EuraFrique

The Final, Crazy Post

2007-09-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

That's it, kids, it's more than halfway through September already! We're done documented our great adventure, and moving on to new adventures... if you look for us, silly and bold and thoughtful and silly (and libby and billy) you'll find us, soon enough...

Culinary Wonders of the World

2007-09-14T12:42:00.000-07:00

We have - of course - eaten lots of food in the last 3+ months. Some of what we've eaten has been quite memorable - either because it was extremely strange, silly, or special. Here's to some of those...

Ola, our couchsurfing friend in Warsaw, was helped in hosting us by her wonderful mother - here depicted making us yummy potato pancakes.

The story of polish "milk bars," communist restaurants for workers, is much more interesting than the food is tasty:

As for really amazingly good food in Poland, Libby's family friends treated us to this wonderful sundae at one of their coffee shops in Warsaw:

Check out the birthday cake we got for billy's cousin, Emily:

Emily's son, Reese, had a great time with his ice cream + chocolate sauce, in solidarity with his mother:

This is simply the biggest carrot ever imagined:

And this simply looks like fast food, not "vegetarian fast food." Amazing, huh?

Speaking of mouth-watering German health food, here's some sauerkrautsaft (in other words, cabbage brine):

More than a meter of cheese rolled up in a little ball:

We only saw these mushroom chips for sale in Hungary. They don't call 'em Hungry for nothin!

Now, now, that's fine french pastry... (See video above)

WOW! Charlie's Bakery in Cape Town is famous for outlandish cakes:

On the topic of outlandish, take a look at that "Eis Lasagna." The Germans specialise in such crazy ice cream creations, complete with coconut parmesan, strawberry tomato sauce, blueberry meatballs, and on and on...

But nothing knocked billy and bear into a sugar coma better than this ice cream mayhem (see video above)...

Ireland

2007-09-14T12:41:00.001-07:00

Billy Says:

Libby and I ended up our months of travelling with a week in ireland with my mom, and her partner, alex. It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, looping around the island in a rented car, and cruising down the narrow, winding roads of ireland. We had lots of silly time, a ton of beautiful views, some super touristic moments, a dose of AA, and a smaller dose of visiting family. All around, a nice finale to a wonderful trip.

Let's start with the beautiful places.

On our first day in the country, we went to Howth Peninsula, near Dublin.

There's a cool lighthouse and harbor:

An awesome rock formation in the sea:

And an area where you can walk along the cliffs:

We spent a day on the Aran islands, off the coast of Galway:

"Have you ever seen so many rocks in one place?"

We all had fun playing in the ruins of seven old churches clustered together:

I in particular had fun trying to take strikingly "artsy" photographs:

and making particularly artsy poses for others to capture on film:

We also went to a really cool old fort, in a crescent shape along a huge cliff:

and, while we were soaking in beautiful sites, we had a nice restful night at a vegetarian friendly hostel (that gave their guests awesome bathrobes to wear):

We went to the famous Cliffs of Moher, on the west coast, south of Galway. You start your tour of the cliffs at a walled off area, safe and sound, looking at the views (see if you can spot mr. bear and windman):

From there you can either go to the left (a sanctioned, wide path with railing to protect you from falling) or to the right (totally not sanctioned or protected).

We ended up going down the path on the right, past the barbed wire fences, and down along a super narrow path, till we reached those flat rock cliffs you can see in the background, laid down and took in the amazing view, and wind (to learn more about the physics of that area, check here).

On our last day in Ireland, we drove along the Beara Peninsula, in the southwest of the island, west of Cork. The landscape there is absolutely breathtaking (I posed special for you, so you could tell):

We also visited my cousins, and my cousins children (nephews? wow!). We had a big meal with my cousins Daniel, and Jessica, and her sons, Jackson and Evan:

Here's my nephew, Jackson (he's a really big wingman fan). His mama, Jessica, is in the background:

My cousin Emily had her birthday while we were in town, so we took her out to a fancy meal, and went to lengths to go over the top with happy birthday celebrations, like getting the staff to sing over her cake:

and her brother, Sean, is a chef at the restaurant we went to:

We also spent a day in Belfast, trying to get a sense of some of the political and social history of "the north," and also going to a couple of AA meetings (which were, by the way, way more welcoming and friendly than any i'd ever been to elsewhere).

We only ended up getting photos of the Loyalist areas on our camera (so if you want to see the beautiful and inspiring ones from the Republican neighborhoods, you'll have to talk with my mom). But the hilarious offensive nature of these shots should give you some sense of what it's like to be there:

huh? a big bloody hand as an inspiring symbol for a community, and a politics?

a thousand british flags? Ireland and England are islands, so there's no chance that people are simply lost and confused (at least not in the literal geographic sense).

Oh, but the Queen!!?? What a joke...

While the descendents of British settlers keep hammering away at a Colonialist fairy tale of never-ending domination by the Crown, the "Celtic Tiger" charges forward. Ireland is a beautiful place, and it's changing fast. A man on the ferry told us, "We're losing our souls. We've simply got too much money. We've got more helicopters per capita than any other country in the world. Things are getting worse and really fast." Funny to have gone through so much degradation, and finally come out of it, only to be caught up in the whirlwind of globalization, american technology, etc...

Onward we walk, hopefully towards something more beautiful than where we are now...

Picnic in Frankfurt

2007-09-14T10:23:00.001-07:00

Billy says:

Travelling from Dubai to Dublin, we had a few hours in Frankfurt. We decided to have a little picnic in the park. The place that seemed most fun to eat seemed to be the litte playground:

It was a good little picnic, with the classic bread-n-cheese, a little direktapfelsaft, water, and...

a good bit of silliness:

We enjoyed our sunny heathen times in good ole' deutschland, until the ole' polizei showed up. They just stood there, mute, looking mean.

Libby asked, "Can I help you?"
One of the cops gruffly replied, "How old are you?"
"Excuse me?" Libby asks.
"That is only for children."
"Sorry I didn't know that it's illegal to have a picnic."
"There's a sign; read it."
"Oh, I'm not used to reading German."

And what of this infamous sign?

We had to read it ourselves, in order to be well-informed, law-abiding citizens...

Dubious Dubai, where everything is the biggest, best, hottest, and most air-conditioned

2007-09-06T07:20:00.004-07:00

Billy Says:

I think going to Dubai might have changed my life forever, in ways that I will only understand years down the line. More than anywhere else we went, I spent major portions of my time in Dubai simply saying, "Wow!" A bit of excitement, a bit of horror, a bit of hilarity, a bit of rage and a whole lot of fascination.

We ended up in Dubai because Emirates Airline is the cheapest way to get between Europe and South Africa and they route all flights through their hub in Dubai. After my six hour layover in the airport on the way to Johannesburg, I was convinced that I need to change my tickets to stay for longer on the way back. The airline played a promotional video as we were about to land, calling Dubai, "21st Century Arabia," and when I got off the plane I thought to myself, "this may be the *only* 21st Century place I've ever been. At 3am, the airport was bustling, everything was open, and flights were departing to destinations throughout the world every 10 minutes. A young Arab kid raised in Canada (who returned to Dubai, to work 12hrs. per day, seven days a week, as a form of re-hab after getting thrown in Canadian jail at 18 on drug charges) increased my sense of wonder about Dubai by telling me many things like that Dubai has elevators that go up from one sidewalk, across the street, then back down, and that there are computer terminals on the street with no keyboard, because you simply talk into them.

Those things are both totally false. But here's some gems of truth that I did stumble upon in my few days in Dubai:

* There are 3 men to every woman in Dubai.
* All migrant workers (more than 80% of the population) are required to be tested regularly for HIV, and deported if they have it. The government is considering screening tourists as well, but Emiratis are still exempt.
* Migrant laborers are forbidden to unionize (and may well be deported for protesting at work, and/or have their passport seized by the boss upon employment), rent a house or apartment (they must stay in company housing, as they must not marry the local population and cannot bring wives or partners) and cannot become citizens.
* The UAE (United Arab Emirates - Dubai is one of seven emirates) is trying to "protect the minority" economically, by enforcing quotas for "emiratisation" of the workforce, and (except for within "free trade zones") requiring that at least 51% of every company operating in the UAE is owned by Emiratis. (For more on the economic aspects see the informative article on Dubai in the New Left Review).
* Dubai has a number of "Mega Projects" (this is a great link; tons of photos) under construction, including building the world's tallest Skyscraper, (which is competing against the second place building, also under construction, also in Dubai) three "palms" and one replica globe made out of islands "reclaimed" by "rainbowing" sand in the middle of the gulf.
* Dubai has already built the world's first 7-star hotel, the Burj Al Arab, with afternoon tea for 50 EURO or a suite for 1000 EURO, a fleet of rolls royces, a helicopter and landing pad, an "underwater themed" restuarant (one of six, offering food 24hrs. a day) and built on a tiny island 280 meters off the coast (which was "reclaimed" from the gulf over two years).
* Other trivial, bizzare futurist constructions include the world's largest mall, an indoor ski and snowboarding center, the world's largest zoo and world's largest aquarium. Somewhat more substantially, "Dubai also hosts or is planning to build a Humanitarian Aid City, as a base for disaster relief; a free-trade zone dedicated to the sale of used cars; a Dubai Metals and Commodities Centre; a ‘Chess City’ headquartering the International Chess Association and designed as a vast chess board with two ‘King’ towers, each 64 storeys high; and a $6 billion Healthcare Village, in collaboration with the Harvard Medical School, that will offer the wealthy classes of the Gulf region state-of-the-art American medical technology." [Mike Davis, New Left Review]

(a construction project being planned, on display inside a mall. construction happens 24 hours daily, with less than 13cm of rain falling annually).

Some quotes on dubai that are absolute gems:

* "Despite its blast-furnace climate (on typical 120° summer days, the swankier hotels refrigerate their swimming pools) and edge-of-the-war-zone location, Dubai confidently predicts that its enchanted forest of 600 skyscrapers and malls will attract 15 million overseas visitors a year by 2010, three times as many as New York City. Emirates Airlines has placed a staggering $37-billion order for new Boeings and Airbuses to fly these tourists in and out of Dubai’s new global air hub, the vast Jebel Ali airport." [Mike Davis again]
* As one developer told the Financial Times, ‘If there was no Burj Dubai, no Palm, no World, would anyone be speaking of Dubai today? You shouldn’t look at projects as crazy stand-alones. It’s part of building the brand’.
* ‘People refer to our crown prince as the chief executive officer of Dubai. It’s because, genuinely, he runs government as a private business for the sake of the private sector, not for the sake of the state’, says Saeed al-Muntafiq, head of the Dubai Development and Investment Authority.
* “We want to protect the minority, which is us,” Mr. Kaabi said.
* [Referring to a protest of 8,000 workers for a wage increase - after 18 years without a pay raise - resulting in 185 deportations, an employer stated] "It was organised violence ... those involved in the violence were educated workers. We have also received letters of apology from remaining workers in which they admitted that they were fooled into staging protests."

***

As for our time in Dubai, we spent the first day jet-lagged, navigating the bus system out to Luke's (our couchsurfing friend) house. We had a meal in an indian restaurant for workers where the food was $1 for both of us to eat as much as we liked and we were vastly outnumbered by people eating with their hands. Libby and I learned that the section "reserved for ladies" can be sat in by men, but not if there are enough "ladies" to fill the available seats:

Luke slept out in the living room on an air mattress (along with two other couchsurfers, sleeping on their own air mattresses):

and let libby and i sleep in his large, comfy bed:

Luke was an extremely gracious host, doing everything to assist us and help us enjoy our time in Dubai. His apartment was amazing and comfortable (in a skyscraper, surrounded by 20+ skyscraper apartment buildings under construction and bordering "the greens," a section of city where grass is being grown -- at great expense), he took us out for a great meal, and told us all about Dubai. As an "expat" from Scotland, visiting couchsurfers help to ease some of the isolation that comes with living in an essentially apartheid kingdom.

We enjoyed our time also with Cyril, another couchsurfer, on his way to Beijing on Emirates airlines:

We went down to the creek with Cyril...

and he helped us fend off the boatmen trying to get 20 Dirhams (about $5) to take us across the creek and instead we took a water-taxi with workers for 1 Dirham (25 cents).

We wandered around the market areas, and Cyril helped break up the monotonous theatre of non-westerners pushing their wares on westerners by requesting leopard-skin fur coats, sun glasses that covered his whole cheeks, and tight pink t-shirts. He also successfully convinced a vendor, in response to the standard, "where are you from?" that he is from "Pimpistan." The man was sure, though, that Libby was "too white to be from Pimpistan." She didn't try and tell him otherwise.

We also did some gawdier shit, like swimming in the 90degree gulf (in the shadow of Burj Al Arab, springing 170 Dirham on "Wild Wadi" water park, and strolling around a mall which has a different section for each region of the world (each decked out in the motif of that place and sometimes even with a painted sky) and so on.

Dubai is a shamelessly unjust society, with all the foulness of a south africa or usa or israel, but a different spin on how to bring it about. With busload after busload of Indian laborers peeking out through the bars on company owned bus windows, deportation of dissidents and people with AIDS, and the king owning absolutely every inch of land, there's a bluntness to the injustice. But then again, the king would rather set up cameras on the motorway to patrol speeding than fleets of cops, and all of the wealth of Dubai is dependant on an image, so the bluntness has to constantly be toned down.

The image of Dubai is being constructed 24hrs. a day, by the 80% of the population that are "visiting to work," for the benefit of the remaining handful.

The image of Dubai is, for bad now or later, working.

nuf said.
but more to say...

Cape Town #2

2007-09-06T07:20:00.003-07:00

Billy says:

It was a really nutty flight down to Cape Town from Johannesburg - in cramped seats and full of silly, silly antics between libby and I:

but it was such a good idea to return to Cape Town and spend another chunk of days there. It really helped us both feel grounded in the place, and to enjoy it without (as much) of the crazy white paranoia that we had inherited from white Americans and South Africans upon arrival to Africa. A month in the area had helped us shed some of our unnecessary fear and stiffness.

We attended an AIDS protest put on by the Treatment Action Campaign that was totally uplifting. Lately it has felt like protests are more often depressing or repressing, but this one had a totally different feel. The crowd sang together with a mix of fury and joy that I don't know I've ever seen; it nearly brought me to tears.

The march was delightful, the way that I always hope they'll be. We poured through the streets, running along, singing, screaming, pushing forward. It didn't feel like a stale routine; it felt like a legitimate expression of people who are fed up with horrible conditions in their society and trying to force a new situation. And it is so beautiful to see that the poor people in South Africa are really at the forefront of solving the overwhelming AIDS crisis there.

It was also fabulous to connect more deeply with our friends - particularly Maya and Londi.

Londi, our main host from the first visit, once again generously offered us her space for a bunch of days. It was the perfect location - an easy walk to the train, minibus to UWC, and cheap veggie roti (as big as yer forearm, by the way). Londi is really cool, very giving, and interested in talking and laughing and sharing a good time. She is the child of a Black South African man and an English woman. Her family had to live in England during apartheid because they were officially a "tri-racial" family, and thus not legally allowed to live anywhere. But she has taken on South Africa with excitement, and it clearly suits her as home.

This time around, Maya also hosted us for a couple of days, and we attended some of her classes at UCT, she took us to some cool spots in Observatory, (to get a better sense of where we were staying, and sites nearby, etc. check this map) and even came out to see the UWC campus one day. With family members having worked with the South African Communist Party, it's no surprise that Maya is thoughtful and concerned with politics and economic issues. What's unusual is that she is so well carving out an independent viewpoint, a life outside of both the 'white' and 'communist' moulds that might have forced themselves on her.

It was good to be on the campus of UCT, and to get a sense of just how regal of a place it really is - in comparison to UWC and mostly anywhere else:

They have a lot of resources, and a beautiful campus, and a whole infrastructure to support Americans coming in to study, but I didn't, overall, feel like I would really enjoy UCT more than UWC. UCT is much more of a European oriented school, both in composition and curriculum, and you can feel it as soon as you step foot on campus. Just on the margins of campus is a huge memorial to Cecil John Rhodes:

We had fun with it...

and there's a great view from the memorial...

But Cecil Rhodes is a bastard.

Exhibit A:

“We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.”

Exhibit B:

“Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life”

Should I go on? Alright, one more should suffice.

Exhibit C:

"I contend that we are the first race in the world,
and that the more of the world we inhabit
the better it is for the human race"

I'll go with the "University of the Working Class" any day.

***

Libby and I also spent a good deal of time finding fun ways to wander about the city. We walked to De Waal park, in the ritzy Gardens neighborhood:

We took the train down to simon town (about an hour southeast of cape town, along the indian ocean coast).

There we had awesome tea and cake at a Tibetan cafe, and spent a whole lot of time with the Penguins.

On our last day in Cape Town (and in Africa) we decided to drive out towards the wine region around Stellenbosch with our friends Londi and Eric - about 30km outside of Cape Town - and just relax in the mountains and valleys there. We tried for a while to find a friend of Eric's house and have a picnic with him, but we had a hell of a time finding it, so we ended up just pulling off the road and having our picnic in the grass near a vineyard. It was quite a beautiful place to be lost, and we had a blast:

i buried a penny in the sand, near simon town, and made a wish...

Making the Road, per Libby

2007-09-06T07:20:00.001-07:00

The border crossing to Namibia is dry dry desert, plus this little restaurant...

********************

Namibia: Culture vs. HIV, and the Ovaherrero Genocide Committee

For all practical purposes, the core of the Making the Road Trip began in Namibia with a meeting with Lucy Edwards, a South African woman who reaserches and teaches Political Economy of AIDS at the University of Namibia. Lucy was one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable presenters we met during the 3+ week MTR trip, responding to our questions with great attention to the complexities and nuances of the structural factors giving rise to Namibia's particular situation.

Lucy asserts that the construction on masculinity and femininity in Namibian culture plays a pivotal role in making heterosexual women the fastest growing and most highly infected demographic group. Gender inequality, evident in cultural practices like polygamy, wife=lending, and wife-inheritance, increase the possibility of HIV exposure. "When it comes to wearing NIke or listening to American hip-hop, the men here are delighted to abandon their own culture, but when it means changing the way women are viewed and treated, forget it."

When the German and British colonial masters of the early 20th Century pushed all the black Namibians (ie., everyone indigenous to the region) into "Communal Areas" up north and established a contract labor system whereby women stayed behind to maintain subsistence farms and men entered into bonded labor for much of the year (confined to compounds near the imperialist mines), they coulnd't have imagined that they were further relegating women to be the most vulnerable when the HIV epidemic hit much later, in the 1970s. But indeed, they laid the groundwork for a migrant labor population, increasing the incidence of casual and transactional sex. Secondly, women were not permitted to work in anything other than agriculture, and thus were economically displaced from subsistence farming after the mechanization of farm labor. Unable to become independent wage earners, many women entered into transactional sex or concubinage as a survial strategy, which to this day remains prevalent. Frequent imbalance in power relations means many women have little agency to negotiate safe sex with their partner(s).

I asked Lucy to what extent the agenda of PEPFAR and other foreign aid programs influenced the allocation of HIV resources. I've heard many anecdotes at health conferences of instances where conservative ideology limits distribution of condoms, or emphasizes abstinence or faithfulness over safe sex. She pointed out that we must ask if HIV interventions, like the "ABC Campaign" (Abstinence, Be faithful, Condomize), are culturally appropriate. In traditional Namibian culture, where lineage is traced through the mother, "being faithful" takes on a different meaning; a man is faithful by providing for his mother's family, and by providing his wives each with a plot of land. Sexual faithfulness is not a concept relevant to most.

"But we are right to ask about foreign inluence, and we must be critical of the knowledge-power nexus. Who is creating the knowledge around HIV & AIDS? Who is profiting from it? And who is setting the agendas?" Lucy Edwards stands out in Southern Africa as a valuable resource and a tremendously empowered, intelligent woman whose analysis is critical to making headway against the AIDS epidemic.

*********************************
BOTSWANA - Dinner with a stranger

In Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, our evening's lodging was a
slightly dodgy casino and hotel, with relatively zero vegetarian
dinner options. That, combined with our desire to engage in African
life outsdie the confines of our tour bus and hotel rooms, inspired
Billy and I to lead a small contingent of likeminded hungry friends
out into Gaborone. Billy's inquiry for an Indian restaurant at the
concierge yielded a hand-drawn map given to him resemble something
like a treasure map scrawled by a 6-yr-old. Nevertheless, we set out
onto the street to try our luck. We walked toward what seemd to be a
market, where endors bustled about under the streelights, packing up
for the day. The women we first asked for directions hadn't a clue,
but fortune had it, another woman passing by heard say the
restaurant's name and stopped. "You are looking for it? I live
nearby. Come with me, I'll show you." And so, delightedly, we set
off with this woman who introduced herself as Anges from Zambia. In
the dark of night, her broad white smile stood out against her skin
and she cheerfully guided us to the taxi rank, where we agreed to
share a private hire.

I'll never know if she atually intended for us to get to the Indian
restaurant; we ended up, instead, strolling through her neighborhood
to a Chinese/Thai place with - gasp! bean curd (tofu) on the menu. We
treated Agnes to dinner while she anwered our questions about daily
life. She said Zambia and Botswana each have a very different feel
for her. "In Zambia, 90% of the people you meet are nice. Here, it
is 50/50." She gave us contacts of her nephew and sister living in
other parts of Africa, should we happen to pass that way on our
travels. (Retrospectively, I regret that we didn't give her nephew a
call when we were in JoBurg). After showoing us her favorte
neighborhood hangouts, she kindly waited with us to be sure we got
safely into a cab back to the hotel. I don't think our paths will
cross again, but it is these tiny moments of humanity that fuel my
love of unknown exploration in places both near and far. How many of
us slow to meet strangers, show them the way, put our own agendas on
pause when the opportunity for a new and unusual connection arises?
We'll remember that dinner with Agnes for a long time, inspired to
follow her example.
Our wonderful drivers for the 3 weeks, Richard and Bartholomew

We've been extremely luck to stay relatively healthy during this trip (esp. since neither of us has health insurance), but a couple kinks gave us a closer look at healthcare in southern Africa. Two weeks after I had badly sprained my ankle in Cape Town, it gave out for a 2nd and 3rd time in Swazilan, landing me on the ground in tears of pain and frustration. A week later, I came down with a case of what appeared to be ringworm (awesome!). I was content to let it do its thing, hoping it wasn't a big deal, but Billy, rightfully disgusted by the festering red circle on my forearm, insisted we get it checked out, and while we're at it, why not have someone take a look at the ankle, too? We were told we could go to a hospital in Rosebank, a wealthy suburb of JoBurg, close our hostel, and that it woud be "absolutely free." On walking into the urgent care, we were told a consultation would be about $115 USD. Across the street at ta private clinic, it was a $30 consult, plus any tests and treatment. In hindsight, that's not much higher than an insurance copay for seeing the doctor in the States, but on our tight travel budget it felt like a lot. The parking lot attendant told us we should try the public hospital downtown. "You won't pay for treatment, but they won't treat you good." Had we had a bit more time, we'd both have like to go to the public hospital for the experience of it.

On average, the S.A. government spends $__ per person per year on healthcare. By contrast, the US annually spends ___ per person. Both countries have parallel care sectors, private and public, which provide unequal services based on socio-economic status. Still, it seemed evident that the magnitude and implications of that disparity are far more severe in South/southern Africa. With 25% of the population living with HIV/AIDS, the ifference between private and public care often means the difference between life and death. See "Capetown #2" for a video of protests led by the Treatment Action Campaign.

Yes, the animals went animal-watching at Kruger Park. If you must go, try to support a locally-run and locally-benefiting guide group like $&@##@
Old gold mines and Johannesburg skyline, now obscured by an amusement park
Fitting an MY trunk in THAT trunk was a true contortionist act...

Above: waiting at one of the borders for our Mexican friends to be let through

*************

SWAZILAND

I confess to going to Swaziland with very little knowledge of the country, save for their high HIV infection rate and being one of the few remaining monarchical governments in the world. I also confess to leaving 36 hours later with little additional understanding. However, a few noteworthy moments can convey a bit of our experience.

Nearly every border crossing (there were 6) proved challenging to 2 of our friends who traveled on their Mexican passports. It drove home for those who were unaware the privelege (desire or not) of traveling on a US passport. In Swaziland, we saw firsthand a glimpse of corruption by border officials, and it generally followed like this:

Border official: There is nothing you can do. They [our Mexican comrades] cannot enter Swaziland without a visa, and they have no visa.
Prexy: We were told there would be no problems.
Border official: Nothin can be done. Please, step into my office.
[15 minutes later, and minus some cash]
Prexy: Quick, let's get out of here before they change their minds.

Sometimes, a little $$ goes a long way... Or takes one a long way, anyhow...

The rolling mountain hills of Swaziland were stunning in contrast to some of South Africans barren plains, and several of us enjoyed a hike to take in the sunset.

We had a free day, and while most of the group went to a local craft market to buy gifts (B & I were still in long-term travel mode and couldn't fathom lugging things around with us post-group trip), the remaining 10 of us opted to go check out the "Cuddle Puddle," a mineral hot spring pool near the town Mbabane. We had a classic "Africa" moment when an already mostly-full minibus pulled over to the roadside where we were flagging down transport, and the driver and conductor encouraged all 10 of us to pile in. This particular mini-bus was distinguished from most by 5 huge speakers installed in the ceiling. As the drive progressed, the volume (which was already bumping when we hopped in) steadily increased, until it threatened to burst our eardrums and had our hearts beating in synch with the reggae-techno remixes.

The Cuddle Puddle itself cost only $1 for a swell, hot mineral pool (imagine a warm delightful swimming pool). Billy and I "splurged" and spent 25 bucks each for 30 minutes in the spa/sauna complex, plus a 30 minute massage. Besides feeling good about the TLC, we also felt good to be supporting an establishment that wasn't a mere tourist trap and acted as a local hotspot for Swazi folks.

(below, the Cuddle Puddle)

The Ovaherrero Genocide Committee performs their battle cry, above.

Also, they kindly let us join them for dinner at a local joint.

*************************************

MOZAMBIQUE: A non-racialized African society?

Mozambique is a vibrant coastal society full of charming quirks we couldn't hope to master in the one week we were there. Take, for example, the organization system in operation at the small market near our hostel. Within a concrete-walled quadrant of the block sat hundress of vendor stalls, selling mainly fruit and veg, canned household items, woven baskets, and in one corner, chickens slaughtered upon sale. All this was shaded under a makeshift roof of corrugated tin sheets, haphazardly perched atop wooden poles, and letting daylight slip in between the gaps to dimly illuminate the space with the same ambience as an arabian souk. The small cocinas there - mini-kitchens comprised of a few small propane cookstoves - served beans, rice, and meat... a heaping vegetarian platter was 20 metacaish, about 75 cents!

"International solidarity is not an act of charity. It is an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objective. " - Samora Machel, Mozambican liberation leader, President 1980-1985.

What does it mean to act out of solidarity rather than charity? This is a question Billy and I sought to define for ourselves and to engage others on the trip in thinking about as we found ourselves in various scenarios where status and privelege could sway us toward more conveneient alternatives, like giving money. Recognizing someone else's struggle as part of your own and devloping projects of mutual aid, on the other hand, require more sustained dedication.

The day-long conference of Making the Road and Mozambique's "Consejo Nacional de Jovenes" (CNJ, or National Youth Council) was one of the most clear examples of an opportunity for building bridges between "allies." To our surprise, many of our Mozambican peers perceived America to be the utopia (or dystopia, depending on your perspective) that it's portrayed to be by popular and mass media. They were stunned to hear that we don't all have big-sreen tv's, that we have a separate, unequal, and failing education system, that 1/2 as mnay black women as white women get breast cancer, but 3 times as many die from it. In breakway session, we had an hous to discuss topics like Art & culture, Entrepreneurship, Development, etc. As the discussion of development unfolded, it became clear that we needed to shift away from the paradigm that considers the US "developed" and Mozambique "developing." In reality, both our countries have a lot to do before they can claim to be meeting the needs of all their citizens. Most of our Mozambican colleages were quick to criticize the US' alignment with the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, but were slower in realizing that we Americans are subject to the same policies as those enacted in the "Third World" by those aganecies. Some of the Mozambicans seemed eager to ask for advice and Billy commented to me "If they want advice on successful development, we're the last ones they should be asking. However, if they want to know what it's like to live in a country that's been following the World Bank's advice for the last 50 or so years, by all means..." And indeed, we'd have much to say about the consequences of privatization - a healthcare system that places profit before people; a national budget that diverts funding from education and social services to the heavily militarized defense of capital; the systematic imprisonment of oppressed populations, taking advantage of a legally-captive workforce.

The conference would've needed to be several days long to sufficiently provide enough time for us to establish real relationships and more cohesive project ideas. Barring that, we at least were able to deconstruct some of the myth of the American dream, and to name some of our common oppressions. Mozambique and the US had differences enough to vary our perceptions of the immediacy of particular issues. "Why don't we hear anything about the American AIDS crisis in your media?" asked one woman -- "All the news coverage coming from the States is about AIDS here in Africa." We discussed, in response, how HIV - though present in the States - is less rampant and most people are on treatment and living [relatively] "normal" lives. In Mozambique, by contrast, nearly 1 in 5 people has HIV/AIDS. Again and again, addressing the epidemic manifested as one of the primary concerns of the development discussion. And it makes sense; one can't begin to talk about projects like a massive scale-up of the healthcare sector while the disease continues to take its toll on the material resources and depletes the already understaffed healthcare workforce.

One project affiliated with CNJ this is making strides to preventatively combat HIV is "ESH". Instead of perpetually sending volunteers into the schools to do AIDS awareness education, ESH works with schools to help each develop its own integrated curriculum so that HIV education is integrated into the normal school subjects. For example, rather than hearing bland statiscs about infection rates, students may instead get moath homework that requires them to carry out operation like calculating the rate of infection when "x" people living with the disease have unprotected sex with "y" partners. In this way, ESH acknowledges the tendency of youth to tune out the overwhelming bombardment of public health messages while providing a more sustainable and holistic HIV education model, unrealiant on a steady volunteer flow.

Despite many cultural differences, immediately I felt more comfortable in Mozambique than I had anywhere else in southern Africa. After a week there, I could imagine myself (with time and some Portuguese lessons) becoming a nearly fulid participant in the society. My white skin, though still noticeable in a predominantly black society, seemed less of an impediment to having genuine relationships with Africans that it did in other countries like south Afric. In our final group debriefing, I asked for explanations.

-- "Is it because there was less of a brutal, racilaized regime under the Portuguese than South Africa had under the Apartheid government?" I proposed.

-- "No, to the contrary," Prexy replied. "The Portuguese were more brutal and vicious to the Mozambicans than you can imagine, even more than the Apartheid government. The reason you don't feel its effects here the way you do in South Africa, Namibia, etc, is because Frelimo fought to make clear that their struggle was not against the whites, it was against impreialism. Their 'most sophisticated weapon,' according to Samora Machel, was their determination to create a non-racist society. So you can give thanks to those who used the weapon to fight for what you felt there."

libby

Making the Road, per Billy

2007-09-06T07:19:00.002-07:00

After two months traveling just the two of us, spending three weeks on and off of a bus with 38 other Americans, through southern Africa was quite a change. There were a lot of layers to the experience we had with "Making the Road." Moments we loved totally, and moments in which we were totally disappointed, or skeptical, or frustrated.

The best part about being on the Making the Road Trip was that Prexy Nesbitt introduced us to a number of people involved with freedom struggles historically and social change work in the present tense as well. Many of these connections would have been downright impossible to bring about on our own. And it was good to be pushed to study the history of each of the countries we visited. Prexy clearly has a great love for Africa, and a great desire to see young americans engage positively with the realities they confront there. He also repeatedly demonstrated an amazing degree of patience in dealing with the various backwards habits of group members, and also a courage and care that allowed him to both challenge and protect us in various situations. I don't think anyone was able to go through the three weeks in a purely tourist frame of mind; they had to think about something.

What difficulties we did have largely had to do with different ideas about how best to manage the group, and how to really provide room for us to process what we were experiencing. We ended up having an absurdly low amount of time to talk as a group with our fellow travelers about the trip, despite repeated mention of such meetings. Further, the higher ideals of the journey were repeatedly sideswiped by unnecessary conflicts around money, which continued, largely because Prexy made a number of errors in communicating to the group around the financial issues that inevitably come up with 40 people traveling for weeks in a foreign country. Had these silly fights been avoided, I feel the time could have gone a lot more smoothly, and a lot less people would have left with a bad or questionable taste in their mouths.

Maybe it was the distinct nature of the trip, or maybe it's the overall political climate right now, but I don't think we succeeded in being a "solidarity" trip. Flat out - no equivocation. We simply did not demonstrate a collective capacity to respond positively to the collective problems facing the people we met in various countries. Perhaps that sounds like a condemnation of us. I'd rather not dwell on condemning ourselves for what we did not do. I'd rather focus on the moments when we did at least try to really engage with the struggles in southern Africa, and maybe even our weaknesses and failures will help us to do better, more, in the future.

Anyway, this post won't be a full-on analysis of all three weeks through five different countries. I'll try just to speak to some highlights.

Windhoek:

After a 20 hour bus ride, our trip began in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. I think of this time as simultaneously some of the best and worst moments of the trip. It's my habit to start with the bad and work our way up.

A group of about 20 of us decided to go out to a dance club on our first night in town. We decided against the grinding, harsh hip-hop club and chose instead the mellower sounding "cubana" place. It turned out to be only occasionally latin-themed, and much more often dominated by USA pop. Anyway, the first hour or two was relatively banal. People in our group were a little tipsy, and so overly friendly with the Africans ("we all like each other so much! We're all so happy to be together!" and so on) but aside from the obvious, that's pretty normal in a crowd of drinkers. Then some of the women (the group was 75% female) started to tip the line of flirtation towards strange and uncomfortable. Serious sexual dancing on the dance floor, taking photos of groups of black men from 12" away, and so forth. To a number of people's credit, a number of folks perked up, and started looking out for their friends, and pulling them out of potentially bad situations.

Around the same time, a group of folks started to say they were ready to go. At first i just wanted to leave also. I wasn't having fun, and the scene was really strange and awkward. But then it hit me that i was one of only a few men, proposing to leave a group of women at a club with dozens of men - many of which were willing to prey on their vulnerability and curiosity with Africa (and Africans). We started talking about getting everyone to agree to leave. Most agreed. A handful wanted to stay on. I spoke with two women in that group individually and checked in about how safe they felt staying on and getting home on their own. Both of them said they'd be fine, and I trusted both of them, so I agreed to most of us leaving, but having fix or six stay on. We started to leave in cab loads. I left in the first cab. By the time I got to the hostel, I had already decided that I had made a mistake, and started to worry. By the time the second cab got to the hostel, my fears were confirmed. "We can't find one person, and someone else lost her wallet," we were told.

Me, prexy and an older couple woke the bus drivers up and went down to the club to try and pick the rest of the folks up. We were too late. While we had been on our way, one woman's camera had been stolen (the one taking the photos from 12" away) and another woman's wallet had been stolen. The bouncers at the club had found the thief, and the camera and wallet were returned (minus $400 in US currency). Once the whites had their things back, the bouncers proceeded to beat the black thief, and our group got in a cab and left.

I took the news really hard. I felt responsible (admittedly, in small part) for the mess that was made. And i felt as if my principal mistake was to not fully abandon basic principles that I would like to live by. I'd like to believe that if women I trust say that they'll be fine on their own, they will be. I'd like to believe that a club full of black men won't take advantage of a group of white women. Both "ideals" seemed totally false that night. I should have stayed, I told myself. I should have made sure that the drunkest, most vulnerable women left in the first cab, not me. I should have insisted that everyone leave, and not consent to a small group staying behind.

In short, I felt more alienated from Black people than I had in years and years. The whole climate we were in felt dominated by the massive gulf between us - financially, socially, nation, history and power carrying on. When we returned to the club, a black beggar tried to "show us" where our bus was parked, and then receive a tip for his "kindness." He followed after us the whole block walk, silently pleading, looking pitiful. When a couple of other blacks decided to try the same trick, he became vicious, screaming at them to back off. He was the only one going to get a little hand out. We loaded into the bus, with him staring at the open door. "Let's go," Prexy told the driver, and the door slammed in the man's face.

Were moments like that the only ones we were able to have with black people in Africa?

***

Fortunately, we also made a number of amazing folks in Windhoek. We went to the office of the National Union of Namibian Workers:

There we heard a presentation from the Vice President of the Namibian Mineworkers Union about the history of Union organizing in Namibia and recent struggles amongst mineworkers.

With the help of Herbert (a Namibian of German descent) from the National Teachers Union, the story of union struggles was connected to a history of the independence struggle in Namibia. The story was intense, and both speakers were really animated in telling it. First colonized by the Germans, "Southwest Africa" was under South African control (though not a strict colony) after WWI (when Germany lost all of its colonies) until independence in 1990. Carrying on the brutal colonial policy of only allowing Africans to live above a certain line, the South African Defense Forces carried out a type of permanent martial law system of exploiting Native labor. As most workers were officially "migrants" living in all-male company housing, separated from their families, not only was unionizing forbidden, but so was every other form of potentially political gatherings. Still, they succeeded in organizing a general strike in 1971, without any sanctioned organizations to coordinate it. The next twenty years of guerrilla and labor struggles against South African control were extremely fierce.

Trying to describe the violence faced in the struggle, Herbert says, "You can't imagine it; it was so terrible. Soldiers were given orders to shoot people off their bicycles as they rode, meetings of 3 or more were violently broken up. You can't imagine how bloody it was." Needless to say, they were both quite proud of having achieved independence and of continuing to struggle for further social and economic gains (Herbert was working on a project to draft a full proposal for economic development that is a clear counter to IMF-backed systems of "development," that bring neo-colonial poverty and oppression everywhere they're used). It was also refreshing to have Prexy with us, and to hear his stories of being in Namibia back in 1990, when the mood was ecstatically celebratory, and everyone felt connected to the independence fights throughout the region.

To thank Herbert for his talk, I gave him a copy of my book:

At the Union hall, we also met with Lucy Edwards, a feminist-Marxist professor from the University of Namibia, who told us about the current AIDS situation, and the effect of patriarchy on the problem. She was an amazing speaker as well - clear-headed, forceful, quick thinking, and radical. She says that the AIDS crisis is made worse by "traditional values" (she says, "men don't seem to care about 'tradition' when it comes to cell phones and ipods, but when it comes to sex, they start clamoring about how important their 'culture' is") of men sleeping with multiple women on a regular basis (despite being married), wife swapping and offering of wives to guests, beating women who do not consent to have sex at a given time (described as "marital rape" by the constitution, which bans it) and "transactional sex" (women, having limited means of employment, offering themselves sexually to migrant workers, in exchange for food and housing). She also made it clear that her proposals call for a radical transformation of social and economic structures in the society, and so haven't been much welcomed by many Namibians.

Johannesburg:

Johannesburg sucks. Of all the places we went, I couldn't ever see living in Johannesburg, or even liking visiting. With more than 50% of the Black population unemployed, and virtually no social welfare system in South Africa, the violent crime in Johannesburg is out of control. Of course, the violent rage of the poor and oppressed wouldn't be severe if there weren't pockets of Johannesburg that are nuts wealthy from mining and over forms of exploiting the Black majority; and those whites with some money (and clogging the streets with their commuter traffic and burning themselves out on 60-80 hour work weeks) wall themselves off in the sea of shopping malls that litter the landscape of Johannesburg. Violent crime + malls = gross.

Grossest of all was our "Soweto tour." Visiting Soweto (the "Southwest Townships," where 3.5 of the cities 6 million inhabitants live, virtually all Black) on a paid tour is strange enough. Worse, it felt like the only way in. But most of this could be stomached (and we were reassured that we were on a trustworthy tour, with local, knowledgeable guides, etc.) until we reached the "informal settlement" portion of the tour.

Here, 20,000 people had been living in self-made shacks for more than a dozen years, many of them on government waiting lists for state-built standardized concrete houses (which most people wouldn't prefer to live in, anyway). We were to spend a whopping 15 minutes (yup - fifteen) with a tour guide, to "get a sense of how we really live here." He told us some about the community, and then asked if we were willing to visit a home. When we agreed he told us that, while we were with the family, "as the heart moves you," we could give them money, "again, as the heart moves you; it's not required." How much? "50, 100 rand, as you wish." ($7-15). We proceeded to file in to this old woman's one room house, and ask her a dozen questions about living in a leaky space with a twin bed and propane cooker, given that she shared the space with her three kids. She played her part, and we handed her somewhere between 500R and 1000R ($50-150). Two minutes, and we were out in the streets of the community again. Running out of time, our guide showed us the water tap that the government had installed (thus symbolizing their commitment to leave the community be, but not help in any substantial way). That was it, the end of the tour.

Oh, but wait. "If your heart moves you," we could pay our tour guide something, as well. This money, we were told, would all be spent on supplies for the settlement, such as food and lamp oil (well, all but his 20% cut). He told us that 28 people had agreed to play this role of tour guide and shopper for the community. Feeling totally sick of the whole thing, I rushed to the van, pushing right past the dozen vendors waiting to sell us crafts and such at the end of our tour.

Others felt good about that visit, like they had contributed significantly to a community that had made a determined decision to help themselves and to turn tourism into economic gain for themselves. I couldn't see anything positive in what we had done. It felt humiliating, anti-human, disgusting. We were just white skinned wallets moving through a community that didn't welcome us for any reason other than our substantial wallets, and even with our wallets, we had to leave as soon as the formalities of emptying the wallets had been performed. Further, it didn't feel like a group of people really fighting to improve their lives and seeking allies, it felt like a community that had resigned itself to helplessness and sought to profit off of pity. Nothing will change till both sides of such dynamics totally and completely reject their roles in the game and craft new - peer - roles.

The upside of the Soweto tour was that it took us to the Hector Pieterson museum (the first child to be murdered by police during the '76 Soweto uprising) and the Constitutional Court (and museum of the old apartheid prison. The same place andrew wegerif's mother told us, in tears, to visit, because the transformation of a place that had abused so many of her friends into a museum was so moving to her.)

***

Despite the museum being built by and on the grounds of a casino, the Marxist-leaning Apartheid museum was interesting and informative. With over two hours there, I still had tons more I would have liked to see, and Prexy said that after nine visits he was still finding new interesting sections.

The museum gave a great basic break down of the history of creating a racialist society, including explaining the ever fascinating "racial classification board" that the Apartheid government created out of necessity:

There was an excellent section of photographs taken during the 1976 Soweto student uprisings. Not wanting to "steal" any of these images, we did photograph one particularly moving caption:

The realities of Apartheid and the rebellion against it are so startlingly contrasted against the opinions of those who orchestrated and carried out the oppression. Check out the difference between Desmond Tutu's opinion and a government official's :

This photo didn't come out well, but the map is a very important document. It outlines exactly where all the different Black "Homelands" were, and what the "migration" routes in and out of "South Africa" were. In other words, attempting to call South Africa a "white nation," a dozen or so "Black Nations" were created by the White racist government to slowly force all of the blacks out of the country, stripping them of any claims to citizenship (and thus suffrage, rights, etc.) totally, while still exploiting their labor.

Overall, the museum was quite inspiring. Tons of posters, photos and videos made for quite an engaging experience. I have to say, though, that it noticeably lacked information about dissident and radical whites and their participation in the struggle against apartheid. I found this be a general weakness in most presentations of history in South Africa. Perhaps more damning, the museum seemed to present the Zulu-Nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party (an explicit creation of the Apatheid state, and known to be responsible for thousands of murders of freedom fighters) as a legitimate party within the body politic.

***

Another good thing about Johannesburg...

We went to a poetry night commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death (at the hands of the security forces of the Apartheid state, who claimed he "fell" out a window) of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. I am very inspired by Biko's writing and efforts, and was glad to be part of an event honoring his legacy.

For example, some words to remember Biko by:

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

"The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity."

"As a prelude whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with Blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior."

Mozambique:

It was great to be in Mozambique. As Prexy has his background in the Liberation struggle in Mozambique, working closely with FRELIMO (the front for the liberation of Mozambique, the principal political party before and since independence in 1974) he was excited to share a great deal of stories of the history of this country. And despite the various setbacks brought about by a vicious anti-communist backlash from old white-rule Rhodesia, South Africa and white ruled USA (i.e. CIA) and the IMF and World Bank, he wanted us to experience some of the beautiful qualities of life in a country that has tried to be in opposition to capitalism and racialism.

To get us acquainted with some of the history, he took us to the Museo de Revolucao. On its own, this FRELIMO dominated museum wouldn't have been spectacular, but with Prexy there to fill in the pictures and quotes with stories, it was a real joy. Check out this nice mural that you see soon after entering:

Believe it or not, this poem full of bold declarations against the ruling classes of the world such as:

Fighting against the bourgeoisie,

Our Native land will be the tomb

Of capitalism and exploitation.

is the national anthem of mozambique:

The museum was full of charts and quotes that attempted to educate visitors about the history and economics of colonialism, and just exactly why FRELIMO fought against it. This, for example, is a map of Africa which shows the pre-colonial and colonized national borders:

But when looking at the images of the revolutionaries themselves, Prexy really came alive, sharing stories of these close friends of his who fought so bravely and against such terrible odds to drive the Portuguese from the country. Most moving, was Prexy describing how Eduardo Mondlane, first head of FRELIMO, was scheduled to have breakfast with Prexy on the morning that he was assassinated. As a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, the university has created a memorial to his life.

Here, then, is Samora Machel, Mondlane's successor, and first president of Mozambique. Incidentally, and rather disgustingly, Samora Machel was also assassinated, though there has been no accountability on the part of the Apartheid operatives responsible for his plane crashing (killing him and 34 others, much of the upper leadership of the Mozambiquan government).

FRELIMO-led Mozambique took such serious heat from international racist and capitalist forces because of their fierce commitment ending colonialism throughout Africa. To try and topple the Rhodesian white-minority government, FRELIMO cut off all freight train traffic from Rhodesia to the Mozambique coast, thus unleashing a wrathful white fury. RENAMO (the "National Mozambique Resistance") sprung up as a white-led (but carried out by blacks from Mozambique) terror army of "counter-insurgency," to "destabilize" the economy and social life of Mozambique. We met with a photographer who had taken a number of photos of RENAMO assaults on buses, in which the group would burn alive whole bus-loads of civilians. More than 100,000 were killed by RENAMO, and a million more made refugees. These sick bastards have now forced themselves into a situation where they can run in elections, and serve on parliament as Mozambique is now supposedly a "multi-party democracy." Continuing the anti-communist onslaught even after this bloody racist nonsense, the USA is now pushing Mozambique to remove Marxist street names and the gun from their flag, or face economic backlash from them.

***

We had the great fortune to meet Samora's wife, Graca, who gave a moving speech, and the National Youth Council that she supports.

The National Youth Council runs an amazing crafts space, for young people to create and sell all variety of crafts. They gave us a tour of their space, and we bought some of there products (though we were bizarrely rushed out early, and many people didn't get what they wanted. I guess we were intended to shop only from malls, not from amazing projects such as this. I'm not just trying to be bitter, this is an important point to consider. Why were we not told to buy only from groups such as this? Why were we even taken to shop at a mall on a so-called "solidarity" trip?)

Here's the sewing room. They work with sorts of materials, fabrics (some of which they make themselves before sewing, as in batiks) and recycled materials such as plastic bags:

They also do ceramics:

and wood work and metal work, including sculptures made from old guns bent into new shapes.

It was a wonderful space to visit. It felt like it was very empowering to the young people involved.

***

I gave this young Mozambiquan writer a copy of my book. He was very enthusiastic to connect:

Swaziland:

The beautiful mountainous kingdom of Swaziland (allowed independence much sooner than the rest of South Africa because the King agreed to collaborate with the British) was a nice place to relax. We had a wonderful evening up on the mountainside with some friends, watching the sun go down.

Cape Town #1

2007-09-06T07:19:00.001-07:00

Billy Says:

When we arrived in Cape Town, our friend Dirk (from couchsurfing) picked us up from the airport, and immediately took us to see some of the most beautiful places in the cape town area. He drove us up to lion's head (and rump) to get a great view of the city down below:

then took us around signal hill, down along the atlantic coast to the beach, camps bay and down to hout bay. we drove from there across the peninsula and south towards Muizenburg, and Simon's Town. Libby and I had to put our feet in the water, to feel the atlantic ocean thousands of miles away from the good ole' Jersey shore, and facing west. It never quite gets warm enough to swim in near Cape Town.

we drove from there across the peninsula and south towards muizenburg, and simon's town. Just south of Simon's Town, we saw African (affectionately named "Jackass") penguins.

Along the way we talked all about South Africa, and differences and similarities between the states and S.A. Dirk, as an Afrikaaner born around the same time as me, has roughly lived two lives. He told us about how he had decided, by the time he was ten years old, to join the Apartheid military and defend Apartheid. Then Mandela was realeased and everything began to change. Now his Black peers tell him about their struggle as youths against that same military he thought to join, and they discuss honetly the different paths that led them to knowing one another. He has adapted much better than his parents' generation, and better than many might, to the new social and political arrangement. Dirk is proudly South African, proudly African, and committed to living an anti-racist life in his country.

For dinner, Dirk, his wife, and friend treated us to a traditional Afrikaaner style braai (BBQ; we supplied the tofu) which was delicious.

District Six Museum:

The district six museum is a fascinating look into some of the beautiful possibilities of life in South Africa, as well as the grim history of Apartheid. It commemorates a mixed-race neighborhood that was declared for "whites" by the National Party government in the 60s, the residents kicked out, and the buildings bulldozed. Whether for good or bad, the neighborhood has yet to be rebuilt, though plans are underway. As the focus of the museum is on ex-residents of the neighborhood to remember their home and tell their stories, things like these street signs make up much of the exhibit:

Couchsurfing friends:

Our couchsurfring friends really made our time in Cape Town possible. It felt like home, and we were generously given gifts of food, housing, laughter, stories, and trips to various fun places.

Here's Maya, a wonderful young woman who is now studying politics and economics at UCT, and who bent over backwards to take good care of us:

J.P. is a friend of Maya's, and also Londi, who hosted us most of all (and whom you'll meet in "Cape Town#2"). Here we sit on Londi's "air couch" that Libby and I slept on for over a week:

Going Back to School:

Libby accompanied me a number of times out to the University of the Western Cape, and patiently helped me think through what it would be like to spend two years in the History MA program there. We navigated the different transit routes from the city (and suburbs) out to the university, tried the different food choices, checked out the library, wandered various buildings, toured graduate dormitories, sat in on classes and talked with professors.

Transit questions sat close to central in my mind when imagining going to UWC, as the school is 13 miles from the city center. The metrorail takes you directly to campus in a little over 30 minutes, hourly. From the southern suburbs (observatory and rosebank being the two we were hosted in) the trip is longer because a transfer is required. The train has a notorious reputation as being rather dangerous, as security is sporadic, and poverty is high and reliable. Tens of thousands of Africans pour into the trains every day, but we only saw a smattering of other whites on all our trips (and most whites we spoke to had never even considered using it). We found the train basically enjoyable, though near dark we did spend the extra 1 rand ($.13) to go first class and get security in the car with us (of course, with 3rd class you get things like people performing or singing together, which doesn't happen in 1st class. Take a look at a funky metrorail train, with a group of rarely seen white passengers).

More people ride in minibuses, and there's a route that connects mowbray (a southern suburb) with the university directly, and this also takes only a half hour if you're lucky enough to arrive near when the minibus gets full, but costs slightly more (~$.25). There's more frequent and varied connections between nearby belleville (2km from campus) and cape town, but belleville didn't seem to be that hip of a town when we visited.

The campus itself is small, but nice, with a good bit of greenery. Designed by the apartheid government in the 60s to be an underfunded forced alternative to UCT for the coloured community, (the university of cape town is prestigious, english speaking, and never was fully a white university, which angered apartheid planners, so the coloureds needed to drawn out of there) the campus isn't startlingly beautiful or overflowing with granite and ivy. It's a simple place with mostly brick buildings. But the layout is comfortable, there's plenty of grassy areas, and on the margins of campus is a nature reserve.

As for the buildings, the library is my favorite. It has 13 semi-floors, laid out along the outside of the spiral walkway going up through the center of the building. The graduate computer lab is right up top, with a great view of the campus and surrounding country side.

The student center is lively, full of people at all times. Lots of noise from people slamming their dominoes onto the table, and billiards, and a number of snack and food places, mostly with exactly nil vegetarian (or at least tasty vegetarian) food. The coffeeshop is nice though.

The undergraduate lecture halls are all painted with crazy bright colors:
and murals:

The housing situation is also a huge one to figure out. On-campus accomodation is cheap (~$1300 per year) and includes high speed internet. But it felt lonely when we visited the building, and one professor said that living on campus would be, quite simply, "grim." I was also troubled by this 500m of apocolypse looking landscape between the train station and the graduate housing. It really looks so crazy desolate, and one man we talked to said that it's not a safe walk to take at night, despite how short the distance. The university provides an hourly shuttle, but still, such lack of safety is a definite drawback.

Ok, but I've so far told only logistical details. Obviously that's not why I would up and move to South Africa for a couple years. The History program looked quite encouraging. I would be required to take one required course and one (but hopefully i'd take two) elective courses each semester, for two semesters, then write a big thesis.

The core course is called "public and visual history." It sounded boring to me, but when we sat in on it, I really liked it. The class focuses on how people in South Africa are choosing now to publicly hold the memory of apartheid and the struggle against it. I found the class atnosphere relaxed, thoughtful, radical, interactive, and relatively egalitarian as far as the relationship between professor and students.

The elective courses I'm interested in (i would try and take them all) are:

Race and Class in the Liberation Struggle: 1960-1994
Forced Removals and Land Reform
The History of the Dutch East Indies Company
The Political Economy of Postcolonial Africa

I'm sure that I would learn a ton in these classes, and be really pushed to produce good, challenging analytical writing. There's only about 5 graduate students in history at a time, which might make me crazy lonely, but would also mean i'd have lots of focussed attention from professors and peers (we saw a professor at an observatory coffeeshop, and he initiated a nice little chat; a good omen for future convivial working relationships).

There's also a weekly seminar, where a guest presents a paper before a large audience and a discussion follows for a couple of hours. The seminar we visited was interesting as far as the subject matter, but socially depressing, as mostly professors and white audience members spoke, drowning out the Black student majority.

The ball is still in my court as to whether I'll begin school at UWC in february '08 or not, but - logistical concerns aside - and mostly enjoyed my time there, and definitely feel that the study would do me a lot of good.

***

for a good map of cape town and the areas discussed, try here (or, to see just the UWC campus map, click here).
for a description of the different neighborhoods, click.

Lindsay and friends

2007-09-06T07:18:00.002-07:00

Andrew's brother in Pretoria

2007-09-06T07:18:00.001-07:00

Billy says:

Upon landing in South Africa, I had the pleasure to stay with Marc Wegerif (the brother of Andrew Wegerif, from Varmland, Sweden) and his family. It was a great way to get a quick introduction to the reality of the "new" South Africa.*

Andrew and his wife (Theresa Yates) have been heavily involved in Land Reform issues in South Africa for the last decade. Marc participated in the University of the Western Cape's Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies. In collaboration with others, Marc has published a book (which he kindly gave to me) entitled, "Still Searching for Security: The Reality of Farm Dweller Evictions in South Africa." The book is a thorough investigation into the continued attacks on poor blacks in rural areas, despite the "liberation" from apartheid.

Theresa, a Black American lawyer, began living in South Africa in 1996 under a Crane & Rogers foundation fellowship. Also known as the Institute of Current World Affairs, the foundation sends people to foreign countries for two years, on the condition that they write extensively about the social conditions they confront in whatever country they are in. Theresa's focus was specifically the successes and failures of the Mandela government in terms of implementing land reform. Her writing is powerful and tells an essential piece of recent history.

In short, Marc and Theresa expressed grave concern about the direction things are going right now as far as justice for the poor. Theresa put it bluntly, "Many mistakes are being made, and there isn't much indication that the situation is going to change any time soon." Since the ANC came to power, two million homes for poor people have been built, (but they are all in traditionally black areas, therefore not disrupting apartheid housing patterns) but a massive housing shortage (and extreme levels of poverty and unemployment going with it) persists.

Between Johannesburg and Pretoria there are currently over 200 illegal settlements, and some of these have as many as 40-50,000 people living on them. The evictions, and resistance against attempted evictions in these areas are a daily phenomenon. A special team of cops who dress in infamous red overalls (called "red ants") are notorious for brutal evictions and communities of squatters are attacking back, barricading themselves in (the morning traffic reports frequently include news of roads shut down by protestors) and even beating the red ants in order to stay in their homes. Returning to tactics from the Liberation days, angry township residents have killed a number of ANC officials in their areas, for failure to meet the needs of the community.

Upon arrival to the country in 1986, Marc set himself up with radical friends of his parents. And, in that time of militant upheaval and martial law response, the majority of his friends were in jail. Marc has been a white member of the ANC (he ran for city council on an ANC ticket, promising his wife that he would lose, solely to have challenging conversations with his white neighbors in the suburbs of pretoria. About South African whites Marc says, "They are, almost all, arrogant bastards, who have no gratitude, no idea what they have.") for many years, and remains dedicated to the radical potential of that politics. Rejecting totally his parents' christian vision of social change, he sees more hope in the empowering and autonomous tendencies of the Black Consciousness Movement (which he insists failed to take hold of the politics of the society exactly because it formed itself into formal organizations with party lines, and so on).

Marc and Theresa are, as well as can be expected, glad to be in South Africa, and committed to the work there. They have accepted certain basic, and unpleasant facts about the way of life there. Marc jokes about his swedish relatives (most of which he has quite rarely seen in the last 20+ years) that "none of them have a proper job, not a one of them; if i don't have a decent job in this country, my kids won't eat, and won't be taken care of if they get sick." Likewise, he is part of a neighborhood patrol that drives around at night to try and deter crime. This isn't an expression of the typical vigilante mentality that many whites have, just, "a basic precaution that must be taken."

Marc told me, "Maybe I'm a sell-out, maybe my brother is the only one living up to his ideals. He's a very principled man." But the situation is a lot more complex than that. In a very ugly and contradictory "liberated" society, Marc and Theresa are carrying on: pushing, pushing, pushing, bit by bit.

----
* After my first day in Pretoria, I was speaking with Theresa about the bustling African city I had visited, full of thousands of black faces and three or four white ones. She told me, "When I came in 1990, the black friends I made told me, 'see how much has changed, we're walking on the sidewalk now. Used to be that when we walked on the sidewalk, white folks would shove us into the street, so we started just walking in the street, near the curb.'"

Uganda

2007-09-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Back around the first of august, we posted the following message about Africa, thinking we'd have time (and money, given $6/hr. rates at internet cafes) *in* Africa to do more work on the blog...

Hey, it's been a while since we've had good internet access, so this is just a quick note to say soon we'll catch up with photos and stories of Libby's weeklong trip to Uganda to visit her friend Erin, Billy's trip to Croatia, and our eventual reunion in South Africa to meet some incredible new friends and to visit the University of the Western Cape, where Billy's been accepted to a Master's in History program. Now we've joined our 40-person strong group tour of Southern Africa and survived over the past two days 22 hours of bus riding. Our group of folks is a dynamic and funky mix of mostly Chicagoans. Stories coming soon!
Love,
Libby and Billy

Now, mid-september, Libby finally shares her stories of her visit with Erin in Uganda...

When the skies break open, the road becomes a red river, the “matatu” taxi bus a raft, and the bumps in the dirt road turbulent waves, throwing us about. But the dirt road and the countryside speckled with thatch huts are a welcome reprieve from the exhaust, grime, and chaos of Kampala. Somehow Uganda felt immediately familiar, as soon as I landed. I guess the feel of people walking alongside dirt roads, carrying bundles the size of small houses on their backs is the same whether you’re in Uganda, Mexico, or Ecuador. Still, once my friend Erin and I had reached the backpackers’ hostel, we were not in Uganda, or even Africa, but within some secret haven of 18 years of friendship, and it was not until we pulled into Kampala the next morning that my heart thumped faster and I felt awkward and more visible than ever, a pale skinned ‘mizungu’ weaving amongst hundreds and hundreds of dark-skinned Africans, trying not to step on the numerous blankets of vended items crowding the sidewalk, and trying to look the proper direction before dashing across the street between speeding bikes, motorcycles, and minibuses.

I always thought I would be the “perfect type” for the Peace Corps, but the first few days of being in Uganda had me incredulous and unable to imagine myself ever feeling able to “assimilate” into the culture, which seems like a critical component of building relationships and learning from those in one’s village or town. It seemed impossible to escape the attention brought by my racial and socio-economic demographic, and I realized I don’t know how to be a race traitor when all the blacks around me are celebrating my whiteness. Erin and another white female volunteer and I attended “Speech Day” at her village’s primary school, where the various grades of schoolkids sang songs to the visitors, welcoming them and demonstrating their knowledge. We were told Speech Day would begin at 10 am, so we went at 10:30. Tens of kids in bright purple uniforms were drumming and singing as we walked onto the school grounds. Immediately upon spotting the 3 of us, a collective scream of delight rose among the children and they rushed across the lawn, swarming us and laughing and serenading us with songs. There were so many complex layers of feeling in it for me – delight to be surrounded by so many exuberant kids, discomfort knowing they would never rush across the yard to greet a black person, shame that I enjoyed being the focal point of their attention, frustration at a system where white people are cherished because of the stereotype of their economic and social status (Uganda relies heavily on a steady flow of foreign volunteers, so white people are generally recognized as comparatively-rich aid workers)… When Speech Day finally DID kick off around 2 pm, we 3 white guests were asked to take seats of honor in the very front row, ahead of all the Ugandan parents who had come to see their children. Again, I felt the sting of unwanted privilege and wondered how to fight it.

Erin and I talked a lot together about how it figures into her daily life in Ntenjeru, her village of a few hundred. “People will try to walk with me through town, not because they want to know anything about me or want to have a relationship, but because they want other Ugandans to see them walking with a white person and to think they’re important.” Only after she waged a massive p.r. campaign to establish that her name is Namata (the Luganda name given her by her Ugandan advisor) was she able to escape the incessant “Mizungu! Mizungu!” called out by children and adults alike in her village. In the taxi park in the town of Mukono, a full hour away from Ntenjeru, she is recognized by a taxi driver, who calls to her from 20 meters away. Still, nearly every interaction with non-acquaintance Ugandans (and even with many acquaintances) was formulaic and money-related. Though eventually I came to see that with a great deal of time and effort, one could begin to have a semblance of relationship with one’s neighbors and co-workers, in most cases it was obvious that transcending capital relations ranged from extremely difficult to impossible.

An unexpectedly incredible interaction happened on my last day in Ntenjeru. Erin and I walked 30 minutes through the tea-covered hills to the nearest village. A woman named Rachel who wanted Erin’s input on a women’s collective project getting off the ground in the area and had arranged the meeting. We weren’t sure what to expect, as often Ugandans solicit advice or money from volunteers, but we were blown away by Rachel’s outlook and project. They are a group of 48 women who started with 50 chickens and now have 250 chickens, 22 goats, and enough food growing to feed them all. They sell chicken eggs and put part of the money back into animal feed and group expenses and then split the rest for school fees for their children. “We women are a collective force. For what a man can do, so too can we women,” she chuckled. She wants to train young girls on how to work together, take care of each other, and be self-sufficient. Her group would like to expand their business so they have enough not only for them and their children but also other vulnerable children in their care. “In Uganda, it is we women who must take care of the children. We need to feed them, get them school fees, get their uniforms. We women care for the children. But it is not enough to care only for our own children; we must also care for the children our friends have left behind when they died. If I see the orphans in the street, not going to school, how can I ignore them? For when I die, will it not be my own children who are orphaned?” Anyone interested in providing solidarity to the women’s group can contact Erin: elarsencooper@gmail.com

Goats at Rachel's collective demonstration site

Rachel and Erin chat finances on the stoop

Erin buys some staples from a fruit stand in Ntenjeru, her village

18 years of friendship!

Crowded Kampala Streets

Wingman does the touristy hike of Sipi Falls

Lib models Erin's fancy shoes in the house

8 year old students sing Welcome songs at Speech Day

The main drag in Ntenjeru

Birthday in the Italian Alps

2007-08-11T06:58:00.000-07:00

Budapest Adventure

2007-07-27T06:00:00.001-07:00

Libby and I spent five(!) fabulous hours in Budapest -- just one afternoon and then back on the train, all the way to Germany. We had a picnic and played all silly-like in the park...

We stumbled upon the memorial to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The memorial is beautiful, a huge set of giant pillars, that are at first disparate and then come together into one.

Then there´s this nice plaque...

And a flag which is reminiscient of the revolutionary days, when people cut the communist emblem out of the center of the flag:

Then I had the tremendous luck to be able to play two fun games of chess with this old man. He spoke no english whatsoever, but was sweet as could be. Oh, and he did say one thing in english. When I had been trying to take one of his pawns for many moves, and then he just stepped the pawn out of the way, he said, "tick, tock. tock, tick." Just like that.

Then we went to these fabulous thermal baths. It was incredibly fun. All of the pools were from natural mineral water springs. Some were 38 degrees celsius, others more like pool temperature, some with jets like a hot tub, others just relaxing. And, in the pool one, there was this circular area with jets coming out of the walls, so you could just float and spin around in circles along with dozens of other laughing kids and adults. Fabulous!

The only down side was that we ended up taking a night train which had no more beds available, so we had a lousy night of sleep in the bike storage car of the train:

Awesome Austria

2007-07-27T04:45:00.001-07:00

Libby and I had a nice restful and playful time in Wien, Austria. We stayed with friends of Gesa (a friend we made in Berlin) and they were super sweet and made us feel totally at home.

The family that hosted us, Lajos (the young one) Bettina, and Rudi...

Communism and After

2007-07-27T03:20:00.000-07:00

Billy Says:

Poland:

"I didn´t like France," our friend Ania (from Krakow) says, "they are much more communistic there, and I couldn´t explain how horrible communism was, for those of us who lived through it here." There was, for example, a law under communism that the state could assign a family with new/extra flat-mates if they determined (by some math) that there was spare space. (It has been a challenge in the last 17 years, because humanitarian law enacted with the transition makes evicting these folks illegal, but staying living together isn´t necessarily easy or desirable). Ania tried telling a French friend about the indignity and discomfort of such a policy. "At least you don´t have any homeless people," the friend replies. "That´s easy for her to say, with a comfortable apartment in Paris... why doesn´t she let homeless people stay in her house?"

In fact, it´s a very difficult conversation. It´s quite difficult to imagine a society that is simultaneously totalitarian and also meeting "all" human needs. Maybe the hardest part about the paradox is realizing that human needs can be met in a totalitarian way (such as forcing people to live in cramped quarters so that no one goes without shelter). But to have grown up in a society where human needs are bought and sold (still there´s plenty of totalitarianism, all the same) it´s hard to swallow a simple, "it was horrible." And, of course, I still believe that it was horrible.

Aside from one or two "Milk Bars," most of the positive aspects of communism in Poland are being (or have been already) erased and replaced with the flashy gawdiness of capitalism (and, delightfully, America replaces Russia as the cultural and linguistic Master of the society). Our friend Ola told us that even the memory of anti-capitalist participants in the solidarity movement has been erased. (Solidarity is a trade union movement which fought against the stalinist state and swept a huge body of support in the early eighties: "Within a few months, 10 million workers [out of 13 million employees] had left the ‘official’ state-run unions to set up their own independent unions under the umbrella of ‘Solidarnosc’. Peasants and students set up their own committees. Even 40,000 police set up an independent union! In an opinion poll at the time, 83% of the population said they were in support of the strikers." This situation led to years of martial law and harsh repression which stuck till the ´89 collapse. The union is now part of the ruling capitalist state.) There is no discussion allowed of people saying that they had fought in the solidarity years for a non-totalitarian, but still not profit-based system. Only the capitalists and catholics are allowed to claim a victory. As if they were the only ones brave enough to stand up to the communist regime.

Now Poland´s capitalist economy is growing so fast that only China´s post-communist economy is growing faster.

There is one more piece to this. Consistently in my conversations with people raised under communism, there is a little anecdote which sticks out where the person´s generally demeanor about the system suddenly changes, and I hear something nostalgic, wistful, happy about the old times.

Anna, a friend we made in Warszawa but raised in the GDR says that she can´t relate to people born just 5 or 6 years after her, people who have lived only under capitalist. She says there is a whole different attitude towards life, a whole different ethic towards human relations, that quite simply turns her off to them, alienates her. When she was enrolled in university in western germany she´d say to her friends, "I´m going home to Germany... oops, I mean, Berlin," because she felt the west to be so foreign as to be another country entirely.

GDR:

I went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin to try and learn more about the division of Berlin and the Cold War generally. I got what I paid for I suppose. Certainly I got a much clearer glimpse into the specific horrors of the wall, which without a doubt terrorized the inhabitants of a beautifully city. I left with a clear sensation that there was a large portion of the German population that felt strongly (immediately after the war and consistently afterwards) that they didn´t want their country to be divided - for the purposes of a war between two distant empires.
Still, on the whole, I couldn´t entirely trust the viewpoint of the creators of the museum. I felt almost bludgeoned by the incessant references to the "free economy," (or even "free world") of the West. If I had been raised in a "free" economy, I wouldn´t feel the desparate desire to eradicate the injustices of my society that I now do. Really, speaking of Capitalism as the "free" economy is pure religious indoctrination. So, take what I learned at the Museum with a grain of salt.

I was most struck by one story, which the museum went to lengths to tell in detail. On June 17th, 1953, there was a massive rebellion that spread throughout East Germany. The starting point for the rebellion was a strike of construction workers against the forced increases in "efficiency" and gross productivity that the state economic planners were demanding. Failing to get anyone in the government to negotiate with them, a call was made for a general strike, and some hundreds of thousands of protestors descended on government buildings in east Berlin. The strikes, riots and clashes with the "people´s army" spread throughout the country, including 24 locations where prisons were ransacked by a furious population and the prisoners released. The insurrection was put down by martial law and the rolling in of soviet tanks to different cities.

It´s a compelling story. I find it most interesting that the igniting point for the rebellion is exactly the workplace, the place that the Marxists claim to liberate first and foremost. From this I understand that life under a planned economy of this sort was not an increase in human freedom. Of course not, as the goal was increased "efficiency," not freedom. So, I´m all for the rebellion, the attacks on the prisons and government buildings, the strikes, all of it. I am inspired and encouraged. Ok, but check this out...

West Germany and the USA went to lengths to encourage the general strike and the clash with the GDR government. They printed up newspapers that were distributed in the east, broadcast over radio and Tv in support, etc. This is strange, eh? Suddenly the "free" economy is in support of general strikes and rioting? The capitalists aren´t willing to force workers to increase efficiency and gross productivity? Not a chance. Had the same thing happened anywhere in the west, the state response would be exactly the same: martial law, mass arrests and murder of protesters. Witness France, 1968, LA 1992, Katrina, 2005, etc.

Friends in Poland

2007-07-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Let Fela Kuti lead you on a stroll through beautiful Poland...

Upon arrival in Warszawa, we stayed with Ola and her wonderful family. Ola is a political science student and is working to help bring to life a museum for the History of the Polish Jews, though she is not Jewish. We had many excellent conversations about Poland and America. Her parents were very sweet and supportive.
Ola´s mother is happily making us potato latkes:
We also stayed with Roman and Elizabeth, good friends of Libby´s uncle Denny. They own five coffee shops in Warszawa, of which we enjoyed only the main one, Cafe Adi, right across the street from a famous theatre.

***

In Krakow, we stayed a beautiful hostel, called DoDo Hostel, which unfortunately we have no photos of, but you can check their website.

We also had the joy to meet friends from Massolit Books, an english-language bookstore that Sam, a friend of Libby´s worked at, and overall a fabulous place:
Here´s Karen, the bookstore owner:

Street Art and Political Posters

2007-07-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

There's so much amazing grafitti and radical posters that we didn't remember to or weren't able to photograph. A few we did get.

Just one of the dozens of anti-G8 posters in Berlin and Rostock (and frankly not the best of them):

Some of our favorites from South Africa (well, there were dozens at the Mayibuye Archives at UWC, but photography is prohibited there):

One of the good Mozambiquan ones, interesting because it depicts the three symbols used on the flag that the United States government hates so much: the book, the hoe, and the gun.

A couple of Paris gems:

In Belgium, there was this graffiti, which i take as an interesting critique, though i can't read the french, really:

Also in Paris there was this set of three, on a bridge. What the hell?

Nazism and after

2007-07-25T05:40:00.000-07:00

Billy Says:

The legacy of Nazism is everywhere here. Even in way northern Norway, into the arctic circle, there's memorials and museums to mark the Nazi occupation and anti-Nazi resistance (see Narvik post). Then, of course, Berlin has a huge memorial (see Berlin post). Paris had my favorite memorial. You're led down a staircase, which opens to huge walls and triangle spikes staring you down, then bars and a small window to the sea beyond. You have to figure out that the memorial is behind you, but while you figure it out, you're usefully suspended in feeling confined and threatened.

In Wien, there's a giant cement block, comprised of hundreds of books (made of cement), all with their spine inward, so as to be unreadable. This is to represent the knowledge lost due to the holocaust. This has been criticized because of course not only the intelligentsia were killed. But my friend Rudi replies, "all the same, it's a huge block of cement; it'd be pretty hard to remove if the right wing came to power, and i think that's part of the point."

Warszawa is subtly horrifying, in that it seems nice enough, but 90% of the city has been completely rebuilt after the Nazis attempted to annihilate the city, the Jews, the Poles who hid Jews, the Polish Jews, the anti-capitalists and anti-Nazis, and Poland in general. IN a way, the whole city is a grim reminder of Nazism, and what spirit of Jewish vibrancy and human institutions remain is a memorial to the necessity of living in resistance.

Auschwitz, on the other hand, is simply horrifying. Libby broke out in tears as we stood in the gas chamber and the playful cries of an infant echoed off the walls which have held so many screams of death. The moment I entered the "dorm" for children (and mothers) at Birkenau, I felt a wave of sheer revulsion, and i think i would have vomitted if i had stayed longer than ( or ten minutes. In the whole place there is a feeling that overtakes you and cannot be easily explained. Death happens. Even death by oppression is understandable, known, and able to be grappled with, given the passing of time. But to stand on a piece of land where 1.5 million were killed in just one or two years? Unbelievably wretched.

In addition, the way in which Anti-Nazism influences a radical/anarchist politics in Europe - and Germany, Poland, and Austria in particular - is fascinating and instructive. I was intrigued to learn that Austria was isolated, governmentally and financially, in 2000 when 25-30% of parliament was elected Neo-Nazi. This, i'm told, gave useful sanction and encouragement to the street anti-fascist movement, and to anarchist rebellion generally. But, as the years passed; the "regular" Nazis, the average voters who elected these extremist-right candidates felt a new determination to bring their politics to life, rather than feeling discouraged or defeated.

I've spoken with so-called regular Germans who struggle with any displays of German flags or patriotism, and outside of sporting this is rather rare anyway. But our friend Rudi in Wien showed us photos of German soccer fans flagrantly displaying German flags, WWI (yes, one) military helmets and generally violent, macho patriotism. Rudi says with disgust, "Look at them, proudly displaying that flag which reminds the world of evil they had never before imagined." He also told me of Holocaust survivors who could never again speak or hear German spoken without traumatics memories of the brutal commanding language of their captors and killers.

Rudi is sympathetic to the "anti-deutsch" anti-fascist tendency, and he presented himself in a way in which was able to have some of taht sympathy rub off on me. I have thought before of the "anti-deutsch" folks as making crude pro-Israel and pro-America displays that I can't even slightly respect. But for Rudi, the emphasis was on establishing a culture of "zero tolerance" for any hints of a recurrence of "National Socialism." For example, Rudi told a story about organizing a caravan of Indian anti-Globalization activists throughout Europe. During the journery, one Indian man turned to Rudi and said, "Hitler was great, he killed lots of Jews." Rudi paid the airline fee to have the man immediately flown back to India. Many people tried to tell him that maybe the man simply didn't understand what he had said, didn't mean it, and so on. Rudi insists, "If I had done anything less, I would have been treating him like a child, not taking him seriously in his opinions."

It feels clear to me that the Nazi "episode" has an aftermath which we are not yet out of. I don't know what it will take to bury the ordeal once and for all, but we aren't finished doing it yet, that's for sure.

***

here´s the view from the bottom of the steps at the paris memorial:

and from the inside looking out:

"But All of Warsaw is a Cemetery"

2007-07-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

Every place has its own hell
"but all of Warsaw is a cemetery."

90% of the city bombed?
87% of the population disenfranchised, enslaved, even?
Recovery, of a sort, has happened.
But to live atop the ashes of the slaughtered?
Something altogether else is required (of you).

"All of Warsaw is a cemetery."
"And what of the park?
What of literature?
Where are the monuments to the living?"

They say no one reacted to the burning of the Ghetto
because gunshots and screams
were an everyday occurrence.
How little does it take?
What is the minimum brutality needed
to produce a complacent population?
Or is it always maximum brutality?
We are still the same as them, right?
The Poles, 1943, we're just like them, right?

***

The secret agent tapping your phone
politely asks you to the cut the conversation short;
it's late, and he needs his rest.
You have no freedom
but your oppressor earns the same wage as you.
You have no freedom
but you have food, housing, medicine and education.
You have no freedom,
but plenty of time to sit and talk with friends.

***

How long does it take a people to forget
the hell of war?
As long as you can say,
"and to my grandfather, they..."
"before... (the war)..."
"before... (the peace)..."
The war is still on.

Pareeee: July 1st-4th

2007-07-03T16:39:00.001-07:00

Augsburg -- Lib visits college friends from International House

2007-07-03T16:18:00.000-07:00

coffee in the town square with Stefan (and Harald, guest photographer)

From Wendy's hospitality in Brussels, I took my first solo flight (this trip) and trained down to Augsburg to visit Harald and Stefan, 2 good friends of mine from the college days of living in the International House. I was curious about rediscovering my "independent" self-- about how I function on mz own while traveling, not being so dependent on Billy to get us to our destinations (he's a timetable whiz!). I'm not as good at taking the most efficient route, I don't think. For starters, I accidentally told the guy at the ticket counter in Brussels that I needed to know the connections to Munich, when really I needed to go to Augsburg, and consequently I spent some mental energy juggling around how I would modify my transfers in different towns to go straight to Augsburg. I figured it out eventually and transfered in Nuremburg. I had by that time finished a book by Winnie Mandela that Billy and I had been reading, and for the first time got deeply into writing some reflections. Unfortunately, I was so intent on my writing that I stayed seated to finish a thought as we pulled into the Augsburg station, and misjudged the length of the stop. As I pulled my bag down from the overhead rack, other passengers getting onboard blocked my quick escape, and I heard the "door closing" bell chime just as I rushed past them. I reached the door just as it had a few inches left. Had I been bolder, perhaps I'd have thrust my hand or arm into the line of fire, but once it closed --and it did -- there was no getting out. For the first time on the trip, even though weäve had a few travel snafus, I really just wanted to cry. There I was, in Augsburg, and now condemned to go all the waz to Munich (40 minutes) and take another train back (thank god for the rail pass). At some point after 20 minutes or so of feeling shaky and upset about my judgment error, I decided I had to choose to think this was absurdly hilarious, and began to feel alot better (also, a cheap scoop of gelato at the Munich train station was of further comfort).

When I got back to Augsburg, Stefan was waiting for me at the station. We could recognize each other from 100 yards away, and it immediately felt impossible that 2 years could have passed since we lived together in I-House. We went back to his place and then met up with Harald at a coffeeshop/bar that night and chatted for a while, catching each other up.
Harald and I went running together with a friend of his the next morning, then Stefan and I walked all around Augsburg that afternoon. We saw the cathedral, the old town, and I learned more about the history of the town, named after Augustus during the Roman Empire's glory days. We climbed hundreds of steps of a bel tower in the city square, and spent time on a sandy beach created on the top of a parking garage, sipping organic ginger-orange lemonade ("Bionade", a German phenomenon) from our lounge chairs in the sunny breeze. Harald made us a delicious vegetable lasagna dinner, and we reminisced and laughed into the wee hours.

After another day of exploring the city, and patronizing once more the city's coffee shops, I got on a night train and headed back west, to rejoin Billy in Paris. It was great to see my friends, if only for 2 days.

reverent worship of the statues in town

Augsburg from the bell tower in town square-- record race to the top is 53 seconds... it took us 3:40 at a leisurely clip

you can't escape the black water of capitalism, even in the Munich train station!

The great Augustus, after whom Augsburg is named.

an old merchant house, now commercial buildings

part of an art series celebrating water

Harald prepares bruschetta and lasagna in the kitchen

the dynamic duo, just as in the olden days of I-House

Belgium

2007-07-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

What better way to wake up from the Copenhagen-Cologne night train than with a rousing song from Herr Billy?!

Billy Says:

I. Squats

When I wrote to wendy about visiting her, she welcomed me and said, "i´m not doing so well, i´m kinda on the edge of a nervous breakdown." Libby and I arrived just a after a series of bad news had showed up in her life. Numerous close friends are facing charges, squatter friends in louven have already been evicted (not to mention, Ungdomshuset, a well-known and long-standing squat in copenhagen being evicted, despite rioting in response, and kopi, a famous berlin squat facing pressure to close) and wendy´ squat has been served eviction notice by a squad of dozens of cops, guns drawn, at 5am.

Wendy and her friends squatted an old church in antwerpen some years back because the surrounding neighborhood was facing demolition, to be replaced by an office complex. They set a policy of accepting requests for housing from anyone without papers. A number of their housemates steal on a regular basis, one of many reasons the squat drew police repression (all of these sans papiers folks were arrested). The neighbors that had once beens upportive of the squat now say, "did you know you were living with thieves?" in disgust, and are supportive of eviction. When I told Wendy that it took courage to take such a stand as to house undocumented immigrants, she shrugged it off and said, "if you don´t give people papers, what do you expect them to do, if not steal?"

2. Belgians and Africans

All of the neighborhoods i´ve gone to with wendy - are - to my eyes - virtually totally descendants of Africa. I put my foot in my mouth multiple times with comments like, "I don´t see any Belgians." Wendy then reminds me that these communities were established three generations ago in the post-war de-colonization times, when belgium was strapped for labor and encouraged workers to come in huge numbers. She´s right, they´re Belgians now. But still, the mural in the park (in Brussels) talks about fighting to end ghettos, the loss of culture experienced by young people in the neighborhood who feel like "exiles." So, what exactly is happening? It can´t be as simple as Wendy´s "Europe isn´t just White, Billy, you have to stop thinking that." I get that Brussels isn´t Morrocco and that no matter how many moroccan bakeries, fruit stands, mosques and radios fill the streets, it´s still a neighborhood in a major European city. But with so much control of local businesses in "African" hands, it doesn´t exactly remind me of an American ghettto, either. In other words, the "culture" of the neighborhood feels much more "distinctly" African - or even just to say, intact - than an all-Black neighborhood in the states.

One thing I am used to: feeling out of place.

As we (a group of six or so White anarchists) walked through the streets looking for potential buildings to squat, a man yelled out his car window: "it´s over there, on the right. What you´re looking for, it´s on the right." As in, "I don´t know who you are or why you´re here, but i can tell that you are lost."

3. Responses to my book

I sent Wendy a package of ten of my books before visiting. She had read it, as had her close friend Laurent whom I´ve met before and really respect and admire. Both of them were delightfully interested in talking about the book and the thoughts that arose for them from reading it. Wendy said that found it unusually easy to read, given that it is all non-fiction, and finished it in just a few days. The story-telling structure of the book made it much more readable for her. Both Wendy and Laurent spoke about how the chapter on the transportation of Irish people to the New World and their transition to Whites helped contribute to conversations that her friends have been having about the nature of slavery and race. They also both commented about how they originally struggled with the sections of the book that focus on Frederick Douglass High School, and education struggles generally. At first they weren´t sure that the projects were worthwhile, or radical. But they found that by the end of the book they felt much clearer on why I find these projects important, and could feel comfortable supporting such struggles. Laurent explained that part of his resistance to taking the discussion about education seriously is that the American school system treats its underclass students worse than lower class students get educated in Belgium, or Europe. In Belgium, a much higher standard (or "floor" as Bob Moses says) has been set.

All in all, I was very grateful and encouraged by Wendy and Laurent´s thoughtful response. I hope that others, who at first are only interested in schooling and education issues read my book and then become interested in the historical/political ideas, as well.

4. Care and Love

I arrived at Wendy´s house having been sick for a full week. By the time I got to Brussels, the sinus infection had moved to my ears and was causing me great pain and lack of hearing. She immediately said, "Well, what will you do about this?" and we set about figuring out what i might be able to do. We discussed different "natural", herbal options, and also found out about cheap clinics that might prescribe me antibiotics. Then we went to the pharmacist and he insisted that i needed antibiotics. Wendy then skillfully persuaded him to sell us the medicine without a doctor´s prescription. Through it all, Wendy was so caring and tender, and it turns out that antiobiotics were really vital because the pain became so severe in my first night in Brussels that I am now confident I´d have shattered my ear drums without medication.

While I was in Belgium, I got another glimpse of what I consider the really special love between Wendy and Laurent. As it is a particularly anarchist love, based on a mutual rejection of the current society and all of the definitions of happiness currently available, they probably won´t appreciate me going to lengths to describe their love. So, I won´t. But, I promise, it´s a beautiful thing.

Late night card games at the squat-ish collective house (with 5-15?! residents) in Brussels

Wendy and Billy play in the streets of Belgium

Quiet Resistance in the Hills of Värmland

2007-07-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

Billy Says:

Tucked in the "wilderness" of Sweden, we stumbled upon a beautiful piece of of the history of anti-apartheid struggle. We first met Andrew,a young father about my age, who had his back broken by Carribinieri in Genova, 2001 and now tries to live out a peaceful life with his partner and kids. Andrew, Malin, Eliann (5) and Lumi (3 mos.) live on Andrew´s mother´s land, in the hilss of southern Värmland, along an 8km lake. It´s a space with no indoor toilet, running or hot water, a well and a wood stove, and the last house to receive electricity from a string of poles running a few kilometres back to town. Andrew´s grandparents bought the land back in the 40s, and though it has mostly been used as a summer home, Andrew and Malin live there year round, and Andrew´s Mother Elsa will soon retire on the land. But the route to this small patch of land (where the sun doesn´t rise above the hills for 10 weeks of the winter) is windy and incredible.

Andrew´s father, Boudewijn Wegerif, was a Dutch man raised in South Africa. He met Elsa on a plane from London in 1964, after spending time helping to bring about the South Africa Defense & Aid Fund in London, roughly the first western anti-apartheid organization (it sprung up in response to Sharpeville). The two decided to get married, and spent seven years together as white, Christan, pacifist dissenters to the apartheid regime. As Elsa says, "Apartheid laws seemed like they were impossible to get around, but if you wanted to - and were willing to be under surveillance by the special branch (many people were watched, but not in trouble) - there were ways around them all... We made no secret of the fact that we weren´t interested in forwarding apartheid." In addition to trying to live out a multi-racial lifestyle, they also participated in some explicit projects against the system, such as helping a group of Swaziland textile producers, inter-racial "sensitivity" gatherings, and the printing and distributing of 1,200 LPs of Martin Luther King´s "Message to the Churches" (which a South African friend had heard in person in the states and recorded).

They felt like they weren´t ever doing enough, despite the surveillance, detention, torture and exiling of their friends (and themselves). Elsa spoke about how, going back to South Africa, she realized how sad she´been. "In those conditions, you have to be strong, you have to give the finger to the wire-taps and stay angry, but you never get time to notice how sad the whole thing is," she said, in describing a new constitutional court and memorial made in the ruins of an old jail for political prisoners.

In 1971, the South African government simply refused to allow them to keep living there. First they went to London, and then in ´84 to Sweden. Starting at four year´s old, Andrew was raised here, and the house was something of a commune, with more than one family living together always, and his mother and father still involved in the radical non-violent dissent that had gotten them kicked out apartheid South Africa. His father was gone for months and even years of his childhood, on long walks to talk about global poverty (Sweden to Rome, Sweden to South Africa [2.5 years of walking] etc.) and jail for civil disobedience (publicly smashing bank windows in defiance of capitalism - he did this three times).

At death, Boudewijn left many papers and books, debt to the banks (which couldn´t be paid because he spent decades "on the goodness of people," and without a legal income) and a chess set. For decades Boudewijn played on a little magnetic chess board, which he carried to the lengths of the earth. Andrew and his brother Marc played a game for it, and Andrew won it. Since his father´s death Andrew takes chess much more seriously (he beat me solidly a good dozen times) and spoke with deep regret about how he was never so good at chess when his father was alive. "I wish I could have given him a good match while he was still alive."

It´s an intense legacy to be born and raised into. Andrew and his family carry on the legacy quite beautifully: emphasizing kindness and love to others and quiet defiance against the current system.

Malin makes the best bread we've tasted on this trip!
(and hey, that´s the WOOF coordinator for Sweden in the background)

Billy and Andrew chat on the shore

Trying to wash Billy's hair without him getting in the lake...

Post-swim picnic on the lawn

Wwoofing at Kulturstationen in Sweden

2007-07-03T15:36:00.001-07:00

This video is a good start to understanding kulturstationen and our role in it...

Billy Says:

When we first thought of the idea of spending some time WWOOFing in Sweden, we searched their website and immediately kulturstationen stood out as the most intriguing and beautiful of all the projects. The vision is clear, and excellent. They have taken a space that was once the centerpoint of industry and international trade - within an otherwise sparsely populated rural area - the train station erected by the iron company, and are turning it, once again, into a hub of activity. Except this time, the rail line is replaced by a bike path, and so people come to the station and connect to the outside world through visitors, movies, and the sharing of radical and alternative ideas. The focus is no longer on trading products for money, labor for capital, but instead to trade companionship and conversation, with food and pleasure to go with it.
Artur and Minna have a lot of work ahead of them in order to reach that vision. They have inherited a space that was misused by a crazy animal nut (17 dogs, 17 cats, multiple horses, rabbits, sheep, etc.) for nearly twenty years: a man that walled himself off with a huge fence while his space deteriorated behind the wall. Like I´ve seen with friends doing rehab in the states, taking a space that has been ill-used and putting it to good use is so much harder - and more necessary and honorable, often - than tearing down and starting from scratch. But Artur and Minna are really dedicated folks, and they´ve already been at it for a year and a half, while raising a child and holding down full time jobs as well. Their determination to work through the spartan conditions of the current Myra station, while maintaining a love of the Kulturstationen they see in their minds, reminds me of the steadfast settlers in colonial america (minus the genocidal, money-hungry drive).
Working with Artur and Minna is a wonderful experience. They are both extremely supportive of our autonomy and happiness, and repeatedly reassure us that we are encouraged to speak up and share all of ourselves with the work. It is nothing at all like the typical boss-worker (or even volunteer-manager) relationship. It feels much more like family, like peers co-creating a beautiful thing. We contributed only a small bit of labor to their project. Mostly we just got the outdoor toilet to a good place, mowed the lawn, made a few meals, and tended to their son Josef a bit as well. The nature of our current trip meant that we didn´t have time to help tackle some of the larger projects, such as ripping out the floor in the living/guest room and putting in a new one. Still, I look forward to returning to Kulturstationen in the years to come, both to contribute our labor and ideas, and also to celebrate the coming success of the project. I strongly encourage anyone interested in creating alternative spaces for radical ideas and people to thrive to go and work with kulturstationen.

Billy reads to his young, uninterested pupil, Josef (18 months old)

Billy lounges on the luxurious platform of the future "Culture Station"

Rural setting of Varmland

Forget lawn-mowing... try the weed-whacker!

Snack break with the Swedish high-school laborers

The Beautiful but smelly guest room

Midsummer Candlelight table

Friends of Artur & Minna at Midsummer's Celebration

Midsummer's Feast

Says Libby:

Staying with Artur and Minna was overall a delightful experience. Both Billy and I felt like we were on equal footing with them and that they were extremely open to letting us shape a general assignment into a specific vision of our own.

As for family life, it felt special to be around Artur and Minna and to see their mutual passion for the project they've created, as well as their affection for each other. Artur works full-time from home organizing and fundraising for a large music festival to take place later this summer, so he was quite busy answering and making calls, all the while organizing for the event of the summer: the Midsummer Celebration. Because so many winter hours are spent in darkness, with the sun making only a brief appearance each day (if at all, in the far north), the arrival of the longest day of the year is celebrated with great festivities and revelry. Christmas and Missumers, we were told, are the 2 most widely celebrated holidays in Sweden, but Midsummer i considered the more outrageous, as one is expected to pass Christmas with one's family, but Midsummer ismarked by heavy drinking with one's close friends, as it lacks the religious seriousness of Christmas. Artur had many stories to share from relentless travels all over the Eruopean and Asian continents, of such & such strange or comedic character who'd given him a lift while hitching from here to there. His knack for mimicry made him a delightful storyteller.

Minna, who is designing her own fashion line, oversaw our work, and also flung herself with great dedication to the task of nettle removal; the vast yard between the house/station and the stable, overgrown with tall grasses and weeds, had an abundance of the painful plants. One afternoon when Billy was sick and still sleeping, I had prepared lunch for all of us, as well as some tea I was taking out to B. Minna was pulling up nettles out by the stable, and I stopped by to tell her lunch was ready. "I'm very much in the head of the nettles right now -- I can tell how they think" she said, "and how they grow. They put down these roots and *schoonk!*-- grab together and they become so strong, and if someone tells them not to come up in one spot, they work together to stay connected and find another place to grow, and this is how I want the people who come here to be; theyäll become strong together. I want our people to be like nettles!" Minna seemed to me a wild spirit, someone who takes seriously to the earth and who proved herself to be very sensitive to the energies of those around her.

The youngest member of the Kulturstationen trifecta is Josef, 18 mos., who is one of the most fun kids to spend time with I've met in a long time. When we first arrived, we spent an hour entertaining him/being entertained BY him, and found him incredibly curious. We tried out all of our "kid" tricks within a very short time, and while Josef had a limited attention span for most games, he took forever to get bored of running around us as we lay on the floor of the living room, completing many a lap around its circumference with his pacifier obscuring his broad grin as we cheered him on. There ended up being many children around for the midsummer weekend-- seems like Artur and Minna's generation of friends (though not so much older than us) has hit the reproductive phase of life, and we realied once there were kids crawling everywhere that we were quite content to be able to walk away from the responsibility of tireless attention after an hour or two of play and to let the parents be parents. Not now, thank you. I was also really reminded of the importance of raising kids within the support of a strong community to be able to provide some relief amongst the parents, especially in an isolated area like Värmland.

Midsummer tradition includes the chopping down of a tree. Gender roles are prominent; the men go off into the woods to do the chopping and hauling, while the women and girls gather flowers, vines, and greenery to wrap around the pole. Artur described to us that the ritual had very secular origins, but that the Christian tradition had since influenced the procedure, and instead of a simple pole being erected in to the hol made in the ground (a pretty overt symbol of fertilization), an extra tree was now usually added to make the pole into a cross. Artur insidsted that the ceremony on their land would remain a cross-less, rather hedonistic celebration, and chuckled, joking that they'd brought us there to be sacrificed, not to be simple wwoof volunteers.

Friends started showing up Thursday afternoon. Tuckered out from work and with Billy sick, we curled up for a nap before the commencment of official festivites. One of the more amusing moments of that afternnon occured when a young man popped his head into our bedroom out in the old military hangar about 50 yards from the house. Wearing a little less than our pajamas, I thrust my hand out from under the covers and introduced myself. He said "yeah, I heard I could find you guys out here and wanted to meet you. I'm Yandi, the national WWOOF coordinator of Sweden." I almost burst out laughing and somehow was able to hold it back until the interaction had ended-- there we were, half naked and sleeping, not such great exemplaries of hard-working volunteers at that moment. Over the weekend we had the chance to get to know Yandi much better, despite our hilarious first introduction.

Other friends turned up throughout the evening and we all sat down together for dinner before moving on to various activities. Billy and Andrew played chess for hours, Artur practiced DJing on the turntables he'd rented for the weekend, and we had no idea when we hit the sack at 2 or 3 am that the folks who arrived at that hour would stay up until 7 or 8 dancing and partying. When we finally dragged ourselves from the hangar to the house for breakfast sometime in the early afternoon, we were greeted by others in the kitchen "Good morning." We felt embarrassed until realiying only half of the guests were up yet, and those in the kitchen had just arisen and were eating breakfast.

A lazy afternoon was followed by an evening simliar to the previous night, but this time more people, more food, and more drinks. Dinner began with a hearty toast, and echoes of "SKOL!" around the table, and was several times interrupted by rousing traditional drinking songs. People spread jarred fish in various garlic or mustard sauces onto crackers and bread as part of the traditional fare. Soon dancing and chess again ensued. Our friend Andrew had again attended the party and offered that perhaps we might visit his family's land, 40 minutes south. We were sad to leave Kulturstationen the next day, but were excited for a little change of scenery and another glimpse into life in Värmland...

Minna's Fashion studio

The next Bobby Fisher

This is how we get down (that´s the head of WWOOF Sweden in the middle)...

Ummm... doesn't get much cuter.

Myra Station with the erected midsummer pole

The revived outdoor toilet; one of our proud wwoofing accomplishments

Poetry while you p...

Soon to come...

2007-07-03T06:10:00.000-07:00

Updates coming soon on Kulturstationen in Sweden, new friends, squat visits in Belgium, college friends in Augsburg, and fun in Paree...

Funny videos...

2007-06-20T09:30:00.000-07:00

So, we now have capacity to include some of the home videos we've been making along the way. Please have a look at some of our earlier blogs and you'll find we've added more photos and videos.

Apologies to our German friends for this one...we couldn't resist the play on words!

Billy tries salty licorice candy in Denmark:

Libbilly and the Critters: International Karaoke Debut

2007-06-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

Imagine yourself on the top floor of a crazy ferry-nightclub, with Finnish and Swedish 80's-esque electronic beats and pop lyrics again and again taking all the attention. what about family values? What about good old American music, like the tunes of the Saint Vincent Children's choir? As diplomats from our nation, we had to act...

Fun in Finland...

2007-06-18T14:13:00.000-07:00

Finnish: one of Europe's most difficult languages!

Having experienced one night in the true land of the midnight sun in Narvik, we jumped back on the train, which by now has become our second home, and headed the 7 hours back down to Boden, Sweden, where we walked to the bus station that would take us 1.5 hours to the border with Finland (for some reason that we couldn't figure out, and no one could explain sufficiently, to get from Sweden to Finland, one must bus from Boden to a border town called Haparanda, walk 1 km across the border into Tornio, Finland, and catch another bus or a cab from there to a town 25 km away called Kemi, where there's a train station connecting with the line down to Helsinki.) As we were asking for more specific information about the transitions from bus, foot, cab, etc, the bus we needed to get to make the last night train down to Helsinki pulled out of the station. Blast. At first we were a little frustrated and unsure what our next step would be. We kept our stay in Narvik short so that we could catch that bus and the night train, and now it seemed unlikely we'd make our connection to Helsinki. After brief deliberation, we decided to throw ourselves in to adventure and hop on the next bus. Neither of us wanted to go back to Stockholm without a taste of Finland, and we thought there was a narrow, narrow chance of catching the train (turns out we were wrong because of the time change, but our bus went so slow it became irrelevant to consider catching the train). If we couldn't get the night train, we'd try hitching to the Kemi train station and find a place to stay, perhaps in a field with sleeping bags.

The trajectory

Upon arrival to Haparanda, we followed the signs to the border of Suomi (Finland in Finnish), and casually strolled across, grinning broadly as we stuck our thumbs out at any cars that passed. We got smiles and honks but no takers. More walking, we decided. At one point we strayed from the highway that would take us to Kemi, and realized after a trucker stopped offering to pick us up that we were 1 km down the wrong road. "ok" we thought, "we'll ask this woman walking with her dog to be sure of where we need to go." Stumbelina was a short woman with dyed red hair and a huge dog that looked like a long-haired greyhound relative, and at first she appeared to speak no english. She babbled Finnish at us with one eye squinted shut and gave a huge, slightly offputting grin after every statement, waiting for a response from us. Every question from her was met by us giggling about the language barrier and indicating we didn't understand. I joked to Billy that she had said "I'd like to kis s your cute friend", and "is that vodka in your waterbottle?" She kept indicating for us to follow her, and since we were going to walk that way in any case, we decided to tag along at her slow drunk pace with the dog and tried to interact with her the best we could. eventually she was able to summon a few english words and explained to us "i not bad girl; i good girl. my boyfriend loves me. loves dog." we think she also invited us to come sleep at her house and have some coffee, and perhaps we'd have said yes to a less sketchy arrangement, but we gestured that we had to go to get to Helsinki on time and said our goodbyes.

Only 5 minutes later, we scored a ride from a young trucker named Tommy (roughly). He said he could give us a lift to Kemi, and as we chatted more he eventually offered to take us as far as Oulu, where he lives, and where there's also a train station. We gladly agreed to tag along, and the sun set and rose again in the window between midnight and 2 am that we rode along in his truck. He seemed basically to enjoy trucking, (although it meant being away from his 4 year old son alot) and gave us a little insight into the friction between Finland and Russia. There are a number of Russian truckers who'll come into Scandinavia, but next to no Scandinavian truckers willing to sit in the 40 km long border crossing line to get back and forth into Russia, unable to sleep for several days and having to eek forward only a few meters at a time. He also said it's fairly common for Russian truckers to rob Scandinavian ones, and talked about making sure he picks well-lit truckstops to try to avoid getting robber himself, but he said he could understand why - Russian truckers make a fraction of the wage in Scandinavia.
(Billy in front of the 25 meter-long truck at 2 am - this is bigger than most European trucks, but Tommy say he wants to go to Australia, where they drive trucks up to 54 m long)

Tommy wasn't overly expressive, but was curious enough to ask questions about our travels and our lives and seemed to enjoy trying to answer our questions about Finland. His view of the European Union was that it was a fine arrangement that didn't really seem to impact his life so directly, except that there were a lot of stupid silly regulations, like how much light the cab of a truck could give off. (He showed us a ticket he'd gotten for this in Sweden, but shrugged it off as "the company's problem; it's their truck"). By the time we reached Oulu, he offered us a place to stay at his apartment, only 3 blocks from the train station. Both Billy and I trusted him and were excited to not have to sleep outside, so we accepted and konked out on the living room floor around 3, just as the sun was starting to come in through the windows.

Friday we awoke and caught the train to Helsinki. I became a groggy zombie for the entire 7 hour ride after ingesting an anti-nausea pill, so I didn't see much of the countryside, but Finland is known for having thousands and thousands of lakes. The bulk of these, rumouredly the most beautiful terrain, is in the east of the country, and we were in the western half near the sea.

Upon arrival in Helsinki, we met up with our delightful couchsurfing host, Renato. An Italian who moved to Finland "for a girl-- there are 2 reasons Italian men come here: to chase a girl, or to work for Nokia." Renato studies Finnish, among many other languages, is vegan, and doesn't drink, so he offered a humorous, if cynical, take on the heavy alcohol consumption of the Finns. Sure enough, when the 3 of us went out to a bar to check out the scene, the first thing we saw when we hopped off the bus was a guy peeing straight in our direction, and while at the bar, we saw someone get beer thrown in his face, as well as a beer bottle get thrown against the wall. When the management came to investigate, those at the table held up their beers as evidence that he or she were inculpable. The odd bottle out had to leave. Also of note: the Finnish are super into black metal music, and the bar was dominated by black attire, long hair, and dog collar jewelry. As an "outsider" himself to Finnish culture, I think it was really valuable to hear Renato's observations about living in Finland. He joked about how it's common in Finland for a woman to ask a man on a date or to take him home, and how this would "never ever ever" happen in Italy and took some getting used to. As an extra bonus, he also works at the only vegan restaurant in town and brings home leftovers which he freezes and keeps for later, so we had some delicious cuisine at his flat. Before we left the next day, he showed us around a little more and let us print out some readings for our Africa trip at the university library (where printing is free!) We took some fun photos (below) and said our goodbyes. Hopefully we will meet again.

Traditional Finnish dress observed in the market aquare

The "White Church" in Helsinki

(Billy's into leg lifts, can you tell?)

Hmmm....

Billy and Bear reflect...

Then, it was off to the Silja Serenade, a huge 12 story ferry with casino, nightclub, fancy restaurants, tax-free shopping, andddddddddddddd... Karaoke! (Yep, see our video blog above of Libbilly and the Critters!) In some ways the ferry was repulsive and in other ways, fun. We both agreed that we liked Helsinki better looking at it from the ferry as we pulled away, rather than being surrounded by stumbling, fighting drunks.

The ferry pretty much embodied the spirit of capital - every "opportunity" was a chance to splurge, and if you're money sticklers like us, good luck! We didn't spend a dime, and even walked away with a huge box of expensive chocolates (each) for participating in a survey about chocolate box styles. Billy commented that maybe the over-the-topness of the boat was an attempt to compensate for the absolute horror of ship passage in the past. We and the critters enjoyed a beautiful sunset, though we're still far enough north that it never got dark, only lingered for hours and hours and grew light again. We each had a bunk in gendered 4-person cabins in the very bottom of the boat, free with our Eurail passes!
Atlantis Nightclub & Casino
free chocolate!

(Wingman and Bear enjoy a good sunset smooch)

When we awoke as we arrived back to Stockholm, it was a rainy dreary day, and the 3 hour train ride from Stockholm to Karlstad so we could hop on a bus north to KulturStationen felt truncated and short -- we're so used to 7 hour (minimum) chunks of train time that we felt we'd barely settled into the ride when we arrived. Now we're snuggled down at Kulturstationen and it feels good to be outside the train/bus/boat windows and in nature, stationary for a while.

Into the Arctic!

2007-06-18T14:12:00.000-07:00

Billy says:

Ok, I admit it, I'm obsessed with trains, and I'm obsessed with deals. There's things I want to do only because they're covered by the rail pass, and the more places we go, the better deal the passes become. The initial idea behind the trip to Narvik, Norway was based on this. It's simply the furthest north place you can go by train. We left Lund at 11.30am Tues. and arrived in Narvik at 7.15pm on Weds. Aside from a few hours in Stockholm eating dinner and buying groceries, the rest of the time we were on the train. That's about 1900km covered by train. When we met people on the train who asked us where we were going and why, we could only say "it's the furthest north that the train goes." Honestly, I'd pictured the train being virtually empty most of the way and ending in a tiny town with a few hundred inhabitants, but it turns out there's a university town (Tromsö) with wbout 80,000 inhabitants 240 km north of Narvik. I guess my vision of the world is pretty skewed by "civilization." But along the way, we learned a number of reasons to go to Narvik, after all.

The last seven hours of the train ride are breathtaking, and the scenery alone almost makes the whole trip worth it. I learned that as you move north, past the arctic circle, trees are permanently dwarfed by the constant cold. These dwarf forests are kind of eerily beautiful. (The trees only started having leaves one week before we arrived, and summer ends in August!) Then we passed dozens of small lakes, and one huge one that was so still and clear that it reflected the sky and mountains surrounding it as perfectly as a mirror. It literally looked like you could dive into the sky. Libby loved the scores of waterfalls from the melting snow everywhere. The train winds for the last hour along a cliff, looking down an amazing fjörd, and another mountain across the way. This is such a thrilling and dramatic way to reach a city.

When we arrived in Narvik, we immediately saw that it was a much bigger city than we'd expected and then we saw an almost perfect (double) rainbow! Quite a good omen.

Some noteworthy things to know about Narvik (mostly learned at the Narvik War Museum, and also through conversation):

¤ Narvik is a port town, and principally used for shipping Iron Ore, which is extracted from the earth at Kiruna, Sweden (The city of Kiruna, incidentally, needs to be entirely relocated because mining has made the earth surrounding into a very swampy terrain). The rail line we rode connects the mines with the sea ports at Narvik and Luleå, Sweden.

¤ Due to its importance in iron transport in particular, and the rail connection to Sweden generally, the Germans and British fought bitterly for control of Narvik during WWII. (Striking how we thought we were going so far away from "civilization" and smacked into more history of WWII and the Cold War. What a huge thing WWII was, with ripples everywhere and for generations). The British eventually lost the battles for Narvik, and Norway surrendered to the Nazis who, with the help of the Norse National Socialist Party, controlled the country from 1940-45.

¤ The Germans had a propaganda campaign to convince the Norweigans that they needed to occupy the country because the british wanted to bring war to their "neutral" nation, so the Germans represented "peace" through military occupation.

¤ When the British took control of Narvik, the British bombed the town severely, to try and leave nothing for the Germans to make use of. 90% of the city was destroyed.

¤ A British Naval officer, facing Court Martial for disobeying his superiors, commandeered a few large vessels and successfully evacuated half the city's population.

¤ The Nazis held thousands of Soviet prisoners in the area surrounding Narvik (and throughout Norway). The Museum had dozens of items that the Soviet prisoners made in order to barter for food from the Norwegians, since their rations were so so little, like this chess set. A great many prisoners died from starvation, overwork and straight brutality, as apparently both Hitler and Stalin agreed that Soviet prisoners of war did not deserve human rights. In one instance, a few thousand Serbian prisoners were made to - unwittingly - dig their own mass graves before being wholesale slaughtered.

¤ During the battle for Narvik, women of the town took their children outside and held them high to show the war planes that they were not targets to be bombed.

Far from the rest of the world?

Here are our 11 pm shadows:

Playing in the city at 1 am while the sun glints off this oblisque:

p.s. if you take your own trip to Narvik, we learned that some beautiful places on the way and nearby are: Abisko National Park in Sweden and the Lofoten islands off the coast of Narvik, which one Norweigan woman said was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. We regret not having time to make it to those places...

Live, from Stockholm, Sweden!

2007-06-12T12:40:00.000-07:00

Says Libby:

So! We're at the Central Station in Stockholm, Sweden and will be leaving tonight (in half an hour!) on a night train to Boden which arrives at noon tomorrow. From there, it's just one more 7 hour train to Narvik, Norway ; the northernmost point served by the European rail system, and situated at 68 degrees north, even further north than Iceland! We'll arrive in Narvik at 7 pm on Wednesday, but from what we can tell, it will never get dark that night! Then the next day we have our fingers crossed that there's a bus down at the border between Sweden and Finland, because no one at the train station has been confident enough to confirm this in definitive language - they all say they "think so"... from the north border of Sweden and Finland we'll train down to Helsinki, the capital, where we're hoping to "couchsurf" with some gracious host before taking a long-ass ferry across the water back to Stockholm and eventually making it inland to Kulturstationen, our woofing spot. [click here for a general map of our itinerary]

To fill folks in on our last 36 hours....

After we left Bente and Soren's delightful place in Fano, we hopped on the "train" - another bus, due to the travel-prohibitive expansion of the rails from the heat, and bussed-trained through Kopenhagen across the islands to Sweden, where we were delighted to be hosted in Lund by a dear friend of mine from the International House days at UCSD, Nik. Nik met us at the station and treated us to a tasty dinner at an Italian place. The three of us talked about the political system and the positive and negative aspects of the European Union. European farmers, for example, receive 1/3 of the money of the EU to subsidize their crops, and continually overproduce. The surplus is dumped onto the African market so that prices stay higher for the farmers in Europe (the US is culpable of the same), the value of the African goods is greatly reduced, and this is one more reason why African agriculture can't compete on the world market (not even considering access to technology, disparate growing conditions, or hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, etc.) Despite some of its flaws, Nik was keen to point out that the greatest benefit of the EU is the solidarity bred among the citizens of the continent and the assurance that Europe won't again see a continental war like befell them with WWI and II. As we strolled back in the cool summer twilight to Nik's place in the student dormitories, we mused about effective tactics for social change. Many folks had moved out of the dorms for the summer so we had our own luxurious dorm room! It was great to see Nik and we're hoping to reunite with him next month when our trajectories collide in Montpelier, France.

As we left Lund this morning, there were a bunch of drunk Swedish high school graduates in special sailor hats (apparently a Swedish graduation tradition), blowing whistles, singing, and trumpeting through the streets this morning to celebrate their graduation. Slightly obnoxious, slightly entertaining.

Once we arrived to Stockholm, we stuck our heavier bag in a locker and explored Stockholm for the afternoon. The buildings here are tremendously well-kept, the facades intact and most of them having really interesting architectural design with fancy domed black roofs, turrets, balconies, etc. There seemed to be an abundance of trees and parks mixed in with the busy city, and it has a very international and multicultural feel having recently left the sheltered island of Fano (Thai food for lunch, hurrah!).

We've got tons of photos to upload, but unfortunately this netcafe won't allow us to connect the camera, so they'll have to wait until next time, probably this weekend. Sorry for the lag in postings, and we look forward to being able to relay the experience of life in the land of the midnight sun and other Scandinavian adventures!

Much love from Libby and Billy

Learning about Denmark on Fanö island

2007-06-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

Billy says:

We spent a weekend in roughly idyllic conditions, visiting libby's cousins bente and soren on the island of fanö, off the west coast of denmark. We were housed in our own little cottage, given bikes to travel about, and fed scrumpuous meals everyday. Bente had asked us to bring some warm weather, and we brought unusually warm days indeed, with 30 degrees celsius full sun till 11pm. Still, we enjoyed running around the yard with their dog sisse - playing "tug of war" with her rope - walking, (and, for libby, running) along the beach, (where the yearly two week long kite festival with dozens and dozens of kites, was underway) and biking the 10km length of the island down to the small town of sonderhö for a few scoops of ice cream.

Despite Soren being shy with his english, Bente kept lively conversation going the whole time (and translated for Soren as well). She is a very attentive listener, fully and genuinely engaged, curious, and delighted to share. We had silly times, like when we made casual bets on the "speedway" motorbike races on TV, trying to solve Danish kids' word puzzles, and trying out incredibly hard to pronounce and giggle-producing Danish phrases. But we also had many important, serious talks.

Bente was very interested in us learning about the Danish political and social system, and she's a good teacher. Bente was raised by a social-democratic family and is still proud to be participating in a society that intends to care for the health and happiness of its members. She sees it as important that workers join unions and play an active role, thinks anyone that wants a bed to sleep in ought to have one, and is compassionate enough to realize that working doesn't make everyone happy. Personally, since both her and soren have slight disabilities, they are eligible for the "flexi" work program in Denmark. As such, they both work roughly 20 hrs per week, and, with funding from the state, are paid a full week's wages. She is quite grateful for this program because, in her 40s, she doesn't feel ready to retire and feels quite useful in her job at county hall. This is only one of many excellent provisions and rights within the Danish system, such as: all students in university receive a monthly living stipend, childcare is subsidized 75% or more, children 9 and older are heard in court regarding their parents' divorce (and at 12 their opinion is given full weight), and - as if it's cliche to say so - every aspect of health care - from the midwife to the nursing home, is totally free.

Bente doesn't feel that these values are being eroded in Denmark, but she wasn't too proud to note the down sides, such the recent election of a neo-liberal president and Denmark's role in West Indies slave-trading during colonial days. In short, her version of socialism is quiet, simple, genuine, and open to modification.

***

from left to right: libby, sisse, bente, soren and mette, soren's daughter, in front of their house:

some extra photos:

the train across the german-danish border was only one car long, sort of like a bus. it had to honk and slow down at lots of little farm intersections!

soon there will be photos and stories about: G8 Blockades! here

2007-06-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

says Libby:
Hello! We don't have time to write/post all of our stories at once, so this is a teaser. Soon there will be stories and photos here about more of our experience in Rostock at the G8 summit, creating a blockade of the roads 10,000 strong to disrupt the smoothness of the summit. Some of the things you can look forward to reading about are: staying the night at the Indy Media Center, couchsurfing with a delightful German woman named Charlene, and marching through fields by the thousands to avoid police barricades en route to the creation of our grand human blockade. Also, ideological factions amongst protesters, police intimidation tactics, and, lest we get discouraged, humans helping each other meet their basic needs. I promise I'll do some work on this on the 50 hours of training (as in, trainRIDE-ing) we'll do this week so that it's a snap to post when we get back from the North Pole. Humor us by coming back to read this later, eh mateys?
cheers!

Tourists of sorts in Berlin

2007-06-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

Says Billy:

Berlin was a joy to visit. Aside from everyone speaking German all the time, Libby and I were ready to move in. The "Futurist" in me (i don´t know what this means, but Libby likes to call me one) loves the highly organized, efficient and easy to use train and subway system (and though we bought a day pass on our first day in town, we used the subway dozens of times and never saw any need to have a ticket).

The anti-G8 organizers decided to disperse the international visitors throughout the squats and radical collectives centralized in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. Enjoyably to us, the cold war division of Berlin into four quadrants means that there´s no real "downtown," but rather lots of distinct neighborhoods with their own cultural and commercial districts. Kreuzberg is a pleasant mix of Turkish and African immigrants and young vegetarian and leftist leaning Germans. As activist "ghettoes" go, Kreuzberg felt much more "integrated" with the "locals" than other cities, and the organizers tried to strengthen this connection by printing 5,000 anti-G8 newspapers and distributing them door-to-door throughout the neighborhood and having Volkes Kuche (People's Kitchen) in Gorlitzer park.

Gorlitzer park is a likably run-down place, about 12 blocks long and 2 wide, with a nice stone path running through the whole length and then across the river and further on into the old East Germany (right across the river we stumbled upon an artsy/anarchisty squat neighborhood of vagens, with a couple dozen campers and a huge social/theatre space, all tucked underneath the bridge and running along the river). The whole park feels (to be dainty) "under manicured" and across from the people's kitchen is a huge fountain that apparently was built with the wrong kind of stone and so it froze and cracked horribly. As a result, it looks like bombed out ruins. This adds to the general worn down look of the park. But all the same, the park was full of people, no matter what time of day we went, and there seemed to be a relatively contented mix of muslim women chatting together, young hipsters having picnics and groups of punks drinking beer. It was a good place to have a free meal and have a meeting about protesting the G8.

We got set up with an awesome place to stay. An apartment with 7 anarchists living together, right by the health food store and U-Bahn. We had our own room with Loft bed and were welcomed to leave our things and go off to Rostock for days. All the housemates we met were kind, hospitable and thoughtful radicals. Really, we talked about moving in!

On our last night in Berlin, we made a huge meal and sat and talked with three of the housemates. One was raised in a small town in East Germany and one was raised in East Berlin. Both were teenagers when the wall fell. So, we asked them to tell us about the "good side"* of life in East Germany. I know that I'm at such a disadvantage in trying to really understand communism or the cold war. I think the so-called "iron curtain" was so thick and full of thorns that it'll be incredibly difficult to tear it down now. So, I'm really grateful for the stories and descriptions our friends from Berlin gave.

In short, they told of a profound contradiction, or paradox. In East Germany, they had, "no political freedom," "everything was totally ordered - our whole lives were planned out," and, basically, "it was totally boring." "We lived in identical grey concrete boxes and just worked. Everyone who didn't want to work was punished for 'anti-social behavior'... then, suddenly, at 65, you didn't have to work and you were free to travel." At the same time, "food was really cheap," "rent was cheap," "books were cheap," "the cinema was cheap" "everyone was guaranteed housing and healthcare was free," and to top it off, "our schools were better than those in the West; we were all highly educated, with a high emphasis on literature, culture." In other words, meeting all of people´s basic needs is not enough. People crave - maybe need - autonomy, joy, play, even unpredictability.

Our friend from the small town in East Germany seemed stubbornly devoted to doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants. One housemate said that he sometimes goes weeks by himself and then suddenly rejoins the community. This seems a natural reaction to a highly organized existence. Still, he says he wants "No Government, but when a hospital needs built, I want someone to build it."

It's simple-minded and self-serving to say that communism is all bad and claim a victory for capitalism, but this is what has happened since the wall fell. There was some small discussion about "taking the best of both Germanys" but this was way less popular than simply scolding the communists and flaunting all the new commodities. Seems so much better to just face it, talk it out, analyse it, try and understand what communism really meant for people living "under" it. There's a lot to reject, even hate, and certainly laugh at, but it's so pitiful and horrible to deny, to pretend, to lie.

* We had gone on a "free" (because they don´t pay their staff anything, so they survive off of tips) bike tour earlier in the day, which had some highlights, but was disturbingly full of pro-capitalist propaganda - the same kind of nonsense my parents were fed when they were forced to hide under their desks because the Russians were about to bomb them to bits and somehow the desk would save them. We were told that millions of East Germans flocked to the West because the west had "Levi's and Coke" and in the east they only had "polyester pants and lemonade," and other such gems of wisdom. There were repeated references to how ugly the communist architecture was and how it was poorly built because the communists didn't have all the great wealth and technology that the west has.

Still, as tours go, it was mostly interesting, with lots of info. about the Berlin Wall and Nazism. Maybe my favorite thing was the "memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe," which was an intentionally vague field/grid of some 2700 grey concrete slabs of various heights (but same dimensions otherwise) right in the middle of the busiest area of Berlin.
I also really loved the memorial to the 20,000 books the Nazis burned in 1933. It was a whole bunch of empty shelves, enough to hold 20,000 books, and it was underground, so you looked at through glass on the ground in a plaza. There was also a plaque there with the quote, "if you start by burning books, you'll end by burning bodies."

In all, Berlin is really intense. So much of the tour took me to places where horrible atrocities had happened, or really ugly attempts at war or totalitarianism. It was hard to know how to take it all seriously enough on this brief tour through the city with a bunch of ignorant and arrogant Americans.

Freedom of movement

2007-06-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Says Libby:
Today we attended a demonstration for freedom of movement, against the anti-immigration policies of the EU. We made some German friends quickly simply by asking where the demo was going to be when we got off the train station this morning - we'd decided to commute up for the day, but brought our sleeping bags in case something drew us to stay the night. We tagged along with our new friends through the streets of Rostock toward the meeting center for the demo. Every street was lined with police vans. Honestly there must have been hundreds. As the German Darth Vader storm troopers in full riot gear tromped behind us toward the same point, there was a little bit of an ominous feeling... until - what's this? Bells, whistles, and cacophony? We turned around to see a colorful clown brigade tooting their whistles, blowing bubbles, and marching behind the troops of polizei to the tune of "Left, right, left! Love and respect!" The 2 Storm Troopers at the end of the line marched backwards, half tripping in the awkwardness of facing the wrong way, but making sure the dangerous clowns didn't use their bubble guns on any of the cops. (Actually, later, I watched a sad clown get the water dumped out of her toy water gun).
[below, clowns hold off the (unnecessary) riot police]

Ironically, though we were demonstrating in support of freedom of movement, we weren't allowed to go anywhere for the first 2+ hours; the polizei surrounded the initial bulk of demonstrators and made folks choose whether to be in or out of the circle, which was comprised not only of the riot police, but also of the giant water gun tanks, pre-emptively pointed inward at the crowd (which was notedly made up more of the dread-locked flower children sorts than the autonome). Apparently this circling is also called "kettling" (sounds and feels a lot like "cattle-ing") - a common tactic of British cops, now adopted by this crew.
We remained at the periphery for those 2 hours, unsure if the situation would escalate and wanting to avoid being trapped in the center of the circle or having to have our documents checked. I guess the police were saying there were too many demonstrators or something... we heard many stories about why the procession wasn't going anywhere. Just imagine lots of waiting and standing around while the bright yellow vested folks of the Legal Team negotiated with the captains of the police forces. Finally, we were allowed to proceed, and we bumbled forward for a while, until again, the march was stopped. The news over the speakers was that the police were refusing to allow the march to proceed through the city center, and that a press conference was being held at the front of the line. Meanwhile, many took up dancing in the streets to the music being pumped from the trucks in the march, or playing games on the rail tracks beside the road. It had been grey and dark all day; finally, a little rain broke loose, and as Billy and I both needed a restroom and water, we decided to break away from the demo for a while to meet some of our needs.
Turns out we weren't the only ones. It seemed that the demo was dissolving from the tiredness of being repeatedly held up, and people were walking down the streets like us. We decided we'd go catch the local rail back to the train station to return to Berlin for the night. But alas, after some time waiting at the station, an announcement was made that no trains were running between the area of the demonstration and the main Hauptbahnof station, where we needed to catch the train to Berlin in about 15 minutes. Feeling a little defeated by the long walk that awaited us, we walked back to the street we'd come from, only to find the the march had somehow gone on. All the folks who'd intended to catch a train returned to the street with a little renewed vigor as the music blasted and the die-hards who'd stuck it out carried on. We joined in of curiousity, thinking perhaps we'd gain a little ground to get closer to the station, and the crowd picked up more and more energy and it became apparent that several sects of folks who'd broken off were reuniting as independent smaller marches back into one large one, coming in from other streets, to the cheers of all. Rave music pumped everyone up as we half marched, half danced our way back toward the harbor, with old folks and little kids looking out their windows. It seemed like perhaps there were even more demonstrators than when we first began the march! By the time we passed by the independent media center, Billy and I were exhausted and still hadn't found a toilet, so we dropped out of the brigade and came here, where we've had computer access and also some warm food from the völksküche - "Peoples' Kitchen".
And what of it all? All of this is so up and down, push and pull. It's hard in the face of the militarized forces to feel like we're even making a dent. When one police team gets tired, they get sent back to their vans to rest, eat, and have a smoke. If they're thirsty, water is brought to them. We have no place to go but stand, encircled, in the misty drizzle. And yet, there is an unmistakeable energy to all these folks coming together. One of the oft-spoken themes of the demonstration, "another world is possible", while totally cheesy, provides some of us with the reminder to imagine what we want and further, to take steps toward creating it. How to do so in the face of such a monstruous, seemingly unstoppable, well-oiled, well-funded, and well-armed machine? I don't know. At the School for Designing a Society we defined a system as " a collection of components such that any change of state in one of the components alters the state of the whole". It's useful in rhetoric to label the "system" as something I am not a part of, so that I can more wholly reject those aspects of it I find horriying, enraging, saddening, detach myself from any responsibility for the atrocities we propogate knowing-and-unknowingly. But it also seems useful to view myself as one of the components of the system, such that a change in my energy alters the momentum of the whole. Maybe that's overly optimistic and naive. I'll still decide to believe it as long as I can. Both Billy and I felt it important for people of European descent to be a loud presence in solidarity with those non-europeans who are denied equal rights under immigration laws, and though we are quite tired from the waiting around and walking all over the city, I don't think either of us regret coming. There is a certain welling up of ecstatic joy to be dancing erraticly in the streets in defiance of the devaluation of human life and happiness. And that glimpse of something beautiful is enough to keep me going, at least until tomorrow.

ONLINE UPDATES

2007-06-04T12:38:00.000-07:00

Two spots to check up on the G8 action:
G8-TV

Indymedia ticker

We are safe and enjoying ourselves, though tired of standing in lines against cops and for food.

oonz, hee, internazionale solidarite!

Autonomes and Other Disturbances

2007-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

Says Billy:
Yesterday we went to Rostock for the large, anti-G8 demonstration there. This was the first of the week of any large numbers, and clearly planned to be a huge "everybody left of center" type ordeal, complete with trucks blasting political rhetoric and music, vendors and porta-potties galore, and hours and hours of speeches and music planned for the end. It was a huge array of mostly far-left folks, but a good sprinkling of unionists, peaceniks and environmentalists, anti-poverty reformers, etc. We walked some 3 or 4 kilometers before reaching the harbour area.
Spread out for hundreds of metres along the sea, some 50,000+ folks were supposed to stand in long lines for food, drink and toilet and listen to "uplifting" chatter about our bold stances in response to the G8. Meanwhile, the polizei had an occasion to exercise their elaborate "security concept" that has been underway for many months. They stationed some 50 vanloads of police throughout the town, and another half dozen huge attack vehicles - tanks, armored trucks and a huge water cannon truck. Meanwhile, one of the largest groups of Black Blocs i´ve ever seen (police and BBC estimate some 2,000 black-clad militants, marching row after row) have a chance to push the limits of allowable activity. In germany, these folks are known as the "autonome," or autonomous protestors. They have a reputation for "simply destroying," which is perhaps not so different from the anarchist reputation in the US, except likely worse. They are always upsetting liberals.
After a couple of hours of rather tedious, and sporadic, back and forths between the police and protestors (police charging through the crowd in a huge display of nastiness, being pushed back by stones and sticks and occasional fire and then back again to the same starting point), things turn decidedly more violent. At a certain point, the police "retreated," in order to shoot the first dose of tear gas into the crowd. In the power vacuum that followed, the autonome set fire to a couple of cars, sending black smoke hundreds of feet into the air and visible throughout town. Police responded with a series of punishing attacks, sending wave after wave of riot police (dressed in various colors and with various gear) into the crowd, making great fascistic gestures like thrusting their batons in the air in unison, shooting cloud after cloud of tear gas, and eventually dowsing the entire crowd in huge bursts of water from their water cannon truck and pushing everyone back with their tanks and armored cars.
In general, the upset liberals will carry the day´s discourse. The media reports that the "security concept" is correct, because the autonome are so violent. Ludicrous numbers of injured police are broadcast publicly, and likewise the list of damaged property is pumped with steroids. The violence of the anarchists will "legitimize" future repression of this weeks´ scheduled protests.
Ok, so they will say what they like.
Let me attempt to draw a few strategic conclusions/lessons from the day.
First, let´s remember a few things about the "legitimacy" of violence and repression. Both sides can "legitimize" their actions in any way that they like, at any point. The police can and do come up with all sorts of reasons to prove themselves as necessary, but essentially everything the police do is based on the basic idea that the state has the right to a monopoly on violence, which is not to be questioned. And the water cannons that attacked protestors were in place long before any violence "legitimized" their presence (and weren´t used to put out the fire, let´s remember!). On the other hand, the autonome can "legitimize" violence based on the death of Carlo Guiliani or even Fred Hampton, for as far as actions taken are "legitimized" by anything at all.
Second, it´s important to note that no protest with such a mixed set of goals is likely to go well. If some organizers and some thousands of participants wanted a festival by the sea with music and vendors and such and some 2,000 more wanted confrontation, both sides were likely to be frustrated. Furthermore, if the autonome really wanted destruction, they might have done better moving away from the harbor and towards places (even outside rostock) where hundreds and hundreds of riot police were not concentrated.
Lastly, it is clear that anyone attending a demonstration at this point needs to be both informed in advance about what they are getting involved in and thoughtful constantly in the moment. All protests move extremely quickly from one dynamic to the next, and it is certainly the peace-loving white woman in her 40s with a split head that is the saddest sight for all involved.

luck 'o' the irish...

2007-05-31T13:56:00.000-07:00

Well, after a rousing few days in the NYC/Jersey area with friends and family of Billy's, we finally headed to the LaGuardia airport on Monday to catch our flight to Shannon, Ireland. We checked in only to discover that because Billy did not have a specific seat assigned to him and the flight to Philly, he'd be forced to fly standby. Nevermind that we'd made the reservation 1.5 months ago! (Philly is only a 40 minute hop, which was equi-distant from Billy's mom's house at NYC, and we'd have preferred to get on the flight there, were it not for the $200 change fee to miss the first leg of our flight) So, we waited for most of the others to board. I was waiting with Billy to make sure he'd get on the flight, when they announced that due to the number of folks and the amount of luggage on the little commuter jet, no more passengers would be allowed on board, as they'd exceeded the weight restriction. Suddenly neither of us had a seat on the flight! Along with 7 other folks who also were connecting to international flights (as we imagine all the others on the plane were, too - who goes through the hassle of luggage, security, etc, just for a short 2 hr or less drive?), we were a bit irate at the prospect of missing our connection to Ireland. But, never fear! Because we'd been involuntarily booted, we got a FREE LIMO RIDE to the Newark airport, where we hopped on a direct flight to Shannon with another airline (at USAirway's expense), AND we got free roundtrip vouchers for anywhere in the US. Our flight arrived to Shannon before our bags, which had already been loaded onto the other plane did (we found out that the original flight we'd been scheduled on was delayed an additional 3 hours and were glad we'd been booted after all). At first it seemed like it would be a hassle to get our bags back, but instead it freed us up to take the bus straight up to Galway to meet up with Billy's family, and let us wander around the cobbled narrow streets without carrying our backpacks. The airline brought them straight to the house that evening. Ireland was short and sweet... we'll write more later.
Countryside between Galway and Dublin:
Dublin sunset, below

Wingman and Bear have begun to get acquainted

Check out the Dublin airport en route to Berlin - this was at 4:30 am!

countdown: 23 hours until departure...

2007-05-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we leave NYC at 3, only to spend 5 hours laying over in Philly before we have an overnight flight to Shannon, Ireland. Thus far, we've had some fun adventures this side of the pond, including:

conducting the Mentos/Coke explosion experiment (as seen on TV/at the Albany Free School) with Billy's dad and brother Andy

seeing Manhattan from boat with Billy's mom and her boyfriend Alex

snooping around awesome chess shops in Greenwich Village

spending time with Billy's friend Wetzel and getting the full tour of the Red Bank/Little Silver, New Jersey area, where the two of them went to jail from ages 14-18. Oops, we mean school.

It's been absurdly hot: high 80s and 90s. The rumbling clouds outside becry a hopeful change in the weather. Meanwhile, I'm off to do one of the final pass-overs (again) to figure out what I can leave here. Photos of the above soon.

6/3/07 addition: finally, we've downloaded photos, so also included below are some pre-departure classic shots of hanging out with friends in Albany, the Skype command center at Billy's mom's house for contacting our foreign friends, packing, and Billy undertaking a massive change in appearance to impress upon the German authorities that we are, in fact, the beloved activists they invited to come to the G8 demonstrations (check out Corinne's jar full of Billy's hair... she keeps a jar for each one of her "clients"... an art project is pending...)

countdown - t minus 3 minus 7 = t minus 10

2007-05-18T21:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, comrades. The time has come. I've quit my horrific abusive office job in Seattle, after saving money (and hopefully some self-respect). In 3 days, I join my dear companion Billy in Albany, NY. A week later, we leave this continent for others, namely Europe and Africa. Back to living out of a backpack.

Prospective trajectory (in some particular order that does not necessarily reveal chronology, nor dimension, nor joy): Ireland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, North Pole (kidding, but not by much), France, Northern Spain, Benelux, Italia, Romania, Hungary, Czech Republic, (airplane), Mozambique, South Africa, Angola, Namibia, and perhaps (fingers crossed, Erin) Uganda.

We'll be visiting a number of friends, family, some radical communities, wwoofing in Sweden at the Kulturstationen, and going with our friend Prexy on a trip to Southern Africa that focuses on relationship-building and knowledge-sharing amongst those who seek alternatives to the violent and oppressive systems we're still all learning to claw our way out of. I'll try to post some photos along the way, and perhaps an interesting story or two (hopefully by the droves).

There aren't looking to be many bikes involved on this trip, but Wingman is coming along, nonetheless.

The photos are:
1) above - the delightful sunny room in my Seattle collective house I'll be leaving behind for a summer sublet(rock it, Lindsey).
2) below - the adventurers, Libby & Billy. Or, for the lazy, Libbilly.

Health, hugs, and hilarity for all!
Libby