Full paper on participatory depression

Here is the full text of an article I wrote for the ISDA 2010 conference in Montpellier, France. Participatory approaches in development projects are en vogue now, and have the potential to make projects more effective, as well as strengthening human and social capital. However, my paper warns against the possibility of participatory depression. Just as a successful project that has employed deep participatory methods can have positive effects beyond the mere completion of project objectives, a failed participatory project can cause intense disillusionment and frustration among local participants. I conclude the paper by laying out an ethics for researchers that would use participatory methods in their projects. Namely, by engaging local people in a deep personal participation in a project, a researcher takes on an ethical responsibility to finish what he starts. Secondly, the decision to use participatory methods demands a sincere commitment on the researcher's part to collaborate as equals with his local partners.

Creative accounting for Colombian poverty

Here's a rather silly article about poverty in Colombia. Thanks to a change in the way of measuring poverty, over 6 million people have "risen out of poverty" overnight!

Haitian Vodou

This is a really good video discussion of Haitian Vodou and other African-influenced religions. It's a good primer for anyone interested in the topic. I'd never heard of this professor before, but I think he's really cool. He talks very frankly about both Vodou and US culture without romanticizing or scorning either.

Haiti documentary

This is an article about a documentary a colleague of mine is making. It will touch on different models of agrarian development in Haiti. Actually, right now he's in the planning stages, and is trying to raise funds for an initial reconnaissance trip. Please support him if you think this documentary is worth making.

Tourism in Santander

The NYT's Frugal Traveler blog just published this bit on travel in central Colombia. It's sort of a knock-off of an article in National Geographic Adventure magazine in late 2008, but that's okay. I'm just happy we're getting lots of good press.

Anyway, the Santander area profiled in the article is in my neck of the woods, and I've led numerous groups there. Anyone interested in seeing these or other sights, feel free to write me!

A more personal angle on the conflict

After posting my last article, I was left thinking about the conflict in Colombia and my perception of it. I also just found out that yet another local leader of the main opposition party has been assassinated (that makes 8 in the last 3 months).

I am worried that the calculus of things in Colombia right now is that instead of a violent conflict between two equally-matched sides, as it was before Uribe, now one side (the leftist insurgents) has been severely weakened. So certain indicators of outright violence have decreased (homicide, kidnapping), but the situation is now becoming one of one-sided dominance by the right (whether in the form of paramilitary groups or the government itself). So the new violence manifests itself not in outright war but in disappearances of people, assassinations, forced displacement, and the like. If this is the tradeoff, I'm not sure it's worth it. An example: I'm sure street crime and insurgency went down during the Guerra Sucia years of late 1970s Argentina, but no one remembers this time as a great stride forward for security and government stability. No, this period is remembered for its human rights violations, its torture, its forceable disappearances.

Even on its own terms, Uribe's Seguridad Democratica has some major flaws. Its philosophy is to increase security by weakening armed insurgent groups. But in the face of widespread government repression and local violence by now-uncontested right-wing paramilitaries, the leftist groups will only strengthen their moral cause. Furthermore, street violence is on the upswing everywhere as narcotraffickers and paramilitaries enjoy the confidence of impunity. I appreciate the increased government presence in the rural areas, and the better road security (and hence decreased kidnappings). But as others have said much more eloquently than I, if the formula for improving security is increasing repression, this strategy will ultimately backfire.

Conflict and inequality in Colombia

Here is an article in English by Adam Isaacson. It is a great, statistics-backed summary of all the negatives associated with "democratic security" that I've glossed over here and in other posts on my blog. He is very critical of "Plan Colombia", which is the US-funded plan created in 2000 to improve Colombian security and eradicate illicit drug crops. Plan Colombia was inextricably linked to Uribe's "democratic security" policies. It's especially important to take an honest look at the strengths and many weaknesses of Plan Colombia, because certain sectors of the US government would like to see similar plans instituted in Afghanistan and Mexico.

This other article details all the scandals of illegality and collaboration with paramilitaries that surround Alvaro Uribe, the outgoing president of Colombia. It implies that all this illegal activity couldn't have gone on without Uribe's knowing.

Here is another article that analyzes the accomplishments and drawbacks of Uribe's 8-year policy of "democratic security". Gains: strengthened State with more territorial control; weakened insurgent groups; lowered major crime like murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery (the author also claims that paramilitary groups were weakened by their supposed demobilization, but I don't think this is true). Problems: Uribe focused exclusively on military and police solutions (to the detriment of prisons, courts, and local governments); petty crime, rape, and domestic violence went up under Uribe, and even murder seems to be on the upturn again; human rights violations increased under the democratic security policy, notably forceable "disappearances". The article recommends that the incoming government should: give increased civil and local control over the police and security issues in general; respect human rights and respect the independence and authority of the justice system; and explain the reasons behind the increased disappearances of people in 2008 and 2009.

This next article discusses the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Colombia, and blames it in part on the government's refusal to officially recognize the conflict as such. Despite 8 years of "democratic security", there remain high levels of forced displacement, recruitment of child soldiers, massacres, mining of roads and fields, and executions and assassinations. The two major guerrilla groups, FARC and ELN, remain active in many parts of the country, and the so-called "emerging groups", which are really just regroupings of paramilitaries and gangsters, are present and dominant in large swathes of urban and rural Colombia. And even the army commits occasional barbarities against civilians.

My readers may remember Ingrid Betancourt. She was a minor Colombian political candidate that was kidnapped at the beginning of the new millennium, and was rescued in 2008 by the Colombian armed forces. It was big news. Recently, she demanded (from her home in France) that the Colombian government indemnify her something like US$7M for her suffering during her years in captivity. This was shouted down and considered ridiculous by even those sectors of Colombia that are calling for victims' rights. The amount demanded was simply too much, and on top of that, Betancourt's kidnapping occurred when she had basically walked into a war zone despite the warnings and best efforts to protect her by the government at the time.

Anyway, taking the recent Betancourt reparations brouhaha as a point of departure, this article discusses some questions that arise regarding victims of the Colombian conflict. The author summarizes the four types of retribution demanded and deserved by victims: truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees that their victimization will not repeat itself. The author also poses the following questions about the Colombian conflict:

Are there winners and losers?
What should be done about the territorial, political, social, and economic realities constructed through violence and terror? Should they be reversed? Accepted? Should we work on creating a new system of social regulations?
Will there be truth, justice, reparations, and guarantees that victims will not be victimized again?
Will there ever be a true democracy and equality in Colombia?
Or will we have to allow authoritarianism and violence to continue reigning in many areas?

The last article I'm posting here is about economic inequality in Colombia and government's role in it. The author insists that government and policies are the most important factor in decreasing inequality; the market alone will only increase inequality. Uribe's policies ceded more power and more wealth to the powerful and the wealthy (a key example are the successful business ventures and exclusive contracts of Uribe's sons during his mandate). He lowered or eliminated taxes on many large businesses, while decreasing worker rights, all in the name of creating employment. Santos would do well to implement policies to reduce inequality and extend social protection, but given his political and philosophical affinity with Uribe, it's probable that he won't.

University of Fondwa

Here is a good article from a man who volunteered to teach math for a few weeks at the University of Fondwa. I find his tone frank and sincere but lacking the cliches that visitors to Haiti often have. Actually, I guess he does repeat some of the cliches (friendliness of Haitians, resilience amid adversity, etc.), but they are sincere observations. I am also particularly happy with the article because Fondwa is a place near and dear to me. I lived in Fondwa on my first stay in Haiti, and have been back numerous times since then. I once led a solidarity tourism trip from the US to Fondwa, and I participated in a very small way in the founding of the University of Fondwa 2004. I'm always excited to see Fondwa get good press, because much of the reporting on grassroots rural movements in Haiti focuses on the MPP, a peasant group in the center of the country.

The role of government

Here are two interesting articles touching on the role of government in a society.

The first article is from El Salvador, where apparently the conservative Congress has approved a law such that schoolkids will be read to for 7 minutes every morning from the Bible. The idea is to improve their values, though it's not specified which values. Not only believers in the separation of Church and State, but the very archbishop of El Salvador, are up in arms about the unconstitutional law, with the latter claiming that the school is not an appropriate environment for the contemplation of the Bible. The author of the article puts it this way: if family and the church haven't instilled moral values and religion in children, the government certainly won't be able to. It seems to me that cynical, opportunistic right-wing politicians that use religion to achieve their political ends are left in sort of a bind when the very head of the main church of the country insists on the inappropriateness of mixing religion and politics!

The second article is from Martin O'Neill on the justification for taxation. I have often thought along the lines that O'Neill articulates--that the people who live in a society are all undeniable, irrevocably dependent on one another and on the society as a structure. By this thinking, taxes aren't what the government takes from your rightful property, but rather the repayment you give to the government out of the money that the government has enabled you to earn. It is fair that Bill Gates pay millions of dollars in taxes, because his multi-million-dollar income is dependent on the security, the bank insurance, the stable dollar, the infrastructure, the educated workforce, the intellectual property laws, and all the other societal services that his tax dollars then reimburse. The road Bill Gates travels on to get to work is worth more to him than it is to the low-wage worker that travels on it, so Gates should pay more for it.

O'Neill doesn't focus so much on this point as on how government balances its budget fairly or unfairly in times of crisis. He argues that to respond to the banking crisis-caused fall in tax receipts, it is unfair for the UK government to cut public services. This is paying for the sins of the wealthy by punishing the poor.

La Capilla, Colombia

Last Saturday my wife and I visited the town of La Capilla, in the Tenza valley. It is one of the valley's more isolated, agrarian zones.

The town is named for a chapel erected to the Virgin of the Candelaria. One day in the 18th century, a local girl was gathering firewood, when she saw the image of the Virgin Mary in the trunk of a tree. The girl told others, who erected a shrine to the image, and eventually carved the trunk into a statue of the Virgin.



Eventually, the villagers decided to carry the statue to the town of Tenza, which was then the major municipal center. But at a certain bridge along the way, the statue became unbearably heavy, and they had to set it down. A rainstorm broke out, which they took as a sign that the Virgin wanted to stay where she had been before. And sure enough, as soon as the group decided to carry the statue back to the original shrine, it became lighter, and the rain stopped.

There are other stories associated with this image, like the one about a blaspheming woman who was struck by lightning and died as she insulted the statue, or the story of the well that sprung up beneath the foundations of the crypt of the large church they built on the site of the original shrine. This well is still revered by locals for its healing power, and they report that if you bury a gourd with water from the well, a spring will arise on the spot within a few years.





This is what the church looks like from outside. Notice the cool spiral staircase winding up the belltower.





Another fascinating local custom is the burning of a mountainside below another chapel to the Virgin, just outside the town. Every year the villagers set the brush on fire on this mountainside, in the knowledge that the Virgin will send down rain before the fire reaches her chapel. It is considered a show of the people's faith in the Virgin. The slopes just beyond the one they burn are covered in primary forest, which obviously worries local environmentalists, but the village is currently working with the regional environmental authority to figure out how to continue the custom without endangering the entire ecosystem.

The chapel is the little white square on top of the low, unforested mountain in the middle ground of this photo:



Here's a more wide-angle shot:



While in La Capilla we ate a delicious meal of stewed beef, rice, corn cakes, mixed vegetables, and huge corn cobs.



This was served us by a local innovator named Miguel, who produces wine on his farm (which is otherwise dedicated to a mix of corn, beans, squash, stuffing-cucumbers, fruit trees, hogs, and chickens).



He showed us his vineyards, and discussed the difficulties of cultivating grapevines in a humid tropical environment.



Anyway, I just wanted to give La Capilla a bit of good press.

Colombian product innovations

Here is an article from today's República newspaper. It describes eight innovative products invented by Colombian businesses. I'm not crazy about the potato chips and margarine that are supposedly healthy thanks to the addition of Omega 3 fatty acids. But I like the low-flow urinals, the labor-saving hand tools invented by a farmer, the plant-based anti-lice treatment, and especially the production of fabrics using recycled plastic bottles. These are all the type of tangible products with real benefits that I like to see economies basing themselves on.

¿Dónde están los soldados de conciencia?

Hace unos meses se encontró una fosa común en La Macarena, Meta, Colombia. Este fin de semana el presidente Uribe visitó este municipio para dar un discurso halagando a las fuerzas armadas y a la policía. Pero en este discurso también implicó que no existe esta fosa común, y que los que afirman su existencia lo hacen para desacreditar a las fuerzas armadas. En cuanto a la existencia de la fosa, me parecería muy difícil que no exista algo que ha sido documentado en varios medios. Pero lo que más me preocupa es que aquí, como en muchas otras ocasiones, Uribe parece creer que quienes denuncian las masacres y las violaciones de derechos humanos, quienes obran por acabar con estas violaciones, de algún modo hacen un acto de traición y desprestigio contra las fuerzas armadas de la República.

Tengo que creer que hay muchos soldados y mandos que no creen lo mismo. Las fuerzas armadas hacen la labor noble y necesaria de defender al pueblo, a la patria, y a la Constitución. Pero en ninguna instancia cabe la violación a los derechos humanos, la masacre de los civiles, en la labor de nuestras fuerzas armadas. ¿Dónde está el movimiento de soldados de conciencia? ¿Dónde están los militares que creen firmemente que la violación de derechos humanos no es justificada en ninguna situación? A pesar de que Uribe dice hablar en nombre de las fuerzas armadas, me imagino que hay muchos soldados que no están de acuerdo con que una investigación de una fosa común, o una sentencia a Plazas Vega por matar a civiles, es un desprestigio o un debilitamiento para las fuerzas armadas.

Que investiguen la fosa común, para poner la culpa donde se debe. Si esta fosa o cualquier otra matanza de civiles resulta ser un crimen de las fuerzas armadas, perseguir y castigar a los perpetradores sólo puede fortalecer tanto a las fuerzas armadas como a la patria.

Slash and burn: the sequel

Here's an article I wrote for the Goodeater website about the controversies surrounding swidden agriculture. It's a follow-up to a piece I wrote a few weeks ago describing exactly what swidden agriculture is.

Haitian cliches

Here's a rather acid-toned satire about typical news coverage of Haiti. Its form follows closely that of Binyavinga Wainaina's article about how to write about Africa.

Biofortification

Here is an article about biofortification of foods, the breeding or bioengineering of basic staple crops to contain higher amounts of important vitamins and minerals. The article is much fairer and more balanced than my cynical take on the issue in a satirical article I wrote about endowing humans with rumen stomachs. The author responsibly notes that the goal isn't to further enable the current lack of diet diversity that the poor suffer from, but rather that the use of biofortified crops can serve as an immediate improvement to the diet of the poor, concurrent with longer-term efforts to expand access to a more diverse diet.

Unhealthy school lunches

Here is an article about the difficulty of getting good-quality food into school lunches. I have heard similar things from a friend that is in charge of sustainability for a major Boston university. She would love to get the campus diners buying more from small, local producers, but there is some sort of kickback agreement between the catering companies (which have long-term contracts with the university), the universities, and big industrial food companies, so no one wants to source elsewhere.

Articles on bullying and reputation

Here is a NYT article about effective means to fight bullying. And here is an article touching on the related subject of our inborn morality.

And here is an article about how the digital age makes it harder to escape your past reputation. Ironically, this is published in the same issue as an article about the whitewashing and rehabilitation of GW Bush's image.

The article about new online privacy-eroding services rings very true for me today. As I was sending an email message to a friend, my email program warned me, "Your message has the words 'I'm attaching' in it, but you have not included an attachment. Would you like to send this message without an attachment?" That was useful. But also today, as I was posting something on facebook, the site had pictures of me with my face highlighted, asking if I wanted to tag the person in the photo. Given what the above NYT article says, I assume that facebook was using some face recognition software. This was mildly intrusive, but not a big deal, since I didn't label myself in the photos they showed. But I did scroll through the photos out of curiosity, and was distressed to see photos of my father when he was dying (I had posted them for my mother to look at). Presumably his face and mine are so similar that the software thought it was me. But this "helpful" service confronted me with distressing, sad pictures that I didn't want to see in that moment.

Tenza and tourism

I'm back in the Tenza valley this week, helping my wife with her work. Yesterday we went for a hike in a natural reserve called El Secreto. It extends from 2200m altitude (notice the solitary, majestic wax palm in the photo above), a bit lower than Bogota, to 3500m, which is pure paramo. The paramo is an ecosystem unique to Colombia and four other Andean countries. It is a high, moist plain, dominated by frailejones, a type of hardy shrub. Most of the drinking water for Colombia originates in paramo ecosystems.

In our hike yesterday we didn't get all the way up to the paramo, but we did get to see a cross-section of the high Andean forest. This is a forest composed of a mix of tropical and temperate species. There are lots of plants from the Ericaceae family, related to blueberries, and we enjoyed eating the little tart berries as we walked along. There are also lots of unique orchid and anthurium species in the forest.














The area is home to the endangered Spectacled Bear, the only bear species native to South America, but of course we didn't see any of these magnificent creatures. Below is a photo of a cave that they released some baby bears near in a repopulation program.



It's really amazing how different the air feels in an intact forest than in the pastures that dominate the high plains of central Colombia. A forest feels much warmer and wetter, much more tropical, than a pasture at the same altitude, which in theory should have the same average temperature but feels much drier and either hotter (when it's sunny) or colder (when it's rainy or windy). The walk was really delightful, and I was amazed at my wife's sure feet and steady pace on the forest path, despite her being four months pregnant. She made the good point that we were at an altitude about 2000 feet lower than our hometown, so she felt full of oxygen and stamina.



We were scouting out this particular nature reserve as part of my wife's project to promote ecotourism in Tenza. There are a fair number of natural attractions in the Tenza valley, which is really amazing considering the abusive nature of most of the local economic activity. Since pre-Spanish times, the Tenza valley has been a major center for emerald mining. I would guess that something like 10 or 20% of the world's emeralds come from the town of Chivor in the Tenza valley. The area also has iron mining, gravel and sand quarrying from riverbeds, and is a corridor from Bogota to the oil-producing areas of Colombia's eastern plains. It turns out that the pristine wilderness we were walking through in the Secreto reserve sits on top of a rich coal deposit. To think that if the owners of the reserve weren't so environmentally conscious, that entire area could be converted to a dug-up wasteland!

Probably the major economic factor in the Tenza valley is the AESChivor dam, which has filled much of the long valley with an artificial lake that generates power for Bogota. This lake has changed local climate because it cools and moistens the air. The Tenza area used to be a major fruit producer, but since the building of the dam this activity is less viable.

The Tenza valley's mix of extractive and environmentally-destructive economic activities also leads to an odd social milieu. There is lots of wealth in Tenza, lots of flashy emerald miners and gangsters, but it is one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest states in Colombia. Roads are in horrid condition, except for the 16 tunnels between Guateque and Santa Maria, which are real engineering marvels. There are military and police checkpoints everywhere to counter both the armed groups that might damage or take over the dam and other resources of the area, and the cocaine that comes through the area from the eastern plains. Another odd trait of the Tenza area is that the US-owned dam company maintains a fenced-off camp for its employees in the town of Santa Maria.

When my wife started working with this ecotourism project, she wasn't that excited about it. She'd always worked with farmer groups, and somehow tourism seemed a bit frivolous to her. But in time she's come to enjoy and appreciate the importance of her work, and we've come to formulate a more or less unified economic philosophy involving both agriculture and local tourism.

Economists tend to divide an economy in three sectors: agriculture, industry, and services. I would add the wrinkle that agriculture and industry are the real bases of an economy, and the services flow from them. Even in many modern economies like the US, where services comprise most of the economy, we wouldn't be able to operate without the goods and raw materials that the first two sectors provide (even though in the US many of our industrial goods come from elsewhere).

I feel like many discussions of the economy are centered on large-scale, national and international flows of business. Especially in Latin America, many governments seem to be obsessed with exporting products and services to bring in foreign exchange. This has its place, but most of the economic activity in a country is by necessity local. Wherever you live, most of your money is earned and spent in the local businesses, the stores, the gyms, the buses, etc. This is a good thing, because it provides for a healthy local economy, with relatively well-distributed wealth. My wife and I believe in the importance of small-scale, locally-focused activities: agriculture for local consumption, small-scale artisan industries, services to meet local needs.

The difficulty for many local areas is to bring in outside money. Even if local activity is the lifeblood of any area, it's also necessary to have outside infusions of income. This is especially the case in relatively poor areas; if the only economic activity is poor people selling to poor people, obviously it's difficult to build prosperity. So what are the options for a locally-focused economy to bring in outside money? Agriculture can produce certain high-value, semi-processed, and/or luxury items like fruits, sweets, or meat to sell outside of the region or even for international export. Artisans (and fireworks-makers, in the case of the Tenza valley) can sell their products to larger cities and through fair-trade projects with other countries. And in services, we have sustainable tourism, which brings outsiders (and their money) to an area. Large-scale tourism can create some jobs, but it mainly concentrates money in the hands of a few large business owners. But a more small-scale, locally-focused tourism can give visitors an authentic knowledge of an area, and distribute tourist dollars among many small operators.

I think both my wife and I have really internalized this vision of tourism's role in bringing prosperity to local economies. She's happy working in her project, and I've revived my interest in leading tour groups through Colombia.

Last week I ran into two travelers from the US in a cafe in our hometown. I got to talking with them, and on the spot I proposed to give them a guided tour. We went to colonial Villa de Leyva, saw ancient dinosaur fossils and a prehistoric Stonehenge-like monument, and stayed at my father-in-law's farm. They really loved the trip, and I re-discovered my love for guiding visitors in Colombia. On this trip more than on others I've organized, I was really conscious of how tourism could be a vital force for local development. Aside from the money the visitors paid me for my services, in the day I was with them they spent over one hundred dollars in hotels, farms, restaurants, museums, and other activities. All of these were small, local businesses that wouldn't have received that business if those tourists and I hadn't met each other. So I'm enthusiastic about re-initiating small, local guided tours in addition to the larger tour groups I occasionally set up.

Articles on agriculture in Haiti

Here's an article about the importance of agriculture for Haitian reconstruction. Many of its suggestions coincide with the proposal I formulated the week after the earthquake. Here's an article about Venezuela's role in Haitian reconstruction. And here's a long report that I haven't yet read about how the earthquake affected seed systems in Haiti.

Flows of drug money

Here's a little blurb discussing the percentage of drug trade profits that stay in Latin America as opposed to the US. As in many other economic sectors, the primary producers and shippers don't capture nearly as much value as the final retail distributors in the US.

And one more

Here's another piece by a woman who decided to leave behind the life of working for others and start her own business. I can relate, as most of my wife's and my activities here in Colombia are by necessity of our own creation. It's scary, exhilarating, and ultimately I think it's the best life for us.

Two good NYT articles

Here's an article on a garment factory in the Dominican Republic where workers earn three times the minimum wage, and are free to form unions. I would love to see this model promoted elsewhere, and I'm particularly surprised to learn that the higher wages only raise the cost of production by 20%.

Here's another article about a Michigan teenager that runs a vegetable CSA farm for her summer break. When there are so many people lamenting the loss of good eating habits in the US, it's great to see young people making our food culture better.

Tenza musings

I spent a day last week chauffering my wife around the Tenza valley. The Tenza valley is only two hours away from Bogota, but it is rimmed on all sides by mountains, and the region's horrid roads make it feel much more isolated. Ironically, part of the reason the roads are so bad is due to Tenza's lying between the Eastern Plains and Bogota, so it's actually a strategic route for trucks carrying heavy-duty oil drilling equipment. Normally over-weight trucks have to pay a fee to maintain and repair the roads that they damage by using, but enforcement is poorer in Tenza than on the other two major routes from Bogota to the Plains. So in a way it's precisely Tenza's proximity to the capital that deteriorates its roads, which makes it feel very isolated!

Anyway, my wife coordinates a project in the Tenza valley. She doesn't have to be there all the time, as she can monitor and direct her three team members via phone and internet, but my wife goes down almost every week for a few days to meet with local mayors, work out problems, get on-the-ground debriefings from people, etc. Since the round trip from our place to Tenza can be in excess of 6 hours, my wife often stays the night at a rented house in Garagoa, one of the region's major towns. But on last week's visit she had to get back to our home that same night, so I drove her so she wouldn't be tired after a half-day of meetings combined with six hours of driving.

My serving as driver reminded me of my boss's driver when I was doing research in Benin. In Benin there's a heavy presence of international development agencies, and the employees of these organizations live very comfortably. They have cooks, drivers, gardeners, guards, a whole team of people devoted solely to taking care of the daily chores that the foreigners are perfectly capable of doing themselves when they're in their home countries. But there's sort of a beauty to working as an employee of these development bigwigs. The pay is good compared to other local jobs, you have a certain amount of responsibility and control over your boss's projects, and as a driver one has access to a car to run personal errands and the like. Anyway, I thought of my friend Bernard the driver as I navigated the dusty, pitted roads of the Tenza valley.

Another thing that I thought about that day was the difference between working on development projects in one's own country as opposed to in a foreign country. When my wife works on a project, she feels a personal, national stake in it. Of course it's a job for her, but she has a very direct connection and a relationship as equals with the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the project. My wife speaks the same language, eats the same things, has the same cultural referents as the people she works with. It is very different from the sort of neo-colonial, almost slave-like relationship I saw at times in Benin between “developer” and local people.

When we ate lunch at a nice hotel in the town of Tenza, I was again reminded of the difference between my experience with development work in Africa and my experience in Colombia. My wife and I were talking with one of her team members about local affairs. He is from the zone and knows all about the local politics and history. He was telling us that until a few years ago each of the fourteen small towns in the valley had a full-fledged hospital. The universities in Tunja, the departmental capital, sent medical students to the Tenza valley for their residencies, where they were overseen by top-notch doctors. There were even people from Bogota that preferred to go to the Tenza valley for exams and surgeries, because they could go to just one hospital and get everything they needed, as opposed to many hospitals in Bogota where you had to go to one place for X-rays, then another for prescription drugs, then another for bloodwork, etc. Eventually though the state government cut funding and downgraded most of the hospitals to clinics. Now local people have to go to one of the valley's two major towns if they want quality medical care. The professionals and students that worked in the hospitals no longer live spread throughout the Tenza valley, so the economic base that these middle-class people represented for local economies has disappeared.

This story reminded me of the development industry because our friend told us that the hospitals were funded in part with resources from the Spanish and Swiss governments. I don't know if these countries withdrew their aid first, or if they were prompted to by the state government's downgrading the hospitals to mere clinics, but either way I can imagine what the foreigners working on the project must have thought. “It was a good project, but the local people just couldn't keep it going,” or, “Local people loved it, but the government was corrupt/misguided/lazy, and it fell by the wayside.” It must have been something along those lines. I've heard the same thing when working in other countries. Hell, I've thought it myself sometimes when a project I was working on wasn't received well by the local beneficiaries. But now I'm seeing it from below, from the inside, and it's interesting to hear a local person giving a critical, thoughtful treatment to the issue. Could it be that in my projects in the African countryside or in US ghettoes local people were engaging in a philosophical, civic-minded discussion about the merits and weaknesses of what I was working on from the outside?

Also, the hotel we were in reminded me of a hotel I sometimes ate at while I was living and working in rural Benin. Both hotels are elegant, breezy, simple, but the one in Kandi, Benin was catered almost exclusively to foreign development workers, while I think the one in Tenza, Colombia was aimed at the rare Colombian tourists that pass through the town. My wife said a place she used to stay while working in Vientiane, Laos, was also similar in its tropical, simple sophistication. But in her Laotian hotel there was a special section for development workers to sleep with underage prostitutes!

In Colombia the international development sector is nowhere near as visible as in Haiti or Benin. In the latter two countries, you constantly see trucks, buildings, and white people emblazoned with the logo of some major NGO or foreign government's aid program. My impression is that since the economies of many African countries are relatively small, the impact of aid dollars is really big, so development agencies and their employees are a noticeable and important part of local and national economies. In Colombia, however, we have a vibrant, big, diversified economy. I don't know how the absolute value of aid given to Colombia compares to that in other poor countries, but I'm sure it's nowhere near as important for the Colombian economy as it is in other places. Granted, my main experience is in the central region of Colombia, which has a well-developed economy and receives relatively little aid. Perhaps I'd have a different impression if I were living in one of the remote, war-torn areas of Colombia where people are poor and aid money flows abundantly.

On the way back from my Driving Miss Caro trip, we stopped in one of our favorite snack places on the way back from the Tenza valley. It's called “El Fresal”, or the strawberry patch, and they serve a variety of home-made treats from the strawberries, rhubarb, and blackberries that they grow on the farm. Anyway, as we pulled up we saw a big van, the type they use in Colombia for school bus routes. Inside El Fresal was a huge extended family, with various parents and children, and they were all munching on strawberry delicacies. They were clearly Colombian from the way they talked, but there was something slightly off. The kids peppered their conversation with correctly-pronounced US brand names, and everyone except the main dad was dressed as if they were going to the beach. The paterfamilias had on a linen suit with wingtip patent-leather shoes, which is not at all typical of our humble, reserved high plains region. The father's style might be at home in Cali or the Caribbean coast, but people from those areas likely wouldn't summer in the cool, high plains of central Colombia, and if they did they certainly wouldn't be dressed in short sleeves and short pants. Finally we figured it out, aided by the generalized corpulence and use of gym shoes by everyone in the group except the father. They were Colombian immigrants to the US, come back for a summer vacation, for which they'd rented a minibus. That explained the odd mix of Colombian dialect, obesity, and inappropriate dress. It was fun to see people that maintained the general trappings of Colombianness, but with a few US-influenced twists. Yet another flipping around of the view from inside and outside a culture.



A few months ago we visited Santa Maria, at the low-altitude, steamy tropical end of the Tenza valley. We went on a delightful hike along a river that tumbled down from the high rainy mountains surrounding the town. We saw well-coiffed farms with a collection of local varieties of heliconia flowers, lots of cattle grazing tropical pastures, and birds that live in saxophone-shaped nests hung from high tree branches. The highlight was crossing a roaring river in a steel cage that runs along pulley-operated cables.






This hike was fun, but as tired out as I was after only a few hours of walking up and down hillsides in the tropical heat and humidity, I began to think about how life must be for people kidnapped in Colombia by armed groups. They spend day after day on long hikes through mountainous jungle, often for years before they're rescued, traded, or killed. Pretty bleak. But I thought that perhaps the awful experience of kidnapping and forced marches might be an interesting theme for tourism. I have read and seen things about a theme park in Mexico that simulates an illegal border crossing for visitors. What about a themed tour that simulates capture by, forced marches with, and escape from an armed group? I don't know if I'd ever sign up for such a thing, but it's an interesting idea, I think.

Cartagena's brand

This is a news item from the La Republica newspaper highlighting Cartagena's effort to brand itself as a great tourist destination and place to do business. While I love Cartagena, and I'd be glad to see it continue its rise to prominence in the collective global conscience, there's something that bothers me here. Cartagena is the capital of a state in Colombia called Bolivar. The state has a long, narrow shape, such that the south of Bolivar is very far away and isolated from Cartagena, which is on the northern coast of Colombia. In part due to this isolation, southern Bolivar is one of the most violent, war-torn areas of Colombia. Many of the displaced people floating around the country with nowhere to go hail originally from this region. In light of this, Cartagena's prosperity and status as a glamorous tourist destination is unsettling, and the fact that the city is devoting so many resources to further promoting itself as opposed to improving life in the rest of its state is really a disgrace. I know that we live in a complex, diverse world, and that promotion of one thing doesn't necessarily imply robbing resources from another thing. But this gap in wealth, in security, in quality of life between the capital of Bolivar state and its hinterlands is so glaring as to be obscene.

Electronic overload

I like the internet a lot. For my wife and me, it is indispensable to have in the house; our livelihood depends on access to information and other people as provided by a fast connection in our home. My academic writings, my learning, my sharing of information with others, my project proposals, all of these would be impossible without the internet. Sometimes I sit back and wonder at how difficult something I do would have been without the internet. Had I had certain questions or certain ideas ten or fifteen years ago, I wouldn't have been able to pursue them, because I wouldn't have had the internet at my fingertips.

That said, I am aware of the dangers of the electronic life. The immediate-gratification, on-demand nature of the internet makes it addictive, and I like many other people am prone to spend hours on the internet, ever-busy, only to discover that I've done nothing of value in that time. I have begun to try to control this by things like not checking my email as frequently, taking a breath and realizing that nothing too new or important has probably happened since I last checked my favorite blogs, and most importantly, only logging on when I have a defined task to accomplish. This is a good thing. There are times when it's justified for my wife and me to turn on our computers first thing in the morning after waking up and greeting one another, but often it's pure compulsion, and a detraction from our family and love life.

But I realize that my case is much milder than that of many other people in Colombia and especially the US. I spend maybe a few hours online a day, and most of that is legitimate work-related pursuits (information searches, blogging, reading of articles, meetings, etc.). I am aware when I'm compulsively web-surfing, and I try to control it. I don't have a blackberry or any other device that keeps me permanently connected. And in fact, because I don't work in the mainstream professional world, there's not a constant stream of emails arriving in my mailbox. Most of my mail comes from all these progressive groups I have probably mistakenly associated myself with. Every day I dutifully sign petitions, call my Congressmen, etc.!

I think the lack of a high-tech cellphone is key for my wife and me. I have a beat-up fourth-hand Nokia that I bought on the street for like $15US. No color screen, no internet access, nothing. My wife has a slightly newer model (I don't impose my Spartan ethic on others!), but it too lacks internet connectivity. I think this is a real boon for our lives and our marriages, not to be ever-tempted by constant little beeps alerting us to text messages, facebook updates, etc. My wife uses her phone a lot, because she works managing teams in far-flung areas of Colombia, but she's not glued to a blackberry screen. I can't ever imagine myself subscribing to Twitter—that type of information is very demanding of attention while offering little benefit for my life.

My love of plants is another aspect of my life that provides me with a simpler, slower, more organic pursuit to counterbalance the frenetic, ultra-fast electronic world.

Something that I love about plants is that they are on a different, slower schedule than we humans. I tend a number of gardens belonging to our friends, which involves my planting seeds in a nursery here in my house, and then transplanting them out in the gardens when they're of a certain size. I have to keep them watered and exposed to lots of sunlight, but they really don't take very much care. If I don't water for a few days, the plants are fine. Even if I really screw up and don't water them for many days, there's a big window between their drying out and wilting some, and their actually dying. Plants can wilt for a day or two, and if you water them thereafter, they'll be happy and perky within the day. Likewise, when you plant seedlings outside, they look sort of scraggly for a day or two as they adjust to the new environment, but eventually they settle in and prosper.

Aside from their slower pace, I like that plants operate on their own schedule, not mine. A given plant can take a few weeks to germinate, with no ostensible change from day to day, but then from one day to the next there can be a huge change, with the plant peeking above the surface, spreading its first leaves, flowering, etc. In this way plants are sort of like the internet, which goes at its own inexorable pace regardless of whether you're online or not. But plants are intrinsically life-creating, never frivolous, while the internet is often empty and life-devouring.

Here is an article about replacing calendars and datebooks with electronic applications. I have not done so, and I don't foresee my doing so. I maintain various paper notebooks—a diary, an agenda, a notebook for my professional, scientific, artistic, and agrarian ideas, a notebook where I keep track of monthly expenditures. This latter seemed silly and compulsive initially to my wife, but now she is an enthusiastic contributor to our spending records. At the end of each month, I summarize our costs by category in the notebook, and then I pass this to an Excel spreadsheet. I feel this is a good marriage of diligent paper record-keeping with electronic categorization and manipulation for comparisons and future planning.

I think that my wife and I grew up in a good generation for responsibly living in the electronic age. Our childhood occurred in a transitional period between analog and digital media. We were raised on books and bad TV, with video games that started to interest us once we were somewhat into childhood, while never being so interesting that they could consume our lives. I feel that this has put us in a great position to take advantage of the digital age. We are avid readers of books, scientific articles, history, novels, newspapers, whatever we can get our hands on. We keep journals, maintain hand-written lists of things to do, write some drafts of things by hand. The internet merely expands the available offering of media sources. We are able to navigate the net, manage hyperlinks, sort out which information interests us and which doesn't. I wonder if this is the case with younger generations that will grow up with less exposure to books and more to the internet. Will the internet be an expansion of media options for them, or a replacement of analog media (movies, books, music, newspapers) with lots of superficial tidbits (tweets, facebook updates, short online articles)?

Maybe though the generation isn't as critical as the upbringing. My stepdaughter is 14, and has hence spent most of her life in the internet age. She has a few social networking pages, a blog, a cellphone. But in the house she's rarely online (this is due in part to her computer's being temporarily out of service from her loading up the hard drive with movies and music!). She isn't on facebook, she doesn't participate in or suffer from cyber-bullying, she likes to read books. I don't know if this is a tribute to her character, to her parents' raising of her, or to Colombia's being in a different moment with relation to the internet and other digital media.

The importance of upbringing (specifically access to printed, physical books) is underlined in this David Brooks article discussing the profound intellectual development in book-reading children as compared to a mental impoverishment among electronic addicts (and here is a more in-depth article about the ill effects computers have on poor kids' academic performance). I especially like Brooks's comparison of being a book-reader to belonging to a special club, in which one advances in knowledge and references as one reads more. This was something that escaped me as a kid, despite my being a voracious, diverse reader. I would hear people referring to well-known works, academic treatises, things like that, and think that that was an elite club to which I didn't belong, as opposed to the being the higher-level extension of the path I was embarking on. I think this had mostly to do with my own neuroses and feelings of always being left out. That said, once I started reading the great works that people always referred to, I felt great, like a real adult. This happened mainly in college and with technical books. I had always read quite a few important novels as a kid, and those I didn't read were because I thought them old-fashioned and boring!

Brooks makes reference to a book called "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, which seems to have inspired much of the recent thought and debate about the ill effects of the internet age on attention span and intellect. I haven't read it, but this quote from Carr seems to describe the gist of it: "I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do" when he has to read something involved and in-depth like a novel. Carr's thesis is that heavy internet use, with its hyperlinks and immediate gratification, has diminished our ability to concentrate and do what Carr calls deep thought, deep reading. The above-linked review of the book describes email as “that constant influx of the social acknowledgment craved by our monkey brains”, and Carr claims that the internet's basic mechanics turn us into "lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual nourishment." The review ends with a disturbing question: “What will we lose socially, politically, civilly, scientifically, psychologically, if a majority decides that the intellectual 'shallows' are the proper habitat for the 21st-century mind?”

Maybe in the end the problems and challenges of the electronic age aren't so new. I once heard a quote, I think from Proust, to the effect that books are marvelous things if they enhance your life experience, but horrid things if they replace your life experience. My dealing with my dad's death was eased and aided by certain books I'd read, and now when I read “Love in the Time of Cholera” my experience informs my reading, and my reading gives me new insight on dealing with the death of a parent. But from the very beginnings of the novel as art form, Don Quijote reminds us that it's dangerous and delusional to replace real life with fantasy and reading.

I was initially inspired to write this blog by a NYT article on the negative mental effects of always being “plugged in”. An especially interesting insight of the article is that though many people think multitasking makes them more productive, it often does just the opposite, even after-hours when they're no longer working. The article links heavy electronic media usage to a loss of empathy and a deterioration of family life. The NYT also published simultaneous offerings about the increased forgetfulness and impatience of electronic addicts, and people's recognizing their problems with electronic media and seeking to address them. I for one can certainly relate to my behavior's changing due to the internet. Sometimes if I'm looking for a specific passage in a book, I think, “I should type in this phrase in the search function,” only to remember that books don't come with automatic search functions!

Here's a Maureen Dowd article on a more tangible ill effect of technology: radiation emitted by cellphones. And here's an article about tech-addicted parents who interact less with their kids. Here is a good article on breaking the email addiction. Here is a silly but dead-on video about people who lose normal human function due to their overdependence on electronic devices, and the resulting information overload.

As I was finishing the first draft of this blog at 11pm one night, I realized the irony of my being glued to the computer, working on an article decrying the electronic domination of our lives, while my wife slept in our bed, where I should have been at that hour. However, in the subsequent days I have been much more conscious and responsible about my internet use, only turning on my computer for defined work tasks, and this only in our study, never in the bed or in the living room. The mere fact of taking a step back to reflect and write about the issue has made me more self-aware and forced me to ask myself some profound questions and to set some priorities. I think this type of measured reflection is precisely what is needed if we are to use the internet responsibly and to our true benefit.

African cliches

Here is a scathing article by Binyavanga Wainaina about the cliches prevalent in writing about Africa. I liked it and thought much of it was dead-on, but after reading it I hurriedly opened my old blogs I had written while I was studying in Benin, just to check if I had fallen into any of the traps Wainaina decries. After reading my posts, I think the Kenyan author wouldn't be too hard on me. You judge:

Cotonou-Kandi

25/IV/08

Ideally you will leave on a cool morning, 75 degrees after an all-night rainstorm has swept away the heat. Before starting the day you will wish that you could prolong the night and continue sleeping under the steady, sighing sheet of rain washing the roof. Once you leave the house with your driver (development workers need a lot of assistance for their mission of helping the poor), you will dally about the city for an hour trying to find an ATM that accepts your type of card.

After utterly failing in the ATM mission and topping off your gas in the outskirts of Cotonou, you will find yourself in Abomey-Calavi (part of an uninterrupted urban agglomeration taking up most of southern Benin), with its gravel and construction material yards, its impressive variety of wholesale stores (concrete and tin shacks with couches, tires, or toilets arrayed out front), and its university, with its lovely new wedding-cake residence halls. You will listen to one of the innumerable Christian music stations, which play what sounds like regular, run-of-the-mill drums and Fon chanting, but with an occasional exhortation of “Jezi Krist!” Get accustomed to the smell of acrid burn—motorcycles, diesel trucks, garbage. It will accompany you for most of the next 11 hours, irritating your skin and perhaps giving you a headache.

The sun will seem to want to peek out, promising a hotter day as you barely start to leave the urban agglomeration and into the exuberantly green countryside, but don't worry. He'll leave you alone for the day. It's a good thing too, because if not you would see all the beauty you're going to see today as mere hot ugliness. You would feel even uglier than what you were seeing, in the knowledge that the ugliness was coming from within you and not from without.

Along the entire route be watchful of overturned trucks and stopped buses. Most of the buses that are broken down at the roadside are the Kandi-Cotonou line you will have to take back to Cotonou in a few weeks. Don't worry about their all breaking down, don't think that you too will be one of the pissed-off or resigned passengers inside or outside the bus waiting, waiting. Besides, breakdowns happen even to the best, as you see clearly with the stopped bus that proudly says “Transport technicians in training”, with a bunch of people inside of it, neither training, transporting, or being technicians. Occasionally there will be a stopped truck. In this case it's not broken, it's just that the driver and his apprentice got tired. They have stopped the truck, signalled with branches lain on the road behind and ahead of them, and gone to sleep in the shade of the trailer.

In the Dahomeyan countryside you will see fields of humble, squat army-green pineapple plants patiently awaiting the arrival of their magnificent, showy flowers and fruit. Oil palm and teak groves, pygmy goats ambling about villages or perched absent-mindedly atop things, old men hacking weeds to leave a rust-red soil around their gangly young manioc bushes. Sometimes overturned trucks, stalled cross-country buses, wise stolid 30-foot mango trees coyly displaying their dangling, unripe wintergreen fruit. Your driver will stop at some point, beckon to a woman with an enamel basin full of pineapples atop her head. She will come up and perform a rapid-fire skinning of a pineapple, which the driver will grab with one hand by its leafy crown and set into like a turkey leg, eating even the core, which is soft in Benin's treasured pineapples. After a few bites he will toss it disdainfully into the roadside ditch, and seemingly reprimand the woman in Fon, after which she will load 15 pineapples into your truck in exchange for $1.50.

Before you know it you're in Allada, its huge, elaborate church of the Virgin on the outskirts. This will be the most prominent church you've seen in Benin. Even in the non-Muslim south the mosques are more visible with their tall, proud minarets, topped in prominence only by the cell phone towers dominating every good-sized town and village. After Allada it's wide swaths of deforested land, and then oil palm plantations. Hold your breath when you pass the slow-moving semi trucks that squeeze out billows of black exhaust like aerosol shaving cream, a thick sooty mass that sits on the road like cake frosting.

Beyond Bohicon everything is much less settled. You will notice more trees, but very spread out, not a forest. In fact, it will look like land that has been deforested, used, and then left to its own devices. Disturbed once but not maintained since. The soil will be a less deep red, more brown, as will be the houses made from mud-bricks, the corners sharp and orderly and the surfaces melty and cracking and shapeless.

Once in the Collines region, you will notice that the grass is shorter, less lush, but there are still lots of trees. You will pull into Dassa, with its endless roadside display shelves all stocked with identical plastic bags of gari (manioc couscous), and an occasional bucket of yellow mangoes or a big sack of charcoal. Enjoy the Cuban salsa music on the radio, look at the colorful massive church directly below the improbably knobby granite peaks and above the sweeping, misty vistas of heavily-wooded savanna. Walk by the women selling bags of skinned oranges, by a small Citroen packed in the back with four bound, bewildered baby pygmy goats and a pile of yams, and to the huge, stout woman in a colorful robe who shouts “pounded yam” while behind her two young women effectively are pounding yams with 5-foot-long poles in a large wooden mortar on the ground. She will ladle you meat of bush rat or bush sheep, peanut sauce, slimy green okra, and Beninois cheese, like dried feta and dyed scarlet by sorghum leaf sheaths. You will eat it with pounded yam and your hands. If you're foreign they'll point you to the indoor seating area, which is dark and stuffy, but has no undernourished black hens poking around underfoot. If you like this food (which you will), you're in luck, since that's what they eat in the North. Afterwards if you have to piss, just go to the outdoor passageway marked, “Enter, urinate here,” complete with stick-figure pictures of men pissing.

You will continue on your way, until Parakou, where you are greeted by a shining monument to a long-dead president. It's gilded (the monument, not the president). You will pass through the busy “International Market of Parakou”. Here even more than in the rest of Benin you will see women with tiny bald babies strapped firmly to their backs like little squishy froggy bundles. A friendly disfigured woman waves to charitable passers-by at the stoplight. There will be many banks here, none of them accepting your ATM card but one of them with an inexplicable group of five pert, perky, pretty, clean suburban-English-talking white girls. They will seem out of place in a town where long-legged Sahel sheep cluster around barren bushes in the median strips of principal streets to strip them of their last meager leaves, SUVs buzz by with 50 live baby pygmy goats tied to the roof, and Muslim women covered in colorful silk sheets zip along authoritatively on their motorcycles.

Beyond Parakou the road is less well-maintained, with lots of potholes. You will however see how neat and densely-cultivated the countryside is, with its ordered plantations of mango and cashew, the grass burned away underneath the trees. You will see the absence of grass and constantly think you are finally getting to true savanna, but then you will realize it's been intentionally burned, or you will enter a zone with lush tropical foliage despite its being the dry season.

Finally you will get to N'Dali, the village where your driver did 5^th and 6^th grade, and you will know you're in savanna country. On one side of the road will be yam plots prepared in hundreds of little mounds that look like those blue foam sheets old people put on recliner chairs, and on the other side of the road is thick bush. You will notice a shirtless man plastering his house, and shirtless women working in the fields. The fields of erect cotton stubble in blood-brown soil are interrupted now only by the occasional tree or 6 foot termite mound, and long-horn zebu cattle stride along ahead of their young Gando herder boys. Your driver will know they are Gando because they are very black. If not, they would be Peuls, who still refer to the Gando as a slave people.

Before you know it, you will almost be at Kandi. Of course you'll be nervous to start five weeks of research in terra incognita, but that's what you've come for. Just think of yourself as Indiana Jones embarking on an adventure, and you'll get inspired as you hear your own theme music in your head.

Hard Kandi

We were close to Kandi by 7-ish. As night fell we pulled into Sagasso, the village of the main farmer, Yobo, who was my link to the Participatory Plant Breeding group. My driver Norbert pointed out Yobo's house to me, and we immediately pulled up. He got out and asked in Bariba where Yobo was to a group of guys sitting under a mango tree. I got out too, and a fellow who spoke a bit of French and had a weird nutmeg-colored powder on his upper lip greeted me and asked if I wanted to try some tobacco. “This is Bariba country! This is how we do!” and all his friends laughed in confirmation. I said that was fair, but that I needed to ease into things, which met with more approving chuckles. Next arrived the delegation of kids to regard the new visitor, a mix of fear and marvel in their eyes. My tobacco-snuffing friend introduced them to me, and they took turns shaking hands with me (two rounds, just to make sure the first time wasn't a weird hallucination).

Yobo soon pulled up, and after a warm greeting to me, he and Norbert launched into rapid negotiations in Bariba on an affair of which I was unclear. As I followed them into Yobo's compound, I saw that Norbert wanted to buy a large 120kg sack of corn to bring back to his wife, who sells basic foodstuffs in the outskirts of Cotonou. I was bewildered, unsure of what was happening, and no one kept me updated in a language I could understand. Eventually though the three of us returned to the car, squeezed into the front seat, and went to check out my lodging.

When we got there I was a bit skeptical that we were actually in Kandi. Kandi was a fair-sized city, and this place was an unlit compound in the middle of nowhere. We stepped out of the car as night was falling, and Yobo introduced me proudly to the guesthouse of the Union of Cotton Producers of Kandi. Norbert remarked to me on the sly that the rows of jerrycans out front indicated a lack of running water. The guesthouse had a dark entrance lobby, filled with stark wooden benches, vacant except for a young shirtless man looking over some papers in the failing light. A skinny, rat-looking guy took us to my room, a spare number with concrete everything. It did have its own bathroom though, and Norbert asked if the shower worked. “No, you have to use a bucket that we fill outside and bring to the room.” And the power, “It's been out for awhile. It should come back sometime.” Not promising.

We drove back to Yobo's village after leaving my stuff in the room. He and Norbert caught up eagerly, while I stayed silent, waiting for a good opportunity to voice my concerns without seeming ungrateful to Yobo for having booked me the place. I'm not a picky guy with lodging and personal comfort, but I had three criteria for wherever I was going to stay during my research in Kandi. I needed reliable electric power every night to type up my day's findings on my computer. I needed a room with window screens to keep me from getting malaria. These two things were justifiable for my work—I can't do my work without my computer, or if I'm dying from malaria. The third criteria was pure vanity: I wanted running water, just because. I had no work reason to justify it, though I'm sure there's some UN convention that says I've got a right to it. Anyway, this place was shooting 0 for 3.

So we dropped off Yobo, finished the corn bag transaction, and then Norbert and I drove back to Kandi, talking in conspiratorial tones about how to proceed. I felt enough confidence with him to tell him my problems with the residence, and he agreed. We were going to see his big brother (one of 40 siblings peppered in important posts throughout Benin), the commander of the military camp at Kandi. He would surely know of other lodging options. But on the way we noticed that nowhere had power in the city. It was all blacked out. As we drove over roads that were less intentionally-constructed conveyances than an unplanned, neglected area between rows of houses, in the pitch-black 95-degree night, I felt overwhelmed. What the hell was I doing there? How was I going to do research in this place? Had Norbert really not known it was going to be like this, or was he just lying before when he had told me about Kandi's infrastructure? He assured me it wasn't always like this.

We found his brother's house after much confused asking (Kandi is majority Dendi-speaking, so there are huge swaths of the city where Bariba is not understood, despite Kandi's being 5km from the language's heartland). Despite my state of mental distress, I did notice how amazing the sky looked in the unlit night. It was littered with stars, stars I didn't know at all. I was truly removed from all my references. Even heaven is different in Kandi.

His brother reassured me, in part with his wise plan for searching for a hotel tomorrow, and in part for the TV, fridge, and other appliances in his house that attested to a regular supply of electricity. He told us that the city was without power since last night, after a generator caught on fire at the power plant. And at this time of year, the end of the dry season, water was scarce, only available to those who lived in lower parts of the city and hence closer to the aquifer. Not promising, but at least an assurance that my hotel was no worse than any other at the moment in terms of power or water.

After that Norbert and I returned to our scheming and then headed to a maquis restaurant, where two insouciant waitresses served us bitter pineapple juice and too much rice. Norbert was harassing one of the waitresses, and then she “offered” the other to me, and afterwards when I joked to Norbert that it was too bad that both he and I were spoken for (he with a wife and six kids), he said, “Hey, it's no problem. You hit it with a condom and it doesn't matter.” He was amused that I thought it did actually matter.

Yobo called us because he was in town (he had come on his motorcycle), and he soon joined us at the table. He broached the topic of changing my lodging, which was nice since I didn't have to appear ungrateful. My place was expensive and mediocre, and he recommended a number of alternatives, like my staying with his family in the village, or renting a house from him that he has in downtown Kandi. Also a few other hotels that were better quality for less money. All these seemed like good options to me, and so as Norbert and I returned to my lodging for the night, I was in a better mood, not so overwhelmed. And when we arrived, the power was back! So now I'm here typing in my room, while Norbert watches a dubbed bad Brazilian soap opera in the lobby. I've got an overhead fan going, and I'm going to take a nice cool shower before bed.

Maybe I'll be able to survive Kandi after all.

The Land Institute and perennial crops

This is an interesting article about domesticating perennial grain crops. It comes from the Land Institute in Kansas, which has spent decades working on this issue. Almost all major agricultural crops are annual species planted in monoculture, meaning that they must be planted every year, and die off after harvest. This implies that farmers must till, fertilize, and kill weeds every year, either by hand or with machinery. This is a big use of time, money, and inputs like diesel fuel for tractors and natural-gas-derived fertilizers. This contrasts with most natural ecosystems that are dominated by perennial species that grow back year after year. If farming could use more perennial species, farmers would basically have to plant crops once every few years, and thereafter would mainly harvest and perhaps do controlled burns to control weeds and pests. Farmers would no longer have to perform multiple passes with the tractor every year to till the soil, plant crop seeds, and kill weeds. The soil would retain more nutrients, absorb more carbon, and support a more diverse underground ecosystem than it would under annual crops. Granted, planting grand monocultures of new perennial crops would be as bad as planting annual monocultures, and it could potentially suffer from heavy pest pressure, but in terms of water conservation, soil runoff, carbon capture, fertilizer use, it would be a much more ecologically responsible system. And it would not be hard to modify perennial crop-based farming systems to avoid monocultures and have a mix of many species growing in the same region.

Anyway, the Land Institute is onto something. They start with the idealistic, ecologically-sound goal of perennial plant-based cropping systems, and apply rigorous science and plant breeding to pursue it. This is a real achievement as compared to those who would propose an ideal paradigm without concrete measures to arrive there, or those who would merely entertain themselves with state-of-the-art science without having a well-thought, ethical purpose for doing so.

Critical articles about Colombia

Something that always drove me crazy in the US was trying to consume responsibly. For instance, I advised my parents to buy domestic cars, but of the Big Three, Chrysler is now foreign-owned, and Ford produces many of its components outside of the US. On the other hand, Toyota's production is increasingly US-based (though usually in the Union-poor South). So my final conclusion was always that it didn't really matter. Many companies in the US are a mix of foreign and local capital, and mainly foreign manufacturing. What's a patriot to do? Well now it seems that Colombia companies are caught up in the same wave of selling out to foreign capital. In our town I've long avoided a big French supermarket chain as long as I could, but then I found out that the "local" option, the emblematic Colombian company Exito, is now owned by another French conglomerate! Likewise our beloved local gas station chain, Terpel, is passing to Chilean hands.

On that note of discontent with Colombian society, I'm posting a few articles critical of recent happenings here.

This article details how the Justice and Peace process is not as auspicious as its supporters say. Justice and Peace is a procedure whereby paramilitary leaders and soldiers can get reduced prison time for their war atrocities, in exchange for confessing their crimes and helping the State to investigate and prosecute paramilitary crimes and compensate victims. However, there are a number of problems. For one, the process has seemed to favor paramilitary criminals. The government insists on calling them "self-defense forces" as opposed to paramilitaries. This places implicit guilt for paramilitary crimes on the shoulders of the guerrilla groups from which they are supposedly defending themselves. The government offers no solution to the scores of witnesses and victims' advocates that have been murdered during the Justice and Peace process. The legislature (of whom one third of its members at one point were prosecuted for links to paramilitaries) continually weakened the penalties assigned to paramilitaries, while the Supreme Court tried to uphold the force of the law. Furthermore, the government reports success in the Justice and Peace process by citing big numbers--so many mass graves discovered, so much paid out as reparations to victims--but it doesn't relate these numbers to the total case load or need. For instance, the justice system is having trouble processing the 4000 paramilitaries who have agreed to participate, much less the 27000 others that are still out there, theoretically no longer in paramilitary groups but having paid no debt to society for their crimes. In fact, many of these supposedly demobilized paramilitaries are back in action again, sowing terror in the cities and the countryside through gangs or newly-formed paramilitary groups. Lastly, the Justice and Peace process isn't totally aimed at peace. There are many references in official documents to offering certain amnesties for ex-guerrillas as a way of weakening and defeating these insurgent groups. This is a measure of war, not of peace. An even more chilling indication of this is that the government justifies its foot-dragging on returning stolen lands to displaced victims of the paramilitaries, saying that it's unwise to return lands to potential guerrilla sympathizers while the conflict continues!

And here is an article about the UN's numbers for cocaine production in Colombia. The UN released a report on June 20th with the latest stats on the trade. Colombia's acreage of coca supposedly diminished and is now just a bit more than that of Peru, but our higher efficiency of cocaine produced per acre still leaves us in the leading spot by far for total production. While the author recognizes the important and respected role the UN plays in estimating world drug production, he criticizes the many inconsistencies in the numbers. For instance, in 2008 there were confiscations of 711 tons of cocaine, of an estimated world production potential of 865 tons. This would leave 154 tons for world consumption, but Europe and the US alone consumed an estimated 320 tons that year! The author says that it's understandable that accurate statistics are hard to come by, as cocaine production is illegal and hidden, and the UN relies on numbers provided by each country. But at least the UN should point out and explain any inconsistencies or uncertainties.