Third World Green Daddy 39: Benign neglect and childrearing styles

My wife and I have been in charge of three kids for the past year and a half:  my son Sam, my stepdaughter Gabri, and my wife's nephew Manuel.  In many ways, raising these three kids has involved three different parenting styles, because we got them by three different paths.  Sam is two years old, and he was born of our marriage.  Despite occasional debates as to how best to raise and treat him, things have been relatively easy thus far, because he's our kid and no one else's (though of course he has a phalanx of grandparents and cousins and his sister that help raise him).  Plus he's still just a baby.  Raising Gabriela, my teenage stepdaughter, has been a fairly distinct experience from Sam, first of all because she's much older, but also because she's not my biological daughter.  There are certain things I don't feel comfortable imposing on her, and she wouldn't accept my authority on them anyway.  Plus our family has to coordinate with her dad in many decisions as to her upbringing.  All that said, and despite many years of butting heads, Gabri is in many ways more like me than I would ever have imagined.  Her sense of justice, her occasional intolerance and conservatism when it comes to things she considers frivolous, and increasingly an austere, anti-consumerist lifestyle have clearly been influenced by me; I hope some of my inputs have been positive, and that she hasn't simply adopted my most radical, intolerant stances.  Manuel has been yet another situation.  He was raised by his mother until he was 17 (with considerable input from his aunt, my wife Caro), and we have only taken over since the middle of last year.  He was already pretty well formed as a person when he came to us, and I haven't ever felt very comfortable participating directly in his upbringing, though my wife has done a wonderful job bringing out his finer points and discouraging any bad habits he might have.

There was a period about a year ago when our two teenage charges didn't come to many family get-togethers.  Caro's family is very big, and they try to get together at least once a month or so.  We always have fun seeing everyone and catching up.  At any rate, Gabri and Manu often didn't want to go to these events, and Caro let them stay home and do their own thing.  I asked myself if this was normal in families, whether in Colombia or the US.  Family events had never been optional in my childhood, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss them, anyway.  Had childrearing changed since I was a kid?  Was the situation different with bigger kids that could take care of themselves alone, as opposed to my situation as an only child?  Was it a difference between lenient parenting in Colombia and stricter mores in the US?  Or was our teenage kids' non-participation in family events a sign of the steady disintegration of tradition and family that seems to plague all modern societies?


This type of thing also had me wondering what to do with Manuel at times.  As I said, years spent with Gabri have endowed us with a certain understanding of what each one can or can't do with the other, and I am able to incur to some extent in the decisions that affect her.  But Manu grew up as someone else's kid, and came under my care precisely in his most lethargic, apathetic phase of adolescence.  Maybe his non-participation in family events, as well as other non-participations in various aspects of life, was simply a part of normal male adolescence.  A Chicago Public School teacher friend of mine once remarked in response to the increasing concern for poor male performance in high school that the problem of "What do we do with adolescent males?" is by no means a new one.  Many cultures send them to war, or to hunt, or otherwise remove them from normal, acceptable norms of daily life.  I've heard that the Vikings lived in communal longhouses, and a normal part of male development was that a teenage boy would spend a year or so just rolling around in the ashes of the central fireplace, acting like a crazy person.  Maybe this was what Manu and other teenage boys needed.

Colombians certainly do have a different childrearing style than I am accustomed to, though as I remarked above, I think most of the particularities of raising our different children has more to do with their respective situations and our relationship to them, as opposed to cultural norms.  To me and to my Spanish father-in-law, Colombians seem to spoil their kids.  Well into adolescence and adulthood children will cuddle with parents, ask them to do basic things for them like warming their food or bringing them things from another room, and generally act like spoiled babies.  Colombians call this way of babying people "consentir", though it doesn't have the negative connotations of "to spoil" in English.  In fact, Colombians of all stripes seem to regard this type of spoiling as the ultimate expression of care and affection.  Mix that up with the economic inequality inherent to Colombian society, and you have a whole ethic where gettting others to serve you (even if they're hired help and not family members) is viewed as a cute show of affection and closeness, and not as imposition or oppression.  Obviously I'm sort of appalled by this way of doing things, because it contrasts so strongly with the ethic of self-sufficiency, fixing things, and not being a burden to others that I was brought up with.  That said, I wonder how typical my upbringing and my ethic was in the US, and how common the opposite happens, with parents spoiling their kids and never teaching them valuable qualities like responsibility.  The society-scale evidence in the US would seem to indicate the latter approach; we are increasingly a soft, spoiled, rash people with little sense of responsibility or self-control.  At any rate, a positive spin on Colombian parenting would be that it encourages a realistic recognition of our interdependence with others, and prizes affection and gentle words.  In any case, I can't say that one parenting style or the other seems to have created a clearly more healthy society.  Both Colombia and the US are beset by problems of inequality, irresponsibility, laziness, and lack of consideration.

A quick aside on this note has to do with something I read about food pouches that parents can give their kids to suck on instead of actually preparing and sharing a meal with them.  This idea sounds ridiculous to me, and is just one more component of a sick lifestyle where people are harried, eat like shit, don't spend time with their families, and in general are oblivious to real life.  It is what the article refers to as unstructured, "free-range parenting".  Another vomit-inducing quote:  "mobile food technology for the modern family".  The author does a pretty good job of exploring the ethical concerns raised by the existence of these food packets.  I'm especially pissed off by the quotes from parents who claim they just don't have time to feed their kids real food.  I don't know many people who are more busy or productive than my wife and me, and yet we always make time to sit down and eat real food in a family.  When I read nonsense like this, I think it would be more accurate if people were to say, "We have chosen to live two hours from our workplace, to watch hours of TV every day, and to be surgically attached to electronic entertainment devices, so that doesn't leave much time for eating real food or enjoying our family."

While we were studying in France, my wife and I were exposed to a very different parenting style.  One author in the New York Times lauded the French approach, but I would characterize it more cynically as yelling at and shushing kids for the first 15 years of life, and then leaving them to act like silly, wild, partying teens until they're 30, at which point they'll hopefully have finished college and gotten some kind of job.

Over the two years of our son Sam’s life, I feel that my wife and I have gradually adopted (or fallen into) a sort of benign neglect in certain aspects of parenting.  An example of an intentional policy is when we leave him alone and unsupervised in a room as he plays by himself, because we feel that it is best for him to learn how to operate and feel comfortable on his own.  A less deliberate bit of neglect is for instance our failure to have thoroughly childproofed our home.

Months ago I read an article in the New York Times about how parents should crawl aroundtheir home and identify any potential hazards for their child.  Obvious measures to take involve plug outlet covers, securing bookcases to walls, and locking devices to close medicine cabinets and storage areas for toxic cleaning products.  

For a long time we had not taken any of these measures.  I find this shameful in certain cases, such as our having lots of heavy bookshelves, some of them precariously constructed of bricks and wooden planks.  In other cases, like not covering all our plug outlets, I have become convinced by the Colombian example that this precaution is more a superstition of US culture than anything else.  It would be very hard for a kid to stick any part of himself into an electrical outlet, and consistent remonstrances whenever your crawling toddler touches an outlet seem to leave him thoroughly conditioned against playing with plug sockets.  As for locking away toxic cleaning products, we rely more on keeping them high up on shelves so they’re out of Sam’s reach, though we probably haven’t been as assiduous about this as we should.  We don't have TVs or window treatments, so I guess we're okay on that count.

At any rate, I attribute most of whatever irresponsible oversights we’ve committed to our having spent the last year and a half in a crazy limbo of rehabbing two houses in two towns and moving out of two apartments in two towns.  There are a lot of responsible, settled things that I have dreamed of doing, like childproofing our house(s) or setting up a decent handyman’s workshop, that I am only now able to start on thanks to our having finished our epic rehab project in our hometown and moved into this new house.  Just this weekend I managed to fix our bookshelves to the wall so they don’t fall on our kid.

As I mentioned though, there are many aspects (obviously not the life or death things) in which I think it’s good not to be so responsible or attentive to your children.  A few recent articles bear me out in their argument that, if they never face and overcome adversity, childrendon’t grow and development into healthy, responsible, happy, productiveadults.  This is something I’ve always instinctively felt, and that drives even little actions like when I don’t help Sammy untangle his pull-along truck from a chair, but these articles helped me see it in a more conscious, explicit light. 

By the same token, we are now shopping around for a new preschool for Sam in our hometown, after a year in a very well-run preschool in Bogota.  I have written before about the more silly,touchy-feely aspects of Sam’s Bogota school, but I really believe that their basic, common-sense mix of having kids play freely, do art and dancing and things, and pushing them to develop motor and mental skills and discipline, is just what kids need at Sam’s age.  On the other hand, today in our hometown we went to what was surely a well-intentioned preschool, but the influence of petty bourgeois concerns and excessive worries was evident everywhere.  Starting when kids are less than a year old, this school has them sitting in a classroom and doing set workbook activities according to a curriculum.  They pride themselves on things like a focus on computer skills, intensive English exposure, newly-installed security cameras, a full staff of psycho-, speech, and other therapists, and having TVs in every room to reach kids intellectually who are accustomed to seeing lots of TV.  Not only does all this structure seem like bullshit for little kids who should just be running around and pooping on each other, but I fear it is a sure path to the type of constant anxiety and obsession with external appearances that seem to be plaguing upper-middle-class kids and parents in the US.   

The saddest thing is that this preschool isn’t particularly expensive, and I don’t imagine the parents who send their kids there are much different from most people in our town—simple people who, whether laborers or professionals, are usually not more than a generation removed from the peasant life.  I get the feeling that in our town, it may be precisely this type of humble, normal person that insists most on vacuous bourgeois trappings when selecting an education for his children.  The director of the school actually made it a point to tell us that if we come to pick Sam up and see him playing tag, he’s not wasting time, because they are explicitly tailoring his play to the curricular goals.  I imagine all this rigid, neurotic setup is a response to the types of parents who are more concerned with the quantity of official things their kids are doing, with feelings of status and an outward appearance of busyness, and not the quality of what the kid is doing.  “Why isn’t that two-year-old making a productive academic use of her time?”  These must be the same types of parents who look for the most expensive or prestigious private school to send their kids to, and then don’t take ten minutes a day to talk to their kids or help with their homework assignments.  Pure appearance, little content.

I actually think a rigid, conservative school like the one we saw would be good for Sam or any other kid when they’re a bit older.  I don’t believe too much in loosey-goosey alternative educational models that don’t even give kids the basic, rote mental mechanics (reading, writing, arithmetic, consulting a dictionary) that are necessary before you can engage effectively in any higher intellectual pursuit.  And furthermore, I think the sense of not being so special, the sense of arbitrary anonymity you find in a big, orthodox school, both imbues a healthy sense of one’s (relatively small) place in the larger society, as well as a clear indication of ugly things and injustice that should be fought against.  But all of my opinions on the matter apply more to higher levels of education, at least first grade and up.  A two-year-old like Sam doesn’t need to feel insignificant, and is too little to rebel meaningfully against perceived shortcomings of the societal model.  Furthermore, even when Sam is older, I don't want him to suffer for my rigid, anti-elitist dogmas.  He's a kid, not a mission statement.

In general I think my living in a developing country like Colombia has endowed me with a less rigid, normative sense as to how things should happen in life.  As I’ve indicated, at times this is negative, as when it somehow allows me to accept not removing imminent dangers like falling bookshelves from my child’s environment.  But in general I believe it’s a healthier way to live, more in tune with the real possibilities and impossibilities the world offers us.  And living within the means of your world is a big part of what sustainability is all about.

A major manifestation of our having to accept the possibilities dealt us is our desire to have more kids.  We have long dreamed of adopting lots of kids, because we like raising kids and because we want Sam to have siblings closer to his age.  But hectic work, limited economic resources, and above all our not living together have prevented my wife and me from seriously pursuing this project until now.  That said, God has seemed to be signaling to us that it’s not that we aren’t to have more kids, but rather that for now they will come in the form of errant teenagers, and not adopted babies.  Since last year our nephew has been living with us, and we’ve been lucky enough to receive a lot of help from the rest of the family in taking care of him.  We briefly had a friend of my stepdaughter staying in our Bogota house after his mother could no longer pay his rent for college, and in our town, my brother-in-law’s stepdaughter has been living with me as she is in college away from her hometown.  This week we learned that an ex-boyfriend of my stepdaughter’s has been kicked out and cut off by his father, so now we are working out a deal whereby he lives with us and we help him to go to school, in return for his helping us with lots of projects around the house and also with our burgeoning business ideas.  It is how the Haitian restavek system is supposed to work (though in reality this latter usually involves very young children working as slaves for a family and unable to go to school).  At any rate, for now we’ve got plenty of kids, though few that are cute and cuddly and bear our last names.

Third World Green Daddy 38: Migrant blues

Yesterday I was pickpocketed.  I had never been pickpocketed or criminally victimized in any other way in my entire life, a fact of which I have always been proud, because I attributed it to my being very alert and careful.  Which means that now I feel stupid and shitty, because getting pickpocketed implies that I was oblivious and careless.

It happened like this:  I was with my mother in a crowded bazaar in central Bogota, getting party favors and things for my son's birthday, which will be tomorrow.  We had braved our way through the thrumming, thronging humanity to get paper goods, cheap plastic toys, markers, and the like, and we'd even withstood some not entirely friendly attention from passers-by who heard us talking in English.  This type of thing makes me see red; in what kind of a place do people stare or make ugly comments to others based on their nationality or their language?  I mean, for all its problems with race and ethnicity, in the US people usually don't stare or yell things at foreigners just because they're foreigners.  In fact, even in Colombia I usually don't have problems.  I have been to remote peasant villages and provincial cities (hell, I live in one), and more often than not the people there, different from me as they are, treat me like a normal person and judge me for what I say and do, not for where I was born.  What a sad situation that in Bogota, supposedly the open-minded, cosmopolitan capital, people act like uncivilized, xenophobic baboons.

Surely part of the issue is that, despite my height and my odd appearance, it seems that I blend in more or less well when I'm alone and not saying anything.  But when I'm with my very blond mother, and we're talking in English, we seem to attract a lot of attention.  Even so, why should I have to try and hide my language, hide my mother, just for us to be left alone on the street?  That's no dignified way to live.

At any rate, I was already somewhat annoyed with the general situation as my mother and I got onto the public transit bus (which you get on from a platform, just like in a subway).  We had debated whether to catch the bus or a taxi, and then we let a few buses pass as we decided which route to take and which bus didn't seem too full.  Finally, as we got on a bus, I felt a guy shove his leg against mine as if he were trying to squeeze on.  I made sure that my mother got on okay, and that no one was messing with her purse, and then I felt in my pocket to make sure that no one was trying to take my wallet.  But by the time I could do this, and I definitively felt that my wallet was gone, I was inside the bus and the doors were closing.  I thought to pull the emergency stop and get off the bus to find the guy, but for some reason I didn't do it.  In short, in various moments I had an instinctual urge to do things to prevent me from getting robbed (covering my pocket, pulling the emergency brake), but I didn't act on them.  And so I was robbed.

I feel like less of a man now, not only for being fool enough to get robbed, but also because I think that, ever since I started carrying a wallet at the age of twelve or so, it made me feel like an adult.  The heft in my left pocket was a sign that I was like other grown-up men, with money, cards, IDs, obligations, etc.  Now my pocket is conspicuously light and empty, and it reminds me with every step of my carelessness.

Beyond this, the whole affair has rekindled a fatigue and an ire that I've been feeling for some weeks now, if not for years.  Namely, being a migrant, a foreigner, has worn me down and filled me with rage.  I often feel like people second-guess me or simply don't listen to what I have to say, because they are so fixated on the fact that I talk differently from them, that I was born somewhere else.  They are so focused on what I am that they don't care to know who I am.  As a result, they treat me almost like a talking parrot or a chimpanzee.  They hear that I mouth words and even string them together into sentences, but they don't entirely believe that I know what the words mean.

This issue came up a few weeks ago at a place I was working temporarily.  A series of discussions had convinced me that, despite working with me on and off for years, some of my colleagues had never thought of me as anything more than a foreigner, something not quite human.  It really hurt me on a personal level, it offended and hindered me professionally, and it gave me that crazy, self-doubting feeling of the person who is pretty sure he's being discriminated against, but everyone tells him that he's just imagining it.  Like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia.

Right around the time this problem happened at work, I saw a new Canadian movie called Mr. Lazhar.  It is about an Algerian refugee who becomes a teacher in Montreal.  There are many subtle, accurate depictions of the little slings and arrows that come one's way as a foreigner trying to operate in a professional milieu, especially one like teaching where you are supposed to form people and inculcate your values in others.  In many parts of the movie you can see that colleagues, students, and parents discredit or disrespect the main character or his teaching methods.  You never know for sure if it's an honest disagreement with method and philosophy, or if there is an undertone of intolerance or suspicion because the character is a foreigner.  I felt like the movie captured perfectly what I was going through at the moment.

In the case of my problem at that job, I more or less resolved the situation through some difficult arguments and conversations, and now I feel that the people who were mistreating me give me more consideration and respect.  I had thus calmed down, and now felt okay in my place as a foreigner in Colombia, especially insofar as I recently finished rehabbing our house in our small town.  I now have a safe place where it's just me and my family, and we can live life as we see fit.

But yesterday's robbery, along with the stupid comments from stupid people as my mother and I walked around Bogota, all this rekindled my general rancor with Colombia, and especially with Bogota, which I am more and more convinced is not a place where people can live like human beings.  I am sick of people mistreating each other, especially when it doesn't even lead to much personal benefit for the abuser.  I mean, I had the equivalent of maybe $15US in my wallet (between pesos, dollars, and a charged bus card), which even in lower-income Colombia doesn't amount to much.  The thief can't use any of my credit or debit cards, and my IDs and health insurance cards don't do him any good, either.  So he only got $15US, and I lost much more than that in the personal value that my wallet had for me, in the notes from my wife, in my kid's photo.  It is a problem that repeats itself across Colombia.  Politicians and contractors think up scams that rob millions of dollars of value from the public, but only give them a few thousand dollars' profit in their pocket.  Grave robbers search for gold and pottery that they can sell for a few hundred dollars to collectors, and in the process they steal from the nation an incalculable cultural wealth and a sense of identity.  Agroindustrialists replace family farms that generate millions of dollars of profit for the local families with gleaming, modern plantations of oil palm or bananas, which only generate a few thousand dollars for the one oligarch that now controls all that land.  It all makes me want to send the whole country to hell sometimes.

Of course this isn't coherent in my case, because my wife, my child, the people I love, and even professional colleagues and neighborhood acquaintances that I esteem, they're all Colombian.  Furthermore, I can't rightly complain too much about my life here.  I live well, better than most Colombians and probably better than most people in the US.  I am hardly an oppressed victim, a hapless refugee.  Above all, I chose to come here, just as I chose to leave the US.  This decision to leave was in part because there are many aspects of life and culture in my birthplace that I detest (I mean shit, no one in Colombia is storming grammar schools and shooting up 6-year-olds with assault rifles), and in part because my way of thinking and my set of skills aren't very highly valued in the land where I was born.  So it's not realistic for me to think that I should just leave Colombia behind because everything will be better in the States.

I guess this is part and parcel of being a migrant.  You don't fully belong to your original homeland, because you chose to leave it and have chosen to stay away.  But you won't ever fully belong to your adopted home either, both due to your own traits and due to the prejudices of your new compatriots.  You can no longer naively think that by leaving a place behind you can get away from your problems, because you've already done that and have seen that there are new problems (perhaps even some of the old ones from your homeland) in the new place you've arrived to.  In my more optimistic moments I muse that these challenges of living as a migrant make one stronger, make one a better person, even as they cause one to suffer.  But lately I have to say I wouldn't wish this fate on anyone.  It's very possible that all this suffering doesn't have any redeeming value, and is just more hassle and hardship piled onto what you already have to deal with in life.  I dread the prospect of my wife having to live and feel all these things if we live in the US or elsewhere, and I especially feel bad for having thrust my son into a position whereby he may never be at ease, where he will always feel like a migrant split between two worlds.  I'm going to try not to make a big deal of this with him; he might not mind it at all, and my constantly bringing up how awful and difficult it is to live between two cultures might be like the parent who frets so much about spiders that his kid ends up learning to be afraid of them too.

But for right now, I'm sure not liking this whole migrant thing.  It's a tough way to live sometimes.

Land policy in Africa

Here is the final report from a conference on African land policy (that is, the laws and norms surrounding the purchase, property, and use of land) held in Germany in 2011.  Since it is really just the summary of the conference proceedings, it doesn't go too in-depth into any issues.  But it is very interesting to see the clashing viewpoints of European NGOs, European governments, African NGOs, African governments, etc.  Especially on the issue of foreign land investments in African countries, the African participants and a few civil society Europeans come out very strongly against basically any kind of large corporate land purchases, while a few European and international bodies give a weak response that, despite having little or no evidence of any positive outcomes, ever, foreign direct investment in land projects might be a decent idea in some cases.

The Future of Food and Farming

As part of my long-term project of commenting on different big reports that touch on food and agriculture issues, in this post I am going to review a report by the Government Office for Science of the UK, called "The Future of Food and Farming".

In general this is a decent report that discusses various of the major issues that will affect our food supply over the next few decades.  In this respect it follows "The Coming Famine", a book I read last year.  The weaknesses of the UK report though are its consistent pro-business stance.

One of the report's supposed working methodologies is that the authors were not going to reject a priori any policy possibilities based on moral issues (page 166).  Such a goal is near impossible and could even be downright evil if you were really to follow through on it; for instance, the report never considers resorting to slavery, genocide, mass sterilization, or anything else of the sort in its efforts to ensure a stable food supply.  I am glad they don't consider such things, but this is indicative precisely of certain policies that they are rejecting on moral grounds.  What the authors really seem to be saying, then, is that they do not wish to step on the toes of big commercial interests that are trying to make money from the patenting of life forms, the overturning of certain basic biological principles, the destruction of ecosystem integrity, or the industrialization of animal production. 

Furthermore, in almost the next breath after saying they aren't going to reject any policies out of hand, the authors explicitly reject the pursuit of food self-sufficiency on a national level as a valid political decision.  Furthermore, the authors incorrectly equate the idea of national food self-sufficiency (that is, the satisfaction of all a country's food needs through national production) with the concept of food sovereignty, which is the idea that each nation should be able to decide how to meet its own food needs through a mix of national production, imports, and any other options the people deem appropriate.  The report seems to be wary of the idea of national self-determination (as they were of moral deliberation by individuals and societies), because it may interfere in the open market, neoliberal fantasy.  But of course they don't want to make a claim so obviously undemocratic as to say that countries shouldn't be able to decide how they get their food, so the report resorts to mischaracterizing food sovereignty as an unreasonable insistence on totally rejecting imports.  The contradiction becomes clear when the report claims that nations should not be limited in their sovereignty, but then immediately calls for legal frameworks such that the international community can prohibit export bans by sovereign nations (pp. 96 and 97).

In the same vein, the report casts doubt on the possibility that having a few large companies dominate various facets of the food supply chain might be a dangerous or undesirable thing (pp. 99-100).  In addition, the report makes it seem as if only private companies are capable of doing valuable agricultural research, when in fact most of the really important breakthroughs that have had a big impact on the world food supply over the past century were based on publicly-funded research with very little patenting or "protection" of intellectual property rights (the breeding work carried out by public universities and the CGIAR system chief among these breakthroughs).  Another telling sign is that all the research and development projects cited by the report are public-private partnerships involving big companies like Syngenta.  You would think from this report that there are no worthwhile initiatives at the national or regional level, and you would certainly have no idea from reading the report that many research and development projects funded by large private companies (and even private donors) have drawn the wrath of a lot of people (among them the poor farmers they purport to help) for their heavy-handed way of doing things.

When it comes time to assign blame for the 2008 food price spike, the report is reticent about the role of permanent long-position index funds and the dominance of commodity markets by non-agricultural actors.  The report on the one hand mischaracterizes these investors as "speculators" in order to be able to make the tautological and smug claim that speculation always cancels itself out, so there's nothing to worry about (pp. 22 and 109), then makes a quick statement that the role of over-the-counter commodity swaps and the permanent roll-over of long positions in index funds needs to be explored further before it can be definitively asserted that these shady dealings had something to do with the 2008 crisis.  They even show a graph that demonstrates that the 2008 price spike was not that big of a deal, but the graph leaves out corn and soybean prices (p. 106).  On the other hand, when it comes to the relatively self-evident and straightforward wisdom of maintaining food reserves, the report does not hesitate to spout unsupported dogma that such reserves would be more costly to maintain than the crises they were meant to avoid.  In addition, the report mainly deals with the straw man possibility of maintaining a unified, international food reserve, which would admittedly be difficult to coordinate, as opposed to addressing the advisability of each country's maintaining a national or regional reserve (p. 168).  Such reserves are not difficult, expensive, pie-in-the-sky ideas in the same way that a global reserve is, but they do aim to influence markets, prices, supply, etc.  This is clearly against the report's neoliberal orthodoxy, which is why the idea of national food reserves is never seriously engaged in the report.  Once again we see the report's overriding fear of distorting trade and capitalism as is (p. 110).  Indeed, the report mimics the WTO's eternal contortions in an attempt to provide some semblance of environmental protections, protections of rural livelihoods, guarantees of food safety and quality, etc., but always with a suspicion that such concerns are just excuses to interfere in the smooth functioning of the sacred global market (pp. 96-97, and especially p. 122's insistence on looking critically at social protection measures).  Throughout the report there are a million suggestions to address the many market failures of a neoliberal system, while always insisting that it's easier or smarter to get every country on board to agree on these million adjustments, instead of trusting each country to govern itself and look out for its own people.

I hope it's clear by now that this report is very biased in terms of its economic policy thinking.  That said, it gives a pretty well-thought treatment to environmental issues (p. 169, for example), and is healthily skeptical of any quick fixes (like biochar, p. 139).  The report rightly points out that agriculture and food production in general will have to operate with fewer resources in the future, and will have to be a contributor to solving many environmental problems, as opposed to worsening them.

My final critique of the report, and it's a really big, damning one, is that there was hardly any input from farmer groups.  In the authors and editors listed, there is one representative of a UK farmer union, and no other national or international farmer representation.  This is perhaps the best indicator of the report's bureaucratic, big business focus.  If you are purporting to ponder and write about food production but you involve basically no farmers in the process, you're bound to miss a big part of the story.  I don't want to say that this report is totally irrelevant, because I know a lot of people worked hard and earnestly on it, but I think if you asked the billion-plus small farmers that feed most of the world, I imagine they wouldn't have much regard for "The Future of Food and Farming".  In this respect, the report seems to repeat the mistakes of the past of food and farming; it totally ignores the intellectual contributions and practical considerations that farmers might offer.

A clarification on productivity in diverse cropping systems

A few months ago I linked to an article about how a four-year crop rotation involving alfalfa and small grains in addition to corn and soy could drastically decrease the use and toxicity of agrochemicals, while maintaining production and profit stable.  I have just read this article more closely, and I have found a caveat.  The authors of the report define profit on a per-acre basis, and by this measure, the more diverse, more sustainable rotations were indeed just as profitable as the two-year corn-and-soy orthodoxy.  However, they also found that the more diverse, complex rotations require more work per acre to maintain, almost twice as much.  This means that if the profit per acre is the same, but the hours worked are double, a farmer practicing the four-year rotation would either earn half as much as his chemically-addicted neighbor, or he'd have to work twice as much to earn the same amount.

This is not to say that more diverse rotations are not important or desireable, but it is necessary to be clear in what we're talking about.  A farmer or any worker doesn't usually measure his wellbeing or productivity in terms of how much is produced by each acre or each unit of another resource input, but rather by what he earns for every hour he works.  This is why we usually see intensive land use (high value created per acre but with low earnings per day of work) in places where there are a lot of poor people willing or obligated to work for little, while in places like Australia or the US we have high per-hour or per-day labor earnings, accompanied by relatively low profit per acre.

At any rate, this research was very interesting and important, and gives us a clear indication that it is possible to decrease fossil fuel and synthetic chemical inputs while maintaining the same level of food production and reducing environmental pollution.  Now the key is to figure out how to do this while maintaining the same payoff for every hour the farmer works.

Last post on SEAWL

Here is the last of a series of short, silly posts I wrote around March of this year, and that Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like had the decency to publish.

Equality in Finnish schools

My cousin sent me this interesting article about how Finland's school system pursues equal acces to education for all children in the country.  The country has been receiving accolades for its high marks on international academic tests, but apparently the school system never set out to attain excellence but rather social equality.  And this pursuit of equality, as opposed to the creation of a few exclusive, segregated centers of excellence, has apparently led Finland to become one of the world's best school systems.  This is a valuable lesson for the charter school pushers and the private academy fetishists running rampant in the US.  And it goes along with my experience; I have found that pretty much anyone can become a critical thinker, a knower of facts and cultural referents, a decent reader.  It's more a question of giving people a chance to learn than of their innate ability or the supposed excellence of some prestigious school.  At the same time, I've met plenty of unthinking idiots who are said to be high academic achievers, or that hail from high-end schools.

A bunch of interesting National Geographic articles

I have continued my father's longstanding membership in the National Geographic Society, and for the past year or two I have been receiving copies of the US-version magazine here in my home in Colombia.  The only problem is that I always get issues a few months late.  Initially there was a lag of only two months or so.  Nowadays though, I believe the last normal delivery I received was the January 2012 issue!  Because of this, I have to call National Geographic every six months to scold them and to ask for a bulk shipment of the past six months of issues, which then arrives within a week or two.  At any rate, I wanted to share some good articles I've read in the magazine over the past year.

The first few come from the April 2012 issue, which despite its inauspicious cover dedicated to the Titanic (which bears very little interest for me), has two really cool treatments of African and Diaspora cultures.  One is a photo essay on ceremonial masks and costumes from West Africa and Haiti.  The other article profiles the Afro-Brazilian quilombo communities on the Amazonian fringe.

An article that seemed less well-thought was the magazine's recent offering on Brazil's rapid demographic transition from high population growth to low fertility rates.  The article's base facts seem on the mark; Brazil did indeed go from one of the highest population growth rates to a relatively stable, low rate in very little time, and it would be interesting to examine the country's experience as an example for the rest of the world, which must make the same transition if we are all to keep on living more or less decently on this planet.  That said, the article takes as its focal point the ubiquity of TV soap operas as a key factor in Brazil's demographic transition.  Surely there must be some truth to the argument that television representations of independent, professional women with few or no kids influences popular norms, but to posit that Brazilians are making personal decisions about fertility and consumption based largely on watching TV series seems to me to sell them short as human beings.  The article's series of photos of out-of-shape female slumdwellers watching TV in their sparse lodgings is not a flattering picture of Brazilians at large, either.  I don't imagine that the author or the photographer were trying to offend anyone, but my wife (and surely other South Americans who saw the article) thought it was yet another ridiculous, condescending representation of an entire culture.

But beyond the possible cultural insensitivity of the article, it also brought up some points, or more precisely a way of looking at the world, that worry me.  What the authors describe as a positive trend of "strong-willed women and rising living standards" seems to be a recipe for a future of unthinking, rampant consumerism, as we have in the US. The article's depiction, which is probably more a reflection of the author than the reality in Brazil, is that a nation of TV-transfixed greedy people are too busy chasing new shit they want to buy, so they can't have many kids. The women interviewed in the article think of their body as a baby factory, which is now closed after one or two kids.  While this surely has the socially desireable short-term effect of reducing population growth, I don't imagine that much positive can come in the long term from such a negative, objectifying perception of women's bodies and procreation.

The article speaks of Brazil's rapid industrialization as if it were a good thing, but it was accompanied by land grabs and pushing the most productive peasants off the land to make way for the large, low-margin megafarms that the state favored.  Likewise, in the article TV shows are seen as a way to healthily break with tradition.  But up to what point is it positive to break with tradition?  It's obviously a good thing to break with having 7 kids per woman, or with the oppression of a male chauvinist society, but what about all the other cultural aspects that ground and guide a people and give them meaning?  (And this is to say nothing of the ugly traditions that Brazilians have maintained intact or amplified, such as environmental destruction or grinding economic inequality.  Try fixing those with a soap opera!)  We in the US have at least a century's experience of avidly breaking many of our traditions and replacing them with TV and other forms of consumption, and it hasn't turned out at all well for us.  Will Brazil too become a brain-dead, Prozac-chomping train wreck?  The women interviewed at article's end are starting to identify some of the problems that arise from a culture of conspicuous consumption, but they still regard the traditional life as "imprisonment".  What can we say of the imprisonment of a life with no rules, no grounding, no framework, only the master of your own greed and whims and compulsions?

In the urbanized, petty bourgeois Brazil of the article (or at least of the authors' imagination), kids become a big cost, which is to say they become something that we as shallow-hearted consumers should avoid.  "Clothing, books, backpacks, cell phones--all these things are costly, and all must somehow be obtained".  This doesn't at all jibe with my experience of childrearing, which for us has been relatively inexpensive thus far.  We had to buy a bunch of cloth diapers early on, some formula during the short period between when Sam was weaned and when he started eating just solid food, and then a babysitter and preschool.  Our major costs are not child-related, and of our child-related costs, most is for our teenage charges, who go to private schools and have certain luxuries that I don't plan on providing for my boy Sam.  I don't think I was very expensive either for my parents.  I went to public schools from kindergarten to my college graduation, I was covered by my mom's work-related health-care plan, my baby clothes were hand-me-downs and my childhood and teenage clothes were from Marshall's or thrift stores.  My parents paid nothing for cable TV or internet, and our phone service was a basic plan for a few dollars a month.  From what my wife and I have seen, basic care for a baby requires lots of love and not too much money.  The expensive stuff is if you buy a bunch of shit from Fisher-Price, which is the goal of the women in the National Geographic article. Likewise none of them want to use the public system for school or health--they have the elitist attitude of the 1% in the US, who wants everything private.  Toward the end of the article, an interviewee hints at the problems of Brazil's model for reducing the birth rate.  People may have fewer kids now, but if they consume more, what is the benefit to the society and the planet?  I'd add that if Brazil remains as one of the most violent, unequal, environmentally destructive societies on the planet, what can we say has been the real payoff of reducing the birth rate?

Anyway, the basic point of the Brazil article in Nat Geo is that people are consuming more, so they are obligated to reduce their family size.  What I worry about is what the implication of this trend will be for society at large.  In theory all countries must reduce their fertility rate to 2.1 children per woman (the so-called replacement rate) if we are to stabilize and eventually reduce world population.  A family with two kids seems like a healthy norm, but of course in a society with a stable reproduction rate not everyone will have two kids.  The trend seems to be toward a split; a lot of people are forsaking childrearing altogether in order to seek fulfillment through plasma TVs and spoiled puppies, and then there are some religious nuts in the boondocks who are having 17 kids per couple.  Of course I know plenty of normal people who are either childless or who have a lot of kids, but this caricature of consumerism's replacement of procreation (which is basically what National Geographic is summarizing in its Brazil article) does seem to be an increasingly important aspect in the US and many other countries.

At any rate, it makes me sad to think of societies with fewer and fewer kids.  To me such places seem like dying, doomed cultures.  Of course this isn't entirely accurate.  Even countries with a fertility rate of 1.5 kids per woman, well below the population replacement rate, will have plenty of kids that can play with each other, and will even have some families with three or four kids.  And indeed, the smallish families of the kids I grew up with (a fair number of only children like me, many two-child families, and a few larger families) seemed loving, normal, not caught up in consumerism or private schools or anything like that.

At the same time, perhaps the sharp reductions in fertility rates in the US, Brazil, and Europe are not a one-way, irreversible trend.  Today many of my friends, products of the US's supposedly low-fertility society, are eager to start families.  Yes, we're starting in our late 20s or in our 30s, but our goal of personal fulfillment centers on having children and a spouse, not on conspicuous consumption.  Maybe it's because most of us are comfortably middle-class, and aren't trying to buy our way up the social ladder.  Maybe it's because we didn't have kids early, so we had the chance to live a child-free, immature life for a while without making any final, rash decisions like tubal ligation in our late teens (the National Geographic article profiled many women who had one or two unplanned pregnancies in their teens, before opting for sterilization after one of their C-section childbirths).  Or maybe our society is now in a backlash against precisely the trends described in the Brazil article.  We don't want to watch TV all the time, we don't want to buy our way to happiness, we don't want hurried cesarean sections and clandestine sterilization.

In Colombia I see the same demographic transition happening as is profiled in National Geographic.  In Bogota one sees smaller families, especially among the more wealthy, though in our provincial areas the fertility rate is much higher.  I prefer the family-centered model of our area, with lots of kids around, not the cold, consumerist attitude of Bogota.  That said, I see people of our generation in our town, products of 5-sibling families, now having just one or two or three kids.  In the case of Caro's family, the transition was a generation ago.  Her parents came from families of 7 or 8 kids, but now each aunt or uncle has just one or two kids.  The people I see in Colombia undertaking this transition from many to few children per family are intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working, and very devoted to their kids and family.  They are perhaps responding to the same factors (lower infant mortality, more urbanized lifestyles, desire for education) as the Brazilians profiled in the National Geographic article, but they are not vapid consumerists.  The Colombians I know have personal goals to learn and to rise from poverty, they are thinking critically about the problems of our society, they are providing sensibly for their children (without buying a bunch of needless shit), they are learning how to operate computers.  This reduction in population growth is a good thing, and is obviously a necessary step for every nation to take if we're not to flood the planet with more hungry human beings.  But I prefer the approach I see in my Colombian surroundings, with less consumerism and TV wrapped up in the process.  Surely if I were in Brazil my impressions would be different from the author's too, and perhaps I wouldn't get the sad impression of a vibrant culture plunging toward a cold, shrinking future in which unhappy people chase satisfaction through sterile sex and consumption.

National Geographic also did an article last year on the conservation of traditional crop varieties.  It was a very good rundown of food biodiversity issues.  One small error though--five of the supposed potatoes (Solanum spp.) represented in a photo in the magazine (and here, here, here, here, and here in the online version) are actually oca or ibia (Oxalis tuberosa). I noticed this some time ago in a copy of the magazine at my work, and I'm happy to say most of my student employees recognized the error when I asked them what was wrong with the photo. A colleague of mine, Colombia's foremost potato expert Carlos Ñústez, says his young daughters also rapidly noticed the error, and one of the world's main oca experts, Eve Emschwiller, wrote a brief blog about it. I'm also thrilled that the magazine profiled the Parque de la Papa en Pisac, Peru, where I visited as the centerpiece of my work trip to Peru. In general the article does an excellent job detailing the conundrum that our current agriculture abundance (namely our high yields) is based on a narrow genetic base, but our future versatility and ability to increase production and respond to new risks is based on maintaining the diversity of traditional agricultural varieties. Sometimes this truth gets confused or blurred by those who know or value only modern, high-input agriculture, or sustainable, traditional agriculture.  The former are focused too much on the present, while the latter are often too focused on the past.  National Geographic's article does a good job of looking to the future, when we will have to combine both a concern for high yields in the here and now and a cautious stewardship of the genetic resources our ancestors have left us.

Sojourn in DC: Culture shock, integration, and obesity

I will be in the Washington, DC area for a few days to interview for a job at a pretty big company.  It's really a fluke--the first time anyone in the professional arena has actually shown interest in me, as opposed to the normal routine of people's marvelling at my potential but no employer willing to paying me to exercise that potential.  In this post I will be writing about my initial cultural observations and experiences during these few days in the US, while out of tact and discretion I will avoid specifically talking about the job interview process.  I wouldn't want to mess up my one chance at getting a legitimate, prestigious job!

I get to the Bogota airport late Saturday night.  I'm happy and honored that the company I'm to interview with has paid for my flight to DC, but not thrilled that for some reason they've booked me on a midnight flight out of Bogota.  There are plenty of better schedules for getting out of Colombia by plane, and many are surely cheaper than American Airlines.  At any rate, I walk up to the long line and give them my information, and they ask me, "You're riding in executive class, right?"  I don't think so, but I tell them that if they say so, then I guess I am indeed to ride there.  This means that I get to skip the waiting line.  I've spent all day trying to get myself looking halfway decent.  I've shaved, cut my copious ear hair, ironed my two dress shirts.  My wife was nice enough to shine my dress shoes, with help from my son Sam.  I sewed a crucial collar button back onto one shirt, but the other lacked a replacement button, so the former shirt is designated for my tie interview day, and the buttonless shirt for a more casual day.  For many reasons big and small I have been feeling like a "boleta", the term Colombians use for an unsophisticated, usually rural person.  I don't know that I've ever worked in an environment requiring formal wear, and so my only suit is an Armani that I got secondhand when I was 14, now over half a lifetime ago.  Likewise my buttonless shirt is from this era, and the shirt I sewed the button back on dates from when I was about 20.  I guess it's a good thing that I still fit in these clothes (indeed I think I'm skinnier now than I was at 14, though I'm lamentably little taller), but to my wife's question as to whether they were an outmoded cut or style, I had no idea how to answer.  Neither of us are great followers of high fashion, and my wife confided to me that in her new, high-level job at an important NGO in Bogota she too often feels like a "boleta".  At any rate, I had to make do with my paltry clothing resources, though my wife and I resolved that we should soon make a concerted effort to get decent clothes.  This resolve was made all the firmer when in searching among our backpacks and suitcases for a bag I might take to DC and look respectable with, I saw that the majority of our luggage had ripped holes, broken or missing zippers, and other impediments to respectability.

So now here I am, beat-up shoes, white gym socks, 15-year-old suit, scuffed suitcase, and all, but made to feel upscale by my allocation to first class (I'd long thought that business, executive, and first class were different designations, but at least in the case of American Airlines they seem to be one and the same).  I would never confer upon myself the privilege of flying first class, not only because of the high price and the moral objectability of putting oneself into a separate class than others, but above all because it seems silly to adorn the ordeal of commercial passenger flight with a few superficial perks so as to mask what is inherently an uncomfortable, drab experience of transport.  Going first class on a multi-week trans-Atlantic ship voyage or something might be worth the extra money as compared to being jammed together with hundreds of squalid Irish famine refugees, but if you're going to be crammed uncomfortably into a plane for a few hours anyway, I vote for not trying to doll up the experience.  In any case, in my particular situation my assignment to first class makes me a bit less insecure as to my personal presentation and my right to enter the elegant, professional office milieu for my interview.

My boarding pass is for seat 1A, as if to highlight that I'm the cream of the crop, or at least can pretend that I am for the duration of this trip.  I don't know if it's the late hour, or the flight's delay from 1am to 2am, or the annoying seat-rearranging that occupies the crew for the duration of our many-hours' wait in the flight gate, but I find myself treating people in a curt, superior manner, as if internalizing my temporary bump up to the ruling class.  When the American Airlines staff call me up to the flight desk and tell me I'll be moved to seat 3E, I feel like telling them snottily that I'm willing to fly in the luggage deck if it will get the damn plane off the ground.  But I refrain.

Once on the plane I'm too tired to appreciate the little perks of business class like a larger seat and a dedicated flight magazine (which frankly looks crappier than the airlines's Latin American, Spanish- and Portuguese-language magazine that is also in our seat front pockets), though I do partake in the water and orange juice offered us, a talisman against the cold I feel creeping on.

After reading the Latin flight magazine cover to cover as the plane taxis for liftoff (fascinating articles on a luxury train in Andalucia, and a writeup of a Madrid hotel I think I once visited), I am able to recline my seat and sleep a few scant hours before we arrive in Miami.  My wakeup is brutal--dry mouth, impending sore throat, and piercing pain as the pressure of my inner ears adapts to the cabin's artificial pressure increase.  But we land in one piece, and I set off at a full run to catch my connecting flight to Reagan airport outside of DC.  Because of the flight delay, American staff in Bogota had told me I'd likely have to change my DC leg of the trip.  I was surprised at how few flights American has going between Miami and Washington.  I mean, they're pretty big cities, the latter with 3 regional airports.  As it happened, I had to suggest they book me a space on a flight to Baltimore/Washington airport.  The staff had no idea this might be a viable option, and I only did because I'd checked out a Google map a few days before.  The next flight after the 7am one I'd surely miss apparently wasn't until 1:45pm!

At any rate, in Bogota they hadn't definitively changed my original DC boarding pass, in the hope that I might actually make the connecting flight.  I certainly do my best to, running through the sprawling Miami airport at full speed, dragging my single carry-on wheeled suitcase that I've wisely limited myself to for just such an occasion.  I get a quick treatment at immigration, as one of the relatively few US citizens with our shorter, exclusive line, and I desperately run up to an intra-airport train that takes me to my distant boarding gate.

Alas, despite my best efforts, my plane has already left.  I only now realize how sweaty I am, even in the ubiquitous airport AC.  Luckily, the ladies at the gate counter find me a soon-to-depart flight to Baltimore, which leaves me with only the task of calling the driver who is to pick me up to change our rendez vous from Reagan to Baltimore.  I have my Colombia cellphone, but I only find out later that it can make calls in the US (at great cost in pesos), so for now I get change for the $20 a family friend gave me long ago for emergency use (thanks Termini), and promptly have $2 in quarters eaten and not returned by a greedy payphone that doesn't complete the call I need to make.

I have never been a very outgoing person.  I don't know if it's my reserved Midwestern roots, or a general trait of US culture, or my own particular neuroses, but for most of my life I've never been able to walk up to strangers and make small talk.  Thanks to my living abroad for so long, well out of my comfort zone, and probably too under the influence of the more outgoing, sociable cultures I've lived among, I now regularly talk to strangers, especially when I am arriving in the land of my forefathers after a long stretch, giddy with travel and the prospect of returning home.  To immigrants I ask where they're from, their personal stories, to native-born Americans I make folksy comments about the shared ordeals of security checks and such.  I imagine most people I talk to in this way think I'm crazy or at least weird.

At any rate, I call upon this newfound faculty to solicit aid for my telephone predicament.  Since the payphone won't work, I ask some nearby airport staff on break if I might use one of their phones to make a call and pay them whatever it costs.  Again, after some initial surprise and awkwardness at such a request in a country where everyone seems to have his own state-of-the-art cellphone, one of the guys accedes, and I sweat up the screen of his elegant iPhone.  I apologize profusely afterwards, but he seems accustomed to the sweaty screen issue, and doesn't even charge me for the call.  I repeat to him the old Tennessee Williams line about the kindness of strangers, and again he seems bewilderedly amused at this eccentric character who talks like someone from the US but by this point surely acts more like a lost country bumpkin from Colombia.  With this unexpected friend, as with the customs people and everyone else I interact with, I adopt a very gracious, almost excessively deferential attitude.  I don't know why this is--I've always thought of myself as sort of an arrogant, cocksure guy.  Am I internalizing the almost feudal linguistic modalisms of my new home in Boyaca, where people address each other as "Your Mercy" and say "sir" at the end of every response?  Or is it merely a stronger resurgence of my courteous Midwestern roots?  Or am I just so awed by everything and worried that people will for some reason decide I should be deported from the land of my birth, that I bow and scrape like a beleaguered second-class citizen?

One other cultural tic I feel that I am increasingly free of thanks to my time abroad is the racial complex that characterizes much of social interaction in the US, the post-traumatic stress manifestation of the country's original sin of slavery and race hatred.  Maybe it's just in Chicago, but situations where whites and blacks mix always have seemed loaded and tense to me.  Either everyone is wary of and hence jerky to one another, or there's a contrived congeniality in which one person or the other is trying too hard to downplay differences or mimic the other's linguistic and cultural quirks.  At any rate, I feel that I've largely done away with that now.  It's increasingly natural for me to treat my fellow citizens of any color precisely as fellow citizens, genuinely feeling that we bear more in common than we have separating us.  Indeed, to Colombians or Spaniards or anyone else outside of the US, the people of my homeland are clearly identifiable by a series of cultural traits that transcend color (the way we dress, the volume we talk at, the swagger we walk with, which my wife once described as looking like we have our pants full with poop).  In this optic I'm more and more able to talk to a black person without thinking or worrying about all the social constructs and loaded issues and terms that could serve to separate us.

Once I've communicated with the company driver, and am on my Baltimore-bound flight, I am more able to enjoy the first-class luxury than I was on the previous redeye flight.  They serve us copious amounts of juice and water, plus a delightful breakfast of a biscuit, bagel, yogurt, fresh strawberries and blueberries, and a banana that frankly tastes and feels like cotton next to the fresh, flavorful bananas we eat in the tropics.  Despite the mediocre banana, it is perhaps the best airplane breakfast I've ever eaten.  I am also surprised at the caliber of the in-flight magazine (for some reason a different issue than in the prior plane), especially its crossword puzzle, which was genuinely challenging.  Not at all like the simple Spirit Airlines puzzles.  During the entire flight there is a pair of overweight women across the aisle from me, chatting it up with a flight attendant.  Their conversation is pretty vapid, centering on the pros and cons of different faceless Florida suburbs and the nuances of different TV programs, but with my ethnographic eye I appreciate their congenial, genuinely friendly way of relating to each other and to the flight attendant.  I think this generalized good will is a positive trait of my countrymen.

I am picked up at the airport by the company's driver, a soft-spoken, moving-and-shaking Nigerian immigrant about my age.  I ask him about his country, interested to hear what someone from another place thinks as an immigrant to my country (albeit a distinct region of my country that I'm not very familiar with), in order to compare it to my impressions as a migrant elsewhere and as a returned prodigal son.  He's not very interested in talking about Nigeria, which makes sense given that he apparently wasn't interested enough to stay there, but he does fill me in a bit on the DC area geography.

After a somewhat long ride along endless forest-brimmed interstate, we pull off to another highway, and at the end of a series of such highways we get to the residential complex I am to stay at.  It is owned and kept by the company for the express purpose of hosting visiting interviewees such as myself.  As we pull up to my door, one among many indistinguishable doors throughout the complex, I begin to realize that this driver, my main human contact with this whole place, will now leave me alone in the residence.  There will apparently be no one to receive me, no one waiting in the apartment, just the keycode that they have given me beforehand to get into the apartment, and another code to get into my private room.  The driver accompanies me as far as the door, and then leaves me to an eerily unoccupied apartment.  It is like when you arrive at a friend's house in an unfamiliar city to stay for a few days, but they are out for work and won't be back for a few hours.  But in this case there are no friendly notes, no expectation of reconnecting with someone familiar.  Just a perfectly arranged room with its amenities, and a stack of take-out menus on the shared dining room table.  The fridge is empty but consuming electricity, there is a collection of single-serve sealed plastic bowls with kids' cereals on the counter, and the AC has been pre-set to 80 degrees F.

In many respects I feel like the rural migrant arriving to a strange new environment that seems impossibly elegant.  Lately I have been reading the excellent book "The Warmth of Other Suns" about the Great Migration of blacks in the 20th century US, and so I guess I have the image in my head of the clueless, backwards country relative coming up from the feudal South to find a shocking, gleaming, cold and efficient new world.  Surely the experience must be similar for many present-day immigrants from other countries, Colombia among them.  I am at once awed by the shimmer of everything, the seemingly modern apartment house, the ubiquitous (and not all that necessary) air conditioning, but also taken aback and left cold by the absence of humanity in it all.  The streets have lots of cars and few people, this housing development is centered on sprawling parking lots but with little visible human life, the playground and tennis court and swimming pool are totally unused on this Sunday I arrive. 

It is a reverse culture shock to return to the US after living in Colombia, where 8-person households are common and receiving guests is given great cultural importance, or after working in places like Haiti where poverty and a neocolonial inferiority complex mean that everyone is constantly bowing and scraping, trying to attend to your every need and even many needs you'd prefer to fulfill yourself.  Normally I get annoyed with too much solicitous or even slavish attention from others, but now in an apathetic suburban US, I miss the human presence.  There isn't even any noise in the halls here.  My family's rental apartment in Bogota is in a building that is by no means raucous, but the fact that 4-8 people live in many apartments necessarily means that you hear a bit of the lives of others as you walk the hallway stairs or even when you're in your own place.  My culture shock is double in that I am not returning to a region and a lifestyle that I grew up with, but to an atomized exurban culture I've never been around much before, even when I lived in the US.  I don't know how many people live like this in the States, with AC, sterile, drab carpeting and decor, and lifeless streets, but it's a far cry from Midwestern city living or rural farmhouses.

In this context the material comforts seem like little compensation for the absence of humanity.  I have internet access and a big TV mounted on my wall.  But these do not a happy human make.  I mean, what good does the thick, vellum-like toilet paper do me?  It's just to wipe your ass.  In this and in many other of the "improvements" in US life as compared to life elsewhere, any advances beyond the most basic levels of necessity don't add much to quality of life, and they seem to go hand in hand with the dehumanization of daily interaction.  Toilet paper is a definite improvement over rough corncobs, but thick, resource-intensive toilet paper as opposed to a basic, rough grade doesn't really do much for me.  Freedom from constant hunger is good, but a selection of 15 different ethnic take-out cuisines (most of them in a fast food form that's bad for you anyway) doesn't substantially improve life beyond that basic level of satiety.  I am thus ironically proud of my maladaptation to this exurban lifestyle I'm seeing here.  I do feel a bit bewildered and out of touch when I see the apparent glitz and perfection of the physical surroundings, but when I consider that much of that impressive glitz is related to misplaced values and a series of poor collective decisions in the way we live life in the US, I don't mind being out of touch.

Furthermore, as I'm exploring my new temporary home, I realize that the material comforts and the quality of things here aren't actually that great, either.  My bedroom light is out, and I have a feeling it's due to a bad wiring job.  But just to make sure it's not a simple burnt bulb, I decide to take a look at the fixture.  This is easier said than done.  The ceiling is maybe 11 feet high, and the light is right above the bed.  So I get a chair from the dining room and attempt to stand it atop the bed in order to reach the fixture.  From this wobbly perch I am able to undo the screws holding the glass cover to the fixture, which also ends up detaching the whole fixture from the ceiling!  I am about to break my neck, so I get down, fixture dangling from the wiring, and I push aside the mattress so I can support the chair directly on the box springs.  The mattress is cheap and light, crappy foam just like we use in Colombia and in many other developing countries.  And the box springs are in fact some light poplar frame covered in plywood and cardboard.  I had always marvelled outside the US that people don't use box springs.  In Colombia and most places I've been, you put the mattress directly atop wooden planks that span the bedframe.  This in fact makes a lot more sense to me; as a kid I wondered what the point was of big, heavy, unwieldy box springs.  Now I'm suprised at their absence, at least in a US lodging.  But perhaps they aren't that common anywhere, even in the US, and I was just raised in a weird world of old Victorian houses that use box springs.

At any rate, I push aside the mattress, place the chair on the cardboard "box springs" (trying to find a firm spot where the chair legs won't just punch through), and finish my dismantling of the light fixture.  At some point in the whole process I wonder if there's a hidden camera somewhere, and this is simply the first in a series of trials to get the job I'm applying for.  Maybe they want to see how resourceful we can be in adverse, poverty-style scenarios.  I don't know if my mad busting up of the room would be a point in my favor or not, especially once I find that it is indeed a wiring problem and a new bulb won't fix it.

Once I have more or less reattached the useless light fixture and restored the room, I see another sign that perhaps not all is so elegant here in exurbia, US.  It is another wiring messup.  Apparently the builders installed a plug outlet that wasn't connected to anything.  So to make this blind outlet work, they plugged an extension cord into another outlet,





Ran the cord under the carpet until the blind outlet, and plugged it in.  That way the blind outlet has at least one functioning socket, in this case for the nightstand clock.

By now I am feeling less bewildered, less out of my league.  In this housing complex, and surely in the exurban US in general, not all that glitters is gold.

Next I take a walk to see the "sights" of my exurban Maryland community.  I naively think that I should at least get to know the surroundings and the character of the place (naive because the place ends up having little character.  My Wikipedia search reveals that the town is old and has some colonial buildings in the center, but where I am is a far cry from there.  Perhaps if the walk is pleasant I'll get all the way to the older part of town. 

The walk is not pleasant.  The weather is hot, with no trees on the sidewalk to protect me from the sun overhead.  Everything I see is residential:  either parking-lot-centered complexes like mine with names like Cherry Hollow, or retirement communities.  There are also a few older (read 1950s to 1980s) small town trashy single-family dwellings, clapboard houses with barking dogs and rundown cars in the driveway.  I wonder about the history of this area, as it surely has gone through a transition at some point from a rural small town to a DC exurb.  Is all this settlement from outsiders moving here, or have the locals simply remained in one place and gradually upgraded from dirt-floor shacks to bland, poorly-constructed but perfect-looking houses? 

I do like that the town and the housing complex are mainly black (and I will later find that the company I am interviewing for is also predominantly black, at least in the office staff I deal with).  For some reason I often feel more comfortable around black people than in all-white areas.  Is it due to some cultural affinity I share or pretend to share with blacks?  Maybe it is precisely the opposite--that our differences are obvious and explainable, so I don't feel bad about not entirely fitting in.  This part of Maryland also feels less hostilely segregated than Chicago.  The feel of the place for me is similar to a sensation I have had in visits to New Orleans, which is mainly black and fairly segregated, but where I have never felt the racial tension I feel when whites and blacks mix in Chicago.  Maybe it's just that in majority-black areas black people feel more comfortable and confident, and white people are accustomed to being around non-whites.  I am reminded of a quote from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, something to the effect that southern whites don't mind how close blacks get, as long as they don't get too big, while northern whites don't mind how big blacks get, as long as they don't get too close.  Ellison's observation surely has some truth to it, but I think it's generally bullshit to pretend that, aside from the occasinal lynching, southern whites have historically been more friendly and comfortable in dailly dealings with blacks.  The Warmth of Other Suns puts the lie to this idea with its depictions of the hateful, sinful, neurotic obsession that southern whites had for bullying and brutalizing blacks, the widespread meanness of whites in the 20th century South.  Of course Maryland is border state country, and we're in the 21st century, so I don't know how the racial vibe here really fits into the scheme of the Great Migration.

This area reminds me of a slightly more prosperous version of southeastern Chicago around Altgeld Gardens.  Housing consists in the same mix of enclosed apartment complexes centered on parking lots, plus lone, ramshackle houses on big lots that look more appropriate for a small town than for part of a huge metropolitan area.  People here have cars, and the houses aren't totally blighted, so this part of Maryland beats Altgeld Gardens and Riverdale in that respect.  But Altgeld Gardens at least has a number of commercial places, both in big, formal establishments, as well as operating out of private houses.  So in that respect, Altgeld Gardens is a more liveable urban landscape than this place.

I muse on the odd version of racial integration represented by the DC area.  Everyone, white and black, is living in a bland, acultural morasse, united in their determination not to interact with their neighbors or the outside world.  I bet the more elegant areas in northern Virginia and around Silver Springs, Maryland, aren't that much different in their basic organization from my sad little housing situation here.  I imagine they too are car-dependent, with few sights to see, little variety in their residential landscape, and no one on the streets.  Perhaps the rich and the poor are separated into different segments of the DC area, but there's a certain democracy to all of them living in the same boring, soul-crushing suburban anomy.  Plus in my little enclave, though there is a clear black majority, there are also a fair number of people in the housing complex who are white and Hispanic, and even many mixed-race couples.  I don't think Dr. King would've liked this version of antisocial equality, and Malcolm X would snidely point out that this was what he was warning of when he criticized integrationist blacks who wanted to live just like whites, with defects and all.

On my little foray into exurban Maryland I also realize why people are fat.  I don't mind heat, and in fact welcome it.  But the merciless sun, ubiquitous pavement, and soulless blandscaping (I wish to coin this neologism) make walking uninspiring, and there is nowhere to go anyway.  Later on I discover the mall in the other direction from my apartment complex, but it's all take-out food (though admittedly varied, with Indian, Chinese, Italian, and fried chicken).  My massive portion of Chinese food and my 24 ounce 5% juice drink make me understand other side of the obesity equation.  Portions here are far bigger than anyone should eat in a single meal, and there is an inordinate amount of sugar thrown in everything, even in salty food (which, by the way, is also far too salty).  So given my uninspiring surroundings and my sickening options for pseudo-food, finally I succumb to the exurban mandate to go back indoors to my apartment.  Under these circumstances, it's easy to understand why people don't go outside, and are constantly gaining weight in much of the US. 

I'd initially hoped to get work done in my temporary new home, but I thought it would be a shame not to see the area.  Well now I've seen that there's nothing to see around here, so I'm going to go ahead and work.