Now It Can Be Told...

May 19th, 2011 I received the payoff from the sale of my house. The place had been on the market since January 2007. On other words straight into the teeth of the most massive real estate downturn in U.S. history. Had I tried to sell it one year earlier odds are I would have sold it much easier and for (I estimate) double what I eventually received.

But OK, that's history. Others had it far worse. Life marches on.

But there's a heck of a story leading up to the actual sale.

We were in China. This was last February. At the Wudang Taoist Kungfu and Taiji Academy foreign students come from virtually everywhere in the world. They do so for all manner of reasons and lengths of stay. Some we became close to. Others not so much. It depended largely on how long they were around (often only a week or so) and of course personality.

Over the winter, when it was very cold, the number of students dropped to maybe six or seven students. So we all tended to bond together more so than in the spring or summer when the roles would swell to three or four dozen folks.

Around the first of the year we had been joined by a French woman whom I'll refer to as Dana, a very pleasant, jovial lady, who was always a joy to be around. She had been with us for close to two months when it came her time to leave.

On her last night in Wudang several of us gathered in her room for a bit of socializing and to bid her a safe journey. We had some snacks and a bottle of "Great Wall" wine. A very pleasant evening. In the event I was telling her my basic life story, lamenting the difficulty in unloading the house. I actually did have a buyer who was living in the house paying me on a "Bridge loan" until he could qualify for bank financing. But the contractual time limit for the financing had expired and even though I had agreed to extend the limit it was looking unlikely anytime soon. I had a constant fear of learning he had moved out with no forwarding address (It had happened before on an earlier sale attempt).

At this juncture I should mention that Dana is a self-described Shaman (Shawoman?). No, Shaman. That in itself is a very interesting yarn. But it's hers, so I'll roll on with mine.

So I'm giving her the sorry details when she asks me to hand her some cards she had laying on a nearby table. They were little, business card-sized things. Laminated and connected with a kind of ring as I recall. She also had a little pyramid-shaped charm, like you'd see on a decorative bracelet. She began waving the pyramid over the cards and having a private conversation in French, which I couldn't understand. It seemed as though she was asking some questions, making the odd comment, occasionally nodding her head as if in response to something.

After a minute she looked up and said "You have a ghost in the house. It doesn't want the house to sell. Until you get the ghost out the house won't sell."

I was stunned! But the shock was just beginning. So, who is this ghost? Turns out it was my mother-in-law! I will tell you that in my story I had mentioned how my mother-in-law had lived in the attached apartment for several years, but a few years before her death had moved in with her surviving daughter. Some might say "Aha! She picked up on that and used it to 'work' you." OK, maybe so. But in the end I don't care. I'm not one for mumbo-jumbo, metaphysical crapola. As a rule I don't buy into Aliens, Yetis or spirit world/human interaction. But read on...

"How could this be!" I asked. She didn't die in the house! Dana replied it wasn't necessary to have passed away there. She explained how the spirit of those "beyond" sometimes go back to a place where they were happy during their physical life. I knew my mom-in-law had loved her little apartment, so that made sense as far as it went.

"What about my wife? She actually DID die in the house. Was she still there?"

No, she has moved on. In the spirit world she is not Jan as you once knew. She is a different "facet" of her spirit. But she is happy and well and wishes you good things (I'm paraphrasing.)

"So what do I do?" I asked.

Dana gave me explicit instructions. I needed to write a letter to my mother-in-law, read it to her aloud, burn it and spread the ashes into the hillside. Even though I was in China the message would be delivered.

I looked at Cabrini and said "I gotta go!" Cabrini had been in other conversations and didn't know what I was up to. "What?" she asked. "What are you talking about?"

I just said I'll be back in a few minutes. Then I ran to our room, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and wrote my letter. I basically told her that, much as I loved her and appreciated her many kindnesses to me during her life, it was time for her to "go into the light." In fact I wrote "I command you to go into the light." I then set fire to the sheet and blew the ashes to the winds.

Afterwards Dana told me the house would sell by the end of March. She added the proviso that since she didn't speak English well and all the messages she received were in French it was possible she may have mistaken certain details of the message. But we agreed to stay in touch. I would let her know what went down.

Well, March passed by and no sale. Oddly, I had been hopeful. I don't know why, nothing else had worked in four and a half years. But I'm a generally positive guy.

About halfway through April I finally emailed Dana to inform her nothing had happened. It was a couple weeks before she replied (some people apparently don't LIVE on Facebook). But toward the end of the month she wrote back. "I checked and checked again for your house... just be patient... it s ok now, just it needs little time more ;-)) that is the message from "Upstairs"...just wait..."

The very next email I checked that morning was from the guy in the house. Suddenly he had come into enough money to give him the down payment he needed to close out the sale.

To shorten a long story my accountant emailed a few days later telling me to check my bank account, it was a little heavier. Indeed it was! My long financial nightmare was over. The house was gone, Baba was in heaven (or where ever) and the cash was in the bank. Zip-a-dee-do-dah!

So how far off was Dana's original call? March...May...How similar are those in Francais?

All Too Soon It's Over

A couple days ago I posted about the sale at long last of the old homestead.

An even better story was occurring practically simultaneously. Literally (and by literally I mean literally) five minutes after the confirming email of the sale Cabrini got an email from an agency that recruits for the US government. She had posted her resume online the night before.

Long story short she's been offered a job as a (civilian) Social Researcher with the US Army. She reports to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas the 11th of June for training followed with deployment in four or five months. Its the kind of position she is extremely qualified for and will give her great "Street Cred" in years to come.

We leave for the States in two days.

These past couple days have been bittersweet. Nine months living here has changed us in a fundamental way. We feel like we belong in our little unusual Wudang Taoist community. The temple monks and nuns, the ladies who run the tourist shops, the kids in the school, our teachers...all have made us feel so welcome and accepted here. It's been a time in our lives which we will always look back on with deep fondness.

But life moves on and so must we.

228 South Albatrossaroundmyneck, Columbiana, Ohio

I thought May 19th was a big deal last year.

Four and a half years ago I put my house of 16 years on the market. Those who have seen or visited the place will agree it was a pretty sweet layout. Secluded, lake front 3800 square feet ranch-style, completely finished basement, attached "Mother-in-Law" apartment, detached Guest house, 40x40 two-story pole barn, all with matching facade. All in all one great house in the great little village of Columbiana.

In the midst of the most drastic economic downdraft of my lifetime I have ridden waves of angst over this. At least five times the house was supposedly sold only to have the deals fall through.

But today, May 19, 2011, exactly one year after leaving the Peace Corps the deal is FINALLY done! Woo! Hoo!

I would like to express my undying appreciation to the bastard SOB bankers of the world who so torched the financial system for their own personal cocaine habits that they completely hosed me (and basically everyone else along the way) out of at least half what I would have gotten five years ago.

If I ever have occasion to visit the graves of the chief culprits from Countrywide Lending, Lehman Bros., Merrill Lynch, etc. KNOW I will happily relieve my bladder on their tombstones. Then I'll shit on their burial mounds. Or vice versa.

Because in the long run we're all dead and all that junk they accumulated will go to someone else.

But for the moment I GOT MINE!

May 19, 2010

One year ago today we did the Botswana Bugout. It's been a wild, crazy, wonderful ride.

The best metaphor for it is a once great Akron, Ohio-based tire manufacturer: Goodyear.

A few more years like this and I might just live forever...

This Great Idea is also Stolen

Politicians should be required to wear uniforms like NASCAR drivers. The product logos plastered all over them would represent corporate donors. The size and placement of the patches would indicate the size of the largesse.

All My Best Thoughts Are Stolen From Someone Else...

I'm reading "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood," by James Gleick

It's a wide-ranging book, sometimes pretty difficult to parse. But he includes a quote from a play called "Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard. It's my philosophy of life in one paragraph:

"You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."

And that explains where all my old T-shirts went.

I was a Jimmy Carter supporter...

...Until he failed to lay on a back-up aircraft (Iran, 1980 Failed Hostage Rescue Attempt). Kudos on that Barack.

Some, unwilling to credit the President for making the call to go after bin Laden, are saying HE didn't do it, the American soldier did it. True in the strictest sense.

However from every wet-behind-the-ears Second Lieutenant to the highest General officer and on up to his boss this one thing is also true:

The Commander is responsible for everything his unit accomplishes or fails to accomplish.

This About Sums Up How I Feel About the Osama bin Laden Deal

All this flag waving and talk of justice served doesn't obscure for me the (now apparent fact) that we gunned down an unarmed man. They say he resisted. Was he throwing rocks? (The conspiracy theorist in me suspects a CIA Wet team did the actual deed, including the crashed helicopter in the compound. Navy SEALS provided the legitimacy of the hit. But hey, that's just me.)

We are so desperate to believe in anything as a united people that this pathetic action is rousing our spirits. It's not a sporting event like the Olympic games. Chants of "USA! USA!" turn my stomach.

We have conveniently forgotten Osama bin Laden was trained, unleashed on the world and betrayed by the U.S. government during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Remember the Rambo flick "Dedicated to the brave freedom fighters of Afghanistan?" That was the Taliban.

It's easier to cheer on the murder of a super villain than to take stock as citizens of the country that we have let run astray. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the SOB is dead and no longer poses a threat to the world. If I were President I would have ordered the hit too. But it sickens me to see my fellow Americans taking such zealous glee in his murder. That's the thing that sticks in my craw. As a nation, we have forgotten many things, among them the ability to think critically and the resolve to make our government accountable for its actions against the rest of the planet. The notion, if anyone truly buys it, that killing Osama bin Laden makes the world a safer place is inane. Our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have guaranteed a ready supply of terrorists willing to blow down our doors. Stop waving your flags with such ignorant delirium.

Somehow I think Thomas Jefferson would be spinning in his grave.

Osama bin Laden is Dead

For months after 9/11/2001 I was in kind of a state of stunned disbelief. Oddly similar to how I feel now. I take no pleasure in this. It's justice served and deservedly so, but what price have we as a country and culture paid to achieve retribution? This is no time to breathe easy.

I gotta ponder on all this...

This "Birther" Business

I'm following this bullshit via the New York times and many of my Facebook friends. Now President Obama has felt compelled to post his birth certificate online so the world will know that being born in Hawaii makes you an American citizen.

Still, the howling mob of idiots scream "Fake! Fake! Fake!"

And I'm wondering just what is really going on here. No one can seriously doubt that Barack Obama is a natural born Amurikan. This goes deeper. Almost beyond race. But not quite.

Then it came to me in the night. "Our" world is passing away. What do I mean by "Our" world. I'm a 61 year old white guy. From my earliest years I was taught the history of the world through Caucasian eyes. Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, George Armstrong Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, George Patton, John Glenn. All white. Mostly men. No doubt, like you, that was my frame of reference.

For almost all of American history our story has been dominated by white folks. Oh sure, there were the likes of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, even Muhammad Ali. But they fit into the story because they were "homegrown" so to speak.

But now the story is shifting. It's been shifting for some time, but the rise to the White House of a black man has brought it into sharper focus, especially since he is the son of a non-US-born father. That's key.

For years we've known the fastest growing minority in the US is among Spanish speaking people. There's that whole movement to have English declared the "official language" of the United States. Bet you find a lot of Birthers are involved in that.
You can declare all you want. People are still going to speak what they're comfortable with.

The east and west coasts teem with people of Asian descent. Pockets of various ethnicities exist in what seem like the most unlikely places. Somalis in New Marshfield, Ohio? Who'd a thunk it in 1968?

We always like to claim America is a melting pot. But that seems to work only if the ingredients come from Europe. If you're from east of Istanbul or south of Cairo the welcome mat isn't always so welcoming.

Doesn't matter. People are still drawn to America because our economic, social and political potential is still the best in the world. We are inexorably linked to the world outside our borders. And the world is linked to "us."

The sooner we quit thinking about "Them" and "Us" the better off we'll all be. It's ALL US! The face of America is changing every day. The America of 2111 is going to look a WHOLE lot different than the America of 2011. Get used to it. Better yet, embrace it. We are a better people and a better country when we realize this.

The Birthers don't get this. Probably they'll never get it. They'll be swept away by history.

Good riddance!

World’s Oldest Man Dies at 114

Walter Breuning of Great Falls, Montana was the world's oldest man. Not person. Apparently there's a woman in Georgia who is 26 days older. But Walt passed on a couple days ago. In a recent interview he laid out some some interesting advice for living a long life:

— Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. ("Every change is good.")

— Eat two meals a day ("That's all you need.")

— Work as long as you can ("That money's going to come in handy.")

— Help others ("The more you do for others, the better shape you're in.")

Then there's the hardest part. It's a lesson Breuning said he learned from his grandfather: Accept death.

"We're going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you're born to die," he said.

And so it came to Walter Breuning. All in all he sounded pretty Buddhist.

We could do worse...

Wishing Good Fortune to Purple Heaven Temple

Some pilgrims from Taiwan laid out this message today. I took the picture from a terrace above the courtyard so it's actually upside down. Odds are you can't read the Chinese characters anyway. After almost eight months here I recognize maybe five characters...out of the three thousand (or is it six thousand?) total.

Hooray! Hooray! The Federal Budget has passed!

This bit of political theatre only served to remind me that "We the people..." are totally irrelevant to the whole process. It was just a show. Not even a good one.

It's a sorry example of American life.

The 2010 Federal budget was $3,456,000,000 so we can assume the new one is in that neighborhood. The talking heads are saying they cut $38 billion. So basically they cut one percent.

A pox on all their houses!

Climate Change and "Experts" Who Deny it's Existence

"It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

OK I cribbed this from a NYTimes Paul Krugman Op-Ed. But it pretty much nails it.

Of ebooks, China, and the internet

Oh how I love living in the 21st century! In the brief hiatus between Peace Corps and coming to China I got myself an ebook. Amazon's Kindle seems to be the most popular model, but I had to order it via mail. Maybe after two years in Botswana I was untrusting of postal services in general, but I never got around to placing the order. Instead, while visiting my buddy Mark in Toledo, I picked up a couple Barnes & Noble "nooks" at a local store. Mark, nice guy that he is, even bought me covers to protect them.

And I must say they are fantastic. Purchasing books was never so easy! But it turns out B&N will only allow online purchases from a computer located in the United States. This was a problem since I was on my way to China for a year.

A Barnes & Noble rep in New York suggested I get a Virtual Private Network or VPN. A VPN, through the magic of the interweb, allows your computer to "appear" to be in the continental US. My VPN runs around $80 a year and makes my laptop appear to be in Oakland, California. Ergo I now have 90+ books on my nook and never have to leave behind favorites in my travels because my backpack is too full and I'm over the 20 kilogram airline weight limit for checked bags.

Many people say they prefer an actual book, that they like the feel of the pages, etc. Fair point. I do too. But ebooks are the wave of the future for those who still read. In fact I predict young folks will be more inclined to read on these gadgets. Time will tell. Fact is the growing sales of ebooks (now an official category on the New york Times best seller lists) bodes well for the technology.

It turns out there is another advantage to a VPN. It is a well known fact the government of China blocks such internet sites as facebook, Youtube and many blogs (doubt if they've picked up on this one). Of the 500 million registered facebook users in the world only something like 14,000 are in the People's Republic of China. that's an incredible number considering China has 1.4 billion people. Yet I have many friends here in-country, foreigners and Chinese alike who regularly post on facebook and Youtube. The reason? VPNs and other software that allows this.

Except for dissidents and some attempts at protests against government policies, the Chinese rulers seem to take a fairly light-handed approach to life online. It's true they employ official hackers to try to counter the potential deleterious effects of the web against them. But I suspect ultimately it will be to no avail. Regular citizens can read about the 1989 Tienanmen uprising and arrests, beatings and jailings of well-known dissidents, including Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The lid is off this Pandora's box and it will be very difficult to put it back on.

This is a big country with a LOT of people. Much of it still rural and still developing. The critical mass for political change may still be decades off. Or it may not. Six months ago who saw the uprisings in the Arab world coming? No one. Not even them.

Why Is It...?

If someone is against gun control, is for increased defense spending and thinks Ronald Reagan was a great president you can bet money they think man-made global warming is bullshit.

But if they are for same-sex marriage, increased spending on education and thinks George Bush was a tool of Dick Cheney you can wager that same bet they think man-made global warming is real.

None of the mentioned beliefs have anything to do with global warming. I wonder what that says about us.

Taoism and Buddhism

The Buddha is represented in several different ways. Sometimes Caucasian, sometimes Asian depending upon where in the world he is found. Often a laughing fat man is considered the Buddha.

The Yin Yang symbol is often used to represent Taoism. Many natural dualities—e.g. dark and light, female and male, low and high, cold and hot— are thought of as manifestations of yin and yang (respectively).

For seven months we have been living, training and learning in the Wudang Taoist Tai Ji and Kungfu Academy. We train in a Taoist temple. Often the temple is visited by Buddhist monks and nuns. Many Taoist monks and nuns live and work here.

Much of the philosophy of our martial arts training is incorporated in the Tao. And much of the Tao is very similar to Buddhism in it's precepts.

We had a Taoist monk here to teach us about Taoism a couple weeks ago. He laid out some things about both schools I thought might be interesting.

I won't get into the whole Taoist "catechism" nor the history of Gautama, who became Buddha. I just want to throw up a simple comparison given by the monk in which each purports to teach us how to live.

To boil it down, each philosophy (I refuse to call them religions as neither are confessional) has three basic "Pearls."

Buddhism's are:
1. Wisdom
2. Patience
3. Compassion

Taoism's are:
1. Compassion
2. Moderation
3. Humility

You can right away see the similarities. Buddha preached "The Middle Path," which could also be considered Moderation.

Both start within ourselves, but in a sense face different directions. Buddhism teaches us how to deal with the world outside of ourselves, while the Tao looks more inward. Another way of looking at them is that Buddhism is more concerned with one's mind while Taoism is more focused towards the body, hence the martial arts component.

Now these are VERY simplistic explanations and I wouldn't want to assert any authority on these words. But it is clear to anyone exposed to these bodies of belief that the keys to being a good person lie within.

This is Kungfu. This is What it's Like Here (Thanks to Hani for the Quote)

“The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.” Lao-Tzu

Thoughts on Botswana

I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of finishing my Peace Corps service in Botswana.`Haven't written much about that episode of my life but a couple thoughts have been buzzing around my head in recent days.

Peace Corps released a sort of self-congratulatory video celebrating it's 39 years in Botswana. I was amazed to see how similar scenes of villages in photos from the 60s and 70s were to the village I lived in and to most of the villages I saw when I was there. The same mud and stick houses, pit latrines, chickens in the yard, etc.

Forty years of not only Peace Corps, but uncounted millions in dollars, Yen, Euros, Pounds and Renmimbi have been poured into this country and except for the Gaborone area (The Capital city) not all that much has changed. This is a country that has had no wars, has natural resources (e.g. diamonds) and a booming tourist industry.

I was struck by that because in 1975 and '76 I was stationed in South Korea with the army. At that time the countryside was pretty similar to Botswana's. Rural, under-developed, mud and stick houses, old men carrying firewood stacked high on A-frame "backpacks." Seoul, the capital was pretty modern. But once you left that city it got "country" real quick. In 2003 I returned to find an extremely modern developed country. Nothing could be found of the "old" Korea I once knew. This was a country with no outstanding natural resources and sharing a border with North Korea and their two million man army poised for attack.

I just wonder what is the difference.

This isn't about Peace Corps or any of the dozens of other Aid programs and their effectiveness. I'm not against helping others in need. It is after all the Golden Rule. But after 40 years what's the point?

Spirituality and Mount Wudang

We are here studying TaiJi and Kungfu on one of the most sacred places in Taoism. Taoism is a major philosophy or religion if you will here in China, very closely akin to Buddhism. Both TaiJi and Taoism began right here on this mountain so it draws people from all over the world. Seekers.

I suppose you might say we came here as seekers as well. For me it was just to get into great shape and experience 21st century China for a bit. But our school gets people often who seem to be seeking some kind of ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience. Kind of a "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," floating through the bamboo trees kind of thing.

Of course there is no such thing. Even here on this holy mountain physics rules. No one floats. People get insight, sure, but that can happen anywhere.

Life for us here is very physical. We get up in the morning, train for two and a half hours, rest for lunch, train again another two and a half in the afternoon. It's hard. I've dropped 13 pounds. Gained flexibility. Gotten stronger. But it never lets up. Day after day it's the same program. Winter, 19 degrees Fahrenheit? Outside in the snow kicking. Summer, 85F? Kicking. Rain? Kicking. It never ends (Except Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays).

Still no out-of-body experience.

And yet it's a transformative place. We have looked into our lives and found deeper meaning to who and what we are. But it occurred to me this morning this is not my first time for such a similar experience.

Military veterans of every branch of service from any country in the world will relate their basic training to this experience. I went through Ranger training almost 40 years ago. Yet I carry the lessons learned there with me every day. Now NO ONE in their right minds would try to sell the military as an "ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience."

But brother let me tell you, it is as life changing and meaningful as anything one can ever experience.

And I think that's what we have here on Wudang Mountain.

I do like to watch the bamboo swaying in the wind though. From the ground...

On Michel de Montaigne

I've been reading some of his essays. Montaigne has been called the world's first blogger. He lived in France in the 16th century. But if you read him you'd swear he wrote yesterday, and specifically to you.

So the dude has inspired me. I've said before I was going to blog more. But I haven't. This time it'll be different. Every stupid, insipid, insulting, asinine thought that pops into my head is going up.

Let the insanity begin...

Good-bye 2010, hello 2011!

Just a few minutes ago our TaiJi school informed us we would have the next two days off to celebrate the calendar New Year (not the Chinese New Year in February). So, whoopee! We're going to nearby Shiyan tomorrow morning for some rest and dining.

Twenty-ten was a very active year to say the least. We began it in Zanzibar. Cabrini's and my first night dive together the evening of January 1st was a thrill. We surfaced to a full moon rising over Stone Town, a thrill I'll never forget.

Later in the year we got to spend some time among the African wildlife in the Okavango Delta.

Then of course we finished our Peace Corps service on May 19th. Immediately we bolted for wonderful Cape Town, South Africa where we got a tremendous adrenalin rush doing some shark cage diving among other things. During that trip we relaxed along side Lake Malawi (my only new country visited in 2010, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro (summiting at 6:45AM, June 17th), cruised the Nile, visited ALOT of piles of ancient Egyptian rocks and got some great reef diving in at Sharm El Sheikh.

Finally, after over two years we got a few minutes back in the US and A. Six weeks actually. It was great, but the road still called.

August 25th found us landing in Beijing. If you ever want to see what's going on in China now's the time to do it.

Four months later we are living and training at the Wudang Taoist Kungfu and TaiJi School in the Wudang Mountains. We're loving it! The training is generally hard, but we're surrounded by gorgeous vistas. Our biggest challenge now (aside from the twice daily workouts) is the January and February weather. It'll be cold but together Cabrini and I will see it through and come into Spring lean and mean.

We're planning on staying here until at least August. After that, what the hey, more travel. We want to visit Lhasa in Tibet, Sikkim in India, Bhutan, Vietnam and BACK TO SRI LANKA!!!!!

With all the travel and everything this year I only read 79 books, fewest since 2006. Probably won't do much better this year, although my Nook ebook reader from Barnes & Noble makes access to books VERY easy!

But for this moment now we want to say Happy New Year to all our friends, fiends and loved ones!

"Why We Travel" by Pico Iyer

Reprinted from "WorldHum," The Best travel Stories on the Internet.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship—both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of “Wild Orchids” (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator—or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo—or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet—and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon—an anti-Federal Express, if you like—in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import—and export—dreams with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more—not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes—they help you bring newly appreciative—distant—eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second—and perhaps more important—thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity—and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious—to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves—and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year—or at least 45 hours—and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me—no one can fix me in my resume—I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear”—disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families—to become better Buddhists—I have to question my own too-ready judgments. “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning—from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament—and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.

That whole complex interaction—not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)—is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And—most crucial of all—the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas—and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic—the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million—it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room—through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing—not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris’s “House Arrest,” a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On Page 172, however, we read, “La isla, of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator—a fictional construct (or not)?—confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is—and has to be—an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul’s recent book, “A Way in the World,” was published as a non-fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, “My Other Life,” were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also—Emerson and Thoreau remind us—have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack’s “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Yeah

I know what I said. Still...

Reason #23 Why China Will Rule the World

I want you to take a good look at this seemingly simple roll of toilet paper. Do you see that big number 3? That's THREE PLY amigos! The Trifecta of asswipe.

In Botswana we made do with single ply. It was a hardship, but it was Peace Corps and Africa and sacrifices were to be expected.

When we returned to the States we got back into the double ply routine thinking "That's right America! We're number one with the number two!"

But now I've been "re-educated" if you will. We were once great. But the torch has been passed.

I know. I know, you'll say "Hey, Gillete Fusion! Five blades!" That was then. This is now.

We had a good ride. And sure, we'll be importing three ply into Mal-Warts soon. But the message has been delivered.

Beijing It Is!

We've been here a couple days. Turns out we have to wait a couple more for our train to Wudangshan. It's a twenty-some hour trip. We could've left earlier but the only class seats available were something called "Hard Seat." Even the train's website said these seats were basically Hell and you'd be lucky to arrive with your possessions and sanity intact.

Ergo we got "Soft Sleeper" class seats. Better than a sharp stick in your eye.

So we've been exploring the neighborhood near our hotel. In the days to come we plan to visit Tiananmen Square and other famous spots. Cabrini and I have seen these places before but they are pretty cool in their own rights.

There are some interesting shops all around us. But this one caught my eye. From now on this is where i get my threads.

Saw "Inception" Tonight

Excellent flick! DeCaprio is great at playing the tortured soul. It has a kind of "Matrix" air about it. Good action. The final scene is a gripper. Gotta see it a time or two to retain everything. Be interesting to see how Rotten Tomatoes judges it.

My only question is this: am I actually sitting in front of a computer writing this?

Two Weeks Back In America...

I keep surfing the TV channels for something good to watch. So far nothing holds my interest for more than a couple minutes. Well, not exactly. I still like Colbert and John Stewart. But even my standby MSNBC and Keith Olbermann can't hold my attention.

And who is this Glenn Beck idiot? People believe in this clown? This guy spells trouble for this country. Like we needed it.

And advertisements (radio AND TV) irritate the shit out of me. What crap!

In other news, Cabrini and I got our visas for China. Here we go!

Back to America

So, wow, what a trip! We made it back to the US on July 1st. And we had ourselves a time. I've added some pictures to kind of summarize our trek from Cape Town to Cairo.

So we started out by going down to Cape Town, South Africa. First thing we did was go shark cage diving with the Great White Sharks. It was like watching Shark Week except those suckers were about six inches from our faces. Intense!

We climbed Table Mountain, visited Robben Island and saw Nelson Mandela's prison cell, went on a wine country tour, kayaked, scuba'd, ate lots of food. Just had a great time in one of the great cities of the world.









So from Cape Town we worked our way north to Malawi. Spent a few days relaxing on the shores of Lake Malawi. We wanted to get some scuba diving in there (it's supposed to have some of the best fresh water diving in the world) but the Dive Master was sick the day we had booked, so no go. Hey sometimes you win sometimes you lose.

After Malawi we went back to Tanzania. Cabrini and I had visited the Serengheti, Ngorongoro Crater and Zanzibar back in January. But this time we had one thing in mind: Mt. Kilimanjaro! So we caught a train (24hours) across southern Tanz, then bused to Moshi where we met up with Bibi and Azizi of Maasai Moja trekking company. They took us in and treated us like family.

Long story short seven days later we summited Kili. It was a beautiful experience! Fifty or five thousand pictures can't tell the story, but one will have to do.



Then it was Cairo. After the obligatory trip out to giza to see the piles of rocks we flew to Aswan for a cruise down the Nile.

We saw some of the coolest temples in the world and an absolute TON of hieroglyphics. Aswan, Edfu, Luxor, Karnak, Valley of the Kings and more that I can't even remember. Of all the temples, monuments and various archeological sites in the entire world Luxor has fully one third. It's amazing.

Finally we fly to Sharm el Sheik on the Red Sea for some great scuba diving. We didn't have a good dive in Cape town (rough weather), and the dive in Malawi was scratched. But the reefs we dove on at Sharm were beautiful. Great visibility, beautiful colors, a gazillion fish. Fantastic.




So we didn't have an underwater camera, but you can see how awesome the water was.


Finally it was back to Cairo. Re-connected with my old friend Hani. Then it was catch a flight to JFK and just like that our African adventure was over.

Two years. Man, where did it go? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I met a wonderful woman. Saw amazing things. Did amazing things!

I'm going down to Costa Rica next week to see Mick for the first time in almost two years. Cabrini and I have a few things to do in August. But the biggest thing is on August 24th we hit the road again. Well, the skies to be exact. We're going to China. More about that later.

Sorry if the pictures are incomprehensible or out of order. I hope to get back into the blogging routine. If I could just stay off facebook...

Strange Days

Sixteen days and a wake-up. On May 19th I´ll exit Botswana after two years in the Peace Corps. It doesn´t seem real.

Although at times it felt like it would drag on forever now it feels like we arrived fifteen minutes ago. But as they say, it´s all over but the shoutin´.

I´ve been asked if it was worth it. Would I do it again? Would I recommend it?

And my answer is a resounding yes! Or no. Or maybe. (I'll probably need a couple years of psychotherapy to fully be able to answer that.) Was it life changing? Sure. But no more so than four years in the army, 25 years of marriage, a night on the town, or a good steak. It's just a matter of degree.

So what now lies ahead? What is the ever popular "Way Forward?"

When getting ready to come here I was interviewed by the Columbiana Morning Journal and asked "what are your plans when you finish Peace Corps?" In typical smart-assed style I just said "It shall be revealed unto me."

Here is what has been revealed thus far:

On the 19th Cabrini and I hop a bus for Johannesburg, South Africa, change buses there and move on to
Cape Town. Gonna spend a couple weeks there. Check out Robben Island (UNESCO World Heritage site), where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned during Apartheid times, go diving with Great White Sharks, climb Table Mountain, drink some nice wine, eat good food and get out of there before the World Cup starts. Then we'll fly north to Malawi. Spend a week or so along Lake Malawi, hoping to get a dive or two in what's supposed to be some of the best fresh water diving in the world.

Eventually we'll work our way north back into Tanzania. Our goal is to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, th tallest mountain in Africa (19,350 feet) and the highest in the world climbable without specialized equipment. And yet another UNESCO WH site...

Once we finish that little workout we basically plan on flying to Cairo to complete the Cape Town to Cairo trip. After visiting the ancient piles of rocks outside Giza it's back to America.

At least that´s the general plan. We might get sidelined by gorillas, guerillas or some other offerings of Afreaka. But all in all looking for an early July return. Then it gets interesting.

I haven't seen my son Mick since December '08 and he's now in Costa Rica doing HIS Peace Corps bit. I'll be zipping down thataway for a couple weeks. Otherwise I'll be frantically re-connecting with friends and family as Cabrini does with hers in New York...

...until mid-August. One of our fellow Botswana volunteers is getting married out in Montana on August 14th. Cabrini and I will re-unite to attend the nuptials.

THEN its back to NYC in final prep for our non-stop flight on August 24th, JFK to Beijing. The plan is to spend upwards of a year at Mt. Wu Dang Taoist Academy for the martial arts. Its located on yet another UNESCO WH site. Gonna learn my self some Tai Chi.

After that? Well, kinda back where we were a little over two years ago. "It shall be revealed...yada, yada, yada."

An Homage to Shortness

I woke up this morning and nearly broke my neck falling out of bed. It felt like the floor was ten feet below the mattress. "What the...?!" And then it hit me.

Today I am officially (and for the second time in my life) "short." Not the kind of short you may be thinking of. Granted I stand 5'6", tall for a short man. And I mean no disrespect to little people.

But as of this moment I am a two-digit midget. My time left in Peace Corps Botswana is rapidly drawing to a close. The last time I experienced this phenomenon was 1976 in Korea. US Army. What a difference three and a half decades make.

By May I´ll be parachuting off a curb. Ninety-nine days and a wake up. Giddyup!

Happy Turkey Day (Unless you´re the bird)

Peace Corps policy is that we don´t get the day off for American holidays. So today is just another day in the Kalahari Desert. (if you work in Peace Corps headquarters you get both American AND Botswana holidays off. A total screw job in my opinion.)

Anyway, it doesn´t bother me. Although some yams with butter and gravy would go down pretty well. Maybe some fresh blackberry pie. And another slice of the bird. Don´t care if its light or dark meat. More gravy...

Where was I? Oh yeah, also Happy 62d Anniversary to my parents. I like to think they are living "Happily Ever After."

In other news: Monday, December 1st is World AIDS Day. Exactly two years ago on that date I received notification from Peace Corps sending me on my way.

I´ll be traveling up to Kasane on the Zimbabwe/Zambia border for the national commemoration. I see where the spread of AIDS worldwide appears to be stabilizing...except in southern Africa. Fifty percent of maternal deaths in Botswana are due to complications of AIDS. One in six children is an orphan. It´s a perfect storm.

Be of good cheer!

And Then There Was One...

It was 1977. I´d gotten out of the Army the previous year. Was single. Twenty-seven years old. Getting fat.

I had tried playing racket ball to stay in shape. But there were few courts in Athens back then and court time was tough to get.

One day, while waiting for a court to open up I decided to jog around a bit to warm up. And thus the die was cast.

It wasn´t bad at first. I built up to three miles and stuck to it fairly well. Wasn´t looking for much more.

Then one day I was getting a haircut at Max Carsey´s shop down on Court Street. He had a copy of "Runner´s World." That did it. I was hooked.

Looooooooooong story short this morning my three mile jaunt brought me to mile number 99,999 lifetime. (I don´t count runs done in high school gym or Airborne shuffles. Just ´77 onward.)

Thirty-two and odd years. Forty marathons (Best- 2 hrs, 39 mins flat; Columbus 1984), 17 Bostons. Fastest mile- 5:03 (pedestrian), best 10Km- 33:42, best ten miler- 56:19, half marathon- 1:14:40.

In one eleven year stretch I recorded 44,000 miles, over 4,000 miles per year. I wonder how I was able to do it.

But tomorrow morning I´ll make my goal. A hundred grand by age 60. With weeks to spare.

Don´t think I have another hundred thou in me. But I still have a few. And the next day I´ll start on them.

Five Years On...

Those who follow this blog know the significance of this day. Five years ago Jan, my wife of 25 years, passed away. And every year I post something on this date about her, about me, about what it´s like.

In the past year I´ve begun a sort of metamorphosis. I´ve written this post out on that topic about five different ways now. And none satisfy what I want to say.

But basically it boils down to this:

I´ll always love her. I´ll always remember her. But it´s time to fully engage in this life. I can´t continue to measure time by how long its been and what has been lost.

This blog is the Best of What´s Left. Not the Best of What´s Left Behind.

This is my last "Anniversary of" post. Of all people she would approve.

Paradise in the Indian Ocean

Just got back from nearly two weeks in Mauritius. Got re-certified in scuba after 36 years. With me is Cabrini. We had a wonderful time! Nuf said.

Artsy Fartsy

I did this over the weekend. From looking at my last post you can see my immediate inspiration. It was a combination mosaic/water colour (get that UK spelling?)with salt, Thokolosi salts (don't ask) and some kind of beans (mung?).

There's one part I'm particularly proud of. I posted this directly on facebook and no one got it.

Wild Kingdom Lives!

This was awesome. John John Kempf, the Afrikaaner guy who took us all out into the CKGR, was driving alongside these guys (or were they running alongside us?). I was laying on the roof of the Range Rover snapping away as we rolled over the plain. He was yelling "Are you getting this?" I'm yelling "Yahoo! Keep going! Keep going!"

It was a moment.

It's Not All Donkeys, Goats and Cattle...

I'm having a terrible time posting pictures on blogger. Hope at least this one comes through. Saw this big guy a few weeks ago when camping in the CKGR (Central Kalahari Game Reserve). He wasn't overly thrilled about giving ground. But we were two vehicles and he apparently didn't like the looks of us. We were a bit gamey at the time.

I Am Not Dead

Reliable sources inform me I have not posted here since April 29th.

My excuse is I have no excuse. Just haven´t heard the muse.

Sorry.

So...I´ve been in Peace Corps 14 months as of tomorrow. The day-to-day is pretty unremarkable.

Oh! I have started teaching reading at Rethuseng, the local Junior Secondary School. Forms two and three. That´s like 9th and 10th grades. About 30 and odd kids in each class. Once a week.

So far I´ve done it once. It was fun. Their reading level is below what I´d expect for kids that age. But that´s just me. Overall they seem nice. It´s something to do that feels good.

I´m closing in on 100,000 miles run lifetime (not counting the army). I want to hit that milestone by my 60th birthday. Got less than 500 miles and about seven months to do it. Shouldn´t be a problem.

Starting to think about life post-Peace Corps. Got some ideas, but don´t want to discuss them here yet.

Otherwise everything goes well here.

Jiminey Cricket!!!

This is a Corn Cricket. They are huge. Apparently when the Corn Crickets appear that means the end of the bug season. I've been seeing them all over for more than a month though. And there's still a lot of bugs around.

This Is Teaspoon!

The happiest dog in the 'ville of Charles Hill. Teaspoon started life as the pet of a former Peace Corps volunteer in nearby Karakubis. When she left her boyfriend moved to Chuck.

People in Botswana typical treat dogs with the care and tenderness usually reserved for rats in your pantry. To show kindness or affection is somewhat akin to pure lunacy.

But Teaspoon was weaned on Americans. And she LOVES to run with the other PCV in the village and me. She can't understand why we can't keep up with her. Naturally she was spayed early on. So her teats don't drag in the dust like most feral dogs around here. Also she mightily enjoys showing off her speed when she goes after various goats, cattle, chickens, donkeys and other quadrupeds.

If I happen to be out at night Teaspoon comes along for escort service. Of course I have to give her a reward.

Just one of the treats of African village living.

One Year In Peace Corps (Amended from Yesterday)

So today marks one year since I pulled out of Columbiana, looked across Arrowhead Lake for (what I hope) the last time and headed to Cleveland for the short flight to Philadelphia and the Peace Corps..

So today marks one year since I pulled out of Columbiana, looked across Arrowhead Lake for (what I hope) the last time and headed to Cleveland for the short flight to Philadelphia and the Peace Corps..

Ordinarily I do my year in review on January 1st. But this is a more significant date.

So what has transpired in the last 365 days?

First, the raw numbers:
Miles run-978 (My lowest since 1977, yet still on pace to hit 100,000 miles by my 60th birthday. I only have to average 2.5 per day, not as easy as it sounds, but eminently doable.)
Countries visited- five (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and Swaziland, in that order)
UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited- Squat. (Not a good year for cultural and historical edification.)
Books Read – 113 (Not bad. Lot’s of alone time. Also explains why my Setswana is so bad. Ga ke bua Setswana sentle!)
Times I’ve ALMOST sold my house- Three (Last time was close. Within five days of the closing the buyer lost his job. Curses!)

So what else? Phew! Lots!

The reason my companeros and I came here is to help in the fight against HIV/AIDS. I doubt any of us had much of an idea how hard that thing is. You know, as bad as it was, AIDS in the US was brought under “control” relatively quickly. Certainly it could have been handled MUCH better (Read “And the Band Played On…”). But the Grim Reaper no longer hovers over every potential sexual encounter like he did in the late 1980s-early 90s.

Would that it were so easy here. We are up against so many variables it boggles the mind. Every couple months it seems a new focus arises. ABC (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condomize). Circumcision. Multiple Concurrent Partners. Sexual Networks. So far no magic bullets.

BILLIONS of Dollars, Euros, Yen, Yuan and Pula have been poured into this over the last 20 and odd years. Yet the problem ceases to go away. Or even get much better. Whole bureaucracies have sprung up around the banner of HIV/AIDS. I can’t even begin to keep track of all the NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations).

I can’t be expected to understand it all and/or what it will take to make any difference.

I have to self-censor this blog because Peace Corps monitors blogs and what we say. But here is my current opinion (subject to change tomorrow. Or even this afternoon.):

First of all one must recognize that historically Africa has been a hard place to survive. I often say for untold millennia Africa has been a pretty easy place to wake up dead on a given morning. Bugs, snakes, Africanized bees, malaria, dengue, Yellow Fever, wars, big animals that like to eat you. Africa has it all. For 200,000 (or is it two million?) years evolution here has been developed to ensure survival of the fittest. I don’t want to go into everything I think that entails. But suffice it to say it’s a life-pattern significantly different from what we in the west call “normal.”.

The influence of the western world in Africa has only been for around 150 years, give or take. Most countries here were colonized by the “Great Powers” in the late nineteenth century. Independence came to Africa barely fifty years ago.

Two hundred thousand years vs. 150.

I speak of Botswana, because that’s what I know best. But I also think much of what I say can be extrapolated throughout alot of sub-Saharan Africa.

Things here may APPEAR familiar to us. The clothes are basically the same. The cars are the same, except for the whole “driving on the left” thing. Television pumps American style entertainment into living rooms. Internet, though not ubiquitous, exists. Coca-Cola is Coca-Cola (only with REAL sugar, not corn sweetener. Big difference!) Over all it kind of LOOKS like us.

But those things lie only on the surface. Underneath the skin “Survival of the Fittest” still calls the shots. Behaviours that ensure propagation and survival of the species still reign supreme.

We think we (Africans and westerners) are all driving together on the same road in the same direction. But my feeling sometimes is we are in opposite lanes, going opposite directions, both hoping to arrive at the same place at the same time. We will never understand each other. We CAN’T understand each other! The cultural gaps are too wide.

I seriously doubt that our two years here will make any critical kind of difference. Even the six or so years since Peace Corps was reintroduced to Botswana hasn’t seen much improvement. Most likely 20 years here wouldn’t make much difference. Am I sorry I came? To the contrary. I HAD to come! How else would I learn? It is in the best efforts of evolution that we try to help our fellow humans survive and thrive.

How will this all turn out? I don’t know. I’m a doomsdayer. I see the potential scenario for Apocalypse in every society, ours included (I had a ball with Y2K. Of course I was wrong!).

What happens if/when the HIVirus mutates and the Anti-Retro Viral (ARV) drugs lose effect? Or the Botswana government, in the current financial crisis, can’t pay for the ARVs? Or Zimbabwe melts down (even more) and war spills over the borders. What if. What if? What if!

Maybe a cure will be found. That would be a HUGE monkey wrench in a lot of careers! Sometimes I think history will judge us from a distance of a century or so and say “Those blind fools! Couldn’t they see how stupid they were? If only they had done X or Y or Z!”

I don’t write this as an indictment. My service here is no better nor worse than if I was digging irrigation ditches in Mongolia. I’m glad I came. Sometimes we must tilt at windmills. Don’t read this and say “Oh, Wigal is unhappy. He’s sorry he came.” I am very happy. I have learned a lot and have found my happiness here. Four years ago I was at the nadir of my existence when I happened to fly into Beirut, Lebanon and my life changed immeasurably (Yes, Joseph). For the better I think. Botswana also is having that same effect.

One of the very few things I can say in Setswana is “letsatse le langwe kwa Paradise!” Don’t worry. The Motswana never understand what I’m saying either.

Look what I Found

I'm sorry it's taken so long to post. We just got internet in the office I work. It is VERY slow and I have to keep refreshing the page.

A couple weeks ago we had a music/drama tour of the sub-District. Ten villages and settlements in five days. It was a whirlwind tour.

Later I'll try to put up more pix. For now I'm just hoping these will fly.

The one without the baby was of me and some of the crew. the baby was just a random cute kid who hitched a ride with us one day. The mom hitched too. But we let the little guy ride up in the cab.