final thoughts from Nepal

So, after a short two months, this will be my last post from Nepal. Man, how the time flies when you get into a routine.  I’m getting increasingly excited to get out of here and back to the developed world, to good, safe food, to my own house, to walking around shirtless, to the freedom of driving a car, to good mexican food, to A FAST INTERNET CONNECTION, to friends and family, to american women, and to kickass microbrews.

And yet, I’m also hesitant to go.

I’ll miss these incessantly fascinating days, where something completely brand new happens every day and leaving my apartment to bike to work is like stepping into an entirely different universe.  Riding that shitty Indian cruiser through pitch black streets at night with only other headlights to give me the slightest idea how to navigate around the potholes. The spectacular view from my roof that sometimes shows me glimpses of the Himalayas at sunset and is an awesome place to just watch the heartbeat of the city, cars, bikes, and people moving in a thousand different directions.  The incessant laughter, motorcycle rides, and visits to temples with my Newari friend.  The hidden ancient temples, Buddha statues, and intricate wood carved buildings hiding in the most random corners of this haphazardly developed city.  The absolutely dwarfing presence of more than 20,000 ft peaks, and the far too kind Nepali people.

I’ll miss this country; it has been good to me.

So, thanks for following along and listening to my rants, all 20 of you.  Since I’ve got such an enormous following, in all likelihood this blogging experiment will end, at least temporarily, here and now.  Hope you’ve enjoyed.  So long, farewell, alvetersain, ciao, adios, arevoir, namasteeeeeeeee.

and on another happy note

I just can’t. I…I’m speechless.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill

I don’t think I’ve ever seethed with this kind of rage at the actions taken on behalf of my country.  It wasn’t bad enough that a preemptive war has shredded to pieces the lives of so many in the middle east and back home.  Now we have to hear that it literally was being fought as an “anti-muslim” crusade by the most corrupt, murderous company in the history of the United States.  I always knew there was something sketchy about this guy and his company, Blackwater, the most obvious being the recent name change to Xe after events in 2007 that finally led Iraqis to kick the entire organization out of the country, but this goes above and beyond my wildest imagination.  I have no words, I just can’t fathom how one gets to this mindset.  If there is evil in the world, Erik Prince is the purest embodiment of it.

Some choice quotes:

Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe”

“Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.”

“Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.”

“Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

“some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy “unfit men” and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were “the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to ‘kill ragheads’ or achieve ‘kills’ or ‘body counts,’” as well as “excessive drinking” and “steroid use.  However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, “Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to ‘stop costing the company money.’”

“Prince “obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince’s employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis.”

“…it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct.”

And to top it all off, the man was profiting on smuggling illegal weapons into Iraq, like “sawed off shotguns with silencers.”  Awesome.  And people don’t understand where all this “jihad” and middle eastern anger at the west comes from.  Put yourself in the shoes of a family member of a random Iraqi civilian mowed down by one of these roided out assholes, calling you racist names, disposing of your loved ones like it was fun, to increase his “body count.”

I’m so ashamed. I just…this can’t be how the world really is.  Every once in a while, when I vacillate back toward that more centrist view that’s willing to give people in power the benefit of the doubt, that their intentions are coming from a good place, something like this just slaps me in the face so damn hard, demolishing what little idealism I have left.  I don’t know how to respond, don’t know how to continue some piddly fight against forces so far beyond my control.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower in his final speech as President, 1961.

our consumer electronics are raping congolese women?

Not to ruin your day or anything.  It’s never a good feeling knowing that somewhere along the supply chain of the products you buy is some horrible truth.  Not sure what to do about this one.

http://www.theawl.com/2009/07/the-rape-of-africa-designed-in-california-made-in-china

I tend to agree with the closing paragraph:

“The thing is, I’m not going to suggest that you can somehow make personal decisions that would have an impact—such thinking is fallacious, if comforting. Because even as information technology abounds, informed decisions seem harder to come by. “Awareness” proves at best a form of rationalizing behavior on the individual level that in the aggregate remains tragic. Americans and Congolese alike are so tightly woven into the fabric of global capitalism, there’s no real choice but complicity.”

revenge of the leeches

Just got back from a feild visit to the middle hills yesterday.  I’m trying to bust ass to get this report done, so I’ve just attached a chunk of an email sent to a friend about the experience.

“…It was definitely the boonies out there, people living in straw roofed huts, no electricity, sometimes an outhouse, though only where the red cross has paid for them.  Everything was super isolated, where towns are 2-5 hours walk over slippery trails (I bailed constantly on the way down, like I’d been drinking nail polish remover), and intermittent downpours and huge landslides are frequent.  The first five days or so were crazy, walking from town to town and over terraced rice fields, talking to the locals about their lives, why shits so undeveloped, how dependent they are on the land, how bad of a problem food security is.  These are people that make way less than a dollar a day.

It was a strange, mind f*** trip of a time.  The clouds were socked in a lot, with sight distance like 50 feet.  I’d just see little kids scamper off into the abyss.  It made everything so eerie, and over the last few days started to seep into my brain.  But the first 5 days were great, having hilarious conversations with this guy who was my guide that worked for a tiny WWF office out there.  I always wonder how different people’s personalities are in their own language than how they come across when they dont speak the best english.  It’s like Akiko’s (un)intentional hilarity just because of the english phrases she uses.

tenuous at best

Officially 20 days left in Nepal, and I’m finally starting to get my head wrapped around the ridiculous complexities of this country.  I just got out of a meeting with two of the most cynical phds (even more than I am) that have spent 25 years working on natural resource issues in Nepal, that finally gave me a more accurate picture of how truly fubar everything is here.  This is how I see it:

After a 10 year civil war where 13,000 people were killed, two thirds by national army soldiers and the rest by the Maoists, a peace agreement was finally brokered by the UN, which would oversee Maoist arms control, between a 7 party alliance of democratic leaders formed in India, and a coalition of the diverse communist movement.  In the three years since, Maoists continue to perpetrate violence through armed youth groups, which the opposing democratic parties have themselves formed in response so that they’re on equal ground, leading to random beatings, stabbings, and killings both amongst the different youth groups and on random more well off citizens.  Small arms are everywhere, the peace process is hanging by a thread, the UN is widely in disrepute, and the current democractically elected government has 10 months to create a constitution out of thin air.

In one recent incident that continues to baffle me, two local student groups representing different political parties, which themselves are affiliated with different contracting companies, broke out into violence against one another, including burning furniture and shootings in an all out melee, all over which contracting company would receive the bid for a new chemistry building on campus.  This one incident is unfortunately a microcosm of how this city and country tends to devolve into chaos.

good times

Three weeks before I go, and I finally had one of those epic conversations about the state of the world last night.  Went to an Australian restaurant called the Red Dingo with my “boss,” Luna,  and met up with her Tibetan friend, Dorjee, who travels the world teaching chemistry for various secondary schools, but is on vacation from Azerbaijan at the moment.  Like many of the older Nepalis I’ve talked to, he got his phd in the states from some small town midwestern school in Iowa. Not sure why so many of them end up in the midwest, but I think it has something to do with full scholarships to engineering schools.  After a few beers, we got to talking about the state of the world.  I had always wondered about the CIA connection to Nepal (as theres one for every country), and had yet to hear anything about it, but then Dorjee told us about how the CIA, with financing from Taiwan, put a bunch of Tibetan guerillas on a plane and flew them to Colorado for “training” and then sent them back to fight the Chinese in the early seventies.

the road

“The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.  Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

Jesus, the man can write.  No wonder it won the pulitzer prize for fiction.  It’s a rather dark and gruesome post apocalyptic tale, cannibalism and all, but well worth the read.  I can’t remember the last time a book kept me up at night.  The movie version with Viggo Mortensen comes out in the fall

water wars

This is exactly why I’m working on climate change and water:

Water wars in India.

Forget about the Taliban, Pakistan is f#@$%d.

The coming water wars.

local talent

An amateur filmmaker from Nepal just won the Democracy Video Challenge, put on by the state department, that asked for submissions of short films from all around the world that finished the sentence “Democracy is…”  I’d embed the videos, but wordpress makes you pay more for that, so the links will have to do.  The winner from Nepal is pretty good, but I like also like this other one from Nepal just for the creativity.

The winner.

The contest.

I don’t think all of winners are as good as the above two from Nepal (there’s a bit too much cheese in the rest), but this one is pretty powerful.  Between the two from Nepal, you get a remarkably good picture of the problems facing this country: trash in the streets, power outages, political violence.

climate change

With all of the hullabaloo over Waxman-Markey, I figured I’d offer my two cents on the matter.  WM is a shitty bill, clogged with the kind of pork and handouts that are standard in all too much legislation these days.  Most importantly, however, it will not do nearly enough to address so many of the impacts/effects of climate change that the U.S. and the rest of the world will experience with greater frequency in the coming decades… but it is at least a minimal start.

Before you stop reading and say to yourself, “climate change is bullshit, we don’t even know if it’s just part of natural global patterns that work over thousands of years,” take just a second to think about the amount of complex scientific knowledge required to operate global climate models that attempt to project decades into the future.  Sure, uncertainty is going to be pervasive in any model that attempts to predict that far into the future, but these conclusions are not being made by everyday Joe Blows that have little understanding of the complexity involved.  These are well-trained scientists that have spent their entire lives investigating the effects of increased CO2 levels on planetary climate systems, and the detailed reports they produce show it.  So my question is, why wouldn’t we defer to their understanding?  Of course scientists have been wrong in the past about climate trends, but that has been wayyy overblown by opportunistic rewriters of history.