Lists

Everything has its trends. This semester at CIEE, one trend has been reading. Ian was the first. He read constantly, every few days closing one book and opening another. People started asking to borrow them, and soon he organized a book swap. It has been amazing to see everyone excitedly reading and talking about books, really good books: In Cold Blood, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, To the Lighthouse, Crime and Punishment, East of Eden. I have been plowing my way through Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, which has recently become a trend in and of itself. Hopefully we will have a discussion about ethics and tactics of community organizing and revolution-making in the coming weeks.

And everybody is writing lists of things they want to do before they die. This trend can be traced to our program facilitator, Miles, who revealed his list one night in all of its 100+ item glory. Miles’ list is carefully crafted, with a detailed preface stipulating that the list is not binding and asking forgiveness if any of his items are distasteful. The list is then organized into categories and specifications (e.g. spend 3 months in Brazil).

“What I Want to Do Before I Die: The List” caught our imaginations. Why not write it down? Why not dream up things that will truly satisfy you? What do you want to do? What do you want to have? I saw lists that said make goat cheese, build my own house, take an African dance class, travel with my sister. As I began to think about my own list, I was surprised that it was hard for me to think of things I want to do before I die, and that things I expected to write just didn’t seem to fit. What I wrote was this:

Write a book
Take a figure drawing class
Learn how to play the fiddle
Learn how cars work
Work on a farm
Do a one-week meditation retreat
Go skinny-dipping when I’m 80
Travel by myself
Know enough about something to speak insightfully about it for 30 minutes

The list continues to evolve. I wouldn’t be crushed if I didn’t learn to play the fiddle or figure out how cars work, and there are things I know will be on this list when I find a way to articulate them. It was fun to write the words, fun to open up the space and time to think about what will make me happy. And it was good to share lists with friends, to find out more about them, discover common hopes, and to begin to hold ourselves accountable to what we think is important.

A Note About Trash, And Cities

Trash facts:

• Americans throw away about 5 pounds of trash per year.
• They recycle about 1.5 of those 5 pounds
• Decomposing trash gives off large quantities of methane, which in some places, is fed into a system that uses it to create electricity.
• Paint thinner, nail polish, batteries, transmission fluid and motor oil are toxic in landfills (and groundwater if the chemicals are not contained).

--from "This is Paradise" by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ Magazine May 2009

Published in the New York Times just a few days ago, "Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash":
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html?_r=1&ref=science

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"Around a billion people--almost half of the developing world's urban population--live in slums"
--from "The Megacity" by George Packer, published in The New Yorker, November 13, 2006

A slum, according to the UN definition, is a place where people live with any one of the following conditions:

1. Inadequate access to safe water
2. Inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure
3. Poor structural quality of housing
4. Overcrowding
5. Insecure residential status

Let's Have Fun

When I first walked into Theparak 5, a slum that snakes along Thailand’s state-owned railroad, I saw a billboard rising above the entrance. It showed young people leaning over their scooters, with a city rising against a bright blue sky in the background. “LET’S HAVE FUN,” read the sign. Cars passing on the road would have seen the billboard, but not the tin-cement-reclaimed plastic homes nestled together below. I was struck by the pairing of “LET’S HAVE FUN” and a community still working to ensure that they won’t be evicted by the railroad company, that their recent three-year leases will be renewed, and that they will have access to affordable water and electricity. But in the next twenty-four hours, I found that “let’s have fun” was not as out of place as I thought.

My host sister Juan was 12, and she liked to have fun. Her best friend from next door practically lived at her house, and other neighbor kids gathered in the narrow street. One round youngster carried a plastic “sword” at all times and ineffectively attacked people at unpredictable times. Another drew small, careful pictures on a balloon. Another led me into a nearby library and repeated the English words back to me as I read her the story of Fluff’s disappearance from Apple Tree Farm.

From the minute we arrived, the 12-year-old friends were proposing games. We played badminton, volleyball, basketball (with someone holding an actual basket), and Simon Says. We sang songs, we played a more violent version of monkey in the middle, we wove through lines of poles as we ran. When we smacked a badminton birdie onto a roof, they knew just how to bang the tin to send it flying back down. “What should we play next?” they’d say, abruptly throwing down their rackets.

Life in the slums is not all games. Our host parents sat inside the windowless house all day, weaving baskets to sell. Our host mother rarely smiled or left the house. But playing Marco Polo in a fifteen-by-fifteen foot part of the house, the only part open enough to really move in, I couldn’t stop laughing. As I reached for people hiding in the same places they had hidden the time before, I realized how much fun people can and do have, no matter where they live.