The ethics of advertising to children

I have written before on this blog about the immorality of selling junk food to children.  It appears that nutritionist Joan Gussow beat me to the punch by about 40 years.

Oh, and here's a sad, cynical contribution from McDonald's to the conversation about getting kids to eat healthier.  And a fascinating article about different strategies that junk-food producers use to get people hooked.

Logistical preparations for the achira experiment

After three days of going live on the Indiegogo fundraising site, I'm thrilled at the generous response from people.  We are almost halfway to our goal of $1500.  It's been a strong start, and I know that often there is a flush of contributions just before the final deadline.  So now the key is to keep going strong, and I hope that I can do that by offering updates on our preparations for the harvest phase of our experiment.

First off, I have finished shopping around for the laboratory that will do our nutritional analyses.  We will send our samples to the food chemistry laboratory at our university in Tunja, as they give us a good rate per sample.  Furthermore, the National University in Bogota is shut down thanks to an administrative workers' strike, so even if they'd offered us a better deal, we couldn't send them our samples, because they can't get into their lab!

Our schedule next week will look like this then:

• Cut and weigh leaf samples on Sunday to get an idea of the relative forage productivity of our different achira varieties.
• Harvest, clean, and weigh rhizome samples on Monday to see the different yields of each variety.  (Rhizomes are underground storage organs, like tubers; they're what you eat or process from achira).
• Dry our leaf samples in an oven on Tuesday (the lab we're sending them to for analysis is also in the National University, and since they don't know when the university will open again, they advised us to dry down the leaves so they don't rot in the interim).
• Process rhizomes for starch extraction on Wednesday.  This consists of grating the rhizomes with a motorized grater, rinsing the pulp through a strainer with water, and letting the starch settle to the bottom of the bucket.  This is the trickiest phase for our experiment, as we need to manage 25 separate buckets, each with a different type of achira.
• Wash starch on Thursday.  This consists in dumping out the dirty water from the bucket with the starch in it, adding more water and stirring it up with the starch, waiting for the starch to settle out again, and repeating the process until the starch is pure white and the rinse water comes out clear (usually it requires some seven washings!).
• Set starch out on cloth sheets to dry for the next few days, again maintaining each of the 25 samples separately. 

If you haven't check out our fundraising page yet, please do, and contribute something if you can.

Ang Lee

A few weeks ago my wife and I saw the movie of Life of Pi.  It was our first time seeing a movie in a theater in months if not years, and it was the first modern 3D movie I’d seen.  I hadn’t read the book, and I was disappointed that the movie was dubbed into Spanish instead of subtitled, but it was an enjoyable experience all around.

I don’t think I’m sold on the 3D movie thing.  It didn’t add anything to most of the movie, and much of what it did add were little gimmicky moments—a hummingbird hovering in the foreground of the screen, a tiger leaping at you.  More importantly, the mechanics of a 3D movie mean that you don’t control what you focus on on the screen.  In a regular movie, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie may be kissing in the foreground in a Cambodian village, but if you want (and you are somewhat autistically-inclined, like me) you can focus on a kid sitting on his porch in the background, or the jungle canopy framing the image.  With a 3D movie, everything is severely out of focus except for what the director wants you to see.  You lose control of what you’re observing and noticing.  That said, my wife liked the effect in the underwater scenes.  She felt it was a very accurate representation of what we saw the time we went SCUBA diving, the odd dimensionality and interplay of light.

Aside from the 3D, I was disappointed at the overuse of computer graphics in The Life of Pi.  The tiger didn’t always look like a tiger, the kid in a boat on the open ocean often looked more like a kid in a boat on an open bluescreen.  And knowing that the movie relied so much on CGI probably had me thinking an image was computer-generated even when it wasn’t.  Again, as with the 3D I felt that the CGI was an example of a filmmaker’s becoming so fascinated and fixated by new technology that he molds the movie around the technology, instead of using technology to complement and improve what is at base a good, fundamentally sound movie.  In this case the technology detracts from the storytelling instead of adding to it.

So I believe that The Life of Pi was a misstep for Ang Lee, but I have to admire him for always trying new things and challenging himself.  This is a Taiwanese director that has done simple stories that are surely within his comfort zone, as in Eat Drink Man Woman, an excellent analysis of food and family in a modern city, but has since gone way beyond his comfort zone.  Crouching Tiger was a mainland Chinese historical set piece with an old-fashioned story overlain by stunning visual and acrobatic effects.  And Life of Pi is a foray into what might be called electronic filmmaking.  Interestingly enough, through all these distinct genres, Ang Lee’s movies bear a certain artistic signature common to them all.  His thematic focus seems to be love and distance, and sweet melancholy that drives us to do good or even great things.

By far my favorite film of his is Brokeback Mountain.  This film has to figure in the all-time top ten of gay sheep rancher movies, certainly in the top twenty.  Honestly though, it is perhaps my favorite film.  Again, I marvel at how an urbane Taiwanese director gets into the mind of a Western cowboy.  The story is compelling, and the visuals are amazing.  I’m sure glad Lee didn’t try to use computer graphics for the sweeping panoramas of the Wyoming High Plains.

Brokeback Mountain is about a lot of things.  The most obvious theme is the pain and the thrill of a love that cannot be, which I think anyone can relate to, whether they’ve experienced it firsthand or not.  But the film is also a contrast of strengths and weaknesses.  Ennis Del Mar can bear anything, and is the clearly the stronger of the main characters in this respect, but he is a coward when it comes to facing himself and rocking the boat.  The two are related—his ability to live indefinitely with an unpleasant situation also inclines him never to try to change the conditions around him.  Jack Twist is brave enough to be himself at all times, and it eventually leads to his death.  But the flipside of this bravery is that he can’t ever control his impulses or put off gratification.  He is weak in this way.

Brokeback Mountain is also about a changing, fading USA.  In the day-to-day lives of Ennis and Jack over various decades, we go from the agrarian and industrial golden age of the 1960s to the bleak, suburbanized 1980s.  In their youth the rural US still has something to offer them, there are still possibilities of creating a decent economic existence.  But by movie’s end, Jack has had to forsake the rural lifestyle he loves for a neutered suburban existence as a salesman, while Ennis has held fiercely to the ranching life, and for this is condemned to live penniless in a trailer far from his family.

Anyway, I’ll forgive Ang Lee for Life of Pi, and I’d even forgive him for ten more duds like it.  Brokeback Mountain has cemented his reputation as a filmmaker in my eyes, and nothing can change that.

Petition against mining in the paramo ecosystem of Colombia

Here is a petition asking the Colombian government to respect already-existing laws prohibiting mining in the fragile highland moor ecosystems called "paramos".  Check it out and sign it.  If you don't speak Spanish, you can get your browser's translator to put it into English for you to see what you're supporting.

Help me fund my research on achira

Hello faithful readers!  I am writing today to ask for your help on a project that's very important to me.  As I've written about in past posts, I work in a project devoted to researching ancient crops used by the Muisca of central Colombia before the Spanish arrived, and still used today in our zone.  One of these crops is achira (Canna indica).  It is native to the Andes, widely used for cellophane noodles in Vietnam, and has the potential to at once give the farmer a commercial product (starch flour extracted from the rhizomes), a source of home-produced food for household subsistence (the rhizome, cleaned and cooked whole), and a source of animal feed (the leaves and the waste products of starch processing), all while requiring very little care and few if any purchased chemical inputs to grow.  In short, it's got a lot of potential for use in a diversified agroecological system, but few researchers have done serious work on the crop.  That lack of basic agronomic knowledge is part of what we hope to address with our project.

Our experiment is nearing its end, and we will soon proceed to final collection and analysis of data.  But some of the data we mean to collect requires expensive laboratory tests to analyze the nutritional value of fresh rhizomes and extracted starch flour, and we need help to finance these tests.  Please check out the link below to learn more about the project, and to donate whatever you can to get us down this home stretch.

Different faces of Paul Farmer

Here is a thoughtful article about Paul Farmer, famous doctor working in Haiti, and the seeming change from his old, critical, social-justice-minded self to a seemingly depoliticized (though ever-more embedded in formal politics) gladhander.  The article is well-done, and the comments afterwards, especially a long one taking issue with the article's tone, are also interesting.

Appropriate action to change the food system

This is an interesting piece on the importance of political action to make a better food system and a better world.  The author accepts that individual consumer choices are a part of how to attain this better future, but that they risk depoliticizing us and keeping us within a capitalist consumer mentality.  I have often thought along the same lines.  I understand campaigns to encouragepeople to make responsible consumer decisions, and I think that responsible buying is a basic precondition of living a sustainable life.  But our engagement and protagonism cannot stop there.  I think that especially in the US many of us shy away from grassroots political action, and separate our lives into consumer choices, which we directly affect, and large-scale national politics, which we feel helpless before.  So at worst, as this author argues, being a responsible consumer is just another (more well-intentioned and thoughtful) brand of the general culture of unquestioning consumerism.  We need also to take concrete measures to address overlying superstructures that make for an unjust or otherwise undesireable world.

The United States and me: A torrid love affair. Part III: Pining

Last year about this time I started writing an outline for a short story about a trip I took with my friends in late 2005.  That trip was sort of my swan song for living in the US.  A group of about seven of us had been out of college for a year or so and were still in relatively dead-end jobs at that point, and our vacation/unemployment situations all worked out for a trip in late August.  We rented a car and drove to New York City, Philadelphia, and then a few of us onward to Raleigh, North Carolina.  The weather was still really hot, and Chicago was getting over one of its worst droughts in recent memory.  I’m not going to go into detail here as to our itinerary, but basically we had an amazing time hanging out, seeing sights, shooting the breeze, and even arguing.  In retrospect, it felt like the last taste of the pre-adult relative leisure that we’d been enjoying for a good part of high school and through college.  Following that trip each would go on his way to more long-term, professional employment.  For many of us this meant leaving Chicago indefinitely.  In this sense the trip felt melancholy, or at least I see it that way now (though at the time few of us knew we’d be leaving our hometown).  This melancholy is compounded by the fact that Hurricane Katrina hit while we were travelling (which, combined with the concurrent Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in many respects at their most dire point in that moment, marked for me the worst, saddest, ugliest, most hopeless face the US has presented to the world in a long time).  Also, upon returning to Chicago, I found the urban garden I’d been tending all year for my job totally withered and dead.  Internecine conflicts at the organization I worked for meant that my colleague wasn’t allowed in to water, so everything just dried up and died.  This last event was perhaps the final catalyst for my deciding to leave the US.  There just wasn’t much of a place for me, neither professionally nor socially.

I never ended up writing the story, but I do think a lot about what that moment, and especially that trip, meant for me.  I think about growing up in the same house in Chicago all my life, being friends with the same people since pre-school or grammar school, sharing all sorts of referents with them.  On the one hand, we shared a city and its physical and social landscape (we even shared the myriad changes Chicago suffered in the 1990s), but we also shared all the experiences and stories accumulated over years and years of friendship.  Looking back on it, I recall a coziness that was so pervasive we never noticed it until now, when it’s gone.  If we did feel it, that coziness felt like a stricture, the boringness of everyday life and routines and the all-encompassing “here”-ness that you chafe under when you’re a teenager dreaming of many prospective “theres”.  Even in college, when most of us went downstate to U of Illinois, and some went farther afield to places like California, there were frequent weekends and especially summer nights when, as we did in high school, we’d sit on my back porch underneath the El tracks (that’s the elevated metro line, for non-Chicagoans) and talk about girls and stories and long-ago childhood memories.  In high school this was the default option, as we couldn’t go much anywhere else.  But by college, when we could have gone to bars or clubs, we still preferred the old back porch, and one another’s company.  I think a lot of what we were doing there was dreaming of the future, dreaming of doing something with our lives, even as in our reminiscences perhaps we were preparing to let go of the past (and maybe even recognizing that “doing something” elsewhere wasn’t entirely preferable to “doing nothing” there where we were).  At any rate, now I am doing things with my life—I’m married, I have a kid, I take care of many other kids, I work in an interesting field, I think, I cook, I write…  I’m happy with this adult life of mine, and often shocked and thrilled that I am finally in the future I’ve always dreamed of.  But sometimes that slow, stuck time as teenagers on my back porch also appeals to me.

Around when I was outlining my aborted short story last year, I was also enjoying a fair number of cultural inputs from the US, and really appreciating certain aspects of our shared identity.  I got into an online TV show called the Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, and I saw Garden State again (thanks to my Colombian father-in-law’s massive film collection).  These and many of our popular culture artifacts in the US are notable for their consciousness of race, their US culture in-jokes, and especially the nervous tension of everyday life.  My wife is more familiar with US culture than most foreigners I know, but even she is often unaffected or uninterested by our humor.  Even for films she likes, such as Cyril or What about Bob?, she finds it hard to sit through all the tension.  She squirms. 

Above all I have been recalling, impressed, how at least the educated middle class in the US is really a society of cultural consumers.  Most of my family friends are voracious movie watchers, book readers, playgoers, magazine readers.  An important part of their shared identity comes from classic movies they love, or new articles they can discuss, or books they read in their book clubs.  I have been at many a family gathering where we spend hours recalling favorite scenes from movies we’ve all seen.  In this respect, our culture in the US is almost like a pre-literate tribal culture in that we share and repeat stories that everyone knows about.  It’s just that these stories come from a post-literate canon of mass culture, and not simply oral tradition.

Seeing a movie like Garden State, I also missed the frankness and rawness of regular life in the US.  People seem to think about and show their emotions more, to cover up and conform less than in other places I’ve been to.  I also feel like people go through life more aware of the larger implications of what they’re doing.  In the US, even litterers, racists, or anyone else doing something that seems thoughtless, are usually aware of the arguments against what they’re doing.  They have in fact thought about it, and come to a conscious (though perhaps incorrect or flawed) decision.  In Colombia and other developing countries I’ve been to, people often don’t look beyond their immediate wants and impulses.  They don’t tend to ask themselves if something is correct, or advisable, or coherent.  Maybe the thoughtfulness I perceive in the US is because much of our daily life is relatively undramatic—we’ve got washing machines, cars, automatic furnaces, and even many jobs are automated and uneventful these days.  So maybe people in the US have stripped away some of the day-to-day busyness and drama of just living and getting things done, and this gives them more time to explore themselves as mental beings and not simply physical task-doers. 

Of course the flipside of this is that a lot of people spend so much time thinking about their emotions that they don’t do anything else, and we end up with a certain degree of collective neuroticism in our culture.  At least that's the media image, especially in a movie like Garden State.  Perhaps if I weren’t feeling so nostalgic when I saw the movie, I wouldn’t be thinking of the constant emotionalizing as a good thing, but rather asking, “Why do they have to be so damn quirky?”  Furthermore, why can’t we recognize our emotions and explore our inner self while working on something worthwhile, and not just being complacent in jobs we don’t believe in?  This is similar to what I thought with the movie The Namesake.  This film explores the relationships among members of an Indian-American family.  There is lots of love and emotion, but the setting is always bland suburbia, and we never get the sense that the parents’ jobs matter much to them.  They never talk about their work or their beliefs as to how to live in and change the world around them.  So as much as I like The Namesake, I again wonder why people can’t combine the daily challenges and joys of raising a family with work that they can believe in, and a mission to change the world for the better.  And this brings me full circle to why I left the US in the first place:  a sense that many aspects of daily life were frivolous and not at all important or transcendental.  Perhaps we’re so focused on our own emotions that we allow (or promote) the stripping of all character from our collective spaces.  Hello faceless malls, cars to take us everywhere, soulless lawns.  Hell, even the Awkward Black Girl show, which I like a lot, has everyone driving in cars instead of walking, and working at jobs they don’t care about.

Of course the unfruitful navel-gazing I decry in the US is not exclusive to our culture or even our time.  I recently read The Country of Carnival by Jorge Amado, written and set in 1930s Brazil, in which all the characters are basically effete nihilists that scorn happiness or meaning or striving or even concern.  It is a good read, especially considering the author wrote it when he was 18, but it sure is a downer.  And a reminder that the well-off and those with lots of time on their hands have probably always tended to endless self-analysis, moroseness, and neuroses.

At the time I was intensely pondering all these questions about culture, it also was looking as if we’d be moving to Chicago in the next year or two, and I had visions of my son Sam attending my same pre-school and grammar school.  I asked myself if he too would experience many of the things I loved and hated in Chicago.  Would he feel the comfort of long-lasting friendships and a familiar neighborhood?  Would he learn hard, ugly lessons about race and class?

Third World Green Daddy 46: Let them eat worms

A little while back I posted about my raising worms in a compost bin.

Actually, I'm not so much raising worms as using worms to process my garbage.  My main focus is on reducing my household garbage production, not on being a good custodian of the annelid race.  Since switching to a composting system for all my organic waste (except for bones, which take too long to break down), I have drastically reduced the amount of garbage the municipal waste truck has to pick up from our house.  Right now for an average occupancy of maybe 3 people (2 during the week, and anywhere from 0 to 6 on weekends), we're generating one, maybe two normal-sized plastic shopping bags of garbage every week.  And these are not heavy, or even packed to the brim.  If you squash them down they take up maybe half the space of a full shopping bag.  If we were throwing away organic waste, we'd be dumping a shopping bag every night or two, and a heavy one, at that.  Of course I'm also generating high-quality compost for my plants, but since different types of manure are so easily available for purchase around here, that's not my main goal with the worm system.

(A side note--I recently read that that average US household consumes almost a thousand kWh per month of electricity.  Not to toot my own horn, but we're consuming like a tenth of that.  I don't know if it's because we turn off lights when we're not using them, or because we use low-consumption light bulbs, or we have a small fridge, or what.  None of these seem like they should be a major source of electricity savings, since we don't always turn off lights, not all of our bulbs are fluorescents, and our fridge is old and probably not too efficient.  Plus our water recycling system has us turning on pumps for a few minutes or even an hour every day.  Part of our savings must be because we don't have many electronics that stay plugged in all day.  No TV, no computer in one place, and we even unplug the modem and the stereo when we're not using them.  This relates to a larger trend--I think that we avoid some of the excess consumption that many US consumers don't or can't avoid, simply because in Colombia, or at least in our house, we are able to make choices that are difficult in the US.  I imagine it would be hard to even find a refrigerator as small as ours at most appliance stores in the States.  Ditto for the washing machine.  And often a US household has so many plug-in appliances like clocks and phones and TVs that it's not realistic to keep them all unplugged when not in use.  So once again, I feel lucky to be in a society in which, without being particularly conscientious, you can make ecologically responsible choices.  Often the de facto choice in small-town Colombia is low consumption, whereas in the States it's the other way around.)

Anyway, despite my main interest in the worms being their capacity to process my garbage, I was also curious about their potential as a food source for people or livestock.  With this in mind, this morning I cooked up a batch of worms.  A caveat:  this is not a common thing among people who do worm composting.  I don't want anyone to get the idea that composting is only for freaks that do things like eating worms.  It just happens that as an agronomist, I was curious about eating the worms.  Don't let my odd nature give a bad impression of composters in general, or discourage you from composting at home.  That said, if you are interested in eating worms, I'll tell you what I did. 

First I picked some worms out of an active compost pile.  I tried to get about 20.  This didn't make a big dent in my worm population, nothing that would hinder timely garbage processing.  On the other hand, as I picked them out one by one, I realized just how many worms it would take to make a filling meal for a person or even a chicken.  For a portion of meat with your rice or bread, I'd wager you'd need at least 100 good-sized worms to feel like you'd eaten sometime.  And taking so many worms just a few times would quickly diminish my working worm stock.  This was just an experiment though, so I figured 20 would do.  Another thing I noted while picking out my worms is that unfinished worm compost really stinks.  Since it's basically undergoing a not-entirely-oxygenated decomposition process, the stuff smells like hot garbage.  It doesn't really emit a smell outside of the bin, but if you put your hands in it, they'll stink until you take a very hot, very thorough shower.

Once I got my worms out, I rinsed them in a colander to get off some of the slime and smell of the garbage, and then I put them in a little tupperware container with moist breadcrumbs that were left over from stale bread.  My son helped me by playing with the worms and keeping them company.








After a few hours, the bread medium was dotted with the worms' poop.



This was the whole point.  I didn't want to be eating stinky compost along with my worms, so I was purging them.  I could have just put them in the container with a bit of water so they'd fast, but I figured it was more humane to give them something to munch on, which would furthermore give them a nice internal breading, like inside-out fried chicken.  Anyway, I took out the worms from the bread, rinsed them a bit, and dumped out the poopy bread.  I did this two more times over the next day, until by the third and last bread change there was little or no poop present.





Then this morning it was showtime.  In addition to our fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, orange juice, and beef broth, my pupil Carlos and I were going to feast on worms.  Actually, feast is an exaggeration for portions of 9 worms apiece.  Nevertheless, we were looking forward to trying this exotic meal.  I heated up some olive oil and salt in a pan, and threw in my worms.  They rapidly sizzled and deflated, and when I scooped them out after perhaps less than a minute, they were crispy, like those fried thin noodles in Southeast Asian cuisine.  Carlos and I tried a few straight, and found them to have a mildly bitter, spinach-y flavor, with a broad, bready finish.  I was surprised at how good and flavorful they were.  I'd expected them to just take on the taste of the oil and salt.

My conclusion is that California redworms are a decent eat.  They don't come in enough quantity to be a main course, and their bitter flavor makes them a better seasoning to complement and make more interesting your main event, as opposed to standing on their own.  If I were to start a cafe or fast-food place, I'd consider putting out a bowl of fried worms as a novel topping for your burger or something (to do this in any quantity I'd have to look for a larger-scale producer feeding large worm herds on copious amounts of manure).  All that said, I don't think I'll be eating them again any time soon.  I'm not grossed out by them--for some reason I don't have any problem with the idea of eating them.  It's just that they don't give much bang for the work involved, and above all, they're worth more to me working on my compost pile than sating my appetite.

At any rate, I wanted to share with my readers this silly little experiment. 

600th post

This is just to mark my 600th post.  I started this blog about three years ago, and I've really enjoyed being able to write about different topics, in a semi-formal format that forces me to do decent research and organize my thoughts well.  Anyway, I want to thank the readers who have waded through reams and reams of my nonsense.  I hope you've found a few kernels of valuable insight.

The United States and me: A torrid love affair. Part II: Reconciliation

In October 2011 we took our yearly trip to Chicago, and it snapped me out of my September blues.  The prior year we’d gone to the US for the first time as a family; Caro had never been there before.  Sammy had come along, but he was still in utero, in big-as-a-house utero at his 6 months of gestation.  That time in 2010 we’d gone in a balmy Chicago September, trying to avoid the sweaty heat of summer, which Caro is not that keen on, having grown up in the cool Andean highlands all her life.  This time, in 2011, we were going a month later, and in the process we’d get to see the start of a Midwestern autumn.  Another change from the prior year (in addition to having a semi-walking son in tow) was that my stepdaughter, Gabri, came along.  She had never had any interest in the US, but we had gotten her a tourist visa the year before along with her mother, just in case.  As we were getting ready for our trip in 2011, she asked us, “Hey, why didn’t you invite me along?”  We’d just assumed she wouldn’t want to go, so I guess we had never asked her.  At any rate, she ended up tagging along, and this was a really special addition to our trip.

As always when I’m to go back to the States after a year away, I was giddy and excited for a week or two beforehand.  In the airport I was in high spirits, and I jaunted into Immigration just as I’d been jaunting everywhere that day, especially pleased to have a notarized permission letter for Gabriela to leave the country, signed by her father.  I thought we’d foreseen every possible administrative roadblock to taking our trip.  But I was soon on the verge of tears, incredulous that they were giving us a hard time because Sam only had a US passport.  You see, my son was born in Colombia, which automatically makes him a Colombian citizen, as his birth certificate indicates.  But by dint of his being the son of a US citizen, he is also entitled to US citizenship, and I had gone through the paperwork earlier that year to obtain his US citizenship certificate and a US passport.  I figured the passport would be good for him to go anywhere in the world. 

But not good enough to get him out of Colombia.  Apparently, as a Colombian national he must present a Colombian passport to leave the country.  The immigration person explained that she couldn’t let Sam out of the country without a Colombian passport.  Normally we might obtain this passport in an office in the airport, but it was a Saturday, and the office didn’t open on Saturdays.  The other option would be to treat Sam as a US national who’d overstayed his 3-month tourist visa, which would entail paying a fine, but this was again handled in an office that didn’t open that day.

I couldn’t believe it.  I was just dumbfounded, thinking that either we wouldn’t be able to take our trip, or I’d have to go without the rest of my family.  And we’d swallow a few thousand dollars, to boot.  I tried to plead, to explain, to not get angry, but mainly I just stood there with a bewildered look on my face as my wife Caro tried to reason with the people. 

After a few excruciating, tense minutes, a supervisor came along and had mercy on us, letting us go as long as we promised to get a passport for Sam as soon as we were back in Colombia.  We promised, and I was again almost in tears of joy.  I know I’m by no means an oppressed migrant or anything, but the half hour of uncertainty as bureaucrats decided the fate of our trip was a reminder of how tough it is sometimes to navigate these multiple cultural interfaces and identities.

The flight was a breeze.  Sam behaved well, and the cabin pressure changes didn’t seem to bother him as they’d always bothered me as a child.  He played a lot with his sister, and I just sat in my seat with a goofy grin on my face for most of the flight.  We’d gotten through the gauntlet, and were now on our way to a good, safe place.

Caro was once again surprised at how congenial the immigration people were in Fort Lauderdale, not at all the image most Latinos have of menacing impersonal US government institutions.  Gabri shared in her mother’s pleasant surprise, and I got a sappy, proud feeling to see the “Welcome to the United States” video they show on a loop, with images of all our best landmarks and traditions and general human warmth.

After theprior year’s intensive body search of Carolina, who didn’t want to pass throughany machines while she was pregnant (she was bemused at the overly careful,courteous security guard woman who explained with every step, “Okay, I’m goingto touch you with the back of my hand, and if I feel anything, I will turn myhand around and touch you with my fingers”), this year I got randomly marked for an intensive search.  They had me take off my shoes, get patted down, and looked through all my bags, item by item.  All the while the security guys were cheerful and polite, that odd juxtaposition we have in the 21^st century USA of sunny customer service and a paranoid militarized State.

As always, I enjoyed the Fort Lauderdale airport for the number of Haitians everywhere, working, travelling, chatting on lunch breaks.  Chicago has a sizeable Haitian populace, but nothing where you hear Haitian Kreyol much on the streets, even in Rogers Park or Evanston, the main enclaves.  In Fort Lauderdale (or at least in the airport) Kreyol is everywhere, and even people that speak to you in English with no accent have nametags that say things like Patrice Laferrier.

My general wide-eyed marveling continued once we were in Chicago.  Our cab driver had a Nigerian name and accent, and I started grilling him the way I always do these days when I am freshly arrived in the States (when you live there, you forget how odd and fascinating it is to have people from different countries all around you).  It turned out he was Yoruba, and he got a kick out of our telling him about certain Afro-Latino religions and asking about the spirits he’d grown up hearing about.

Finally we got to my mother’s house where, after putting Sam to sleep, we stayed up past midnight catching up with my mom and eating homemade cookies.  Once again I found myself back in the house I grew up in, but in a different moment and a different stage in my life.  Gabri needed something from the drugstore, and it was wild to make the same 11pm walk down Waveland to the Walgreens that I’d followed so many times in years past, now with my stepdaughter!

In general it felt weird to have my child on the scene of my childhood.  We would go places, and I’d tell Caro about something that had happened to me in that place when I was fourteen or something, and I realized I was now a father sharing my own childhood, my own geographic origins, with my son.  Better said, I was sharing them with Caro as I talked up a storm, and frankly I felt bad that I wasn’t addressing Sam more as he dozed in his stroller, but I imagine he caught what I was telling about, even when I wasn’t speaking directly to him.  I’d never been in that situation before, at least not in that way.  Sam was hearing from me the stories of a distant time and an unknown place.  Of course I’d talked to him about my past before, but not with the evidence right there in front of us. 

I also realized that every place in the city is a story for me.  Every corner has some memory from years and years spent walking around and doing things with friends and family.  A corner I’d always turned down on the way home from school, an alley I stationed myself in to park cars for Cubs games, a house I went to a party at, a storefront that used to be something else.  On a big chunk of the North Side, no block is just a block to me—they all have memories attached to them.  When I was a kid, I always loved Chicago, but sometimes I felt as if my geographic surroundings were not “valid”, at least not in the US popular imagination.  I didn’t grow up in a ghetto or some other place that had been mythologized and made interesting by popular media, but I didn’t grow up in a bland suburb either, where real, normal white middle class people were supposed to live, according to most movies and songs and TV shows.  Life as a white kid in the urban core was too exceptional, too different from the rest of the US, to be meaningful on a larger scale.  Furthermore Chicago, perhaps more than many other cities, has a collective lore that residents learn as children.  The World’s Fair, Al Capone, John Dillinger, the Daleys, the Haymarket riots, and more recently the destruction of housing projects and gentrification of lots of areas.  As a kid, I sometimes felt that this canon was at once provincial and bourgeois, too big and historical to connect to directly, yet too small and local to be noble or inspiring.

But now as I revisited Chicago after many years living elsewhere I felt even more tied to my place of origin, aware of its influence on me.  The stories I grew up with as a Chicagoan are just the real, local connection to place I always advocate for in my development work, and my own personal stories overlap with the larger contemporary events and even the historical events that led up to them.  I no longer felt as if my idiosyncratic, authentic neighborhood were some anomaly or statistically-insignificant blip in a standardized countrywide landscape of strip malls and big front lawns.  Whether or not it was typical or “normal”, my childhood and the place where it transpired were 100% real and normal for me, and if many people in the late-20^th century US didn’t grow up somewhere with a strong local identity, then that was their loss, and not something for me to feel left out of.  Each person’s unique, hyper-local reality is different and interesting.

We squeezed in a lot of sightseeing and other local musts.  The Lincoln Park Zoo, Byron's Hot Dogs, various deep dish and stuffed pizzas, the Pick Me Up café (I’m realizing as I write this list that a big part of what I do when I visit the States is stuff myself with junk food).  We visited Lane Tech, where I went to high school, we went to my family’s house in Wisconsin to canoe and jump in leaf piles, we ate at Culver's, then Sour Patch Kids and Cheetos at a gas station, we went to an outlet mall in Kenosha or Racine, visited my aunt in a retirement home, shopped at a small town grocery store, split wood, invited friends over for parties, went to the Art Institute, rode the CTA, took walks in my neighborhood (including the lovely Alta Vista Terrace), bought consumerist stuff like computers and cameras that are pricier in Colombia.  Again, it was odd to do these things from my childhood and bachelorhood, but now with a child of my own.  Especially to drive to Wisconsin from Chicago, as if I did this drive all the time (which I guess I have, just not in the past six years).  Sam seemed right at home though, not at all put off by the new surroundings nor hearing everyone speaking in English.  He loved meeting my extended family, and he had no trouble sleeping with the El train running by my house all night.  The only difficult adjustment for him might have been a lack of fiber.  In Colombia we eat a lot of fruit and drink a lot of juice.  Even our staple foods, like potatoes and plantain and cassava, have a certain amount of fiber in them.  So coming to the States, where common fruits like apples aren’t that fibrous, and staples like bread and pasta have had all the fiber stripped out, was hard on his digestive system.  That said, I think we got off easy, considering all the drastic changes we were exposing him to.

Gabri was great throughout the trip.  She helped out a lot with Sam, even sleeping alone with him a few nights (these were the first times Sam had slept in another room from us since he was born, I believe).  She and I went to a high-end camera store on the semi-industrial Near West Side, where we were attended by a very enthusiastic and knowledgeable camera expert, who gave us just what we needed, at a good price.  It seems he initially assumed Gabri was my girlfriend or wife, and advised me to “take good care of her”.  This was a bit embarrassing, but Gabri dealt with everything well, even through the language barrier.  (That said, in retrospect I don’t think Gabri made much of an effort to speak English on this trip.  She understands it pretty well after years living with me, and I have the impression that she can string together sentences decently, but she’s so shy about it that I really can’t be sure of anything in terms of her English skills).  Gabri’s helping my mom take care of Sam one night even allowed Caro and me to go on a little date to an Indian restaurant on Devon.  We got out pretty late, so the place we ended up eating at was determined more by its being open at that hour than by the promise of high culinary quality.  The year prior we’d eaten at a higher-end Indian place (where Caro was tickled to be attended in Spanish by a Guatemalan busboy), and frankly this year the restaurant had a distinctly Mafioso feel to it (and we’re pretty good at detecting this, living as we do in a country full of Mafia fronts), but the food was decent and we enjoyed the time alone together.

Another highlight was getting some pants that fit.  I am not a big clothes guy, and every year I go through a cycle where I’m sick of my old clothes that don’t fit (too short, too tight, too big, etc.) and want to replace them all, but then I balk at the idea of spending money on clothes.  On this visit we went to both Marshall’s and a few thrift stores, and I was very happy to get some pants that actually fit me.  Of course within a few months I realized that they didn’t really fit so well, or I’d lost or gained weight to the point where they no longer did, and the cycle started all over.  But at the time I was very happy, and felt much more dignified to be living life in well-fitting pants (which for me, as a child of the urban 1990s, means comfortably loose pants).

                           

Normally when I am in the US to visit, I am initially reticent for the first few days and feel out of place.  I suppose it’s natural; I’m used to living in one place, so going to another place is going to entail a change in what I’m used to as far as customs and such.  And the fact that the “new” culture where I feel initially awkward is my own birthplace, with all the associations (both good and bad) and emotional charges that that implies, makes me feel especially weird and abnormal, because I should be more at home here than anywhere.  At any rate, for the past eight years or so that I’ve been living out of country, every time I go to Chicago I feel a bit  depressed and out of place for the first few days (even frustrated or angry at the problems in our country), and thereafter I feel happy and at home.  Likewise, when it’s time to leave again, I feel bad and somewhat maladapted when I first return to my place of residence.  This too soon passes.

On the trip in 2011 I didn’t go through this process as drastically as on other occasions.  Unfortunately though, at one point early in our trip I helped my mother for a party she was organizing with some friends, and it fell during my maladapted time.  It also happened that there were a fair number of people my age at the party, and they were now living as young professionals in Chicago.  Given my predisposition to melancholy at that moment, I started thinking to myself that I was somehow inadequate, not as classy as they were.  They had grown up in Chicago, just as I had, and had even gone to some public schools, as I had.  But I guess that because they ran in different social circles, and many went to Catholic high school, I invented this whole story in my mind that we were separated by some big cultural divide.  This was of course pure nonsense, but it was compounded by the fact that I was serving everyone during the party, so I felt even more as if I were somehow of an underclass.  In my grey mood, I even fixated on how relatively short I am in the US.  I have become accustomed, in an adolescence at a high school full of short immigrants’ kids, and later on in my adulthood in other, shorter countries, to being the tallest guy around, and that bolsters my self-confidence, make me feel special.  But once back in the Midwestern United States, I’m just of average height, at least among white males my age.  It’s like Superman going back to Krypton and being just a regular Joe.

Anyway, all this silly drama never manifested itself except inside my neurotic mind and in my whining to my wife.  Soon thereafter we had a nice evening dinner with my cousin, and I felt at home again, in a place where I belonged (and at peace with my not-so-exceptional height).

By the end of our trip I was sad to leave the US.  I reflected that just one week isn’t enough time for me to visit home; I need longer to bask and let things sink in, and then come to terms with my leaving again.  Furthermore, at that time it was looking as if we’d soon be returning to live in the States, so I had spent much of the trip dreaming and getting excited about possible projects, businesses, gardens to plant.  Now I would have to put all those on hold once again and return to my regular life in Colombia.

On this trip I’d tried to get my mother’s attic in order.  This has been my bedroom since I was eight or so, and now it has all my assorted papers and books and memorabilia.  Since I’ve lived abroad I’ve attempted to slowly get this space organized, chipping away at piles of things to put them in boxes or the crawlspace or the garbage can.  Yet again on this trip, I didn’t get done as much as I would have liked to, and so I had to leave some piles untouched.  I pondered melancholy that most of what I left would not move from its place for a year or so, as it hadn’t moved in the prior year until we came to visit.  Since our prior visit we’d had a baby, new jobs, deaths, new living arrangements, yet in a corner of North Side Chicago, in my mom’s attic, those papers and books had remained still and stoic through it all.  Who could know what the next year would bring, as my attic piles remained stolid and indifferent?

Despite my sadness at leaving Chicago, I was very happy that Gabri and Sam had gotten to see my hometown (and Caro to visit once again).  We’d done a lot of typical regional things, and I for one enjoyed the nippy fall weather (Sam, on the other hand, was furious whenever the freezing wind would stir up and whip his face).  I was wistful on the plane (at least the time I was conscious after our 2am wakeup), and I expected a few days of mopeyness as I readjusted to life in Colombia.  But to my surprise, when we had landed and my father-in-law picked us up, I became happy to be back in Bogota as I watched the cityscape pass by our car window.  I snapped back into my everyday mode and looked forward to pending tasks at work.  I had found peace once again with my homeland after years of on-and-off disillusionment, but I was also content with my adopted home in the Andes.