can start doing away with individual TV sets.  Start with those in bedrooms (no one should have a TV in his or her bedroom--it makes for antisocial behavior and bad sleep habits), then move on to the dining room and kitchen.  If you're going to leave a TV in your house, have it be in the living room, where the family can watch things together.

• By nixing the TV, you'll have more time to be active.  Do more things in general:  read, play with your kids, talk to your spouse, garden, cook good food, make love, walk to work, visit friends, call your parents, or even just sleep.  This last possibility is important--many people say they are too tired at the end of the day to do anything but watch TV, but statistically people in the US watch hours of TV every day.  If they stopped watching TV, they could sleep more, and be less tired at day's end! 
• Eat real food.  Without a TV, you and the family can spend time together in the kitchen, fixing real meals with ingredients bought at the grocery store, a farmers market, or even grown in your back yard.  If you don't have time to cook so much (which would be unlikely now that you've added 4 hours to your day by cutting out TV watching), just cook a few big meals every week, and use the leftovers creatively.  By eating real food that you prepare in a family, you will be healthier, you'll spend less, and you'll spend satisfying time with the people you love.  In addition, kids that grow up talking with their parents and eating decent food around a table are less likely to don a black trenchcoat and raze their classroom with bullets.
• Don't drive so much.  Again, without a TV you might have sufficient time and rest to consider walking, biking, or taking public transportation to work.  Whatever you replace driving with, it will be a winning trade-off--exercise, contemplation, and fresh air in the first two cases, or the chance to think or read if you're on public trans.  You might even get to a point where you can ditch your car altogether and save on gas and insurance.
• My final step, and this is probably something that will turn off much of my intended public, would be that people consider moving out of the suburbs, to more human-scale, walkable settlements, be they small towns or big cities.  I am no longer keen on making sweeping condemnations of suburban people or anything like that.  It's just that suburban life makes it easier to be more hooked on the TV, the car, and bad food, and harder to make good lifestyle choices on these points.
• I of course am a big advocate of agrarian rural living too, but most people can't and won't change their job and lifestyle to go start a farm.  On the other hand, moving to a remote rural area but commuting to a faraway job is essentially just a worse version of suburban living.  
• So for now I'd advocate for moving to small towns or big cities (or even older, well-planned suburbs).  That way you can live within walking or public transport distance of where you work, shop, eat, go out, etc.  Your kids will be more autonomous when they don't need a ride everywhere.  It's also likely that they will come into at least indirect contact with the problems of the poor if they live in a big city with all types of people.  This is another positive, because they can at once be aware of the precariousness of life (and thus the importance of working hard in school), and also feel motivated and empowered to help others (and thus keep out of trouble themselves).

Okay, that's my little quick point-by-point plan to make life better for people.  I'm aware that none of what I'm saying is new; people have been calling for less TV consumption, less driving, and better eating for a long time, and for reasons ranging from environmental responsibility to my angle of just making life better for yourself.  If I have anything new to offer, it's distilling the major tenets of a sustainable lifestyle into just a few concrete points.  I want to call attention to the fact that getting away from the TV is first and foremost on my list.  I honestly believe that if people just watched less or no TV, a whole lot would change for the better in our world.  I also hope that I conveyed my proposals not as dreary sacrifices (get rid of your TV, get rid of your car, get rid of your microwave hot pockets) but rather as actions to take so you can replace these things with something better.

The big question is how I could convince people to make some of these changes.  Should I start up a crusading, door-to-door movement to spread the word (a la Jehovah's Witnesses)?  Would advertisements on TV and other media do any good?  A viral internet campaign?  I would instinctively go more for just living a decent, responsible lifestyle and thus serving as an example for others, but that doesn't seem to be having much impact thus far!

Penultimate shout-outs

Our fundraising campaign has ended for the achira experiment, but there are still people I haven't gotten to thank yet.  Here is a selection of more of our diverse and fascinating group of funders:

Roberta Wegner works for an insurance agency.  She is an avid reader, and adventurous in her choice of both film and travel destinations (among them Colombia!).

Alan Lawrence is an English teacher in Japan, a committed and talented pianist and composer, and an amateur photographer.  He blogs occasionally at jediknightalan.tumblr.com.

Jean Coleman is a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher.  She dedicates her days to tennis and an ambitious travel schedule (next up are the Baltic countries).

Travis Gilchrist administers an entire unit of a major hospital.  He has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music, bad television shows, film, and professional sports.

Toni Lawrence is a devoted teacher of special needs children and a lifelong learner, while her husband Bob is a composer of daring, irreverent poetry.

Jason Tham is a fearless traveler and eater, in addition to his expertise with computers and programming.  

Bjorn Usadel runs an advanced molecular biology laboratory in Germany concerned with plant cell walls and genetics.

Persecution in the name of charity

This is a really fascinating short documentary about the links between the conservative culture war in the US and the assault on LGBT people's rights in Uganda.

Adventure in Peru 6: Andenes research station

Here’s a brief description of the Andenes agricultural research station just outside of Cuzco.

Andenes is one of a series of agricultural experiment stations that the government maintains throughout Peru, in different climates representative of the country’s diversity.  At these stations one of the major tasks is the preservation of germplasm, which is to say the range of genetic diversity present in different crops.  Each station has a few crops it focuses on in terms of preserving germplasm, alongside duplicate seeds of other crops from other research station.  In the case of Andenes, their main crops are cubio, ibia, and ruba (known in Peru respectively as mashua, oca, and olluco).  The photo above shows the field germplasm collection; every year they plant out seed tubers of every variety they possess of these species, so as to multiply the seed.  There are also in vitro copies of many of the varieties, and when a variety’s seed tubers get bogged down by lots of viruses and disease and they stop multiplying so well in the field, that variety gets rotated through the in vitro laboratories so they can clean it of its problems.

Andenes research station receives its name from the pre-Hispanic stone terraces that comprise its fields.  In Peru they call such terraces “andenes”.  It is lovely to look at these ancient stone masterworks, complete with drainage and irrigation infrastructure, and then to think that they are still contributing to the country’s agricultural life.

When I visited, there was a really cool experiment going on in which they were screening hundreds of wild potato species (dozens of times more than the seven or so cultivated potato species that exist in the world) for resistance to cold and heat and different diseases.  The eventual goal was to then forcibly interbreed these resistant wild species with existing traditional potato varieties, so as to maintain the charm and uniqueness of the cultivated variety, but endowed with resistance to changing disease and climate pressures.  Here are some photos of the wild species they were screening.  For those who know what a “normal” potato looks like, these will be a real surprise to see.

Here are some typical seed banks of things like quinoa and amaranth, which can be kept in storage for years and remain viable, unlike the fragile tuber crops, which can’t be stored for long without rotting or dying (hence the need to replant and multiply the cubios, ibias, and rubas every year).

There was also a sort of visitors’ garden they had, with various different species planted for people to see in their beauty.  



Here I am fondling a kiwicha plant there, a type of grain amaranth similar to quinoa.

And not at Andenes but rather in the National University in Cuzco, I also caught a glimpse of a few of the genetic varieties of achira that they maintain in their field germplasm bank.  It's fitting to recall these now as I am wrapping up our project's own achira experiment.

A human rights look at drug control

This is an article about the human rights abuses that occur throughout the entire chain of the war on drugs.  While the article focuses on the suffering of drug users in many countries, we in Colombia also know very well the atrocities committed against growers and sellers of drugs, as well as against and by different armed groups that participate in the drug trade.

Last chance to contribute to our experiment fundraising campaign

Hello all,

This is the closing day of the fundraising campaign for our experiment with achira, a little-known Andean crop with the potential to improve life for small farmers in our region of Colombia.  You can read all about this crop and our experiment on the fundraising campaign website.

We've had a great turnout, surpassing our initial goal, so we want to thank all of our contributors for that.  But we'd still like to make a final push to see just how much money we can raise.  Our initial request of $1500US will fund a series of laboratory analyses we need for our experiment, but anything we raise beyond that will constitute a fund for local farmers to implement other projects to promote achira as a crop and income generator.  In our big final event that we held last Sunday, farmers and local institutions expressed interest in taking more concrete steps such as improving agroindustrial processing and marketing channels for achira.  I will be working with them to formulate project proposals to present to large institutional funders, and if they have a fund of their own that they can leverage to show their personal investment and commitment, their ideas will be more attractive to potential funders.

So if you've been wanting to donate to our cause but haven't gotten around to it yet, now is the time!  The campaign will be receiving contributions until midnight, US Pacific time.  Thanks so much.

Adventure in Peru 5: A funny little museum

It’s been close to a year since I last posted about my trip to Peru.  I’m sorry about that.  I never got done telling all the things we visited and saw; I just left things hanging, and never got around to finishing.

One last Lima sight that we visited was the Museum of Anthropolgy, Biodiversity, and Anthropology, which was founded by French researcher Frederic Engel and is now nominally linked to the National Agriculture University.  It doesn't look impressive at first sight, but the museum actually contains some of the more important agricultural remains in Peru, stretching back 10000 years to the dawn of farming in the country.  There are old, preserved corncobs of different varieties:

Desiccated potatoes





Different types of cotton


And an amazing collection of preserved textiles

We also saw a cool poster in a back office, showing the native corn varieties in different regions of Peru.



In general, the quality of the archeological work early in the 20th century that established much of the collection, and the presentation and curation of the museum, leave much to be desired.  But it is a must-see sight for anyone interested in ancient Peruvian agriculture, with many of the original artefacts recovered from Tres Ventanas, one of the defining archeological sites for South American agricultural history.