The adventure may be over, but this blog isn't

For the past, oh, year and a half—basically since its creation—this blog has sort of fallen by the wayside. I like to blame graduate school applications, third-world infrastructure, and our fancy for spending time in the wilderness. It would have been wonderful to inform the world of what we were doing, as we were doing it, to reassure our friends and family that we hadn’t fallen into the ocean and not climbed back out, and to share all the amazing things we were seeing and learning. Sadly, that could not be. I feel, though, that those things are still worth sharing, even if some of them happened months ago.

That’s why I intend to keep up this blog for a while. Partially, I will write for the few curious people out there who may still want to know what the hell we were doing all that time. More importantly, as that gulf that separates the past from the present grows and the bold ship of my recent adventure sails off leaving me stranded here on the shore of my increasingly normal daily life, I want to write about my experiences so that I myself can remember them—so that I can see the places again, feel the excitement of learning, stand again in the presence of things mysterious and foreign. Hopefully by re-adventuring in the world of memory I can find something I missed the first time and extract even a bit more wisdom or inspiration.

I also hope to get some more pictures and maps and other interesting things on here, make it sort of, you know, worth reading.

Let’s see how this goes.

Growing Up Lao

*Kristian and I worked as volunteer English teachers for a German non-profit organization in Laos from April 2012, until August 2012. For more information, see previous post.*

“Ab nam king! Ab nam king!” chants the crowd. They’ve convinced me to go for a swim in the creek, and their joy at having accomplished this is evident in their ecstatic faces and their little limbs jumping and whirling with the inexhaustible energy of childhood. It’s like being in the center of a hive of absurdly affectionate bees, and I wonder how I will be able to keep up with them for the next four months.

Someone grabs my hand and drags me down the dusty yellow road of the village, between the bamboo walls of two houses, and then we’re hurtling down a steep, leaf-littered trail under the shade of a teak grove toward what I presume is their favorite swimming spot in the Nam King, the creek after which the village, Sop King (Mouth of the King) takes its name. Children are shedding garments as they run. Tattered t-shirts, probably handed down through several generations of siblings, fly off; children pause as they near the creek, hopping on one leg and jerking off their shorts, smiling with anticipation. They throw their clothes into a pile and hurl themselves off the four-meter rock outcrop into the water in one quick motion, shrieking with joy.

One naked brown body after another flies into the deep green water below. They gesture toward the high rock, smiling encouragingly at me. I peer over the edge. The ones already in the water shout at me, waving, palm-down, with the ubiquitous Southeast Asian signal for, “Come! Come!” The creek is not that big; how deep can this water possibly be? It occurs to me that the nearest hospital with an English speaking doctor is over seven hours away, three hours by river boat, and then at least four hours more on bumpy mountain roads. Sop King would not be a good place to break a bone or get a concussion by jumping into an unknown swimming hole onto a shallowly submerged rock. No, I smile and gesture, no, I can’t, I’m scared, I will climb down another way.

As I pick my way down the steep rocks towards the water, I meet children hurrying up, all smiles, ready for their next jump. The surface is slippery with the water they are dripping. I make it to the level of the creek and lower myself in. I am instantly swarmed and can hardly keep afloat. The water churns with frenetic limb-flailing and joyous shrieks. Naked and half-naked children cling to my back, neck, arms, jostling for position. I’m pretty sure that in the United States, I’d be arrested for swimming alone in the forest with a dozen naked schoolchildren, but, in this situation, I certainly feel like any onlooker would have to acknowledge that I am the victim, not them.

I make it to shallower water where I can stand comfortably, and start imposing a semi-ordered system of turn-taking on their chaotically eager desire to climb all over me. One after another I go underwater, a child climbs on my shoulders, I emerge, count to three, and, launch! Dunk, scramble, one, two, three, launch! After a while, I employ a scrap of the little Lao I have learned in my first few days in the country. Muay—I’m tired, I’m tired! Am I pronouncing it incorrectly? It doesn’t seem to register. Eventually, though, I start denying turns, though the flash of disappointment on their faces pains me. I like to think I’m a fairly energetic person. But keeping up with the energy of a kid is always a challenge. Keeping up with several dozen Lao kids, I realize, is going to be a very special challenge indeed.

           

Lao children: their character and habits

I’ve had some experience working with kids. From my teenage days of volunteering at after-school programs with elementary schoolers, I went on to be an experiential educator on tall ships, where I occasionally found myself confronting fairly daunting kid-related challenges—keeping the morale of eighteen nauseous high school girls afloat on a ten-day trip out on a rough, cold sea; shepherding twenty sassy and mischievous at-risk ninth-graders through La Guardia Airport on my own; and, of course, the daily challenges of simply trying to teach on a boat, with the deck rolling, leaping dolphins hogging my students’ attention, and, of course, the constant possibility that the staysail club could fly across the deck and knock off a fifth grader’s head. I felt that working with kids on tall ships was a fairly adequate training for whatever Laos could throw at me. And though it was certainly more help than if I had spent my entire educational career yapping at some sleepy students in a windowless classroom, there were, of course, plenty of surprises.

The biggest surprise was Lao kids themselves. To beat again on the old “same same but different” drum, they were, of course, similar in many ways to their American, or European, or generally non-remote-village-dwelling counterparts. Kids are kids—they run, they play, they make messes, they love attention, they don’t like being scolded; some of them are shy, some of them are bullies; some of them will follow every instruction you give like it’s the word of God, some of them are too cool for school. For the most part, my previously acquired kid-skills were transferable. Yet it would be entirely false to claim that Lao kids were basically equivalent to their video-game-playing, soda-slurping, bug-fearing Western equivalents. Every day someone did something that had you scraping your jaw off the ground.

    

Picture a three-year-old, wobbling about on his chubby little legs. Now picture him wobbling about, pantsless, on a dusty village street, holding a ten-inch machete, no adult in sight. This was a common sight in Lao villages. On another occasion, an excited ten-year-old approached me, brandishing a broken prop from a small boat engine. Later, down at the swimming hole, I understood the function of this toy. Standing on the rock outcrop, he chucked in his big chunk of jagged metal, and jumped in after it. After he’d retrieved it from the bottom, I saw him dragging it through the water, fascinated by how it rotated when he pulled it forward. He swung it close to me to show me. Though I was enthusiastically in support of his fascination with the laws of fluid dynamics exhibited in this phenomenon, I wasn’t particularly keen to get closer than a few feet from his new toy.

These examples perfectly illustrate one prominent difference between Western kids and Lao kids. Lao kids seem perfectly content without shiny plastic toys and elaborate gadgets (probably because they’ve had no exposure to them). They seem able to find entertainment in the everyday objects that nature and village life put in front of them. They manage to turn mundane, ignorable objects into fascinating playthings—an old plastic spool attached to the end of a bamboo pole becomes a car. The unwanted bamboo strips from basket making become sunglasses, pinwheels, and elaborate headdresses. An ear of corn becomes a doll, its silvery silk long, luxurious hair. Even chicken feathers tossed into the air become the center of attention during a rare windy moment before a towering thunderstorm hits the village. Entertainment seems to be everywhere.

In addition to demonstrating their creativity, the examples of toddlers with machetes and kids learning science with jagged cast-of boat props speak volumes about Lao parenting philosophy. Some would say that letting your three-year-old wield a large knife is egregiously irresponsible on the part of the parents. I say, this is Lao parents letting their kids learn how not to be idiots. Though I occasionally raised an eyebrow or two when I saw toddlers running around with sharp things, pointy sticks, and fire, I never interfered. In my opinion, that was the job of their parents, and if they looked on unconcerned, then so would I. Considering the number of unattended kids who were climbing trees, doing back flips off of cliffs into the creek, driving tiny canoes around on a rushing river, and dangling off a fifty-foot-high bamboo bridge like it was a jungle gym, very few kids ever seemed to get injured. Lao kids seemed, for the most part, to possess a shockingly high degree of common sense, which I imagine comes from their parents’ letting them learn from their own mistakes.

Another quality that I suspect helps them avoid injury during their wild and dangerous play is their incredible degree of coordination and athleticism. Playing with Lao kids was an extremely physically demanding job. My weight-loss regimen included Lao food (not always the most savory), and a daily game or two of tag in the Nam King. I had to eventually give up trying to catch some of the kids. Anyone over age ten was pretty much too fast. They would dive under the water, and pop up twenty feet away before I’d even turned around. Too bad they didn’t understand, “Hey, teleportation is cheating.” This insatiable desire to play tag extended to land as well. They would have Kristian and I run around and around the toe-breaking, uneven village streets, even at night, until our hearts threatened to explode and we were soaked with sweat. “Hot,” “tired,” “finished”—these were English words the kids learned fairly early on. I’m sure sometimes it seemed to them like these were the only words in the English language, judging by how often Kristian and I repeated them.

The most popular team sport in Laos is by far ka taw, which is basically volleyball—except that you can only use your head, and your feet. Teenage ka taw players frequently spike the ball over the net with the bottom of their foot. I doubt many American thirteen-year-olds, aside from trained gymnasts, would be capable of such feats of flexibility and coordination. It’s certainly hard to imagine enough Americans being fit enough to play ka taw for it to become the national pastime.

Along with Lao kids’ athleticism came what would be, by American kid standards, a perverse insensitivity to pain. I hesitated to introduce the game Red Rover, because I thought that, given their energetic tendencies, someone might break an arm the way they would play it. But when I saw the Fight Club-esque, village-wide games of kung-fu fighter that went on in the evenings, I realized that Red Rover was far less likely to lead to bloodied faces. It ended up being a huge hit, to the point of drawing impressive crowds of girl sibling and adult spectators.

Which brings up an issue I have previously not mentioned—gender roles. Not being able to speak Lao, it was hard for me to find answers to the innumerable questions I had about Lao daily life, so I must admit that my understanding of such elements of Lao culture hardly amount to rigorous anthropological studies and are based only on superficial observations. That said, I noticed that though Lao girls are impressively athletic—they outran, outswam, and outclimbed me on a regular basis—they are far less involved in rough-housing than their male counterparts. They also do not play ka taw. But the behavior of the village girls highlights another striking difference between Lao children and the children I was familiar with from back home—incredible independence, responsibility, and work ethic.

It was not at all uncommon to see an eight-year-old, usually a little girl, hunched over from the weight of her baby sister or brother, whom she carried around all day long while her parents were working elsewhere. When a toddler flopped on its face and started crying, it was almost always an older sibling, often a sister, who came to the rescue. For the most part, these kids discharged their responsibility with great consideration and care in between chatting with their friends or playing whatever games could be played with a baby strapped to one’s back. Additionally, I often saw girls (though rarely boys) trekking in from the jungle, bent over with a load of firewood or vegetables, helping their mothers with laborious chores from the age of six or seven.

This precocious ability to care for one’s self and others was not entirely limited to girls. When I heard that the organization had built a boarding house in one village so that children who live far from the nearest school can stay nearby during the school week, I immediately asked who monitored the kids during non-school hours. Having gone to a boarding school myself during high school, I knew that, at least in the Untied States, in loco parentis is taken very seriously. My high school was basically a gigantic, overprotective parent. When I went to boarding school, our day was meticulously scheduled so that we had almost no free time to go looking for trouble. We were told how to dress, we had a curfew, we weren’t allowed to go for rides in our friends’ cars, we were assigned chores. Considering my experience of boarding school, I was flabbergasted to learn that the boarders at this village’s primary school lived away from home five out of seven days of the week entirely without adult supervision.  It being a small village, there were often adults around, sure; but, amazingly, no one was directly responsible for taking care of these kids. They gathered their own food, cooked their own meals, cleaned up after themselves, and put themselves to bed entirely on their own.

This boarding house was built for the village’s primary school, which meant that the oldest of these children was about fourteen. What these kids were doing as pre-teens, many American youths aren’t expected to do until college, at best. Even then, it is assumed they will probably screw it up; hence the need for Resident Assistants, hall monitors, and such individuals whose job is to make sure these sadly dependent eighteen-year-olds don’t get drunk and trash the place, or burn down the building trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich. I will admit that the grounds of this boarding house in Laos were not in a much better state of cleanliness than most college dorms; but these kids didn’t have the luxury of housekeeping staff.

At first glance, it might seem that their independence and wild energy would make Lao children difficult to teach. And perhaps, if one thinks that learning can only happen while sitting at a desk in a classroom, this would have been true. Luckily, our method of English teaching didn’t require classrooms or desks, or textbooks, or tests, and their energy, as well as their warm and affectionate nature, made Lao children excellent students.

 

English teaching, English learning

I will acknowledge that Lao kids are not what one would call “good students” by Western standards. They don’t spend much time on homework; they’d always rather climb trees or play in the street. Most children seem to think that class consists of sitting in a room and repeating what a teacher shouts at them. However, when presented with a variety of informal learning activities out of the classroom, they proved themselves to be interested and capable learners of English.

Kristian had studied linguistics in college, and with his knowledge of second language acquisition, he began designing a new English program for the organization. It is based on the so-called “natural approach,” in which the teacher’s job is not so much to teach a language through forcing students to study grammar, memorize vocabulary, and learn to reproduce common phrases, as to create an environment in which students can hear and analyze a new language and learn to speak by synthesizing their own utterances based on the rules they have inferred from the input the teacher gives them. This method focuses on informal interaction—basically, play. We swam, played games, drew pictures, all the time speaking only in English. We never made the children take a test or quiz, or memorize anything. After only a couple months, the results were quite impressive.

Watching them gradually develop the ability to communicate in English was marvelous, like watching a plant grow, or watching the sun come up. First, they would stare at us shyly when we spoke in English, but soon we realized that, though they didn’t say anything back, they understood the greater part of what we said to them. Before long, they were able to answer yes or no questions—Do you want to play? Do you like mangoes? Then, they could provide simple one-word answers out of their stock of recently absorbed vocabulary—What is this? A dog! The youngest son of our host family, Sompit, had an impressive understanding of English by the time we left. The three of us—he, Kristian, and myself—had an ability to communicate that was quite amazing, though not perfectly sophisticated. We were able, however, to talk in English about most things that were relevant to a seven-year-old’s daily life, and Sompit even began to act as a translator when our Lao failed us in conversations with his parents.

Though it requires volunteers with inexhaustible energy and dedication, I am convinced it is perfectly possible to teach children English in the setting of a rural village, without the usual resources considered necessary for a “proper” education—textbooks, notebooks, even classrooms. However, after this experience, I was left wondering about the ultimate purpose of this English program. Within a very few years, these children will certainly be fluent English speakers. But what then? Will they simply become English-fluent rice farmers? What possibilities does our presence open up in the life of a Lao child?

Laos is a country undergoing radical changes, very few of which I understand. Subsistence farmers are moving to the cities to find wage jobs. Chinese firms are negotiating contracts to plant vast teak forests across the countryside. Massive road works, damn projects, and the spidery spread of telephone and electrical lines are changing the flow of people, water, and information. Some villagers now have television dishes, sound systems, and cell phones. What are the causes of these developments? Who is set to gain by them? What will be their ultimate effects on rural Lao people, on my students? And can knowledge of the English language help them?

I cannot answer these questions after spending only a few months in Laos. I hope that the organization I worked for will eventually come up with carefully-considered answers and help its volunteers develop a greater sense of purpose by understanding the role of English language education. Just from my own limited experience, I do, however, think Lao children gain simply by exposure to foreigners whose agenda is not to take advantage of them, but to help them appreciate and preserve their own way of life, while developing a new understanding of and curiosity about the world beyond their village—a world which is rapidly coming nearer and nearer.

Part of me thinks, may the approach of the outside world not spoil these children—in several senses of the word. I felt a twinge of pain when I saw teenagers roaming the village streets in packs, hovering around one lucky boy and his cell phone, transfixed by its ability to capture fuzzy images of them posing in silly postures or squirt out tinny-sounding versions of America’s or Thailand’s latest pop sensations. What if there comes a day when village children no longer get excited about jumping into the creek, or playing with corn dolls, or making sunglasses out of strips of bamboo? What if they will begin to need kung-fu movies, music videos, pop stars, and camera phones in order to find excitement? Though I have no right to stop anyone from seeking what they see to be the good, I do not myself want to be the connection between these children and the global entertainment network that will in short order crush their creativity and make them addicted to mass-produced garbage. On the other hand, there are certain tools that may be of great use to them in the future—the computer, the telephone, the internet, the automobile—and perhaps, as an educator, I should see it as my job to show how these things work and what they can be used for aside from entertainment and frivolous short-term satisfaction. The same things that can suck away creativity and absorb what is unique about a people can also be a means to preserve and strengthen the ties that hold people together.

Laos is changing, quickly, inevitably. All that one can hope to do, as a concerned individual, is try to make sure that people are educated about what is happening, and empowered to protect their own interests. Though I don’t feel like I did this in a particularly direct manner, I hope that, by simply spending time with these children and happily riding the wave of their energy and creativity, by preferring to go swimming rather than watch TV, or listen to Lao music instead of American music, I showed that I valued them and their way of life, and that I wasn’t there to make them change, but to provide knowledge that may help them protect what they have. Who knows what we accomplished in those few months, if anything, really. But I hope to stay involved, and, as much as possible, follow the lives of my students as they grow up in an ever-changing Laos.

 

An Apology and a Preface

Wynne Hedlesky
1214 local time
Düsseldorf, Germany

Beloved readers, I am deeply sorry for my extended absence from the “blogosphere”. I will apologize for Kristian as well. Sadly, he is currently working on a novel and may not post here again for a while. One might think that hitchboating around the world is basically an extended vacation, but you would be surprised at how busy a person can get. We have also been in some fairly remote places, where even electricity is a luxury. Hard to blog if your computer is dead. As for the internet—well. When we had it, I was frantically trying to complete graduate school applications so that I could submit them before I got on a sailboat to cross the Indian Ocean. Turns out there’s not internet out there, either.

Excuses, excuses. I have been burning to say something about the eight months we spent in Asia, and only now, in the comfort and leisure of a snuggly first-world Christmastime, am I finally finding an opportunity to post some words on our experiences there, the highlight of which was, by far, the time that Kristian and I spent living among the emerald mountains and kind-hearted people of northern Laos.

As a preface to the post that follows, I would like to briefly describe what we were doing there. Kristian and I spent four months volunteering for Bambusschule, a German non-profit organization that focuses on improving education and health care along the Ou River in northern Laos. We lived with a Lao family, in a Lao village, three hours away by boat from the nearest town with automobiles or the Internet. In most of the villages where we worked, we were the only English speakers. Our job, roughly, was to teach English and carry out some maintenance projects on the buildings—three schools and a boarding house—that the organization has built in the region. 

  
For the first few weeks, we had some small degree of guidance from the organization’s Field Manager. He acquainted us with the key figures in the villages where we would be working, and helped us plan the summer’s maintenance projects. He provided next to no guidance about the English teaching program, however, other than showing me a box full of paper, pencils, and other school supplies and telling me this was what I had to work with. No book, no syllabus, no notes from previous volunteers, nothing. He seemed completely unconcerned at the lack of structure or guidance—“Bo pen nyang, relax, this is Laos!” he said. He was never particularly interested in that part of the organization’s work; he focused more on plumbing projects. He had a love for building things out of little blue PVC pipes. After about a month, he went home to Australia on vacation. Shortly thereafter, he was fired.

So Kristian and I were left more or less alone for three months in rural Laos to find the best way to accomplish the organization’s goals and represent its values. For the building maintenance projects, we had to get by with our meager knowledge of the Lao language—we had no translator while purchasing and transporting supplies, or negotiating with village leaders. We were also supposed to incorporate as much English teaching into our schedule as possible, but with the added complication that school was out of session for most of our time there, and so we had no scheduled time for English class, and no classroom in which to teach. And yet it could hardly have been better.

We took advantage of our lack of direct supervision and the open-ended directives to begin designing a new English program for the organization, based on the knowledge of second language acquisition that Kristian gained during his university studies in linguistics and his participation in a research project about the subject conducted by the university of Cologne in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen. Throughout everything we did, we worked closely with the organization’s founder in Germany (or as closely as you can when you can only communicate every two weeks or so). The core of our new program is informal interaction—that is, play. It was not difficult to convince the village kids to get involved. By the end of the summer, some of the kids we worked with had gone from robotic repetition of “How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you” to the ability to express their likes and dislikes, ask questions, explain aspects of their daily life, and open up the all-important highways of communication between people from vastly different worlds.

I hope that the opportunity to interact with us ends up playing a positive role in those children’s lives. Learning about their way of life was certainly a valuable experience for me. More than anything, I continued to be struck by how so many aspects of Lao daily life stubbornly remained unexplained, regardless of the fact that I had lived in such close contact with Lao people for several months. The richness of cultures is such that people as different as me and my Lao hosts can find vast areas of common ground, while there always remain differences that make each group unique, and incite in us curiosity about our fellow human beings. I hope that the exposure to foreign people and language both instills in the children I interacted with a desire to learn about the world outside their village, as well as an understanding of the value of their own unique way of life.

P.S. If you are interested in volunteering with Bambusschule (Bamboo School), contact Bodo Peters: info@die-bambusschule.de, or visit die-bambusschule.de

 

Same same, but different

May 21, 2012
Nong Kiau, Luangphabang, Laos
1736 local time
Wynne Hedlesky

            I have neglected to post a blog entry for several months. My reasons (otherwise known as excuses) are many. First, I was studying for the GRE. Now, as a volunteer English teacher, when I’m not trying to entertain several dozen highly energetic Lao children, I’m working on grad school applications. But, really, the reason is that I have not been able to think of how to condense four months of experience being geographically and experientially on the other side of the world into a thousand words.

            The answer is that it is not possible. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll write a quick summary of the emotional arc of my time in Asia, alluding to experiences and interesting anecdotes which I will not share. I hope that many of them will come out in later blogs.

            It’s quite a collection, all together. Truly, I’ve gathered an embarrassment of brief tales of the odd and unusual. Not a day has gone by that didn’t present some curious sight, some enigmatic event that left me scratching my head, laughing out loud, or scraping my jaw off the ground. The people who live here would say, “welcome to life”; I tend to say, “What the hell is going on?”

            I will describe our first twenty four hours in Asia. Even after what I have seen since then, that immediate impression is still strong. Never had I experienced such a sensation of bafflement at things that presented themselves as ordinary.  Perhaps it’s a bit like falling on your head, coming to, and no longer being able to recognize your own friends and family, though they smile at you familiarly. It was surreal from the moment we stepped out of the taxi from the airport into the general neighborhood of our guesthouse. Kristian and I spent our first night futilely trying to sleep in a room right on the raucous, nocturnal booze trough that is Khao San Road, where drunk tourists come together from all over the world to suck down “buckets” of the world’s cheapest cocktails until they entirely forget they are in Bangkok. In the morning we sallied forth for our first daylight stroll in Asia.

            We soon got marvelously lost among the busy streets, shady canals, and tiny, winding alleys of Bangkok. Everywhere people went about their business. You could tell by the comfortable looks on their faces, the casual jokes shared with neighbors. But what was their business, exactly? That I could not determine, try as I did. They all bustled about, or sat and did what they do, in a world which, though it contained people and streets and motorized vehicles and buildings just like the world I came from, made very little sense to me. What’s the deal with these dollhouses on pedestals, covered with fruit and rice and flowers and opened bottles of orange soda with straws? The second floor of that house is about to fall off, and the walls are made of random bits of plywood. Do they not have building codes? Shit, I didn’t know you could fit a moped there. It’s hot, let’s sit in the shade. There’s a bench. Wait, that’s in front of a house…no, a store. What if it’s a private bench, here on the public sidewalk? Well, it’s not really a sidewalk, I guess. People are driving mopeds on it. That bench is right next to that rusted-out, abandoned car full of trash…Let’s find a park instead. Oh, there’s one. No, it’s a trash dump. I mean, someone’s back yard. No, trash dump. What’s that mass of gold and sparkly stuff over there? Ah, a temple. Let’s go in. Oh, wait, I’m wearing shorts…I can’t go in, right? Where am I not supposed to point my feet when I’m inside? Oh well. Let’s get some lunch. Wait, is this a restaurant or a house? There are people sitting inside at some tables. They don’t look interested in helping us. Maybe they’re just the residents. Maybe it is a restaurant, but it’s closed. Is it because it’s Sunday? Why would it matter if it’s Sunday, they’re Buddhists. Ok, right. Ok, let’s try the street vendor. Yeah…can’t read the menu. Let’s just say, like, “noodles,” or “rice,” and see what they make. We could point to the stuff in the case. What is it? I don’t know. Intestines?

            And on it went. Everywhere was strangeness. Every basic activity had to be relearned, in some way, at least. Drinking water, going to the bathroom, crossing the street, buying things, it is all done significantly differently in Asia. Or so it seemed to me.

            Kristian, on the other hand, frequently pointed out that, although the way things are done in Asia surprised us not on a daily but on an almost momently basis, a city like Bangkok, for example, is more similar to a city in the West than it is different. People hurry everywhere; there are streets packed with cars, buses, and other vehicles; people buy and sell their goods. They catch trains, buses, and boats. They work in shops, restaurants, in the tall buildings full of offices. They think about fashion, about money, what’s for dinner, about their friends and family. They sit and have drinks after work. The friendly ones greet strangers on the street. Beggars and bums curl up in alleys. Humanity pulses on, being human, as it does in every place on earth.

            The difference in our reaction to Asian life got me thinking about a couple of well-worn phrases in wide use across Southeast Asia. When asking for a price comparison between two food dishes, a vendor might reply, “same same.” When trying to convince a handicraft vendor that you don’t need their goods because you already have a bracelet like that, they will probably say: “But this different.” If someone struggles in their limited English to point out the subtle differences between two items, they might say, “Same same, but different.” So common are these phrases, and somehow so fundamental to the tourist experience in Asia, that they are plastered across t-shirts in every souvenir shop in every country we have visited. Even locals wear them. As much as a cliché as they are, they represent a patch of common ground, an idiosyncrasy of Asian English that exists neither in English, nor in any Asian language, but is a valuable tool for communication across cultures, as well as being humorous. It is recognized as such by people from both sides.

 I think neither “same same” nor “different” adequately describes my current impression of life in Asia as compared to my homeland. Not surprisingly, cultures resist being crammed into one or the other end of such a dichotomy. I’d describe Asia as a t-shirt with “same same” on one side, and “but different” on the other.

            Over time, though, the “but different” part stands out less and less. That original sensation of bafflement, of wide-eyed wondrous confusion has subsided. For some of the things I have seen, I have since found definitive explanations. For others, Kristian and I have inferred what we think to be a probable account, and have left it at that. For many, many other strange events and observations, I have simply not sought an explanation, or hardly even noted their occurrence, because to live in a state of constant wonder is impossible. This is not because it is exhausting, or difficult to maintain; to live every moment truly appreciating the strangeness of things you do not understand is contrary to a basic law of human existence, that we, as human beings, stretch and flex and adapt to our surroundings, without even needing to try. Now, I simply perceive what goes on around me as “normal,” even when I do not understand it. I notice an anomaly, shrug, and go about my business, because, at a certain point, what you do every day starts to feel “normal,” even if what you do every day is see things you’ve never seen before in your life. 

            What lies at the root of our ability to adapt to life in a different culture? Would I be able to adapt to life with space aliens who have tentacles and no faces, communicate telepathically, and get their energy from plutonium reactions rather than the combustion of carbon-based molecules? Probably not. What makes it possible to be less startled at the “but different” of life in another culture is that, as humans, we really share a lot. You could even say that the differences are superficial matters of etiquette or practicality. Even though we speak different languages, I can read the emotions of my Lao hosts here in Sopking by looking at their faces. Children here still like to play, love attention, and dislike being disciplined. Boys and girls flirt. People work during the day. Meals are central to the organization of time. At night, people eat, socialize, then go to sleep. Any human could get into that groove.

            But these observations, again, attempt to corner a culture into one end of the “same same but different” dichotomy by attempting to boil all perceived differences down into mere trifles, which they are not. These differences are precisely what makes traveling worthwhile and life-changing. Why travel if you don’t want to experience how things are done in other places? If you want the same food, the same beer, and the same company while you travel that you get at home, then stay home.

In addition to being inherently interesting and making a person feel like he or she is part of a vast and fascinating world, these differences provide a priceless opportunity, the opportunity to reset our eyes, to be able to view the familiar as something new, something strange. During that window where wonder is alive, before our ability to adapt turns the strange into the normal, I hope to learn from and think about my own homeland in ways I have never been able to before. I hope that in a year and a half, I’ll write a blog entry about my baffling first twenty-four hours back in the United States.

White Savior Industrial Complex?

1245, local time
Luang Prabang, Lao PDR
Wynne Hedlesky

This is just a quick comment I posted on Facebook in response to Teju Cole's viral tweets and follow-up article on the "White Savior Industrial Complex." For the most part, I agree with what he says, and unlike some readers, I don't particularly find his tone resentful, pretentious, or grating; I think his anger and sarcasm are justified, and also serve to help take the issue out of the realm of neutral language that ensures that readers remain unruffled and indifferent.

I posted on Facebook:

'As I prepare to teach English in Lao, I wonder if I am about to become a "cool 20-something American hero," though on a different continent. It's a strange, uncertain feeling that leaves you really wondering about your own motives, and feeling rather afraid to look inside and try to discover them. I try to remind myself that this is a drop in the ocean; that this is more for myself to develop skills of working with people in the field in future projects than to save the people of Lao, and I shouldn’t let my conscience pat me on the back.

I’ve learned a tiny bit about the recent political history of SE Asia, and I must agree with Teju Cole—it it's hard not to be convinced that the “money-driven villainy” of America, France, and other powerful nations played a central role in the destabilization of the region in the last hundred years, just as colonialism, both overt and in the guise various policies aimed at securing the economic interests of powerful nations, has done all over the world.

Much more than a do-good attitude and youthful enthusiasm is necessary to clear up the wreckage and prevent further abuses, and it's merely self-serving delusion to convince ourselves otherwise. Am I going to solve these complex political problems by teaching English in some Lao village? Of course not. By providing basic literacy skills, am I going to equip a few individuals to compete in a changing social and economic landscape and perhaps lead a more autonomous life and stand up against the powerful interests that will work to exploit them? Just maybe, a little.

And hopefully, someday, I’ll have the knowledge and influence to address underlying issues and root causes. Personally, I think this will involve changing attitudes and policies in my own country. What drives policies that exploit the people and resources of other nations? Habits of over-consumption and greed. Maybe we can do more to “save the world” by addressing these tendencies than by clicking “like” on a youtube video.'

Learning

Hue, Thua Thien-Hue Province, Vietnam
13:12 local time
Kristian Isringhaus

We need to learn from the past. That is one of the reasons why historical education is so important. We should do everything in our power to make sure we do not repeat our mistakes or the mistakes our ancestors made. The holocaust is a great example of something we can learn from; the Vietnam War is another one.

I have to admit that I have been a little negligent in learning about the latter. Before travelling to South East Asia, I didn’t know too much about it, except maybe from a few movies. But even Wynne, who has enjoyed a great education in some of the finest high schools and universities of the United States, was not aware to what extent America screwed up the whole region for generations.

I did some research to fill the gap in my education and want to share my thoughts about it. Whether you think you could do with a little more knowledge about the Vietnam War or whether this will merely refresh what you already know—it can’t hurt to read on.

I do also see parallels between the war back then and the wars the United States is involved in right now. If I am not mistaken by seeing these parallels, then that means that other people, more important people, have refused to learn from the past, repeating mistakes that led the United States to one of the darkest hours of its history.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower came up with an almost ridiculously far-fetched justification to support France financially in the First Indochina War against Vietnam (the “Vietnam War” being the Second Indochina War). Ike explained that if Vietnam fell under a communist regime, the rest of Southeast Asia would probably soon follow, leaving Malaysia dangling off of it with no chance to oppose Marx’s demonic henchmen and once Malaysia “fell”, Indonesia could become communist, as well.

And then, god forbid, the United States would lose cheap access to Indonesia’s tin and tungsten. See any parallels to recent wars yet? Tin and tungsten? Oil?

The logic, however, is flawless, I suppose. If Vietnam becomes a communist country, other countries might become communist, too. All correct so far. He might have overlooked that other countries could become communist even without Vietnam following Marx’s ideas but that is not the point. The point is that according to the United Nations Charter which the US had signed only eight years before, neither a nation’s political orientation nor the access they provide to resources is a legal reason to attack a sovereign country.

However, the congress agreed to support France’s war against Vietnam with a total of no less than 400 billion dollars, which was a lot of money back then. In the last years of the war the US spent more on France’s battle to keep its illegally conquered colony than France itself did.

Shockingly, in 1954 the Vietnamese army defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu and forced them to surrender unconditionally. The United Nations devised a plan to rebuild the country. According to the plan, it was to be divided temporarily until free elections in 1956 were supposed to find a single government for a reunified Vietnam. Guess who opposed those free elections: the United States and South Vietnam, who were scared that the people might vote for the popular communist leader Ho Chi Minh. Apparently, free elections are only approved by “the land of the free” if American interests are well taken care of. We will see again later that the United States will pick a tyrant over a democratically elected government in a foreign country any time as long as they can control that leader like a puppet.

Therefore, the US decided to support the inhumane, despotic dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, who ruled over southern Vietnam. More than 12,000 people who dared to differ in their religious or political views were slaughtered in the first few months of the Catholic ruler’s cruel regime. More and more people started to fight for their freedom and organized in militant opposition groups. Ho Chi Minh supported these people against the oppressive regime.

Reason enough for the US to engage in a war that would, over the next ten years, cost two million Vietnamese and 58,000 American lives. It also cost the American tax payer over 600 billion dollars (a lot of money back then), proving Eisenhower wrong in assuming that a war would be cheaper than the possibility of losing access to Indonesia’s tin and tungsten.

In the course of this war, the US probably broke every single one of the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and every article of the Geneva Protocol and the UN Charter, attacking a sovereign country only to preserve their own economic interests, using illegal weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange, and piling up crimes of war and crimes against humanity in an unprecedented manner. The dioxin in Agent Orange alters the DNA and is therefore passed down through the generations. To this day, babies are still born with horrible disfigurements, sometimes to healthy parents, since the diseases can skip generations.

Another thing that the world is widely unaware of is that during the war more bombs were actually dropped over Vietnam’s neighbor Laos than over Vietnam. The weapons used there were so-called cluster bombs, which are big containers holding about 100 tennis-ball-sized bombs. About 80 Million of those little explosives did not detonate and are still littering vast parts of eastern Laos. To this day, about 100 people get either killed or crippled by them every year, mostly kids playing outside.

But even when the war was lost for the US, they weren’t done doing evil in that region. Their war that they had taken also to Laos and Cambodia had destabilized Southeast Asia to an extent that enabled the Khmer Rouge to take over in Cambodia when the country was literally collapsing under the weight of Vietnamese refugees. The regime of the Khmer Rouge was likely one of the cruelest in the history of this planet, paralleled only maybe by Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. In only three years and eight months of power they managed to kill directly or torture to death over two million of their own country’s men, women, and children.

The details of the horrific regime of the Khmer Rouge are a different story. But here is my point: in 1979 the Vietnamese army marched into Phnom Penh to free the people of Cambodia from the cruelties of this regime. The Vietnamese never had the intention to take over Cambodia and wouldn’t have been able to afford that financially anyways. They simply freed their neighbors from their oppressive rulers and left when the country was somewhat stable enough to carry on on its own.

The joke, however, is that members of the Khmer Rouge still held the Cambodian seat at the United Nations until well into the 80s. Instead of getting prosecuted for their crimes against humanity, they enjoyed international power and represented in the international community the people they had so cruelly oppressed. How is that possible, you might wonder. For the simple reason that Cambodia was freed by the hated Vietnamese, the United States decided to support the Khmer Rouge despite the fact that they, too, were communists. And with Russia and China not opposing the Khmer Rouge for obvious reasons, for more than a decade they represented in front of the United Nations the interests of the country they had so horribly scarred.

These days, the remaining senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge are finally tried. Those trials, however, might soon get suspended due to international pressure. A few countries including the US and Britain are worried that some nasty details might be revealed that they had hoped to be forgotten.

Now, that is the past. We learn from it what unpredictable effects any military meddling with foreign countries can have, especially when you consider only your own interests and not those of the people you are meddling with.

Let’s look at today’s battlefields and see if we can see any parallels. Again, of course, we need to start at the beginning, need to look at when the meddling started. And we will see that a lot of the problems we see in the world today could have been avoided.

It all started, again, with the communists. Russia showed some interest in Iran, which, in the early 1950s, was led by a democratically elected, liberal regime. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, showed some great political understanding and was cruising on his way to turn Iran from a third world country controlled by British neo-imperialism into a thriving economical power.

It was again President Eisenhower who, in 1953, did not believe that Iran under Mossadegh would be strong enough to stand up against Russia. The US needed a puppet in the Iranian government, and therefore plotted a coup that brought down the democratic regime and put the Shah back in power. Once his reign started, the Shah then didn’t lose any time establishing a Gestapo-like secret police to suppress the freedom of his people.

Naturally, the Iranians didn’t like that, which gave fundamentalists fertile fields to find supporters. You need to understand that the regime the US ousted was the first and to this day only democratically elected one in the Iran. Instead of enjoying freedom and prosperity, the Persian people were once again oppressed by a dictator, during whose rule their hatred against the US grew steadily. In 1979 a revolution put an end to the Shah’s cruel regime and installed an Islamic theocracy under the Ayatollah Ali Khomeini.

Uncle Sam, however, was not done yet. Unhappy about losing his puppet, he started looking about for someone who could oppose Iran, this new enemy that had, under the Shah’s rule, grown strong with American money and American weapons. A personable guy named Saddam Hussein seemed to be just the man to do the job. He grew so popular in America, that he was even named honorary citizen of the city of Detroit in 1980.

During the First Gulf War from 1980 – 1988, in which Iraq invaded Iran after being encouraged to do so by the US, America supported Iraq vastly with money, intelligence, and weapons. The latter included chemical ones like mustard gas, and biological ones like anthrax and bubonic plague (I need not mention that all of those are banned by the Hague Conventions).

Despite the great support from the US, the Iraqis eventually had to withdraw and accept the old borders, leaving Iran a sovereign country, its hatred towards America understandably fueled. Eventually, Saddam Hussein lost a marble or two, he invaded Kuwait, (that’s the one with the oil), and I suppose the rest is recent enough for everyone to remember.

But the inexplicable American fear of communism required fighting on more than one front. At the same time, on December 24^th, 1979, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Reason enough for the meddle-loving and communism-hating United States to arm the Taliban, a strong group of Mujahidin or “Holy Warriors”. Yes, for those who forgot: the United States armed and trained the Taliban with advanced weapons. Among those trained by the CIA at that time is one individual whose name stands out from the rest: Osama bin Laden. With American help, the Mujahidin managed to put up enough of a fight for Russia to lose its interest.

And what did the US do? They withdrew and “left the problems of a well-equipped, fundamentalist, ideological and religious group that had been battle hardened to the Afghans and the Pakistanis”, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it on October 7th, 2009.

Now, my question is: does anybody remember radical fundamental Islamic terrorists from 40 years ago? I don’t. And are they really against the non-believers in general, or rather against the United States in particular? Well, I sure haven’t seen them bomb the Vatican yet, so I suppose the latter might be the case.

A lot of Americans think that Islamic regimes hate the US because its freedom and happiness makes their own people jealous and want to stand up for more rights. Unfortunately, this explanation is based on one of the greatest flaws in character Americans tend to show: arrogance. They hate us because we are the freest and best country in the world and everybody is jealous.

Consider this: there are other free and wealthy countries on this planet and many of them enjoy a higher standard of living than the US. Muslim extremists show little interest in attacking them, however. Thus I do not believe in the jealousy theory. I believe that America inflicted all the hate the Arabian world feels against them upon themselves by excessive meddling with other cultures, sovereign countries, and different political ideas. Their arrogance and constant striving for hegemony is what enrages people—not the freedom that they praise so highly, and that is at the same time so strongly restricted by the various domestic secret service agencies, the FBI being the first to mention.

Therefore, only a sign of peace from the original aggressor can put the problems in the region to an end.

I do not at all agree with the take on human rights in a lot of countries of the Near and Middle East, especially the status of women. But again, no one has the right to attack a sovereign country for that, and someone who supports cruel dictators over democratic governments the least of all. I also believe that all those countries were actually on a decent path to more human rights before being set back by American actions. It may now take a few decades, sadly, for them to get back on track.

By meddling around, imposing their codes of ethics onto people who don’t understand them, people with a completely different cultural background, trying to make everyone similar to them, the US has driven a lot of rather liberal Muslims into radicalism. They have given peaceful people a hated enemy and turned people that were on the verge of revolution into strong supporters of their respective regimes because these, however cruel they are, represent the interest of their people against the common enemy.

The next step is, inevitably, that hatred builds up on the other side as well, and the whole situation escalates. There has been a horrible trend in the USA over the past decade. Many Americans have begun demonizing the whole religion of Islam. When I tried to find a book on Islam on amazon.com, the first ten hits I got were either about learning to love our Muslim brothers so we can more effectively convert them to Christianity, or how we must stop the violent and gruesome religion of Islam in order to save the “free world”. These days, everybody with a long beard is considered a possible terrorist in the US. Every project to build a mosque faces great opposition because the land of the free in which every man is equal is free only to conformists.

Overgeneralization is the worst enemy of peace and intercultural understanding, a strong helper for propaganda, and a potent instrument of the right wing. However, we only need to look at Indonesia, the world’s most populated Islamic country, to see that Islam itself is not an oppressive religion. More than 300 million Muslims live there, and there is no opposition to the recent redefining of the role of women. Despite the fact that societies historically are patriarchic, women these days are becoming more and more independent without facing any oppression.  We should not forget that women in the United States actually had a harder time liberating themselves. There are no forced marriages in Indonesia and men are not allowed to swap jail for a marriage with their rape victim. Many countries in the Arabian world are the same way, a fact of which few people are aware simply because these countries are not mentioned daily on Fox News.

Naturally, if you want to oppress your women you can find a part in the Quran that will, with proper interpretation, support you in your doing. You can interpret any text in a way that suits you. There are enough nutjobs in the United States that think the bible forbids homosexuality or abortion. What kind of a religion would Christianity be if that really were the case?

On the other hand, it’s barely even worth debating about the whole human rights issue, seeing that it is but a charade to justify wars that are led to protect economic interests. If the United States were serious about it, they should probably start in their own country, where the many secret services and investigation agencies pile one human rights violation onto another on a daily basis.

Concluding, I shall state that I believe President Obama has taken a big step towards peace and sent a great message of willingness to compromise to the Islamic world by pulling US troops out of Iraq and putting the departure from Afghanistan into motion. The wars did set back the human rights movements in those countries by decades, giving the fundamentalists more power and supporters than they ever had. The earlier the wars stop, the earlier those movements can start over again.

Theft

I think I might be the victim of a crime. There’s a chance that I have been stolen from. And it makes me happy. I do sincerely hope that it is the case. I hope I didn’t lose the object in question by any other means than theft. I shall explain.

When I was in Redwood City about a year ago as crew on the brig Lady Washington, a man came aboard for a deck tour and started telling me about a three masted, square-rigged ship he had seen in Argentina. I suggested it might have been the ‘Europa’ out of The Hague and he promised to bring me a picture the next day. He did and it indeed was the beautiful Dutch barque. He gave me the picture to remember the nice people of Redwood City. Henceforth, I have used it as a bookmark.

Now, a year later, I am in Laos. My parents are on a vacation trip here, and Wynne and I met up with them ten days ago. While on a river cruise down the Mekong River, I got out my book to read. Seeing the bookmark I showed it to my mama because the ‘Europa’ is a sight well worth sharing. A crew member, a young server, happened to come by at that very moment and I realized that he hesitated for a second, his eyes drawn to the majestic vessel on the photograph.

Soon thereafter, we stopped to visit the village of a hill tribe that still lives in a very traditional way by the shores of the mighty Mekong, and I left the book on our table. Upon our return, I realized that my bookmark was missing.

Now, there are a few possible explanations for this. A gust of wind could have blown the book open and taken the picture with it—even on this calm day. Or it could simply have fallen out of the book and slipped over the wooden sole of the boat out of sight. But I fancy the thought that the server, a boy who could hardly have been older than 18 years, took it.

But why do I want that? It is the stolen object that makes me think that way—or rather the concept that was apprehended, because this deed was not about an object and it was not really a theft, either.

Out of all the cameras on board, all the wallets, passports, watches, computers, smart phones, iPads’n’Pods, out of all the things that can be turned into money, this boy decided to snag the picture of a beautiful ship. But what does a sailor on a Mekong river boat need the photo of a Dutch barque for? The only answer I can come up with is to dream. The photo does not represent any monetary value to speak of. It does, however, speak of adventure, of faraway places, of the age of sail, and of the ocean that the landlocked and poor Laotians rarely ever get to see.

This boy did not steal a picture, he snagged the right to share a dream. I have dreamt of crewing on the ‘Europa’ someday. I still do, which means that he didn’t steal that dream from me. He couldn’t. He merely asked for the right to share it.

I believe and want to believe that he took the picture. Call me romantic—I don’t care. But this gives me hope. The fact that this kid went for a dream instead of money gives a great insight into his value system and it makes me believe that it might not be too late for us after all.

Australians

Australia is a weird country, and so are its people. Wynne is correct in stating that nature here is more interesting than the people, because little is more fascinating than the amazing flora and fauna down under. Also, Australian culture is closer to our own than Polynesian culture, for example, which tends to give the animals and plants center stage. However, the purpose of my travel is to learn about mankind, and I did not fail to make some remarkable observations about the people of the land down under. I shall also try to draw a conclusion or two regarding my quest for world peace from these observations.

Mostly everybody has some kind of stereotype of Australians—partly fueled by movies like ‘Crocodile Dundee’—as laid back and friendly people that say ‘hey mate’ all the time, that are a little rough around the edges, close to nature, and drink a lot. The last part is true, for sure. As for the rest, I might want to undertake a slightly more detailed analysis.

But I do not want to make one of the greatest mistakes often made when observing people. I am talking about over-generalization. We spent 95% of our time in Queensland, and therefore my analysis will not be of Australians, but of Queenslanders only. When in Victoria for a few days at the end of our stay, we found the people there to be much different. Good on them, I would say, using a common Aussie phrase, for my opinion on Queenslanders could hardly be worse. I shall explain.

Unfortunately and to my greatest dismay, I have to state that the most striking and prevalent feature I have recognized about Queenslanders is a deeply rooted racism, sometimes latent and sometimes obvious like a giant white-head pimple in the middle of the forehead. Naturally, I did not meet every single Queenslander, but the frequency and absolute predictability of this feature was shocking. Even though vast parts of the rest of Australia are very much like Queensland—low education levels, low population density—I desperately hope that racism is not as wide spread as in the north east. Perhaps Queensland is simply the Texas of Australia.

We did, first of all, find a lot of parallels between Australia and the USA. Both countries are fairly young, both countries were founded by white people on the land of indigenous tribes, both countries suppressed those people, and both countries keep those people in reservations now, seeking to make amends for the damage done without bending over too much or even—God the All-whitey forbid—costing them anything.

Australia, however, seems to be somewhat behind the US in its development. Until only about 40 years ago, the country was politically led and culturally guided by the unabashedly racist ‘White Australia Policy’, which strictly banned foreigners of other races than the Caucasian race from immigrating to the country. Apparently, Australians had forgotten that their population was already heterogeneous. The ‘White Australia Policy’ continued even after Aborigines had gained hard-earned citizen rights in 1967. Interestingly, it was the Vietnam War that brought an end to the policy itself, but its ideology is still perceptible all over Queensland.

We have found other forms of prejudice to be widespread as well. Though most Queenslanders will greet you with a platitudinous ‘How ya goin’, mate?’, often times you will not feel any warmth in the words. We frequently had the feeling that it might be my dread locks that caused such lack of friendliness, and even uncalled for and unprovoked hostility.

Let me give you an example. All over the country you will find Tourist Information Centers where volunteers, often retirees, help travelers seeking particular attractions, or just help them find their way. The elderly couple in the info center in Townsville was so unfriendly from the moment we walked in that it came close to a complete refusal to help. When we described a place we wanted to see, and tried to remember its name, instead of giving us more information about the place or how to get there, they would just say, ‘That’s not what it’s called.’ Not a particularly helpful comment. They even went so far as to make derogatory remarks about our hygiene when we told them we didn’t require showers at a camp area. How many backpackers in campervans do they meet that need daily showers?

The lady in the Tourist Information Center in Emerald was at least willing to help, though she showed no signs of friendliness or even politeness. We did, however, also encounter the diametric opposite. The two elderly ladies at the info center in Beaudesert were not only going above and beyond to help us—phoning camp areas to ask for rates and giving us their private cell phone numbers so that we could camp in their back yard in case nothing else worked out—but they also engaged us in a half an hour’s worth of conversation, inquiring with genuine curiosity and interest about my dread locks, and finally giving us a jar of homemade lemon butter because we were ‘such a lovely couple’. The lady in the center in Babinda was no less nice and happy to share stories about crocodiles and cassowaries with us.

The problem, however, is that friendly treatment should be the standard in a facility dedicated to service of visitors, who come in all shapes and sizes. I should not have to point out the rare friendly agents, but the occasional unfriendly one. Unfortunately, service in general is incredibly horrible in Queensland, and on that issue Queenslanders for once agree with me entirely. One could assume that Wynne and I are spoiled by the great service mentality in the USA, but in my homeland, Germany, no one is ever going to win a prize in customer satisfaction, either. However, there still is a wide and hugely perceptible gap between Germany and Australia.

In Brisbane, we had to take a bus to get to the rental place for our camper van. To make sure we got on the right bus, I asked the driver whether he was going to the stop we needed to get to. He told me he had never heard that street name. I told him the name of the main road our bus was supposed to go down, and asked if he was going down that road. He informed me that he was no GPS. I asked him if he was going to the neighborhood the rental place was in, and that much, at least, he could confirm. The problem was not solved yet, though, because he didn’t know how much to charge me, which apparently was my fault. I told him it was two zones and he went along with it. As hoped, the bus went down the main road that he wasn’t familiar with because he was no GPS (despite the fact that he goes down that road every day), and stopped at the stop I had inquired about at the very beginning. But the confusion was still all our fault, because in Queensland, it’s apparently not the bus driver’s responsibility to know his route, but the passenger’s. Especially when the passenger is obviously foreign and has dreadlocks.

When we dropped off a rental car in Mackay, we had to wait until the lady from Europcar had finished the sandwich that she was not willing to abandon for a single second, and were then helped while a significant amount of mayonnaise remained on her cleavage. Since Europcar does not provide a shuttle service, we inquired about the best way to get downtown. She said there was no bus service in that direction, so we asked about the walking distance to town. She assured us it was no more than two kilometers, easily walkable in 20 minutes. About twenty minutes later, a city bus overtook us as we trudged through the dusty heat out by the airport. After walking six kilometers and more than an hour, we arrived in town, sunburned and fatigued from the relentless 90° heat.

And finally, the mobile phone company Telstra screwed us out of about $25 worth of internet service. The thing that bugs me most about that is that I smelled the fraud and asked specifically about this situation at a Telstra shop. I was assured that I had nothing to worry about. Despite multiple complaints, it was not possible to get the stolen amount back. All I got through fatiguing email correspondence with customer ‘service’ was an admittance that I had indeed been screwed over and an apology for the inconvenience caused.

But even when I was the one providing a service I was never safe from the widespread prejudice and racism. When tending a bar, I was regularly insulted for my hair style and often called a hippie (which seems to be the worst possible enemy of mankind, according to Queenslandian doctrine). Once I was even given attitude for my ‘Yank accent’ and told that I should be proud of my German heritage. In other words, I am not supposed to learn English correctly in order to keep my national pride. What these people do not understand is that heritage, which depends only on where we happen to be born, is probably the very last thing in the world that someone can claim achievement for. Being proud of something not self-achieved seems not only laughably stupid but also to contradict the very definition of the word.

However, in most cases I was able to change people’s opinion about me by providing fast, efficient, and friendly service, which proves that their initial resentment was nothing but prejudice. The worst and most appalling thing I encountered while tending bar was a guy vigorously requesting I turn off the music, which happened to be playing Wham. He had a problem with the group because ‘George Michael takes it up the ass’. I was, for a second, tempted to suggest that he try said practice, which might help him lose his obvious fear of liking it, but then thought to myself that the mere fact that I’m in Queensland should not be an excuse for me to adapt the local service mentality.

I also feel very much disturbed by the fact that prejudice and racism are not only common amongst the general population. Recently, an overloaded boat with 250 Asian asylum seekers was thrashed into the rocky coast of Java, unable to maneuver due to the overload, the horror on the faces of the victims visible on HD video feeds. Almost every soul lost their life. Australian politicians blamed this on the country’s lax immigrant policies and called for stricter ones. The lack of offshore policing of immigrant boats would, so the argument went, encourage foreigners to come to Australia illegally. This encouragement was to be blamed for the incident. Though it is their right to control immigration into their country, this was not a particularly tactful response to a situation that called for condolences and showing sorrow.

Another politician—an elected official, not a right wing opposition extremist or anything—demanded that Asian immigrants take better actions to integrate, especially regarding the use of deodorant. Though she was forced to apologize, she’s still in office, making policy about cultural integration strategies for new immigrants. In this country a politician can seriously get away with claiming that all Asians stink!

Sadly, watching the news that day was not the first time that I had heard that terribly offensive claim. Another person in Australia had told me, after assuring me that she was no racist, that Chinese people all smell bad. Do people not realize that by assuring others that they are no racists they pretty much mark themselves as such? A non-racist would never feel the need even to mention it. This assurance, however, invariably precedes a racist statement and thereby proves itself untrue.

The people I heard call a help hotline and utter worries that they will just get a ‘bloody Pakistani’ on the line probably do not realize their lack of tolerance, either. They should maybe have preceded their statement with an assurance of racial impartiality, too.

When we went to hang out with our neighbors for an afternoon drink on Christmas day, it did not take long before jokes about Murrays (Aboriginals) were told and received with great joy.

Now, let me point out again that these are only case studies without any over-generalization. I have met an almost negligible fraction of the population of Queensland, and I predominantly encountered people with a rather low level of education, most of whom I assumed did not have a college degree. (If they did, that would make the things they said all the more disappointing). But the regularity with which one finds the opinions mentioned above is nevertheless shocking.

As stated earlier, I desperately hope that the rest of the country is less prejudiced. Unfortunately the news on TV that we watched almost daily did not give me a lot of reason for this hope. The ongoing debate about the Murray-Darling Basin, for example, reflects a related and no less discouraging mentality that I sense in this country. This basin is the most important water supply for east Australia, but farmers drain it for irrigation purposes to such a degree that in some months not a drop of water reaches the ocean. This, of course, has an incredible impact on the environment and even the climate. Experts warn that if measures are not taken right now, the entire system might vanish in the foreseeable future.

In that case farming would be rendered almost impossible in the entire region. Yet the claim remains: I’m a white farmer and I have a God-given right to use this water for whatever I want to use it for. After hundreds of years of bad agricultural practices have left virtually no fertile soils on the continent, farmers do not seem to have learned. They don’t seem to care a lot, anyways. A farmer we rode in the same car with tossed an empty plastic bag out of the window without even thinking twice about it. When we expressed our revulsion, he admitted never even having thought about impacts on the environment. This is, again, a farmer I am talking about.

Once more, this is a single case and might not be representative. Unfortunately, my overall impression of the people of Queensland suggests that it probably is.

We have also learned from some people here that Queenslanders do not give a flying flatulence about the rest of the world. This topic came up big when a significant number of Australian troops got killed in a terrorist attack in Afghanistan. All over we heard people ask ‘Why are we even there?’ And this is where we get to my insights on world peace.

Queenslanders see themselves as a peaceful people in a safe country. Of course, bar fights are a staple, but that should not be taken too seriously. On an international level, no one wants to get involved in any foreign wars. That could be called peaceful, I guess—if it were for the right reasons. It is, however, not due to a deeply rooted belief in pacifism, but to not caring. And I personally believe that world peace can almost by definition only be reached if we start to care for each other.

White Australia, for example, does not care about its indigenous people. Even though no real war, no open fighting, has happened in a few decades, I would say the two parties are far from being at peace. The world peace that I hope for is a state where oppression is replaced by equality.

These are the observations I have made about the people down under. You might have been surprised by my mix of examples, featuring racism, homophobia, prejudice, farming practices, and service mentality. I do believe that all five of them are closely related, concerning caring about fellow humans and the world we live in.

Obviously, I have a horribly bad opinion of Queenslanders and, of course, I have to ask myself if I am being unfair or maybe even hypocritical. Isn’t there racism all over the world? Don’t we find it in many of the southern states of the US as well as Europe? Don’t Italian and Spanish soccer fans insult players of their own team if the color of their skin is not white? Haven’t German secret services just discovered a radical right wing terror cell? Isn’t the Chief of Police of Dallas still in office after commenting on an unprovoked and excessively brutal assault on a homosexual by some of his officers with the words, ‘That faggot had it coming’?

First and most important, I have to say that the fact that racism is sadly widespread is not an excuse for it anywhere. It is to be condemned wherever it occurs. And second, I must say, I have never during my travels encountered so much and so frequent racism as in Queensland. I have visited some of the southern states of the US and most of Europe, two places with regular racist allegations. Even amongst Polynesians, a people that I hailed so much for their genuine friendliness and hospitality, their tolerance and spirit of equality, we found some weird hatred towards the tribes of rivaling islands, an old inherited hatred that I would love to see revised and abandoned. But I have never in my life seen hatred, racism, and prejudice displayed as blatantly, openly, and frankly as in Queensland.

Whenever I encounter deeply rooted hatred that exists for mere superficial reasons—like the color of skin or sexual preferences—I have to wonder where it might originate. What makes people hate? I cannot come up with any other reason but fear, the fear of losing cultural and possibly even genetic values and attributes due to the introduction of new ones. And that makes racists not only insecure but also extremely arrogant. They claim that their values are superior without having knowledge of any others.

Statistically, it is highly unlikely that one people has the perfect set of values. Only through cultural interaction, fearless and open interaction at that, can we find that perfect set that might help us take a great step towards world peace. Tolerance and lack of bias are absolutely essential for that. I hope that both Queenslanders and other racists the world over will eventually realize that, no matter the color of their skin.

I am aware of the fact that there is no absolute good and evil; we must not see this world in black and white only. Tolerant people with no prejudice usually have their faults as well, and even racists will in most cases have one or two decent features about their character. No culture that I know of has so far found the perfect way, which makes interaction even the more important. Only by learning can we improve.

So much for the interpretation of my observations. Now, even though I was often times appalled by the racism and homophobia I encountered, I must still acknowledge that Queenslanders are almost as extreme as their country. Alongside the unprovoked hatred for people of different races, sexual preferences, or hair styles, I have also found sincere friendliness. The rare people that featured it were so incredibly nice that I want to end on a happy note to honor them.

Our friend Guido who lived in our neighborhood for the two months that we were stationary, is the perfect example of how wonderful a Queenslander can be. He is a miner, a laborer without advanced education. Yet he is interested in interaction, in cultural exchange, in learning, in arts, and is far from being prejudiced. On Christmas, before we even became friends, he gave us a card with a poem he had written himself to comfort us for being so far away from our families over the holidays. Guido and the ladies from the Tourist Information Center in Beaudesert are what I want to remember about Queenslanders.