Nina enda Kenya!

It’s a few days after Christmas, and right now I’m probably about 35,000 feet or so above the upper Midwest of the United States.  My destination is Nairobi, Kenya.  I have a small herd of undergraduates in tow, scattered about this jam-packed aircraft. For the sixth year, a group of 12 students will join me for two weeks to immerse themselves in the Samburu culture, where the inequities of the planet are right there in front of you: lack of sufficient health care access and clean water; women who have traditionally been denied basic rights such as property ownership or choosing their own husbands; severely under-resourced schools, and more. But also right in front of you in this region are efforts to tackle these challenges head-on, and that provide some hope for the future as a result.  More on this in a future blog.

So Christmas came and went in a flurry. I spent a far too-short period of time with my good childhood friend Shannon and her family, just north of San Francisco.  Growing up, our families vacationed and spent holidays together, in addition to all of the day-to-day interactions facilitated by little leagues, birthdays and so on. I’ve known Shannon for 36 of my 41 years, which means nearly all of the time of my life where I actually had some sense of what was going on in my surroundings.  If I live to be 78 (the average for a male inthe U.S), I will have known and remained in close touch with Shannon for 94% of my life.

So, Christmas. Before you go on, if the song title “Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” means nothing to you, then you need to first watch this:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmj7KlIut1w.   The song was an effort by many eventually washed-up pop culture artists (where are you now, Boy George?) to raise money to address famine in Africa.  Now, at the time in 1984 when this song was released, the song may have been understood as a sensible and compassionate approach to African events of the time. But without fail, I hear this song a dozen times every Christmas season including the current season, playing in the background of a retail store, on the radio, and so on.  In the 1980s, my brain was cognitively predisposed to memorize lyrics to a lot of songs that I would later judge to be crappy but they stick with me nonetheless, taking up precious space in my cranium. So as I’m roaming the aisles of Ace Hardware in December 2012, I hear the song being played as background music and I am able to quietly sing along to the entire song.  We’ve all been there: you just sing along but never knew that you really paid attention to the actual lyrics. So let’s dissect this holiday song in more detail, because there's a lot of really senseless and odd lyrics.

The chorus is a repetition of “do they know it’s Christmas time at all?” and it’s repeated about 600 times.  So let’s address that question: do they know it’s Christmas? The implication seems to be that people are so hungry they can’t keep track of major Christian holidays. Well, 67% of the African continent identifies with a religion other than Christianity, including 30-40% of Ethiopians which I note because in 1984 when the song was released, the world focus was on famine in Ethiopia.  Do they know it’s Christmas? I don’t know. Do I know when it’s Ramadan? Do I know when it’s Yom Kippur? Do I know when it’s Magha Puja, a major Buddhist holiday? No, I don’t know exactly when any of these holidays occur unless something around me prompts it, like when my local Safeway moves all of the Jewish food to a display near the entry, or when my buddy Faoud can’t drink water at half-time of our soccer game because of Ramadan. Then I know something is up.  So I think the lack of awareness about Christmas in places throughout the African continent might not be attributable to hunger alone.  The idea that a non-Christian might not be aware of a Christian holiday because they are really, really hungry....isn't that just a wee bit absurd?

Africa is 47 countries on a land base that is bigger than China,the U.S and Europe combined, yet the song lumps it all together as though the entire continent is sharing the same experience and climate.  Among its lyrics: 

“Where the only water flowing is the bitter sting of tears.”  No water flowing anywhere on the entire continent? They've overlooked the Nile River. And "bitter sting of tears"? Ugh.

“Well there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime.” In most places, that's true. Though I'm not sure that's something worthy of lamenting, as a good chunk of the planet will not have snow on Christmas.  By this logic, we should pity a good chunk of the world’s population which doesn’t live in a snowy climate. So sorry, Florida.  My thoughts are with you.  

“Where nothing ever grows.”  Right. Nothing.  Not those Ethiopian or Kenyan coffee beans you bought at Starbucks, for example.

“Here’s to them, underneath the burning sun.”  Good lord. Sigh.  You get the idea. 

Okay, enough ragging on the well-intentioned pop artists of the 80s.

About an hour ago we departed the Minneapolis airport for a connecting flight to Amsterdam. Our gate was G-8 and the window next to my seat provided a view to the west. None of that should be remarkable. It’s a connecting flight at a busy airport during a post-holiday travel day, and I sat in a plane waiting to leave.  But just beyond the airport in the view from my window seat was a grassy hill, maybe 50-60 feet high and that stretched along the airport's property, probably a human-made berm to provide some buffer from the airport noise because literally on the other side of this hill is a national cemetery, and it’s the cemetery where my paternal grandparents are buried.  I’ve sat on top of that hill, just beyond their grave site, and watched planes come and go.  So, on a journey from Denver to Nairobi, I somehow temporarily ended up maybe 600 meters as the crow flies from their burial place. 

They both died in 1986, when I was 15 years old. Grandma died in June, and Grandpa died the day after Christmas -  he hung on for one final holiday.  Most of the summers of my school-aged years were spent under their care, at a lakeside cabin that I doubt was any larger than 900 square feet and built around the time of the Depression by great-grandparents that I never really knew.  My grandparents had two children – my father and my aunt – and six grandchildren. Nine hundred square feet is not a lot of room for co-habitation of 11-12 people.  Granted, we had an entire lake and its surroundings to spread ourselves around during the daylight hours,and we did, in reckless and wild abundance. I have absolutely no doubt that my grandparents would be deemed irresponsible by today’s caregiving standards.  We explored the lake and its woods, without supervision and well out of view, we swam in depths of the lake that were over our heads and without lifejackets. My grandpa showed me how to use a table saw when I was maybe nine or ten years old, in a garage where we later discovered he kept a stash of brandy and cheap beer. It’s entirely possible I learned how to use a table saw from a grandfather who was buzzed on Old Milwaukee. 

My grandma was the matriarch. I can see that clearly now as I replay cabin memories as an adult, but at the time I didn’t realize her role in bringing and keeping our family together. We had a big campfire ring with about a half dozen logs situated around it. While she may have liked campfires, I bet my grandma liked that campfire  because it kept the family together well into the evening.  

Things have changed. I shared summer after summer as a kid at that cabin with two cousins I haven’t seen now in probably 10 years,and even longer since I’ve seen their mother, my aunt.   So while I sat on the plane looking in the general direction of their gravesite, I wondered what our conversations would be like if they had the chance to tell me about their latest travel adventure or if I had the chance to tell them about mine.  It bummed me out for a moment. They were great people who I never got to share my adult life with.

But I’ve learned as I’ve become older that energy expended on lamenting about what‘s been lost is fruitless and wasteful.  Those summers provided tremendous memories, and in some way I know those summers helped shape me in ways of which I’ll never be fully aware.  The long-term take-away from those summers is graciousness for the tireless efforts and love of Grandma and Grandpa. 

Enough of the personal exposure.  Let me close the curtain on this and move on.

I have unfinished business from the first blog about from Montenegro-Albania-Macedonia. And it relates back to grandparents. Sort of.

One of the colleagues I met on the trip was Borut, who works for a conservation organization in Slovenia, also part of the former Yugoslavia, like Montenegro. When I’m in a new culture, it’s great to have a go-to person from that place who you can point-blank ask things like “Is it 2or 3 kisses on the cheek when greeting someone here” and more urgent questionssuch as “What is this terribly unfamiliar thing I’m about to eat?” Borut became that person for me. We hit it off, and we had a lot of over-the-road travel time as our meeting hosts schlepped us around the entirety of Albania.  Ironically, Borut is a bird person,and my bias about bird people is this: they are often freaks (sorry birder readers).  This isn’t an uninformed conclusion.  Birders essentially hijacked the small cruise I had in the Galapagos in 1999, dictating how long we would stay on a given island by their yawn-inducing pursuit of yet another species of finch.  Exhibit B: Sometime this past year I sat next to a guy on a plane who read a bird guide page by page in the way I would read a novel,dressed in his khaki pants and khaki vest. I’m sure if I tackled him and searched his pockets, I would find his paper life-list in one of his 24 zippered pockets.  Like any reasonably thinking human being, I figured he was connecting to another flight following our arrival at Dulles (Washington DC) to some birding mecca, and so I asked himas much. Nope. Just going to a granddaughter’s recital in suburban DC. 

I liked Borut, not only as bird people go, but as a regular human being, and perhaps that’s why I liked him, because he was a birder AND a normal human being.  We got to talking about the break-up of Yugoslavia during the early 1990s.  He was around 10-11 years old when it all came to a head and the killing really took over. He remembers as a Slovenian, his grandfather told him he was a Slovenian first, and then a Yugoslavian. Well, that seemed to be the prevailingthought process for a lot of people in the six states of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia,Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia). The boundaries of those states were based mostlyalong ethnic lines and a strong desire by members of those six states to becomeindependent.

It was just a few days after the school year ended, and Borut had arrived at the Mediterranean coast with his family when the unrest in Yugoslavia erupted into war.  For days they remained in this beach resort which was mostly unaffected. The coastal regions generally didn’t endure as much of the conflict because of the mountain range located just inland from the coast and consequently provided a natural barrier to opposing forces which were mainly ground forces at the time. 

But his hometown suffered hugely.  One day you go to the beach with the liberated feeling of the end of the school year, and a few days later you helplessly wonder if your home, friends and relatives are safe or are completely gone. Borut lost his grandparents in this conflict. Throughout the war, more than 100,000 people died from a Yugoslavian country that numbered around 22 million.  As it was told to me, everyone lost someone important in their lives. Imagine tragically losing your grandparents and the story not being novel, because everyone around you has their own tragic story as well.   

During this recent trip people talked now and then about the recovery of the region from this brutal history of the early 1990s. It’s interesting to me how we de-personalize this conversation a little bit, I guess so we can feel okay talking about it. “Regions” don’t recover from conflict but that was definitely the lexicon to use when talking about how the area recovered. A region is just some arbitrarily understood geographic area. People recover; the conversation is really about how people sufficiently manage the heavy psychological and physical tool that comes alongwith tragic loss.  Imagine an entire community of people in which each individual has experienced something unfathomably awful, and then in the post-conflict era those same people need to collectively find the will and motivation to rebuild and redefine their communities and their lives. 

My mind is racing with a zillion more thoughts that would be incoherently placed if I wrote them down as they are coming to mind. But I’ll sum it up with this: around the world lives are lost every day from violence that is rooted in civic conflict; lives of people who were simply going about their day in a market, on a bus or whatever.  I’m bothered by this. I don’t want to think about it because it sucks but then I do want to think about it more because maybe there’s some sense of responsibility to know what’s going on with my fellow humans.

Sabbatical begins....

I'm entering the blog-o-sphere.

As of last Saturday, I’m on sabbatical from my faculty position at Colorado State University for a semester, which leads into the summer months when I typically have fewer responsibilities around campus anyway. So voila, it amounts to an 8-month getaway from the regular work routine.
 
Though this sabbatical just started on December 15, I started slipping into sabbatical a few months ago. The more I responded to various requests to commit to something that would carry on after December 15 with regrets that I couldn't commit, the more I was able to say it without any hint of apology. In fact, I think initially my response to those moments sounded something like“I’m really sorry but I’ll be on sabbatical” but by the end, I think it came acrossmore as “F-off, I’ll be on sabbatical.”

That lastline reminds me that I need to create some blog warnings and expectations.

· Sometimes I will swear or I will say or imply something that is equally uncharming. I do not underestimate the power of profanity to make a point.

· I have no idea what my level of commitment will be to this. Our blog relationship will have its ups and downs. Sometimes I won’t know why I continue to be involved and you won’t know why you continue reading. You might get hurt, I might get hurt, and there will no mixed tape to fix it.

· Some of you are too young to know what a mixed tape is and its historical role inrepairing adolescent relationships. You can’t set an iPod playlist on someone’s front seat and watch from a crouched position nearby when they got into their car to see the reaction, and for that, I would argue that you post Gen X-ersm issed out. That’s love. You know what else is love? Sleeping on a lawn chair overnight in front of the Tacoma Dome ticket office for a Madonna ticket. Wait, how do we get on this topic? See the next line.

· Sometimes I lose focus. And not just when I’m writing. This happens in class, too, and students exploit it when they figure it out. We watched Eddie Murray’s “My Girl Wants to Party All the Time” video two weeks ago, and a month ago I had a white-board full of numbers explaining the national debt and the fiscal cliff. For those who don’t know me, I teach natural resources. Side note: if you doubt your dance abilities, watch that video and you'll think you're super hip.

So what’s the reason for the blog? I have some plans for this sabbatical: travel plans, project plans, and plans to average 7 hours of sleep again. A few people suggested the blog as a way to follow what I’m up to and where I’m going, which creates some pressure to keep it interesting. It won’t all be about travel and professional pursuits, though.  I enjoy the blog-style of free writing, which rarely comes up for me since my primary writing duties are typically relegated to the sterile and technical world of academic journals, or letters of recommendation comprised of recycled parts of old letters of recommendation from students who remind me of each other. I don’t know that I’ll have anything profound or informative to say, and you might just end up with an affirmation that I can’t focus on one thing for very long. But I will share insights, observations and knowledge about what is crossing my mind or my path during some of these sabbatical adventures. It will be about the places that I visit during the next 8 months, and it will likely have some opinions about what’s going on with humanityand the role of reasonable and collaborative thinking and problem-solving on our planet.

So let’s get this started. Here's a visual aid to help with the following text.
 

It’s nearly midnight in Thessolinki, Greece which is close to where the brown, minty green and yellow areas converge on the map. I have spent the past four nights in four different countries, and that sentence makes me feel like a whore. The first night in Turkey was unplanned when I ended up in Istanbul, Turkey, and I will squarely place the blame for that on Turkish Airlines. But I find stories about the stresses of travel to be uninteresting so I won’t include mine here. Travel is a voluntary behavior, and if I’m in the fortunate position to travel than I should keep perspective and not bitch about a cancelled flight or a Turkish Airlines employee who ironically had the phrase “customer service" in her title of "customer service agent.”  But I WILL complain about the gigantic bummer that we arrived to the hotel in Istanbul at 11pm and left at 4:30am. Cruel because Istanbul is a GREAT city and I didn’t get to revisit any of it. Go there someday if you have the chance.  It’s a culture of Europe, Asia and Northern Africa all wrapped into one, with Christians, Muslims and Jews living together in a region of the world where in other countries, people lose their lives for belonging to one of those religions.

Second night was in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro which is one of the former states of Yugoslavia before the awful war and subsequent break-up of the country in the early 1990s. This was my second trip to the tiny country of 600,000. On my trip in September, I met the prime minister who casually walkedinto our meeting. I thought he was just some late-comer with nicer clothes thanthe rest of us. No secret service, no stressed-out personal assistants at hisside keeping track of time.  It made the statement pretty clear that Montenegro doesn't get too worked up about much.  And there's a lot of wealthy Russians running around here building up huge resorts on the coast.

Third night was in Albania. My apologies to Albania. It was only about two weeks before I departed that I was asked to come here, and it’s just not a country I had ever made a commitment to as far as learning basics such as its location, language and so on. Consequently, during the two weeks before I left I misspoke a few times. I told my brother I was going to Algeria and a few days before I left I received an email from a colleague who signed off with “Good luck in Armenia" because I probably told her that's where I was going. Despite my confusion, I can confidently say that I’m 95% sure I was in Albania.

I had one of the best meal experiences of my life in Albania. From what I could tell, Albania is divided between the top 1% and the remaining 99%. As a former communist country, that 99% seems to have what they need though not a lot more.  During our time there, we were treated like the Top 1%.  Some of you know of my increasing obsession with food, food experiences, food presentations, etc., and this place put me in a place of food nirvana.  Five courses of beautifully prepared courses, with a lot of Mediterranean influence: olives, eggplant, feta, pistachios, apricots, all in some state of puree, sautee, etc.... And Italy is just across the Adriatic, and the influence is apparent. And what I mean by that is the wine flowed, and flowed, and flowed. If wine is gonna flow in the abundance that it did, you can serve me just about anything and I'll be happy.  Except the blackbird. There was blackbird on the menu.  Two people ordered it, and I quietly hummed "Bye Bye Blackbird" to myself as they ate.

Tonight is the last night, and I’m in Greece. It’s definitely Greece.

Here are the nuts and bolts of why I’min the Balkan region of the world. There’s a few big lakes around here: Lake Skadar and Lake Prespa, specifically. Both are sizable (between 300-400 square kilometers; Tahoe is about 500 to give you a reference point) and have a lot to do with providing drinking water, wildlife habitat, jobs for fishermen and soon. And both straddle the borders of at least two countries (Lake Skadar: Montenegro, and either Albaniam, Armenia or Algeria; and for Lake Prespa, it’s Greece, Macedonia and also one of the “A” countries). So things get complicated pretty quick for figuring out how the lakes can meet a lot of demands. A number of the countries in this part of the world haven't had independence for very long -- Montenegro gained independence from Serbia in 2006 -- and there's not a lot of capacity within the country on how to do some large scale conservation planning.

Fortunately, there’s money available from a the world's larger conservation organization to encourage countries around here to collaborate and figure out how they’re gonna protect threatened species, such as Mr. Curly Pelican (see photo below). For countries that have their eyes on joining the EU – as Montenegro and Albania do (Greece already belongs) -- those monsieurs and lasses at the EU require that countries have written plans to protect their biodiversity “hot spots” (both lakes are considered hotspots) if they want to join the club. So here we are in Stage 1 of this process: help figure out what they need to do, to be followed at some point by developing a proposal to help address those needs.

Curly pelican: 

Curly from the three stooges (no relation):

It turns out blogging takes a while, and it’s threatening my 7-hours-of-sleep goal for tonight. In our next episode, I intend to share with you my conversation with a colleague who I sat with on the 11-hour journey from Lake Skadar to LakePrespa, and his experiences during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Over and out here on Sabbatical, Day 5.