Kham Abiding

The Abiding Never Ends

2007-08-23T05:07:00.000+08:00

Because I don't know when I'll be returning to China or Tibet (hopefully by the time my students graduate next summer), and now that I'm back in Louisiana semi-permanently, it doesn't make sense to continue writing at here at Kham Abiding. On the other hand, I've made it through the obligatory readjustment period, and as such don't have a good excuse not to be writing at the moment. There's just too much goin' on, ya' herd?

That said, look for me to be helping fill out the content over at Cenlamar. The nature of that blog is considerably less personal than this one has been. But now that I'm back in the United States, I no longer have anything interesting or exotic to say about my personal life anyway, right?

If you'd like to get in touch with me, leave a comment to this or any post and it will end up in my email account. Or you can hit me up directly, dantsmith at gmail dot com.

Thanks for reading.

Peace like a river,
Daniel

ps: "Strikes and gutters, ups and downs."

Pals.

2007-08-17T07:46:00.000+08:00

I spent most of last night with my friend who lives at N. Rendon and Ursalines, but because I took the bike along the bayou back up to Lafitte I didn't hear about what happened last night at Pal's Lounge until lunchtime today. One of my closest friends called my brother to let him know that he'd taken off work because a friend of his had been killed in a stabbing. He had known her from their work at the Road Home program.

The incident is senseless and tragically random. For those of us in the neighborhood it is more a reminder of how fragile things seem now. It doesn't play into this larger trope of the quickening pace of homicides in Orleans Parish.

It's Pal's, and that makes it personal for all of us in Midcity, so I will leave you to get the details yourself. Maitri has more. Sinn Fein.

"Why should we leave America to visit America Junior?"

2007-08-16T06:29:00.000+08:00

My eldest brother (not the twin) and I returned from a wedding in Canada the other night. Kusang and John were married in a simple ceremony next to a lake a couple hours north of Toronto. They had the kind of Christian wedding that gives you more faith in man than the almighty, a good thing in my book. John grew up near there, in a group of cottages that can only be accessed by canoe in the summer and not at all once the heavy snows have fallen. I've only known them from this year in Kham, but jumped at the chance to see Niagara Falls and Lakes Erie and Ontario for the first time. Here's the lucky couple before I knew them in Lhasa.

Chris and I were gone for almost a week, just long enough to enjoy the comfortable Ontario weather and slight societal differences without getting used to or annoyed by anything. For me, the familiarity of bracing the dark wall of sultry air that is the exit of Louis B. Armstrong International Airport for the second time in a less than a month was most telling. I've reached the point of no longer feeling like a visitor in New Orleans again, though vainly; in two days time I leave the Crescent City for an undetermined period of time to visit family and friends in Baton Rouge and Alexandria.

The blogging has been thin, as some of you have noted. Wireless internet is spotty among my Midcity acquaintances, most of whom attend school or work in the service or construction industries. The Fairgrinds and other shops would of course do, but the August sun has kept us inside on most days. I'm in fact sweating against my keyboard as I stand on the unfinished plywood that substitutes for kitchen floors in the shotgun where Chris is currently staying. I think he is bidding the tile contract to the owner sometime this week.

Those're his paintings behind me. It is lazy here but not in the ennui way. We have been catching a lot of fuzzy Simpsons and Seinfeld via the antennae on Channel 38. The first week I watched as Chris put together a couple of works for his summer session studio course:

Let's get a detail shot of that Chiru.

Chris is finishing up his B.F.A. at UNO at the moment, making a living with the side jobs that grew out of the construction work he did in the city all through 2006. He's also sold a couple of other paintings recently:

His interest is non-commercial painting, though I've heard him mention landscape architecture. That said, it may have just been a part of his Art Vandelay routine.

Dancing to Music

2007-07-24T04:00:00.001+08:00

You could say I'm back now.

My body rythms, both Circadean and otherwise, have fallen back into sync today or yesterday.

Chris is painting in the studio at school, and I'm waiting for him at the UNO library. It's the little things that are surprising about being back: being able to access Wikipedia, waiting for traffic before crossing the street, bathroom grifitti written in poor English instead of poor Chinese. Beer with hops.

I'm still going through all the foods and drinks that I missed, so many I didn't even think about but am glad to see again. The objects in this world are so many appearances, but I can't find fault in enjoying them now.

Josh mentioned this must be one of the best times of my life, being unattached with the world completely out in front of me. At the time I was dancing too hard on Frenchman Street to decide if he is right or not.

I didn't take this photo, but you get the idea.

Four Easy Steps to Khampa Machismo

2007-07-10T19:41:00.000+08:00

Step One: Grow Mustache

Step Two: Rustle Yak

Step Three: Acquire Large Sunglasses

Step Four: Cultivate Belly

I have these pictures and others from this year up at Picasa.

Independence Day

2007-07-04T20:33:00.000+08:00

Today I worked hard to get off the job as quickly as possible, like A Good American.

I finished giving the exam at 10am, had it graded by 2pm, and turned in the students' scores by three. I cleaned and dicked around for an hour, and then went to say goodbye to the students and turn in my key.

The students had already begun their computer exam, so bag on my back I only saw them from outside the room. None of them noticed me. I didn't really give them a proper goodbye after their exam in the morning, but a part of me felt it was better to slip out when their minds were on other things. A lot of the girls cried at our year-end party the other week, and I didn't see any reason to uncork a small river before their examination. I returned my key, negotiated my phone bill with the building manager, and found a car to Kangding.

Besides, I've always kind of sucked at goodbyes. I get reminded of change fairly often, but have difficulty expressing the right emotion at the right time. I am most sentimental in periods of great comfort, ingenuous when parting, and usually don't realize how much people mean to me until after the situation has changed.

I'm feeling, again, the regret that comes from making the right choice.

I now have a bus ticket to Ganzi, halfway to Yushu (Qinghai Province, a part of Amdo) where another Bridge Fund teacher Jon and our old friend Meg are to meet me. After spending a few days with them, I'll drop back down into Kham and see a few more students before starting the long journey back to America. I'll try to be on my email from time to time.

Upon boarding the bus from Chengdu yesterday, a very outgoing Chinese man dressed in sweat shorts and a red fleece bordered by gold cloth began talking with me very directly. I felt he was probably a Rinpoche, and he confirmed this after some time. He was recognized seventeen years ago, when he was in Beijing. This Rinpoche is not Tibetan. He had a broad smile, unhinged and young for his age. The burst blood vessel in his eye gave him an impressive countenance.

He blessed and gave me his mala, small prayer beads made of yak bone. He told me he counted five different prayers: Guru Rinpoche Padmasambava, Avalokitesvara, Manjusri, Green Tara, and one other that escapes me at the moment. He told me he declined to say the prayers for wealth that he usually offers Chinese people. I gave him the black plastic mala given to me by a student in return, and a Kalachakra Mantra sticker I bought as a gift for someone at home.

Rinpoche had been to Europe and was clearly very hip to Western youth. I've had a question on my mind, and I told him that I have been thinking of getting a tattoo of some Buddhist iconography. I'm afraid that my motivation is not correct.

He immediately began performing a mo (ritual divination) in his bus seat, and after some time he told me that he had visualized Manjusri, with his blue sword and red lotus, and that if I liked I should tattoo the sword on my right shoulder and the lotus on my left.

The sword cuts through the obscuration that prevents us from understanding the wisdom of compassion. This thanka is for that Rinpoche, and also for my students, whose thirst for knowledge may never be matched by the apparitions of our world.

Bridge Fund Dot Org

2007-06-27T23:50:00.000+08:00

I hope to complete my final report tomorrow morning, though I still have a tutorial, three classes, and a test to get through before I can really say I'm finished. Even then I'll need to incorporate the scores into my report, and I haven't even started the thirty-odd student evaluations I need to write.

Now that I'm wrapping things up, it's nice that the Bridge Fund, an organization for which I am technically only a contractor, has finally gotten its website running (please take heed, those of you who have followed the link in my sidebar and found only a picture of a yak-hair tent and an "under construction" notice).

I really encourage you to look through the new site if you have time, especially the photo gallery. They really did a remarkable job.

Worm Food

2007-06-18T13:42:00.000+08:00

Tom and Kendell came back through this weekend and I think they had a pretty excellent time during their week-long stay in Kham. To chronicle their trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, they have set up a blog aptly--though unfortunately--named Transsibirskayamagistral.

Here's a picture of theirs that I quite like. It is the entrance to what is probably a special sanctuary for performing the Tantric arts, the left-handed path that propels practitioners to powerfully realize the emptiness of form.

It's worth clicking to view the paintings of skinned humans and decaying faces in detail.

Thanks Mike

2007-06-14T22:09:00.000+08:00

A couple of young travelers came through Kangding County on their way to explore Kham for a week or so. One of them brought me a gift from the twin on the south side of the Himalaya.

I hadn't worn a real t-shirt in ten months.

SMITH/DANIEL MR 18JUL 2007

2007-06-14T19:03:00.000+08:00

It's going to be a very long Wednesday.

CHINA AIR        18JUL HONGKONG TAIPEI        125P 305P
CI 608       WEDNESDAY HK INTL  TAIWAN TAOYUAN
                        
CHINA AIR        18JUL TAIPEI   LOSANGELES CA 440P 135P
CI 6         WEDNESDAY TAOYUAN  INTL
                  
CONTINENTAL AIR  18JUL L.A.     HOUSTON TX    455P 1007P
CO 541       WEDNESDAY INTL     G.BUSH INTERCO

CONTINENTAL AIR  18JUL HOUSTON  NEW ORLEANS  1055P 1158P
CO 1416      WEDNESDAY BUSH INT LOUIS ARMSTRONG

windows to a dream

2007-06-06T20:01:00.000+08:00

While taking in the river from John's fifth-story window some days ago, I watched as a young Chinese student clambered upon a rock beneath the wall that separates the back courtyard from the water. It was night and she surely felt alone. She threw a folded piece of paper over the wall, and shouted inaudibly over the waves. Its jejune babbling appeared indifferent to her swallowed cries. In 2046, we are told
Do you know what people did in the old days when they had a secret? They would climb a mountain and find a tree. They would carve a hole in the tree and whisper the secret into the hole, which they would pack with mud so no one would ever hear it.
Friday afternoon I shared a taxi to Kangding with a young and modern Tibetan woman. When she realized I could basically understand her Sichuanese, she invited me to go for beers. I didn't meet her until Sunday, determined to make good on her challenge to outdrink me in spite of the school night. I caught a car in the rain, and as we approached Guza a techno song repeated the chorus, "I don't want no small dick boys." I saw her waiting through the window. She had a face like a wolf and, as I discovered when the evening drew to a close, a boyfriend.

Using a volleyball and a basketball last week in my tutorials, I demonstrated how the tilt of the Earth's axis relative to the sun gives cause to the seasons. I also explained the reason different hemispheres and seasons see different stars, and why the moon waxes and wanes though the face of the man (or rabbit) never changes. For kicks, I showed them Google images of the relative size of the moon to the Earth, the Earth to the sun, the sun to the Milky Way (Silver River), and the Milky Way to the "rest" of the universe. After they took in the pictures, I drew the curtains for dramatic effect to reveal towering mountains and a swollen river. In Thursday's group, Karma Sonam exclaimed
Oohh! Life really is a dream!

So Fresh It's the Anti-Freeze

2007-06-05T21:41:00.000+08:00

I guess the logical thing would be to avoid brushing my teeth for the next six weeks.

From Forbes:

U.S. health officials warned consumers Friday not to use toothpaste made in China because it may be contaminated with a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze and as a solvent....

The FDA identified the following brands of toothpaste from China that contain DEG ad are included in the import alert: Cooldent Fluoride; Cooldent Spearmint; Cooldent ICE; Dr. Cool, Everfresh Toothpaste; Superdent Toothpaste; Clean Rite Toothpaste; Oralmax Extreme; Oral Bright Fresh Spearmint Flavor; Bright Max Peppermint Flavor; and ShiR Fresh Mint Fluoride Paste....

The FDA has seized tainted toothpaste at a DollarPlus store in Miami, Fla., and from a Todo Un Peso, a store in Puerto Rico.

Kham Kampo Association

2007-05-30T20:27:00.000+08:00

A couple of weeks ago at the Bridge Fund office in Chengdu I met a young man from Bathang, and engaged him slack conversation for a couple of minutes before realizing that he had been preceded by his reputation.

Lobsang Gonbo was a student in the well-known Xining English Training Program, where he learned to write grant proposals in English. Xining is the provincial capital of Qinghai (roughly Amdo for the old-schoolers). A proposal to replicate the program in The Tibetan School in Sichuan had the following to say:

The concept of the ETP originated with Kevin Stuart and Robert Lindstrom, both American foreign teachers of English at Qinghai Education College in Xining City. They wrote a proposal in 1991 requesting support for an English language-teaching program targeting Tibetan youth. The proposal eventually elicited interest, and consequently the program has been supported over the years by a number of different organizations such as the Trace Foundation (New York City), The Bridge Fund (San Francisco), Good Works (Idaho), Misereor (Germany), and the Ford Foundation (Beijing/New York City).

The Xining ETP also inspired the Bridge Fund to create the classes for which Tenzin and I teach. In Xining, students earn the equivalent of a vocational associates degree (dazhuan), whereas our students are younger and are studying for a high-school diploma (gaozhong biye zheng) or a vocational degree (zhongzhuan). The National Committee on U.S. China Relations highlighted the Xining ETP in a recent newsletter:

ETP trains Tibetan students to teach English in their own communities and to create community development projects. One student completed thirteen projects, benefiting more than 20,000 people, in medicine, solar energy, schools, libraries, and distribution of second hand clothes; several other students set up local, grassroots NGOs; and another is involved in language preservation.

I'm not sure, but the student mentioned in the above may have been Gonbo. It was Satina and Kat Cooley who first told me about Gonbo and Kham Kampo Association, the NGO he started. Kat is a close friend from Chengdu working for the international NGO Ecologia, and she and Satina had returned from KKA's solar cooker factory highly impressed. The former Education Director of Kham Aid John Geschek (sp?), a friend through Tenzin, called Gonbo an hardcore example of grassroots capacity building.

So needless to say I was stoked to meet Gonbo randomly in the Bridge Fund office that Friday afternoon. Gonbo gave me his card and the next weekend I taxied up the mountain to the KKA office in Kangding.

Gonbo is my age. He graduated in Xining only two years ago. He has another couple of young Tibetan men from the Xining ETP working with him, and has also hired a girl of twenty from the first Bridge Fund class out of Kangding Middle School (Tenzin is teaching the second class, preparing to take their examinations next weekend. My students are the third class.) The KKA does a lot of good work, like installing running water systems in towns, distributing small solar panels, and rebuilding primary schools like this one in Bathang County:

Although foreign teachers taught them to start an NGO, these smaller non-profits have no foreigners working for them (and rightly so). Except for an American in Beijing, us English teachers are the only foreigners in the Bridge Fund in China, and technically we're only contractors. I went to the KKA office to see if I could help them out with any English polishing. I met a woman from the aforementioned National Committee on US China Relations who was already volunteering for the week on that task. I'd finally gotten the opportunity to help and learn more about a local grassroots non-profit (what I'd like to get into when I get back home), but Gonbo said there was little I could do at the moment. Gonbo then surprised me by suggesting that I begin teaching my students about writing proposals.

My kids's English isn't nearly at that level, but last week I introduced them to the concept anyway. Gonbo sent me a copy of a proposal for a running water system to go through with them next week, and someone from the KKA is coming to talk to the class later on. Gonbo and the rest of the KKA staff have a lot of interest in Tibetan students in English language programs, because they are a product of those classes themselves.

This week Gonbo finally did send me some abstracts to proof. They're to be posted on the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library, a very cool and thorough resource in five languages, useful for researchers (ahem, Michael) and interested amateurs alike.

Discover Kham Tour

2007-05-30T19:09:00.000+08:00

One of my students is arranging tours this summer, and I agreed to pass the information along. Dorje is standing in the background at right. His mother is grinning as she offers conifer branches to the buddhas. Cath Marsh, one of his former instructors, is helping him arrange the tours.

15-day Discover Eastern Tibet Tour
July 1 and Aug 1 2007

Dorge invites travelers to join personalized small-group tours to western China’s exotic Tibetan prefecture. The tour will begin and end in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan, with ten full days spent in Kham (Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture), offering a glimpse of one of China’s largest cities, insights into Tibetan culture, outdoor leisure activities and relaxation in peaceful environs.

Highlights:

• Chengdu: Panda Research Base
• Kangding: Tibetan-Chinese border town.
• Tagong Village and grassland
• Tibetan monastery visits and introduction to Tibetan Buddhism
• Day-hike or horse ride to mountain hot springs and lake in the lower regions of Mt. Jara (5,200m)
• Tawu, where we will enjoy a stay at Dorge’s family home - a rustic Tibetan farmhouse built in the traditional architectural style for which the town is renowned.
• Zhaba: a remote village home to a small community of people whose unique language and culture are on the brink of disappearance.

Tour group size is 5-6 persons.

Kham is a developing area and though we make every effort to ensure guests are as comfortable as possible, this tour is not for the faint of heart. Facilities in the remote areas we visit are basic and hot showers not always available. Mild high altitude discomfort is also a possibility.

Tour dates: July 1 – 15 (book before June 8)
August 1 – 15 (book before July 1)

***Tour prices: We have designed 2 travel options and for each tour will arrange whichever there is more interest in.
Comfort Travel (4-WD Land Cruiser transport and 3 star hotels in cities)
US$1,350 per person
Budget Travel (Van transportation and hostel accommodation) US$850

Prices include Chengdu airport pick up, transport, accommodation,
interpretation and tour services, and 2 meals a day.

For inquiries and a detailed travel itinerary, please email Cath cathmarsh@hotmail.com.

Practising British English

2007-05-28T18:44:00.000+08:00

Please excuse the following, as it is an intentionally pretentious downer written to salvage my mood.

The water of the Dadu River, the sonorous flowing of which outside my window puts me to rest each evening, has risen considerably in the last week. The water has swallowed a number of large boulders, ingesting all but an impressionist's stroke of swirl and eddy.

In Kangding this weekend, Tenzin read to me a CNN Asia story about a pair of mudslides in Ganzi Prefecture, where we reside. Soon he discovered that rains along the swollen Dadu had caused the mudslides. In Shimian, a county a couple of hundred kilometers downriver,

rains caused a rock to tumble down a hillside and slam into a bus, knocking the vehicle off the road and killing nine people.

People have related stories to me before about encountering blood-soaked buses crushed by falling rocks. I've only witnessed such automotive fragility in its less natural form: leaving Chengdu a queue of bus passengers milled about looking dazed; a hundred yards away one the form of the driver hung twisted and exposed from the mangled chassis of his small car.

This evening due to a certain ennui and latent frustration I left my flat before the usual suspects from my class came to accompany me to a dinner of egg and tomato noodles in the canteen. I walked to Sunshine Island, a nearby restaurant, with Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls in my hand.

They served my beer cold in a fluted glass, which almost allowed me to ignore the derivative flavor of the hop-less rice appellation. I chuckled through passages, Gogol's humour carrying through (though certainly diminished) though it must have been impossibly difficult to translate. I am finding this satire to be a sarcastic respite, though it's strangely difficult to point to a specifically funny passage. The first of a trilogy to rival Dante's The Divine Comedy, Dead Souls held the place of Inferno. Gogol burned the text corresponding to Purgatory in a fit of insanity. Before he could write the companion to Paradise, he died in spiritual asceticism shouting, "A ladder! Quick, a ladder!"

The book has been my only cause to smile today, save the four Tibetan girls to whom I explained why we observe seasons. A volleyball represented the Sun, and a basketball the Earth, the bisecting black lines of which lent itself to a facile illustration of the way in which the Northern Hemisphere leans away from our star in winter.

As I ate fried potatoes and braised tofu (the final day of the Saka Dawa fast is Thursday), I beckoned to a black cat facing away from me. As it turned, I realized what I believed to be a child's toy in its mouth was indeed the soulless remains of a lizard. Small pink sacs bulged from beneath its tail. My students don't understand why Christians believe animals have no souls.

That image and a number of others--cacti budding among sheer cliffs, the warm dry wind of the valley, a crude stone edifice nearby concealing a pisser--coaxed my memory to dwell on New Mexican summers past, a sentimental trope to which my idle mind has resorted for the latter third of my life. Even as a child some remarked on the curious way that I stare at nothing when consumed by thought or fantasy or the mind's bare qualia (if such a thing were possible), dissociated from the stimuli of an observable world.

I do consider myself a patient man. Travelling for days on a bus or plane or train is not so terrible, and I've been known to forget to leave the house for days. Accordingly, the knowledge of everything that must be done before I finish teaching in five weeks has not so much made me anxious but has merely broken my will. I feel a little dishonest wishing to be in another place in the future, wasting my ever limited time and knowing that I will miss this place once gone.

If you have read this far, please accept my sincerest apologies. In truth I've been rather happy of late, though busy, perhaps you could say happily busy. I felt so bloody pleased with myself the other day that I reread Shelley's Ode to the West Wind and fitted it to my own fancy. I have also thought of seeing you again at the end of the summer, not with broken will, but with the pleasant satisfaction that we are yet too young to refuse the dares of our coy world.

There's always more to be said, but words are ghosts and we are not.

Situ Rinpoche

2007-05-23T23:37:00.000+08:00

thirty-three seconds

Catching Patois

2007-05-21T20:34:00.000+08:00

My class and a group of second-year students in Yushu have been penpals since last term. One of their teachers is a guy who taught here at Kangding Teacher's College three years ago. Jon and his girlfriend were congratulating Tenzin and Maowei on their marriage when I met him at the Hemp House in Chengdu.

Jon taught here with Tenzin (who is now in Kangding proper) and Satina, whose picture is prominent two posts below. Jon kept an exquisitely eclectic website while he was here. Among other things, he writes heavily about the unique language derivations of this area on the aptly titled Catching Patois

[Patois / pronounced patwa / n. (pl. same / pawaz) regional dialect, differing from the literary language].

I found the notable following:

and such incisive prose as

sun got big 'gain today. warm enough to go without the long underwear that's been on everyday all day for some four months, and so the cool noon breeze rolls in through my sweater and loose button-up. a sweet feeling; like that time planting trees and awoke in mid-night, stumbled down in darkness to the cold lake, undressed and dove in. and the water rushed over my body and balls and in between the toes.

and

There is a realm of cannibal spirits, where ogres wander about feeding on each other. And there are Buddhas with wide eyes, fire in their hair and skulls tied round the neck. I find comfort in the thought that these are gods too and might sometimes have their time, and better days are not far away.

and

Tom and Jerry speak Sichuanese too, and right lively like. And children crowd around a tv on the street to see the show and hear the words they use at home, and in their dreams and with their pets. And the older generations enjoy it too; there are few other television programs in a language that many of them understand.

At the top of July I hope to visit Jon in Yushu, where he pulls his water from a well each morning and has holidays to allow the nomads to dig the medicinal fungal hosts of dead caterpillars.

When July ends I will be celebrating my older brother's Golden Birthday in New Orleans. I intend to be sopping with Abita-laced sweat.

Click the Pretty Pictures

2007-05-16T20:31:00.000+08:00

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I had contributed an article to the second edition of Sichuan Travel Magazine.

Matt sent me these layout captures before he had finished editing, so please excuse any errors. In the article, I recollect the highlights of celebrating the icy Lunar New Year in the log cabins of my nomadic students. I never made the time to write about that experience on the blog, so I'm glad I put it in an article. The photo below is of the monastery in Daofu, taken by Kiwi Cath Marsh.

Click the pages to expand them large enough to read the type.

The magazine is designed and edited by Matt Vegh. Matt also administers iHotPot.com, a forum on life in Chengdu. This page from Chronicles of the Shu Kingdom (especially the lower panels; click to view in detail) demonstrate his skill as an illustrator.

Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?

Good Idea, Bad Idea

2007-05-07T16:58:00.000+08:00

Good Idea

I met Satina Anziano a number of weeks ago, though I first heard of her from a community publication in McLeod Ganj last summer. Satina used to be a teacher out here, and had written an article about life in occupied Kham for the English language Indian rag put out by the Louisiana Himalaya Association. She returned to Sichuan to aid with the natural home-birth of the half-Tibetan daughter of a mutual friend from Colorado, also a former teacher.

Experienced in the area in which I live, Satina has written a fascinating and beautiful account of the birth titled, "An Ex-Pat Birth Experience: Having a Child in Rural China."

Bad Idea

A friend pointed me to a travel journal written by a young Christian missionary somewhere in Tibet. The young author and his companions misunderstand and willfully belittle the native religion of the local people, who seem to be nothing more than good hosts for the travelers.

The third building we went to was the most satanic sight I have ever seen. We entered while one monk was in a ritualistic chant banging on a metal cylinder and we walked around the room about the size of a 2000 square foot house. What we saw was again hard to put in words but without freaking you out too much we saw pictures of bodies split in half, eyeballs popping out of eyes, blood streaming out of flesh, creatures with multiple heads, men with bodies of animals and the entire time the boy that was with us was saying what peaceful God's he worships (sorry might have freaked you out). Man how blinded these people are. I have never been in more intense prayer in my life.

To be honest, he has freaked me out.

Out of Pocket

2007-04-29T23:11:00.000+08:00

I finished grading the midterm this evening. I made it difficult so I could see where the students are, and as usual, I'm pleasantly surprised with two-thirds of them and disappointed with the rest.

Tomorrow begins a week vacation. A few students whose hometowns are within a day's journey of Kangding have invited me to spend time with their families. I'm looking forward to sitting around on the grassland again. The days have promised to be sunny and the nights still.

It's been busy but good times of late. Tenzin and I went swimming in a heated pool outdoors yesterday afternoon, protected from the rain by a cheap awning. He told me it snowed the day before. We drank some beers and swam laps. The place was nearly empty.

Returning from the holiday will bring a real reorientation with respect to the class. My students, the Tibetan Department, and the Bridge Fund all know I'm not planning to return next year. Before the term ends, I will have two solid months of class (six days a week), which isn't too long to begin counting the days until I turn in their grades and submit my final report to the Bridge Fund.

I'm feeling good about returning to Louisiana. At this point I'm more confident about living deliberately than I have in years. In spite of that, I can't help feeling that rebuilding an American life is going to be more difficult than I remember. It's like I'm starting from scratch, and I am free.

Just Relax, Take it Easy, You're Still Young, That's Your Fault

2007-04-24T14:35:00.000+08:00

This picture of Maowei and Tenzin is merely a pretty image for you to appreciate. It does not relate to the following.

It took me all week to catch up with school after going to Chengdu last weekend. Chengdu was being resistant, and my lame errands felt especially difficult to accomplish. China's beginning to get to me in that way again. I'll be happy when I'm back in Louisiana. America is inefficient, but in much more familiar ways.

Last semester, when I used the middle school books, we had time for decent activities and casual explanation. This term's high school books are solid, but with four months to teach a year of material there's never enough time for fun stuff. Every week they read newspapers, writing letters, essays, rewrites and diaries, and the first ten minutes of class is devoted to speeches. It was getting to be too much even for me.

I realized on my first break from class since the semester began that I wasn't being efficient enough with the student's time. The term is over in two months, and it's basically my last chance to pull some of the lower students out of a slump before I leave. Some of them have gotten so much better since I came, and some of them act as if they haven't learned a thing.

That said, I've shifted most of my blogging energy to Cenlamar, where I hope to raise the profile of interesting stories and issues relating to Central Louisiana. I am also receiving a week off for the People's Labor Holiday next week. I'll be traveling west to a few students' homes for the vacation.

Yesterday I taught a unit on musical styles. It was nice to have fun in class again. The listening tape for the book played a few American songs for the students, including John Lennon's So This Is Christmas and Father and Son by Cat Stevens. I had them listen closely to Cat's words on the second listening, which also got me listening closely to the song's lyrics,

But take your time, think a lot,
Why, think of everything you've got.
For you will still be here tomorrow,
But your dreams may not.

The backs of my eyeballs began to get hot. Named Dekji lowered her face to hide her wet eyes. These students, especially my girls, think a lot about their friends, families, and what will happen after high school graduation. They open up to me in their diaries in the most amazing ways. They're Tibetan, but they always remind me of me (us) at that age.

Now that Blogspot is not being blocked at the moment, I'm going to begin posting student essays. It will give them a big kick to see their words online in English, and the rest of you will be able to get a glimpse into why I've grown so attached to these teenagers.

Wise Guys

2007-04-19T12:20:00.000+08:00

I usually don't post about this kind of silliness (especially when it's already been hyped here and here), but if you have two minutes to kill you might find this amusing.

Mafia Name Generator

I put in "Daniel Smith," and was duly dubbed Lonely Guy. That describes me fairly well, but it's kinda non-specific. I wanted to give it another try, so I entered "Dan Smith."

The nickname generator divined to the sky and bestowed upon me a new handle: The Yak. I was floored. Not only am I always with Tibetans these days, but I am also a stalwart, gregarious, and hairy beast of burden.

This website must have been coded by the Oracle herself.

V

2007-04-12T23:31:00.000+08:00

We can but hope he's in a heaven of his own design.

When I finished 1984 in 1997, my heart was seared by an unpredictable world of overwhelming cruelty and indifference. Some years later, the ending of The Sirens of Titan taught me to triumph in spite of that world, and healed a scorched heart.

$0.35 in 1959, First Edition

Dad's copy, which I read

Fluff and Filler

2007-04-12T22:38:00.000+08:00

I've been busily preparing for a trip to the provincial capital this weekend. My mind is incessant with the details of class, internetting, and plans for home. In the interest of getting at least one post up this week, I offer the following pictures of some class guests and me. Yes, these are the most flattering pictures I could find.

Meg, to whom I owe this job, as she passed through from Chengdu to Qinghai

The illustrious Tenzin Mullin, son of Tibetologist Glenn Mullin

Stoically Socratic

Cath Marsh, the New Zealander who taught the class last year, during one of her hip-hop seminars

Cath's depiction of a DJ

Sunday Casual Reading

2007-04-08T14:57:00.000+08:00

On some days every link begets two or three more, and soon my Firefox tabs are overflowing (a lot of my recent posts are really just research archives.) Let's just say it's been yet another educational morning.

I finally realized that WireTap Magazine is the youth section of Alternet.org. I'm also starting to see why everyone's switching from Blogger to Wordpress. The way that block quotes and pasting screws up the format in the new Blogger is pretty aggravating. No matter, in four months this blog will be finished.

WireTap Magazine, "Bigger than Hip-Hop." This article describes the current hip hop political movement: "So, culture, class issues, consumerism and varying degrees of complacency all divide African Americans, as much if not more than generational differences. In fact, to reduce the fragmentation of black politics into a generation gap is to play into the hands of the right."

"Shinin' the Light on White Privilege." A detailed history and time-line of the institutionalization of racial oppression in the United States.

"The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), is a national and international collective of anti-racist, multicultural community organizers and educators dedicated to building an effective movement for social transformation." This group has roots in New Orleans.

Letter of the People of New Orleans to Our Friends and Allies: "The South has been traditionally underfunded and often exploited by institutions, including corporations, the labor movement, foundations, and the federal government. We have faced the legacy of centuries of institutional racism and oppression, with little outside support. And yet, against massive odds, grassroots movements in the South have organized and struggled and won historic, inspiring victories with international relevance." The list of signatories at the end of the letter is a Who's-Who of the New Orleans grassroots social activism community.

New Orleans Network - Web Resources. A database and calendar of social activism in New Orleans; possible model for the new CenLamar.

Southern Human Rights Organizers' Network: "The primary goal of the network is to develop innovative and practical methods of organizing across the region. Another important objective is to strengthen the capacity of civil rights and social justice organizations in the Deep South."

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Their most recent publication, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, is described as follows: "In this landmark collection, over 25 activists and scholars describe and discuss the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC)--a system of relationships between the state, the owning classes, foundations, and social service &social justice organizations that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements." This group has been particularly active in New Orleans.

Wiretap Magazine, "New Orleans: Continuing Crisis:"

For many in the nonprofit field nationally, post-Katrina New Orleans has been an opportunity for career advancement. While local residents have been too overwhelmed by tragedy to apply for grants, a few well-placed national individuals and organizations have not hesitated to take their place in line. Although some have no relation to New Orleans, they often have previous relationships with the foundations, as well as resources that translate into easier access to funding, such as development staff, website designers and professional promotional materials

[...snip...]
Foundations are an integral part of the current structure of U.S. nonprofits, a system that INCITE has called the Nonprofit Industrial Complex, to emphasize the intersecting, dependent and corporatized ways in which the system is constructed. It is a system in which organizations are frequently pitted against each other for funding, where organizers are discouraged from being active in their own community, and where accountability to and leadership from those most affected has become increasingly rare.

Update: In the spirit of Easter, the first four of the Eight Beatitudes,

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the land.
Blessed are they who mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.

MCTenz Gives Tibetan Teens a Dose of Authentic Hip-Hop

2007-04-07T14:54:00.000+08:00

Cath Marsh, the New Zealander who taught my class last year, has been trying out her new English learning materials on the students on the weekend. Following from her conviction that language must be learned in context and with interesting content, the module she is currently testing is on hip-hop.

In Kangding she bumped into a vacationing Tenzin Gyaltsen, a half-Tibetan from California (not to be confused with my colleague Tenzin Mullin, who is not Tibetan). He is an MC in Chengdu performing around China, and is a director of Pro-Motion Solutions, working to expand the hip-hop and DJ scene in Asia. He blogs at MCTenz.com.

She invited him up to give the class his views on hip-hop and a first-hand example of MCing, with Sacsha on the beat-box. It was classic (don't miss Tenzin's lecture notes on the board). Even if you're in a rush, watch this video. It's about the sweetest thing I've seen since being in New Orleans or India (you know I wouldn't lie to you):

Update: here's the URL for the Youtube video in case the embed becomes corrupt.

Tenzin has a few pictures of some break dancers in Kangding and his version of the experience on his blog.

I got pretty fired up during his explanation of hip-hop culture, and the students were definitely into it. He stressed that the theme of struggle in hip-hop stems in part from the oppression of minorities in the Bronx in the late Sixties and Seventies. "Struggle, Revolution, Growth." I asked him if the emphasis on cutting down rivals in MC Battles, out-flexing other B-Boys in a face-off, and throwing up the best bombs and tags was a way of getting one's opponent to be the best they can be. He didn't think so, but agreed that that was a result.

At that time my moustache was freshly crafted, and I was a little paranoid that they'd think I was a redneck winger from Louisiana. I couldn't get Deltron's words outta my head:

A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population

Word. I've been trying to reconcile the opposing ideas that hip-hop is about individual power and that it is about community. At some point last week when reading about something unrelated, I stumbled across this story in WireTap: The Political Power of the Midwest. In spite of the title, this post is about how progressive urban grassroots organizers use hip-hop to mold the characters of inner-city youth, in community centers like Elementz and Urban Underground. "Our central theme is respect. We don't have the typical metal detectors and security guards. Instead, we focus on letting young people in on nearly all of the decision-making."

On DailyKos I also came across an interesting diary when I was doing a little research on grassroots hunger initiatives. The Politics of Hip-Hop reads like a manifesto constructed from hip-hop flows, arguing that the nature of hip-hop is political, oriented towards the class struggle of the common man and woman (not necessarily the black man and woman) and based on revolution. I know it sounds Socialistic but it grow up. When I began looking, I found similar sentiments. One diary encourages us to "peep" an email from Nasty Nes, who lists the links for the Hip-Hop League of Voter's local voting guides and give a heads up on common practices of disenfranchisement. Young Voters are still makin' it happen... introduces the Hip-Hop Summit and its relationship to the Youth Movement.

Finally, wu ming asks is political hip-hop dead? I think you'll see from the comments that the answer is fuck no it ain't dead. The comments are also a sure spot to score some downloading ideas for your personal library of underground hip-hop.

Let's get one thing straight, though. I'm a Northern European mutt raised in a professional class family in Central Louisiana. I'm a white boy who "likes the style," but I don't copy. I didn't get into hip-hop until I was in college, when I realized the musical eclecticism of Handsome Boy Modeling School samples, the lyrical deftness of Kool Keith, and the powerful simplicity of the politics of Digable Planets. These are the same reasons I listen to independent music (not emo, Chris and Mike) like Pink Mountaintops, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Silver Jews.

I draw power from this music not because of my race or my extra-curricular habits, but because it inspires me and has the potential to focus the revolutionary fervor of my peers. We're not the MTV Generation, we're not Generation Y, we aren't the Generation of Social Values or the Millennial Generation or the Nine-Eleven Generation (maybe the Generation of the Federal Flood, just maybe). I'm not sure what we are, together, though I am certain of one thing: most of us know shit when we smell it.

More Food for Thought

2007-04-06T21:44:00.000+08:00

On the previous post I hadn't extended my research quite far enough, and Wikipedia (duh, Daniel, duh) suggested a great resource in the way of community agriculture: Local Harvest.

Local Harvest is a "comprehensive" directory of farmers markets, farms, stores, and restaurants that support community agriculture. It's easy to sign up to become a part of the directory. Maps are interactive and can be searched by state or zip-code. For example, one can easily get a list of Farmers Markets within 100 miles or all listings within fifty miles of Alexandria (from which I copped the six farms in the following paragraph). Another nice feature is that individual farm profiles provide recipes and the seasons when each of their products are available.

Most of the farm listings are not of CSA farms, though interesting nonetheless. Fred's Garden in Hornbeck (near Leesville and Many) is proud of their naturally grown tomatoes and summer squash, and goats and sheep are grass-fed and pastured by Running Moon Farm of Dry Creek (for wool) and Boggs Farms of Sugartown (for meat). Ville Platte boasts naturally grown peas and okra from Purple Hull Ranch Farm, premium jams and preserves from Bayou Chicot's Watershed Farm, and free-range chicken eggs from Sopers Hole Ranch.

It is also easy to find Louisiana's CSA farms that have registered with the Local Harvest. They show four. In addition to Pastime Farms and EquiTerra Farm mentioned in the previous entry Food for Thought, we find two more certified organic CSA farms: Gotreaux's Family Farms and Abba's Hill Organics. Gotreaux's Family Farms is in Scott, just west of Lafayette. They have fifteen shares (including half-shares, $400 / $200), and offer food (including honey and a number of meats) from September through July during two sixteen week harvest periods. Tours of the farm are also available. The weekly pickup point is Lafayette's City Garden Market.

Abba's Hill Organics is the one that got me interested; their motto: "Bees, Chickens, & Garden Pickins." They even sell their own sourdough bread. The farm is located between Many and Natchitoches, about seventy-five miles from Alexandria. In addition to having fifteen CSA shares ($15 / week, 20 weeks), they sell their produce and products at the Cane River Green Market in Natchitoches. It's nice to see the presence of a CSA farm in Cenla, and though they individual arrange share pickup and delivery, I doubt they'd provide service as far as Alexandria.

There are likely other CSA farms in the state, as even I have to admit that not everything can be found on the internet. Growing organically and naturally is gaining obvious popularity across the country. I am optimistic about the extent to which CSA will remain sustainable in other parts, and whether local community supported agriculture will finally make its way to Alexandria. I have a feeling that it is merely the matter of finding a willing farm close enough to the city (remember, CSA helps responsible consumers reduce the market risk for local farmers).

I also hope people will read the comments to the other Food for Thought post. A friend mentions that in Argentina, similar practices are used to provide food for destitute areas. Community gardens at schools nutritiously feed the schoolchildren. I also wonder if in the long run a CSA arrangement for an American school or Food Bank would be feasible.

¡Moustachio Imbroglio! - Updated

2007-04-03T17:52:00.000+08:00

Meg, whom I introduced in this post, visited me last week on her way from Chengdu back to Qinghai Province. She's an English teacher working at a school established by her Lama. She helped me with these photos (old news to my Facebook friends):

dan the dirty stinking hippie

Poppycock! I daresay a hooligan indeed, Governor. Cheerio!

Fulfillin' a lifelong dream, ya'll

Bold Vision into the Future: Terra Incognita

Update: Big thanks to those who voted. The results of the poll are as follows:

Frank Zappa: 0
John Holmes: 2
Anthony van Dyke: 1
The Hoff: 3

Web Tech Possibilities for the New Cenlamar

2007-04-02T20:32:00.001+08:00

Just throwing these out there:

Volunteer Coordination

I came across this software, and it stood out immediately as it has all of the features that I had suggested in my original proposal to Lamar. Tendenci(R) makes software that allows websites to have open volunteer sign-ups with a variety of administrative controls. Anyone can see the number of volunteers that have already committed, and it includes calendar features. The interface seems pretty smooth. Cenlamar could get to the point where this type of technology would be handy when multiple groups are trying to recruit volunteers for specific times.

Mapping

I read a lot of New Orleans blogs. Maitri's VatulBlog gave me a great idea. She has been working on the technical aspects of setting up a community website that maps crime in New Orleans. She settled with GeoPress for WordPress, detailed in this post, but in her previous post she lists some of the best open-source mapping software available, and most of it can be interfaced directly into a blog.

Perhaps the new hub of Cenla social activism could benefit from such a feature. Volunteer sites can be easily mapped, and as the community grows it would provide a quick graphic to see which areas of town are being overlooked. Habitat or the Food Bank could map its impact. The applications to open-source web mapping are limitless.

Food for Thought

2007-04-02T18:35:00.000+08:00

One thing Louisianians of all stripes seem to be proud of is our food, be it Creole, Cajun, or Soul Food. Most of the cuisine that is considered typical of Louisiana is not the healthiest of foods. On the other hand, Louisiana has an amazing growing season, and when I worked in fine dining in New Orleans we were able to boast about our fresh local produce, from Vidallia Onions and Creole Tomatoes to strawberries, blueberries, and figs. This post is a bit disorganized, but represents my thoughts on food and some interesting local initiatives that people can take to simultaneously improve quality of our communities and the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Nutrition and Poverty

A recent entry on Facing South confirmed something I've known about for a long time, namely that Southerners tend to eat less healthily than the rest of the nation. "Supersizing the South" is a good read full of useful information. The piece begins with statistics about the number and nature of food advertisements targeted towards children, presents a state by state breakdown of obesity in the South, and finishes by quoting the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, which says that "the highest rates of obesity occur among population groups with the highest poverty rates and the least education."

While that may sound counterintuitive to some (poor kids are supposed to be skinny, right?), it stems from the lack of education and availability of nutritious foods. Moreover, foods (perceived) to be cheaper are often higher in fat and added sugar. Fresh fruits and vegetables are generally more expensive and require more preparation than Easy Mac and Hamburger Helper. Healthy children also perform better in school (food for thought).

I remember reading a testimonial around Thanksgiving written by an intelligent disabled woman. Like many other women in her apartment complex (mostly single mothers), she took advantage of deliveries from the food bank. The woman was older, and had learned to cook before the TV Dinner revolution of the Fifties had completely reversed American eating habits by the Seventies. She described how the younger mothers didn't know what to do with bags of flour (make biscuits and broth) and didn't know how to salvage slightly old vegetables into soups. A large part of the problem is simple lack of knowledge about how to cook a nutritious family meal with limited resources and time. The author suggested cooking classes to go with Food Bank deliveries.

Farmers Markets

Farmer's Markets are reasonably popular in many cities, even in Louisiana. Most of us are familiar with the concept: once a week local farmers meet to sell local produce at a competitive cost. They generally benefit the smaller farms. According to an article about the Louisiana Small Farm Survival Fund at Foundations of Recovery, "farmers and small agricultural-related enterprises have been the foundation for our South Louisiana foodshed. The Farmers Markets who support locally grown, seasonal produce provide both an economic base and an important cultural gathering spot, creating a sense of community between urban and rural residents. Unfortunately, many farmers and local Farmers Markets sustained significant damage during Hurricane Katrina."

The Louisiana DOAF Farmers Market Directory (2005) completely catalogs the local farms and Farmers Markets qualifying for the Farmers Market Nutritional Program Coupon. In Rapides, only three roadside stands (Bayou Rapides Best Produce on Hwy. 28, Ole Grey Mule on Hwy. 71 South, and Poole Produce past Cheneyville on 71) and no Farmers Markets are listed.

On Google Maps there is a listing for a Farmers Market at 500 N 3rd Street, and also a different address and phone number for Farmers Market Booking. Digging deeper, one comes across this interesting tidbit in the Wikipedia entry for John K. Snyder, a former mayor of Alexandria: "One of his pet projects was a simple structure near the Red River, completed in 1975, called the 'Alexandria Farmer's Market,' by which farmers could take their produce directly to the people and avoid middlemen. Interest in the market was strongest in the spring and early summer, but many in time found the hours of operation inconvenient for their own work schedules. Supermarkets were just more accessible than were the farmers waiting patiently for customers to arrive."

Because the Farmers Market must be supported by proactive consumers who are willing to deal with seasonal availability and the lack of Kroger-style convenience, they are not always successful. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm way out of the Alexandria loop; I'll be back at the end of July), but my feeling is that the city still owns the defunct Farmers Market facility and rents it out for events like motorcycle shows.

An encouraging sign is the River City Market under the old Weiss and Goldring building, which Cenlamar describes as "downtown Alexandria’s arts, crafts, and produce market."

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA farming)

Community Supported Agriculture has gained traction in the North, Midwest, and the Northwest. It's a revolutionary concept that grew out of a desire to reconnect consumers to local agriculture. Essentially, a small farm sells fifty to 500 shares of its harvest before planting to raise capital. Throughout the harvest season (which differs from place to place), it delivers boxes of fresh produce to a distribution center or directly to shareholders doorsteps. For a few hundred dollars, shareholders are provided weekly with fruits and vegetables. The food is often organic, always fresh, uses little fuel to be delivered, and is cheaper overall than shopping at the supermarket.

The Organic Consumers Association has an extremely informative article about CSA farming, both on the individual and network scale. A small farm often doesn't have the resources to provide everything a shareholder may want, so a CSA cooperative (or "connection channel") could take the role of coordinating produce from a number of local farms in order to best deliver goods without growing into corporate superfarms. They list all the advantages of Community Supported Agriculture:

The farmer benefits too. The connection channel bypasses the middleman, giving farmers profit margins more comparable to the farmers market. The farmer can retain a higher portion of the final selling price while bringing the cost to the consumer more in line with conventional agricultural products, thereby reaching more people. Advance ordering and knowledge of member preferences fine-tunes the planting process, reducing the farmer's risk of spoilage, surplus production, storage costs, and missed sales. With a pay-in-advance policy, the farmer gets the capital needed for planting and improvements. Most important of all, the connection channel can produce organic food in quantities sufficient to feed the earth's population while avoiding the social costs of industrial production and distribution. Instead of scaling up existing organic farms, one multiplies their number, and uses an extended CSA model to distribute the product to local and regional populations. When properly administered, the connection channel can often deliver in the afternoon what was harvested that morning, providing a field-to-fork time that no hub-to-retailer system can match.

Towards the end of the article they discuss the how to determine the proper number of shareholders for a given CSA farm.

It took a while, but I was able to find two examples of organic and CSA farms in Louisiana, provided by the Southern Organic Resource Guide.

Russell Roy is the proprietor of Pastime Farms, the largest organic farm in the state, in Roseland, Louisiana. He makes his own compost, uses organic pest control, and has over four-hundred members in his CSA. From May to November, Pastime Farms delivers weekly produce picked no more than thirty-six hours before.

Paul and Maria Davidson are wildlife biologists ("learned folk") that began EquiTerra Farm decades ago in Clinton, Louisiana. The farm was slow-going, but they've expanded it to grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, and they even have goat and sheep herds (which is something I've always wanted). The Davidsons' goal is to have "a model sustainable farmstead to show others, especially young farmers, that a decent and honest living can be made on a small farm, working with the land and not against it.” Young people intern at the farm to increase interest in the project.

I was telling a friend from Rochester that a CSA farm could work in Alexandria, but enough people interested in buying shares outright might be difficult to find. She was surprised: "Being healthy markets itself!" I explained that Central Louisiana is unlike California and New York in that everyone is not totally motivated to eat fresh, organic foods. It's usually a priority of the professional class.

And I realized that while CSA is an awesome idea and that it will definitely work in Louisiana once small savvy farms can be found, it only provides the most educated or well-off with an opportunity to score fresh local produce. It would need to be heavily tweaked to make even a tiny impact on the issue of poverty and nutrition.

Community Gardening

Community Gardens are a nice way to bring neighborhoods together while emphasizing social responsibility and nutrition. The model is flexible, but they usually are in a common space, and individual community members are able to utilize the harvest in some proportion to the work or capital they provide for starting and maintaining the garden.

Parkway Partners of New Orleans has a very readable community garden introduction and guide, which even lists the addresses of active community gardens in NOLA.

If nominal start-up efforts and training are provided by motivated members or an outside organization, community gardens can be successful in any part of a city. They are arguably most needed in the poorest areas, and could provide fresh produce to them more easily than CSA farms.

I hope that other people find this stuff as interesting as I do. Comments and criticisms are always welcomed but seldom received.

My Fiftieth Post

2007-04-01T23:10:00.001+08:00

I was going to publish a post about Community Supported Agriculture, but it's late so I'll just hit you with some pictures of my apartment and the classroom. I should have my thoughts on non-corporate farming together by lunchtime on Monday (Louisiana time).

Riveted by yet another life-changing lecture

Garma Sonam (Tyler) explains how nomads make cheese to the class. He is probably my favorite student. I spent the Lunar New Year with his family on the grassland.

grammar grammar grammar

Teachers get bored in class and stare out of the window, too (like last week, when a brushfire tore up the hill). This is my view.

The building that houses the English and Tibetan Departments.

A statue of the Man and Woman of Kham

Lunchtime tutorial

After a tutorial with Yudron (Leah) and Jenna. I visited Yudron, who got the highest score on the final last term, and her family last holiday. The picture of Lhasa was a gift from another student.

Gachu and Woko's families each gave me a printed thankha when I vised their homes during the winter holiday. The one on the left is a thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara, and on the right is a leader at the famous Serda monastery.

Rinpoche

The eastward view from my living room, upriver

Bedroom view to the east

Eastward and downriver

A view to the northwest from my spare room

On clear mornings, the snow on this mountain is illuminated when the sun peaks the ridge opposite the river.

A Union of Dunces

2007-04-01T22:25:00.001+08:00

This post is a continuation of a recent post titled "Confederacy of Dunces." I know the line spacing is FUBAR but I'm too lazy to go through the HTML to find the problem.

I've done a bit more digging into the opinions on MyDD and DailyKos as to whether the South should be important to the national progressive movement. What I've found amounts to a full-blown debate. Simply glancing at the list of diaries tagged "The South" will give you an idea of what I mean.

In 2005, Tom Schaller wrote a book titled Whistling Past Dixie, in which he argues that national Democrats should ignore the South and build a permanent majority coalition by solidifying gains in the West and Mid-west. Though they often give lip-service to Howard Dean's Fifty-State Strategy, I feel that the primary contributors of DailyKos and MyDD generally agree with Schaller's thesis. I often read MyDD and Kos, and usually like their views (these sites allow members to sign up for free and write diaries. The best diaries on DailyKos are highlighted on the main page. Members and editors frequently make comments to further discussion).

For example, take the DailyKos diary "The South: Democrats Don't Get It" by someone called The Poet Laureate. In response to a different diary in which someone presents a stereotyped list of Southern white males, The Poet Laureate makes the following point in response to the stereotype of Southerners as gun-enthusiasts: "We do need to understand both the cultural relevance of guns in the South, however. We also need to understand that the South maintains the awareness of a distinct cultural identity in many respects, and Southerners are wary of "outsiders'" attempts to assimilate them to another culture. I suspect this is at the root of the Civil War obsession down here; it has less to do with resisting change and social progress than maintaining a unique identity."

National progressive's unwillingness to engage with the South comes from their ignorance of the South, and a selective memory that focuses on segregation and forgets the roots of American Populism.

Another diary, pico's "Kos is Wrong on Louisiana," does a nice job of summarizing the decline of recent pro-choice legislators in our great state. I quite like the way she finishes her piece:

We don't agree because we acknowledge that strongholds only become strongholds when the other side has allowed its presence to dwindle. That's the essence of Dean's strategy, and the contempt it received from Begala is not entirely different than the contempt some people have shown for the state of Louisiana.
So my question for the community is this: do we take the Dean route, roll up our sleeves, and get to work building grassroots efforts in Louisiana, or do we take the Begala route and avoid Louisiana completely?
Either way, let's give some respect to the liberals who have stayed behind, who are sitting on their porches in New Orleans, angry that the state around them has veered hard Right, frightened that violent crime has taken a sudden upswing, depressed that large chunks of the city are still in shambles, and uncertain as hell about the future. The last thing they need is to be dismissed by the rest of us. They need a bit of our support right now, if you can spare it.

I have given this a fair amount of thought, and while I remember a lot of right-wing reactionaries and fence-sitting politicians from my youth, I also have this vague feeling that Alexandria was nonetheless home to many a closeted progressive.

Another diary pointed me to the excellent article, "The Way Down South," on the subject at The Nation. I highly recommend reading this for those who are interested. One highlight includes this quote:

"Today the Democratic Party stands between two great forces.... On one side stand the corporate interests of the nation, its moneyed institutions, its aggregations of wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless.... On the other side stands the unnumbered throng which gave a name to the Democratic Party and for which it has presumed to speak. Work-worn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls."

These words were spoken 114 years ago by William Jennings Bryan. Again, I'd like to copy the closing remarks of the essay:

And yet a stubborn belief in the poor, backward, reactionary cracker South of myth still shapes and distorts American politics. By surrendering the region, Democrats have simultaneously abandoned the old hope of a durable national progressive majority. They have passively allowed right-wingers to build a mighty fortress for the defense of free-market excess in a region that is home to almost half--47 percent--of the Americans who call themselves populists. They have allowed economic, racial and cultural divisions to fester. And now, even with the Republicans' Southern strategy wearing thin, they are lurching toward an even more dramatic break with the South.
It ain't wise, and it ain't right. I can't say it better than Chris Kromm, director of the liberal Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina. "For Democrats to turn their back on a region that half of all African-Americans and a growing number of Latinos call home, a place devastated by Hurricane Katrina, plant closings, poverty and other indignities--in short, for progressives to give up on the very place where they could argue they are needed most--would rightfully be viewed as a historic retreat from the party's commitment to justice for all."

There are many reasons to be committed to either national political party. For me, I don't want Democrats to regain popularity in Louisiana because I don't like the GOP. I also don't like the idea of a national party having too much power in a place like Louisiana, where locals must have the ability to determine our own future. I'd like to see real progressives in our state because we desperately need innovative social policy and economic populism.

This weekend the transparently biased Dead Pelican linked to this opinion piece at the DailyKos about the challenges that Mary Landrieu will face in her upcoming election: "Why Mary Landrieu is the Most Endangered Democrat up for Reelection Next Year." The comments section is especially telling if you'd like to get a feel how the national liberal blogosphere feels about our Senator. Most think that she isn't progressive at all and a slave to our oil industry. Much of the debate is driven by ignorance of our local politics and a desire to recast our state in the mold of northern-style liberalism.

These are my people, yet they don't understand me at all.

Emily Metzgar and LANO

2007-04-01T22:12:00.000+08:00

As I continue to investigate the Louisiana nonprofit scene, the organization LANO (Louisiana Association of Nonprofits) keeps popping up, sometimes in unlikely places.

The columnist and blogger Emily Metzgar (Shreveport Times) has recently interviewed Dr. Melissa Flournoy, the CEO of LANO. The podcast can be downloaded at the previous link.

I generally like Metzgar's opinions and commentary, and her interests parallel my own: the impact of internet on local politics, accountability and transparency in state government, and responsible and informed policy creation.

On a related note, an old friend (no pun intended) David Britt, the current president of the United Way of Central Louisiana, has started a blog. I look forward to having an easier way of following his opinions.

East Side

2007-03-28T17:14:00.000+08:00

After class today I took Cath's camera around campus to take a few photos. This Chinese hamlet near the school is a nice example of the Sichuanese countryside.

I decided to document the few tags around the school. Chinese youths adore hip hop culture these days. My opinion being that when cultural movements are expropriated to non-native places or for materialist reasons, I feel that Chinese hip hop lacks some of the authenticity of the underground movement we (barely) have (left) in America.

Slam, bitches!
I've always been impressed with the Chinese penchant for replacing nature with artifice made to resemble nature.

Yes, that's a Houston Rocket on the left and a concrete ping-pong table on the right. Eminem is tagged at the bottom right, so if that's the level of American hip-hop to which they're exposed, it's no wonder Chinese hip hop seems barren to me.

The Money Shot: MC Death

Basketball is China's most popular sport, and thanks to the NBA, the music industry, and Hollywood, most Chinese kids assume that all blacks in America are basketball players or gang bangers.

These tags suck.

This one sucks too, but hey, it's their second (and sometimes third) language.

Spring is just arriving.

This tag is behind my apartment. I think it says "I'm Tank." Good on ya, Tank.

From what I can tell, the official establishment has nothing against kids expressing themselves in this way in China. I think it's because it never had anti-establishment roots out here in China. Kids tag and dance hip hop because that's what's mainstream and status-quo.

Although they can dress the dress and leave tags, Chinese hip hop dancing is completely choreographed. Noticing that I don't lack rhythm, my students have asked me to teach them to "dance hip hop." I don't really know what the fuck that means. Hip hop moves and rhymes are meant to be improvised, so planning it out ahead of time is antithetical. It's difficult for me to do a real survey of Chinese hip hop, but my impression is that it doesn't come anywhere close to the literary ingenuity of the best in American underground hip hop, and they certainly don't know how to mix dope samples (that's a music term, Mom. It doesn't mean drugs).

Communist China has tamed a number of Western musical styles, including rock-n-roll, punk, and now hip hop. Art has traditionally been used in China to subvert the status quo, from millennia-old veiled political poetry to the allegoric film of the mid-eighties. That was meant to change when Mao declared art to be the tool of the People's Revolution. Hip hop in the People's Republic of China is definitely a tool, but not of Communism: it's a tool of conformity and materialism.

Confederacy of Dunces

2007-03-27T20:44:00.000+08:00

I'm a daily reader of the political blog My Direct Democracy. They first got my attention when they raised the money for Tim Tagaris to cover the most recent attempt to unseat William Jefferson. I find the analysis of MyDD to be generally very interesting, and not quite as annoying as DailyKos can sometimes be.

Recently, though, a couple of posts have uncovered the way in which the South is viewed by the representatives of the current American progressive movement (the Gunbelt refers to the production of weapons in the Military Industrial Complex, of which most factories are located in the South):

What is clear though is that we need to begin to understand economic policies and tax structures as tools in remapping America. There is a moment for the next ten years, during which a non-Southern culture controls the political machinery of the Federal government and the South's veto can be overcome with a brutal series of threats to the region's excessive Federal subsidies and reliance on socialist corporate welfare. If we're smart, we can puncture the institutional architecture that allows the Gunbelt to thrive and build a new America along the networked rule-based freedom-enhancing tolerant lines that exist in the bulwark areas of Blue America.

And in a different post:

The electoral landscape has as its governing party a coalition that has cut out the authoritarian South. And long-term, the authoritarian South can now be tamed, since its dependence on Federal subsidies has grown to become a serious addiction.

I wrote a pretty had criticism of the way the South had been characterized in the comments, but it wasn't nearly as thought out as one that was posted shortly thereafter by someone names Chris. Here's a highlight:

It's telling that you claim labor in the 30s was the only "real" progressive movement in our country. I've been active in the labor movement to have no problem with that. Others might point to the Populists or the black freedom movement, which of course were largely based in the South. But that wouldn't fit your world-view that the South is a bastion of reaction, would it?

Word, Chris. I'm really becoming committed to "progressive politics," and the left-wind (not left-handed) tendencies I used to dismiss as youthfully naive I now am convinced will be with me my whole life. But it's going to be frustrating if I continue to have to rub up against prejudiced Northerners who are still patting themselves on the back for the Civil War and are convinced that every Southerner is a gun-toting inbred. When I try to explain why people in the South still get upset when they perceive the Federal Government to be meddling in state affairs I usually get pegged as a racist.

If Progressives finally wrest the White House from Republicans or Conservative Democrats, is it any use to the redheaded stepchildren down South if all we get is this same sad story?

The silver lining is that Chris left the website address for a Progressive Southern blog, called Facing South. At least I don't feel so alone anymore.

[I hope to post later this week on some software I've heard about that could be used for the new Cenlamar. I have also been lent a digital camera for the week, and at some point I'll have some pictures of my life and the students. Here's a teaser, from today's lunchtime tutorial in my apartment.]

A Look at the Web Resources of the United Way of Central Louisiana

2007-03-22T21:20:00.000+08:00

The impetus for this post came from David Britt, who has been president of the United Way of Central Louisiana for the past decade. Dave left a comment in my previous post, and I felt compelled to make up for overlooking his organization in my hasty and incomplete overview of the nonprofit scene in Cenla. It would take months to uncover every nook and cranny of the Louisiana nonprofit sector's web presence, and fortunately the United Way of Central Louisiana has already completed most of that work.

The homepage of the website for the United Way of Central Louisiana is unassuming and does not belie the bevy of resources it makes available. That said, it's two most important components, the Volunteer Center and the Guide to Human Services, are easy to locate. They will each be dealt with in turn. The homepage also has a link to donate, and an announcement that it is one of just twenty-two organizations in the state to be certified by LANO's (Louisiana Association of Nonprofits) Standards of Excellence accountability program (please see the previous post for more on LANO and the Standards program). It's easy to see why: in every project and forum, one can find almost full disclosure on contacts, financing, goals, and various ways to get involved.

The tabs at the top of the website hold a large amount of useful information about the United Way of Central Louisiana and their programs. Under "Katrina/Rita," the website provides the minutes to the Long Term Recovery Committee and information on the Cenla Hurricane Recovery Center. In the tab "Our Community," one finds the "Human Services Forum," a monthly meeting for nonprofit staff to network with their peers. Also in "Our Community" is a list "About Member Agencies" of the United Way of Cenla, such as the Hope House, the Salvation Army, and the Boys and Girls Club. In "Links," nonprofits can find a number of useful sites from The Louisiana Office of Community Development to Grantsmart. Another tab describes the quarterly educational "GIS Forum," for people who work with Global Information Systems. "Young Professionals" provides information on an organization for those under the age of forty to network with other community-oriented professionals in the Cenla area.

The Volunteer Center provides a searchable and browsable database of volunteer opportunities for the seventeen member agencies of the United Way of Cenla. There is also a calendar, though it seems seldom used.

The real meat lies in the Guide to Human Services, which goes far beyond the member agencies of the United Way of Cenla. It uses an interactive website, called CommunityPoint, that is described as a "powerful website application designed to increase public access to community resources. It enables managers of information and referral data to publish and edit data in a real time environment." It is an open system that has an easy application process for organizations. Hundreds of charitable organizations in Cenla have gotten involved. There are unique searches to find volunteer opportunities, agency profiles, (which “include address, phone numbers, web, and email addresses, hours, disability access, fees, eligibility requirements, and service descriptions”） agency wishlists, and--perhaps most important--the specific services provided by various agencies. It also includes a calendar, but it too appears to be underutilized.

My favorite link on the United Way website (here's where the nerd in me comes out) is the Pathways Mapping Initiative, which is a compilation of articles and case studies for the development of communities in America. It can be found in the "Solutions to Poverty" selection of the "Our Community" tab. Pathways has two initiatives: Child School Readiness and Family Economic Success. A tab at the top of the Pathway's website gives you the option to view each initiative's Components, such as Attributes of Effectiveness, Examples, and Rationale. For the first-timer, the Actions Overview gives a sense of the breadth of Pathways' resources (these links are for the Pathway to Family Economic Success). The Pathway Navigator is interesting, though my personal favorite, of course, is the list of Indicators.

To list one example of many, "More Outlets for Reasonably Priced Goods and Services" is in the group of Community Investment indicators under Family Economic Success. This indicator acknowledges that in inner-city areas, retail goods are generally more expensive. A link to a project that analyzes vendors is provided, and suggestions and concerns are discussed. Essentially, nonprofits or policy makers could use this information to begin to address the disparity of goods-pricing in economically depressed areas. Other indicators include "Increased Home Ownership," "Increase of Levels of Family Income and Earning," and "Children With Health Insurance."

My personal interest lies in methodologies for evaluating and monitoring public policy and nonprofit projects. These kinds of websites provide virtually limitless resources for researching social empowerment.

The website of the United Way of Central Louisiana has many more features, and here I've listed those that I feel are most important. I encourage you to peruse their site, and if I've missed anything, let me and other readers know by leaving a comment. Their website is just one of many examples of the impact the Internet can have on the nonprofit sector. As evidenced by the explosion of personal and political blogs, the open exchange of ideas on the web is democratizing information and allowing ordinary citizens to easily get involved at the grassroots level. There is one caveat, of course: sitting in front of your computer is no substitute for leaving the house and getting your hands dirty.

Nonprofit Coordination and Capacity-Building Research: Some Examples from the State of Louisiana

2007-03-20T16:54:00.000+08:00

This post is inspired by a dialog with Lamar White, Jr., who works as an assistant to Mayor Roy. With a new administration comes new ideas and the chance to innovate in the face of institutional inertia.

Nonprofit organizations are a vital part of a community's ability to provide services to the marginalized, and nonprofits often work independently of the government and compete with each other for limited resources. Because of this, any opportunity to eliminate redundancy in services should be readily welcomed. On the other hand, government must tread the fine line between advising and interfering, as nonprofit organizations have the desire--and the right--to make their own operational decisions.

In the following I hope to present examples of efforts to increase efficiency in the nonprofit sector, and suggest that these efforts stand on two important legs: coordination and research. These legs correspond to the reasons for merging the Center for Nonprofit Resources and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center into the Greater New Orleans Nonprofit Knowledge Works in 1992:

Local initiatives focused on building the capacity of the nonprofit sector are uncoordinated and inconsistent in their messages, often working at odds with one another.
Much of the key information needed for planning either does not exist or is not readily accessible.

I couldn't have said it better myself. This organization is an excellent example when it comes to the innovative capacity-building research necessary to achieve nonprofit coordination in Alexandria. The GNO Nonprofit Knowledge Works

strives to enhance the management capacity of the local nonprofit sector to provide information-driven, systemic and effective solutions to community problems. We believe that evidence (data, published research, and community perspective) is an essential foundation for the development of effective social programs. And our unique emphasis on systems is based on our theory that no matter how well agencies operate independently, real community change will depend on nonprofits working together in systems that are oriented to meeting clients’ multidimensional needs. [emphasis mine]

[Although Hentschel (1999)* claims that data can be either quantitative or qualitative and that methods are actually more or less contextual, the common wisdom in America is that "data" refers to hard statistics derived from quantitative methods. Because of sampling techniques, this kind of data is usually very general and is good for identifying trends. "Community perspective" here would include qualitative information, teased from interviews and case studies. It yields highly contextualized results and is useful for determining the cause and effect relationships. "Published research," of course, can be either quantitative or qualitative.

Moreover, qualitative evaluative techniques have only recently come into the mainstream for assessing and monitoring the results of nonprofit programs and government policy. Traditionally, the "hard" statistics of quantitative empiricism, which emphasize reaching benchmarks and goals established before the onset of the project, have dominated evaluation. This approach to management and monitoring has been criticized for being inflexible. Qualitative and participatory evaluation methods often build in mechanisms for the ongoing assessment of projects, taking not only top-down management priorities into account, but also considering the demands and adaptations of the beneficiaries and stakeholders of a project. This empowering epistemological shift has obvious political implications, and our government does not exist in a vacuum of good policy research bereft of political motivation.]

The GNO NKW describe the purpose of one current project, a Community-Based Service Network, as the development of "a local model for the use of wraparound funds to increase coordination of care among local agencies." Wraparound funds usually do not come from typical funding streams, and therefore can be used more flexibly. Another project, the maintenance and dissemination program called Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, is a staggering resource with important lessons on the way community data and advice can be made available for the entire public (honestly, if you skip every other link in this post, at least look at this one).

Another example of the use of analytical information to inform public and nonprofit policy comes from the Urban Institute. They have compiled a research bibliography of studies related to Hurricane Katrina that is broken into six components:

(1) housing;
(2) children and families;
(3) arts and culture;
(4) disaster preparedness;
(5) community health; and
(6) poverty reduction and asset development.

This research has been compiled to be a tool of policy-makers and community organizations struggling to understand the problems (and their potential solutions) wrought by the failure of the levee system of New Orleans. It is, of course, only useful if it is used.

The group that may be most vital to streamlining our state's nonprofit sector is LANO, the Louisiana Association of Nonprofits. Their website advertises

an expansive slate of trainings covering a wide range of nonprofit topics

one-on-one technical assistance to help you confront the challenges you face in the nonprofit world

member discounts that significantly lower the cost of operating a nonprofit and let you spend more money achieving your mission

representation of the nonprofit sector to the Legislature, Governor's Office, and other local, state, and nation government agencies

leadership for the nonprofits world, bringing national best-practices and innovative strategies to Louisiana.

LANO, in addition to the Greater New Orleans Nonprofit Knowledge Works, gives advice for starting one's own nonprofit organization. Their website also has a number of extremely useful features, including employment listings (I wish I would have seen this when I was preparing to get my B.A.), a member directory, and (wait for it) a central calendar of events and training. Perhaps the most notable is its section on capacity-building, which is highlighted by an eightfold certification program for ethics and accountability to improve the operation of nonprofits, called Louisiana Standards (also a must-read).

"Why haven't I heard of LANO before now?" you may ask. A possible reason is suggested by the graphic at left. LANO has five major operating centers, the closest of which to Alexandria is Lafayette, though we are grouped with the Northern Louisiana region out of Shreveport. At first glance, this may seem like regional discrimination, but let's consider a few numbers. As mentioned on CenLamar, Alexandria has about eighty nonprofits. According to an Urban Institute report, in 2003 almost half of nonprofit expenditures came out of New Orleans, when the state of Louisiana boasted around 3200 nonprofits. At that time, New Orleans was "home to nearly 900 charities spending $4.3 billion and holding $6.3 billion in assets."

It's no surprise that Alexandria is not home to one of LANO's centers. In light of this fact, and LANO's extensive resources and training opportunities, more Alexandria nonprofits should be encouraged to get involved with the greater nonprofit sector of Louisiana. When browsing the member directory, one finds that the Alexandria members include:

AfterCare Ministries
The Arts Council of Central Louisiana
Cenla Advantage Partnership (CAP)
Cenla Area Agency on Aging, Inc.
Cenla Medication Access Program (CMAP)
Central Louisiana Aids Support Services, Inc.
Central Louisiana Community Foundation
Central Louisiana Partners in Literacy
Community Development Works
Community Healthworx
Family Counseling Agency
Friendship House Adult Day Services Inc.
Hope House Inc.
Inner City Revitalization Corp.
Kent Plantation House Inc.
Louisiana Youth Prevention Services
Pediatric Therapy Center Inc.
Rapides Children Advocacy Center Inc.
Renaissance Home For Youth
Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation, Inc.
The Extra Mile Region VI (Pineville)
The Orchard Foundation
The Rapides Exploratory Education House, Inc.
The Rapides Foundation
The Shepherd Center
United Way of Central Louisiana Inc
Volunteers of America of Central Louisiana
YMCA of Central Louisiana
YWCA of Central Louisiana

That's twenty-eight by my count, excluding the Extra Mile because it's in Pineville. Some of these memberships may be defunct or expired.

LANO was founded in the late nineties by the Council for A Better Louisiana.

CABL is an excellent public interest research organization. They frequently conduct surveys on voter opinions (such as this one on statewide support for Health Care Reform), and they publish a popular resource called the Louisiana Fact Book for the 2007 Election Year: How Do We Measure Up... How Far Do We Have to Go?

I have only begun to understand the impact of operationalized research on the coordination of nonprofit organizations. I have learned that responsibly applying appropriate research methodologies--be they quantitative or qualitative--is essential to determining the efficacy of a particular project. Moreover, a combination of these methods can be used to uncover ways for the entire sector to improve. To name a couple of quick examples, quantitative statistics can be applied to government data to find patterns in target groups and funding streams, and qualitative research practices can be used to measure the opinions of those in nonprofit management towards government policies.

Let's return to my favorite example, the Greater New Orleans Nonprofit Knowledge Works. They explain the four areas in which they operate, which correspond strikingly to the needs of the nonprofit sector in the City of Alexandria:

1) collaborating with local funders to help them use evidence to strategically invest in the community;
2) working with collaboratives of agencies to design evidence-based, systemic approaches to addressing community problems and then with their member agencies to help them participate in the redesigned system;
3) providing individual agencies with on-demand information and advice to address their technical assistance needs; and
4) creating and maintaining centralized information systems and infrastructure for the local nonprofit sector.

The Knowledge Works is at the cutting-edge of innovation in this field, claiming, "Our systems redesign consulting and our information products require a good deal of innovation because we are working in young disciplines without much codified knowledge." It's true: determining the best research style, method of variable operationalization, and data analysis is no easy task (indeed, this is the field that I hope to study in graduate school; read my original musings on this subject here). In fact, among other things, the organization provides workshops for "evidence-based program planning and grantwriting." But what if a small organization lacks the resources to contract or train a researcher with such technical qualifications?

Consider the following study, conducted by researchers from Loyola a few years ago: Online Communication in Nonprofit Organizations. Following a basic research design, this study investigates the difference between email responses from nonprofits when donating directly to an organization's website or when donating through an intermediate website (to ensure legitimacy). The analysis of this study was accomplished by using descriptive statistics no more complicated than high school algebra.

Remember, making lasting and beneficial change in a community is a long process that requires the transparent participation of a number of actors, including policy-makers, community leaders, and researchers. In my opinion, this change must involve both top-down (government) and bottom-up (grassroots) feedback. Empowering beneficiaries to become active participants gives them a greater stake in their democracy, and ensures the longevity of whatever endeavor will be undertaken.

*Hentschel, J. (1999) Contextuality and data collection methods: a framework and application to health service utilisation, Journal of Development Studies, 35, 64-94.

Hip-hop theolo-G

2007-03-19T19:10:00.000+08:00

As I was researching liberation theology, which argues that the poor and marginalized are special before Jesus and that the highest moral aim is fighting for them, I stumbled across the Indian theologian Sebastian Kappen.

Kappen (who incidentally looks like a beardless Indian version of my father), published Jesus and Freedom in 1977. The book drew heavily from the Latin American priests and theologians who were experimenting with liberation theology. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which Cardinal Ratzinger (da' Pope) was a member, rejected Kappen's book and liberation theology as a whole because of the movement's Marxist sympathies and investigation of spiritual matters informed by materialism. Kappen wrote the pamphlet Censorship and the Future of Asian Theology as a reply. I slowly read the following:

Moreover, if God is alive and speaks to humans of all places and cultures, there is no basis for a censorship that evaluates all theology by the standard of one theology, I mean, by the standard of the dogmas and concepts developed in the western historical-cultural context. The traditional mode of thinking in the West is representational.
[...]
As Asians, our mode of thinking is unitive rather than analytic, experiential rather than representational, existentialist rather than essentialist. The dichotomies western thought has thrown up — matter and spirit, faith and reason, nature and grace, temporal and eternal, human and divine, and the like — are foreign to us. For us thinking is communing, not conquering; is being present to what presents itself, not re-presenting it through concepts; is being one with the oneness of all, not exploding the one into the manifold. Our ancient seers would have questioned even the 'and' in the customary formulation, God and man, if taken in the additive, disjunctive sense ; so finely attuned were they to the underlying oneness of the many. These cultural specificities are ignored by the church when she compels us, Asians, to think as do people in the West. What is this but cultural imperialism and colonisation of the mind?

The primary locus of theology, therefore, cannot be the closed community of Christians but the open community of all those who hunger and thirst for justice and freedom.* And if the theology that emerges out of dialogue with the Lord of history bursts the old wineskins of tradition, none need shed a tear over it except the makers of old wineskins!**

Word, Baba Kappen-G. Before I made it to the word "manifold," the prophetic words of Deltron Z's Madness stood up in my mind:

The universe is one and I can see what rap can be glorious
Put in the Smithsonium my podiums for holy hymns
But you see who's controlling them
Fuck myself off cuz of the egotistical mode I'm in
[...]
I'm trapped in a bottle
My music's gettin hollow
That's what happens when humanity you follow
Where every leak or info is hard to swallow
Sell your Marlboros and car insurance
Put niggas on the moon and can't pay your burdens
I smoke herb and rock a turban
Meditate on the world and whats occurrin
A lot of white boys like the style and copy
Dig in something deeper and you'll peep that were not free
It's not about the separation its about the population
[...]
When all paths are intersections
It all depends on the persons perception
[...]
I believe you held something back for too long
It grew strong
And energy has its own will
And people think they make music still
But music is there with out you or me we just manipulate
For better or worse so let it situate
[...]
I'm glad I love music and life
cuz it's easy to see the pain and strife
and end it all tonight.

Exactly like an Aeolian Harp, which "is played not by human hands, but by the wind. Its melodies and harmonies are not those that we have chosen. They are the improvisation of nature itself."

(the remainder of this entry has been moved to immutablefruit.livejournal.com)

Working Overtime

2007-03-18T18:22:00.000+08:00

This weekend, an article I wrote was accepted by the Sichuan Travel Guide Magazine, a quarterly magazine which was recently started by the administrator of iHotPot.com. The article will be published in about a month in their Spring edition. iHotPot (titled the Shu Kingdom Guide) is a forum for expats primarily living in Chengdu. I, of course, do not live in Chengdu, and my piece focuses on my experiences celebrating the frigid Tibetan New Year with the nomads of the Zongta Grassland.

Losar marked the beginning of the Year of the Fire Boar, and isn't that little SuperPig cute?

I will post the article here after the publication hits the stands. It will also be available on iHotPot.com at that time. If anyone would like to read the unedited draft before then (Mom), please email me and I'll send it to you in the good faith that you will not scoop the magazine.

柔中有刚

2007-03-15T17:43:00.000+08:00

So it's been over six months since I first began this job in Kangding County. I realized recently that I've never related exactly the inside-out turn of events that led me here. I promise I'll keep it short.

It begins back in late August. After the teachings in McLeod Ganj in Himachal Pradesh, Mike and I traveled for a week with Neil Guidry and his group of Tulane social work graduate students. In addition to the two of us, we were accompanied by a Jordanian woman and a girl from Rochester, NY. The winding jeep rides through the bright Himalayan foothills were filled with idle chatter. Neil sat in the front with the driver (in case his Thai "Press Pass" was needed to bypass toll stops), Mike, Nada, and Meg occupied the bench seat, and yours truly, the wannabe minstrel, strummed his miniature backpacking guitar in the rear.

As many of you know I returned to Asia without much of a plan, chasing a dream that I wasn't sure existed. I just wanted to get back to China to practice my Mandarin, and to hopefully work for an NGO doing something that could help me feel like I was moving in a direction, any direction. Teaching English would be something to fall back on. I hadn't made any real progress, though I met a couple of the right people at the temple in McLeod, and before I left I bounced ideas off of the requisite professors and friends.

While lamenting the lameness of English instruction, one of those friends, Olivia, mentioned that she did enjoy meeting the teachers of a group called the Bridge Fund. They didn't have to put up with run of the mill Chinese classes, which are notorious for rote learning, apathy, and poor spoken English. Moreover, they worked with Tibetans in some of the more remote areas of Greater Tibet.

When allowing my mouth to wander through the list of half-baked job ideas I had created, I mentioned the Bridge Fund to Meg and the others. Meg immediately mentioned that she was personal friends with the founder and director of the organization, a woman named Monica. Meg lives deep in Qinghai, a province that borders the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the PRC. She teaches some small children in order to pursue her practice in her lama's hometown.

Splitting from the others, Meg, Mike and I traveled to Bir so that he could make good on an invitation to meet the Neten Chokling Rinpoche and his consort Tenzin in their home. That evening Meg showed me photos from her computer of the deep green valleys of Qinghai in the summertime. Tiny Tibetan children swam freely in the rivers. She informed me that not far from there, in a town called Jyegu (Yushu), a Bridge Fund school had been established.

The following day we both emailed Monica. I didn't send a formal resume, only a description of my experience and my reasons for wanting to work with Tibetans. A short time later I received an email that the NGO needed a position filled in Dartsedo (Kangding), and that I was to email the China Director of the Bridge Fund to work out the details of the job. Two weeks (and a number of visa-related headaches) later, I found myself completely unqualified in front of an eager group of twenty-nine high school juniors.

I found out from the class's previous English instructor some time later that she had gone through an extensive hiring process. A man named Carlos had been hired to the job, but dropped out unexpectedly weeks before the term was to begin. Via a notable chain of coincidences the Bridge Fund hired me to my current job. It felt effortless. Some have called it karma. For once in my life, I trusted Fate and She delivered. Not until around Thanksgiving did I fully realize my good fortune.

Since then I mentioned to a close friend that I hope to move through life without effort. He was somewhat put off: becoming successful or achieving one's goals often requires a great deal of effort. I'm forced to agree with him, for fear of becoming passive and reactionary and unable to act to improve my life. On the other hand, I can't see the future. I find that in the periods that feel the most certain, things are changing the fastest. How does one live progressively and flexibly without worrying about what lies ahead?

Three and a half years ago I spent a long week of all-day martial arts training in Dali in Yunnan Province. The smooth motions of kungfu are powerful indeed, but they must be lithe and tempered with grace and flexibility. I still remember what the martial artist traced in the dust of the exercise yard to hammer this point home:

柔中有刚

Amidst Yielding Lies Strength

p.s.: Today is the Ides of March. For my American audience, I offer a warning. Because I am thirteen hours ahead, as I publish this you are enjoying that memorable set of strange dreams that delights us before we begin the day. I have all but finished my day. I awoke to a message from an old friend pointing out my shortcomings: inconsiderate carelessness on my part translated into a mark of deep disrespect and betrayal. Though I know I am basically self-centered and exhibit a number of pig-like tendencies, when it becomes obvious to others my ego can't help but be burned. All day long. Please tread with caution on this, the day of Caesar's death.

Do I Really Have a Hand in My Forgetting?

2007-03-13T21:38:00.000+08:00

I put this song on earlier, because Nico has always had a lot of meaning for me. This time I felt reminded of something, and I realized that it was trying to get me to remember this.

The Fairest of the Seasons

Now that it's time

 Now that the hour hand has landed at the end
Now that it's real
Now that the dreams have given all they had to lend
 I want to know do I stay or do I go
 And maybe try another time
 And do I really have a hand in my forgetting?

Now that I've tried
Now that I've finally found that this is not the way,
Now that I turn
Now that I feel it's time to spend the night away
I want to know do I stay or do I go
 And maybe finally split the rhyme
And do I really understand the undernetting ?

Yes and the morning has me
Looking in your eyes
And seeing mine warning me
To read the signs carefully.

Now that it's light
 Now that the candle's falling smaller in my mind
Now that it's here
Now that I'm almost not so very far behind
I want to know do I stay or do I go
And maybe follow another sign
And do I really have a song that I can ride on ?

Now that I can
Now that it's easy, ever easy all around.
Now that I'm here
Now that I'm falling to the sunlights and a song
 I want to know do I stay or do I go
 And do I have to do just one
 And can I choose again if I should lose the reason ?

Now that I smile,
Now that I'm laughing even deeper inside.
Now that I see,
 Now that I finally found the one thing I denied
It's now I know do I stay or do I go
And it is finally I decide
 That I'll be leaving
 In the fairest of the seasons.      

I don't like Chinese Cake, but I do love Irish Whiskey

2007-03-12T21:59:00.000+08:00

Here I am enjoying Jameson, neat, at Emily's birthday party. These pictures were taken a week after roasting the lamb leg.

I don't remember what I was saying, but judging by the look on Sarah's face, it was probably really smooth. Please contribute your own caption in the comments.

Photo Archive Part Three

2007-03-10T20:59:00.000+08:00

Dharamsala, August 2006

Reuniting with Mike Griffith, now with the Tulane School of Social Work, was a highlight of my trip to Northern India.

In McLeod Gang during the waning monsoon

New Orleans, June 2006

I miss the slow life in MidCity.

Ian Aucoin, on the right, took the photo from the vault below. Beside me is Breton Boudreaux. This party, at Meghan and Shuchin's recently renovated shotgun on the corner of Toulouse and North Rendon, was to celebrate the occasion of, well, probably nothing. Does one need a reason to have a house party?

Wif da numba one scrilla on Norf Alexanda

From the vault: Yunnan, August 2003

This is a typical Tibetan man. This photo was taken on a Chinese bus near Zhongdian, while bouncing around northern Yunnan Province with Josh Tremblay and Ian Aucoin. Zhongdian is one of a few places that purports to be the authentic Shangri-la.

Photo Archive Part Two

2007-03-09T23:23:00.000+08:00

Nepal, January 2007

Baba-ji, a hermit near Shivapuri peak, opened his home to us for a night as we hiked around Shivapuri National Forest for a few days.

The home of Baba-ji is very peaceful.

This is the other part of the hermitage and the yard beneath the porch pictured above.

Sweat and the Himalaya:
Cousin William, Chris, Mike, Fulbrighter Ian McCormick, and yours truly

On Shivapuri Peak

Mike experiments with form, light, and balance.

On the road near Chissapani in the Shivapuri National Forest north of Kathmandu.

In an impressive cave beneath Bhandipur. Leif, on the right, is in Tanzania working on an art project with village children to raise money for basic infrastructure projects.

"Heartly Wel-Come in Maoist Base Area to All the Tourists. Long Live Marxism, Leninism, Maosim, Prachandapath," reads a wall in Chissapani village.

This photo is of the non-view from the World Peace Pagoda in Pokhara.

Kathmandu, September 2006

Jason Fults, whom Mike and I first met at the Dalai Lama temple in India, took this photo just before he left on his long journey around Southeast Asia.

The facade of the Sadbhawana Party Headquarters in Kathmandu. Sadbhawana is one of the seven powerful political parties in the Nepali Government, and their office was little more than a few rooms with mostly plastic furniture.

Jason and Mike with the student activist of the Sadbhawana Party. Jason, who is committed to grassroots and alternative political activism, became very excited when the students recounted the widespread protests of April, 2006.

Photo Archive Part One

2007-03-06T20:28:00.000+08:00

These photos were taken on or around February 1st at a cookout on the roof of an eleven-story building in Chengdu. Only recently returned to China from Kathmandu, I had met these American college students just days before I decided to purchase two pounds of lamb leg (at roughly $1.25/lb). I also roasted beef kabobs and pork ribs.

Cooking with wine

Carving the roast beast

Chengdu served as my home base during a week-long excursion into northern Sichuan's Aba Prefecture. I had been living out of my modest backpack in Nepal since before New Years. I spent the majority of this vacation from my vacation loafing around with BurningMan kid Zander and underground hip hop aficionado Scott.

Medium-Rare: Chef's Choice

The following week I stewed the remainder of the frozen leg for Boston Emily's twenty-first birthday.

These are probably the most recent photos available of each of the Smith twins. I'm sure Mike (and Shuchin) would have been aghast at such atavistic disregard for sentient life.

What's Up, Breaux?

2007-03-05T20:29:00.000+08:00

While catching my regular waves along Internet Reef I stumbled across this nugget, which I had caught mention of on Oyster's New Orleans blog but immediately dismissed as too good to be possible. Larry Sabato does an excellent job laying the groundwork for the gubernatorial races of 2007, which are already being overlooked by basically everyone as we oogle over the next Lemmiwink to make it into the Oval Orifice.

After discussing the woes of embattled Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher (and declaring Mississippi's Haley Barbour to be a shoe-in), Sabato turns his Crystal Ball to the Sportsman's Paradise:

In Louisiana, another Governor is in trouble, this one a Democrat, Kathleen Blanco, first elected like Fletcher in 2003. Hurricane Katrina is the proximate cause of Blanco's woes. Fair or not, she was seen as ineffective in the storm's aftermath, compared to Governor Barbour in the Magnolia State. Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans received as much blame locally as President Bush and his incompetent Federal Emergency Management Agency.

And the kicker:

The scenario being most widely discussed now is a surprise: Blanco could step aside, and popular former U.S. Senator John Breaux (D) would take Blanco's place in the race. (Breaux and Blanco have been allies, and Breaux has recently raised some money for her reelection.)

Wee-hoo! Johnny versus Bobby! A bayou grudge-match for da' hole famly.

Now, someone with a career as long as Breaux's must have plenty of bad things to say about him (and I don't mean hanging out with Johnny Rzeznik of the Goo Goo Dolls), and certainly our local lovable RINO's will drag them all out if John decides to run. I remember the man most for when he fondly told W. Bush to stick the offer of Energy Secretary up his Texas-sized Crawford to preserve the Democratic balance in the Senate.

Who knows what will happen (besides Pat Leahy and Mr. Spock, as always)? I'm just glad I'll be back in time for all the fun.

[I've been waiting three months to make that joke, since you asked.]

Journey to an End

2007-03-02T10:51:00.000+08:00

This morning I am posting quickly from Tenzin Mullin's apartment in Kangding. He just left for his first class of the new term; I begin on Monday. For the previous two weeks I have visited a number of students on the rolling Kham plateau, bringing in the Lunar New Year in high style with the families of my favorite student nomads. A good story is there to tell, though I have a semester's worth of planning to do before I can relax and describe those ersatz adventures in the clumsy and jejune prose so characteristic of this blog.

Last night, we ate homemade Cantonese and Sichuanese sausage and roast chicken, and drank wine and Chinese sherry to celebrate the resignation of our close friend, John from Michigan. He had finally told his boss that he would not renew his contract as the Education Director of Kham Aid. As I know well, quitting one's job is certainly an occasion for alcohol and the eating of meat. We were joined by Maowei, Tenzin's new bride from Emei Shan. Although Tenzin is a decade my senior, I consider him my brother due to his playful recklessness.

Tenzin and Maowei decided to get married a week before they left New Zealand on his annual vacation to visit his family. It was her first time outside of China, and other than missing Sichuanese spice (which I find to be a bit ordinary--no jalapeno, tabasco, or cayenne to be found anywhere) she rather enjoyed herself. I sat through five albums of photos.

John returned to the office to sleep, as he has to work this morning. The remaining three of us decided to walk home through the crisp Kangding evening. Spring is approaching; the moon will be full in a day or two, signifying the end of New Year celebrations. Tenzin affectionately chided her for her caution on crossing the road (rather unusual for a native Chinese woman), and she got on the subject of her father who was killed in a motorcycle accident some twenty years ago.

She said that she and her mother were no longer sad about the incident. The choose to remember him for his humor and benevolence. Though English is her second language, I felt she still described him in the words of a seven year-old. She remembered the way other children and adults talked about her as if she was so unfortunate growing up, being without a father, though she always felt his presence any time something good happened to her.

She wondered why people must always gossip about others. Tenzin, after recounting his childish obliviousness to his parent's divorce, remarked that people just need something to talk about. In truth, when people talk about others, they are really only talking about themselves.

I immediately thought of this blog.

[RIP,T.R.]

Open Threads

2007-02-11T15:48:00.000+08:00

I slept most of the way up the mountains to meet my nomad friends in Aba Prefecture last week. The evening before had gone fairly late into the night (or early into the morning) and in spite of the bumpy switchbacks I was asleep for the first five hours. I stuffed myself with twice-cooked pork and rice at the dusty roadside lunch stand. Further down the road I noticed the snowmelt that had run down the wooded hillside into the shadow of the lee of the mountain. In the colder air, the water had refrozen into columns of ice, still and static yet textured with the look of bubbling liquid motion. The rice from lunch put me back to sleep.

I woke to a completely different landscape. The firs on the green cliffs had been replaced by a treeless shallow valley, tan and rocky and unencumbered. Yaks idly grazed. The surroundings seemed high, although from every direction one could see only higher hills and distant mountains. The low clouds or the thin air gave off the impression of elevation, or perhaps it was mere association upon seeing the woolly beasts of burden.

The following morning I opened the curtain for sunrise. My watch read 8:15. Fat crystals of ice covered the glass. As the ocher rays bent across the hard grassland the frost began to break up on the inside of the window. The ice crystals became fuzzy at the edges. They weeped into dirty wet drops at the bottom of the panes, and refroze once out of the light into amber icicles beside the bed. I picked up Frank Kingdon Ward's In the Land of Blue Poppies, given to me for the moment by Mike to lend me "perspective on living out there:"

It may be remarked, however, that though there is a season set apart for harvest, yet there are always seeds; just as, in the ups and downs of the collector's life, there are always flowers.

The nomadic brother of the Sichuan director of the Bridge Fund, with whom I had been staying, helped me find a cheap truck to Drago's village. The monk I sat beside eagerly shook my hand as we parted ways in Longri Xiang, where I found Drago. For two days with Drago I enjoyed easy rural life. There is little to do in the wintertime on the plateau. Many nomads come out of the plains to wait out the cold months, with little else to do but collect yak patties to fuel the wood stoves. We walked around the small town talking. Brown and white were everywhere: dull tans and drowsy grays, and brown masquerading as green on the shrubby spruce. Near the small gompa, merely a sagging collection of wooden prayer wheels along a circumambulation route, we met a Belgian researcher and her Tibetan friend traveling from Xining in Qinghai Province.

She had been away from Europe studying nomadic folk music for years. She felt that because she had been in such a special cultural place for so long that she could in no way simply turn around and walk away from it. I thought of Chris in New Orleans and Michael in Nepal, and my students at the edge of Kham.

The time crawled through two nights. I missed the day's car to Hongyuan in the morning, and rode out midday on a postal motorcycle. We threaded through the open plain, flanked in by the low snowy peaks to the south and the rising northern grasslands. He let me off at the intersection of the Longri Valley and the Sichuanese road from Chengdu to Aba and Hongyuan.

A teenage nomad was sitting on the painted concrete sign that marked the roads and the town. He was from Xining, far in Northern Amdo, and had come to Sichuan to save money herding yaks. He said to me that he had no parents and had lived in Nepal. I told him about visiting Mike and the monasteries around Kathmandu. He offered me his mala, dark orange prayer beads made of thin plastic, and taught me to count the number of mantras by moving a loop of thread along the beads. As I searched for something to give him in return, I found a black cord, one of many blessed by Lama Wangdu and given to Mike in Nepal.

Earlier that day my Hindu bracelet from the Ganges River had broken. The red yarn threads had opened as I washed socks on the porch of Drago's familial home. Michael and I had gone to the Ganges at Haridwar in Northern India on August 29 last summer, one year after the New Orleans hurricane and one day before I crossed into Nepal for the first time. A young brahmin on the river said prayers as we made our holy baths, giving us blessed prasad and water from the river to be taken to the wife and children of Mike's deceased tabla drum teacher. Last month in Lelegaon, Nepal, our friend Shyem told me that having a string from a priest for that long is unusual. I had left it to fall off on its own. I had intended to throw the yarn from the Ganges back into a river when it finally broke, but the stream is frozen at ten thousand feet in the Longri Valley. I burned it instead.

Only a few hours the bracelet had expired, now suddenly replaced by a string of Buddhist beads. I deliberately hadn't bought beads while in Nepal. I didn't feel right deciding whether to own a holy item as a souvenir. I felt I should simply wait, and if any were given to me in the future to accept them humbly. That gift would be a sort of karmic indicator, the necessary temporal condition for starting to recite Om mani padme hums. On the other side of the road the land sloped down beneath the herds and faded to cloudy mountains at the dark foot of the valley. I took a ride in a white van with a handful of Tibetans.

My student's English name is Lisa, but her Tibetan name Lotus (Wanma in Amdo; Pema in standard Tibetan) is more fitting. Her family has a winter home outside Hongyuan, the namesake of an upper county in the Prefecture. The dwelling is framed with solid logs, its braced roof angled against the wind. The dry grass shook fiercely at dusk and dusty powdered snow began to fall.

Her parents offered yak dumplings, though Lotus isn't eating meat over the next two weeks--including the new year Losar--due to the death of her older maternal uncle. The days moved slowly. Her parents gave me a deep golden Tibetan overshirt, and collared with thick colored material. Their generosity impressed me deeply. Later that night the weather cleared, and in my Nepali touque, scarf, and wool coat quietly found Drako the Dragon between the two Dippers in the northern sky. Though half a world from Louisiana and Colorado, the winter constellations of the northern hemisphere do not vary along the latitude lines to China and Tibet. The evening before I left, Lotus's cousin Potala gave me a ceremonial strip of silk and an image of an instructive meditating dakini goddess.

Soon I will be going back to Kangding from Chengdu, and moving through to Kham to celebrate the Lunar New Year with other Tibetan nomads on the snowy grassland. I have had much time to reflect on returning to the states in the summer. I have relaxed a bit by being with new friends in Chengdu and Amdo, and curiously as I miss Louisiana less I become more confident on returning in half a year. I intend to be back at the Teacher's College by the beginning of March.

Festival Season

2007-02-03T14:35:00.000+08:00

I consider February to be the real Holiday Season.

February 2: Groundhog Day
February 12: President\'s Day
February 14: Valentine\'s Day
February 17: Lunar New Year (Tibet, China)
February 19: Lundi Gras
February 20: Mardi Gras
February 24: My birthday

It just gets better and better.

Back on the Plateau

2007-02-03T14:20:00.001+08:00

A week ago when I flew into Chengdu I found that most or all of my friends were out of pocket (sick, traveling), so I went to the local supertourist bar to see whom I could recognize. One Guinness and one Beck later I finally recognized someone, a Spanish girl named Ira who challenged me to a game of fuzball. As we were playing on what surely is one of the only tables in Sichuan, possibly China, an American kid wearing a hoodie and some hemp challenged her. He had plans to go to a bar aptly named Hemphouse, and seeing as the place we were at was dead anyway, I went too.

Two bars, two clubs, and a bottle of Absolut later I found myself crashed out on his couch. It turns out that he and his fellow students are mostly pretty hip, and I felt rather fortunate in putting my trust in luck and having it work out. In my experience, when hitting a bar stag things can either turn out really great or really terrible. This was a great night which turned into a great week.

Yesterday I finally got around to leaving Chengdu for a bit, taking the ten hour bus ride up to Aba Prefecture. My buddy Drako, who works for A. Rinpoche, lives about sixty kilometers from the Hongyuan County seat, Hongyuan. I\'m in Hongyuan now, having just spurned a ride to Drako\'s home because of the obviousness of the ripoff. Last night and presumably tonight I will stay again with Tsedrup, the younger brother of Gabzung, the Sichuan Program Director for the Bridge Fund.

I had heard it\'s cold up here, and even though this year is a mild winter Tsedrup gave me five blankets to keep me warm last night. For good measure under the blankets I slipped the fleece blanket given to me by Steve Clark before he died. I was able to stay relatively warm, and the clear full (or almost full) moon poured brightly through the curtains of the second storey window. As I fell asleep I urged the round moon to set quickly, so as not to block out all of the stars which I knew hid in the moonlight of that solid night.

This morning there was ice in my Nalgene. Tsedrup\'s son Dorje Ningju has showed me the town, and without him I\'d be lost in this fairly small town. He speaks some Sichuan Dialect, of which I understand less, but considering my Amdo Tibetan is basically nonexistent we\'re making do just fine.

The phone numbers for Lisa, my student from Hongyuan and ostensibly my reason for coming, are all bogus. Lisa is Tsedrup\'s niece, though I get very confused very quickly when it comes to nomad family trees due to the number of young mothers, mixed families, and men who marry a girl and later her sister. Tsedrup is herding this afternoon, and I hope tonight he\'ll be able to show me Lisa\'s home.

Tsedrup offered to bring me out to help them herd, but I slept too late and my horse-riding skills are kind of nonexistent. Some of my other students have offered to teach me, in addition to learning to downshift on a motorcycle.

By next Friday I hope to return to Chengdu. One of my new American friends is turning 21. I\'ll leave soon after that, stopping at home in Guza to shower and wash clothes. At that point it will be off to the Kham part of the Plateau to ring in the new year with a couple of my favorite nomad students. They\'re second cousins, I think.

Non-profit Nerds Unite!

2007-01-29T17:01:00.000+08:00

I'm killing time this Monday afternoon at the Bridge Fund office in southern Chengdu.

I enjoy the small staff here, though my boss Sherub and the program director Kabsung are both out sick at the moment. Everyone is Tibetan, and most of the project managers (grunts) are graduates of English Training Programs similar to the one for which I teach. They're good natured, and while living in a big Chinese city like Chengdu must sometimes suck for a kid who grew up on a grassland, I can tell they enjoy and believe in their work.

While in Kathmandu Mike lent me Wealth of the Poor, the World Resources Council official publication for the year 2005. The work essentially argues that the current and potential financial situation of the world's poorest is vastly underestimated by international bodies and local governments. Most of the world's indigenous poor make their livelihoods from the environment and not from wages or remittances. The purpose is not to say that these people are richer than we think, it's to argue that their environmental situation is crucial to lifting them out of poverty. Too often governments make commitments to alleviate poverty but do not address environmental sustainability or stewardship, which is often the lynchpin of survival.

The extent of the publication's statistics and case studies is what struck me as truly laudable. It was also very oriented towards giving power to the people.

Here in the office, I've picked up a copy of Methods in Development Research: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. It has a number of case studies with an emphasis on asking the right questions and using the right data to assess development projects. I've also got my eye on a fat volume called Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, but it seems a bit daunting at the moment.

I didn't take behavioral statistics until the second semester of my junior year at Rice, because I didn't add my Psychology major until I returned from China. That course basically changed the entire way that I view human epistimology. In psychology, the proper way to analyze basic statistical hypotheses is to compare the measured difference between two conditions against a random difference between the conditions (null-hypothesis). If the experimental results diverge from a model of randomness by more than five percent, the data are said to be "statistically significant."

Essentially it is a method of finding a measurable signal amidst random noise. Our brains work in a similar manner: in order for a cognitive event to be salient (perceptible), the significance of the signal must break a threshhold to be noticed among the noise of random neuron firing.

Statistics allows soft sciences like psychology and economics to actually discuss reality quantitatively. It allows an experiment about the way that people behave to be subject to factor analysis. It moves the psychologist away from the armchair and into the laboratory. I've abandoned psychology as an option for graduate school, but I am hoping that I will be able to continue to study statistics in whatever I choose to do later on.

I've renewed my interest in NGO work, and books like these give me hope that I'll be able to link my willingness to work in the development sphere with my secret desire to parse vast swaths of numbers into something statistically significant. In this Zen Kantian world, where no thing exists as "a thing in itself," I feel it is the only way to make a statement of fact beyond mere speculation.

If only there were a way to evaluate the hearts of men.

I'd most like to find a way to do this work closer to home. My fantasy is to find a field with as much relevance to the Tibetan Plateau as to the new New Orleans.

Back in the PRoC

2007-01-27T20:20:00.000+08:00

"Back in the PRoC.
No one's as lucky as me, yeah.
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRo
Back in the PRoC."

Well, I made it back to Chengdu without any hassle. The streets of China actually appear clean and orderly compared to those of Kathmandu and Nepal. My opinion of Chinese traffic sanity has come full circle in a meager three years. The fashion has changed considerably in that time, shifting from fifties conservatism to eighties kitcsh, though my opinion of it hasn't: Chinese people categorically haven't known how to dress themselves since the middle of the Qing Dynasty or thereabouts. I love it here, of course.

My previous post gave light to a bit of angst I've had over the last short period of time, and it was going to be three separate posts but I felt that there were some undercurrents uniting my disparate thoughts and feelings about the last year. On the whole, I feel really good about the way things are going right now. In fact, the real question is whether to renew my contract for another year this spring.

To put it simply, I feel as if I've totally "changed my life" in the last year. I quit my two part-time jobs in Houston at the end of 2005. I feel like I spent most of the end of that year in Houston hospitals, what with Jay and Nath and Sonny (RIP). At our cousin Holly's wedding in PA Michael convinced me to move to New Orleans. Chris had already decided to leave Portland. I made arrangements and was there before February 2006.

I cut my hair and shaved my beard, and then cut my hair again. Between the Mardi Gras season and starting a good (read "decently paying") job in New Orleans and Mardi Gras, I kept myself quite distracted from what leaving Houston had meant for me. It turned out to be completely essential to leaving behind college and making the transition from that life and lifestyle to a more responsible (read "adult situations") one. It was all a matter of perception, of course, the change in physical space allowing for a new psychological space bereft of the baggage of finishing university. Leaving was doing something, and I had been treading water for eight months.

Some of those bags--the people with whom I lived and loved (though I was a coward to admit it, even to myself)--have found their ways into my dreams, though rarely my reality. I miss them, and I have been mostly unable to feel as though I didn't let them each down in different ways, and that has kept me from even contacting some of them.

As spring became summer in the difficult new Big Easy, I began to feel as if I was again stagnating. Waiting tables, like other types of indentured servitude, has the special property of breaking the will of the waiter. Mike left for Asia, and our idyllic months living together in an economical double shotgun came to a close. I moved near work, living with Chris's longtime friend Bjorn, a tiler from Baton Rouge. Bjorn tosses and heaves a baseball bat in exactly the same fashion as the axe-wielding Neil Cassady described by Tom Wolfe in Acid Test [edit 1/29 with picture]. Shuchin had returned to New Orleans from Houston. Lamar had begun doing well for himself in Alexandria. I embraced Louisiana with a clean heart after almost five years in Texas, but yet it was not enough.

I grew back my beard and decided to return to Asia too, again following Mike but this time to Delhi and Kathmandu. Crossing the globe did more this time than open up new psychological space, it made me feel like a new person again in a way I hadn't experienced since I was nineteen in that period between working the Rayado backpacking program in New Mexico and leaving for China the first time. I didn't have a plan but I had money from the restaurant, and the more I relied on luck or letting it be or karma the clearer things became. I effortlessly found myself in front of an amazing group of students by mid-September, two weeks late by their academic calendar but fifteen months late by mine.

Then it took until Thanksgiving to appreciate that luck, and considering that I still had 1800 Nepali rupees left in my wallet from the summer I headed back to Kathmandu to reunite with my brothers.

I tend to think about periods of my life as discrete units, at least since the time that I decided to leave Alexandria Senior High to attend the Louisiana School. Usually this directs my memory, but I've found it affects the way I make future plans as well. I have been breaking up my postgraduate future into different years, spending this much hypothetical time in China, and that much in Louisiana, and then this much in graduate school until I'm like thirty or something. Only time to time have I remembered how it feels to have the future open, gaping, almost bleeding in my face with possibility and the horrible pleasure that comes with the irresponsibility of living deliberately.

I don't feel that now though I'd like to, but I'm afraid not to have everything planned out in advance and yet somehow scared of committing to anything.

I'm also pretty uncertain as to what I'll be doing for the next couple of weeks. An Australian guy in my hostel dorm room is up for a bar, so at least I have tonight planned. My ill-timed return to Chengdu has left me without local friends who aren't sick or totally out of pocket. My buddy Drako is already back at his home in Amdo, which is the logically next stop on my trip but I hadn't planned on being there for two weeks. I may go up early and then return to Chengdu in a week or so, to reunite with some American friends. It doesn't matter to me all that much, and you, of course, don't give a shit either.

With love,

Denied!

2007-01-24T21:01:00.000+08:00

I had hoped to take a jeep trip across southern Tibet to Lhasa next week. Going from Kathmandu back to Kham strictly over land is challenging but possible: from Lhasa the new train goes through Xining to Lanzhou, where buses occasionally head south into Amdo (upper Sichuan) and over to Kham at Luhou.

In order to enter Tibet from Nepal, the Chinese government requires foreign travelers to have a Tibet Permit in addition to a special group tourist visa. I currently have an unlimited entry business visa with a residence permit until July 20, and did not foresee any major visa difficulties as I figured it would be valid for the TAR as well.

The Chinese Embassy, however, has informed me that my work visa will be cancelled upon entering Tibet at the border, and there's a chance it will be cancelled if I enter Lhasa by plane. In order to get the Lhasa permit, which can only be arranged by a travel agent, I'd need to sign up for a tourist package, the cheapest of which costs $125 and includes two hotel nights, airport pickup, and the permit. The extra connection from Lhasa to Chengdu was only an extra $75.

I've opted to simply return to Chengdu via Air China to avoid the possibility of losing my visa and being unable to return to work without again leaving China. This is somewhat of a personal defeat. As the Geshe who stays with the Khari Rinpoche explained to me last week, an opportunity to visit the Potala and Jokhang in Lhasa is not the result of personal planning, but due to karma. Now that I have encountered such an obstacle, the implications are glaring. How does this differ from viewing the events of one's life as God's Will, unfolding according to reason but with causes too vast and compounded for a simple mortal to comprehend?

Perhaps it's no different than calling it simple bad luck. Nevertheless, I'm in denial about being denied.

Chris should have arrived in New Orleans sometime today. Hanging out with him here had been most excellent. I'm glad I was able to see him learn to wrap his tongue around a bit of Nepali. His composure was mad righteous for being abroad for the first time, and his years of living out of bags between Louisiana and Oregon gave him the endurance and street sensibility necessary to brush off the hassles of traveling in Asia. He says he'll come back next year.

I had missed both of my brothers tremendously since leaving New Orleans in August, which seems oh so short a time ago. I enjoyed our time together, though one can never have as good time as one remembers having hoped for. It's coming up on a year since I left Houston. I left a life behind, which has made me hurt. I miss the people and the love, and I got exactly what I had hoped for.

[The other morning in a lonely pre-dawn I roll over on my stomach, my arms crossed beneath me, clinging to sensation of the hard mattress on my stomach and hard pillow on my face until my shoulders and neck become cramped and I must roll to my side to massage them out. From then I had Neutral Milk Hotel's Life is Neverending in my head most of the morning:

"But I know that life is neverending.
Sometimes the miles can cut you down to size.
But I had a love,
She was my anchor,
She held me down,
And saved my soul.
So take the blood
You never gave her
And let it go."

and went to bed soloing Perfect Day by Lou Reed:

"You're gonna reap,
Just what you sow..."]

This photos is from the Shivapuri trip I wrote about a few posts down.

I hope that Chris, Mike and I can make a trip from West China over Tibet, ending in Kathmandu. Michael and I could share our cultural and linguistic knowledge, with my experience in China and Kham slowly giving way to his felicity with Tibet and Nepal. I hope we can make this trip in the summer of 2008, when the half of the world that still gives a rat about the Olympics will be fixated on the Chinese capital. It will be the time of my students' graduation. I could visit them then, though

there is the growing possibility that I will choose to remain in Kham for another year. The knowledge that remaining to teach my students in their final year will be my difficult choice to make has slowly settled in the rear of my brain. If Tenzin, the more experienced instructor for the Bridge Fund in Kangding doesn't offer to teach them and prepare them for the Chinese Government Exam and the High Educational Exam, how will I be comfortable in abandoning them to another instructor? My skills are still green but in what ways would I regret turning my back on them after only one year,

which means nothing compared to two years. I could live an easy life in Louisiana. I could handle up on the GRE and LSAT, save some money, and pick a law school or a grad program for international development methodology (the current pet fantasy).

I will definately return to Louisiana in late July, before Chris's birthday.

Speaking of the more immediate future, after Chengdu I'll probably head north into Amdo to see a friend and a student, both from nomad families, in the cold town of Hongyuan. It should be easy to make it to Luhou before nomad Losar (Tibetan New Year) unfolds. I'll be back at the Teacher's College before March, to lesson plan like mad before the start of the spring semester.

"The Answer, My Friend,"

2007-01-20T14:07:00.001+08:00

Spent the last four days outside of the valley.

Chris and a friend and I saw Pokhara, which has a stunning view of the Annapurna, allegedly. Some mist and fog restricted our vision to near ridges and deep valleys and whatnot. As Chris remarked, "That John Denver's full of shit." Pokhara is some kind of heavy tourist spot in the fall and spring, and seeing as it's January it was pretty lazy, though not cold. We did some boating across the lake and walked up to a pagoda on a hill.

On Wednesday we met Mike in Bhandipur. He's been volunteering for a Film Festival, and they showed a couple films in the small brick square of the hilly Nepali village. "Ujeli" is a lo-fi flick, a story about a Nepali girl married out of grade school. Nepalis laughed at jokes I didn't understand but I was more than satisfied with participating in a local showing of indigenous, low-budget, socially-oriented cinema. They followed it with a documentary about a geologist working fifty years ago in a much more virgin Nepal

After seeing an impressive mineral cave with cathedral sized chambers we watched the dull sun dissolve into the foggy horizon. On our last night our proprietor, Khrisna Pradhan, played some surprisingly loyal Bob Dylan to me on his harmonium. He's a retired English teacher. I felt like a young Magister Ludi. Cigarette smoke poured from his nose and mouth and the fingers pumping the airbox.

Yesterday we rode back to Kathmandu on the roof of a long public bus. We crammed inside when the sun went down and the road became too cold. Cars and buses jammed the city streets as we returned to the capital. We walked a bit and cabbed a little, and ate Korean food and went to bed dirty, at home.

Hi, Mom

2007-01-12T05:18:00.000+08:00

Mike's got some more good pictures up at kilgoresmith.blogspot.com

Accomplishment

2007-01-10T12:51:00.000+08:00

The group's back in Kathmandu after spending a few days hiking around the Shivapuri forest north of the city. The five of us (my brothers, cousin Will, and a Fulbrighter from Rice named Ian) went to the Royal Hana Japanese Gardens last night for hot baths and Japanese cuisine to celebrate, to unwind, to whatever. The food was tasty and later I passed out easily at the guesthouse with Enter the Dragon playing on Mike's Mac.

The hiking wasn't long--over three days we probably covered only twenty miles--but it was a good deal of up and down. Shivapuri peak lies at about only 2700 meters, but as we crested the rim of the ridge we were able to clearly view the Annapurna and Everest ranges. It's certainly incredible to stand at the top of a mountain and see such peaks from a distance, realizing those mountaintops are three times as high as the cliff upon which one stands. Being above the smog and dust of the Kathmandu valley gave me enough time to get over my sniffles, and after having slept in this morning I'm feelin' good.

We started typically late Sunday afternoon. It was an easy hike to Nagigompa, a nunnery bearing the name of the female snake deities, the nagi. We took tea and decided on thin information to try to get to a hermitage before dark. Our de facto tour guide, Mike, busted his ass to make certain that someone arrived before dark. A bit under the weather, Ian lagged at the back with William. We reached the hermitage in time, passing a stone and concrete pool studded with Shiva phalli and tiger heads with the forest silently dusking around us.

One of the two yogis fed us a meal of rice, potatoes, and vegetables. He refrained from even the starches, as he's on a strict diet of vegetables. Babaji, or "honored father," cooked under a large metal hood in his low hermitage constructed of dung and wood. Buried in dusky blankets, we slept five abreast crammed between the fire pit on one side and piles of radishes and rice on the other.

In the morning we hit the peak. We found a young, thin Nepali loitering at the grassy top, drying his dewy sleeping blankets. Frost lined the shadow of the shrine on the mountaintop. He was about our age, a student of modern art taking a few years off to meditate in the mountains. He showed us his cave, made by a previous yogi. It was cold at the mouth of his cave; although he has a distant view of the Himalayas, the sun never hits the nothern side of his mountain.

That night we walked to Chissapani, and enjoyed the local alcohols raksi and chang with a couple of girls from Vermont. The hike the next morning was strictly downhill, and by the time we reached the exit of the forest our knees and thighs were thoroughly inflamed. It was wonderful.

Now Chris and Will have full plates adjusting travel plans, combating their travel agents from across the globe. Suffice it to say, by inquiring as to the possibility of a flight extension Chris got his flight canceled, and is now battling to arrange something that puts him back in the US by February. Chris is carefully crafting a rebuttal at this moment. That said, it'll be nice to have him around for another couple of weeks.

Slides from my Vacation

2007-01-06T16:57:00.000+08:00

Adjusting from one foreign culture to another has taken me a few days. I made it to Nepal on New Year's Eve Eve, and because I woke up for my flight from China at 3am Kathmandu time it was a wasted day. The ride was a holiday, though. I stayed near the handful of Nepalis returning home from Chengdu via Lhasa, and we celebrated with Yanjing beer as we crossed the Himalayas, returning to their homeland. The Tibet side of the mountain rim was cloudless, leaving the northern view of Everest clear and unmistakable. The aircraft followed a long crescent clockwise around the mountain group, through a reasonable pass lying to its west.
Nepal was an ocean of clouds, and soon we were decending into the foggy Kathmandu valley.

Michael grabbed me from the airport on his motorcycle. The change in face of the streets struck me immediately. Kathmandu has so many beautifully carved window facades and authentic clothing. It's also quite a bit dustier than the Chinese towns I'm used to. And the Chinese have this love affair going with decorating the outsides of buildings with bathroom tile. I met brother Chris soon enough. He looks good. I've missed those two kids, possibly most of all, since leaving New Orleans in August.

New Years--what can one say? It felt like Mardi Gras here, no less because of the wall to wall throngs of jumping and dancing Nepalis in the tourist-by-day bar-by-night district of town. I get the feeling "Open Container Law" wouldn't translate well into Nepali, and it felt natural to relax again about having a good time in 'da town. The new year turned over for us, however, in a typical Nepali bar, with men dancing to traditional music. Chris and I drank whisky and noted the anticlimax.

Later we found ourselves at what Chris described as a "Space Bar," both out of place and anachronistic. I felt dissociated again, as I had just two nights before, where in Chengdu I inadvertently invited myself to a banquet hotpot dinner in honor of a gallery opening. I enjoyed the company of the university and professional painters of Chengdu eating swan stomach and watching a private concert of Sichuanese folk dances, and later relaxed in the restuarant owner's wife's studio. She paints "man woman city scenes," heavy on the lavendar. Unnotable canvases but for the certain details they lacked: her husband's face was pale and undefined; the skyline of Chengdu imprecise and redundant.

A couple of nights after the new year we went to a classical Hindi (more formal than the Nepali folk music) conert in honor of the full moon. The tabla, sitar, and harmonium masters played in Pashpati, a Lord Shivatemple complex draped in moon shadows and hidden meaning.

Our cousin arrived on Thursday, and we've already been quite busy seeing a few mainstream visitor places. A museum in they royal Patan square provided some great remediation to Hindu gods and Buddhist images. We rambled about the Swayambu stupa, meaning "self-arising," and teeming with monkeys. William has also been a nice addition to our group. His interest in English etymology and European mythology counterpoints nicely with Mike's knowledge of local religious symbolism and language.

He also knows how to relax and have a good time.

Time

2006-12-25T20:59:00.000+08:00

A little birdie reminded me that I have been neglecting updating this journal for some time. I apologize that those of you interested have had to suffer through the crushing eroticism of my previous post.

That said, Merry Christmas. I had mashed potatoes ("potato mud" in Chinese) and roast chicken for dinner with a couple of Americans and a couple of New Zealanders. I've enjoyed getting close to a few other people who also teach English, some of whom are quite experienced and, I daresay, wise about the whole thing.

Around Thanksgiving I realized how lucky I am as a recent graduate teaching without oversight to a group of scholarship Tibetan students. More recently I've begun to appreciate the significance of being a high school English teacher. Half of the people I know rate their high school English teachers as one of the most important adults in their lives before university. Although I teach English as a foreign language, this job is the most rewarding thing I've done, ever, including those summers I spent as a backpacking guide in New Mexico.

Critical thinking, debate, active questioning: these are the things my students have begun to explore with the least bit of prodding from me. They open up to me in their diaries like no American student would dare, and share the traumatic and ecstatic generously. Life is short, they say, or life is long. We must do good to help Tibetans, they explain, to prepare us for our next lives. Why do half of Tibetans seem uninterested in learning the Tibetan language, they ask without answer, and how should they feel about the Government and Party? Is there an intangible cost to redeveloping their hometowns to industry and tourism?

They haven't the vocabulary or grammar to express these ideas in such terms, but they are showing signs of real creative thinking, albeit tenuously. While I don't have anyone directly evaluating my progress or observing my class, I still tread a fairly fine line when it comes to shaping their debates and opinions about some pretty heavy issues.

And these issues don't have clear answers, of course, and I'm particularly glad to have first had a familiarity and affinity for China and Chinese before being confronted with the reality here. The Tibetan Buddhism is thick, but the people of Kham are rough and most are far from saintly.

My student is informing me that the power will be cut off shortly. On Wednesday I will go to Chengdu, and from their head to Kathmandu on Saturday. I will head back to Sichuan via Tibet over land in buses and trains. If you think I have been lazy updating this blog now, just wait.

I will ring in the New Year with my two brothers in Kittymandu. I can't believe I even just wrote that sentence. I've been so stressed recently and now I am seeing light. The winter holiday lasts for two months here. By the time I teach again, I will be 24, it will be the fire year of the boar, the year of my own zodiac sign, purportedly an unlucky year for me. We will be through another Mardi Gras as well.

Time.

God Sends Colossal Hurricane To Punish Homosexual Saturnians

2006-11-26T12:40:00.000+08:00

The Creator has once again manifested his opposition to the ephebophilic and bacchian traditions of Saturnalia.

From Telegraph.co.uk:

The storm on the giant, ringed planet measures about 5,000 miles wide, roughly two thirds the diameter of Earth, with winds howling clockwise at 350 mph. Jupiter's Great Red Spot, which swirls counter-clockwise, is far bigger, but is less like a hurricane because it lacks the typical eye and eye wall.
The images — essentially a 14-frame film — were captured by the Cassini spacecraft as it passed about 210,000 miles from the planet as part of its exploration of Saturn and its moons.

This greyscale image makes me giggle.

because my correspondence is more interesting than my blog anyway

2006-11-17T22:45:00.000+08:00

Hey Lamar,

I know you've got an overflowing plate at the moment (congrats by the way on the transition committee appointment; nice to see your mom, ray, wally fall and bob bussey on there as well), but I wanted to bring something of some interest to your attention.

So I think I posted somewhere on your blog about DailyKos and other nat'l liberal blogs coming out in support of Karen Carter against Dollar Bill Jefferson in La-02. (DailyKos, MyDD, and a blog called the Swing State Project compose the ranking triumvirate of lefty political blogs; during the election they raised over 500K for grassroots candidates overlooked by the DNCC.) Last weekend, Matt Stoller of MyDD called on 100 people to donate $100 a piece, and when they received 11K plus dollars they decided to hire a man named Tim Tagaris, who covered the Ned Lamont race for MyDD, and send him to NOLA for the next thee weeks to follow the La-02 runoff.

www.mydd.com/story/2006/11/15/154230/71

In the comments of MyDD's announcement, they put forth an open invitation for people to contribute blog names of New Orleans activists (I signed up to MyDD to plug the Roy election victory and your blog, btw). It's an interesting list, and here's the motherload:

thinknola.com/wiki/New_Orleans_bloggers

Anyway, Oyster over at YourRightHandThief (a nicely written progressive NOLA blog) in his most recent entry titled "MyDD: Moral Ghostbusters" (I couldn't find a permalink), has some interesting opinions about Stoller/MyDD's portrayal of Landrieu as a "moral ghost" and MyDD's decision to send Tagaris to NOLA. In the first comment blogger Adrastos (.blog-city) calls Tagaris a "carpetblogger."

righthandthief.blogspot.com

Tagaris actually left a comment of his own on the thread, and it's really conciliatory and he immediately won the support of Oyster's readers (no small feat in the blogosphere). He seems extremely motivated, and in spite of his benefactor and previous jobs he is not directly attached to the Carter campaign. Here's his first segment, which has okay comments as well, the highlight (lowlight?) being a picture of a Katrinacorpse.

www.mydd.com/story/2006/11/16/195119/10

I'm sorry to give you so much to look at all at once, since you have more than you can handle with one city already, but this is all going to be irrelevant after December 9.

I thought you'd be interested because this actually represents the national blogging community refocusing on New Orleans, and an example of how bloggers are not simply a bunch of computer potatoes. There are real projects that bridge the gap between the virtual and the visceral. It is also informing my opinion of Landrieu (Oyster at YRHT defends her pretty well, and he has the same reservations that we do, i.e. Holy Joe, and with the upcoming coastal oil revenue sharing proposal she and Blanco are going to be in the spotlight a bit more over the next two months). It's also interesting that Tagaris seems to completely understand the importance of engaging a community through it's bloggers, especially considering that his medium is professional internet journalism as well.

Yours,

Patrul and Ad.z.m R's

2006-11-16T20:33:00.000+08:00

[Desmond Dekker, Rude Boy Ska]

I've been intermittently reading Patrul Rinpoche's The Words of My Perfect Teacher, lent to me by Lisa, a lay attendant to Ad.z.m R. She's also friends with my pal, Olivia Bartlett (who met her while studying in there). On his way, he'll be stopping in Chengdu for a day after leaving his monastery in Chamdo, and I hope to meet him in the city. I've been trying to get through Words, a commentary on the preliminary practices of a Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, before I leave. In my brother's words, the book "contains everything you need to know to become enlightened."

I recently stumbled across a mention of the town Dartsedo, the Tibetan (and proper) name for Kangding, the city half an hour from the college. The context in which Patrul Rinpoche brings it up reminded me of a number of things, which I'll get to after sharing the passage with you:

Where tea is grown, in China, the number of small creatures that are killed while it is planted, while the leaves are being picked, and so on, would be impossible to count. The tea is then carried as far as Dartsedo by porters. Each porter carries a load of twelve six-brick packs, taking the weight on a band around his forehead which wears away his skin. But even when his skull shows through, al white, he carries on. From Dotok onwards, dzo, yaks and mules take over, their backs breaking, their bellies perforated with cuts, patches of their hair chafed away. They suffer terribly from their servitude. Bartering the tea involves nothing but a series of broken promises, cheating and argument, until finally the tea changes hands, usually in exchange for animal products like wool and lambskins. Now wool, in summer before shearing, is crawling with fleas, ticks and other small creatures as numerous as the strands of wool themselves. During shearing, most of those insects are decapitated, cut in two or disembowelled. Those not killed remain stuck in the wool and suffocate. All of this can only lead to lower rebirths. As for lambskins, remember that new-born lambs have all their organs of sense, and they feel pleasure and pain. Just as they are enjoying their first instants of life, in perfect health, they are killed. Perhaps they are only stupid animals, but nevertheless they do not want to die--the love life and suffer as they are tortured and slaughtered. As for the ewes whose little ones have been killed, they are a living example of the sorrow experienced by a mother who loses her only child. So when we think about the production and trade of such products, we can understand that even a single sip of tea cannot but contribute to rebirth in the lower realms.

I used to think about these kinds of things quite a bit during the summer of 2001, my first stint guiding in New Mexican woodlands. That was when I stopped eating meat for two years. At the time I felt that there was a way to reduce the suffering of animals, at least, little by little. The wheel of death could be slowed in time, eventually halting, upon all ills would be undone.

The following summer significant areas of the ranch for which I guided suffered from forest fire. Alternatively hiking through restricted blackened areas and places that hadn't seen a fire for half a century provided stark contrast. Neither represented especially healthy forests; the under-burned areas were chillingly grey and orange from the accumulating largess of fallen tress and their resulting decay. I found a certain peace, however, in the face of such destruction, which relieved any guilt about my hand in death.

I disagree with some literalist Christians that believe that Man's divinely imparted stewardship over the animals gives him carte blanche when it comes to ecology. On the other hand, there can be no Absolute Zero with respect to the food chain and the natural events of birth and death. The process can never grind to a halt. Perfect equilibriums never last in natural systems. I'm reminded that when I was a child I thought that the Theory of Relativity meant that if the Earth ceased moving and spinning, Time would also stop. I'm not sure if that's wrong, but it certainly is absolutist.

Contrary to what you may think, the above passage by Patrul Rinpoche does not necessitate vegetarianism. His aim in pointing out the resulting carnage of such a mundane and basic activity is to remind the reader of the suffering that is everywhere in life. In Buddhism, we are held accountable for even the above actions via karma. I find the transmigration of souls to be at best irrelevant, though, and at worst empty threats to encourage moral action.

This does not mean we can hope to completely stop the chain of good and evil that tethers our mind to the conventional phenomenology of this world. It does mean that there are causes to our every action. It also suggests a way out; by taking responsibility for results of the things we do, and recognizing their impact on our way of thinking and our attitudes, we can discover the antidotes to our misdeeds to effectively become liberated from ourselves.

Sorry for sounding preachy. I'm really only trying to convince myself.

[Mountain Goats, Nine Black Poppies]

Day Six

2006-11-14T20:06:00.001+08:00

[This is the final segment of an eight-part creative non-fiction travel journal. Soon, you won't need 10mg of Ritalin and a cup of coffee to make it through my blog.]

A handful of Dorje's middle school friends shouted from the monastic alley up through woodwork of the second story window. The black sky gave no indication that it was six o'clock, and I failed to see the old monk as we hurriedly collected our belongings and met them downstairs. I remained quiet as we picked our way down the hill and back into the Chinese tile and Tibetan wood fusion that is Daofu. I'm often quiet when I first meet strangers in China, remaining somewhat reserved in employing my language skills (or lack thereof) until a relative level of comfort has developed. Rising before dawn, especially in such cold, pains me greatly. This Saturday morning was no exception as we walked to the store where the night before we had stashed my pack and bags of apples and walnuts, yak butter and tsampa.

I ventured to ask Dorje about our travel accommodation. He was enjoying bantering with his old friends, and his terse response about a cousin's truck insufficiently allayed my concern. I chose to remain silent for the most part, as I tend to do when I'm slightly annoyed and without effort to mount resistance. We trudged a kilometer or more to the yard that served as Daofu's equivalent of a truckstop. A shabby black dog was chained near the first of the trucks, and barked aggressively as we arrived. No other people could be seen. Dorje looked around a bit, and I headed to the toilet before anyone showed up to collect the fee of five jiao (six cents), according to the sloppy red characters painted on a wall.

Soon the pre-dawn sun began to illuminate the tired-looking truckyard. A pile of logs had been stacked beside a steel machine that looked like a cross between a steam engine and a time machine. Seven o'clock soon approached, the time that the day's only bus to Kangding would be leaving Daofu's tiny bus station. Dorje and his friends and I stood shivering on the sidewalk beside the entrance to the yard. Soon it was decided that we should locate some breafast, which was easily accomplished in the form of a tea and baozi (steamed buns filled with meat) hut not far from the truckstop.

We returned to our preassigned curb. A slim young monk stood near us, also waiting for truck drivers to show up to ask for a ride. It is traditional for Buddhist monks to wear maroon or saffron robes. He donned a yellow Marlboro racing jacket. Our group continued to stand for two more hours. I was unsure of what we were waiting for, though I chose to appear slightly standoffish as opposed to laboriously extracting details from Dorje. Soon a man began to chainsaw the logs into smaller sections appropriate for chopping into firewood. He was wearing sandals and I kept imagining him cutting off his feet. A well-dressed Chinese man wearing some kind of sports outfit and trekking boots showed up in a filthy car, and a couple of workers thoroughly washed the car and it's tires. I soon discovered that the unidentifiable machine was for pressing vegetable oil, which I assumed was also the reason the man was chopping firewood.

[If you think this narrative is plodding and uneventful, imagine how I felt.] Dorje mistook my perturbation as general coldness, and he gestured me into a small single room building that served as the caretaker's home and office. I was offered a place near the small wood-burning stove, and I began to warm myself. A tiny kitten was leashed beneath a bed. [I have seen more cats on leashes in China in the past two months than I've seen in my entire life in America.] Relatively soon, a number of people began preparing a blue truck for departure from the truckstop, and Dorje's friends climbed in the back. I began telling them goodbye until Dorje climbed in with a couple of young children and a middle-aged Tibetan man, and I was offered shotgun. It was well after half past nine.

My mood began to improve immediately as the large rig slowly pushed it's way out of Daofu and into the surrounding countryside. I wearily stared at the amber hills, rustic stone cottages and low fences covered in sod and flanked by stacks of thin firewood. The truck blew by a number of people waving palms down for it to stop, the Chinese version of thumbing for a ride. Within a half an hour, though, it picked up another student of mine, a bright round-faced Tibetan girl named Lamei Deji (Hannah).

The truck moved slowly around the curves of the highway, but the shotgun position of the blue big-rig afforded me a much more impressive view of the surrounding countryside than the bus from Kangding had. Additionally, being positioned ahead of the front axle as opposed to on top of the rear axle significantly diminished the discomfort of the pot-holed road. I wondered how Hannah and the other students were fairing in the bed of the truck, bouncing like so many yaks.

I rather enjoy the way that Tibetans tend to decorate their cars and motorcycles. A few pictures of lamas, including the Big Man On The Plateau, were taped above the driver's' side visor. Twists of colored silk hung from the rear-view mirror. I began to warm up to my fellow passengers, and I learned that the Tibetan man which whom I was sharing a seat was a Thanka painter.

Dorje layed on the small bed behind the row of seats, with a preteen boy and a grammar school-aged girl. Soon the attention of the passengers shifted to her, and I noticed that she was crying. She had become embarrassed for throwing up a bit out of the window. The man next to me was beside the window, and we lifted her from the back to sit on his lap so she could lean out the large passenger window if necessary. Dorje produced some more local walnuts, and she began to feel better as she munched on the white meat of the nuts. The insides of her nostrils were coated with scabby blood.

Once she cheered up, though, she was a delight. Her Mandarin accent was perhaps the best of the six of us in the front of the truck (Dorje knows standard Mandarin well but retains a largely Daofu accent), and my range of conversational topics generally matches those of an eight year-old. I discovered she was from Kangding, visiting Daofu "for fun." I disproved her father's assertion that all foreigners have blue eyes and blond hair, and she ran her fingers up and down my arm-hair. Her name was Drolma, and she even had an English name, Vera. She sang ABC's songs and one called "Good Morning, Teacher," the lyrics of which are basically "good morning, teacher" over and over. We drove straight to Tagong.

I hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy Tagong on the way up, and as we stopped to rest a moment Dorje's friends, Dorje, Hannah and I went to the local and super-famous Tagong Monastery. It cost ten yuan for me to enter, though the rest of them got in for free. Drolma scampered in behind us. We only had time to circumambulate one shrine room [through the small door in the white facade at the right of the photograph I did not take], and their large paintings of Guru Rinpoche and other revered Tibetan Buddhist sages was impressive and of a style I hadn't yet encountered. The incidentals of the monastery are hundreds of years old.

I offered Hannah my new toque (the Canadian term for a knitted winter hat; pronounced "tewk") and grabbed some skewered roast potatoes as we climbed back into the truck and left Tagong. The driver had purchased a number of drinks, and I was offered a terrible Chinese knockoff of Red Bull. The scenery began to change from the rolling ochre mountains to more wooded and open plains. Soon we arrived at a three-road crossroads, which marked the point at which the Tibet-Sichuan highway splits into its northern and souther routes. Turning right would have taken us west to LiThang, and soon thereafter into Tibet. Turning around would have sent us past Daofu to Derge, with northern Tibet close ahead. We turned right, and followed the traditional road back to China, back to Kangding.

[I find the term Sichuan-Tibet Highway to be somewhat misleading. Gloriously filled with potholes and composed of little more than rock and dirt in some places, the road gives new meaning to the word "highway." Most of you should envision Alexandria Senior High's parking lot before 1999, the US-59 Montrose Exit construction in Houston, or Toulouse St. near St. John's Bayou in New Orleans for comparison.]

As we approached Xinduqiao, the truck, and another rig with which we were caravaning, pulled to a stop and a handful of men disembarked. Dorje's friends had also reached their destination, a middle school in Xinduqiao. I learned that the trucks were thinning out the passengers in the cab because of a rumored traffic checkpoint on the road ahead. Apparently there is a regulation forbidding having more than four passengers in the cab of a truck at once, and the Tibetan men where unwilling to press their luck with the authorities. The men would walk and meet us for lunch at a restaurant a few kilometers down the road.

We arrived at the restaurant and waited for at least a half an hour for the men to arrive. I could see them from quite a length down the road, because they were all wearing a combination of navy blue and orange [the school colors of my elementary alma-mater, J.B. Nachman], colors that seem to be quite popular in this part of the world. A crippled cow and her calf ambled about the side of the restaurant's parking lot. The men arrived and we lunched together quickly. I insisted afterwards that Hannah join us in the cab. She appeared stiff from shivering in the back.

Two men had been switching as drivers on the journey. We started with Dorje's older cousin as a driver, and then a man from one of the other trucks took over in our truck. This man's name was Tashi, though to me he appeared to be the long lost Tibetan brother of the O'Doyle (O'Doyle Rules!) family. He was quite large and had a rather dopey expression on his shiny face. He allowed the young boy to sit on his lap and steer the rig, reminding me of just how annoying boys between the ages of ten and twelve can be.

I asked Drolma what her Zodiac birth animal was. She replied, "Wo shu niu," which means that she was an ox. I offered that I was birthed under the Zodiac sign of the boar. I offered my personal interpretation that boars are very clever. Tashi O'Doyle immediately began to tease the young girl. The word shu, a verb which means "am the birth animal," sounds quite a bit like shi (pronounced "sure"), which means "to be." Tashi asked her in astonishment if she was an ox.

She became obstinate. "I'm a person not an ox!," but Tashi insisted that she was an ox. She had been talking to the yaks out of the window, which only gave Tashi more evidence that she indeed was a cow of some kind. Soon she offered that her mother was birthed under the sign of the dog, which only made things more interesting.

"Your mother is a dog?" inquired Tashi. This, of course, is insulting in most languages. Young Drolma became quite angry, using this opportunity to test the limits of appropriate behavior with adults to shout at Tashi.

"You're a dog!" she shouted at Tashi. He seemed to enjoy the conversation, and I found it rather funny myself. He almost pushed her to the point of crying. She continued insisting that her mother was a person, and not a dog. When Tashi discovered that her father was a rooster he became incredulous.

"How does a dog and a rooster have a cow for a child?" and so on in this manner for a long time. Later, Tashi began to convince the girl that everyone had paid for the ride but her. In fact, the reason that all of the students and other passengers were enduring the slow ride through the countryside was precisely because it was free. I even played along, saying that I had payed too.

Tashi threatened to throw her out of the cab if the poor girl didn't surrender all of the money her mother had given her for snacks on the trip. She was upset, and accused him of being a dakuan, an interesting Chinese term that means roughly nouveau-riche. It was clear to me that he was nothing of the sort.

We crossed the mountain pass that marks the final descent into Kangding. The change in scenery is impressive. From the top, one can look west towards Tibet to see tan mountains and shrubby grasslands. Looking east, one views the jagged green river valleys of China. Snow-capped peaks can been seen in either direction.

The truck rolled wearily down to Kangding, and rested for a while at the other end of town as Drolma's and her brother's parents arrived to take them home. It was past seven o'clock, but we hadn't eaten lunch until almost three so no one was hungry. The thanka painter disappeared for a bit and returned with a Tibetan woman, who shared the front seat with the two of us. It made for a cramped return trip to Guza, but I insisted that it was no trouble because of the short duration of the final leg back home. The driver and the painter would be driving clear to Chengdu that night, and I'm certain they couldn't have arrived earlier than two in the morning.

We snaked through the steep greenery that reminded me of the view from my teacher's apartment at Kangding Normal Teacher's College. I was rather excited about returning home, and I still had a bit of work to do as I had class with the students the following day. I disdained the idea of class at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw the large sign advertising Wasigou, the far side of the small town that contains the crossroads to the Teacher's college. Not halfway through the one-street podunk community, though, a uniformed traffic cop signaled the truck to stop. Dorje and Hannah quickly hid beneath a blanket behind the seats, and the painter sat in front of the woman to block the policeman's view of her. I was happy to see my students had such good instincts when it came to the authorities. I smiled politely.

The driver and the cop bantered for a bit in some extremely rough Sichuanese. I may have heard the driver ask the traffic officer if they were in Japan with all these strict rules, but I could have been imagining it. Either way, the cop asked him to get his paperwork together for review in an office.

The painter appeared concerned. I wondered if I should grab my things and walk the remainder of the distance to the school. The painter got out to see if the driver needed any help, or perhaps just to lend some moral support to the Tibetan and an extra set of eyes in the office. The Tibetan woman counted whispered prayers on the beads in her left hand.

I found myself imagining what would happen if the police found a reason to arrest or beat Tashi O'Doyle. I had already spent a good deal of the afternoon narrating the events of the day to myself for later recollection and documentation. I had even coined a clever pun for my blog title, KhamAbiding. I fantasized about the emotional weight of having a comedic character like Tashi become a tragic figure just as my narrative drew to a close.

Idle thought has little impact on objective reality, but it actively defines our intentions and perception of the world around us. I chided myself for secretly wishing something terrible would happen for the sake of a story to my friends. Tashi returned after a long twenty minutes. He breathed a long sigh of relief, and we drove in silence to the crossroads of Wasigou and Guza. Hannah, Dorje, and I got of the truck, thanked the men, and organized our things. I gave the painter a handful of cigarettes from the pack I received from the tourists from Chongqing.

We didn't have to wait long for a minibus to take us to the college. The reader can likely imagine the rest of the story. Dorje gave me a bit of tsampa, walnuts, apples and butter for my apartment. I hadn't showered in exactly a week, and bearded in my dirty clothes, toque, and newly broken in hiking shoes I felt more rugged than I had in two years. I admired my reflection in the window of the school canteen as I purchased some bottled water to assuage the thirst I had built from the fake red-bull and riding ten hours in the rig.

I have finally moved beyond all of my fantasies of becoming a trucker in the American West. Being a foreign guest in Western China, on the other hand, is a highly underrated activity.

Fool's Gold

2006-11-13T21:12:00.000+08:00

[Sufjan Stevens, enjoy your rabbit]

I'm happy that some people have enough humor and diligence to create golden absurdity and bury it in the unlikeliest of places. I was lucky enough to stumble upon this via the academic blog CrookedTimber.org, and I hope you're smart enough click on this anime rendering of Egon Spengler: Ghostbuster. FYI: The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man link on the following page is a dead end...

Fair Use Rationale:
"It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots for identification and critical commentary on the station ID or program and its contents...qualifies as fair use under United States Copyright Law."
(Egon Spengler. {{Tv-screenshot}} Edited [Wikipedia] version from http://www.autographcity.co.uk/catalog/default.php?cPath=2_22&osCsid= 0893c2132395b579f760bb7fa420271d Fair use to illustrate person in question.)

Day Five

2006-11-10T18:14:00.000+08:00

[Beach Boys, Pet Sounds]

When writing, as when living, some periods are felt to exist merely as filler, sections experienced in reflection of what has transpired and in anticipation of the (un)expected. Friday in Daofu represents just such a day. It was the exact middle of the eighth lunar month (October 6), and consequently over a thousand million Chinese people were celebrating the Mid-August Lantern Festival. The full moon arrives in the middle of the lunar calendar. Chinese people consider the full moons that fall near the Autumnal Equinox to be the largest and the brightest of the year. The full moon classically symbolizes familial and romantic separation, so if possible, Chinese families travel from all corners of the country to reunite. The families cook a large dinner, drink teas, and stuff themselves silly with moon-cakes, the classic symbol of the full moon.

Although my students are Tibetan, many of them expressed in their diaries a longing to be with their families on this day. The October National Day Holiday lasts for only seven days, and because it takes at least two days for many of my students to travel from Kangding to their hometowns scattered across Ganzi Prefecture, few of them were able to return home. In the case of separation, one gazes at the full moon and imagines that one's mother or brother or lover is also viewing the moon with longing (kind of like Fievel Mousekewitz. Did you know that An American Tail was the first full length animated feature released by Universal Pictures? And that the Mousekewitzes are Russian Jews? I [heart] Wikipedia).

Dorje and I decided to take the day very slowly. We slept late, ate slowly and fully, and played with the dog for a couple of hours. There was little reason to leave the house. At lunchtime the family ate boiled yak meat. Yak meat is often very tough, and they let it boil for a couple of hours in the morning. I still found the meat nearly impossible to tear off of the bone and chew into a palatable bolus. Chinese and Tibetan people also enjoy eating gristle and tough fat, which has not been the culture in America since the Second World War. I felt somewhat disrespectful as I discarded some of tearthe hardest fat and tendon with my bones, though Dorje reassured me that it was nothing to worry about.

I spent the afternoon perusing the stations their satellite had to offer. Bloomberg News and some terrible British video-game channel were the only English language stations available. I learned for the first time that I actually kind of enjoy watching economic news, delightfully dryer than either C-SPAN or Oscar Wilde. From the Bloomberg ticker I discovered that Denny Hastert had resisted calls to resign over some unnamed Republican scandal. I would not find out the details of MAF54's explicit instant messages until the start of the following week.

I asked Dorje if we needed to purchase bus tickets for the following morning. He assured me that he would find a ride for us in one of the large blue rigs that transport all kinds of ridiculous things around China. I was skeptical, but he hadn't failed me yet.

We unleashed Jake, the Shandong dog raised by Dorje's previous teacher, a woman from New Zealand. I really enjoy dogs that can jump, and he's a fairly good sized blond something-or-other. He is smart, but I got the feeling he hadn't been trained to perform any tricks, at least not with the kind of commands that we use in America. He wouldn't sit or fetch. I bet that dog won't hunt.

At the slowest part of the late afternoon I learned from broken Chinese that Dorje's uncle, the monk, was preparing to return to the monastery. I also discovered that Dorje and I were to go with him. I scrambled to collect my belongings and my disposable camera (from last Christmas--did you know they have expiration dates?) and asked the family for a group photo, which didn't exactly happen as I had planned. The monk was already sitting on the road and grandma didn't seem very inclined to go downstairs. Dorje took the photo of us in front of the ancestral home, which developed into a distant grainy shot of Dorje's nun sister and mother looking expressionless, and his father with his arm around me. We sat on the windy road and waited for a taxi.

Soon we were in town, braving the cold in a brightly lit, undecorated restaurant. The establishment was noticeably ordinary. We at a large bowl of clay-pot soup, which is an assortment of fungus, cabbage, and meats. We also had fish-fragrant eggplant, recommended as a foreigner delight. I often get these kinds of hit-and-miss suggestions, and while I do like this dish they overcooked the eggplant. This is also the way I was turned onto my favorite dish, dry-fried green (four-seasons) beans. People often recommend tomato and egg soup as a dish loved by foreigners. Tomato and egg soup, as the name may suggest, is noticeably ordinary.

Soon Dorje told me that he was leaving to secure our ride for the following morning. The three of us would be staying the night in the monastery. This new excited me terribly. Although sleeping in a monastery hasn't been as important to me as it has been to my twin brother, I've always thought it would be cool to crash at one. Dorje left, and in a light drizzle the fiftyish monk and I trudged through a light rain and heavy wind to the monastery.

Daofu's monastery is quite unique. It is a complex of buildings at the top of the village, creating a patchwork of yellow mud and wood buildings. It doesn't look much like a monastery, and it's a little difficult to tell where the townspeople's homes end and the monastery begins. It was also very dark. On the way up the hill, the monk stopped to purchase a large bottle of Sprite for himself and his guests. As we got inside the labyrinth of alleys that creates the mosaic of a monastery, he stopped suddenly and squatted towards the side of the alley. It was very dark, and difficult to see exactly what he was doing, but I came to understand that he was somehow peeing without seeming to lift his robe in the slightest. I was impressed.

We soon arrived at his building, and he went ahead across the ground floor to turn one of the only lights in the abode. It dimly illuminated the bottom floor from the second story. I followed him, walking across the dirt floor and taking note of a large wooden beam in the middle of the room. There were bits of wood, hay, and stone strewn about the room, though no sign of any animals. The stairs to the second story were customarily steep, like an angled ladder with thick, wide slats.

A hallway/foyer upstairs was also strewn with wood, and a corner was completely blackened from the wood-burning stove. A side room that seemed to be built into the side of the hill contained the toilet, a wooden rectangle set into the dirt that opened into a larger dirt hole beneath it. The hallway opened directly onto an upstairs patio balcony, which despite the slight rain afforded a wonderful view of the Daofu's florescent evening sky and the surrounding mountains.

The monk's room was quite nice. The floor, walls, and ceiling were wooden. The ceiling was painted blue with the same thick red logs as rafters as in Dorje's family's home. The monk had a number of butter lamps and water-offering bowls, and one of the walls was almost completely covered with pictures of various lamas. Everyone's favorite High Lama In Exile was a centerpiece of his collection, as was the former Panchen Lama, beaming out from beyond his previous incarnation's grave with his characteristically chubby smile. There was also a poster of a very attractive Tibetan woman holding prayer beads hands pressed together in front of her chest. I tried to make it seem I wasn't gawking, though I was definitely surprised.

The monk and I spoke a bit, though it was difficult to get through even elementary conversations about the coldest wintertime cities in Ganzi Prefecture. Even when people in Daofu switch from their native tongue to Chinese, the Sichuan style of speaking is also often difficult to decipher for a Mandarin speaker. He offered me Sprite, but after one bowl's worth I was ready for some straight hot water. My stomach was rather active, and I was cold and exhausted. He chanted silently to himself and turned a microwave-sized prayer wheel on the table. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sit halfway between reality-like dreams and dreamlike reality.

Dorje returned after the monk had turned off the light and retired to a separate room. I was asleep, and woke slightly for him to tell me that we would be rising at six o'clock the following morning to catch a truck back to Kangding.

[Alice in Chains, Alice in Chains (Tripod)]

Saddam Hussein Sentenced to the Gallows, plus two ten-year sentences

2006-11-05T23:20:00.000+08:00

[I can remember Sunday mornings in the early Nineties drawing intricate battle scenes with U.S.A. nukes annihilating a Saddam Hussein ("So Damn Insane") to pass the time during Big Church. Also, Saturday was the 27th anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran.]

Former U.S. A.G. thrown out before judgment; timing speculated to be related to U.S. Midterm Elections; Saddam likely to be hanged by February.

From the AP's Hamza Hendawi:

"Before the session began, one of Saddam's lawyers, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a memorandum in which he called the trial a travesty..."

"Some feared the verdicts could exacerbate the sectarian violence that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war, after a trial that stretched over nine months in 39 sessions and ended nearly 3 1/2 months ago. The verdict came two days before midterm elections in the United States widely seen as a referendum on the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. U.S. and Iraqi officials have denied the timing was deliberate..."

"Saddam's chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi condemned the trial as a 'farce,' claiming the verdict was planned. He said defense attorneys would appeal within 30 days.

"The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.

A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted.

From the AP:

Saddam Hussein, former Iraqi president:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to death.
-- Guilty of forced deportation, sentenced to 10 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Barzan Ibrahim, Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to death.
-- Guilty of forced deportation, sentenced to 10 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former head of the Revolutionary Court:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to death.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, former Iraqi vice president:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to life in prison.
-- Guilty of forced deportation, sentenced to 10 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 7 years in prison.
-- Guilty of inhumane acts, sentenced to 7 years in prison.

Abdullah Kazim Ruwayyid, former Baath Party official:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to 15 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 7 years in prison. (Sentences run concurrently so he will serve 15 years).

Mizhar Abdullah Ruwayyid, former Baath official:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to 15 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 7 years in prison. (Sentences run concurrently so he will serve 15 years).

Ali Dayih Ali, former Baath official:
-- Guilty of murder, sentenced to 15 years in prison.
-- Guilty of torture, sentenced to 7 years in prison. (Sentences run concurrently so he will serve 15 years.)

Mohammed Azawi Ali, former Baath official:
-- Acquitted of all charges and ordered released from custody immediately.

[No editorial necessary]

Tibetan Thanka

2006-11-05T22:11:00.000+08:00

A Black Dakini in the Tibetan thanka syle:

I realized that I hadn't seen many good examples of Tibetan iconography before I went to India a few months ago, and since I haven't scanned my photos from my vacation to Daofu there's a good chance that many of you also aren't familiar with their artistic style. I was unable to find an example of thanka painted in light colors on a black background, which makes for a nice reverse chromatography excellent for depicting fiery skulls and blazing Dharma Protectors with bulging eyes and enormous teeth.

I think this image is related to the Hindu Mahakali (Great Black Goddess), and similar or the same as the Tibetan Vajrayogini. Michael would be able to correct me on all of this. Things to note about this image are her headdress of skulls, and the tiny man she holds in her right hand. She tramples a man under her left foot, and she wears a necklace of red and blue severed heads (that has a nice ring to it). I'm uncertain of what holds in her right hand.

She is a Dharma Protector. She ferociously guards the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Other fiery deities are appealed to in order to purify bad karma or powerfully overcome obscuration. I'm embellishing a bit, and Michael would have more authority to explain this symbolism. She is a powerful Tantric deity, clearly superior to her male counterparts; some Dakinis are even depicted as coupling with one or a number of shriveled male consorts.

Pretty damn sweet if you ask me.

My Address

2006-11-05T18:38:00.000+08:00

I'm not as far away as you think:

Playing on the Strings of My Heart

2006-11-03T13:37:00.000+08:00

There's an Aeolian Harp in the heart of each of us, and I was reminded of mine today while viewing a favorite watchdog website, Crooks and Liars. I often get an emotional reaction from reading their compositions, but rarely is it so sentimental. Click on the picture to see the story.

Please vote in my stead on Tuesday. I was too lazy to get an absentee ballot, and I don't think I need to explain the impact of our government this time around.

Self-Aggrandizement

2006-11-02T21:43:00.000+08:00

On Halloween, I read a letter on Salon's advice column that struck a rather familiar chord. In the letter, a 23 year-old Yale graduated describes returning home to care for her dying father. After he passed, she found herself "stuck" in her small hometown, in a relationship with a local doctor and consumed by the malaise of her situation. She wants to travel and pursue her career. I empathized with her because her situation seems to be precisely the opposite of mine.

[By the way, has everyone upgraded to Firefox 2.0 yet? I think the new version is great!]

I decided to post a response to the letter. At the time, I was the second person to post a comment, thanks in large part to having opposite hours as America. They've received about 30 letters since then, and the columnist Cary Tennis picked five to be Editor's Choices, one of which was mine (hence the red star). I wanted to share with you my opinions on her situation:

Perennial Movement

The moon is always changing, yet it returns to where it was with a regular rhythm. There are many small arcs in our lives, yet our life is also one large arc with a pattern reflected in the lives of the rest of us. It's easy to know that this has all happened before, but difficult to accept that it will only happen to you once.

I'm also 23, and fortunately a number of years ago my father dodged prostate cancer. He beat it with surgery, and now he recently retired from psychiatry. He sends emails about how his joints hurt, and he feels hungover in the morning when he doesn't drink the night before. His writing style has changed from reading my brother's and my travel blogs.

I'm from a small(ish) town. I think fifty thousand people in the middle of Louisiana counts, though it's probably bigger than where you're from. I went to Rice, and I spent my summers alone in the New Mexican mountains. Houston certainly felt like the whole world compared to where I grew up. That is, before I went to Beijing.

We are similar in many ways, but I feel we are on opposite trajectories. Now I am teaching in Western China, near Tibet. I wish I was home with my family. I want to be stuck in my hometown, piddling away the afternoons in a canoe or writing for our two-bit paper.

Cary is right. Take your time. You can't speed up the hurt, and sometimes it will hurt less before it hurts more again. Dostoevsky says it will become the dull pain of joy. In Swingers, Ron Livingston says one day you will wake up and miss the pain when it's gone.

I feel the pressure to run back to school, too. I can't justify why I want to help people on the other side of the planet when there is so much pain near my home. I lived in New Orleans for the first half of 2006. It was a painful joy. My grades say I should search for the top. My heart tells me to dig my toes between the roots.

After being at Yale, must you get back to the centre of the world? Is there a way to bridge the gap? Cary composed a small fiction of your life. In your stories, I can see the fiction of my own.

Yours,

Daniel Smith

dantsmith@gmail.com, khamabiding.blogspot.com

"Your past joys and sorrows are like drawings on water: No trace of them remains. Don't run after them!...

Your future projects and plans are like nets cast in a dry riverbed: They'll never bring what you want. Limit your desires and aspirations!..."

-Gyalse Rinpoche, 14th Century

Day Four

2006-11-02T17:42:00.000+08:00

In prewaking half-dream I pleasantly listened to the atonal singing and staggered recitation of the fourth-graders in the adjacent room. In the misty dark of the previous evening I hadn't realized that Gonga Sonam's bedroom was a fixture in one of the student dormitories. I didn't mind the children, and I enjoyed my normal course of absurd waking dreams as Sonam and his roommates prepared themselves for class. A county official was coming to inspect the school, so although Sonam didn't have a class during the first block, he nonetheless had to get himself ready.

Thursday turned out to be the most amazing day of the vacation, and it began with the most incredible moment of the trip. Sonam greeted me as I stopped pretending to be asleep, and directed me to look out of the window. From the bed I could only make out low hanging white clouds. Behind and beneath the clouds I could still only see white. I rose on my elbows and my gaze met with an expanse of whiteness on the ground as well. During the still night, the year's first snow fell on the small mountain town of Yuke.

I hurried to get out of bed. The air was not nearly as cold as the evening or afternoon of the previous day. There was a calm about the morning after the snowfall that cut the icy air, and allowed the dull warmth of an igloo to pervade the community. Snow sat on the grass that I didn't pee on the night before, the roofs of the uniquely colorful frontier cabins, and every part of the impoverished primary school. It was, for lack of a better word, inspirational.

I ate a breakfast of Ramen-style noodles on the iron stove-box. I enjoy the way that Dorje would eat them in a metal bowl sitting on top of the wood-burning stove, and my bowl had been prepared in a similar manner. It bubbled slightly as I ate my steaming breakfast. I drank a bit of tea, and waited for Dorje to return from playing with the children, somewhere out of sight.

Soon he returned and I let him convince me to wander down to the local hot spring. It was very close; we walked a bit down the main road past the road's "bridge," and soon we found it on the other side of the river. We carefully crossed a snowy log footbridge and approached a large, stone building with a number of weathered wooden doors. Dorje commented that it would be a kuai for us each to enter, but without paying we slipped into the middle of three doors.

The pool was low, divided into two by a yellowing concrete wall. It smelled of rust and sulfur. We disrobed our many layers and eased into the water. It wasn't very hot, but it felt pleasant after walking in the fresh snow. There wasn't any steam. I relaxed and looked up. The most interesting aspect of the bathhouse was certainly its ceiling. The wooden rafters had rustic, reassuring spiderwebs at the joints. The ceramic shingles were loosely arranged, allowing light to stream into the room. It not only acted as a skylight in the low-tech baths, but the light struck bits of dust suspended in the fresh morning air, illuminating them in illusory shafts of light. I hope to remember this detail always.

We had entered the center bath because Dorje felt it was the cleanest. Soon we heard voices in the adjacent chamber, and an old set of eyes peered at us through cracks in the wooden wall. The next pool, although purportedly not as clean, was significantly hotter than the one in which we presently bathed. Some other people, with children, wanted our room, so we scrambled to put our underwear on before they came inside. We quickly ran across the snow with our clothes in our arms, steam rising off the drops of water on our backs. We went into the new room, but this time I felt the need to leave my underwear on as there were a number of other men in the room.

One of the men was an old worker. He looked oddly fit for a man his age. Another man was fat. The fat man wore no clothes and scrubbed himself with a stained washcloth. Dorje and I got into the baths quickly. I was still wearing my new stocking hat. We began an idling dialog with them, though I had difficulty following their rough dialects.

[The reader may be concerned about my lack of discomfort at this part of the story. A neo-Freudian literary analyst would have decried my lack of self-awareness of its homoerotic undertones, although my relationship with Dorje is certainly more innocent than Robinson Crusoe's affair with a brown boy named Friday. I can accept the reader's concern, primarily because of what happened next. Moreover, I apologize to those that revere postmodern academic theory (especially post-colonialism) for some of my following comments and witticisms. But let's be honest; Daniel Defoe sucks.]

The door opened and three Tibetan women slipped inside. Dorje would later tell me that the women's pool is very cold, and recently some of the younger women were flaunting convention and following the warmth, regardless of sex. I'm all for equality, especially when it comes to bathing. The fat man arranged his washcloth triangularly on his loins, not that it made much of a difference. As those of you that have sat in a pool with a naked man (and who hasn't?) already know, refraction and shadow cast the genitals effectively invisible. From the vantage point of the women above the pool, however, the view is much more (or less, depending upon your point of view) accommodating.

The women helped each other remove their Tibetan dresses, which consist of a number of large pieces of material wrapped around the body. Because I was trying to only look at them indirectly, the only respectful way in my country, I couldn't clearly see if they were wearing bras. My guess is that these forward thinking women of the Tibetan cultural avant guard were not. Most nomadic women see no need for them. They removed everything but their hair ties and underwear.

The group of men continued chatting, although fitfully. At one point Dorje and I moved near the opening at which the hot water sprang from beneath the ground. I put my legs deep inside and opened my toes with the clean, therapeutic stream. Soon Dorje offered to wash my back, and after he scrubbed me I returned the favor. My attention was mostly on the girls, though. I feigned incognito, which is to say I played the I'm-Not-Looking-At- You-But-I'm-Trying-To-Sneak-Looks-At-You-Without-You-Seeing-Me-Though- I-Want-You-To-Know-I'm-Trying-To-Look-At-You-Anyway Game, a personal favorite of mine.

One of the dakinis, who was very flat chested and cute and who had a small growth of some kind on the right side of her neck, looked at me through her opened toes and the steam of the bath. Her and one of her friends each had a single gold tooth replacing a maxillary lateral incisor. Dorje supinated his body completely, stretching almost flat on his back with his face above the water to fully receive the effects of the bath. After a while, though, I felt I had cleaned enough dirt off of me and picked up enough sulfur and rust to call it quits. Dorje's and my fingers were raisins.

We awkwardly dressed, trying to hide our bare asses with our jackets as we removed our wet drawers and put on our pants. I knew that they would not dry in the cold by the time we needed to leave, and I was not looking forward to riding the motorcycle commando back to Daofu. In our haste I forgot my soapdish, even though we hadn't used the soap in the first place. The snow had largely melted. Dorje and I spoke excitedly as we walked back to the primary school.

"Don't tell anyone about the women in the hot spring," he asked me in his accented English. I pressed him on why not. "Because it not our custom for the men and women to have a bath together." I promised him I wouldn't tell his sister or the students in our class in Guza. I also told him that I would definitely tell all of my friends in America. I was excited. "It is very bad for us to look at women in Buddhism," he remarked. He asked me how long I had had my tattoo, and after telling him that I got it four years ago (wow!) I said that I thought a fiery Dharma Protector would make an excellent tat. He responded that good Buddhists shouldn't have tattoos.

"Why not," I asked, "I have seen a lot of Tibetans with tattoos of dragons and all sorts of things." Tibetan men and women, especially nomads, like to wear colorful accessories, like feathers in their hats, yarn in their hair, or earrings and heavy stone necklaces.

Dorje appeared slightly austere. "In Buddhism, our body is not our own. It is borrowed. We should treat it like it is not our own, because when we die, we will give it back." I agreed with his logic, though I feel the indiscretions of my past are completely excusable. On the other hand, I hadn't removed my Chenrezig medallion when we got in the baths, and when we were getting out I noticed that most of the other Tibetans had taken off the necklaces that their lamas had given them. That was three strikes against the Three Jewels; I realized that I was not a very good Buddhist. It was certainly no surprise. Vanity led me to my trespasses, and I still do not know the Tantric antidote to pride. I do know that it prevents one from seeing one's faults, and is related to the jealousy that prevents one from rejoicing in the accomplishments of others. I'm also a jealous guy.

When we arrived at the school, Sonam had finished whatever duties the morning required of him, and I invited him to walk around town with us. It is a short walk, and he led us to a couple of old, small temples. Each had a handful of large prayer wheels, suspended from the ceiling. We turned them clockwise. I made seven rotations in the smaller temple, and in a larger temple we completed three full circumambulations. I learned from Michael that three and seven are auspicious numbers in Tibetan Buddhism. It's also good to add a few extras, in case the aspiration or intent or one's mind was not in the correct place during one of them. For screw-ups, you could say.

We left the back of the town and walked into a large meadow. Tibetans almost exclusively call meadows "the grassland" in English. By now the snow had melted from everywhere except the yak paddies. I am uncertain as to what it is about dried piles of yakshit that prevents snow from melting. We walked to a shrine in the meadow. It was a small, cubic stone structure with countless poles coming out of the top. A colorful flag was attached to each pole. About five meters away from the tower of flags sat an altar covered with partially burnt juniper boughs. Dorje, Sonam, and a number of my other students are fond of calling these shrines "the mountain gods." It is a holdover, I discovered later, from the indigenous Tibetan religion called Bön.

"We do not pray at the mountain gods," Sonam explained. "If you pray at a mountain god, when you go to the next mountain god it will know." We also did not do korwa around the shrine. "The next mountain god will feel very jealous, and you will have bad luck." I earnestly searched my soul, and discovered that I indeed did not have any desire to pray at the Shrine of the Mountain God.

I don't remember what we ate for lunch. Soon afterwards we pulled the motorcycle away from the primary school among a horde of children shouting, "Goodbye!" and "Good Evening!" and "Hello!" The town's workers had already completed the section of road in front of the school, and we quickly rolled out of town. Near the "bridge," we passed the old man from the hot spring. I had to walk the length of the makeshift bridge once again.

Soon after leaving town Dorje offered to teach me to drive the motorcycle. The sky was still cloudy from the snowfall, but the pine-covered hills were beautiful. Everything in the valley was alive with an alpine lushness that I hadn't considered possible. I had already been daydreaming about the many similarities between Steven T. McQueen and Yours Truly, so I of course agreed to an impromptu lesson. I'll spare you the details for once; suffice it to say that it is not difficult on flat, traffic-free roads. I'm very good at shifting up. Hills are a bit tricky. I'm terrible at down-shifting, and I stalled it a couple of times.

As we approached the pass, low clouds began to blow over the edge of the mountains. There was still a large amount of snow in the upper areas, and the road was wet. Dorje rode slow and carefully, but I became anxious as the last bit of blue sky was enveloped by dark clouds. It began to hail as we approached the pass. I hadn't heard any lightning, but I was nervous to say the least. As we passed between the peaks, the wind became almost unbearable, and I was on the back of the bike. Dorje had no goggles, so I'm sure he was in a great deal of pain. Small bits of hail began to hit my cheeks, and piles of it were mounting where my thighs pressed against Dorje's back. He did an excellent job steering the bike.

I daydreamed idly, mostly about what it would be like to write an autobiographical novel. I would embellish it dramatically, and give it a self-important title like "500 Days." It would chronicle the 500 so-odd days between the April Fool's Day in which my friends and I found a dead guy at the Rice Stadium and last August, when I watched a Nepali man be cremated at a riverside ghat. Death is so dramatic when it happens to people other than you. I would use everyone's real names, and they'd be very upset because of my propensity to speak truthful hyperbole. My roommates in the Houston Heights would receive special treatment, because of how much I now realize I cared for them, despite their and my imperfections. Shuchin and Lamar and Nath would be major characters as well, and I'd deal heavily with my stint in the Houston underworld, my dead-end job, and the self-made vicissitudes of my relationship with April. In the course of six months I visited Hermann Memorial Hospital three times; Jay contracted pneumonia, Sonny suffered a heart attack, and Nath hurt. Sonny passed a month after I moved to New Orleans. The story would investigate the conflicting determinisms of karma and postmodern existential atheism (two things about which I know very little but claim to know a lot), in much the same vein as Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses.

About halfway down the side towards Daofu, he was ready for a break. We pulled off at a small group of buildings on a plateau on the hillside. We found an opening in the fence and pulled it up to a black tent. Inside, a woman and her daughter were tending a fire. There was a large pot of tea at a constant low boil. We sat down beside the fire, and they served us tea. Soon a young man with long curly hair and an adult monk joined us in the tent, and Dorje dried his wet gloves next to the embers. My toes were frozen. I drank black tea, and Dorje had milk tea. We gave the woman some candy for the children, although I didn't see any children around. By the time we rose stiffly, it had ceased raining.

We rolled happily down the hill into Daofu. Dorje had to run a quick errand in town, so he left me with a distant aunt at a roadside stall. She offered me a bit of tea, and explained (after quite a bit of trying) that the following day was the Chinese Moon Festival. She offered me moon cakes, which were rather delicious in fact, though I couldn't eat them as fast as she asked me to.

On our way back to Dorje's home, we caught up with his parents and uncle receiving a ride on the back of a tractor. It was fun for them to see us on the motorcycle after our journey. It began to rain a bit, but I was elated. It was not yet dark, and soon after we returned to his home we had dinner. I was too exhausted to remember anything of significance that evening. It's very likely that nothing really happened. Nothing ever does.

The Senator and the Queen

2006-10-27T23:29:00.000+08:00

Life Imitates Art

little joys

2006-10-26T22:53:00.000+08:00

since i was young i have heard about "the joys of teaching." lately i hadn't thought of that much, as i have been letting myself get bogged down by grading papers, teaching grammar, and formulating my first midterm. i also have to make corrections on each student's diary, which they write in two or three times a week.

this entry, written by a student whose English name is Nikki, reminded me of a lot of things. i've decided to leave it the way she wrote it, except where i think it's absolutely necessary:

"Miss

'The miss taste like a bitter coffee.' I can't sing any song but I can remembe this song. Because It likes [is like] my heart.
Today is a sunny day. But my heart is raining day. I left my grandmother and my relatives there is a miss in my heart. I want to fly into my home. But I can't what can I do? Please tall me what can I do? I hate times keep my grandmother and I part [apart]. I want to go back to when I was chiled [a child] I can't either.
I don't want to be the daytime and the night. When the time finish They need to leave. They can't alway daytime or night. [It can't always be daytime or nighttime.] I like the sky. it alway in there. everybady can see it. when I see the sky, maybe my grandmother see the sky too. Maybe I can convey my heart to its. Let it takes to them for my grandmother. If that [is so, then] I will be the sky look after my grandmother and my relatives of corse also my teacher classmate, friend and everything.
Next lifetime I will be a in frot of my home's tree, because after the tree grow a place then alway can't another place. [In my next lifetime, I will be a tree in front of my home, because after the tree grows in a place then it can't grow in another place.] So I will never leave my family."

i will finish the story of my holiday soon. suffice it to say i miss all of you; my old friends, flames, pals, and families.

yours,

[Aside]

2006-10-26T16:02:00.000+08:00

[My internet service provider no longer seems willing or able to connect me to blogspot.com. Apparently, the powers that be have discovered some of the reactionary and/or rightist propaganda I view and contribute on online journals such as Cenlamar, WeSawThat, KilgoreSmith, CenlaAntics and MediaGangBang.

Fortunately, accessing blogger.com is no trouble at all, so I do not foresee any difficulty in continuing to update this website. On the other hand, proxify.com is not blocked, so I will continue to read these blogs as I see fit. However, until I find an IP cloaker that will allow me to post content in addition to reading it, I won't be able to contribute to the online discussions.

Thanks Proxify! And Fkuc Yuo hCenise voGrennemt!]

UPDATE: I have found that NinjaIP runs cleanly and allows webposting. I'm back.

Day Three: Part Two

2006-10-26T14:54:00.000+08:00

The townspeople of Yuke are in the process of building a bridge over the small river. Currently, all traffic from the small mountain must endure a short makeshift crossing of planks and logs, barely wide enough for the motorcycle. I had to dismount as Dorje spun it across the earthen banks and flimsy boards. Entering Yuke, however, was worth the small inconvenience. "The word for this kind of place," I explained to Dorje, "is 'Fronteir.'" In addition to the bridge project, workers were "resurfacing" the main drag in town. Large craggly stones were assembled in the floor of the road, and then covered by gravel and an upper layer of dirt. A curious pounding machine flattened the new, concrete-less road.

From the outside Yuke looks rather small, a neat conglomeration of wooden homes and a single Chinese style structure (replete with the Red Flag), the local primary school. As we rode across the unfinished road through town, numerous Tibetan pedestrians and monks waved greetings to us. I imagine that few foreigners make their way down that road from Daofu, despite its stunning natural beauty, and in spite of the stares I enjoyed the relatively warm reception. We immediately headed to the school, where Dorje's sister works as a Chinese teacher. She unlocked the gate for us, and we went inside to rest and eat.

We were starving. It was past one o'clock, so everyone had eaten and the students and most teachers were in class. Dorje's sister helped us to their left-overs, and we also brought some food out of the rough sack that we had strapped to the back of the hog. One of the plastic bags containing cold spicy noodles had broken. It was no matter to Dorje and the rest; they scooped it together onto a plate and served it as if nothing had happened. I, on the other hand, attempted to stick mainly to the relatively fresh food left from lunch.

The room had a wood stove, similar to the one in Dorje's home. Yuke sits at around four thousand kilometers, and was significantly colder than Daofu. I kept my new hat on as we drank tea and relaxed from the journey, warming ourselves by the fire. After a while we decided to walk explore the small town. When the children saw us, they crowded and pressed around me, saying simple non sequiturs like "Good Evening!" and "Good Morning!," and trying to hold my hand or kick me in the butt. Most of them had ruddy cheeks from numerous winters, and nostrils permanently crusted with snot. Down to the first grade the students lived at the school away from their mostly nomadic families. We finally dislodged them all and made our way through town.

There aren't many things in Yuke other than the unique mountian homes and the beautiful mountains. It certainly was enough. After walking a short ways we found ourselves in the back of town at the monastery, a towering single-roomed square building of stone that faces away from the rest of the community. Around the courtyard there were men stripping large logs and preparing them for lumber. Later I learned that they would be building simple living quarters for the monks of the six year old gompa. We went inside, prostrated three times, and seated ourselves in the back among the little children and the old ladies that had brought them at the back of the colorful room.

The group had come to listen to the monks chant and play their horns and drums. The group sat in six rows, three facing three with the large drum in the center. In one of the middle rows, a beautiful adolescent boy with long straight hair and a golden jacket sat among the other monk. Some of the older monks dozed toward the back. Dorje explained that the boy with long hair was probably a Rinpoche, a "Precious Jewel," a thulku or reincarnated high lama from the past. He also explained to me that I had been prostrating incorrectly. Since first learning to sit still at the Zen Club at Rice University, I have pressed my palms flatly together with my left thumb sitting over the right thumb. Dorje explained that I should leave an empty space between my palms, and not allow any fingers to cross the others.

Soon a monk came over to us, and offered to show us around the monastery. I was a bit embarrassed as we had already been attracting (distracting?) a lot of attention from the monks. The man was Hannah's uncle, and Dorje and I recognized him from the thukpa shop in Daofu that her cousin owns. We agreed to the tour, and he began by showing bringing us to the rear of the hall. There was a large statue of Padmasambhava, the Guru Rinpoche, in a rear section of the hall that was surrounded by workers painting thanka on the walls around the icon. Dorje informed me that it had been "made of" a deceased lama, which disturbed me somewhat until I realized that he meant to say that it was "made by" (the financial offerings of) a previous lama. In fact, the new monastery and the housing project is underwritten by some wealthy lamas and practitioners that have taken the Yuke community under their care.

He next showed us the thanka, or paintings, that surrounded the perimeter of the hall. Each colorfully and stylistically depict a Buddha, Rinpoche, deity, or Dharma protector important to their lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Soon we came across Chenrezig, an immanation of Avolakiteshvara, the Guardian of Compassion. Some suggest the he takes the female form of GuanYin in Chinese Buddhism, and Kannon in Japan. When Michael and I visited Lama Wangdu with Ian McCormick in Kathmandu, He gave us each a colored metal medallion to wear around our necks. I was blessed with one of Chenrezig. Michael told me that the Lama had said it was because I have a "white heart." Chenrezig has four arms, two of which are holding a mediation mudra (hand gesture) and two of which are pressed together at his sternum. His hands are slightly parted, as if he is holding something very special...

Soon we returned to the school after circumambulating the gompa a few times. We ate dinner with Dorje's sister and one of her friends. The conversation drifted between Mandarin and the dialect of Daofu, with a bit of English here and there. Although the girls were not English teachers, English is a requirement on all teaching and government examinations in China. After a while a young man named Gonga Sonam joined us. He was a recent graduate of the Bridge Fund program, and had just begun at the school as a Tibetan teacher. He was only twenty, deciding not to take the exams to go to University. He was a little concerned with his school placement; when requesting to teach in Daofu county, he had not expected to be placed so far into the countryside. He said if he was a judge's son, he could easily get moved, but since he didn't know anyone there was a chance he'd be teaching in Daofu for the next three of four decades. The eligible batchelorettes in Yuke are few and far between.

Dorje and I took a bit of time to watch the children as they ate their dinner. Each child gets noodles for dinner, enhanced with a bit of cooked cabbage floating around the soup. Although it is a simple meal, they are welcome to as many helpings as they like. Dorje said that for lunch they get some vegetables, although he wasn't certain. Meat is expensive. Dorje felt that watching the poor students was good for us both: "It really makes my heart open." He asked me about certain words in English, begging me translate terms like "depressed economy," "development," and "resources."

I took the opportunity to dispel a myth that I hear constantly as I travel in China, that all people in America are rich. I explained to him that although even dishwashers make at least $800 a month, which is quite a good salary in China [a little more than what I'm making as a foreign instructor, incidentally], it is rarely enough to live on in America. I explained to him that rent, health and automotive insurance, gasoline, a car note, energy bills, and basic living expenses generally add up to over $800 per month; even for a person living on their own, making a living on the minimum wage is extremely difficult. We also went into credit card debt a bit. People in developing countries tend to focus on the higher wages that people in developed countries earn for even the most menial tasks. They often forget the fact that an inflated economy means that everything costs a lot more, too.

Soon the sun set and it became dark, much darker than I expected, actually. A light drizzle moistened the deep night. Yuke does not have a central power grid. Sometimes they stoke up the generator at the school, but not this evening, apparently. Gonga returned with a few beers for the two of us, and Pepsis for the girls and Dorje. Students in the Bridge Fund are not allowed to drink booze. I've been drinking a lot less myself. Beside the stove, the five of us chatted by candlelight about numerous useless topics as ate sunflower seeds and some god-awful hard-candy.

I stopped after one beer, as I was concerned about a relapse of my morning headache, which by now I was ready to attribute to the altitude. Gonga offered to let me sleep in the extra bed in his room, which he shared with two other teachers. As I got into bed, Gonga threw an extra blanket on top of me and Dorje actually tucked me in, on all sides. They acted very concerned that I would be too cold during the night. I assured them that I had fared much worse in my old sleeping bag and thin ground pad in the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico. I pulled my hat on tight. Gonga told me that if I needed to pee during the night, just to step outside and go in the grass. I certainly had no problem with that. It was not yet midnight, but I fell asleep quickly, and did not need to get up until breakfast.

Day Three: Part One

2006-10-23T20:58:00.001+08:00

I awoke to a low sun filtered through thin white curtains. The day promised warmth, a welcome change from the drizzly chill of the previous afternoon. I washed, stretched a bit, and sat cross-legged on the couchbed for about ten minutes. I stared blankly at the opposite wall, trying to ignore the patterns of gold paint traced amid patches of pink and green and blue that make up the majority of the designs around the walls of the home. I finished packing away the sweaters and hats we had horded for the upcoming journey, and readied myself for breakfast.

I had a dull headache as I ate the endless stream of boiled eggs presented to me. It was an annoying throb, unusual because I hadn't had anything to drink since Kangding three nights before. I drank extra bowls of water, and after Dorje finished his tsampa I grabbed the bag and we headed to the back of the house to check out the motorcycle he had borrowed. He informed me that he used to drive bikes very recklessly in the days of his rebellious youth. About two years ago, at the age of sixteen, he realized the emotional trouble he was causing his parents and decided to "change his heart." Now he is one of the top students in my class, and a conscientious Buddhist.

The bike was red, and had a colored Tibetan snow lion etched below the seat on the back panel. It reminded me of Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace's freewheeling hog from the film The Rockers. He kicked the foot starter, and the engine whined but refused to turn over. After a few more tries, Dorje asked me to push the bike as he tried the ignition. Soon the right throttle handle came completely loose. Dorje was not pleased, and decisively unscrewed the steel nuts that held in place the thin cable that runs from the chassis to the throttle. The wire slipped easily out of the handle, clearly frayed at its end. By twisting the skinny steel cable around his fingers, he was able to get it to start as I, pack on my back, pushed the motorcycle all the way down the rocky driveway and into the thin highway. He gassed it up the road a bit, and spun around to pick me up. As I mounted the hog, I could see that the wire was already causing his fingers to turn bright red.

We rode the five clicks to Daofu with high spirits after our potentially abortive obstacle. This was the second time in five days that I had been on the back of a motorcycle, out of perhaps five times in my entire life. It was far more pleasant than whipping through Chengdu, and certainly beat the hell out of drunkenly crossing Houston on the back of a rice rocket. In a cabin in the Himalayan foothills of India Michael had recounted a story about his trip from New Orleans to D.C. in a busted jeep. He moralized his story by saying, "if it seems that everything is trying to keep you from doing something, then perhaps you shouldn't do it." My headache was growing more persistant, but my spirits had risen considerably.

As Dorje had the bike repaired in a roadside shop in Daofu, I ducked into a local drug store and purchase some headache medicine. After resisting the shopkeepers attempts at selling me some extra cold medicine, I took a few of the pills with a cup of hot water and rejoined Dorje by the bike. He was having it serviced fully for the trip. I watched the motor oil pool on the sidewalk as a couple of young Tibetan men were having a tape deck installed on their roadhog. Their motorcycle was decked out with colored carpet on the seat and streamers on the handlebars. Dorje bought some white gloves, the same as the technicians were using to repair the bikes. We mounted, crossed town for some petrol, and turned on a paved road rising steeply from the town's main road. Soon it became a rocky dirt road.

As we snaked up the hill, I asked him if the road would be so bad the entire way to Yuke, the nomad community to which we were headed. He said no, and I remarked that it must be a shortcut. He said he understood, which was clearly not the case as the road would only get less smooth from then on. I thought it was a good time to explain to Dorje the English language concept of the open road. Freedom, Captain America riding his chopper across an unencumbered New Mexico, limitless possibility, the Zen of a moment. Soon we were eye level with the hillside mantras. I began to see the way in which Daofu sits within an accommodating valley, as the rest of the countryside rolls and slopes through grassland and forest on average a good thousand feet above the river below. It was breathtaking. Stunning prehistoric mountains started to peer from above the more gentle and still autumn grasslands. My headache was gone, and we made numerous stops to pee and to bundle up as the wind and air grew more frigid. I could see snow above the pines. We curved numerous times around progressively more threatening bends. I got my first look at the range that contained our pass to Yuke, a snowy razor edge of grey stone and patchy snow. The bike glided up the last few hundred meters and slipped through the aperture that separated this side from that.

The top of the pass sits at well over four thousand meters, and is marked with a couple of shrines to mountain deities. The vertical flags make a colorful contrast to the brown and grey, white and deep green that is evident at every angle. I forced Dorje to stop for a couple of pictures. By now my bag was empty as we had layered every sweater and jacket that we had brought. I was wearing two hats, and it was more than worth it. On the opposite side of the pass from which we had ascended, there was a thousand-plus foot drop into a pristine valley, alpine yet fertile, walled on the other side by an even higher strip of mountains and passes. Delta-like threads of blue-white snowmelt cut down it's face, the lifeblood of the plain below. A few black yak-fur tents dotted its grassy floor. We got back on the bike and rolled down the frozen path.

It took no time for the sub-tundra plain to fade into nomad plains, and soon we dipped below tree line. Vast triangular configurations of prayer flags melted with pines in both directions of the valley. Soon squatty horses and shaggy yaks could be seen grazing in fields beside the road. Crude fences appeared, and homesteads of frontier cabins and black tents established themselves in the ever more lush valley.

Dorje steered the bike off the road at one settlement to check out the tent, and although a hat was hung on a peg outside and smoke poured from the slit of a door, no one was to be seen. My legs had stiffened completely. Soon we passed through a real community, and within another ten clicks we had arrived at our destination, the small mountain town of Yuke. From the back of the motorcycle I felt very free and very fortunate.

It was the culmination of two months of blemish-free karma. I vowed not to forget the feeling once the karmic pendulum began its decent.

For the first time in a couple of years, I really felt there. Everything was totally with it, and my thoughts were with you through it all. I tried to enjoy it all for its own sake, for my sake alone. I couldn't help but anticipate recanting the tale, threatened by my own motivations of vanity. It is my pride and my ego, but it also the only gift I have for you now. This is my love.

Day Two

2006-10-20T11:06:00.000+08:00

By the time I eased off the couch every member of Dorje's family had finished their prostrations in the adjoining shrine room. As I washed my face and teeth, hands and feet on the upper patio, which opens down the length of the long pastoral valley, I really noticed it's simple and meditative quality. I wondered if when growing up Dorje had ever gotten tired or failed to notice the gentle ochre hills backdropped by more impressive stoic snowcaps, or the practical grace of the wheat plots set against the idle river. I knew that in a weeks time I would not. I climbed to the roof to get a better view, and I allowed my thoughts to mingle with the morning incense smoke rising from his home, and ever other house, stupa, and mountain deity shrine I could see.

We breakfasted on tsampa, a staple of ground roasted barley mixed with the low-quality nomad brick tea to make a very palatable ball of dough. They offered me butter, dried cheese, and sugar for flavor, and insisted I eat more boiled eggs and drink more fresh unpasteurized milk than my weak and shrunken stomach could handle. They were very insistent, as they would be the entire week, and also very successful at making me rather bloated by the end of each mealtime. By the end of the meal my pants were covered in a fine barley powder from my amateurish attemps at molding my breakfast ball of dough.

Not long after breakfast word came upstairs that Dorje's robed uncle had invited a number of Chinese tourists from Chongqing to tour the home. I stood at the top of the steep stairs and listened to their clean hiking boots stamp out their ascent. Upon reaching the second floor they greeted me with a hearty "Tashi Deleg!" before realizing I did not look as Tibetan as the rest of the family. Everyone was introduced, and I enjoyed bantering with a couple of them as they toured the family home and the shrine room. One of the tourists pointed to the upstairs outhouse door and asked if it was a staircase. They seemed very happy to give their respects to The Venerable One, who's face peers from multiple directions in the elaborate wooden house. They gave gifts of terrible tasteless Chinese candy, and I was given a pack of cigarettes, a special Chongqing brand. I explained that I don't smoke, but they wouldn't take them back. "For bribing taxi drivers not to cheat me," I concluded to myself.

Soon the tourists moved on, giving Dorje's mother a ride so she wouldn't have make the hourlong walk to town. Dorje explained to me that his parents worked very hard and do not like to waste money. He hopes to learn English and make money abroad, so that they will not have to continue their manual, agricultural tasks into their old age. The hardships of half a century are already visible on his mother's dark wrinkled face, and his father's broad body and curled hands. As we waited for a cab to town, we turned a large prayer wheel suspended in a nearby earthen shack.

We met Hannah, my other student, in her cousin's noodle shop, and immediately set out for the monastery. We peered into each shrine room, and I was surprised and how many statues and images we continued to find. Many of the carvings made from colored yak butter had begun to melt with last summer's heat. I made a few donations here and there, and Dorje showed me the rooms set aside as "bedrooms" for the previous Panchen lama and the current Big Lama. I especially enjoyed His Picture set in a spiral of shiny plastic, making it appear as the focal point of some crazed hypnotist's device.

As we did one large korwa, a circumambulation, I snapped photos of the view of the city and the outside of the monastery. I prefer not to take pictures inside temples, though I'm not exactly sure why. I really love looking at the detailed thanka paintings, my favorites being the ones painted on black backgrounds with colorful subjects like burning skulls and vajrayoginis and protector dieties. I just feel a little strange snapping their photos. I also felt immediately ashamed when I clandestinely took the picture of a monk, about my age and wearing a brazil soccer jersey beneath his maroon robe, as he walked up a path between the low, mud buildings of the monastery. The complex is a rather beautiful combination of a simple monastic style and the specialized wooden structures of the Daofu area homes. I have heard them described as giant Tibetan chocolate cakes covered in white icing, but I don't really think that does them justice.

After lunching on the thick Tibetan noodles at the restaurant, we grabbed a cheap taxi across town to see the large Daofu stupa. It reminded me quite a bit of the one in Boudha, Kathmandu, at which Mike and I spent many an afternoon in ambling korwa. You could actully go inside of this one, climbing a series of narrow wooden ladders to get to each of the smaller, cocentric levels. From the inside, one can see the small buddhas placed in each small, glassy archer's window. At the top of the stupa we took the customary photographs in front of the Buddha Eyes and the mantra arranged on the hillside. Dorje and Hannah pointed out to me which local mountains were worthy of "mountain gods," hold-over deities from the pre-Buddhist religion called Bon that were recruited by Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava to protect the Dharma.

During the afternoon Dorje informed me that he had been asking around to borrow a motorcycle for us to ride up over one of the mountains to a local nomad community. His sister is an English teacher in a very small town called Yuke, and that afternoon I purchased a maroon stocking cap for $0.75 in anticipation of the ride. After saying goodbye to Hannah, we took a cab to an orphan school about halfway back to his house. The school was established by a network of do-gooders from Germany, and there was very tall and very friendly Swiss English teacher, near my age, on a two or three month stint in Daofu. The students were typically over-fond, and one of them with the English name Sunshine asked me if I knew Karma Sonam, one of the students in my program and a classmate of Dorje's. Karma is one of my favorite students, and his cousins Tashi Nema (Lucky Sun) and Tashi Dawa (Lucky Moon) offered to show me around. After seeing the thanka and weaving classrooms, Dorje and I set out to his home accompanied by four or five of the local schoolchildren.

We ate momos backed on the wood-fire and more thukpa soup, and put all of the warm clothes we would need in my backpack for the trip the following morning. I had no idea what to expect.

Day One

2006-10-12T17:11:00.000+08:00

I set out for Kangding at about 6:00 Sunday evening. The road from Guza to Kangding winds for about half an hour through the green rocky river valley. I bantered a bit in rough Sichuanese with my taxi driver, asked him to drop me at the bus station so I could purchase tickets for Daofu for the following morning, and paid him the flat rate of ten yuan. Tenzin, another Bridge Fund instructor, had invited me to have dinner with him at his apartment, a flurry of vegetable dumplings being prepared by a giggling gaggle of six Tibetan teenagers. Tenzin is white, and technically an American (at least his passport says so). The son of a Tibetan-English translator of no little repute, Glenn H. Mullin, Tenzin was born in Northern India and spent his childhood between India, America, Nepal, and New Zealand. And his name really is Tenzin. I've seen his Georgia driver's license. He has taught for the Bridge Fund for five years now, and he's really become one of my closest friends and professional mentors. As such, we went out for beers after the girls cleaned up and left.

Tenzin and I tried a restaurant turned bar turned karioke club that his friend manages. Between the loud music and drunk highschoolers we decided to split, for a less crowded less popular thirtysomethings upstairs bar. We typically get invited to drink with Tibetans or Chinese people immediately upon sitting down, as we are generally the only foreigners around and we are a rather lonely looking pair. We attempted conversation with a Tibetan man from Danba, but his Kham Tibetan was different from Tenzin's, and his Chinese was different than mine. Traveling to Daofu would be the same: From standard Chinese, the Sichuan dialect is once removed, and from standard Tibetan, the Kham dialect is once removed. For places like Daofu and Danba, their local languages (from being relatively isolated half a century ago) a again removed from the local dialects.

Soon some Kangding drinking pals of Tenzin's called him and they showed up almost immediately. I asked a girl that was with them what she was drinking, and one of the men promptly informed me that she was his girlfriend. Insecure punk. Tenzin's friends are very goofy, but good natured and friendly. One of them showed me a picture in his cellphone of the former political leader of Tibet, the main man himself (currently kicking it in the green beauty of the Indian lower Himalayas). Tenzin jovially informed me that he is a traffic cop in Kangding. I guess official political loyalties don't run so deep.

I pestered Tenzin to go home and let us pass out at about midnight, as my bus was leaving at 6:00 the following (Monday) morning. I got up slightly before 5:30 and went looking for a cab. It was dark and there were no cars at the gate of Kangding Zhongxue (Middle School, i.e. High School), where Tenzin lives and teaches. I walked up the road to a few parked taxis next to men loading a work truck, and when I inquired as to the drivers the men told me they were sleeping. No surprise there. I began to become concerned that I'd miss the bus, and jogged up the road with my modest pack. After a while I saw a taxi approaching, followed it to its fare's destination, and directed him to the bus station.

Cars in China generally drive very quickly and recklessly. In my hurry I had probably located the only slow taxi driver in Sichuan. We ambled through the back mountain roads until he finally deposited me at the bus station. I hurried past the luggage scanner and onto the bus platform, searching vainly for about ten minutes. I could not find my bus, and it was already past 6:00. I began to feel some anxiety. I asked some passengers milling about at an empty bus stand, and they remarked casually that it had not come yet. Monday was perhaps the busiest travel day of the holiday, and most of the buses that leave Kangding depart for destinations only once daily, at 6:00 am. I walked out of the traffic entrance to the bus yard and found my bus among a long line of empty vehicles waiting to even get into the station.

I asked the driver if I could put my bag in the trunk. It was the only piece of luggage there. When I climbed on I notice five foreigners struggling to stack their overburdened packs in the aisle and on the seats beside them. They had, likely not by coincidence, been assigned the back row of five seats, slightly elevated. These seats are a blessing in an empty overnight bus on a smooth highway, as one can spread out and catch some sleep. They are notorious, however, or bumpy roads, as the back of the bus tends to amplify the vertical jerks of the potholes. I informed them that I had put my bags in the trunk, and they said that the driver hadn't let them. I asked the driver about it in Chinese, and I barely made out from his dialect that it was because they were not going all the way to Daofu, but rather stopping off at Tagong, a popular grassland community with an impressive, millennia-old monastery.

I didn't feel like sticking around to argue as I really needed "to see a man about a dog." I found the public squatter, and wasn't able to take my time as I like, still slightly anxious about the bus departure. I returned with plenty of time, and I attempted to get some sleep as the bus rolled out, well behind schedule. Soon, the foreigners engaged me in conversation. They were Polish, which I had secretly guessed but didn't want to ask because they could have been Russian or Check or Croatian and probably would have resented being called Poles. They were nice, after all, and dealt with their crappy seat and luggage situation in stride by calling the driver crazy in English, and one of the girls was astonished that I could read Mullin senior's book in spite of the bumpy ride. I was feeling a bit ragged, from my previous encounter in the squatter and my lack of water after drinking the night before and from skipping breakfast, which I hate.

The houses began to appear more squarish with facades bordered by wood, as opposed to the bathroom tiled external walls of modern Chinese architecture. I saw a few horses with colored yarn braided into their manes and tails, and embroidered rugs with pictures of dragons or snow lions serving as saddles. But as we entered the valley down the road that leads to Tagong I saw the first really beautiful picturesque views that trip, as magnificent as anything I've seen since Colorado and New Mexico and maybe flying over the Himalayas in September (views from planes are magnificent, but a little too alien for inspiration). The hills were green and amber, not as imposing as near Guza, and the sun shone along a clear stream (like really! Clear water does exist in China!) littered with large stones that led to the open grasslands of Tagong. In the distance I could some snowcaps, dark mountains with shining snowy crowns distant and formidable against the rolling meadows and ridges of lower Kham. I decided rather deliberately that my hunger and discomfort would not distract me from the beauty, and henceforth they did not.

The Poles hopped off at Tagong, the bus barely slowing down enough for them to lug their packs into a white and yellow ocean of tourists and a brown gulf of locals. Later I lunched on potatoes and pork, and fell asleep on the last leg of the trip as a couple of rough Tibetan herdsmen sat next to me smelling like strong butter. As I awoke the scenery was as impressive, but with more New England looking trees and low homesteads with haystacks, firewood stacks, and low stone walls capped by transplanted sod. I noticed a few mantras pieced on the distant hillsides, om mani padme hum and others that I didn't recognize. I knew I was close because I had seen them in pictures of Daofu in the past. The mantras as contructed with white stones, in much the same way that college towns put giant "M"s on the hillsides for Michigan State and the Colorado School of Mines, or how evangelical Christians in Central Louisiana fashion giant crosses near the highway in Louisiana.

I heard "Hello Teacher!" before I could see my two students outside of the bus, waiting for me. They were at the station, waiting for a while as the bus was rather behind schedule. I asked the driver to pop the trunk, and it swung open with a cloud of dust like a forgotten treasure chest in some deserted jungle. My bag, normally a stylishly rugged forest green and black affair, was completely tan from the fine dirt that had kicked up from the pocked road. I smiled a thank you at the driver, knocked off an insignificant slew of the dirt, and slung my belongings onto my back, which left two tan racing stripes against the stone grey of my suit coat.

My student Hannah (Namei Deji) has a cousin that owns a noodle shop across from the bus station in Daofu, and we relaxed there as a few Tibetans watched popular Tibetan singers belt out tunes from a VCD. I snacked on some thukpa noodles with bits of meat. Soon, I noticed a man on the VCD that I recognized, His Imminence Adzom Rinpoche himself. I realized that they were watching a copy of the very same VCD that had been given to me free of donation by Lisa and Drako in Chengdu two days before. The beef stuck in my teeth as I watched images of the Rinpoche alternate with pictures of cows getting their throats cut and snakes being skinned alive. Denouement: conscientious Buddhist purchased the animals from the market and set the luckless beasts free.

After a while Joseph (Dorje) and I made our way to his home. The houses in Daofu are very famous, and his parent's home is a classic example. It is set an an extremely pastoral "village" (a collection of seven to ten homes spread out among the farmland about five kilometers from home). His father inherited a plot for growing wheat and potatoes from Dorje's grandfather, in addition to a modest orchard of green and red apples. As we approached, his previous English teacher Catherine's dog Jake became very excited. Being raised by a New Zealander, he was ecstatic to see a white man. I met Dorje's parents, a regular Tibetan Gothic scene with floppy straw hats and classic dusty rural fashion. I was welcomed inside to meet the rest of the family. Dorje's grandmother is eighty-five and her principle interest is turning prayer wheels. She seems with it enough, at least when she responds the tough Daofu dialect shouts of the family members.

Dorje's uncle is a monk at the monastery in Daofu, and he was able to return to the house to celebrate the holiday with the family. He is the younger brother of Dorje's father, and spent the majority of his time plucking beard hairs with a metal clamp, spinning the prayer wheel, mumbling mantras and attending to the family shrine room. Dorje's older sister is a nun as well, and she was at home recovering from an operation. Her face is a beacon of light, her small eyebrows standing apart from the strong muscles of her forehead, in constant motion from her tireless propensity towards laughing and smiling. She spent a great deal of time singing in the shrine room, reading Tibetan books or preparing food wearing her robes over white and pink long johns beneath a tan corduroy jacket that would have made a great Goodwill find.

The house is large, with the downstairs dedicated to the animals, and washing and storage areas. The one staircase upstairs is very steep in the classic Daofu style. Everything is wooden and painted in beautiful Tibetan thanka style, and the ceilings are blue with bright red rafters. Snow lions and dragons peek from behind wall columns. The main hall/foyer of the house leads in to a number of rooms. Dorje and I stayed in the TV room, which connected the house to the shrine room. There are other sleeping rooms, but the center of family life concentrates in the kitchen (naturally). The roof of the kitchen is covered in plastic sheeting to protect the wood from smoke stains. Near the center of the room is a classic wood burning stove, where all of the cooking is performed. It is also the only source of heating in the home. Because of the high ceilings, Dorje's father told me it gets a little chilly in the winter. The toilet, a medieval side room with an open hole to the first floor and an archer's window to match, is across a second floor outside patio. In the corner of the patio is an altar for burning incense. There is also a metal ladder to the roof, which has vertical prayer flags on poles.

To the side of the foyer is a group of photos of the Great Spiritual and Political Leader that Dares not Speak His Name. I was a bit surprised to see his amiable, paternal face peering from behind his bespectacled old eyes. In America, there are many misconceptions about the stringency in which certain Chinese policies are enforced. Moreover, I spent my time in western Sichuan, which does not suffer from many of the prejudices of the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Lhasa. Also, the night before in Kangding, there was the aforementioned episode with Tenzin's traffic cop buddy.

That evening we dined on thukpa and they force fed me meat momos. I also drank milk tea, which I rather prefer to butter tea. We watched a little TV, aided by the family satellite dish. There were more channels in Arabic than English. I read a bit of Mullin's Gem's of Wisdom, snuggled into the colorful Tibetan style couchbed. Dorje turned off the television, prostrated three times on his couchbed, took off his clothes and killed the lights.