More on soylent

A few months ago I wrote about a food substitute called Soylent.  My take was that it was another fad-ish techno-worshipper idea that is fundamentally unsound.  Well right on cue, Soylent is now being plugged on CNN as a brilliant new discovery that may save the world.

Uptown

Here is a pretty comprehensive article on the history of Chicago's Uptown neighborhood.  This area was my stomping-grounds as a kid, and I'm sure that its long-established spirit of solidarity with the poor, of recognizing that some stand to lose in the gentrification and prosperity game, must have influenced much of who I am and how I see the world.  Right now, as my family and I feel very rootless in our temporary digs in northern Virginia, it is refreshing to recall what it was for me to be so rooted in a local geography as I was growing up in Chicago.  I hope we can soon reestablish some semblance of personal concern and investment in our local surroundings.

Extreme poverty

Ending extreme poverty is a hot topic these days.  Here is an article comparing labor and non-labor income's respective roles in reduction of extreme poverty in various countries.  That is to say, how important is economic growth for decreasing extreme poverty, and how important are social safety net programs run by the government or private agencies?  The answer is that they are both important.  By my reading of the graphs, it seems that very poor countries like Nepal or Ghana owe most of their improvement in extreme poverty to general economic growth, while middle-income countries like Colombia or Panama, redistribution and welfare programs play an increasingly important role.  This makes intuitive sense to me, since really poor countries don't have much private wealth nor government revenue to redistribute, while middle-income countries have a lot of wealth they could potentially draw on to help out their own poor.

This other article looks at extreme poverty in the US, defined as incomes of less than $2/capita/day.  I was amazed to learn that some 2.8 million children live in households earning less than $2 per person per day.  By my rough calculations, this would mean about 5 million people in total (children, the adults living with them, and the elderly not counted in this study) living on less than $2 a day in the US.  While this is less than 2% of the country's population, on the other hand it represents more extreme poor in the US than in many poor countries (tiny Sierra Leone, for example)!

Trade and food security

Here is a pair of good articles on how trade and trade policies affect food security.  The first article gives a great overview of food security, while the second looks more specifically at how trade policies might affect food security positively or negatively for different social groups, different families, and different countries.  I appreciated these articles because they are even-handed and recognize the complexity of the food security-trade nexus, as opposed to simple boosterism in favor of increased trade liberalization.

Third World Green Daddy 55: Waiting for Paulo

Once we had gotten moved into our new place in the DC area, we dedicated ourselves full-time to getting ready for our new son, Paulo.  I must admit I wasn't a very big contributor in this; my wife Caro was much more proactive.  If it weren't for her, the baby might have been born on the stairs one day going up to our apartment, with no clothes or bedding or anything ready for him.  

I wasn't totally useless; I made lists.  First we had to find our apartment and get moved in, then find a preschool for our son Sam, then straighten out our new health insurance, and finally set up a birth center for Paulo to be born at.  And actually, I helped with a lot of the phone calls and logistical preparations for these things, but both Caro and I were so well-organized that it didn't seem like we did much work.  Each day we would take care of one element that needed resolving, and before long we had a preschool, a birth center, and a health insurance policy to cover us.  In retrospect though, a week or two after Paulo was born, we realized we'd spent the last two or three months without a moment's pause, without much free time.  Any free moment was taken up with making phone calls, searching for apartments, packing, unpacking. 

We looked at a few preschools in our area for Sam.  All were decent, and seemed like good places for kids to play and learn.  We noticed that most preschools these days belong to corporate chains with multiple sites.  We visited two such places, and beyond my instinctive distaste for the idea of entrusting my child to a corporation, they probably would have been fine for Sam.  Sam loved each of them when we visited, and wanted to stay there playing.  Both corporate preschools had a focus on early learning, with lots of art and science activities.  We didn't like how glossy and perfect they were though.  They were immaculate, the toys were all intact.  In short, they didn't look like places where kids were playing.  We didn't see a plethora of books, either, and both places had as a selling point that the meals came from a high-end catering service (snack time was packaged tortilla chips and salsa when we were visiting one place).  Neither of these traits were attractive to us.  Also, both corporate chain preschools were located on the ground floor of tall, massive office buildings, so their inside spaces didn't have much natural light, and their outside spaces were totally manmade.

The place we ended up choosing for Sam's preschool was a home daycare that had at some point in the recent past become a more formalized institution (but still based in what had originally been a residential house).  It wasn't as flashy, lots of the toys and books were worn, and they didn't have the frenetic pedagogic program of the other schools.  This place was mainly kids playing, singing, reading, and drawing with the all Latino female staff.  Basically it felt like Sam's preschool in our small town in Colombia (where Caro had also gone in her childhood)--few pretensions, but good for the learning and development of our son.  It is explicitly bilingual, in that I believe they speak only in Spanish in the morning and English in the afternoon.  I don't know how strict they are with this; I think they speak to Sam mainly in Spanish, though judging from the leaps and bounds Sam's making in English, I assume he talks a lot to his classmates in my mother tongue.  I now sometimes worry that Sam, who until two months ago only formulated phrases in Spanish and needed my constant reminding to speak to me in English, is now putting his Spanish by the wayside.  He still speaks perfectly with his mother and other Spanish-speakers, but it sometimes seems as if his attitude is seeing English as more "cool" or desireable or something.  

The school's outside area really is outside, beneath one of the towering shingle oak trees that characterize this region.  They do have a child-friendly astroturf instead of real grass to avoid too much mud, which I understand on a practical basis, though I don't like the idea of my child's missing out on that good exposure to soil microbes.  One of their selling points that really resonated with us was that they have an industrial kitchen on-site, where they prepare only healthy food (some of which comes from a garden the kids plant during the summer).  This healthy focus leads to some snippiness from them on certain points--parents can only schedule four cake birthday parties a year for the whole school, and this well in advance.  Everyone else gets a watermelon party or something of that nature. Anyway, we like their focus on real food.  It's nothing too alternative or outside of the norm--it's not like they're doing raw-food diets or anything--it's just the common sense of not giving reheated junk to your kids, which in today's dysfunctional food system can seem like a revolutionary idea.

This choice of preschool was a bit cheaper than the others, though not by much, and that wasn't a deciding factor.  At any rate, the going rate around here of $1500-$2000/month for full-time preschool is just appalling to me, and we certainly couldn't afford it if my work didn't provide a very generous subsidy to defray the cost.  My wife has often commented on how sad it seems to her that preschool isn't considered or sought after as a right for all kids in the US.  Many countries don't provide universal preschool, but plenty of people there at least see it as a noble goal to strive for.  In the States it sometimes feels to Caro that we are resigned to things like preschool being available only for those who can pay a lot for it.  She always feels bad when she sees kids with their parents during the day in our apartment building, and those kids get all excited when they see a preschool group that they're not a part of walking around the premises.  Of course we've also discovered that many parents in our social group don't want to send their children to preschool until they're 3 or 4 years old.  Some of this is obviously a cultural difference or a personal choice, but the economic hardship of sending kids to preschool is surely a contributing factor to this custom of keeping young kids at home for a long time.

Preschools in the DC area all seem to have long, exclusive wait lists, and as such mark parents' first introduction to that ratrace, treadmill mentality to frenetically strive to get your kids into the "best" schools and programs, before the kids themselves start to stress out about getting into the best jobs and moving up the corporate ladder.  I think that the staff of the preschool we chose liked the fact that Sam was a native Spanish speaker.  They talked to us conspiratorially in Spanish during our visit, and helped us along the waitlist, saving an open spot for us to enter immediately (pending the gauntlet of prior medical checkups etc.).  We have since seen that there are in fact a number of middle-class Latin American parents like us with native Spanish-speaking kids, but I guess that the majority of kids enrolled in the school are still Anglos learning Spanish, such that it is attractive to the administration to attract Spanish-speakers.

Once Sam entered school, Caro's life became a lot easier (if a bit lonelier), since she didn't have to entertain an energetic kid all day that was yearning to be with other kids.  We made it a point for me to always pick up Sam in the afternoon, so that he would know he could count on me.  This was especially important looking to the future when Paulo would be born, since we didn't want Sammy to feel like he'd been discarded or something.  Our afternoon walks have become a special routine with us, first in the balmy, sunny evenings of early Fall, and transitioning into the cold darkness of late November, when Sam points out Venus and the Moon in the sky, and the catalpa trees that I've taught him to identify have gradually lost their leaves.  It's a six-block walk, filled with landmarks like Roxy the dog who fetches her ball for us and gives Sammy kisses on the face, or the five-foot-high brick wall Sammy climbs up and walks along (and from which he once fell face-first onto the sidewalk below).  For certain stretches Sam rides on my shoulders, and at other parts he runs like a maniac (though always very careful about stopping and waiting for me before crossing the myriad driveways that interrupt the sidewalk).  We sometimes recite poetry or sing the alphabet song as we walk, and sometimes we just walk in silence.  In terms of sustainability and bucolic childraising, you can't ask for more than a healthy walk twice a day in which Sam can learn the local landscape (suburban as it may be) while it transitions through the seasons.  

Despite all our fears about Sam's feeling left in the shade when Paulo was born, I at least have become more attentive to Sam.  Now that Caro is loath to be outside much during her first post-partum month, I both take Sam to school in the morning and pick him up in the PM.  In fact, for most of Paulo's gestation I was fretting that I was focusing too much on Sam.  An out-of-the-womb, real-live, active kid has a way of demanding a dad's attention that is hard for a fetus to compete with.  Unlike during Sam's gestation, I was rarely able to read to Caro's belly with Paulo in it.  I didn't talk much to him, rub Caro's tummy, or anything of the sort.  Of course my wife reminds me that Paulo still heard me talk, listened to the books I read Sam, and felt my embrace when Caro and I slept together.  But I felt bad for neglecting him.  One big difference from Sam's gestation was that I was working full-time throughout Paulo's, not to mention our big move and the general stress load in our lives.  Frankly, this time around I often felt like I wasn't even able to pay much attention to Sam, mired as I've been in work and other things.  But as I said above, towards the end of this pregnancy I've been able to step up and really take responsibility for my firstborn.

Of course for all its merits, the preschool we chose is still ensconced in a car-centered, suburban mentality.  While the employees all commute by public transport, most of the parents bring their kids in cars.  Sammy usually takes a toy truck or something to play with on our walk to school, and then puts it away in his backpack during school hours.  He's always done this in Colombia, and knows he isn't to play with his toys in school.  Anyway, it seems that sometimes the toys get out of his backpack (I don't know if he asks for them and the teachers oblige him, or if other kids open his backpack and take out the toys--I assume the latter, since his juice always arrives intact at day's end).  Recently we were scolded by the school's administrator for bringing toys to school, because then at the end of the day the teacher has to take time to find Sammy's toy for him to take home.  I was kind of pissed off, because the "toy" in question that day was a rock he'd picked up on the way to school, and I know that at least for the last year and a half, he's never taken his toys out during school hours.  Mainly though, it made it clear to me that they were assuming that everyone brought their kids in a car, so it was no problem for the parent not to leave any toys with the kid.  But we're on foot, and I'm going straight to work from dropping off Sammy in the morning.  I'm sure as hell not going to lug around a toy tractor all day just because the professors can't keep the kids from opening their bags during school!  

My other little annoyance thus far with the school has just come up this week.  I am beginning to think that they have the kids watch a bit of TV every day.  Of course it's nominally educational stuff, but I am not paying good money to have my kid sit in front of a black box and fry his brain.  I'm going to have to look more into this.  If this is so, it would be especially ironic that they are showing Sam the television that we prohibit him, and then scolding me for letting him bring to school a rock that had sparked his imagination!

Getting my health insurance lined up hasn't been that big of a challenge.  My work provides me with the insurance, and plays a big chunk of it.  But our coverage didn't start until October 6th, 3 weeks after our arrival in the US.  This was obviously stressful for us as we awaited our new child, though there was really very little chance of Paulo's being born before that.  I did have to submit and re-submit many forms, and make a lot of phone calls, before we were finally signed up and in the system for my insurance policy.  But at least until now, it's all worked out for the best.  We still have to see if they'll honor our claims for the medical expenses we incurred while we were waiting to be assigned a member number.  Maybe I'll be writing an irate post in a few weeks about the injustices and inefficiencies of the insurance companies.  I sure hope not.

Perhaps the most important arrangement for us was figuring out where we'd have Paulo.  We are not opposed to having a baby in the hospital--in fact, that would seem like the most logical place to have a baby, and we did have our son Sam at our Colombian town's public hospital.  We'd been very satisfied with how they treated us, and especially with the free price tag.  However, having a baby in the US is apparently a very different proposition.  From what we've heard, hospitals pump mothers with lots of stuff they don't necessarily ask for, like IVs, epidurals, oxytocin, etc.  They also charge a lot for everything they do, some of which is of questionable medical merit (doing a metabolic screen on newborns when that test doesn't give any meaningful results until the child is at least a day old, keeping mother and baby in the hospital for hours if not days after labor, etc.).  We were especially concerned with horror stories of parents who were saddled with huge hospital bills that their insurance wouldn't cover.  Even if the insurance would cover the costs, we were offended at the idea of hospitals' charging $20000 or more for a childbirth.  Plus there was no hospital near our apartment.

Caro had been doing research on non-hospital options since we were in Colombia.  We saw that there were a fair number of midwives operating in the Washington DC area.  There were even quite a few birth centers, where midwives attend births outside of people's homes.  We didn't want a home birth for a number of reasons.  For one, we really are pretty orthodox at heart, and that just seemed a bit too alternative for us.  More than that, we wouldn't be very settled in to our apartment by the time Paulo was born, so it made more sense to have the baby somewhere where they're specially set up for childbirth.  The problem was that many of the birth centers, from low-cost inner-city options to high-end centers affiliated with hospitals, were all in heavy demand.  They wanted you to get in touch before you were even pregnant, or at least very early in your pregnancy, to get a spot and set up everything for the birth there.  The centers usually offer integral service, seeing the mother for all her pre- and post-natal visits, in addition to attending the birth.  We, on the other hand, would be arriving barely a month before Paulo's due date!

There was one place in particular that Caro had fallen in love with even before we got to the States.  It was near us, was well established, and had a full staff of midwives to do office visits and be on-call for your birth.  Like many of the birth centers we investigated, they didn't post many details on their website.  We didn't know how much it would cost, nor how to become a patient there, but when I called, they were quite clear that they had no availability for late October, when Paulo would be born.  Nonetheless, Caro pressed that we should give them a try.  It is a tribute to her personality, as well as the general Colombian way of doing things, that my wife didn't simply accept an official no, but pressed on to see if they might be able to accomodate us somehow.  We booked a place in their upcoming weekly tour, and afterwards we spoke to the director about our tricky situation of having just arrived with the baby due soon.  To my amazement, she squeezed us in for a late October birth slot.  I think she liked that we were not first-time parents, and that we seemed confident and laid-back about things.  In our regular checkups over the next few weeks, we confirmed that many of the parents-to-be at the birth center were very nervous and had a constant onslaught of worries they saddled the midwives with.  Many of the midwives commented that they enjoyed dealing with us and our calm attitudes.  I think the director also might have accepted us due to a small administrative misunderstanding--the secretaries had let us come to the tour as a courtesy, but made it clear that we couldn't be accomodated at the birth center.  I think the director might have assumed they'd told us there was a space for us, otherwise they wouldn't have let us on the tour.  At any rate, it worked out to our advantage!

Having the birth center lined up was a huge weight off our shoulders, and we were thrilled not only at their all-inclusive price of $4500 for the delivery and all visits, but even just at the fact that they could give us a clear, flat price for their services.  Most hospitals and other clinics are not able to do this.

Over the next few weeks as we waited for Paulo to come along, we had a few worries related to his gestation.  Caro didn't gain weight for the last month or so of her pregnancy, and I was worried that maybe the stress and chaos of our moving and reestablishing a home was impacting her and the baby.  Her belly kept getting bigger, but the rest of her sort of shrunk away.  In retrospect, many women would be thrilled to slim down at the end of their pregnancy, but at the time it caused me a bit of worry.  Also, ever since Colombia, doctors had been expressing their concern that Paulo seemed to be small for his fetal age.  He kept showing up normal in the sonograms, but for some reason both our Colombian doctors and the US midwives remained preoccupied about it.  It sometimes seems to me that kids in the US these days are simply immense, so maybe a normal-sized kid looks small.  The 50th percentile isn't what it used to be!  Flipping through the scrapbook of babies recently born at the center, I was amazed that a good deal were over 8 pounds.  At the same time, when you talk to parents, you get the feeling that everyone's kids are in the 99th percentile.  It reminds me of Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

Are kids really getting bigger?  If so, I'd wonder why.  I know that people in a country become physically bigger once they transition from widespread undernutrition to eating enough.  But the US crossed that threshold long ago, so you wouldn't think that we'd keep getting bigger.  Anecdotally, I've observed that I'm taller than many older guys, whereas among white men my age and younger I'm just in the middle of the pack for height.  Demographic statistics seem to bear me out on this, and obviously people are getting not just taller but also fatter in the US.  Could it be that our widespread overeating in this country also makes for much bigger babies?  What about all the substances in our environment that can affect hormonal levels?  I weighed 8 lb at birth, and was considered a pretty big baby, but now 8 pounds is about the minimum of what baby boys are expected to weigh.

Anyway, with the major institutional arrangements taken care of (insurance, a birth center, Sam's school), we were finally able to have the baby in peace.  I was put in the uncomfortable situation of having to negotiate leave, telework, and vacations with my boss before even really starting work!  We'd been praying that Paulo would hold off until my insurance kicked in on October 6th, and thereafter I hoped he'd still hold out until I finished my work orientation (and gotten over a long-lasting cold that I didn't want to pass to his fragile immune system).  This was especially the case with the final details to be prepared for the childbirth; I simply hadn't found time to get everything together, and I was terrified that Paulo would come calling and we wouldn't have our house ready for him.  Very early on, Caro had conscientiously packed a small go-bag with the items recommended by our birth center--towels, clothes, vaseline, etc.  We also had brought an entire suitcase's worth of diapers and clothes for Paulo from Colombia (all donated either from his brother or a friend who recently had a newborn baby).  I packed a lot of food to keep our energy up while Caro was in labor (and to provide for the midwives), and my mother's taking care of housekeeping during her two-week visit allowed us to really get our other ducks in a row.  Mom's offer to take care of Sam during our labor was also a huge boon to us, because we were worried about what to do with him. 

My cousins held a sort of virtual baby shower for us, and their check allowed us to get a stroller, carseat, bathtub, and other accoutrements that we never think we'll need (fancying ourselves as non-consumerists, as we do) but always end up needing.  We got a double futon bed for ourselves to replace the uncomfortable, bouncy single bed we'd been sharing.  Our furniture still hadn't arrived from Colombia, but I made a makeshift crib from a cardboard box I'd salvaged from the garbage.  In particular, our birth center was adamant that we have a carseat for the baby to go home once he was born (again, no consideration that people might walk or use the Metro).  This was good in the end, because we did end up getting a ride from a friend with a car after Paulo's birth.  Furthermore, until we got his crib shipped from Colombia last week, Paulo preferred sleeping in his carseat instead of my box-crib I'd made for him.  The birth center had also essentially insisted that we somehow magically have a car, which we don't.  I guaranteed them that we had a 24-hour taxi service on call, as well as multiple friends at the ready to drive us if need be.  They didn't like this, but I guess they didn't have much choice, unless they planned on buying a car for us!

Most important, and put off by me for the longest time, I put together a list for the birth day, with numbers to call in their respective order, an inventory of food and suitcases to bring, etc.  I made two copies, one for me to have on hand at all times, and one for Caro in the house.  With these last preparations, we were finally at ease, ready for Paulo to come along (and after the 39-week mark, we were really rooting for him to get moving already).  In fact, writing this blog post was the last thing I had pending before Paulo's birth.  I got some of it under my belt before he came along, but as you can see, it's been over a month before I could really finish writing.

As I mentioned above, though the birth center we worked with does at-home births, we opted to have Paulo at their center, since they have everything set up there (as opposed to our half-moved-in house).  This seemed like the most logical, easiest choice, but of course it implied having everything ready to grab and go at a moment's notice.  And though on the day of the birth, Caro was in fine condition to have gone to the center on the nearby Metro, the quantity of junk we were hauling demanded that we take a taxi.

Though I've always found it weird when people schedule their exact birth date, that's essentially what we did.  Our birth center's policy was that for women over 41 weeks pregnant, and over 35 years of age, they would refer the case to a hospital.  We didn't want that--didn't want the IV drips and the staph infections and the pathologization of a natural process, and certainly not the exorbitant, arbitrary prices a hospital would charge--so we were hoping that Paulo would decide to come before that point.  But by about midway through week 40, we were getting fidgety.  That week's routine checkup revealed that Caro was already fairly dilated.  Not enough to have the baby, but enough to tell us he'd be coming soon.  So they sent us home that evening to think about their options for induction.

The next day, October 30th, we called the on-duty midwife, and went into the center to get started on the birth.  They prescribed us cervidil, which is a hormone that promotes the birth process (I won't go into details on this or much else, since I don't intend for this to be a blog post about my wife's or anyone's anatomy!).  The birth center uses this vaginal insert as opposed to a oxytocin IV drip, simply because the latter requires equipment and monitoring that the birth center doesn't have capacity for, while the cervidil can be physically removed if its effects ever become too intense or it's no longer needed.  Anyway, I had to go to the pharmacy and buy the medicine.  Aside from this the birth center employs nipple stimulation (provided by Dad), and finally breaking the mothers' water, to speed along the birth process.

The childbirth was much more difficult than we'd experienced with Sammy, who popped out six hours after we'd gotten to the hospital, after barely an hour of hard contractions and just two real pushes.  In retrospect, I guess Paulo's birth was normal--ten hours of gradually-increasing contractions, quite a bit of pushing that didn't seem to get us anywhere, lots of waiting and pacing and pain.  But for Caro it seemed like a really complicated birth.  One comment she had was that the birth center was great for this birth, but if it were her first time and she were ignorant and uncertain about how things were supposed to go, she'd have wanted an authoritative doctor telling her what to do, instead of the excessive freedom of choice as to whether to push, what position, etc.  Towards the end, she told the midwife and me that she just wanted us to stop asking her questions about what she wanted.  The midwife really stepped up at that point, and saw that what was needed was for her to tell us what to do, and me to gently force Caro to do it!  In the end they broke Caro's water, and Paulo came out pretty immediately; who knows if this could have saved us hours of labor if they'd done it to begin with, or if those hours of labor had been effective at preparing Paulo to come out well?

Paulo was born just after midnight, thus making him a Halloween baby.  Sam had been born with a full moon on the winter solstice, while Paulo was born almost with the new moon, on the traditional festival of Samhain marking the symbolic start of long, cold winter nights.  So both our sons have good pedigrees in terms of pagan astronomy.

For this birth I was much more involved, helping Caro to brace herself and push, and cutting the baby's cord.  Most impressive for me was to see up close the baby's dusky, slimy head emerging from the womb.  I couldn't believe this little alien thing was our baby!  He looked really scrawny and skinny, but I guess that's because we're accustomed now to our big three-year-old.  In fact, Paulo was slightly bigger than Sam when he was born.

In terms of sustainability, I think our birth center birth was by far the best option.  Little waste, few drugs and chemicals, no ambulance or long-distance drives.  And cheap!  They gave us the standard $4500 package that covered prenatal visits, the birth itself, postnatal, everything (of course the first part of our prenatal care was in Colombia, so we didn't take advantage of the whole package here in he US, but everything was free in Colombia, so we didn't lose out on anything either).  Labwork cost a bit extra, but never the ridiculous prices a hospital would charge.  The birth assistant (a nurse that helps the midwife during the birth) cost $900 and usually isn't covered by insurance, who consider birth assistants as an unneeded luxury (which might be the case in a hospital, but certainly isn't true when it would otherwise just be you and the midwife in a room trying to juggle gauze, pads, scissors, flashlights, etc.).  Since we helped the labor along with the prostaglandin insert, we had to buy this for $330US.  Because my wife is over 35 years old, the birth center's new policy wanted us to do weekly sonograms for the last few weeks to check on the volume of amniotic fluid.  If it were in Colombia, where such sonograms cost $70US a pop, we might have done it, but the radiology place charged us $600 per sonogram, half of which was for a procedure we didn't need or ask for (the observation of blood flow in the umbilical cord).  So we ended up doing just one of these sonograms, and then putting off the follow-up, until we finally had Paulo!  Our insurance would have covered the sonograms, but we couldn't brook the idea of saddling our medical system with even more frivolous charges for something that was simply an institution's new procedural requirement and not a medical necessity.  At any rate, a healthy pregnancy and birth with top-notch medical attention for around $6000US, most of it covered by our insurance, is a pretty good deal.  Certainly a sight better than the arbitrary, exorbitant prices charged for most childbirths in the US.

The evening after Paulo was born, I was understandably tired as I went to pick up Sam from preschool.  It was Halloween, and I'd had grand plans of going trick-or-treating in our building with Sam, in addition to attending a building party the night prior.  We of course missed that party on the 30th, busy as we were giving life to a new child, and frankly the prospect of going door to door in dimly lit hallways didn't seem that appealing either.  The neighborhood we walk through to get to Sam's school is a typical high-income inner suburb.  Since the beginning of October, there had been lots of Halloween decorations on front lawns, many of them surprisingly gory.  Sam noticed these, and would sometimes say, "Look, a skeleton!" or, "That's a spider," without understanding the ritual context.  I wonder what he thought--maybe that some people simply decorate their houses with fake tombstones and severed limbs.  On her visit, my mom brought two Halloween picture books, made Halloween-themed cookies with Sam, and decorated a pumpkin with him, in addition to a pumpkin he'd decorated as a school project.  She even made a fruit-filled jack-o-lantern out of a hollowed-out orange skin.  Initially Sam was bemused and sort of lost as to what all these green women in black hats and skeletons meant, and at some point he got an idea that he should be scared.  And he was--Caro was a bit shocked and dismayed at the whole ritual fascination in the US with scary things and the occult, though at the same time she was fascinated to see Halloween as a genuine, autochtonous, complete cultural manifestation and not just the watered-down commercialism that has begun to arrive in other countries.

At any rate, in the course of October Sammy started to make the connection as to why the lawns were all decorated with skeletons and the like.  He would sometimes remark as he looked at Halloween decorations, "That's just like in the book that Grandma brought me."  So by Halloween night, though he didn't expect to do trick or treating, and in fact didn't want to wear the mapale AfroColombian outfit we'd repurposed from his June school presentation to be his Halloween costume, he knew that Halloween was a thing.  And he wasn't surprised when I decided that we would take advantage of our walk home to do trick-or-treating, though I did have to explain the concept to him some.  We asked his school for a spare shopping bag, and headed out into the balmy night.  There were many groups of kids about, most with parents but some of the older ones on their own.  Sammy got down pat saying "Trick or treat!", and even parts of "Give me something good to eat!"  We only went to a few houses, and Sammy isn't even that into candy, but I was really glad we got to partake in this fundamental US rite.  Indeed, I don't know if he'll get another chance to do so, since most of his childhood will likely be spent outside the States.

When we got back from our outing, we returned to a warm house, Grandma cooking a delicious meal, and a one-day-old baby.  This was the best treat we could have asked for on Halloween.

The covert campaign in Colombia

This is an in-depth, fascinating article about the US's clandestine role in Colombia's assault on the FARC leadership over the past decade or so.  It gives a general review of the course of the Colombian internal conflict in this century, and gives new information on the US's participation in the conflict.  I guess the FARC always assumed/knew that the US was involved in the precision airstrikes that have decimated their hierarchy, but this article confirms that involvement.  I hope it doesn't derail the ongoing peace talks in Havana.

Third World Green Daddy 54: The unsustainability of moving

                The past few months have convinced me that there is no good way to move, at least in terms of low environmental impact.  Moving is inherently a wasteful, unsustainable process.  Obviously the transport of people and goods over a long distance requires the burning of a lot of fossil fuels, but beyond this, it seems to me that the chaos and upheaval implicit in changing and reestablishing your home obligate you to waste a lot, to temporarily take on habits and ways of doing that are much less sustainable than what you would do in a more normal, stable life.

                First there’s the question of duplicates.  Because my family and I are moving from one continent to another, we have had to ship our household possessions from Colombia to the Washington, DC area.  This is a pricey undertaking—some $7000US or so, by my understanding, though luckily my company is covering this relocation cost.  I was proud that all of our furniture and other stuff from Colombia (minus the couch and some things we’ve left there so our Colombian house isn’t totally barren when we come back to visit) weighed only 1000 pounds.  It seemed like a lot of stuff to me, and filled up an entire half of our living room in Colombia.  But we were far under the 18000 pounds allowed us by my company.  I can’t imagine the amount of junk you’d have to accumulate to reach 18000 pounds! 

The shipping process is also slow.  Our stuff finally arrived at our new apartment in November, about two months after we came to the area.  Because we didn’t simply put ourselves in suspended animation for these two months, we’ve had to figure out a way to have some of the essentials while we waited for our Colombia furnishings to reach us.  We were lucky enough to stay at a friend’s furnished apartment in DC for the first week we were here, but once we moved to our new place, we had to start from scratch.  We did without some things for a while, sleeping on our blessedly soft, carpeted floor for two days before transitioning to a twin bed into which my wife, her pregnant belly, and myself had to squeeze together.  For a kitchen table we used a big empty box my mother had found in the alley behind her house in Chicago and used to send us some of my clothes.  And we’ve been operating with four plates and few pots for two months.

The redundancy comes in when you start to resolve these scarcities.  Even though we’ve got a bed coming our way from Colombia, we bought a twin stowaway bed for my wife and me (in addition to a twin daybed for Sam).  This wasn’t so wasteful, since eventually our new son Paulo will use that second bed.  We then bought a futon double bed for my mother’s visit, and another for ourselves.  We made it a point to buy things that weren’t exactly the same as what we already have in the shipment from Colombia—for instance, even when we have our real bed, the two futons will serve as sofas and guest beds, so they aren’t a total loss.  Likewise, the small folding table and chairs we eventually got for our kitchen will work nicely as lawn or patio or balcony furniture once our real dining set arrives.  Still, there are some things that we simply wouldn’t have bought if our stuff had arrived earlier, like the middling-quality pots and pans we got from TJMaxx, or new blankets and covers.  And whether redundant or not, buying all this stuff immediately upon arriving is stressful and implies a huge up-front cost that is certainly not what you are accustomed to nor look for when you are trying to live a low-consumption, sustainable lifestyle. The onset of winter, with its attendant wardrobe, implied yet another round of new purchases for our family from the mild highland tropics.

On top of this, the rush to live like human beings means that you have neither time nor inclination to bargain-hunt for these purchases.  At other times in my life when I’ve had to buy a lot of things for a big event (like when I got diapers and bottles prior to Sam’s birth), I’ve been judicious in combing Ebay, second-hand stores, and even alleys for the stuff we need.  When you have to find an apartment, get settled in, start a new job, be sensitive to the needs of your pregnant wife and toddler son, all while eating and sleeping and keeping warm as all human beings like to do, you don’t have time to bargain-hunt.  We bought everything new, trying to go to the cheapest possible places like Marshalls or a local discount mattress chain, but in retrospect I’ve seen a lot of things we could have gotten for cheaper if we’d had more time and leisure.  That said, it has been hard for me to find thrift stores at all in Washington, DC.  Of course I haven't done a rigorous combing of all the area's neighborhoods, but it certainly seems to me like second-hand stores are less common than in Chicago.  Maybe people here simply throw away their old clothes, or don't like the idea of buying used stuff.  Or maybe I just don't know where to look, at least not like I do in Chicago.

A big part of our buying has been on Amazon.com, somewhat to my dismay.  I have a few problems with Amazon.  First off, it represents the ultimate triumph of individual consumerism over interpersonal contact.  Where before you would go to one or various stores to get the things you need, and interact with the people working in each place, now with Amazon you can order, pay, and receive your goods, without any human interaction.  Granted, it’s not like Amazon directly put small mom-and-pop stores out of business or undercut our contact with other human beings; the big chains did that long before Amazon, starting with the Sears and Roebuck catalog and culminating with Walmart and Costco.  But Amazon represents another step in that progression, and if they ever do get off the ground their plans for drone-baseddeliveries, they might even end up putting out of business the US Postal Service (or at least its workers) that the company has bolstered for the past decade or two. 

Perhaps more important than this first misgiving of mine with Amazon is what its business model implies for workers in the US and elsewhere.  Like a high-tech Walmart on steroids, Amazon relies on a cheap, precarious, desperate workforce to staff its operation.  As more and more of our workforce is occupied in such jobs, how will we maintain a more or less prosperous, stable country?  Who will be earning enough, or have enough rights, to maintain a generally decent standard of living in the aggregate?  Both a thriving economy and a robust democracy depend on a certain critical mass of people living with dignity, so if enough of the population is working these menial jobs with no chance of advancement or stability, the whole dream of development and prosperity falls apart, both in the States and the rest of the world.

Luckily, we're pretty well settled in by now.  We've got our house furnished, we've established a certain routine of day to day life, and we're even coming to enjoy many aspects of our new life Stateside.  I hope that after this first rush of buying a bunch of stuff, we will wean ourselves away from Amazon.com and new purchases in general.  

One advantage of our two months living austerely was that we were brought together as a family in new ways.  Our daily routine centered around time with our kids, eating together, bathing them, putting them to bed, taking Sam to school.  Sam was forced to explore new ways of playing with the same few toys, and used his imagination to make kitchens and castles out of spare packing boxes.  It was sometimes tiresome to read the same few books multiple times for Sam's bedtime (chief among them the "C" volume of a Sesame Street encyclopedia from the 1970s), but it allowed us to discover new subtleties, new details in these books.  In short, having fewer things made us be more resourceful and appreciative in our use of them.  Now we've got more books, more toys, more furniture.  But I'd like to think that we've taken to heart our time of living sparely, and that we won't take for granted our big, firm mattress, or stop appreciating the creative play opportunities represented by a cardboard box.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here? from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.


This is a documentary called "What are we doing here?"  It is an amateurish effort in many ways, such as the filmmakers' being wary of Rwanda as a dangerous place 20 years after the genocide, or not knowing that Somaliland existed.  I often found myself wondering why they saw fit to make a documentary about development aid in Africa despite having apparently done very little research and knowing very little about the subject beforehand.  I mean, plenty has been said already about the errors in development work, or the problems facing Africa, or the hope, or the hopelessness, or whatever other angle you could possibly think of regarding development, aid, and Africa (Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, for example, follows the same Cairo to Cape Town route these filmmakers took, and his analysis is much more nuanced and thoughtful than theirs, albeit a bit snotty and cynical, as seems to be Theroux's wont). The film is also full of cliches like lots of images of flies landing on sickly kids, or having a circle of smiling AIDS orphans singing piercing African harmonies, or the outsider filmmaker breaking down and crying, overwhelmed with all of Africa's problems.  Also, the analysis of development aid as being largely ineffectual, done with little local consultation, and especially the stereotype of most African governments' depending on aid for a large part of their budget, is not very up to date as far as I know.  As I've documented in prior posts about the rapid economic development in many African countries, the image of Africa as a perennial basketcase continent is simply not accurate in 2012.  I guess when you rely on a handful of interviews with local NGO workers, and assume that their knowledge, interpretations, and priorities match those of their country as a whole, then it is very possible you get an outdated, narrow picture of the development context.  This is especially the case when you as a director bring very little prior knowledge to the film project.  Finally, I am not happy about the constant underlying tone that often subtly implies that aid recipients are on the whole manipulative or lazy.

All that said, it is a decent overview of some of the challenges, ambiguities, and conundrums surrounding the practice of development aid in Africa and elsewhere.  And perhaps the amateurism of the filmmakers even has a positive side.  Most people don't read extensively on the nuances and debates within the field of international development, and are in effect largely ignorant on the subject, so maybe the filmmakers bring the complexities of international development to the level of a general public without prior knowledge on the subject.  If you have a spare hour or two, you might want to check out "What are we doing here?"

Bill Moyers with Wendell Berry

Here is a great interview of Wendell Berry by Bill Moyers.  They hit on all the topics of modern decay and agrarian hope that Berry has long pontificated on.  If you have read much by him, this interview won't show you anything new, though it is impressive to hear him talking in the flesh after reading so much of his voice on the page. 

Amish allergies

I have written before about the new findings on the complexities of our interactions with microbes in and around our bodies.  Here is another article for the same file, about the apparent links between exposure to a rich microbial environment, such as that found on working Amish farms, and the virtual non-existence of allergies seen in agrarian peoples.  This is especially interesting for me, who on the one hand have terrible allergies and on the other work with farms (where my allergies tend to be blessedly absent), especially as we begin to raise our sons, one newborn, in a highrise of synthetic carpet and canned air.  Our new living environment is drastically different from the old buildings, mud plaster, and frequent farm trips into which my first son (who shows no signs of allergies) was born, and I hope it doesn't negatively impact our little Paulo.

Heads up on African inequality

I have written in the past about the continuing poverty in many countries that are growing economically and looking generally glittery on the macro-scale.  Here is another contribution to that effect, reminding us that the majority of Africans are not necessarily taking much part in the economic bonanza that their respective countries are undergoing.

Food waste and breakfast

Here is an article about food waste in the US and the world.  It doesn't say anything groundbreaking or new to those of us who work in the area of food and farming, but it's a good summary for people who don't know much about the magnitude of food waste today.

On a lighter note, here is a photo essay showing different typical breakfasts from different countries in the world.  The focus is mainly on wealthier countries, but it gives some idea of the diversity that's out there in the world's diets.

Third World Green Daddy 53: Learning culture

In the first few weeks here in Washington, DC, I have noticed that Sam is at a key moment in his cultural formation.  Being in the US is a clear change for him, and he is conscious that things are different now.  From the moment we arrived in DC, he identified the apartment buildings he saw out the car window as belonging to “Grandma Bonnie’s house”, which is what he calls Chicago.  Something about the street layout, the architectural style, spoke to him of a clear identity in the US, clearly different from Colombia.  Not only Sam’s age (almost 3), but also the hectic changes we've imposed on him over the past few months surely predispose him to major new developments in his acculturation.  At the same time, perhaps the juxtaposition of Sam with so many contrasting environments and cultures makes me more aware of his learning and transitions at this particular moment.  Namely, Sam is coming into contact with new aspects of violence, television, gender, language, and race. 
I think Sam has a healthy aversion to violence, but given that both Colombian and US cultures at large are so violent, my son is often at an apparent disadvantage.  The month he was away from Colombia this summer, plus the two weeks of the agrarian strike once he got back, made for a long time when Sam wasn't going to preschool.  When he finally resumed contact with his preschool peers, he became a bit more aggressive than he had been in the intervening weeks.  I assume the preschool jungle requires a more assertive stance on your personal space and your stuff, since you're with a bunch of other kids trying to clamor for everything.  This was especially the case in his preschool in our small town, which was much less sweet and flowery than the alternative, progressive preschool he’d gone to in Bogota.  
We thought his newfound aggression was normal, and somewhat welcome, since we don't want him getting pushed around.  That said, when we first returned to Colombia this summer, Sam came back a few days from school with scratches on his face.  Apparently his friend Daniel had had a naughty stretch, and indeed, even after he and Sam had made up, for a while we would pick up Sammy in the evening and always see Daniel sitting in a corner, being punished for some transgression or another.  Also, for a few weeks in his Colombian preschool, Sam would always report at the end of the day on who was hitting whom that day.  We would ask him how his day went, or what he did, and he’d limit himself to something like, “Aureliano hit Maria Paula”.  I think in our small town in Colombia the kids were pretty aggressive with each other, and Sam really honed in on that. 
We tell Sam that if someone hits him, he should tell them not to, and if they persist, he should hit back.  But his teacher in Colombia doesn't have much hope for this approach from Sam.  She says he's too calm and "noble" to hit the other kids.  This makes me worry a bit, but I take heart in that Sam is physically bigger than most of his classmates, so I don't think they'll do him harm.  And his equally laid-back cousin Manu says that he himself was the same way as a kid until one day, when he got tired of kids hitting him, he hit one back hard, and never had problems thereafter!
On the other hand, when we first arrived in DC, it was a new context in terms of aggression and force.  In the bourgeois neighborhood we arrived to, Sam was often the more aggressive kid on the playground, pushing others out of the way on the slide or whatever.  At the same time, Caro noticed that kids from certain cultures on the playground, and certain ages of kids, seemed to be more aggressive than others, or simply less aware of the other kids around them.  I posited that especially in lower-income groups in the US, childrearing tends to be more harsh, and so kids in turn are more aggressive with each other.  I think in the US in general, and especially among people and social groups that have a history of economic and social hardship, there is an idea that life is hard, and parents must prepare their kids to do battle with the world and not be crushed by it.  I have seen such an attitude among the Western whites of my family and their neighbors, in many black communities in Chicago, and also in certain Latinos in the US—all groups that either are or have historically been poor and marginalized.  Even among middle class people of all stripes in the US, it does seem to me that childrearing is harsher and more focused on building self-reliance than happens in other countries I’ve lived in.
We try to make sure that Sam doesn’t bully or isn’t mean to anyone else, though again, I think it’s normal for kids to be aggressive with each other as they learn to negotiate shared spaces.  On the other hand, we have a zero-tolerance policy for representations of killing.  We don’t do toy guns, and the one or two times when he’s been playing with a cousin and they’ve started simulating guns, we’ve clamped down hard.  I’ve heard people say that it’s impossible to keep little boys from playing at guns, that if you take away their toy guns they’ll use sticks or their fingers.  This has not been our experience; Sam has no natural impulse to play at guns.  I’m pretty sure the main difference between him and other gun-inclined boys is that he doesn’t watch much TV, and certainly none of the gun-happy violent drivel that dominates commercial TV and film.  In fact, I’ve recently been more sensitive to how prevalent firearms are in our popular culture.  Actors like Denzel Washington or Mark Wahlberg, both of whom should know better given their inner-city upbringing, seem to think that the most productive use of their acting skills is peddling gun glamour and murder in film after film, script after thin, poorly-developed script.  And it’s not just them.  Even more progressive, “thinking-man’s actors” like Sean Penn or Matt Damon or Jake Gyllenhaal, seem unable to get away from the lure of gun-happy crap culture (or the money they can earn from contributing movies to said culture).
To this end we also made a drastic gesture shortly before leaving Colombia.  Sam had been pestering his sister for weeks about getting a brown car (he is obsessed with cars which, though they’re not climate-friendly, we tolerate as less inherently harmful than guns).  One day when he and Gabri were in our Bogota neighborhood’s local general store getting some paper, he pointed out a brown toy car that they had for sale there.  Gabri was in a rush, so she just got him the car for a dollar or something.  When they got home, she saw it was a military armored vehicle, with a machine gun mounted on the front, two small SAMs on the back, and machine guns on either side.  She was very apologetic to me, and not just for my sake, because she shares our stance against toy guns.  Anyway, I decided to neuter the car, and Sammy and I made a fun activity out of it.  The rear missiles came off easily, but the machine guns we had to cut off with a scissors, working slowly through the thick plastic.  When we were done, we had a gun-free car, and there was a hole in the hood that Sammy could put other toys to ride in.  Problem solved!
When I was a kid, growing up surrounded by the gun-obsessed popular culture of the US, it seemed silly to me when a friend’s mother confiscated the Nintendo zapper because she didn’t want guns in the house.  But now my stance has obviously changed, and I think even gun enthusiasts would agree with me.  Many people say a firearm is simply a tool; I am not entirely convinced by this argument, because it is not a tool like any other.  A gun is a tool specifically designed to kill.  In this sense, it is not something to be toyed with, as you might give your child a toy hammer or screwdriver so they can get accustomed to using it.  My son has seen plenty of real guns in his life, held by military personnel or police, and when he’s a bit older, I intend for him to learn how to use a firearm safely and correctly.  But I want him to know very clearly the difference between real guns and the irresponsible fiction portrayed by popular culture.
Speaking of popular culture, TV and movies are another thing that Sammy has been increasingly exposed to.  We’ve never had a TV in our house, but starting this summer he has been seeing occasional things on our computer.  We’ve settled into a nice routine now in our new house near Washington, DC, whereby he only watches on weekends, when he doesn’t have school.  Even then we limit it to two shows after lunch.  One of them is invariably a short movie called the Mickey Mouse Road Rally, which he saw this summer in Chicago and has been his favorite ever since then.  The show is pretty devoid of any real educational or otherwise edifying content; it’s mainly about fuzzy notions of having fun and friendship, which consists mainly in not rocking the boat or doing anything different from the group.  But it seems to me socially innocuous at worst.  There are no overtly violent or destructive messages, though it is full of incessant repetition of certain phrases that are clearly branding a high regard for Mickey Mouse and Disney in the viewer.  Most of these repeated phrases are silly word alterations plugging in “mouse” in other, longer words or making magic words involving “mouse”, though the characters also occasionally call on a magic creature called Tootles.  Sam’s Hispano-toddler accent renders “Oh Tootles!” as “Achurus!” and I never understood what he was saying until I actually saw the Mickey Mouse Road Rally for myself.  The program is also full of poorly-written, sixties-ad-jingle-type songs that are probably preparing viewers for a life of avid, unthinking consumerism.  At any rate, since Sam doesn’t have much exposure to ads or other commercial TV, Mickey’s proto-consumerist message seems to fall on deaf ears.
I see the effect of Sam’s not watching TV in his consumption habits.  His teachers always marvel at how he actually listens to what others say, and I attribute this mainly to his not being exposed to TV.  Sam doesn’t have much use for sugary cereal; if he’s ever confronted with it, he tries it and enjoys it, but doesn’t feel a pressing, addictive need for it.  Characters like Toucan Sam or the AFLAC duck or Spongebob Squarepants are just funny-looking animals to him.  They don’t inspire confidence or the urge to acquire whatever they’re pitching.  Even characters from movies he’s seen are just characters.  If he sees a toy or an ad with the Monsters Inc. crew (or any other remotely similar monster), he’ll say, “We saw that movie”, and that’s about it.  He likes Buzz Lightyear and Mickey Mouse, but he only knows them from their movies, without all the marketing tie-ins.  I don’t want to be complacent, because Sam’s increasing recognition and identification with these characters is what immoral marketers build on to peddle their wares, but at least up to now we’ve kept at bay the advertising onslaught.
I mentioned that Sam’s favorite Mickey Mouse show is pretty devoid of intellectual content.  We let him watch it (over and over again), though for the most part we try to select only movies or shows that are well done in terms of plot and values.  We like the old Disney programs based on fairy tales and folk tales (Peter and the Wolf, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.), we like Sesame Street (especially the old episodes available on Netflix, which remind of a lot of things from my own youth), and occasional Disney movies.  We stay away from TV series other than Sesame Street, and generally anything that holds him rapt and unresponsive while he’s watching it, but then unable to say what exactly the show was about afterwards.  During Sesame Street or even the Mickey Mouse Road Rally, he does respond to questions the characters ask, and he interacts with us when we ask him what’s going on onscreen.
We have nixed this one stupid show about anthropomorphic trucks, where a “kid” dump truck named Chuck and his friends basically serve as an excuse for a computer animator to get his rocks off.  I mean, the plot is thin, the only educational content is a few de rigueur lessons about friendship and getting along, and the only strong point is the animation.  The program seems more like there were a bunch of animators who thought it would be pretty easy to put together some images of talking trucks, and then tried to peg on a plot and some seemingly kid-friendly content in order to get it on the air.  Sam loves the show, but we’ve pushed it out of the rotation.
Another awful show is Curious George.  In it, George is less curious than naughty and immoral, and most of the episodes focus on his being disobedient and then trying to cover it up.  We have gradually decided to nix this one, as well, and stick to the classic Curious George text that my cousin gave Sam some years ago.  Even the original book is sort of sociopathic.  George’s “friend” is a man who captures and kidnaps him, presumably to sell off to a zoo, and George at one point smokes a pipe.  Sam loves this book though, and lately he alternately self-identifies as either Curious George (in cat and dog iterations as well) or Mickey Mouse (often in a monkey form).
So TV and movies are now on Sam’s menu and his radar.  We try to limit the damage they do to his brain, but they are still in my eyes pretty clearly detrimental, in however small a way.  When Sam was out of school for a few weeks, he often wanted to watch TV; when he is in this mode, he doesn’t want to go outside or do other things, and he makes a big fuss when we turn the TV off.  Now that we’ve cut way down again on TV-watching, he seems to have a more balanced, less addictive relationship to it, but the danger of TV addiction is always out there, lurking, especially in our new temporary home in the US.  When a teacher recently commented on what a good, observant, thoughtful boy Sam is, we told her that it was likely because he didn’t watch TV.  She looked at us like we were crazy.  You know you’re hooked on something when you notice the positive effects of its absence, but you still aren’t able to fathom the idea of living without it!
Sam appears not yet to have internalized our society’s typical gender roles either, or even basic biological differences between men and women.  Though most of his toys are cars, and he does very boy-like things with them (engine noises, crashes, etc.), he also exhibits a more tender, nurturing side that you usually see in girls’ play.  He often plays house or school with his cars.  They line up and listen to a teacher car, or one car is friends with another or gets in an argument with the other one.  At night Sam tucks his cars under the covers so they can sleep, either in their box or in the bed with him.  Often he’ll say that each car is either a member of a family (Mommy, Daddy, etc.), or that riding in each car is a different member of Sam’s family.  Cars are sometimes Ernie and Bert, or Mickey Mouse, or a cat version of Curious George. 
In short, since Sam doesn’t really have many dolls, he plays dolls with his cars.  One time when he was just beginning to string words together into phrases, he had a line of cars on either side of a big bus, with their hoods just under the bus’s sides.  He explained that the bus was the mother, and the cars were nursing, as he’d seen cats and dogs and pigs do many times at the farm.  Sometimes his play pushes gender roles even further, as when he carries a car or a ball under his shirt and says he has a baby in his tummy.  As Sam explores humor and irony, he’ll even jokingly say that his mother has a penis, or that he doesn’t have a penis.  I don’t think this is indicative of any transgender identity on his part, but rather that he is starting to become aware of the differences between males and females, both physically endowed and socially created, and is playing with and challenging them.  In the same way he sometimes says things that he knows are wrong, like pointing to a blue horse and saying it’s a red sheep.  One day Sam went through a whole picture encyclopedia and say that every picture was of an astronaut, whether they were really chimpanzees or dentists or dinosaurs.
Another cultural aspect that Sammy is learning and mastering is language.  For over a year now he has understood a large and increasing amount of what we say in both English and Spanish, until arriving at total comprehension perhaps earlier this year if not before.  Sam has also said lone words in both languages since he was maybe one year old.  But only since this summer has he really started to string together entire phrases, and he is getting increasingly adept at it.  Though most of his first individual words were English monosyllables (“ball” and “car” as opposed to “pelota” and “carro”), Spanish has always been his more natural tongue, first in understanding and now in arming sentences together.  This is normal, since he’s spent most of his life in Colombia, where I’m the only one who speaks to him in English, and even that was limited when we were living apart.  Anyway, now that he’s in an English-speaking school, in an English-speaking city, and spending a lot of time with me, Sam has gotten better and better at talking in English.  His first milestone this summer was consistently responding “yup” instead of “si” for the affirmative when I ask him something in English (we are now trying to transition this “yup” to “yes sir” and “yes ma’am”).  Next he started parroting certain words in both languages as Caro and I would be talking to one another or with other people.  When we got to the DC area Sam began really watching me intently if I was speaking or singing in English.  He would fixate on my mouth and how it moved.  Now he still initially says most things in Spanish, but if I sound out the words a few at a time, he repeats after me in English, and at times I can even just ask him how to say something in English, and he’ll do it.  For a while I was worried that he would have a Latino accent when he spoke in English, but that fear has been assuaged as he expertly pronounces things like “doggie” and “that”, complete with nasal Chicago “a” sound.  He even says “white” with my exaggerated aspirated “wh” sound.  Now that he’s more comfortable in English, he sometimes mixes up the two languages, saying things like, “I want lanzar the doggie su pelota,” which is precisely what we’ve tried to avoid by having me speak exclusively in English and Caro only in Spanish, but he recognizes his errors when we call him out on it.
At this point Sam is not only flourishing in his two native languages, but I think he shares with me my enjoyment of the very process of language learning.  I don’t intend for him to be some wunderkind polyglot, but somehow as we were practicing counting in English and Spanish, we also incorporated the numbers in French and German, and from there he wanted to learn other words like “dog” and “car” and different types of food in those languages.  He has a lot of fun with it, with learning new words and sounds.  We have even taught him the Marseillaise, which he loves to march around and sing.  I think the Colombian national anthem is catchy enough for him to learn, too, though the Star-Spangled Banner is going to be a tough sell.
One last development on Sam’s cultural front is his exposure to race in the US.  Colombia is a pretty multicultural place, though our particular geographical region doesn’t have many black Colombians living there.  At any rate, Sam’s first forays into the playground in the central DC neighborhood we initially stayed in brought him into contact with kids from all sorts of different cultural and racial backgrounds.  This coexistence all in the same place is rare in Colombia, and I thought that I noticed Sam to be quite interested in all the different colors and ages of the kids surrounding him.  Now we have settled in Arlington, Virginia, which seems to be fairly ethnically diverse, though distinctively less black than Washington, DC proper.  In Sam’s preschool there are both Anglo kids and lots of Latinos of different national origins and colors, but there are very few if any Afro-descended kids.  I don’t particularly like living in an area where one ethnic group is absent or excluded, and I certainly don’t want Sam to grow up thinking that white neighborhoods are normal, and black folks are somehow a novelty. 
Sam doesn’t seem to be particularly conscious of race as such.  I don’t know if it’s because of the relatively fluid and inclusive definitions of race in Colombia, or what.  More than in other countries in Latin America, I really feel that race is not that set in stone in Colombia, nor does it serve as a major basis for discrimination.  It’s not that people are more open-minded or anything; it’s just that social class, the rural/urban divide, and a number of other factors serve to channel people’s discrimination, hatred, and even armed conflict.  It’s hard to set up rigid race categories when everyone is a mix of a bit of everything.  Sam’s family in Colombia has people of many different colors, some with more African-looking facial features, some more European-looking, and some that look more like indigenous Americans, and this is typical of many families.  In our books and with his dolls, he sometimes identifies himself or his family with black characters, sometimes with white, sometimes with yellow or pinkish-red.  Nevertheless, I’m not naïve enough to think that Sam doesn’t notice race, or at least that he won’t after a while here in the US.  I don’t intend to raise him blissfully “color-blind”, especially because in his life as a multiracial, multi-ethnic kid, he is sure sometimes to be the butt of racial animosity, and sometimes to benefit from or even promote the racism that hurts or marginalizes other people.  It reminds me of an article Iread about how to talk to your white kids about race.
As I marvel at and interpret Sam’s evolution as a cultural being, I also see Caro’s observation of her son’s acclimation to US culture.  She has been tickled by Sam’s daily enjoyment of the bathtub, a standard feature in most US bathrooms that is practically unheard-of elsewhere.  My wife has even put up a facebook album showing Sam doing new, typical US things like putting together mail-order furniture with his dad and making cookies with his Grandma.  At the same time, Caro is blessedly tolerant of my own attempts to immerse myself in this, my native yet new culture.  I have spent long hours reading up on hunting regulations and requirements so I can finally hunt a deer after a lifetime of seeing my cousins do so without myself participating.  I have harvested apples and walnuts from street trees, and checked the internet to see how to process the nuts.  I am reading up on dumpster diving and scouting out promising stores to scavenge behind.  In short, I am trying to catch up on or try for the first time any number of cultural tendencies (mainly related of course to my passion for living off the land) that I have been cut off from after years living abroad.  Culture is something you pursue actively, whether you know it or not.  Sam and I are perhaps more conscious of this pursuit right now, [re]discovering as we are a cultural milieu that is at once alien and a visceral part of who we are.