Insight from Southeast Asia.

While in Vietnam I took a history class on the Vietnam War, taught by Dr. Christoph Giebel and came to a simple idea about America’s poor reaction to losing the War. As a culture we had to reconstruct it in our memories with phallic symbols of American might in films such as Rambo to compensate for our loss. We also bullied the rest of the world into imposing crushing sanctions on a victorious country that did not match normal Cold War sanctions against Communist governments[1].

This isolation has given Vietnam a fend-for-itself mentality that is apparent in how the people seemingly never give up when it comes to economic advancement such as creating little corner shops in front of their houses, which are everywhere, to gain a little extra money. Maybe to compensate for poor living conditions during and after the war, Vietnamese narratives of the War and its aftermath are staunchly nationalistic, classically portraying the beaten French, Japanese, Chinese and American forces as weak cowards. This nationalistic narrative of expelling foreign aggressors[2] has been so deeply embedded that a large plaque summarizing Vietnamese history in a National History museum in Ho Chi Minh City even fails to mention that a French missionary developed their Romanized script (quốc ngữ). The American military, after using more bombs and bullets in Vietnam than all of WWII combined, after poisoning thousands for generations, after leaving a beautiful countryside identical to the landscape of the moon, has been portrayed by Vietnam’s nationalistic narrative as the defeated foreign aggressor.

Though Vietnam carries traces of the war everywhere, when I asked a Vietnamese friend how he felt about me being in his country, he said he did not care about the war. He said that he liked Americans, the language, the culture and the people, and that he only wanted to do what the U.S. military failed to do during the war, make a real personal connection.

Cambodia, because of a complex number of factors that relate to the Vietnam War, has quite a different story from Vietnam.[3] In five years, one fourth of the Cambodian population was killed due to the one time teacher Pol Pot who aimed to kill all intellectuals and artists, teachers, bilingual people and even anyone with glasses. According to his own ideals, Pol Pot should’ve been killed too to reach his agrarian dream of complete equality. He pursued this complete equality, but destroyed all semblance of society.

The past lays heavy in the air in Cambodia, like a scented humid night that continuously draws up faint memories difficult to place. With many ex-Khmer Rouge leaders controlling Cambodia for the past twenty-five years there has been a slower process of recovery than in Vietnam, especially most of the builders and maintainers of society and culture had been killed. Yet, even while I walked through a killing field and found bones sticking out of the ground, I could still see in Angkor a past worth being proud of (that is, if you agree with national narratives that would connect the Angkorian Empire to the now dominant Khmer people group in Cambodia).

Angkor is a wonder in itself. I felt as if I was walking through various mythical tales all at once. In one place I saw the Jungle Book (which was inspired by Angkor). In others I saw Wats that could easily be in the next season of Game of Thrones. Somehow, in Angkor, the heavy weight of Cambodia’s recent past seemed to have been blown away by the small breeze that is a breath of life in the heat of a Cambodian summer. It is frustrating to see such an impressive past in a country torn by war and ran rampant by expats that treat the country like the Wild West we were a part of when playing Cowboys and Indians as children[4]. After leaving Cambodia through the God-awful Thai-Cambodia land crossing, I would look back fondly yet sadly on a country whose countryside reminded me so much of Texas and a people who have every reason to not smile yet were continuously some of the nicest people I have ever met.

After paying for a visa at the Myanmar embassy, I found myself in the nicest airport in Southeast Asia as I traveled to Yangon. There are an uncomfortable number of cars in Yangon and traffic is second only to Bangkok. Unreasonably uncomfortable taxi seats aside, Myanmar stands out from its Southeast Asian neighbors not only for its ability to remain as most uninfluenced by the West, but presumably also most unaffected by U.S. military policies. The U.S. has yet to have any direct military engagement with Myanmar, but due to the U.S.’s paranoid War on Terrorism, Myanmar in the past has been labeled as an Axis of Evil by Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush, giving Myanmar the same shunned treatment as Vietnam received between 1975 and 1994. U.S. military policies against perceived national enemies damaged Myanmar’s already weak economy and helped to develop a black economy[5].

The Burmese people are unimaginably nice and Yangon was easily the safest city I have ever been to, if I ignored the random gaping sinkholes in the sidewalks. Yangon is a microcosm of Myanmar. Yangon has a decently sized Muslim community (from what I saw, though numbers are never mentioned) and a quickly developing economy (just three years ago there were almost no cars), but both of these characteristics meet at a delicate middle ground where economic hardships and opportunities combined with more political freedom are manifesting themselves in random acts of violence against Muslim communities.

The tallest building in Yangon has a rooftop restaurant: off to one side I could see the inspiring Shwedagon temple and the sprawling metropolis of Yangon. Yet, when I turned to the other side of the restaurant, I saw a city that stops and gives way to a sea of green and infinite blue sky. While Myanmar, like Yangon, holds promises of a bright future, the past effects of U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia leave Myanmar’s future as wide and uncertain as the fields and sky that surround Yangon.

Thailand left me with an odd taste in my mouth. Although Thailand has never been in a major international conflict to the same scale as Cambodia and Vietnam, Thailand has a heavily militarized society. Pictures of the royal family are everywhere. If you say one bad thing about the family you are put in jail. The U.S. used Thailand as an anticommunist example in the Cold War after failing to progress anywhere with Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos. Thailand has even developed a national identity that at times is portrayed in specifically not being communist.[6] The U.S. has had a close relation to Thailand since the Cold War that has helped direct Thailand’s history and identity. Overtly aggressive U.S. military actions in Southeast Asia has even helped to develop a robust military society in Thailand by the sheer force of U.S. presence in the region.

In much of the world there are traces of war and the after effects of military actions. But Southeast Asia is different: the memories of U.S. military polices are heavy in the tropical air, it drips in the sweat that rolls around the smiling mouth of local citizens greeting new American tourist, carrying money not guns. In America we often forget what effects our military has on the world, be it on-the-ground violence as in Vietnam or Cambodia, or in more psychological and cultural military influence as in Thailand and Myanmar.

Although there are traces of U.S. military policies across Southeast Asia there are also traces of the future in the warm way people of various cultures seemingly invite foreigners with open arms. It is hard to tell if their smiles are the forcibly polite smiles our mothers have taught us when entertaining unwanted guests, or if it is genuine. Either way, the lingering effects of war are everywhere. The way to fix the current problems left over from the past are many and disputed. But the first step is the step my Vietnamese friend made in Hue, caring about the past, but not letting it affect his view of Americans today. We all carry requiems of war, but how we use those memories in the present constitute how the future will unfold.

Insight from Oxford, England.

I’ve been in the UK nearly three months now. I’ve settled in the city of Oxford where the dreaming spires exude the city’s haunting beauty, ancient intellectualism, and sacred atmosphere. It’s easy to think in these nostalgic narratives, Oxford is so beautiful. Though, reviews in the past have been mixed. Here are a couple opinions I find rather concerning:

“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!” – Matthew Arnold

“The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it.” – C.S. Lewis

Fortunately, for me, I am here neither as a tormented poet or novelist. Nor a student for that matter. It seems odd to place myself in a city where academia permeates the air and not be a student at one of the colleges. I’m here on a five-month work internship with international children’s charity, Viva. My brief experience here has been incredibly formative — international development theories are coming alive, being confirmed and tested.

One of my questions coming here was to observe and measure the effectiveness of faith-based organizations vs. secular charities with similar goals and beneficiaries. Many development organizations target children as their main demographic – and this makes sense, as it is a strategy meant to go up stream and identify systematic issues “killing all the fish” as it were. Consequently, we’ve seen a large number of small non-profits popping up over the past decade responding to the needs of children in their respective communities, but they often lack the skills and support they need to offer those children a more secure future. They have plenty of compassion and commitment, but often struggle without the formal training and expertise their challenging jobs require. So many well-intentioned schemes have gone awry due to poor allocation of funds and vision – so I came to Oxford to find out what people here were doing to fix that.

Viva is a Christian grassroots organization that works in city networks, bringing together service providers, churches, government officials and other non-profits to offer the best future for children across the world. To me, it’s a brilliant model. Sharing resources, a comparative advantage of sorts, to actually change the landscape for children at risk. The model is based on working together to affect a greater result, not just starting up another non-profit that works with the same type of beneficiaries (of which I was mistaken for the other day! I guess things like this come with the territory if you’re the only Southeast Asian in a rural English village).

Like I mentioned, Viva prioritizes relationships with many local churches and uses a Christian faith-based approach to partnerships – this is brilliant because the church has historically always been the number one, immediate caregiver in local, developing countries. Churches will always have legitimacy in local communities that an outside organization may never achieve. Churches were there before foreign aid and will be there after everyone has left. These churches in addition to other indigenous groups are worth investing in for the transformative change many people like myself are hopeful to see.

I’m afraid the same can’t be said for UK churches. I visited one the other day and a lady passed out mid-service — to no one’s concern! The man next to her pretended it didn’t happen and it took nearly 30 minutes for a paramedic to arrive. It was quite the British experience.

In the spirit of optimism, I leave you with a favorable review of this most curious city:

“We were conscious all the time of the strong intellectual life of a thousand years. Despite the modern laboratories, Oxford is still ‘breathing the last enchantments of the middle ages.’” – Sheldon Vanauken

~~~~~

Rebekah Kennel is an International Studies major and an Editor for the Jackson School Journal of International Studies. She also is a contributor to Sense and Sustainability, an organization and podcast devoted to sustainable development. Rebekah will graduate from UW this spring 2013.

Insight from Quilpué, Chile.

As the product of the Jackson School, which encourages its students to be “global citizens” and “critical thinkers” regarding issues on the world agenda, I have not been able to help but analyze my surroundings here in Chile with a corresponding mindset. Past academic courses touching on the familiar themes of economic growth, development, industrialization, protecting indigenous rights, among others, have all subtlety influenced the way I view my surroundings here in Chile. The main impetus to writing this piece was the desire to understand “development” from a variety of angles and viewpoints. Along these lines, by way of my current position teaching English in Chile, living with a host-family, casually conversing with people in my town regarding the quotidian matters impacting the lives of ordinary, every-day people, I have been afforded the unique opportunity to gain an on-the-ground perspective of development to contrast with my previous assumptions, the majority of which have been fostered through reading numerous articles and books on the subject.

A prime example that immediately comes to mind comes from earlier this year with one of the students in my ‘English Club’ elective. In preparation for the Chilean Ministry of Education’s English Opens Doors debate initiative we held informal discussions covering a wide range of topics. After posing a question to my kids regarding charities and foundations and their role in impactful change in places like Africa, the topic of discussion eventually steered into territory more relevant to my students: what does it mean to be a Third World, developing country? Taking the question a step further, I asked them about their thoughts on Chile, and whether or not they viewed it as a first world, industrialized country. One student quickly responded without hesitation; “I think Chile is definitely a Third World country.”  Amidst head-nods and what seemed to be resounding agreement from the others in the group, he proceeded to explain his rationale.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure how to react. After two years of solid immersion in all things ‘Global Development’ during the latter half of my university stint, I had come to not only associate the term ‘Third World’ with the abject poverty seen in the shanty-towns of Africa, India and Southeast Asia, but also as a term that had lost some of its relevance and could no longer be used to classify countries in the modern, post-Soviet era. Even more so, in preparation for my trip to South America, I had been quite adamant about doing my homework and reading the associated literature. Thus, after some pretty hefty research regarding Chile’s current and future economic prospects, its inclusion as the first Latin American country into the Anglo-Saxon-dominated OECD, as well as high rankings in terms of democracy, rule of law, and business-friendly infrastructure conducive to foreign direct investment, I was operating under the assumption that Chile had realized the elusive ‘pinnacle’ of development, one which is set out and perpetuated by an intricate system of lending and indebtedness between creditors such as the World Bank, Regional Development Banks, industrialized countries, and their debtor counterparts in the rest of the world (the majority of which lay south of the equator). However, after a few months in-country, my current viewpoints have deviated slightly from those I was harboring at the outset.

After stumbling upon this revelation, I began to view my surroundings differently. Starting with my own backyard – Quilpué – the town in which I’m currently living has plenty of industry, exemplified by a bustling city center and pockets of noticeable wealth in a few neighborhoods; yet, it also has more than its fair share of poorer, destitute sectors which comprise a sizable part of the outlying metro area. I’m now reminded of this on my walk home from work every day, where I pass El Retiro, one of the nicer, safer neighborhoods of the city lined with aesthetically-pleasing houses, manicured lawns, and expensive, foreign-manufactured cars in the driveways only to walk a half a kilometer further and see rows of rinky-dink shacks lined up near a small stream, bordering the countryside and number of abandoned warehouses.

Beyond the intra-city level, another aspect which has caught my interest is the relationship between Santiago, the sprawling, capital-city metropolis and the rest of the country. If one were to create a “Development 101” course, included in the curriculum would certainly be the relationship between a country’s administrative center, or its core, and the rest of the country, often referred to as the periphery. The idea is that as a country begins to develop its industry and advance its economic prosperity, inevitably certain demographics begin to benefit more than others, and a disparity in wealth and income distribution occurs. More often than not, pockets of wealth accumulate in the larger centers of industrialization and commerce, i.e. cities, while rural areas are generally omitted from this progress.

Now, I would be among the first to say that any economic progress, albeit only in certain areas, is better than absolute poverty all around. Especially with the proper political institutions in place, this new economic capacity could effectively be leveraged in order to redistribute wealth in a more equitable fashion. However, this theory usually remains a theory, and looks entirely different in operation. In the case of Chile, Santiago has become a bastion of finance and commerce, and accordingly, has become the gateway for foreign capital not only into Chile, but the whole of South America. Buoyed by copper exports, the Chilean economy has managed to utilize a surplus in its natural resource sector to diversify other sectors of its economy, most notably financial services and materials & processing. As such, the Chilean economy has a low level of unemployment and growth prospects that would make any European periphery country green with envy. However, the reality of the white-collar executive in Santiago is not necessarily the same as the fisherman in Coyhaique, and what may be beneficial for the former may not be for the latter.

This is where the oft-heard phrase in development literature comes into play: “Industrialization and its Discontents.”  Although I personally am of the belief that industrialization is a crucial element of economic growth, and that the entire doctrine of modern capitalism implies that there will be winners and losers in any case of even slight economic progress, as it is this competition between firms and companies that creates the foundation for growth, and maintains market efficiency. And, I firmly believe that it is the government’s role to manage and oversee the economy in a way that mitigates any possible negative externalities associated with the free-market capitalist model. The universal solution to this has been the creation of the modern welfare state: however, within the parameters of this essay, I’d like to focus on the protection of environmental and indigenous rights. In Chile, there is at present an overwhelming detachment between what is happening in Santiago and what is happening in the rest of the country, namely rural areas with special neglect of the Chilean South. Currently, Chile has seen a wave of protests with the slogan “Patagonia Sin Represas,” a movement which has materialized in order to challenge a motion to build a sprawling network of five hydroelectric power plants in one of the most ecologically, environmentally, and culturally significant places on earth. The HidroAysén project has been fully endorsed by the current administration led by President Sebastian Piñera, which helped to facilitate a joint-venture between Endesa, the Spanish-Italian energy conglomerate, and Colbún S.A, a Chilean utility company to secure the necessary investment and capital to finance the project. On one end, the project will supposedly help maintain Chile’s current rate of economic growth by providing the necessary energy infrastructure needed to support said growth; on the other hand, a number of studies point out that it will very likely displace thousands of nearby indigenous, fishing, and agricultural communities, as well as have dire consequences for the swath of Chilean Patagonia in which it is being constructed.

I will be the first to stand by the importance of a “pro-business” mindset in advancing the livelihood of a country and its citizens. I do maintain the belief that the concept of finance does in fact serve an invaluable role in allocating capital efficiently across market segments to provide support and enable firms and companies to grow and achieve larger scale.  However, the realm of finance often does not adequately take into account the real world outside equity markets, with a precedent that encourages managers to pick securities and shares which maximize returns for investor portfolios whether or not the returns come at the expense of a minority group or a nature reserve that exist outside this realm. As far as “socially-conscious investing” is concerned, a friend and past colleague of mine has summed up the idea quite aptly in his blog, where he states that in spite of an investor’s abstinence from buying shares in companies whose operations negatively impact the environment, the void will inevitably be filled by other investors in the market. This is due to the fact that “markets are typically very efficient, and unless everyone works together to withdraw financing from ‘unethical’ firms, those who don’t care will arbitrage their share price back up to where it was before socially conscious investors withdrew their capital.”

In addition, I politically consider myself as a left-leaning moderate, and before coming to this country, would never in a million years have thought myself to be falling on the socialist end of the political spectrum. Basically, the fact of the matter is that many Americans in the current day are a bit hesitant to refer to themselves as socialists.  However, I have noticed that the variation of the ideology that exists here, Socialism “a la Chilena,” along with the country’s current model for economic and social development is less about radical, Marxist-style income re-distribution utopianism, and more about a sort of moral and economic fairness.

To conclude, I would like to point out that on the whole, Chile has made great strides in overcoming a brutal dictatorship, adopting a pro-growth economic model and providing appropriate political institutions to support it. All of this can be noted in the country’s past three decades of positive growth in Real GDP and GDP-per capita, both of which have resulted in improved living standards for many Chileans and a robust middle-class which increasingly enjoys more influence in the country’s political agenda. However, despite these notable improvements, creating tangible solutions for extending the benefits of this growth to the country’s poor remains a large-scale issue. As a result, Chile must address its underlying political and social problems moving forward before we go ahead giving it our unrelenting praise.

~~~~~

Julian Fellerman graduated in the summer of 2011 with a degree in International Studies (Development Track). He has complemented his studies with internships at the U.S. Department of Commerce-Export Assistance Center and the Global Indexes Group at Russell Investments. While at Russell, he was part of a team that produced the Russell Indexes Country Guidebook, a semi-annual report which outlined the macroeconomic and investment landscape for developed and emerging countries in Russell’s indexes.

He is currently a volunteer with the Chilean Ministry of Education/UN Development Programme initiative, English Opens Doors, where he teaches primary and secondary-level English at Colegio Montesol, a semi-private school located in Quilpué, Chile. He wrote this piece for a blog he is keeping chronicling his experiences in the Southern Cone.

Insight from Karachi, Pakistan.

I have been back home in Karachi for more than a month now–Ramazan passed, Pakistan’s Independence Day passed, Eid-ul-Fitr came and went, the weather got hotter and wedding season began. The only thing that remains constant every time I step out of the house is the amount of people shopping. High end malls keep opening up, people are packed into the shopping centers and buying as if they will never get the chance to do so again. Prices have soared but shops seem to have gotten fuller. A new mall is under construction in the very spot that Mid East Hospital stood a few years ago. I knew it was coming (the hospital was sold back in 2005) but it is still an unpleasant shock to see the building converted and plastered with images of shops and restaurants “coming soon.” How can you tear down a fully functioning hospital, especially in a city where there are already not enough, to build a mall? This a question I keep repeating to myself but have no answer for.

The amount of beggars on the streets also soared during Ramazan. A leading English daily carried a few features on the topic, including “Beg, and you shall receive” wherein a beggar voices his preference for traveling by air (which he did) rather than by train to come to Karachi during Ramazan to beg. Begging is a full-fledged business in the country and Ramazan is a peak time for maximizing profit. People are meant to feel for the poor when they fast and experience hunger but these days the doling out of cash to beggars probably has more to do with the guilty conscience of the wealthy who are hauling around truckloads of shopping bags. The extreme social and economic disparity, the root cause of more than half the problems the country faces today, seems to just keep growing.

The economy has been suffering for far too long; exports keep suffering setbacks that have little to do with their quality or a decrease in demand and more to do with internal factors. Pakistani textiles are something to write home about and that includes jeans. Most people in Karachi know about a place called Zainab Market but not everyone is aware that, if you know where to go, you can get the best jeans at outrageously low prices here–jeans that are exported all over the world and sold for four or five times the price abroad. The shop owner complains though, that half the market for such exports has shifted to Bangladesh in the past few years. It takes me only a second to figure out why—the ridiculously long and frequent electricity cuts in the country are making it impossible to get any work done right.

Once known as the city of lights, these past few years Karachi has seen much more darkness than light. Both literally, with the constant electricity shortage (read mismanagement and corruption), and figuratively with the death, destruction and despair that has gripped the place. The resilient city still bustles with life though. People go about their daily lives; work, fun, ceremonies, hanging out–all goes on. In some areas of the city you might not even realize that things are any different than usual in Karachi until you see the various body counts in the news every single day. The situation is grim, quite grim, but on the ground reality is not as utterly awful as the news media would have you believe; normality still exists and happy moments are interspersed in all the madness. Karachi may not be the city of lights these days but it is still a city of bustling life, of people who face their fears and refuse to stop living. Here’s hoping for the lights to come back on.

~~~~~

Nabeeha Chaudhary is a second year M.A. student in the South Asian Studies department at the Jackson School. She grew up in Lahore and Karachi and studied at the University of Karachi for more than two years before transferring to Miami University where she completed her B.A. in English Literature. Her current research interests revolve around Media, Education, and Gender Disparities in South Asia with a focus on Pakistan.

This blog post was written while Nabeeha was in Karachi for part of summer 2012 to visit friends and family and to collect material for her M.A. project on the representation of women in Pakistani television serials.

Insight from Yangjuan, China.

Previously on the Cool  Mountain Educational Fund blog as: We’re making a difference; Three future teachers; and 113,000 RMB in scholarships find grateful recipients.

Thus far in 2012, I have taken several trips to China as part of my work as head of the Cool Mountain Education Fund, a non-profit organization working to support education in Nuosu Yi communities in China.  The Cool Mountain Educational Fund works to increase enrollment of graduates from Yangjuan Primary School, way up in the Cool Mountains of southern Sichuan, in middle school, high school, college, and trade schools.  To do this, we provide scholarships to all qualifying students.

In April of this year, I was joined by Sichuan University Students and UW exchange members Zhang Yin and Huang Wenlan for a 3-1/2 hour bus ride through lush and drizzly Sichuan countryside, on a freeway so smooth I could write in my field notebooks on the ride, to Deng Xiaoping’s hometown of Guang’an, where we arrived around noon to find Yangjuan graduates Qubi Lisan, Ma Xiaoyang, and Li Musa waiting for us at the bus station; we hopped a city bus to the College, not far out of town, where we had lunch at a little restaurant outside the campus gate, and caught up with the students’ doings.

All of the boys are in three-year credential programs, studying to be elementary teachers.  Lisan wants to teach English, Musa early childhood education, and Xiaoyang art.  They had all recently passed their first-year qualifying examinations with no trouble, and the next hurdle was a test of pronunciation and grammar in the Standard Chinese language known as Putonghua (ordinary speech) in China and Mandarin outside.  They had gained an enormous amount of confidence since I had known them back in their middle-school days, and it seemed to me they were going to be a credit to their ethnic group and their village.  In addition, studying to be a teacher is, I think,  not just a matter of job security, but a way of giving back to the community and the schools that had enabled them to come this far.

After lunch, we toured the campus, dominated by a statue of Deng Xiaoping on a high pedestal.  The boys said several times that it was too bad we didn’t have more time; they would have liked to go with us to Deng’s birthplace, which is now a local museum, which they have visited twice already.  And rightly so; if it were not for the visionary program of reform that Deng set out for China in the 1970s and 80s, it would have been very unlikely that Xiaoyang, Musa, and Lisan would have been able to go to college.

Still, for Xiaoyang’s family in particular, college expenses are almost prohibitive.  Lisan’s and Musa’s fathers are both township officials, so they are not feeling the economic pinch of college as acutely as Xiaoyang’s family is, though our scholarships still help.  But consider that these boys have expenses, including tuition, room and board, food, and transportation home for vacations, that amount to about 11,000 or 12,000 yuan (between $1,700 and $19,00) per year. Xiaoyang’s father Labbu, whom I have known for a long time, is an ordinary farmer in Yangjuan, though endowed with special skills in the old Nuosu art of felt-making.  In recent years, he and his older son Muga have been traveling to big cities, including Beijing, to work on construction projects. Together, they can probably net enough to cover Xiaoyang’s college expenses in a half-year’s work, but of course they have other expenses as well.  Muga was seriously injured three years ago by a falling crowbar, but he is now back to work. Xiaoyang told me that his father had insisted that Xiaoyang come along to Beijing last summer and work construction with them. It was incredibly tiring, he said, much more so than the farm work he has been doing after school and during weekends and vacations since he was a little boy.

As my old friend Scott Rozelle, a Stanford economist, argues, one of the biggest challenges facing China in the next decade will be the ability to keep its working-age population employed, given that its labor costs are rising and that the multinational businesses that have turned to China as “the world’s workshop” in the last 20 years will soon be taking their business elsewhere, to places where wages remain cheap. When this happens, China will need to have a workforce educated well enough to make them worth the $10 an hour wages that they will be demanding.

This coming wage crisis, he said, is exacerbated by the fact that China’s social and economic inequality is rising: the latest estimate of the Gini coefficient, a measure of economic inequality ranging from 0 for the most equal societies to 1.00 for the most unequal, is .50, very high by world standards. He emphasized that the countries that have “graduated” in the last three decades from middle-income status (where China is now) to high income status–including Taiwan, South Korea, Portugal, Greece, and others, have all had Gini coefficients below 40, and most of them below 35. China’s is not only high, but increasing, and the biggest factor in the increase is the widening gap not just between cities and countryside, but also between rich rural areas (mostly in the coastal provinces, but also in certain inland places such as the Chengdu Plain) and poor rural areas, which contain about 22% of China’s population. And one of the biggest elements of the inequality between rich and poor rural areas is in education. Whereas over 40% of elementary graduates in China’s cities now attend either four-year colleges or state-accredited junior colleges, in the poor rural areas, the ratio is only 2%. In other words, a child graduating from the sixth grade in a poor rural area has only one-twentieth the chance of attending school enjoyed by her urban counterpart. If she is going to have a job in China’s future high-wage, high-skilled economy, we have to increase her chances of getting a higher education.

The Baiwu Valley where Yangjuan School is located is, of course, part of a poor rural area; the whole county of Yanyuan is an officially designated poverty county. So it is really noteworthy that of the 34 children who graduated in Yangjuan’s first class, in 2005, 15 tested into four-year or junior college programs, and 12 of those are attending college right now. In other words, Yangjuan graduates have a record of college attendance comparable with children from an urban elementary school, far, far better than could be expected from a school in a poor rural area, let alone one in a poor, minority rural area.

How much of this is due to our efforts is a matter for us or others to research. But the preliminary conclusion is that we are, indeed, doing some good.

In August, I returned to China, where I spent five days from August 21 to 26 meeting with former Yangjuan Primary School students, their teachers, and parents, consulting with dear colleagues Li Xingxing and Jacques Duraud and, as a climax, awarding increased scholarships to 23 current college students and over 70 high school students, as well as giving token congratulatory awards to this year’s sixth-grade graduates who are proceeding to middle school this week.

I arrived in Chengdu a little after midnight on the night of August 20th-21st, and didn’t get to bed until almost three, yielding a less-than-comfortable prospect for a long drive to Yangjuan the next day. I met Li Xingxing outside the Sichuan University gate at a little before 11, and we set out to try to get to Yangjuan the same day. This would have been impossible just a few months ago, before the opening of the final link in the freeway between Chengdu and Xichang completed the trans-continental superhighway from Beijing to Kunming, but now it seemed possible.

Anyone who has had the privilege of riding in Li Xingxing’s car knows that he doesn’t dally at the wheel, and so it was no surprise that, just four hours and ten minutes after we got on the freeway on the outskirts of Chengdu, we were at the Xining exit outside Xichang, for a brief pit-stop including a snack of hard-boiled eggs and salty crackers. The freeway itself is worth commentary, for which see my post about this engineering marvel. We left Xichang a little before 4:00, and were at Ma Fagen’s house, where we stay in Yangjuan, at exactly 7:00. Counting the time on the surface streets before we mounted the freeway, it was less than eight and a half hours door-to-door, compared with the previous 10 hours on the train and up to six hours in the car, or two days if one drove the whole way.

It was cloudy and drizzly the whole time we were in Yangjuan, with the exception of one lovely moonlit evening, which dissolved back to rain before dawn. This made for a lot of mud on the village roads and lanes, and very limited opportunity for the hiking I usually like to do when I’m there. But the real business of the trip was scholarships, and I’m happy to report that this important part was highly successful.

Since our funds, generous as our donors have been, were not sufficient to give quite as much aid to both high-school and college students as we would have liked, we made an on-the-spot decision to concentrate on college students, and to give 3000 yuan (a little over $500) to each of the three students who are now enrolled in four-year, bachelor’s degree programs, and 2200 yuan (a little less than $400) to each of the who are either in three-year, vocational and technical programs, or in the special college-preparatory classes offered to ethnic minority students after high school. This left only token awards for the 82 high-school level students, including four in 5-year, post-middle school nursing programs, 10 in three-year, high-school level nursing and vocational programs, and 68 in regular high schools. We gave 600 yuan ($95)–a little extra congratulation and incentive–for students starting high-school this year, and 400 ($65) for those continuing in high school level programs. Finally, we were encouraged by local leaders, including Yangjuan Primary School Founder Prof. Ma Lunzy, Baiwu Administrative Village Head Ma Guohua, and the Yangjuan teachers, to give small congratulatory prizes of 200 yuan each to the 38 students who graduated from Yangjuan this year and are starting middle-school this week.

We want to give special thanks to Yangjuan Primary School founder Benoit Vermander and his co-worker at the Taipei Ricci Institute, Jacques Duraud, for their generous help in finding funds to meet the ever increasing needs of our scholarship program; this year they raised over a third of the money that we were able to distribute to our scholarship students. We also want to thank those who have committed to sponsoring particular students with full college scholarships: Beverly Bossler and James Tsui; Rachel Meyer, in memory of Liu Vuli (Lili); Alicia Robbins and Nina Robbins; Margaret B. Swain and Walter Swain; and Cheung Siu-woo.

Every year, it takes a lot of effort on the part of local people, including Principal Sha Kaiyuan and the teachers of the Yangjuan School, village officials and parents, CMEF board members–particularly Prof. Li Xingxing and me–and the indefatigable Ma Fagen, to determine exactly who is eligible for scholarships. We always require new recipients to show their acceptance notices from their college or high school in order to receive our funds, and we go over the list of continuing recipients with local people to try to eliminate the rare case of someone not attending the school he or she originally intended to attend. Then, of course, we need a careful record of the proceedings.

This is more difficult than you might think. There is no functioning computer or printer at Yangjuan school, so we need to go to the nearby town of Baiwu to print the list so we will have a hard-copy record and a place for students or their parents to sign for the receipt of their scholarship money. This year, we were scheduled to present the scholarships at 3:00 p.m. on Saturday, and didn’t finish the list until about 11:00 in the morning. Ma Yifei, one of our second-year vocational college students, was around and had his family’s motorcycle available, so we asked him to go to Baiwu with a USB-drive to print the list and make a couple of photocopies.

30 minutes or so later, he returned with the news that the print shop couldn’t open the .docx file, and asked me to convert it to .doc. I did that, and off he bounced on the muddy road again. Another half-hour plus, and he was back with the news that they still couldn’t open it, and the best thing would be for me to give him my laptop to take and connect to the printer there. That I was unwilling to do, but I did pop the laptop into my backpack and hop on the back of his motorcycle to see what I could to in person. The ride was bumpy, but he went slowly enough that we didn’t crash, though I did have to get off a time or two in particularly muddy stretches. When we got to the print shop, we tried several things, but it turned out that my laptop lacked the software for their Lenovo printer, so still no luck. Fortunately, another shop up the street had a more modern setup, and we printed and copied the list with no problem, and got back to Baiwu in time for Ma Lunzy’s arrival, a quick bowl of noodles, and the scholarship ceremony.

This story is best told in pictures, all courtesy of Li Xingxing.

First, there is always speechifying before we hand out scholarships:

One mother was very happy to get her child’s award:

Teacher Ma Jinyin signs for an illiterate mother while her son and teacher Ma Zipo look on:

The final event was a celebratory feast, for which families each contributed a little money. This reduced their scholarships by about 10%, but it’s something we have discussed with them many times before. In Nuosu culture, the obligation to reciprocate for a favor or present is not only socially enforced, but felt very heavily emotionally. My friend Ma Jyjy explained it to me: if you give us something major, like a scholarship, and we don’t reciprocate for the gift, “hxiemat jie ap jjip,” “our hearts will not settle,” in other words we feel anxious, unfulfilled, apprehensive. So there was an ox, a sheep, and four chickens that night for all to enjoy. The ox ran away, but they caught it a little short of the village of Gangou, and it was duly brought back, slaughtered, butchered, and served. A good time was had by all. We’re still hoping that next time we can persuade them to forget the ox and just have a nice meal of mutton and chicken.  We think it will be plenty to show their gratitude.

~~~~~

Stevan Harrell joined the faculty of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies (later to become the Jackson School) in 1974, and has been a member of the China studies faculty ever since.  He is now Professor of Anthropology, Professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, Adjunct Professor of Chinese, and Adjunct Curator at the Burke Museum. He has written extensively on family, demography, religion, ethnicity, education, and environment in Taiwan and Sichuan.

Steve and his students helped build Yangjuan Primary School in 1999-2000, and founded Cool Mountain Education Fund in 2005, to help graduates of Yangjuan go on to middle school, high school, and college.   If you would like to read more about the Cool Mountain Education Fund or find a way to become involved in its work, please take a look at its website, which can be found here.

Insight from Kagbere, Sierra Leone.

Previously: On Hunger & Loving Humans & Manifesto (For Clarke Speed)

I. Sell

Sento is twenty-seven years old, maybe twenty-eight. She’s got a figure, a voice, a hairdo, and an attitude that all say city instead of village, Los Angeles instead of rural Sierra Leone. Mostly, it’s her attitude. [1] Sento’s confidence is inexplicable, an anachronism; like many other things about the lives of women I know in Kagbere, it seems all but impossible. Keyword being but. Because Sento is there, on that porch, wearing a fitted t-shirt and enormous silver earrings, selling someone a packet of sugar or laughing with some man on a motorbike, radiating confidence the entire time. Impossible, but possible.Sento is a business lady. The verandah room of her house is also a storeroom, 3/4s of it filled with piles of plastic buckets, plates, crepes (shoes), packets of sugar, salt and Maggi, notebooks, a rusty radio. Buying and selling small items isn’t unusual for women in Kagbere, but on such a large scale, for profit, certainly is. And Sento’s out for profit, as she very proudly illustrated one evening. A bag of Maggi, or MSG, costs seven thousand Leones in Makeni, the largest city in the north, which is too much and too far a distance for most people in the village. But Sento makes trips into the city every few months, packages the Maggi into packets of a tablespoon or two, and resells them, for one hundred Leones each. People just seem to know she sells goods and for how much. Children would silently appear during the evenings I spent with her, sopping from the rain, pay and pocket their wares, and leave as quietly as they came.

We sat close as she taught me how to spoon the Maggi into plastic and twist the plastic into perfect spheres. (Well, hers were perfect.) Scoop, pour, twist, tie, repeat. The sky was a grey-violet color, calm after dinnertime’s torrential storm, and as it darkened we counted the packets we finished and stuffed into a jar: seventy-three. Selling all of them would recoup her costs on the bag of Maggi, and the quarter left marked something she didn’t have to translate into Krio as she held it up to me and smiled widely: profit. To buy rice and goats, or more bags of Maggi, to sell, to make money, to buy more rice. To eat. “Business is how you make money,” she told me, “and money is how you get food.” [2] I smiled, looked out over the dirt road and the goat field beyond, and thought about the impossibility of picking up business acumen from a woman in a village in northern Sierra Leone. All but impossible, right?

From when she was nine until fifteen, Sento lived in Makeni, which helps explain the big earrings and the tiny t-shirts. Her mother couldn’t afford to keep her, so she was sent to  live with an uncle, who put her through evening school. She learned to write, got pregnant when she was fifteen, and returned to Kagbere, to raise her son and run the family store. [3] The story of a young woman returning to the village pregnant after time in a big city is a familiar one in Kagbere, but Sento expressed no regret. “In Makeni you have to pay for everything,” she explained. “Kagbere is my home.” [4]

Two men sped by on a motorbike, radio blaring. She points at their receding forms and says, “Makeni boys. They’re bluff.” Bluff, na Krio, translates roughly into cool, hip, confident, self-assured. How do you get to be bluff? I ask. [5] Sento laughs for a few seconds, thinks about it, then says what sounds like “You’re either bluff or you’re not. You’re bluff!” She pats my hair, which in the humidity flips out with a self-confidence the rest of me does not ever possess. “You’re the bluff one!” I insist. She laughs, looks out at the road, and shrugs, as if to say, Yeah, I know.

Impossible, but possible.

II. Weed

Koni Konteh is pregnant. This is her fifth pregnancy, but her fourth child. Nyandeh, the youngest, is two and well on her way to becoming just as sassy and pretty as her mother. Then there’s Curtis, four, with a tubby belly and cowboy dance moves, and Saidu, nine, the perfect miniature of his father, high-pitched giggle and all. Koni wants another girl, another child that can be hers, and predicted her due date with confidence, though inaccuracy: July 15^th if it’s a girl, August 20^th if it’s a boy. [6] She remembers exactly how long she carried each of her previous children to term, though – like almost everyone else in the village – she doesn’t remember their birthdays. [7] Age, in Kagbere, does not hold the same significance as a marker of life lived. Babies born, or farms planted, or even just the sheer, daily fact of survival – this is what is important. There is no calendar in Kagbere on which to cross off days: there is only the next meal, the next harvest, the next child.

Koni herself is twenty-two or twenty-three, only a few years older than me, though her belly, breasts, and hands all suggest she has already endured a lifetime. We sit on her porch in the evenings and I tell her about the forests in America, my mom, the relative lack of rice. We laugh, and compare hand sizes: my soft, small ones to her broad, callused palms. I tell her I am twenty-one, not that much younger than her, and she asks me if I have a husband in America. I say no. Unlike other women, who laugh unbelievingly and tell me I am only a smol gayl pikin, a small girl, Koni says maheio, good. “Husbands are trouble,” she says to the ground. “You suffer boku.” It is impossible to think of the right thing to say, so I give her hand a squeeze, and she squeezes back. We sit in silence for a long time. Possible.

Koni married her own husband, YY Konteh, when she was fifteen, moving from her natal village to Kagbere, and leaving her family to start one of her own. Married and moving are active verbs, but it would probably be more accurate to say Koni was married and was moved. YY chose her when she was just a young girl, paid her initiation fees, and received the return on his investment a few years later. [8] One afternoon, struggling to understand, I asked Koni if she was ready to come, how she knew what to do – which seems, when you are a woman in Kagbere, like everything. “Oh!” she said first, as she always does, as if she is continually surprised I still want her opinion. “Mi mudah, she done tich me. Ow fo bruk, ow fo kuk, ow fo wid, ow fo sell.” Women in Kagbere “just have to work… if you don’t work, you won’t eat. You need to feed your family.” And if you don’t have a family? “Oh! You’ll get one. You’re not able to choose.” [9]

How to survive this, how to maintain a universe you do not get to choose, seems embedded somehow in lessons on cooking, washing, weeding, and selling. Women learn how from other women, and that, somehow, is enough to keep going. To me, it seems impossible, but there it is: possible. And so I go weeding.

It is the morning of July 4^th, and even though Koni said her granat farm was close, it’s really a twenty minute walk away. The farms this far down the road are densely planted, and the granat plants on Koni’s land are more matured than the others I have seen. Because of her pregnancy, Koni hasn’t been able to weed in a while, and so the weeds are also bigger, tall and sharp and a complete pain to pull out. [10] The sky is overcast, but even in the morning the heat is relentless, and after just ten minutes I am already dripping with sweat, debating to take a break or pull a few more plants first. I like the repetitiveness of weeding, but today, instead of calming, it is a struggle. I go over it in my head, basic field methodology: bend down, grip the bottom of the weed, pull, discard, repeat. Avoid the thorny vines and the granat plants; stick to the tall, grassy ones, with edges sharp enough to cut.

Bend down. Grip. Pull. Slowly. It is hot and I feel dehydrated. I turn, to see how Koni is doing, and – even though she’s been going back and pulling what we miss – she’s several yards ahead of us. We insist she take a break, but she shakes her head and smiles, and continues to pull with an efficiency that I, for all my youth and fitness, cannot muster. She is eight months pregnant, and keeps weeding. Impossible, but possible.

Women learn from other women. I manage to write just one sentence in my journal that day before I fall asleep: A lesson in strength.

III. Plant

Yai Mary grew up in a village between Kagbere and Mbendembu, eight miles away, a distance you can cover in a morning – if you’re her, which means if you walk fast. [11] She has three other siblings: a brother in Romoko, a sister in Freetown, and another brother who died long ago. She is old enough to have been old in the 1980s, but young enough, apparently, to have a sixteen year old daughter. Age is especially meaningless when it comes to Yai Mary, as the most important thing about her – to me, anyway – is that she is, when all the (public) rules say she shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t still have a farm and a bevy of people to support when you’re a widow; you shouldn’t command so much respect, from men and women alike, when you occupy the margin. But the holographic playing card shifts, the circle spins, and she’s Yai Mary, so she does. Somehow.

Yai Mary’s story, like that of so many other women in Kagbere, is also the story of the husbands and sons and brothers-in-law in her life, who control the land she works – and, somehow, sometimes, the universe she keeps running in spite of them. A woman’s biography is her family, which is her lineage, which is her land, and so it goes, on and on in a circle. It is hard to parse out who has power and who doesn’t, even harder to see how it works.

Like Koni, Yai Mary was married to a Konteh man: Pa Alemami, former section chief, YY’s uncle, JKK – my host dad’s – brother. [12] He died a few years before the war, and – as she tells it, which does not mean it is necessarily accurate – she was with some mysterious pastor for a while, which did not last, and then with JKK, her brother-in-law, for thirteen years. As a widow, ownership of Yai Mary’s farms passed to her sons: women cannot own land in Kagbere, or access it “pas [without] men.” [13]

Though husband-less, widows are not man-less. It is customary for the elder brother of the deceased to take responsibility of his brother’s land, wife and children. As JKK put it, “it is important to keep everything in the family.” [14] Brothers technically cannot drive their sisters-in-law from the family house and farm; usually, if the widow is “humble”, “puts herself down”, and “’grees”, the brother-in-law marries her, and her access to the land she needs to support her family is secured, at least for a little while. [15]

This sounds like a plausible explanation for Yai Mary and JKK’s relationship, though according to him, “that relationship done fade.” [16] JKK’s responsibilities as the Konteh elder extend to another Konteh widow, Yai Fatouh, and the costs of supporting both families in addition to his own apparently proved to be too much for the man. (Instead, JKK insists, Yai Mary and her children know that he is their “uncle”, and that his “eyes are always over them.”)

Despite this, despite all the men in her life that are there and then not there, Yai Mary has a farm. Two, actually: a granat farm, and a rice swamp. I do not know, for all my reading, my questions, how she actually has this land; JKK’s support is the plausible explanation, but at this point even plausible explanations move in circles, shift dimensions, defy words. What I do know, what I have the words for, is this: Yai Mary’s rice swamp.

Yai Mary’s rice swamp is at the end of a path behind blind Pa Sori’s house, on the same road that goes to the river. It is green, greener than green, so green your eyes hurt, even weeks later as you look at the pictures on a computer screen. Hers is a rectangular piece of the swamp, maybe twenty-five by thirty yards, among other parcels of swamp with rice shoots of varying maturity. The land opposite the bank where we leave our packs and our shoes is covered in jungle and palm trees. We wade in. The water is cool, the mud squelchy, the ants out for blood. Yai Mary brings over bundles of rice shoots, bundles and bundles, then leaves and returns with more. And then we begin.

Like weeding, planting rice is repetitive. Separate two or three rice shoots from the bundle, hold the bottom with the thumb and index finger, insert straight down into the mud. Plant the shoots a few inches apart, and stick to the more solid mud formations; if you put them too close together, or not deep enough, they’ll fall over onto themselves, and Yai Mary will shoo you away and fix it herself. There are nine of us, and still the work takes the whole morning. After two hours I am smarting from several ant bites and somehow more dirty than everyone else. And then she herds us towards the deeper part of the swamp, the more technically challenging area to plant, and we realize: she isn’t here to lead a field trip, or do a demonstration. She’s here to plant the whole damn thing.

And so – like Koni, like Sento, like the lady herself – we keep going. Two more hours of bending, pushing, separating, bending back down again. Two more hours of avoiding water spiders and cursing at ants that bite; a few moments of looking around and savoring the sheer absurdity of the moment. And then bending back down again to plant a few more rice shoots, not thinking about how hot it is or how much left there is to do, only thinking about the next plant, the next plant, the next plant. Kulu gulu. Step by step. Plant by plant. Harvest by harvest, child by child, day by day. [17] We keep going.

When we finish, after four hours, we ask Yai Mary in broken Krio how long it would have taken her by herself. She surveys the swamp, covered now in very satisfying clumps of green rice shoots, her mouth in a straight line, and says “Three.” The nine of us took four hours, and if she was doing it alone, just one woman planting and pulling and pounding at the earth, it would have taken her still less time. Impossible? Maybe. But spin the circle, shift the holographic card, and you can see: possible, because you’re Yai Mary.

IV. Live

Speaking of circles: it is mid-morning, and Koni and Yai Mary are standing in a big one, among other women, crowding around a pair of young girls. There are maybe thirty women present, many I know or have seen around the village, others I don’t recognize. The brightly-colored patterns of their lappas stand out against the grey sky and the brown thatched hut they congregate beside. But there’s also something else that stands out – just the sight of so many women together, sharing a space and an occasion, in spite of all the rice to pound, the meals to make, the children to raise. They are here, to celebrate and  mark something, and even if I do not yet understand what that something is, it is a marker nonetheless. An entry point to the endlessly spinning circles that I think of when I think of Koni’s life, or Yai Mary’s life, or Sento’s life. [18] It is the Bundu, the women’s secret society.

They have gathered behind Tapia’s house today, a few houses away from the Chief’s compound, because Tapia’s niece, her daughter, and another girl, Yai Mary’s namesake, are beginning their initiation process into the Bundu society. It is the rainy season, and thus unusual for the Bundu to gather now. (Usually, families wait until the dry season, in the fall and winter months after the harvest, because that is when they have the money to pay.) But Tapia and her sister, Isatouh, have decided to do it now, and so the women have gathered next to her cooking hut, near a path that leads into the jungle.

A woman in the center beats a broken drum that lies on the ground, and older women around her sing a call-and-response song, one punctuated by claps and the beating of the drum. The initiates stand near the center, sometimes clapping, sometimes dancing. It is hard to read their expressions, and confusing to watch it all. It is moving to see all the women I know, with different farms and different families, come together for something; it is unnerving to realize that what they are dancing for is called, in our First World dictionary, female genital mutilation. The public ceremony is beautiful, but the words we have for it are ugly, and trying to reconcile the two only leads me back to Endnote 13, again and again and again. [19] “Good” and “bad” and “equal”, or “life”, even: they don’t mean the same things in Kagbere as they do in Seattle, and trying to reconcile the two flattens three-dimensional reality into a cliché. Trying to understand a woman’s life in Kagbere requires a different conception of what a life is and what it is supposed to be – and how you measure the difference between the two.

For all my experience, I went to Kagbere the second time intent on understanding, convinced somehow I could measure the distance over this human abyss and then build a bridge across it. I asked Sento, and Koni, and Yai Mary over and over again, in different contexts and with different words, how they survive, hoping they’d reveal some strategy, some secret of sisterhood, that would outline the foundations of that bridge in a way I could see. And, over and over again, in different contexts and with different words, they would all proceed to tell me the same thing: You just do. You keep going.

Sento would shrug, and pull out more salt for us to package. Koni would look at the ground and say,Oh! Uman no able fo chose, and pull out a few weeds that I had missed. Yai Mary, on June 27^th, July 1^st, and July 5^th, would say “Life i tranga fo uman na Salone, dey no get power,” and then stack another bundle of rice shoots on her head. They just did, they still do, and I could not see the answer.

One evening, soon after the Bundu’s public dance, I was invited to Tapia’s house, to sit with her and the initiates for a while. It was dusk, the light turning that violet color that shrouds everything in invisibility, and there were women walking back and forth under the partition that delineated the girls’ space. [20] A woman from another village was teaching the girls a clapping routing, and one of theyaiyos from the Chief’s compound was teaching them the words. The elder women would sing and clap, and the girls would repeat after them, dutifully learning the words that – like salt to sell, weeds to pull, or rice to plant – would hold their universe together.

Clap, sing, repeat. Plant, pull, pound; live, birth, endure. Over and over again, the opposite of life as a straight line or development as a series of stages. Instead, a circle. For which there is no formula, no yardstick by which to measure progress: there is only the spin. The next line in the song, the next child, the next harvest. [21] It took four women sitting around me in an almost-invisible room to finally see: I had been asking how all this time, and how is exactly what they had been teaching me. As Koni said of the lessons she learned from her mother: ow fo plant, ow fo wid, ow fo kuk, ow fo sell. These are the active verbs in a woman’s life. This is how they survive a way of life that, in my dictionary, is supposed to be impossible. Methodology as the closest thing to an explanation: possible.

Back at the public Bundu dance, another woman takes over drumming for a little while, and passes around a bottle of poyo. The initiates look expressionless, but the other women drink and laugh and dance around each other, proudly and easily. It’s as if there is no rice to pound, no meals to make, or no children to raise. But there are, and somehow that is the point. There is work to be done, work that you do not always get to choose or control, and it is as much as part of the circle as laughter and brightly-colored lappas against an overcast sky. There isn’t a utopia, a place with resolutions and without spin; there is only the circle, where you weed granat, sell salt, or plant rice, and hope the next day you can wake up and do it again. [22]

Ferries and airplanes and autobuses, unfortunately, only move in one direction at a time, which makes this (Big T, small t) truth hard to see, and harder to accept. Things fall apart: crops fail, babies die, rain doesn’t come. But women still dance in circles, and move in cycles, of bodies and of plants. The circle still spins, and the center holds.

In the evenings, I would teach Koni the words to that song from Rent, the one called “Seasons of Love.” [23] How do you measure, measure a year? we’d sing, my voice high and out of pitch, hers lower and unsure. I came to Kagbere hoping to find the timeline by which I could measure a woman’s life, so I could know how to measure my own. I left, and realized what I had instead was a collection of moments. Moments that were hard and moments that were confusing, and other moments – ones full of strangeness or absurdity or adorable kittens – that made up for those. You measure a year, or four weeks in Kagbere, or a woman’s life, in moments. [24] In step by steps, in grains of rice. In lessons in strength.

You tell me that’s not possible.

[1] Girl, where’d you get that swagger? Did you buy that at the store?

[2] Conversation with Sento, 30 June 2011. Hanging out on her porch, chatting about nothing, as was my method. “Ethnography is just deep hanging out.” Tony Lucero said that.

[3] Sento’s mother, Yai Colonai, is a big lady in the Bundu, the women’s secret society, and formerly Kagbere’s only traditional birthing assistant. Her son is a quiet boy with a big smile, around twelve, who takes care of a herd of goats and good-naturedly teases his mother because she doesn’t know how to write her name.

[4] Conversation with Sento, 6 July 2011.

[5] Same conversation. (I’m an ethnographer. I only ask the hard-hitting questions!)

[6] Conversation with Koni, 27 June 2011. “Boys take longer.”

[7] Same conversation: Saidu, nine months and twenty days; Curtis, nine months and eight days; Nyandeh, eight months and fifteen days.

[8] Though this sounds too easily like the African Woman Cliché, it is and isn’t at the same time. Clichés , though often true, flatten, while reality operates on multiple levels simultaneously, like one of those holographic playing cards that changes when you look at it from a different angle. Koni has little access to recognizable, public forms of power because she is a woman in a patriarchal society: yes. But Koni is also, in ways only vaguely recognizable to me, more powerful than other women in the village, and certainly better off. Her life to me seems hard – and it is – but there are other women whose lives are harder, in different ways. The card turns a few degrees to the left and suddenly I see how, when Koni visits me at breakfast, the women in Yai Kadi’s cooking hut offer her a seat, a piece of bread, a cup of tea. I don’t know why, and I do not even know how to ask why. This female reality that operates on different levels in different languages at the same time is another one of those impossible but possible things, both to articulate and to accept. I do not know how to do either of those things yet but I keep turning the playing card over in my hand.

[9] Conversation with Koni, 31 June 2011. Apologies for the spotty Krio translation.

[10] Weeding with Koni is unlike weeding with anyone else: she’s got work to do, and as happy as she may seem to have you with her, she isn’t going to slow down or check on you just because you’re a white girl who goes to university in America.

[11] Conversation with Yai Mary, 27 June 2011. A lot of what I know about Yai Mary only makes sense because she’s Yai Mary. You can weed an entire field of granat by yourself, because you’re Yai Mary. You can shelter abused women and their children in your four-bedroom house, because you’re Yai Mary. You can be my life hero, the person whose face I am most likely to get tattooed on my arm, but also the person who scares me the most, because you’re Yai Mary. Your life is impossible but, somehow possible, because you’re Yai Mary. Basically.

[12] There are not, as I initially believed, four Pa Alemami Konteh brothers running around Kagbere. Of the Konteh men of Yai Mary’s generation, four of them were all named Pa Alemami at one point or another, because they all served as section chief: one inherits the name along with the position. Confusion ensues. (From my interview with JKK, 28 June 2011)

[13] Conversation with Yai Mary, 27 June 2011. This was reoccurring theme of my weeks in Kagbere; she also told me on July 1^st and July 5th. The third time she told me I waited until nobody was around and then I threw my hands up in frustration and cried, for a really long time. This is how I interacted with practical reality: sometimes I cried, and then I would have a Star beer.

[14] Interview with JKK, 28 June 2011. Though it seemed at first to me as if he was talking about women and children as if they were chattel, it isn’t that clear cut. (The holographic playing card metaphor again!) There is no such thing as an independent women na Kagbere, because there is no such thing as independent person; everyone belongs to someone else. For better and for worse.

[15] Interview with Philip, 30 June 2011, and interview with JKK, 28 June 2011.

[16] Interview with JKK, 28 June 2011. In a place where the word “answer”, like the words “good” and “bad” and “equal”, doesn’t quite mean the same things, plausible explanations are the most I hope for. And then on the rocky path to finding those, you hear awesome phrases like “that relationship done fade.”

[17] The sheer fact of existence itself in a rice shoot, a universe in a single grain of rice. Planted by who women who cannot lay claim to the land they work, or the universe they live in, but somehow still do, by running it anyway.

[18] Sento, was absent that day from the Bundu dance, sick with a headache behind her mother’s house. And yet when I passed her by she was very insistent that I go watch the dance without her, “because it is very beautiful.” 10 July 2011.

[19] A struggle not unlike trying to hold the phrase “Third World Woman” and the image of Yai Mary’s face in my head at the same time. Now there’s a tattoo.

[20] Though they would typically spend all of the initiation period in the bush, because of the rainy season’s cold temperatures the three initiates of this batch returned to Tapia’s house each evening.

[21] The next step. Kulu gugu.

[22] Though if I ever find that utopia, and I write my version of Eat, Pray, Love, I am definitely calling it Laughter and Lappas.

[23] Koni learned this song from a student before me, and the first time she sang it and asked me if I knew the words, I was so shocked I dropped what I was holding. And then I quickly learned the words, from a woman in a village in northern Sierra Leone. Possible.

[24] If you have to measure at all. Trained in all my Western Enlightenment rationalization, I have to confess: quantification is still something I yearn for.

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Julie Mendel is an International Studies major.  She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Jackson School Journal of International Studies.

Julie Mendel traveled to Sierra Leone during Summer Quarter 2011 as part of the UW Exploration Seminar “Ethnographic Methods & Cultural Production” lead by Professor Clarke Speed, Brook Kelly, and Reverend Kempson Fornah.