Hàng Ngày

It has been raining a lot in Long Xuyen this week. The rainy season in southern Vietnam is typically from June or July through October. Rain in December is usually only a palm’s worth of accumulated dabbles in the afternoon from time to time. Since I arrived in Long Xuyen on Christmas Day it has rained every evening as well as many early mornings. I awoke at four this morning to the pounding of heavy droplets on the roof me and the pounding didn’t subside until nearly seven.

The weather is certainly atypical and everyone is talking about the peculiarity of this week. For me the peculiar feeling extends beyond to the weather as each time I return to this place I used to call home I expect to feel a sense of sentimental attachment, a torrent of memories, and an overwhelming nostalgia. But this time I feel…

I remember reading a word on my friend’s blog a few years ago: “vô cảm.” It was the last line of a poem he had written about his feelings when visiting a particularly Romantic place and when we discussed the poem he explained that this word (not in my dictionary) was actually combination of two particles: “vô” and “cảm.”

The Vietnamese language contains many of these pasted-together words and he told me that “vô” means “without” and of course that cảm was the first syllable of the word “cảm thấy” which means “to feel” and “cảm giác” which means “sensation.”

“Vô cảm,” then, means that someone is without feeling, without sensation. I sat for a moment thinking about this and he went on to say that upon reading this last line of his poem, many friends and family members had posted comments asking “What’s wrong?” They assumed that “vô cảm” meant that he was sad.

But “vô cảm” is not that at all, quite the opposite, he continued. It means just what it says, without feeling, and nothing more. There was no negative connotation implied with this word. He was simply a poet digging deeply into the recesses of his mind for the perfect words to describe his emotions and finding that in fact there were no emotions to describe.

It has been nearly one year since I waved goodbye to my students and friends with tears in my eyes. Many things in Long Xuyen have changed. Several friends have gotten married. Several former students have received scholarships to study abroad. Several former colleagues have been promoted in the university…I am vô cảm.

Many things are still the same, such as the woman who sells vegetables at the market, the guy who fixes bike tires on Võ Thị Sáu street, the little coffee shop across from the university with 3,000 VND iced coffee…I am vô cảm.

The closest I came to feeling any pressure from the chisels of memory chipping away at the icy shell of my heart occurred on a bike ride. My favorite bike ride (see former posts) is a narrow dirt track that runs behind the university’s new campus. It is flanked by rice paddies along the left side with occasional tufts of coconut trees shading the low wooden houses, and on the right side a deep canal carries silt from the fields to the Hậu River.

My mind often wanders on this ride as my eyes accordingly wander across the landscape and a few days ago while riding along the dirt track I thought to myself, “When they pave this road, maybe that will be my signal.” Signal for what, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe that it is time for me to leave Long Xuyen. I think that must have been it.

Not more than two minutes later I rounded a bend to see a large blue backhoe digging away at my sacred dirt path. I lowered my head to avoid stares as I dragged my bike past the machine and when I passed I noticed that my dirt track was the width of a typical country road and had been recently flattened by a steam roller. I pushed a gulp of tears down my throat to my stomach, a painful swallow.

But other than that, my visit to this, my home for two years, has been pleasant, productive, but decisively…vô cảm.

One of the things I learned about when living in rural Vietnam was a little about the theory and practice of asset-based community development. My friend Jenna was one of the first to introduce this concept to me, as she had been privileged to participate in several field visits with the Department of Integrated Rural Development of An Giang University. I learned more when I taught at the Resource Center for Community Development during my second year in Long Xuyen. Since returning from Vietnam I have been doing a lot of my own research about the field and practices of community development and have tried to integrate it into some of my programs and trainings.

Asset Based Community Development is a method and a framework for community building. In their book Asset Building and Community Development, Gary Paul Green and Anna Haines define community development as “a planned effort to build assets that increase the capacity of residents to improve their quality of life.”(xi) This may sound simple but if you look at a lot of community development projects you see that it is not actually common practice. Often the mentality is “This community has a problem,” (such as soaring rates of drug addiction). “Let’s assess their needs and see what kinds of services we need o bring in or how to get people out.” With ABCD on the other hand, the Practitioner” (social worker, politician, local parent, etc.) seeks to assess the assets, talents, skills, and dreams of the individuals, organizations, and institutions in the community and make connections that will change society in a way that increases everyone’s satisfaction and ability. Sounds pretty cool, right? OK, I think it sounds cool.

Back in May I found an interesting article entitled, “Reflections on the Catalytic Role of an Outsider in ABCD,” by Terry Bergdall. Having done work in Africa and Asia, Dr. Bergdall has much to say about the affect that foreigners and foreign development organizations have had on developing countries. How can an outsider be useful in the process of ABCD? Isn’t it based on the idea of the community looking within to find strengths and solutions? Yes, of course. But as the title of the article suggests, outsiders also have a role to play: the part of a facilitator, not with total objectivity, but with the ability to ask questions that the insiders might never think to ask. Questions that perhaps help people to define their own goals and strengths in ways they wouldn’t normally articulate out loud.

So what? I could talk about the subject of community building for hours. Last Sunday I did just that with one of my best friends from college over a cup of coffee in a quaint West Village brunch establishment. She was hungover and I was already accepting the reality that I do not in fact live in New York, despite the fact that it feels more like home than SF in many ways. Despite this we had one of the most personally inspiring conversations I have had in a long time which basically consisted of her drawing out of me the above information and more and the fact that this is the kind of work I want to devote my life to…

Wait, what? Did I know that already? Maybe in some form. But as we walked out of the cozy restaurant onto the cold drizzly streets of New York thoughts and images of my future began flying through my head with much clearer definition than before and I started thinking about what I could do in the next day, the next year, and the next ten years to feed this passion.

I talked to another friend tonight who told me that after our brief visit several weeks ago a sense of calm came over him. The calm, he said, came from the sense that he had a clearer vision of what makes him passionate in life (in this case understanding humanity through the lens of Arabic and Islamic literature and thought) The realization was not directly related to my visit, but again something that he had known about himself for some time without really defining or accepting it. Accepting it and thinking about how to feed that passion, both now and into the future, was somehow liberating for him. The catalyst strikes again.

What was the point of this? Well, this is one of the ways that I can improve my knowledge and experience of community and relationship building in the simplest way: trying to be the catalyst in personal and professional relationships, analyzing how it happens and honing my ability to understand how to identify and draw out the strengths and passions of many different kinds of people.

I’m going to stop now because my right hand is injured and my left hand is getting really tired of doing all the typing on its own. Sigh.

The crisp air draws my breath out of my lungs as I jump down from the van and the frosted grass sinks slightly under the weight of my feet. The gravestones stretch out before me, a mish-mash of squared, rounded and beveled edges popping out of the ground in an orderly pattern.

I am holding a small oak twig with a few browned and dried leaves hanging from its fingers. A slight breeze sneaks through the buttons in my jacket and kisses my stomach causing a brief shiver to pass from my lower back up through my neck. I shrug my shoulders back and begin making my way across the grass, following my memory back to May, to the sun breaking through the shallow rain clouds and my high heels puncturing the soft earth. The tears pressed against the backs of my eyes and my lungs tensed with the shortness of breath that only comes with life moments you know you will never forget.

I weave a path through the aged stones noticing the smoothness of each of them. Some are rough with the recent cut of the gravestone artisans, while others are worn with decades, some nearly a century, of rain, snow, sleet, and family tears. I approach the spot, and turn to my father who is also holding twigs from the oak tree in front of his childhood home.

My chest is tense again with the expectation of the emotions that may explode upon this moment. But as we approach the small stone laid flat upon the ground; as I look to the trees lining the low wrought iron fence of the cemetery; as the flaming tentacles of the setting sun shadowed by the bluish gray passing clouds fan out on the horizon, I feel an unexpected calm. A nothingness. A numbness; no loss of breath.

It has been six months since I stood on this spot and let a few scant tears drip from my eyes and fall to the earth on top of this freshly dug dirt. Six months since I tossed a few pieces of broken pottery that had been worn by the waves of the Gulf of Thailand, into the small square hole. The borders of the grave are still visible, despite the attempt to resod the hole that was dug for my grandmother’s ashes earlier this year.

I can still see her, the last time, sitting in her pale yellow armchair, the lamplight thrown across her face casting shadows on her right side while her left remains ensconced in the shadows of the blinds on the window. My father is talking and my brother is looking at him listening and I am not listening because I am only looking at her, looking at her face and her eyes as she drifts in and out of consciousness and her head rolls from side to side as she mutters inaudibly to someone who is not in the room. She opens her eyes and speaks with no sound to my father, looking with sudden animation at his eyes and he smiles at her, his eyes heavier than hers because he knows that this is the last time, the last time they will share this room, the last time they will share this gaze, the last time they will exchange words, or a lack of words.

We lay the oak branches on the ground in a neat pile and I stick the end of mine into the soft ground with a chuckle. I can tell by his tone of voice that my father doesn’t find it funny but he forgives me in my attempt to wash the moment with humor. I pull the twig out of the ground and lay it with the others. I say no prayers. I remember her sitting in that yellow chair in her old house while I played on the golden shaggy carpet with a set of blocks and miscellaneous plastic toys left from generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

As we walk away I look up to my left to see the sun’s fiery tentacles spreading across the sky, becoming brighter as the sun falls on the horizon and the edges of the blue clouds become more defined with the contrast.

“It’s good to remember sometimes.”

I don’t look at my father’s face but instead continue to stare into the falling sun, the colors becoming more vibrant, spreading from gold to pink and a deep purple that is cut into tiny puzzle pieces by the leafless branches of the trees. We walk through the cold, out of the low wrought-iron gates and I can say nothing, can feel nothing but the mesmerizing glare of the sun’s fingers creeping across the skyline, dripping into the darkness.

On Wednesday October 29th Geoff and I decided we had to get out of Damascus. Damascus is an interesting combination of old city and new city:

OK, it was mostly me who decided we needed to get out of Damascus, and the decision had been made well before Wednesday. In any case, Wednesday night we made a plan to travel to Aleppo (known by Syrians as “Haleb”) in the northern part of the country, stopping along the way at various other towns and attractions.

We headed out to the bus station in the early morning and arrived just in time to catch a bus to Homs in central Syria. I was initially impressed with the Syrian buses (if you want to know why I say initially impressed, keep reading…) The trip is only 2 hours long, but the bus is a large, air-conditioned tourbus with comfortable seats and a “bus attendant” serving tap water in little dixie cups. Cute.

We arrived in Homs around 11 and started asking around for a cervice (van-bus) to Krak des Chevaliers or Qal’at al-Ḥiṣn, a crusader-era castle about 60 km from Homs. We were told by a few taxi drivers that there were no cervices that day because it was Thursday (the Muslim Friday, the day before the weekend begins). We sure didn’t see any around so we let these cab drivers convince us that we should take a cab to the castle. It was actually really cheap, so we agreed and five minutes later were speeding down the superhighway towards the sea, the mountains of Lebanon rising out the lefthand  window of the car.

The castle was pretty awesome. Here’s Geoff carefully scooting along the castle wall.

In the cab Geoff had talked to the driver about taking us to Hama, another central town famous for giant water wheels and a good mid-point to hop another bus to Haleb. However, as we walked around the castle and Geoff began to relax and realize how much he had needed to escape Damascus, he told me about the Syrian coast which was only another 60 km away. Why not go? we said. So we got back in the cab and asked the driver to take us to Tartus.

We arrived in Tartus around 3 pm and spent an hour or so walking along the gritty boardwalk, watching the fishermen and soaking in the Mediterranean breeze. The harbor was an interesting combination of old and new, industrial and natural.

We started getting a bit tired and realized that we still had quite a ways to Haleb so we found the bus station and asked about tickets. Yikes, the next bus wasn’t until 7:30. That wasn’t going to work so we bought tickets to Lattakia, another city along the coast known for its open atmosphere and beach-seeking tourists.

We arrived in Lattakia at about 6 pm, just in time to catch the last bus to Haleb. There was some issue with us being Americans and we were called into a room with a few cops to ask us questions about our travel purposes. I could NOT have made this trip on my own. Geoff’s Arabic, thankfully, was fluent enough to answer these questions smoothly and we boarded the nearly full bus and took our seats in the back. The “bus attendant” came back to us and started talking to Geoff and motioning to me, and before I knew it I was sitting in the front row next to some random woman. “You’re going to sit with the girls,” Geoff told me. As the sun set over the sea, our bus pulled out of the station.

Twenty minutes later, something was wrong. The driver and his assistant were yelling intensely at each other and we slowly pulled to a halt by the side of the road. They got out and went to investigate the back of the bus. Slowly but surely the men on the bus also disembarked to offer their advice or simply to look on as the driver and his assistant pulled the guts out of the back of the bus and tossed them to the ground. After a good thirty minutes I decided to get out as well. I found Geoff and we watched the “action” for a while. The funny thing was, there was an automotive shop just 100 meters behind the bus. There was a little kid who seemed to be a part of the shop and was going back and forth between the drivers and his father with miscellaneous parts and advice. We stood there for another 30 minutes before the finally decided that the rotator belt they had installed was safe to go, and we all got back in the bus. It was nearly 7:30.

Turns out the woman next to me spoke some English. Her name was Marah’, and she was a student in Aleppo. She told me that the trip through the winding mountain roads would take at least three hours. Yikes. I settled back for the long ride and Marah’ and I spoke about our families, our lives and our futures.

We finally pulled into the bus station in Aleppo at a little before 11 pm and made our way to this hole-in-the-wall hotel where Geoff had stayed with friends once before. We dropped our stuff, washed our faces of the exhaustion, and set out to find a restaurant that Geoff claims is the best food in all of Syria. Beit Sisi was about 10 minutes’ walk away. Thankfully it was Thursday, and Syrians eat late, so we weren’t too off the mark. We enjoyed a light dinner and at 1:30 am decided we should leave so the staff could clean up and go home.

We left the restaurant and on a whim decided to walk to the citadel that stands in the center of Aleppo’s old town. On our way there we asked several people for directions, including a pickup truck with three guys in it who stopped to ask if we needed help. After they told us where to go they looked at us a little strangely and we headed in a different direction. A block later, this truck pulled up along side us again, and the guy in the back asked if we wanted a ride to the citadel. Geoff and I looked at each other. What the hell? Let’s do it.

We hopped in the back of this pickup with three guys we didn’t know and they drove us all around the city and eventually up to the citadel. Geoff thanked them and they smiled as they drove off in the opposite direction.

I didn’t have my camera, but here’s the citadel by day:

Pretty impressive, right? Imagine it lit up with golden streetlamps.

The streets were quieting down and we took a lap around the citadel, peering down into its moat and saying little. We were so tired. After our walk we made our way back to the hotel through the sleepy streets and finally collapsed into our beds at 3 am. Quite an adventure.

But the story doesn’t start there.

Last week I was in Syria. One of my best friends from high school has been there since August 2007, alternatively working, studying Arabic, and learning about one of the places that Americans understand least. I had been making empty promises to visit for months. I do not like empty promises, and I truly did want to see this region of the world that is so mysterious, even dangerous in American consciousness. I saved up my money, and I bought a plane ticket.

On my first day in Damascus, Geoff and I went down to the Old City where we walked around for a bit before stopping in to an internet cafe so I could assure my parents that I was still alive after the long flight. The cafe owner is a friend of Geoff’s and there was another man sitting with him who Geoff had never met. An artist. He started talking about his work and offered to show his studio sometime, it was just a few blocks away in the Christian Quarter of the Old City.

“Why not now?” we said. He nodded, and a few minutes later we were following this guy we’d never met through winding narrow alleyways until we came to a small gated yard and house a few feet below ground level.

The studio was stereotypical “artist” (sorry all my artist friends and relatives!): there were completed and yet to be completed paintings and sculptures strewn about the room, wires, rocks, pieces of plaster, paints, brushes, metal working tools, paper, pencils, pots, cups, plates, tubes of chemicals, and dust, dust, dust, strewn everywhere about the small entryway so that we could hardly move around to see the artwork.

The work on the walls was amazing. I was particularly captured by one painting, a landscape of a grassy field with a lone tree in the background, all shrouded in a veil of red color. I asked Geoff to ask the man what the picture was about (he didn’t speak much English and I spoke no Arabic at that point). After conversing for a few minutes Geoff told me that the painting was somewhat of an imaginary place, based on the landscape of the man’s hometown of Homs, in central Syria, but painted the color red because of the pain of battles fought in that area, the scars left on the landscape and the people. Very moving.

We continued into the larger back room where there were even more implements of design, tools, machines, piles of clay, blowtorches, and many kinds of media all about, and a large sculpture covered in plastic on a rotating table in the center of the room. He uncovered for us what looked like a large fish, but with human features, and with all kinds of natural media in various places: wood chunks, clay, designs of leaves and other earthen elements. He explained to Geoff, and Geoff to me, that he believes man and nature have developed a very violent relationship with each other. Through his work, he tries to integrate the two, forming a seamless connection, to show that man and nature are in fact one, complements of each other, each with elements reflecting the other.

We sat down to tea. He and Geoff talked for a long time, with Geoff translating bits and pieces here and there, and asking me questions to translate the answers back to this artist, who apparently is one of the most well known artists in Syria, teaches at Damascus University, and has been doing this work for many many years. While they talked his pet birds flew around the room, lighting on our shoulders once in a while, pecking at my earrings and eating peanuts out of this guy’s mouth (!!)

We talked about art. We talked about Syria. He asked what our visions and hopes were for the future, both our own and the world. He asked about my work and I told him that I help Americans and Vietnamese build good will and understanding through volunteer programs. We talked a little about this type of exchange. Then we talked about America, and America’s role in the world. The first of many conversations we would have about America that week. Geoff translated.

“Many years ago,” he said, “people in the world had two homes: the home where they were born and grew up, and Syria. Syria was the center of civilization, culture, trade, and activity.”

He took a sip of his matte and continued, “Now, everyone in the world also has two homes: the home where they were born and grew up, and America. Everyone knows someone in America, has a friend, a sister, a parent, a child in America. I think, the best thing that America can do to improve its status in the world is to make America a better place. Everyone knows someone in America. If America takes care of Americans, if America changes itself, everyone in the world will know.”

Last night’s election was not only a hallmark for America. It was not only a historical victory for African America, civil rights, the American Dream, or the American democratic party. Last night’s election was celebrated in many other places outside of America as a small first step in the redemption of America’s status as one of the world’s great powers, with the potential to do so much good work, and so much harm.

This is a post about America, and my hope that the people in this country, all of us, not just that man who will sit in the oval office come January, will continue to bring changes to America that will better care for our own people and thereby restore our ability to demolish the barriers of land, sea, prejudice, and misunderstanding that hold us back from truly establishing mutual relationships with our friends in other countries.

This started as a letter to Minh, who told me several times that I need to go to Santa Cruz. But without a car, however, this is nearly impossible.

I finally went to Santa Cruz on Saturday night. I went to this comedy show fundraiser thing with me new colleague Ben, this Japanese student intern Ryuta, and a 14-year-old kid named Philip who Ben used to babysit. It was a motley crew. I took Caltrain to California Avenue where Ben picked me up in his parents’ car (he’s from San Jose, but now lives in the city). I should have known it was going to be a crazy night judging from the crew on Caltrain. It was the party wagon due to that evening’s Sharks game.

The comedy show was fun. It was sponsored by the Friends of Hue Foundation, a non-profit organization that sponsors a number of projects in the Thua Thien-Hue area of Vietnam. Then they had these three comedians who were variously hilarious. My favorite was the last guy, Sheng Wang. His first joke was that he had just become a friend of Hue, but that he’d been friends with Bun Bo Hue for a long time. Accept he’s not Vietnamese, so he pronounced it all crooked, and it took people a while to get it. He clutched the microphone like he was going to keel over from stage fright if he let go. I think that was part of the act.

The show ended at 10 and we had to get Philip home (10 pm is way too late for a 14-year-old to be out on a Saturday night!) Philip lives in San Jose, actually in Los Gatos. On the way down we saw a sign for Santa Cruz and we were debating what to do and Ben said, jokingly, “Hey, we could go to Santa Cruz.” Ryuta and I laughed. We dropped off Philip and were heading back to the highway and Ben said again, “So, Santa Cruz?” I have gotten so used to flaky people over the past few years that I had forgotten, Ben is definitely not one of them (side-note: Ben was a VIA volunteer in China, the same year as me. We met at training back in 2006, and now he works for VIA) So we get on the highway (freeway) and are racing down to Santa Cruz. It’s about 10:30. It’s foggy. The moon is about 7/8 full. It’s beautiful. We emerge from the woods and Ben says there’s a good place to get ice cream if it’s still open so we stop at Marianne’s and get ice cream. Then we head to the beach.

First we go to Capitola. The boardwalk is jumping with not-so-young drunken partiers. We put our feet in the cold water for a few minutes before hopping back in the car to go to another beach, Ben’s favorite beach. On the way we stop by a convenience store and buy beer for Ryuta (who is only 20). We got lost at least nine times on the way to Ben’s favorite beach, but when we got there it was worth it. Beach 26 had been recently deserted by partying surfers and they had left the coals of their fire glowing in the sand. After checking out the waves we sat by the coals and watched the ocean ebb and talked and Ryuta drank his beer. After about an hour we left and Ben gave us a quick tour of the boardwalk at Santa Cruz before we headed home, but this time the long way.

We drove along the coast, Highway 1, from Santa Cruz up through Half-Moon Bay. We were one of the only cars on the road. Ben pumped up the tunes of Santa Cruz U radio and we were singing and laughing to various genres of music. Ryuta was drunk and we had to stop twice to let him pee by the side of the road. When we got to Half-Moon Bay we turned inland and took Ryuta back to his homestay in Palo Alto. It was 2:30. Ben pounded some coffee and I took over in the shotgun seat, and we drove back to San Francisco talking about social justice and service and other good things. When we finally reached my house, it was 3:30. Apparently this is a typical Saturday night for Ben. Crazy. I fell into bed exhausted with the feeling that I’d had an almost-Vietnam-style adventure (the kind where you get into a vehicle with people you don’t know and hope that the destination is somewhere appealing.)

Is the name of my new cousin

If there is such a thing as a higher power, I hope it can access blogs and read these words of thanksgiving.

It’s a wonder to me how our lives criss-cross like semi-parallel waving lines, constantly ebbing and flowing like the tide and sometimes meeting, colliding, overlapping, or intersecting at unexpected moments, whether brief or prolonged.

I look at the ripples in the sand stretched out before me, some well-defined curves, others subtle suggestions of patterns, all moving in some way toward the sea but with different distances and paths to get there.

And the wind blows across the sand too, carrying individual grains over the ripples, changing their shapes, pushing some into each other and spreading others further apart, building some up into small mounds and shrinking others to valleys. With the breath of the wind the ripples become more and less defined, and the footprints of seagulls, humans, dogs, and field rats are eventually swallowed by the infinite pattern of ripples and it is as if they were never there.

I remember the first Thanksgiving in Long Xuyen. I was so homesick. The air was crisp and images of family gatherings from years past came crawling back into the front of my mind, and the nostalgia was so overpowering that I could hardly concentrate on my work and life in Vietnam. I didn’t think it would happen in reverse when I returned to the US, but last week I found myself missing “Trung Thu,” the Mid-Autumn Festival, celebrated during the full-moon of the 8th lunar month of the year. Memories of lantern-making with students, red and yellow “Kinh Do” mooncake stands around the city, and an atmosphere of playful exhileration that is lacking here at this time of year. What to do? Ben told me about the Mid-Autumn Festival in Chinatown. I was all over that. Enjoy some pictures, as they tell the scene more thorougly than my words ever could. It was a good dose of homesickness medication for me

The streets were packed: just like Trung Thu streets or Tet Markets in Vietnam.

Remember the phrase “cang dong cang vui” (the more the merrier)? It was so vui. It was so vui that these poor teenagers (below) had to essentially restrain people from trying to cross the street because the cars were getting a little annoyed. Did people pay attention? Heck no!

Then the parade came through. Did people pay attention to the parade? Kind of. The parade was on the same street as the market, so some folks came through to push the pedestrians aside so the parade could proceed. Images of the parade:

This was hilarious. There were cheerleaders that looked like “bobbleheads.” I’m not kidding!

Coming soon!

That’s about it. Hope the movie works!!

This weekend is “Slow Food Nation 2008″ in San Francisco, and by a little nudging from my roommate and a little curiosity of my own, I have taken part in several of the events aimed at slowing down food production and processing, reconnecting people to their food, and promoting wholeness and enjoyment through eating. It’s a fairly simple concept (eat food, feel healthy, save the world) but what’s been interesting to me is witnessing the people who are involved in this movement. It reminds me a little of my activism days in college, but less militant, and more peace-loving.

Today I went to a speaker’s panel entitled “Edible Education.” The focus was on bringing healthy food and food and agricultural education to the nation’s schools, promoting the slow food movement by indoctrinating the youngest generation with healthier values. The speakers ranged from Alice Waters, the pioneer of the Slow Food movement, to a guy named Van Jones, who started an organization called Green for All, with the purpose of making working class and low-income people the focus of the green movement in American. They talked about a lot of issues related to food, agriculture, and education in America. The question that I found the most interesting and provocative was: How do we inspire young people to become farmers? How do we recreate the image of farming as a respectable, educated position?

I was thinking about this on my way home, and stopped to get a coffee and sit with my thoughts. When I walked into the coffee shop, there behind the counter was a friend of a friend who I’d met at one of these Slow Food events the night before. Coincidence? Maybe. So we talked for a good long while about farming, and she told me she wants to farm, but she also doesn’t want to miss out on the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. She wants both! I found myself thinking the same thing: wouldn’t it be nice if we could live in two worlds simultaneously and just go back and forth as we pleased? Maybe this is a defining characteristic of my generation, I thought: globalization, which is to say the tug of war between globalization and localization that is caused by the increasing ease of global connectivity and the increasing desire for people to build community where social networks have been on the decline. We want to both have access to tropical fruits like mangos and bananas from around the world, but also to get to know our food growers, and it’s not really possible to do both simultaneously. If someone has a great solution, enlighten me please!

And then, I thought, “Good lord, how can people talk and think about food all the time like this?! It makes me crazy! Can’t we talk about something else, please?!”