What gives? pacificpelican

I recently read How Panhandlers Use Free Credit Cards in The Star, and while I imagine that the writer, Jim Rankin, has his heart in the right place, I can’t help but bristle at the idea that the question is being asked and is so important to those that might drop a few quarters into the palm of a citizen sitting on the sidewalk, begging for change.

Aside from the fact that the article gave spare changers pre-paid credit cards (which we could assume are limited in their drug buying capabilities, but only in a roundabout way), the question of where your money goes when you give it to an obviously needy person is kind of sickening. 

Photo: Tony the Misfit

I’m not attacking Rankin.  This is a question people are obviously keen to know the answer to.  It’s a sentiment you hear often.  “I would give money to bums, but they’d probably spend it on drugs or alcohol.”  

In the context of the article, the people given the credit cards knew their purchases would be reviewed.  We can assume their purchases were edited accordingly. One woman even felt compelled to apologize for having spent the money on cigarettes.  The fact that she felt this way and that Rankin also seemed to think it was something that implied an excuse was necessary shows the writer is on board with the perception that if we give, we should also be cognizant of what the money we give is spent on.

About a year ago, I attended a cultural awareness seminar at the South American Explorers Club.  I found the course enjoyable, but at one point, the topic of how people might spend the money they earned panhandling came up.

One clean scrubbed, bright eyed, overprivileged twenty-something brought up how she didn’t like giving money to homeless people because “they could spend it on anything.”  In the audio version of this story, this is where you here the needle scratch right across the record.  

This wasn’t the first time I had heard this line of logic.  But it was the first time I let loose a cascade of words in incredulous sequence.  

“Why is it your business how they might spend the money you give them?”

“Because they could spend it on drugs.”

“Well, if they do, they need those drugs more than you need your two pesos.  Don’t they?”

I’m not sure how this conversation ended.  I probably scared the poor girl and half the room with my outraged argument.  But in the stark light of have and have not conspicuous in every large city the world over, what purpose does this question serve?

Where does most of the money you spend on a cup of coffee at the Starbucks go? 

Advertising, construction, polluting paper cups.  Even a company that supports fair trade is doing its share of damage.

When you shop at Ambercrombie and Fitch, where do you suppose that money goes? 

Sweat shop labor, ads, promoting an impossible beauty standard, and blasting shoppers ears with payola.

The real answer is that you don’t know and you don’t really care.  You spend the money because you perceive that money going towards a good or service that you want and the real endpoint of that money is invisible to you.

What do you suppose panhandling costs the person doing it?  It’s a job.  Maybe it’s not a job with any discernible purpose, but is it less harmful than working at McDonalds and contributing to deforestation, the pollution of the water supply and chipping away at the collective health of a nation?  I would argue that it is.

Photo: en.en

Panhandling is demeaning job in the grand scheme of things.  If the person panhandling is living on the street, that means he is in search every day for a safe place to sleep, something to eat, dry clothes and a shower.  If a person is homeless, that person has likely spent a less than restless night sleeping on a surface you wouldn’t set your purse down on. 

He feels like shit, is probably in pain and less than ideal health and his diet is a mish-mash of whatever he can get his hands on. Finding a place to take a dump is a problem. Can you imagine what that’s like on a day to day basis?

Then he gets to spend all day on another hard surface asking stone faced strangers who would prefer not to acknowledge him for spare change.

Who are you to place a value judgement on what he buys?  If someone is subjected to all these hardships and chooses to buy alcohol or speed, he obviously needs the speed more than he needs your judgement.  And every dollar you give to a drug addict is a dollar that person is not going to steal from your lilly white ass while you walk by him with your head up it.

If you give money to a panhandler, you can know one thing for certain.  The person you’re giving your money to is the one who’s going to use it.  For nourishment, a clean pair of socks, or to shoot up, your charity is going directly to the source. 

What other form of charity is as pure as that?  There’s no processing fee, no one in a rented office getting their not-for-profit-ass paid, no transportation cost, and most importantly, there is no one making decisions about the most responsible way to spend the money on his behalf.  You are giving a little money that you won’t miss to someone who needs it.  That’s it.

Vetting charity is for organizations.   Spare change is for busses, parking meters, tip jars and people on the street who need it.

That’s what I would say to her if I had the chance to do it over again.

Community Connection

Find out where travelers are most hassled in World’s Most Annoying Cities and the comments field where those with change to give compete for the most annoying beggars in the US and throw your two cents in.

Or if you’re more interested in participating in freeganomics, pop in at BNT where you can learn to live off the good stuff that finds its way to the trash in Dumpster Diving: The Easiest Way to Find Food.

All photos courtesy of Jeff Zimbalist

Mitch Anderson: I’m going to start with the legend of Pablo Escobar…. From the film you get the sense that he was a kind of evil saint, responsible for so much death and corruption, but at the same time seen as a… savior of the poor.  Who was Pablo Escobar?

Jeff Zimbalist: He was both of those things.  He was a devil and an angel.  My brother and I felt that because we didn’t live in Colombia during the era of the PEPEs and Pablo Escobar, it was not our place to make a judgment call….  

We wanted give equal voice to both polar points of view: Either you were a member of the population of Colombia who was given a home and education and health care and soccer fields by Pablo, and you see him as a Robin Hood (and he went to bat against the Colombian elite, the Rosca oligarchy, for the working class poor trying to change decades of oppression and injustice), or you lost family members to random acts of violence, say a car bomb, that Pablo was responsible for.  Pablo dropped a proverbial bomb on Colombia that divided the country into two opposite camps.

Long after the structure of the doc was in place, after we already had the narrative together, we still were focus grouping and getting feedback on the very polarized views of him.  We were still working to make sure that the balance was there journalistically in the film.  Personally, I think there was an internal battle that Pablo struggled with his whole life.  He didn’t want to be a killer, but he couldn’t stop himself; he had to protect his pride and he used violent means to do so, which ultimately destroyed everything he fought for in the name of the working class poor.

Anderson: So you have the “devil and the angel”… wrapped up in one man — Pablo Escobar.  But the other protagonist in the film… is the heroic soccer player, the humble dignified soul, the hope of Colombia and the casualty of Colombia — Andres Escobar.  Who was Andres Escobar, and what does he represent?

Zimbalist: Andrés was nicknamed “The Gentleman of the Field”, “El Caballero de la Cancha.”  He was the epitome of the moral, law-abiding, team captain role model who wanted to use sport as a vehicle to redefine the country’s tarnished image on behalf of all the innocent victims of Pablo’s war – he was the poster child of the Colombian government’s PR campaign to create a new national identity. 

But the irony was that in order for soccer to succeed and Andrés to transform Colombia’s image, he had to turn a blind eye to the fact that soccer needed narco money at that time and that Pablo Escobar, the very same person who was ruining the country’s image, was also the secret weapon behind Colombian soccer’s unprecedented rapid rise out of obscurity to become one of the best in the world. 

Andrés would’ve preferred for soccer to be pure, he would’ve preferred never to visit Pablo Escobar or do business with Pablo, but he played on Pablo’s team and when the Don, the Capo, the King of the Underworld invites you to dinner, you don’t have a choice… you show up.

Anderson: Tell me about violence.  Both “Favela Rising” [Zimbalist's previous documentary] and “The Two Escobars” are linked… by a certain treatment of [violence].  I’m curious about your thoughts, your experiences.  What moves you to tell the story of violence? 

Zimbalist: I’m motivated to make films that tell positive stories that challenge common perceptions about areas of the world, typically developing areas of the world, that are almost always portrayed by mainstream media as falling apart — almost always portrayed negatively.

In some cases, like “Favela Rising”, that means telling a very prescriptive story in a place that is seen as a lost cause, a hotbed of violence and corruption in the favelas of Rio.  And that says, ‘This is the answer, and this is an inside out model of cultural and economic development that is applicable around the world’.  

In other cases, like “The Two Escobars”, this mission manifests in making sure that we’re telling a story about three dimensional characters, embracing the full complexity of a context, a historical moment, where most common portrayals are cliches about the romantic rise to power and monstrous downfall of a scarface type druglord.  

As independent filmmakers I think we have a responsibility to challenge common perceptions and preconceptions, to go deeper and more intimate with our investigation and representations. 

In terms of danger and working in an area that is very violent, there was a stark difference between the favelas of Brazil and our experience living in Colombia. In the favelas, you know literally what you’re trying to avoid: bullets. And the kids in the face masks who are shooting those bullets, the danger they represent is solely in the physical — that they have guns.  They are not old enough, mature enough, smart enough to come up with some plot that you need to worry about. They are not monitoring who you are.  You can just take refuge when they start shooting, and you will be okay.  So even though there was clear and present physical danger the entire time I was there, I was never too scared by it.  

In Colombia it was the exact opposite. I never once saw a gun during the entire production of this film, but I was afraid much of the time.  The fear was in my imagination.  You heard rumors of sabotaging, kidnapping and plots that would happen to journalists all over the place.  And we were dealing with very sensitive issues – going into maximum security prisons, past wounds and trauma, cartel wars.  And so while there was no clear and present violence, my imagination made me feel like I was in more danger in Colombia than in the favelas of Brazil.
 
And I think that’s kind of true in the fear genre and horror genres.   Take the difference between Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King.  Stephen King is full of explicit gore, which is not that scary in the end.  But Edgar Allen Poe, at the end of the story, there is a man locked in a closet with a torch, and your imagination creates the image of the man burning, and it haunts you for the rest of your life.  

Anderson: The film is of course also about soccer.  Throughout, I was struck by a new insight into the nature of the sport.  For Colombians, soccer was a kind of refuge from violence, a sanctuary from reality in a way.  But in the end, it couldn’t escape the cruelty of it all.  The sport became both the slave and the master of the drug lords, it seemed. Was soccer a real refuge from violence? A broken dream?  What do you think?

Zimbalist: Soccer is an extension of society and society is an extension of sport. If you look at sport in a specific time and place in history, you will see everything taking place in society reflected through the sport.  

In this case there’s a line in the film where Coach Maturana says, “Narcotrafficking is an octopus; it touches everything.  Is soccer an island? NO!” There were people on the team like Andres Escobar, who felt that soccer shouldn’t be supported by drug money, and who felt that a victory was hollow if it was won with the support of dirty money and strong arm tactics.  

There was also a great need at the time for something to believe in, for somewhere to put their hopes.   But there was no time to recreate the soccer institution on a legitimate foundation, legal money.  So the shortcut was to use the support of narcotrafficking to lift the sport up and in doing so, lift the country up, and ironically, transform the country’s image to something more positive.

As we know from all the devil narratives, what seems too good to be true, often is.  You can’t escape the means that you use to get to an end.  In this case, ultimately the soccer institution and all that it said about a peace-loving hard-working Colombia ready to impress upon the world a new image of the country – this whole enterprise was built on a faulty foundation, illicit narco money, and was destined to collapse.

There were so many gamblers, drug traffickers and violent factions that were demanding that blood be spilt for the loss of the World Cup that someone had to sacrifice himself, to ultimately be the sacrificial lamb.  Shed that blood.  And Andres Escobar bore that burden.  He stepped up to the dark element to defend his people, all innocent Colombians who were victimized by violence and he did that so that the sport in the country could move forward, could begin to heal, and it has.

Colombia has come a long way in lowering violence and corruption rates since the 80s and early 90s and it was important to us not just to extend the negative stereotype of the country being a hotbed of violence and lawless barbarians, but rather to express through the film, and especially its ending, the respect and love my brother and I have gained living and working with Colombians… the country still has a ways to go, but it’s also come a very long way.

Anderson: On that note, I want to talk a bit about the World Cup. That climactic moment where the United States plays Colombia on US soil in 1994 was filled with this incredible paradox, a kind of disconnect.  For the US, it was a kind of privileged game it seemed, and for the Colombians it meant life or death. What are your thoughts? 

Zimbalist: I’m going to take that somewhere a little different.  Someone said to me today that there are three moments where for humanity time stops.  One:  when a nuclear weapon is dropped from a plane.  Two: when the president of a European or US country is murdered.  Three:  during the game.  And they meant The World Cup.

And it’s true.  The stories are abundant.  Time stops.  And there is no equivalent in any sport that is geared towards a US audience.  

Sport in the US more often takes the role of diversion or entertainment, where in most places around the world it becomes a unifying vehicle or a divisive vehicle for an entire people.  I hope that by making soccer accessible and translating that passion in a way that a US audience can identify with, we will start to understand this language of soccer which is used all over the world.  And then to begin to share knowledge about it, so we can better understand and connect with our cultural and class counterparts around the world.  I think it’s a real tool for us to reach out to people beyond borders.  

I mean, literally, the US team was a ragtag team fresh out of college who had no pressure going into the ‘94 cup.  In playing with no pressure, they were able to be a bit more focused and disciplined.  [T]he Colombian team was an impressionable young team as well, but they had the burden of carrying their country out of decades of civil war, of bloody narco-war.  They had death threats before the game and they had family members killed.  

Ultimately, any game is a mental game, any game is a psychological game.  So when one team is that carefree and the other is carrying those kinds of burdens and mental demons, I think regardless of the talent involved, the game becomes lopsided and the outcome predictable. 

Anderson: The film doesn’t go too deeply or explicitly into any geopolitical analysis, especially regarding the US’s role in the nightmarish violence which gripped Colombia in the 80’s and 90’s. Nor does it seem to make any judgments about the terrible war occurring between the cartels and the Colombian government.  Why is that?  

Zimbalist: I think it’s tempting to include and create conclusions about these massive historical events and external societal moments, but a good narrative needs to draw the audience in and really challenge perceptions and prejudices.  

Even though… this is a story where sport, politics and crime are all intertwined, the film is not an analysis of responsibility for decades of violence. Whereas the motives and interest groups involved in this national story are very complex, we needed to know what our story was and stick to it with discipline and clarity. It’s from this clarity that real narrative tension is born, and space is opened up for the viewer to engage with the experience, the emotions more personally, more profoundly.

We wanted our audience to take a ride on a narrative where they could engage on a personal level, and start to understand the internal journeys of these characters.  We wanted to get beyond the numerous external political differences and into their universal emotional reactions, which is where I think change is born.  

You know, I don’t want to alienate viewers by playing to or against their preconceived opinions, and so by rooting them in the decisions of the moment, rather than the politics of the time, we can access a much wider audience, a more diverse audience, and have them all join in a common experience.  That’s at the heart of it.  If you want to investigate political responsibility, books can do that.  Wikipedia can do that.  

Anderson: “The Two Escobars” was initially meant to be part of a television series for ESPN, but you somehow turned it into a feature length piece.  How did you go about convincing ESPN to give you the space for that?  And how did you straddle the tensions between television and cinema?  

Zimbalist: It is such an elaborate process.

First, it wasn’t me that convinced ESPN, but rather the content that convinced them.  Here was a story that hadn’t ever been told in this way.  

We went down to Colombia and looked into the events of the fatal night where Andres Escobar was murdered.  And ultimately we decided that it wasn’t about the intellectual author of the crime or who pulled the trigger.  But rather it was the entire society that was responsible for Andres’s murder. His sacrifice.  

In order to understand his murder, you had to understand this very secretive phenomenon known on the streets as narco futbol or narco soccer. And in order to understand narco futbol, you had to understand the context of narco society and narco culture, and that meant understanding Pablo Escobar. And while ESPN is a sports network, they were eager to tell stories about the impacts of sports on society, and also, in their words, “redefine the sports documentary.”  

And as we started getting access to amazing characters, far more access than we ever expected, and also to archives that we never knew existed, archives that had never been shown in any other format, through the private archives of the families of Andres and Pablo, but also from the police department in Medellin and also through networks and broadcasters that had closed their doors many years ago, we realized that we could tell the story of sports and society, the story of Pablo and Andres, in the same film.

And so we took a gamble.  

Instead of making a 50 minute film per the assignment, we made a 100 minute film.  And we brought the rough cut to ESPN, biting our nails and holding our breath, hoping they would get behind this foreign language 100 minute feature length film and they did.

They loved it. And now they are supporting the theatrical release of the film.  And they supported us in film festivals.  We got accepted to Cannes, Tribeca and the Los Angeles Film Festival.  So in the end, I think it was the content and the concept that was the most persuasive element here.  

Anderson: On the point of archival footage, man, it’s just spectacular. The murder scenes, the cocaine round-ups, the aerial shots of old villages and fincas, the hysteria of soccer stadiums, the incredible goals, the footwork of the Colombians on the soccer pitch.  How did you get access to all of the archives? And talk to me a bit too about FIFA’s archival footage if you can.  

Zimbalist: Well, with archives like I said, you start with a journey that then branches out, just like any adventure in life.  You start with a point of contact or a resource, and you take what that person says, the direction that that person leads you, and you follow it.  Soon, you are deep within the trees of a forest.  A million different people you know, a million different places you can go. And with archives it’s the same thing.  

There’s all of these broadcasters who, during La Violencia through the times of Pablo Escobar and the PEPES – the whole historical era — they were shooting video the entire time.  Many of those tapes were unlabeled in these closed vaults that hadn’t been unlocked in many years.  And through persistence, we were given access.  

We would go into these vaults, and they would tell us:  this side of the room is sport and this side is politics.  And we would spend the time, personally and with helpers, going through tape after tape, and looking for the gems. I think it is that time investment that independent film and independent production can afford that is what allows us to explore issues with more depth and to investigate angles with perhaps more accuracy than your average daily everyday turn-around news show.  

So all of that was the journey of getting the archives in Colombia.  Getting FIFA footage was more of a corporate red tape process.  Ultimately, it was very expensive and prohibitive. But FIFA loves the film; they’ve gotten behind it. Luckily with ESPN behind us, as well, we were able to afford the footage we needed to include the own goal and the fateful game at the climax of the film. 

Anderson: Lastly, maybe a strange question, but the film gripped me in this anxious way, almost like cocaine.  My palms were sweaty.  My heart beat fast.  I was excited and depressed throughout.  As the filmmaker, just wondering if you have any insight — any thoughts on the symbolism of that?  

Zimbalist: [Laughter]  That’s awesome.  I haven’t heard that before.  No man, that’s your poetry.  I love it.

I think our style of directing is to very advertently and intentionally guide the viewer’s emotional experience through various stages of the narrative, where for 10 minutes at a time you think you love Pablo Escobar. And then the next 10 minutes you absolutely despise Pablo. That rollercoaster of contradictory emotions is ultimately the best representation you can give of life. Compressing many years of history into 100 minutes of sitting in the movie theater.

You know the wider the range of experiences and emotions a viewer goes through, the more authentic it makes their identification with what it would have been like to live through that time.  

I think that it’s a good sign that you had all of those things happening, and that it was able to trigger physiological reactions, but I never thought of it in terms of the parallel to a cocaine experience.  I like it.  I like it a lot.  

Community Connection:

Want to see “The Two Escobars”? If you’re in San Francisco, the film is showing at the Sundance Kabuki Theater, August 27-September 2, 2010. Buy tickets here.

Soldiers in the Korengal Valley, regarded as the most dangerous place in the world, and site of filming for the documentary. Photo: The US Army

Junger’s the journalist who wrote the wildly popular book The Perfect Storm. To the writer’s own surprise, the hardcover spent a year on The New York Times bestseller list; the paperback stayed at the top of the same list for more than two years. A Hollywood movie with A-listers George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg was made.

We’ll forgive him for the fact that the term has now become an entrenched phrase in American English, especially in light of his new project, the just-released documentary, “Restrepo.”

Restrepo is the name of an American combat medic, Pfc. Juan Restrepo, who was killed in action, and the subsequent military outpost his unit built in his name.

Junger and his co-director, Tim Hetherington, spent a year embedded with the 173d Airborne Brigade’s Battle Company, Second Platoon. Free from talking-head commentary, the documentary is completely framed from the perspective of the soldiers, a narrative strategy that contributed to the film’s win at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Have you seen “Restrepo”? If so, we’d love to hear your opinions in the comments section.

A Tiger at the Sanjay Gandhi National Park /Photo by Ipshita B

My glasses keep slipping out of place and my cotton shirt is soaked, pasted to my back. Despite the thick forest cover, the heat pierces through at Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park.

As a child, this was a place for family picnics and school trips – for paddle-boat rides, chutney sandwiches, and the ‘safari’ – a ride around the park’s animal enclosures. Today it’s a green patch in a concrete jungle.

The National Park

For all practical purposes, the National Park is a human settlement with an attached zoo. Children scuttle about in their blue and white school uniforms. Vendors offer me cooling cucumber slices from their baskets, “Tai, only Rs. 10.” The staff run errands at a relaxed pace, exchanging greetings and gossip. Visitors, young couples mostly, sit under trees and along the water, their fingers intertwined.

Park Vendor Photo and Feature Photo by author

I’m here with my sister-in-law, Nisha, to learn more about the Park’s latest ‘adopt an animal’ scheme.

We spotted an advert in the Times of India inviting citizens (and businesses) to adopt park animals for a (minimum) period of one year for a set sum. A promising initiative, I wanted to know more. Nisha saw the scheme, and a white tiger, as a perfect fit for her company.

The Sub-divisional Office or the Yo-Yo Effect

The office, a large white building, is surprisingly cramped from the inside. It holds at least six desks and a cabin. Steel almirahs, typical of Indian government offices, stand against the wall. They are as sturdy as they are shabby. Files are stacked in wobbling piles on the tables and floor.

We approach the closest officer. Unsure, she consults a passing peon. They have an elaborate discussion before passing us off to an officer sitting right behind us. We turn around, wait for the man to finish his phone call, and ask him about the scheme. “Haan, haan!” he says, and promptly sends us across the room to a corner desk. We take four steps in that direction and repeat our now stale query.

Santoshi has a nervous manner about her. Her face registers nothing as we speak. I brace myself from more yo-yoing when she pulls out a magenta paper file and hands us a copy of the official dossier.

“Write an application for the animal of your interest along with your contact details. We’ll consider the application and get back to you,” she says in one rushed breath.

But what does the scheme entail? How will the animals benefit? How will the park utilize additional funds? She adjusts the perfectly placed pink duppatta across her shoulders and points to a green structure across the road. We will get answers there, she assures us.

The Lion and Tiger Safari Superintendent’s Office or the Waiting Game

Only one of the three offices is open. Two clerks are organizing a stack of papers, the almirah is partly open. The officer isn’t in.

“Sir is in the field, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

Photo by author

“Can you check with him on the phone?”

“We don’t have his number.” We laugh.

“Sir’s official phone is out of order. We don’t have his personal number,” she clarifies.

“Will he be back for lunch?”

“I can’t say.”

“Do you know details of the scheme?”

“Haan, write an application for the animal of your interest along with your contact details. They’ll consider the application and get back to you.” When we don’t budge, “You can wait if you like, but I don’t know when he will be back.”

“But he will stop by before leaving for the day?”

“I can’t say.”

The Animal Adoption Scheme or the Aha! Moment

We wait. We gossip, we complain for the next few hours. In the office, the clerk and her colleagues discuss her impending nuptials. They give her grooming advice – what creams to use and when to apply for leave. Outside a dog yawns and settles close to the porch for an afternoon nap.

Just as we are about to break, two cars pull up. The cars are expensive and the men rough – politicians, or goons, we guess – generally an intersecting set.

The guy with a bushy moustache and bully voice asks for the officer. “Tenna phone lava.” Call him, he orders, walking into the closed office. The superintendent appears within minutes, a bureaucratic cliché. Jaws clenched we stay on.

Once the group leaves we are ushered in. We put forth our questions, too tired to bother with pleasantries. His answer: “Write an application for the animal of your interest along with your contact details. We’ll consider the application and get back to you.”

We probe for details.

The money that comes in will be used to run the enclosures as it is run today. There will be no additions, no changes, except a sponsor’s board on the enclosure. In short, no improvements will be implemented.

Photo by magiceye

“Sponsors will not be entitled to dictate terms or interfere in the functioning of the park,” he repeats over and over again.

Why initiate the scheme then?

“So that government money meant for park upkeep can be diverted towards other (important) projects.”

When is the project scheduled?

“Madam, the proposal for the scheme has been sent to the State Government. Once they approved the scheme, we will put it into action.”

The scheme isn’t approved yet? What about the ad?

“We wanted to see if the public would respond to such a scheme before we sent the paperwork to the ministry. The response was very good; we are sure the scheme will be approved.”

It’s four hours later; we leave the park exhausted and without a tiger.

Community Connection

Have you been caught in red-tape? Share your experiences with bureaucracy in our comments section.

Photo: Julian Love

As the Mental Floss blog explained:

“Dutch artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn are bringing vibrant art to unexpected places with their Favela Painting [P]roject. About one-third of Rio de Janeiro’s population lives in favelas, urban slums overrun with gangs and drugs. To prevent kids from getting caught up in the drug trade, the Favela Painting project pays Brazil’s youth to create murals for their communities. As a result, armies of teenage artists are giving their neighborhoods new faces—ones covered in bright, cheerful colors. The hope is that within the next few years, the entire landscape of favelas will become a massive work of art, drawing attention to the needs of the poor and filling the community with pride.”

Koolhaas and Urhahn recruited locals in Rio’s Santa Marta favela to spend a month learning painting techniques and transforming the gray-scale favelas into a vivid complex that looks as if someone took a prism and shattered it, scattering light across the whole favela.

The result–if you like color–is impressive; you can see before and after shots here.

The project is similar to a larger, worldwide initiative called Let’s Colour, which intends to “transform grey spaces with vibrant colour.”

On the one hand, these types of projects are appealing. They leave foreigners who come into “downtrodden” spaces feeling good about themselves and their work, good about what they can “give” or “share” with other people, and good about the connections they make with people who live in “grey spaces.”

On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder what happens when the artists go home and the colors fade. These types of projects are exciting and even temporarily transformative, perhaps, but they don’t lead to real social change. They don’t solve–or even really address–the kinds of problems that crowd people into tiny, grey concrete homes with little or no services. And even when these projects pay the painters, as Favela Painting does, one has to consider whether these projects are anything more than the do-gooder’s equivalent of crack: a quick hit of a feel-good sensation that eventually wears off.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.

Community Connection:

Want to learn more about Brazil? Visit our Brazil Focus Page, where you can find trip tips, drink recipes, language resources, and much more!

Photo: soaringbird

Fifteen of the prison’s 600 inmates competed for titles such as Miss Captive Beauty, Miss Photogenic, and Miss Elegance, sporting elegant donated dresses in competition for cash prizes. Cecilia Juarez, 22, imprisoned on charges of drug trafficking and awaiting sentencing, was crowned Miss Captive Beauty.

Organizers of the event touted it as a rehabilitative effort to raise the women’s self esteem, and contestants interviewed for Mexican television said it helped to break up the monotony of prison life and that they enjoyed dressing up and being outside.

It’s an interesting subversion of the traditional beauty pageant that demands a mirage of perfection in both traditional “beauty” and personal life, and often ends in tearful apologies when some aspect of the beauty queen’s life falls outside of that fairytale dimension.

And certainly if any society is seeking to have effective rehabilitative prisons that address the issues behind criminality rather than simply serving as revolving doors, creative programs can be a step in that direction.

But I can’t help but get a disturbed feeling from watching news reports that zoom in and out on women’s bodies. I’m having trouble making the connection between rewarding a select few prisoners based on their looks and celebrating womanhood. And mostly, I’m thinking of the rest of the women of Juarez, Mexico.

Since the early ‘90s, hundreds of women in this border town have been killed, raped, or “disappeared” and never been found. These women were poor, many of them on their way to work in the maquiladora (sweatshop) industry, and the police have been notoriously dismissive towards the pleas of family members to investigate the cases, with 177 state officials deemed negligent in their handling of the investigations.

Recent measures by the Mexican government indicate that they are hearing some of the outcry, but much remains to be done in the way of true justice and reform. This is compounded by the fact that Juarez is a border city that has been one of the biggest casualties of the drug war.

This is a place where women were often blamed for their own murders, their characters attacked, and their sexual habits questioned, and where flyers would go up with safety tips for women such as not wearing provocative clothes or skirts that are too short.

I wonder whether the well-meaning officials behind Miss Captive Beauty are playing into the same kinds of paradigms that have turned marginalized women into disposable objects, ones not even worthy of a murder investigation, or a look into the complex conditions that drive their involvement in drug trafficking.

I also wonder whether this is indicative of attitudes in Juarez or if it’s just simply that the problematic aspects of beauty pageantry are made more aware because it’s removed from its usual arena and placed in the context of prison. And I also wonder whether I even have a right to question something that seems, at least from media reports, to be happily welcomed by the women of the prison themselves.

What do you think? Is a beauty pageant at a prison in Juarez a move forward or backwards?

Community Connection:

For more on Mexico and border issues, please read our interview with author David Danilo: “Back in 1848?: A Closer Look at the US/Mexico Border.”

Egyptian blogger Mohammed Sharkawy, freed after his arrest and torture in 2006. Photo: James Buck

People who once struggled to get a chance to speak now have a voice. Or at least a platform from which they can shout.

But that doesn’t mean the authorities have to like it, and in countries where public protest is actively discouraged, so too is digital dissent.

Some, like North Korea, Kazakhstan, and Cuba, have suppressed bloggers by restricting access to the Internet. While that might make them the most difficult places to be a dissident blogger, it doesn’t necessarily make them the worst.

Here are five dangerous places to be a blogger.

CHINA

Hardly renowned as a vigorous defender of free speech, China has almost 300 million Internet users and has few qualms about prosecuting bloggers, usually on charges of ’subversion’. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported at least 24 bloggers were serving sentences in 2009 for putting online thoughts that didn’t align with those of the leaders of the People’s Republic.

Prison sentences in China are also generally much longer than elsewhere – averaging between three to ten years.
Meanwhile, the authorities monitor emails and block websites via the so-called Great Firewall of China, recognized as one of the most effective attempts at state control of the Internet.

If that wasn’t enough, last year China announced it would be requiring a program called Green Dam to be installed on computers, which would aid its Internet censorship efforts by blocking sites and collecting information on what users have been browsing. Security vulnerabilities appear to have so far delayed the roll out of this program.

IRAN

While not holding nearly as many bloggers in prison as China, the Islamic Republic has the dubious honor of being the first place where a blogger has died while in incarceration. Omidreza Mirsayafi died in March last year, apparently after being refused medical treatment. He was being held in Tehran’s Evin Prison, notorious in the wake of Iran’s recent political unrest for reports of regular beatings and rapes by prison guards.

However, the Iranian blogosphere as a whole is one of the most active, helped mainly by the large number of dissident Iranians living abroad. And with professional journalists coming under severe restrictions since Iran’s disputed June 2009 presidential election, opposition websites have ended up being the starting point for most foreign media coverage.

MYANMAR

Very few people in what was formerly known as Burma have access to the Internet so those who want it need to use cybercafes. This provides the authorities with a much more cost effective way to crack down on digital dissidents since the cafes are heavily regulated and their users can be easily monitored.

Myanmar also appears to have taken a leaf out of China’s book on disproportionate sentencing – blogger Maung Thura is currently serving a 45-year jail sentence for disseminating video of the aftermath of 2008 Cyclone Nargis.

Photo: Tim Yang.net

The government also appears to have no qualms about simply turning off the country’s Internet access when they really don’t want things getting out.

EGYPT

Among Middle Eastern nations, Egypt wins media freedom points for the fact it blocks very little online content. However, that is of little comfort to political bloggers who are regularly harassed by the authorities.

One, known online as Karim Amer, is currently serving a four year sentence for insulting the president, and many others are periodically rounded up and jailed. Several have been tortured while in prison.

Egypt’s bloggers have themselves documented the near endemic use of torture in jails by posting footage of it on the Internet. Two policemen were jailed in 2007 after bloggers posted mobile phone footage of them sodomizing Emad al-Kebir, a 22-year-old bus driver, with a stick.

SAUDI ARABIA

Religious authorities in Saudi Arabia have several times advocated punishments such as flogging and death for bloggers who have touched on Islam. They have yet to get their way, but the government has been willing to sling bloggers in jail without charge on several occasions.

Perhaps the real problem for dissident bloggers in Saudi Arabia, though, is not the punishment, but the fact there is just so much you can’t talk about. Hamoud Ben Saleh was arrested in January last year for writing online about his conversion to Christianity.

Besides religion and politics, authorities take a dim view of anything they consider vaguely ‘indecent’, a lose turn of phrase covering a multitude of sins. To compound the problem, since sites are blocked using key-word filters, that can include potentially beneficial content such as information on sexual health or breast cancer.

Despite the best efforts of their governments, though, blogging in countries that take a strong line on dissent has thrived and there are many projects designed to help keep it that way.

Media rights group Reporters Without Borders, which last year published a list of 11 countries it branded “Internet enemies,” offers a downloadable Handbook for Cyberdissidents, available from its website.

Community Connection:

Haven’t set up your own blog yet? Unsure about how to use digital and social media to promote the causes you care about? Be sure to visit Matador’s Social Media Focus Page for resources that will help you get started.

Photo: Nono Fara

[Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list. Neither am I consciously privileging one set of violences over others. I have only attempted to highlight a few problems that plague the world in general and women in particular.]

The United Nations defines violence against women as any act of gender based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women.

According to The World Health Organization (WHO), many women do not seek help or report violence when it occurs. WHO also notes that violence against women is a major public health problem and a violation of human rights.

“Women’s Rights Are Human Rights”

Photo: Saad.Akhtar

Two years after The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women, on September 5, 1995, Hillary Clinton spoke about women’s rights as human rights, highlighting dowry deaths, genital mutilation, female foeticide, and malnutrition. Fifteen years later, these problems continue to plague us the world over.

Dowry Deaths

In parts of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where women are often considered their husband’s property, the “dowry” is a veiled form of extorting money from a girl’s family. The Dowry Prohibition Act states:

In this act, ‘dowry’ means any property or valuable security given or agreed to be given either directly or indirectly-
(a) By one party to a marriage to the other party to the marriage; or
(b) By the parents of either party to a marriage or by any other person, to either party to the marriage or to any other person;
at or before or any time after the marriage in connection with the marriage of said parties but does not include dower or mahr in the case of persons to whom the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) applies.

In India, the Dowry Prohibition Act came into being in 1961. Yet, even today we read reports of women being burnt alive.

Forced Genital Mutilation

Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of The United States Population Fund, stated in an interview that “every year, the parents of three million girls and women agree to allow their girls/daughters to allow female genital mutilation/ cutting in order to conform to social traditions.”

Female genital mutilation occurs in Ethiopia, Senegal, and Indonesia, among other countries, and is thought of more as a cultural rather than a religious practice. Genital mutilation is often thought of as a way of reinstating patriarchal power structures and is often justified by stating that “circumcision” ensures that a woman is loyal to her husband.

It is important to distinguish between genital mutilation and clitoridectomy, where women have the freedom to choose whether they want to be circumcised or not.

Female Foeticide

Sex selective abortions are rampant in countries like China and India. Increasing female foeticide in India could spark a demographic crisis where fewer women in society will result in a rise in sexual violence and child abuse as well as wife sharing, according to the United Nations.

Malnutrition

The World Health Organization cites malnutrition as the gravest single threat to the world’s public health. Those living in very poor nations often cannot afford even a single meal a day.

Economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has articulated that gender discrimination in health care leads to the malnutrition of women.

What we can do

All of us can help in some way.

We can write about the injustices meted out to women at our workplaces. As travelers, we can be conscious of the heinous crimes in different countries and highlight them. We can take pictures and use our blogs to spread the word. As human beings and citizens of the world, we can actively ensure that women the world over are safe from violence and can live with basic human dignity.

Community Connection:

Have you confronted oppression of women in your travels? What have you seen and how have you responded? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Photo: artemuestra

The global economic crisis has hit most people and business sectors hard, but big oil says it’s feeling especially pinched.

The quarterly earning report for the last segment of 2009 came out for Chevron last week, and the news wasn’t good: Profit margins fell 37% to *just* $3.1 billion USD.

Shell hasn’t faired much better. In fact, its quarterly earnings report, released earlier this morning, reflected that the company is even worse off than Chevron, which is beleaguered by the Amazon lawsuit, the world’s largest class action environmental case.

Shell’s earnings plunged by more than 50%, leaving company execs with the not so enviable task of informing shareholders that earnings were *only* $12.52 billion USD.

Sure, the profit losses are a huge hit for these companies, but as international aid and advocacy group Oxfam notes, oil companies have operated on a “take the money and run” scheme for years, leaving people who live in oil-rich communities wondering where their profits are.

Check out this Oxfam video, then visit the organization’s website to learn how you can support their efforts:

Community Connection:

Read about two Matadorians’ experiences documenting oil companies’ work in Interview: The Filmmakers of “Crude Independence.”

Photo: mckaysavage

About a month ago, I read about an organization via Twitter. Excited, I pitched the story to Matador’s managing editor, Julie Schwietert. Once Julie gave me the green signal, I plunged into research, almost convinced I would come up with a favorable piece on the organization.

Instead, my research led me to question everything about the organization’s “mission.”

Disparities and Contradictions

First, the organization claimed it was providing employment to rural women. While this was true, I discovered that only individuals who had passed the tenth grade were eligible for employment.

While that is fine as a rule, the PR person I was corresponding with said something to the effect of, “I’m not sure how much you know about rural India, but passing… tenth… is not really a big deal.”

Looking at statistics, one will realize that in India, far more women are married off at an early age than men are, and often without any education. Interestingly, this particular organization is located in Rajasthan, a state with a literacy rate below the national average.

If you think about what the organization states as its mission and what I learned during my research, you will notice the disparity immediately.

Digging Deeper

Further research led to an article about the organization that explained how women who were already employed as teachers were leaving their jobs to work in this company, doing data entry work for “global” clients.

Photo: niyam bhushan

Illiteracy is a huge problem in India and these women were being moved from the educational sector to do jobs that dealt with “computers”? Some were getting paid even less than what they were being paid in schools.

I concluded the organization was doing a great disservice to the educational sector by employing potential educators. And the fact the women were getting paid less seemed exploitative to me. The company was a business venture posturing as an organization promoting social change.

Second, the organization stated it was committed to employing women because money in the hands of women would mean empowerment for their families. When I questioned them about their maternity leave policy, they promptly said they don’t have one, but they let women rejoin the company without any penalties.

They added that their policies correspond with the rules of the government of India. But the government of India has generous rules in this area, offering 12 weeks of maternity leave.

Lessons Learned

I’m not attempting to bring an organization down. As a writer, I believe that it is my duty and responsibility to be transparent with readers. Matador’s senior editor, David Miller talks about having “material transparency” in one’s writing- where one must state one’s own political position such that the reader will understand where s/he is coming from.

I am a liberal feminist and this makes it very difficult for me to write a favorable piece about an organization which seems to be doing more harm than good to rural women, and is not actually reaching out to the absolutely marginalized- poor illiterate women.

The Takeaway

The lessons I learned from researching this organization lead to insights I’d like to share with you so you can learn how to evaluate an organization’s claims:

1. Do your preliminary research and ask questions.

Ask these questions:
Where is the organization located? What do statistics indicate? Is the organization really helping local people? What is the evidence to prove their claims? If you have a feeling the organization isn’t true to its mission, don’t let your emotions cloud your judgement.

2. Check facts.

Photo: shimgray

Nothing is worse than getting your facts wrong. It diminishes your credibility as a writer and gives your readers the impression that you’ve just not taken the time to research your article carefully.

3. Remember that the organization will want coverage and will often give you only the positive aspects of the story.

While I understand they are obviously enthusiastic about having their organization covered by the media, it is also important for you to ask probing questions of PR representatives and do independent research.

4. Maintain journalistic integrity.

As a young journalist just starting out, people may bully you into writing things about them. Don’t allow that- remember that your editor trusts you and your readers trust you. It is more important to be true to them and to yourself than be “nice” and write a favorable piece about an organization just because you think you’re somehow compelled to.

You’re not.

5. Give credit where it’s due.

Often people who lead us to a story or PR personnel who spend hours of their time explaining their angle go unacknowledged. Credit your sources and send them thank you mails/ tweets to convey your gratitude.

Community Connection:

Reeti Roy is a student in Matador’s travel writing school, MatadorU. Join her in her learning journey! Sign up for MatadorU today.

Cartoon by MatadorNights co-editor Kate Sedgwick. All rights reserved.

Community Connection:

What do you think about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: takomabibelot

In case you missed it–which is entirely possible, given that mainstream media made a quick mention of it and moved on to the next big thing–the US Supreme Court handed down an alarming ruling in a critical case last week concerning the role of corporate America’s influence in American politics.

In brief, the justices ruled in a 5-4 decision that the US government can neither prohibit nor control corporations’ political spending in elections. In a rather astonishing leap of (il)logic, the majority decision stated that spending is a form of speech, and as such, spending can’t be controlled by the government because imposing controls would be a violation of the First Amendment.

Well, money does talk, but as Justice John Stephens expressed in his 90-page dissenting opinion, corporate speech (made possible by deep pockets) and the speech of individual Americans aren’t exactly equivalent.

With this in mind, we argue there are at least five reasons why last week’s Supreme Court decision means the end of democracy as we know it:

1. Because it’s an alarming precedent for illogical judicial analysis.

The judicial branch of federal government plays a crucial role in Americans’ lives.

It affects our education, our relationships, and our bodies.

It’s precisely because it’s so powerful that Americans depend upon its decisions to be rooted in the most thoughtful and careful analysis of the law possible.

And in this decision, such analysis was absent.

As MatadorTrips co-editor Hal Amen observed, “I don’t believe relaxing campaign spending restrictions has anything to do with free speech.”

The fact that the Court made a case otherwise sets an alarming precedent for this Court with respect to its ability to analyze legal matters logically.

2. Because it shows just how pervasive the corporatocracy is…

Corporate lobbyists already exert almost unimaginable influence over politics, law, and daily life in the United States.

Graphic: OpenSecrets

They determine everything from what kids eat for lunch in public school cafeterias to what warnings the EPA can compel manufacturers to attach to their products.

And corporate interests have long shaped our foreign policy, from Latin America to the Middle East.

Do we really need more of their meddling? Do they really need any more power?

3. and emboldens them even more.

If you thought the arrogance of corporate America had reached unsurpassable heights (see AIG and big banks’ bonus fiascos), then just wait. Corporate America just got a big blank check, signed by the Supreme Court.

4. Because it further exposes the hypocrisy of American “democracy” to the rest of the world.

As we continue our world tour for democracy, claiming that we’re going to liberate “oppressed” countries from their self-interested “dictators,” we might want to take a minute to reformulate our elevator speech, because the jig is up: the self-interested party is corporate America.

5. Because it means that the little guy just got even smaller.

It used to be that anyone who met the requirements of office could aspire to public service through politics. Exhibit A? Jimmy Carter.

This was a hallmark of American politics.

No longer.

Unless you’re a friend of big business, forget your political aspirations.

Community Connection:

What’s your opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Feature photo: hellodan; Photo above: sillygwailo

Public Debt

Public debt is probably the most noticeable of issues affecting Vancouver, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

When you take infrastructure and security costs into count, no modern Olympics has ever made back all of the money spent to put the Games on.

In fact, actual costs usually end up being exponentially higher than projected costs. The 2004 Games in Athens were projected to cost $1 billion but ended up costing a whopping $9 billion. Montreal held the games in 1976, but the city didn’t finish paying off its debt until 2002.

The Vancouver Olympics are projected to cost $2 billion.

In an effort to win the bid, the city was required to complete various infrastructure projects, including the Sea-to-Sky Highway, a new SkyTrain line, and a new convention center. This brings the cost of the Games to $6 billion. The security budget, originally estimated at $175 million, has grown to over $900 million due to fears of protests and riots, leading to my next point:

Vancouver 2010: Has the City Become a Police State?

To address security concerns in Vancouver, the federal government has enlisted the military to stand guard during the Games. The total number of security personnel is currently estimated at 12,500.

Photo: sashafatcat

As we speak, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are being placed throughout the city to monitor crowds, and locals fear that these cameras will be kept in place after the Games are over.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have gone so far as to establish an Integrated Security Unit, that in the past few months has spent its time penetrating anti-Olympic groups and paying visits to anyone who bad-mouths the Olympics, whether in public or on a personal blog.

In an attempt to counteract protests, the security budget has even been used to build “free speech zones….”

Charter of Rights Violations

…Wait a minute, I thought Canada WAS a free speech zone?!

You can be in favor of the Olympics anywhere you want, but if you want to be against them, you’d better get to a free speech zone. The city of Vancouver has passed numerous bylaws that essentially make it illegal to protest.

Freedom of the press is also at stake. Amy Goodman, author and host of Democracy Now, was recently detained at the border and eventually granted only 48 hours of entry after she was pulled over for being suspected of speaking out against the Olympics, even when she had no such intention to do so, nor was she even aware that there was a problem. She has since educated herself on the subject, so the Olympics have now gained a powerful enemy.

Another act passed just in time for the Olympics is the controversial Assistance to Shelter Act, which gives police the ability to forcefully remove homeless people from the streets and place them in shelters. Many homeless are known to prefer sleeping on the streets than in shelters for reasons ranging from abuse and robbery to the monitoring of their sleeping and eating habits in shelters.

There is speculation that this act was passed in time for the Olympics in an attempt to clean up the streets before the tourists arrive, due to Vancouver’s quickly growing number of homeless….

Homelessness and Poverty

Vancouver has the highest rate of homelessness in Canada, most visible in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Since winning its Olympic bid in 2002, Vancouver has been siphoning money out of crucial social programs to help fund the Games. This has led the closing of at least 850 units of supportive housing and homelessness has since doubled.

Photo: quinet

Rumors have circulated about unlawful evictions in the lead up to the Olympics as well, many cases of which are currently tied up in the courts.

Vancouver’s DTES is also a haven for drug dealers and sex-trade workers. With a rise in tourism also comes a rise in drug pushing and prostitution, which is going to make the streets of the DTES a very dangerous place during the Olympics, especially for those people who call the DTES home, like me.

Another controversial aspect of Vancouver’s DTES is Insite, North America’s first and only safe-injection site, where injection drugs can be used indoors with clean needles and water under nurses’ supervision. Although the project has proved positive in Vancouver and is supported by the city and the mayor, it is often criticized by Canada’s conservative federal government.

There are growing fears that this landmark program could be the next service on the chopping block of budget cuts. Insite is a critical program for treating addiction and preventing HIV and Hep C in a neighbourhood where IV drug use is rampant.

Finally…

The Olympics as Big Business

The Olympic Games have positive benefits, from promoting physical activity to inspiring patriotism and bringing people together, but perhaps it’s time to take a critical look at the Olympics as a corporation.

Human rights should not be sacrificed for any reason, especially for sports. The time to act is now, to work towards a more peaceful Olympics that benefits everyone and not just the businesses and sponsors involved.

For more information and to find out how you can get involved, check out:

The Olympic Resistance Network

No2010

The Anti-Poverty Committee

To take direct action, consider organizing a boycott against Vancouver 2010’s Corporate Sponsors.

Or why not express your feelings in an email or letter to:

The International Olympic Committee

Château de Vidy
Case postale 356
1001 Lausanne
Switzerland

pressoffice@olympic.org

and

The Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC)
#400-3585 Gravely St.,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
V5K 5J5

info@vancouver2010.com

Community Connection

The Beijing Olympics inspired even more public controversy. Read Why It’s Useless to Boycott the Beijing Olympics and How Love and Money Conquered Communism at the Beijing Olympics for a recap of those Games.

Daily life in Dubai*. Photo: Lara Dunston

By the time the evening news broadcast on Monday, I was already over the Burj.

I’d seen no fewer than four TV spots with snazzy graphics comparing the height of the Burj to the heights of the Empire State Building, the Willis Tower, the Eiffel Tower.

I’d heard too many redundant comments about Dubai’s wealth (former) and debt (current), too many “analyses” about the “seeming paradox” of a strictly religious people surrounded by such opulent, ostentatious gluttony.

The news cycle may only be 24 hours these days, but sometimes those 24 hours can really seem to drag along.

And so it was that Monday night, right before I signed off the computer for the evening, I banged out an exasperated tweet:

“You know what I don’t care about? The Burj, that’s what.”

Lots of stuff we throw out on Twitter’s blank wall doesn’t stick, but this tweet did.

Matador member Eloren agreed with me, tweeting:

“@collazoprojects Agree.. So fed up of hearing about it. I don’t see what’s to be so proud of? Tsss.”

And Aussie expat journalist Caitlin Fitzsimmons agreed, too:

“@collazoprojects I know! My husband was trying to tell me about it tonight.”

One person didn’t agree, however, and that was travel writer Lara Dunston, who I respect for her professionalism and her genuine and generous support of colleagues, including myself. An expat who has called Dubai home for more than 10 years, Lara tweeted back politely, but firmly:

“@collazoprojects The people who care about the Burj are the people who live there & love the place, and for whom it’s symbolic of so much…”

“@collazoprojects …which is why I care about it; I think we must feel the way Aussies felt when the Opera House or Harbour Bridge opened”

And just like that, with two tweets, I realized that maybe I *did* care about the Burj.

The problem was that mainstream media had totally overlooked the story that Lara was alluding to in two simple tweets.

She elaborates in her description of the photo that appears at the top of this article:

The pic is of Dubai Creek, the historical centre of the city and lifeblood of Dubai, taken from the wharf at Bur Dubai Souq. There’s something happening down here 24 hours a day, but I love it most in the evening when, with the fairy lights are on the dhows (wooden boats in the background)…. This is the first part of Dubai I ever visited when we moved to the UAE in 1998 and it’s still my favorite part….

There were only a handful of shopping malls in the city then, Burj Al Arab had not yet opened and there were no crazy manmade island developments. It cost less than 20 cents to cross the Creek on an abra (the main boat in the pic) then and now it costs around 30 cents. For many people who live in this area, this is the real Dubai.

When Terry and I lived in the city full-time (ie. before we put our things in storage and decided to live out of our suitcases four years ago), we would walk down here to the Creek several evenings a week…. Friday (like Sunday in the Western world) is liveliest when everyone seems to be down there shopping in the souqs. We saw this side of Dubai far more often than we ever saw the sumptuous shopping malls or extravagant five star hotels, which would only be when we’d go shopping and go out on weekends.

For most people in the city, as in any city, the luxe side represented by the media isn’t the side the locals experience every day. The difference is that with New York, Paris or Sydney, the media also makes an effort to discover and report on the everyday life of the city too – in Dubai they’re not interested. And I could write a novel about why that’s so.…

The Burj is more than snazzy graphics and a gasp-inducing fireworks show.

And that’s precisely why I was “over” the Burj before I really knew anything about it.

All the coverage was from the outside looking in: “Look how Dubai bested us!”

Nobody but Lara, it seemed, was inside looking out. It took a travel writer’s two tweets to make me aware why I found mainstream media coverage of the Burj so tiresome:

It lacked the human element.

Thanks to Lara for restoring it.

Community Connection:

Read other Matador editors’ takes on the Burj. Hal Amen’s Dubai, the UAE, and the World’s Tallest Building can be found on MatadorTrips, and Tim Patterson’s Could the Burj Kahlifah Collapse? is on MatadorAbroad.

Learn more about Lara in this article from our archives: What’s In Your Backpack, Lara Dunston, Travel Writer?

Protesters in solidarity with gay Ugandans. Photo: riekhavoc

Uganda’s Minister of Ethics and Integrity seems to be a very busy man.

In late 2008, Minister James Nsaba Buturo announced that the government was going to step up its efforts to manage “quality of life crimes” that threatened the integrity and well-being of all Ugandans.

Women known or thought to be prostitutes would have their names published in newspapers or on the Internet, and broadcast on television news. (Convenient, as Buturo is also the Minister of Information and Broadcasting).

Buturo also proposed the resuscitation of an Idi Amin-era law banning mini skirts, which, the Minister said:

“can cause an accident when you are… in a car. Men while driving gaze out when they see these women and this causes accidents.”

Oh dear.

But the bee that’s really been buzzing in Buturo’s bonnet is homosexuality, and the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009 was intended to quash this “emerging…threat to the traditional heterosexual family” by making homosexuality punishable by death.

Under the law, homosexuality would be defined broadly, including not just sexual acts or identity, but also activities the government considers to be supportive of homosexuality, such as the distribution of literature or other “pornographic material.”

Buturo and the government supported the imposition of a death penalty for gays until the United Nations and other world governments expressed their outrage and their intent to withhold aid and other support. This week, the government announced it would dial down the punishment. Instead of death, gays are eligible to be imprisoned for life.

All of this is troubling enough, but what’s more disturbing to me is the fact that three Americans appear to have played a significant role in helping the Ugandan government craft the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. The men–one a “reformed” gay man who leads “healing” workshops and the other two, missionaries–gave talks to thousands of Ugandans at a three day conference last year; they were presented as American experts on homosexuality.

According to Jeffrey Gettleman of the New York Times, “police officers, teachers and national politicians” were in the audience, and the effect of the conference was the setting in motion of “what could be a very dangerous cycle.”

Reverend Kapya Kaoma, a minister from Zambia who was interviewed by Gettleman, observed, “What these people [the missionaries] have done is set the fire they can’t quench.” Gettleman cited Kaoma as adding, “the three Americans ‘underestimated the homophobia in Uganda’ and ‘what it means to Africans when you speak about a certain group trying to destroy their children and their families.’”

Though the missionaries claim to have been horrified that their conference led to the crafting of such an aggressive bill– one is even quoted as saying something to the effect of “Some of the best people I’ve met are gay.”–their eagerness to present to a group of people about whom they obviously knew little, if anything, is problematic because they weren’t even able to imagine the potential consequences.

If you’re concerned about this issue and would like to keep track of events and make your own opinion heard, here are a few steps you can take:

1. Subscribe to the blog Gay Uganda, a personal blog maintained by a gay Ugandan. The first person perspective of this blog is paired with up to date information about developments regarding the bill.

2. E-mail members of the Ugandan government to express your concern about the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. Contact information can be found on the Ugandan government’s website.

Community Connection:

Wondering how homosexuality is treated in other parts of the world? Read about India’s decriminalization of homosexuality.

Photo: Marc van der Chijs

Compared to paddler David Miller, rock climber Abbie Mood, and runner Sarah Menkedick, I’m probably the most sedentary member of the Matador team, but even I know that climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro is no Sunday stroll.

But this little tidbit from ABC News, in which it’s reported that five celebrities will be doing a Summit on the Summit “charity climb” of Africa’s tallest mountain, makes the arduous trek seem exactly that.

Emile Hirsch (of “Into the Wild”), Jessica Biel (of, well, you know), Lupe Fiasco, Isabel Lucas and Elizabeth Gore will step off on Thursday, aiming to reach the summit in an effort to “use star power to help raise awareness about the need for clean water worldwide.” Fans of these celebrities can follow the climb and donate “as little as a dollar” to raise money for the cause.

Exhibit A; Arranged by Hal Amen

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for celebs using their status to do good. And anyone with 20-20 vision can see (Exhibit A) that Biel has a body that’s in way better shape than mine. But climbing Kilimanjaro takes a bit more skill and effort than putting together a charity ball, designing a reusable bag for Whole Foods, or even running the New York City Marathon… especially if they’re shooting video and Tweeting at the same time, as they apparently intend to do.

Curiously absent from the article and from the Summit on the Summit website is information about how (or whether) the stars have trained for the ascent.

Though I wish them the best of luck and hope they raise a ton of money in the name of clean water, I’m curious to see how they handle the climb.

Community Connection:

Matador member CaliforniaKid7 intends to summit Kilimanjaro this year. Read about his 2010 resolution in Summiting Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2010.

Feature photo: ABA; Photo above: littledan77

“The public execution is… a hearth in which violence bursts again into flame.”- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The words of the French philosopher Michel Foucault are charged with a passion and urgency uncharacteristic of “objective” academic texts. In his classic work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault explained that the hallmark of modern “justice” is that it is ultimately meted out far from public view.

The horrors of punishment become private, even anonymous… the person who throws the execution switch remains anonymous to everyone but himself. And, being beyond our line of sight, the person being punished is effectively silenced.

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I’m not a soft-on-crime bleeding heart: I believe people who commit heinous crimes should be held accountable for their actions.

But I also believe that there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that the death penalty is not an adequate form of accountability. There’s the Innocence Project’s report documenting at least 17 cases of death row sentencing of people who were wrongly convicted.

And then there was Republican Governor George Ryan’s commutation of sentences of all 167 death row inmates in Illinois in 2003. It was a decision, Ryan said, that he knew would draw serious criticism, but the possible burden of that decision was one he would bear willingly because the administration of the death penalty was simply too flawed to be morally or constitutionally legitimate.

Rarely, though, does the public hear from death row inmates themselves.

Napoleon Beazley was just 17 years old when he murdered John Luttig in 1994. On May 28, 2002, Beazley was executed by the state of Texas. In his final statement he reflected upon the death penalty as an effective form of justice:

The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here – I am.

I’m not going to struggle physically against any restraints. I’m not going to shout, use profanity or make idle threats. Understand though that I’m not only upset, but I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight. I’m not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.

If someone tried to dispose of everyone here for participating in this killing, I’d scream a resounding, “No.” I’d tell them to give them all the gift that they would not give me…and that’s to give them all a second chance.

I’m sorry that I am here. I’m sorry that you’re all here. I’m sorry that John Luttig died. And I’m sorry that it was something in me that caused all of this to happen to begin with.

Tonight we tell the world that there are no second chances in the eyes of justice…Tonight, we tell our children that in some instances, in some cases, killing is right.

This conflict hurts us all, there are no SIDES. The people who support this proceeding think this is justice. The people that think that I should live think that is justice. As difficult as it may seem, this is a clash of ideals, with both parties committed to what they feel is right. But who’s wrong if in the end we’re all victims?

In my heart, I have to believe that there is a peaceful compromise to our ideals. I don’t mind if there are none for me, as long as there are for those who are yet to come. There are a lot of men like me on death row – good men – who fell to the same misguided emotions, but may not have recovered as I have.

Give those men a chance to do what’s right. Give them a chance to undo their wrongs. A lot of them want to fix the mess they started, but don’t know how.

The problem is not in that people aren’t willing to help them find out, but in the system telling them it won’t matter anyway. No one wins tonight. No one gets closure. No one walks away victorious.

Community Connection:

To learn more about American “justice,” read How the US Prison System Has Become Big Business.

For a look at life inside a prison, check out Photo Essay: Going Inside Brazil’s Prisons.

Feature photo: 826 Chicago; Photo above by author

Late this afternoon, Media Bistro reported that Dave Eggers’ most recent book, Zeitoun, has been optioned by Jonathan Demme to be adapted for the big screen.

Zeitoun, a non-fiction account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, recounts how the eponymous protagonist remained in New Orleans during the epic hurricane and his efforts to help neighbors and strangers after the levees broke. But the otherwise feel good story about Zeitoun’s belief that God might have selected him to witness the aftermath of Katrina and to provide whatever help he could turns, as Salon.com summarized, into a “a quasi-legal bureaucratic nightmare that resembles a Kafka story but is all too real.”

Eggers, whose previous book What Is the What? was about Sudanese refugees, learned of Zeitoun’s story and became interested in converting it into narrative form, while working on his Voices of Witness project, an oral history program that “depicts human rights crises around the world through the stories of the men and women who experience them.”

Demme, for his part, had not only been moved by Eggers’ books; he had also witnessed firsthand the physical and psychological destruction of New Orleans while working on the documentary series, “Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower 9th Ward.” Connecting through mutual friends, Demme let Eggers know he wanted to adapt Zeitoun for film.

Eggers agreed to Demme’s proposal and has reportedly donated all of his option money to the Zeitoun Foundation, the mission of which is to help rebuild New Orleans and protect human rights across the United States.

You can read an excerpt of Zeitoun here or learn more about Eggers here. To learn more about Mr. Zeitoun, check out this video:

Community Connection:

New Orleans still needs volunteers. Read my suggestions about the six best volunteer opportunities in the Crescent City here. Still need a reason to visit NOLA? Here are 10 to get you packin’.

Maybe these baboons have heard of A.A. Gill. Photo: Tambako the Jaguar

The latest Twit-storm kicked off in Britain today when high-profile restaurant and television critic A.A. Gill decided to devote half his Sunday Times column to his experience of shooting a baboon while on safari in Tanzania.

Why? “To get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone,” of course.

In the column, which ran on Sunday, October 25, Gill recounts in full, Technicolor detail how he shot the baboon from a mere 250 yards while hunting in “a truck full of guns and other blokes.” He explains how he felt the urge to be “a recreational primate killer” – then went ahead and shot the animal through the lung. “You see it in all those films,” he writes, “guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?”

Inevitably, the column prompted outrage from animal rights groups. Steve Taylor, of the League Against Cruel Sports, called the act “morally completely indefensible”; Claire Bass, who undoubtedly has the perfect surname for wildlife manager at the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said: “It’s hard to say what’s sadder – the unnecessary death of a healthy baboon or that [Gill] has so little regard for the life of another creature. The vast majority of visitors to the Serengeti have a fantastic time shooting with cameras, not guns. We condemn the killing and the crude portrayal of it as ‘entertainment’ in Gill’s column.”

The RSPCA also condemned Gill’s actions but allegedly could not act against him because the shooting took place beyond its UK jurisdiction. As Steve Taylor also commented in The Guardian, “If he wants to know what it’s like to shoot a human, he should take aim at his own leg.”

Strangely, Gill has found some support. Commentators have pointed out that the baboons are classed as vermin by some in Tanzania. Oh. Right. So perhaps Gill was merely doing the locals a favour and saving their crops? What a benevolent soul – maybe we should be thanking him. But wait. Safari parks are not farmsteads and the closest Gill has ever gotten to vermin control is keeping himself in check – which he doesn’t tend to do very often as we’ll see.

Others have said only non-vegetarians should be permitted to express outrage. Well, I’m no vegetarian but I don’t go around performing drive-bys on cow sheds or kicking my way through chicken farms with scythes strapped to my ankles. You don’t have to be a bio-ethicist to know that there’s a difference between killing for food and killing for fun.

No.

Gill is right up there with those other contemptible imbeciles, fox-hunters. In fact he admitted as much in his article: “baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun.”

“Naughty fun.” I thought taking your partner to a sex show or raiding your parents’ drinks cabinet when you were 13 was “naughty fun,” not riding around in a truck wasting defenseless wildlife with big guns. If that’s naughty fun, what’s insensate and needless animal slaughter?

Restaurant critic/baboon killer, A.A. Gill.

There’s that and then there’s the smugness.

Gill knows full well he’s done something obnoxious – “it can’t be mitigated”- and with his savvy understanding of the media knows it’s going to get him talked about. Sentences like “I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways,” or “They die hard, baboons. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out,” are built to provoke, and sure enough he’s found himself a ‘trending topic’ on Twitter and the subject of a slew of outraged articles like this one.

No surprise then that Gill is no stranger to controversy.

Dressing up an ugly superiority complex as caustic humour he has described chef Gordon Ramsay as “a wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being”; the Welsh as “loquacious dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls.” And Albanians, to Gill, are “short and ferret-faced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of Shetland ponies.”

All of which could be quite witty if it didn’t come from a man with a heart dark enough to want to know “what it might be like to kill someone.” What next? Sex with a praying mantis so he can “get a sense of what it might be like to procreate with someone”? One can only hope.

Community Connection:

Are your travels contributing to animal cruelty? Read From Elephant Tourism to ELephant Voluntourism, one of the many articles about animals in our archives.

Photo: Slumdog Thousandaire; Feature photo: Michael Pickard

Somewhere, a marketing executive must have smoked a bowl and watched “The Amazing Race.” He’d probably been grappling with how to exploit all of the social networks in one shot, his team had probably been harping about peer-to-peer marketing, and his boss was most likely riding him about joining the YouTube Generation. What to do?

It would seem that he (or she, or an outside marketing company) invented Coke’s luke-warm Expedition 206 campaign, in which three pre-packaged Coke-heads will travel through 206 countries currently serving the beverage. Along the way, according to Coke, they’ll “seek and share the optimism and happiness of Coca-Cola”, while providing the world with more much-needed blog posts, tweets, videos, interviews and pictures.

Voting is currently taking place to pick one of three teams, whose candidates have been assembled by Coke themselves, having gone through “an extensive application process and boot camp at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, GA.” Take that for what you will, but I smell media training and a polish.

Rehearsed and scripted ‘viral’ video introductions of each team are currently available on the 206 website. In an apparent attempt to alienate almost anyone at the campaign’s onset, the clips ooze with surreptitious corporate objectives, from the squeaky clean contestants to the team’s humdrum names (“Team Wow!” ,“Team Mix”). The whole thing comes off like what it is– a marketing tool.

In a move that won’t come as a surprise for with an IQ higher than a pheasant, Coke is downplaying the branding aspects and is instead selling the project as a glorious experiment for mankind. Adam Brown, director of Coca-Cola’s Office of Digital Communications and Social Media, told Forbes, “It’s not about having the Coca-Cola brand first and foremost, center of the screen…. It’s about telling the story that involves Coca-Cola, that involves the attributes of what Coca-Cola is about, optimism and joy.”

What’s that smell?

Coke! Available in Sierra Leone! Photo: Sigma Delta

As someone who has been traveling the world for nearly a year, I keep wondering if the company really has any idea what they’ve taken on, and to what end they will pursue it. The upside seems to be the potential for a social media presence, as witnessed by the obvious grabs during the voting process (add Coke to your Facebook friends, etc.). But couldn’t they have nailed as much activity by giving away a few new computers and a pony? Why the desperate need to organize some kind of worldwide hokey-pokey?

The answer, of course, is that marketing executives need to substantiate their jobs in a world gone socially mad. Fourteen year olds are marketing their shitty death metal bands better than some brands and there are many expensive college degrees left out there to substantiate. This contest is merely executives trying to prove that they can out-maneuver a bedroom marketer.

The three winning candidates are surely out for a great ride, and at Coke’s expense. I have to wonder if they realize, though, that the whole thing will be Last Year’s News by mid-2010, as they’re left wandering the planet Tweeting about neato waterfalls to a captive audience of ten Coke interns. Twelve months is an eternity in the advertising world, where new campaigns and new initiatives are launched monthly. Unless the program is a huge success, I don’t see how it could hold the interest of a corporate culture for that long.

There also seems to be little revelation about what these youngsters will be doing out in the world. According to the site, they’ll be “…meeting new people, seeing amazing places, experiencing different cultures and attending local events….” This could mean life-expanding adventures that open their world view. Or it could mean a canopy walk and a game of ‘ole Pat Pong Ping Pong.

Lastly, there’s all of this business about happiness. I’m all for making the world a better place through a positive attitude and hope… but how about shedding a little bit of light on what is pulling the world apart? We’ve got a planet currently held together by duct tape – is now the time to spend a year running around it like Smurfette, giving kisses to whoever will have them? Or is it the year to expose world poverty, build houses for the homeless, and get together with the world’s thinkers? How exactly are you going to make a person with no water smile? Oh right, you’ll hand them a Coke.

It’s a little unfair for me to be jumping the gun this early, before this group’s body of work is brought into the world. I do wish them the best and I hope, no matter which team wins, that they’ll realize they have a platform to show us more than they have in their current trite videos. And hopefully Coke will keep their hands of the censor button long enough to allow these kids to tell us about the important things happening in the world.

Either way, at least you’ll have me watching.

Community Connection:

Interested in the tactics other big corporations are taking to polish their image? Check out Christine Garvin’s article “Localwashing: Shop Locally at Your Neighborhood Corporate Store.”

Photo: stuartpilbrow

Daniel Suelo, 48, has been living without money or any barter system, and no food stamps or government help, for the past nine years. While in Ecuador on a Peace Corps mission, he witnessed a rural community acquire increased monetary wealth through farming and shift their traditional lifestyle towards a diet of unhealthy, processed food and a newfound addiction to television.

The experience led Suelo on a spiritual quest that realized itself in India, where he was particularly moved by the Sadhus, wandering monks who renounce all money and possessions. He made the conscious decision to return home, quit his job, and carve out a life without money.

As he put it, “I simply got tired of being unreal. Money is one of those intriguing things that seem real and functional because two or more people believe it is real and functional.”

Photo: platschi

Today, Suelo lives in a cave in Utah and gets around by hopping trains or hitchhiking. For food he relies on dumpster diving, foraging, fishing, and, occasionally, hunting. From the public library he authors a blog and a website where he discusses his everyday life and offers up deep philosophical musings on why a society based on the concept of money is harmful and contrary to our true nature.

He says he’s never been happier, living like “ants and deer and slugs and sparrows and bacteria and atoms and galaxies.”

Though Suelo’s story is a particularly riveting one, less radical communities of “freegans” are cropping up in places like San Francisco and New York. These groups have risen out of a desire to boycott what is seen as an unethical corporate system and to minimize the waste of resources. To varying degrees, freegans salvage edible food from dumpsters, squat in abandoned buildings, and encourage a reconsideration of the benefits of leisure and play as opposed to excessive work.

These movements have not flourished without criticism. Freegans are often dismissed as freeloaders. Others assess the lifestyle as a way to deal with extreme liberal guilt while still living within the confines of privilege and comfort. Daniel Suelo frequently receives hate mail expounding him to get a job and stop mooching off society.

It’s a valid discourse. It’s nearly impossible to be completely self sufficient. Suelo frequently relies on hitched rides, a library that’s supported by taxes, and the various cast off excesses of consumer society. He dismisses that this devalues his philosophy, asking “Are swallows nesting in house attics dependent upon money?”

He cites that goods flow from producers (laborers) to bankers, brokers, and landlords who produce nothing. He frequently touts his lifestyle as a return to a way of living more in line with the natural world, a way towards freedom from things that don’t exist towards one of generosity and truth.

However, it can be argued that a system of barter is indeed a part of our nature. Our nearest relatives, the chimpanzee, frequently barter food for grooming and sex. Even Neolithic cavemen bartered. A return to a world without money would be possible only if human beings, like bees and ants, decided to utilize our skills equally so that we may benefit from each other freely.

Photo: scriptingnews

Knowing the history of humanity, however, it doesn’t seem that we can adhere to such noble principles. Furthermore, even without money or a bartering system, human beings could still find ways to oppress each other.

It’s also important to note that Suelo’s lifestyle would not work if he lived in a less monetarily wealthy country. Many people live with virtually no money, and there are no overabundant dumpsters or gifts from generous neighbors to compensate for a lack of “monetary illusion.” In those places, not being a slave to a piece of paper also results in starvation and death.

Many travelers often walk a thin line between admiring a community and romanticizing poverty. It’s possible to question whether Suelo’s motives lie in some kind of imperialist nostalgia towards the communities he encountered on his travels.

However, philosophically speaking it is true that we tend to live in a real-life matrix. Our society as a whole is comprised of things that exist only in our collective consciousness rather than in reality.

Take for instance, the idea of borders. In the 19th century, Native Americans referred to the border between Canada and the United States as the “medicine line” because they were perplexed that the American troops would chase them through the land but suddenly stop when they crossed that invisible line. They thought it was magic; to the Native Americans, all of it was just land.

Just like borders, money is a concept that becomes real only because we believe in it collectively. As Suelo says, “If a dollar bill represented itself, it would no longer be money. It would simply be a piece of paper with pretty art on it.” The fact that people will kill each other and ruin the earth for an abstract concept seems almost ludicrous when analyzed from that angle. It’s downright maddening when multiple psychological studies confirm the old adage that money really does not buy happiness.

Who really understands our complex monetary system, other than the few who benefit tremendously from such knowledge? Henry Ford once said, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” Rarely do we ever question our entire financial system until some kind of disaster, like the current economic recession, sparks the discussion.

Regardless of any stance, it is interesting to witness someone who disagrees with conventional society to such a degree that he opts out of it completely.

Do you find Daniel Suelo’s lifestyle commendable or outrageous? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Community Connection:

Want to try your hand at some freegan strategies? Check out Matador editor Kate Sedgwick’s Beginner’s Guide to Dumpster Diving and David DeFranza’s Beginner’s Guide to Foraging for Food.

Ignorance is Bliss Photo and Feature Photo: Albie Girl

A mistake often made is attaching an emotional value to these and similar thoughts and having that emotion cloud objectivity to the point that the ideas are forgotten in the haze of anger, bitterness and defensiveness.

The following is a list (a very incomplete one) to get people thinking about white privilege as noted by a white girl who has spent most of her life in the U.S., so please forgive the U.S. bias. If you are non-white, please excuse the obvious direction of this article to whites.

________________________________________________________________

Have you ever been in a bookstore and noticed the “African American Literature” section?

Think about the implications of this.

Does it mean that Black American writers are not American writers of American fiction and literature?

What does this mean to white readers who can safely peruse the fiction section knowing their race is reflected in the selection, while perhaps the experience of Black Americans is not?

What does it mean for Black readers?

What does it mean to Black writers who hope to sell their work to a wide audience?

Does it mean that the experience of African Americans is not relevant to the typical, white fiction reader?

As a white person would you feel that you were conspicuous or out of place perusing the African American literature section?

Not all Bigotry is This Blatant
Photo: cometstarmoon

If so, how does this translate to the experience of a Black shopper?

What really are we supposed to glean from the fact that books are segregated in a bookstore?

Is the African American experience a niche market?

Are bookstores making a point of spotlighting the work of African American writers?

To what purpose?

Do they want to be seen as liberal and fair?

If so, why are they bringing such a conspicuous display of attention to what is usually such a small selection of books?

Do they want to make it easier for people interested in African American literature to find the relevant books?

What other “subsections” of fiction or literature are there in the book store?

Is it significant to you at all that you can choose to think about this or not to think about it and it will not necessarily have an effect on your life?

Can you continue to ignore race politics and theory without having it bother you one way or another?

Is that significant?

Can you think of ways in which other people might not have that luxury?

Is it a luxury?

Are Hughes or Hurston any less relevant to the lexicon than Hemmingway or Plath?

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Recognizing white privilege is an ongoing process that requires active participation by the person who wishes to recognize it.

You must think about your whiteness and its implications, read and talk about it or write about it to be aware of it and understand it.

Race is a touchy subject. Whites are often so afraid of saying the wrong thing that we claim not to see race or that it doesn’t matter to us. We claim not to perceive our own race. In order to avoid taking responsibility for our privilege, we deny that it exists.

Pretty convenient of us to deny race when for many people the day to day fact of their race is a relevant and important part of their identity. Yet we can claim not to perceive that part of the identity of other people with little or no consequences for our willful ignorance.

Playing dumb is a total cop out.

You know it’s true.

a S.H.A.R.P (Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice)
Photo: thivierr

Once you acknowledge that whites are recipients of advantages, you must acknowledge that other people are the recipients of disadvantages in a system that does not acknowledge an unfair bias and in many cases denies that a bias exists.

In a recent Newsweek article, white parents’ reluctance to talk about race was exposed as a crucial factor in the development of biased attitudes concerning race in young children. Certain parents who had signed up for a study about race, when told that they were to take a few minutes to discuss race with their children each day for its duration, chose instead to opt out of the study – the discussion was too uncomfortable.

Many seemed to think that discussing race was an inherently racist thing to do. That might be the truth if you hold racist attitudes. The fact that most of us do on one level or another and refuse to own up to it in order to stamp them out is willfully ignorant and destructive.

In this way, white children learn to shun the topic of race as shameful and it becomes the job of society at large to school the majority on how to think about race. It seems like too important of a topic to leave to chance or to heavily biased media outlets, but by and large that’s how it’s done.

These kids associate discussion of race with the fear implicit in their parents’ silence and by proxy begin to view race as a taboo topic, further surmising that there is something to be ashamed about. Too ashamed to talk about.

Ignorance continues to be propagated.

Other sites I’ve run across recently are Stuff White People Do, an article to do with the Palins as an example called “What is White Privilege?” from the Chicago Sun Times by Mary Mitchell, and the essay “White People Need to Acknowledge Benefits of Unearned Privilege” by Robert Jensen.

If you are interested in talking and reading more about anti-racism, find groups on the web like White Anti-racist Community Action Network and join up. Another really wonderful resource is the LiveJournal Community Debunking White, a community that does not have open automatic membership, but which you can still access without being a member.

When you start, it’s best to keep an open mind and just allow yourself to consider ideas that you may find foreign, disconcerting or even upsetting. Wait to fully consider ideas before jumping in with questions and opinions. You’ll find that questions you have have been answered before in many ways many times. Dig deep and you’ll surely find change within yourself.

Community Connection

Search for “white privilege” yourself in any search engine and see what you come up with. Post awesome and interesting finds in the comments field below.

Photo: aussiegall

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Colin Beavan, a.k.a. “No Impact Man.” In case you missed it, here’s Beavan’s story: for one year, Beavan decided to go green… so green that he wouldn’t use public transportation. Or toilet paper. Or, at the most advanced stage of his experiment, electricity.

In my article, I wondered aloud whether Beavan was admirable or a bit off his rocker. Secretly, I thought he was a bit of both. He was clearly committed in a way that few of us are to really lessening his impact on the environment. But to drag his wife and daughter along for the ride–a bit unwillingly, it seemed– raised questions for me about how our personal commitment to various kinds of change impact the people we love if they’re unable or unwilling to make the same commitment.

Ultimately, Beavan’s wife came around, as she details in this article in Business Week.

But not everyone was convinced, and New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert lit into Beavan as a way to approach the question, “What’s wrong with eco-stunts?,” which was also the title of her article.

Kolbert’s article opens by giving readers the Beavan back-story. Beavan, she says, wasn’t much of an environmentalist. He didn’t know much about global warming. But as he was casting about for a book project, he seized upon the idea of the no impact experiment, which he presented to his agent “[o]ver lunch at a pricey midtown restaurant.” She goes on to describe Beavan’s year of lessening impact, in a tone that’s often snide, concluding–after ripping into Thoreau (yep, THAT Thoreau) and a string of other environmental “stunt” artists–that Beavan is a “tad disingenuous.”

To support the claim, she says:

“Beavan is, after all, a man whose environmental activism began over lunch with his agent…. [E]very day Beavan bikes to the Writers Room…and plugs in his laptop. Meanwhile, Michelle [his wife] scooters off to work at the offices of BusinessWeek, and Isabella [their daughter] spends the day at the (presumably electrified) apartment of a sitter…. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.”

She concludes by noting that poor people around the world were generating far less impact than Beavan during this time, implying that his experiment was somehow meaningless by comparison.
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My problem with Kolbert’s analysis is its holier-than-thou undertone. Who cares if Beavan’s year of no impact was a stunt? He surely decreased his carbon footprint far more than Kolbert (who,it should be noted, writes for a magazine supported by big oil advertising). He’s brought attention to issues of overconsumption and waste. Maybe he’s inspired other people to try their own no impact experiments or, at the very least, to scale back some of their excess.

Does Beavan have to live in slum-like poverty or forgo restaurant lunches with agents (which is, after all, where many meetings with agents take place) to be an environmentalist?

If we each took just one of the steps that Beavan took, we’d dramatically reduce our collective negative impact on our planet. But if we’d rather sit around and call scaling back a stunt, then we’re not likely to avert some serious problems that will affect us all.

Community Connection:

And on the theme of holier-than-thou’ism, check out contributing editor Christine Garvin’s article, “6 Ways to Not Be a Holier-Than-Thou Traveler.”

Photo: heathbrandon

Project Name:

The Pro Bono Jeweler

The Big Idea:

Jeweler Gabriel Craig takes his studio out to the streets, where he makes jewelery as performance art… and then gives the pieces away.

History:

Craig started a similar project, “The Collegiate Jeweler,” as a college student back in 2007. In an interview with American Craft Magazine, Craig explained the purpose and spirit of the project:

“My objective was simply to share handmade jewelry with those who may not ordinarily encounter it. I wanted the format of the performances to reflect my educational and altruistic goals and so I gave away silver rings that I made on the spot—over 30 in the first few weeks. By giving away jewelry I was able to focus on its cultural value rather than its commercial value. The criterion for receiving a ring was participation. Those who seemed interested got to take home some of the excitement…. In the studio I am just a jeweler, but on the street I am a magician.”

Craig continued by explaining how jewelry might just be a meaningful vehicle for communication and community building:

“Approaching jewelry as a theme, I found that the opportunity for communication and change grew exponentially. Despite how pervasive jewelry is in our culture, as a maker I spend a lot of time in the studio by myself, complacent in the isolation and insular world built around studio jewelry. With The Collegiate Jeweler performances, I had finally found a direct way to share what I do with people. That was how it started—wanting to share and be inclusive.”

Logistics:

What do you make that you could give away? Whether it’s a poem, a small ceramic pot, a photo, postcard, flower from your garden, or a homemade candle, you can adapt Gabriel Craig’s pro bono art project wherever you live. Remember: the key is not just to give something away, but to create a moment where you and your public can connect, even if for a few brief moments.

For More Information:

Visit Gabriel Craig’s website.

Photo: Zack Sheppard

Rio has slum tours. New York City has an “underbelly” tour .

So why shouldn’t Alberto, Mexico have an immigrant immersion tour?

For 100 pesos, tourists can join the Caminata Nocturna, or “La Caminata,” a four hour night hike led by guides intended to simulate the experience of migrating by foot from Mexico to the U.S. The tour involves trekking through dark, treacherous terrain, including dry, rocky hills spotted with cactus, and being regularly insulted by the guides, who act as smugglers.

The threat of immigration catching you is simulated, but the risks of injury and overexertion are real.

“La Caminata is an homage to migrants,” say the organizers, “and is intended to make us conscious about the risks people take to fulfill the ‘American Dream.’”

It has also helped turn the community away from the brink of disaster, according to a recently released documentary about La Caminata. Alberto, according to one of the tour organizers interviewed in the film, had lost the majority of its young and middle aged people to migration; the community had become a ghost town. Economically, Alberto was on the verge of collapse.

But then they came up with the idea of La Caminata.

Over the past five years, La Caminata has not only helped bring much needed income into the community, it’s also lured back some of its citizens who migrated for better work opportunities.

Participating tourists interviewed in the documentary admitted the trek was challenging and frightening, but agreed that they came away with a more profound respect for people who feel compelled to migrate, and a deeper understanding of the kinds of challenges they face.

You can watch the trailer here.

Community Connection:

What do you think of this type of tour? Would you sign up for La Caminata? Share your thoughts below.

Photo: bowena

Hari Kondabolu isn’t the only comedian who used the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States as a point of departure to create some powerful stand-up about race, ethnicity, identity, and human relationships.

But Hari, who holds a degree in comparative politics from Wesleyan University, is willing to go out on a limb in his routines by “speak[ing] truth to power with confrontational and personal material” rather than simply poking fun at others.

In this interview by Colors NW, Hari and fellow comedian Ahamefule Oluo talk about the ways comedy can be used as an effective way to raise social consciousness about profound human issues while having a good time:

Community Connection:

For a more philosophical take on how we can be more conscious, check out Matador editor Sarah Menkedick’s article “Travel Is For Idiotic Idealists: Three Americans Held in Iran.”

What about fun for everyone? Photo: havenholidays

“A ‘Whites-Only’ Pool in 2009?” That was the subject line of an e-mail that landed in my inbox a few days ago.

According to this story from NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate, black kids from the Creative Steps Day Camp visited a private pool in Philadelphia (having paid over $1,900 for the “privilege”) and were asked by pool attendants to leave because “minorities [were not allowed] in the club.”

Guess the pool administrators forgot to ask the camp leaders the race of the would-be swimmers.

In a follow up story, Valley Swim Club President John Duesler didn’t mention the pool attendants’ remarks, saying only that a comment about the kids “changing the complexion” of the club was “a terrible choice of words” that was “blown out of proportion.”

He added that the real reason the kids were asked to leave was because there were concerns about safety and the total capacity of the pool, though why such problems weren’t anticipated before both parties signed on the dotted line remained unclear.

The club has since invited campers to return, but in the interim, at least one lawsuit was filed and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission opened an investigation, scheduling a visit to the club for the end of this month.

Community Connection:

What’s the most offensive form of discrimination you’ve experienced or witnessed at home or during your travels? What did you do about it? Share your experiences in the comments below.

Photo: helgasms!

In every one of these articles, it’s clear the writer is passionate about an issue and hopes to use his or her writing to raise awareness and inspire action. But often, these submissions are rejected because the writer is afflicted with “plight syndrome,” a style of writing that relies upon the gross manipulation of the reader’s opinions and emotions.

The narrative device characteristic of plight syndrome is melodramatic hyperbole. Consider these two examples:

1. In an article about animal abuse: “The people running the shelter are… doing as much as they can to help these forgotten and discarded babies [who are killed by the mayor,] the man everyone knows is responsible for executing the rash of cruel poisonings on the animals of the city.”

2. In a book about poverty among Indian children: “There is a holocaust quietly happening among India’s children.”

What are the problems in both examples?

• The language is overly emotional, conflating opinion with facts.
• They reflect the disturbing tendency of plight syndrome writers to make assumptions about the root causes and responses to social problems in other communities.
• They draw upon highly charged images or references, such as the Holocaust, that dilute the power of words, potentially insult readers, and force comparisons that may not be fair.

Photo: Brian Sawyer

The end result?

Pieces that read as preachy tract-like screeds rather than carefully considered dispatches about social problems that will inform and engage the reader.

Objectivity isn’t the goal here; objectivity (as in being uninfluenced by personal feelings) is a myth. What is important, though, is a fair assessment and an article that doesn’t finger wag the reader into accepting your point of view.

So how do you write about plights without coming down with plight syndrome?

Here are five tips:

1. Stick to the facts.

Observe the situation and state what it is. Don’t embellish it with your imagination or your opinion.

2. Show, don’t tell.

It’s the most repeated advice writers in other genres hear and in the case of plight writing, it’s even more valuable. Don’t tell the reader how to think or what to feel—take him there. Put her in the place and allow her to arrive at her own decision.

3. Step out of the narrative frame.

Articles afflicted by plight syndrome are almost always written in the first person. But the plight isn’t about you. Try changing the narrative point of view from first person to third.

4. Take a cue from fiction writers.

The stakes are different in fiction than in non-fiction, but the effective techniques used in both genres are remarkably similar.

Daniel Alarcon’s remarkable fiction about state-sponsored violence in Latin America doesn’t say “Violence is horrific, ripping communities apart.” It doesn’t need to. Instead, it reveals tiny, almost insignificant details—like the government’s policy of changing the names of towns—in powerful prose:

“Before, every town had a name; an unwieldy, millenarian name…,names with hard consonants that sounded like stone grinding against stone.”

So take a cue from fiction. Think Charles Dickens. Ralph Ellison. Upton Sinclair. John Steinbeck.

5. Read more.

Beyond fiction, familiarize yourself with writers whose careers revolve around writing about plights without falling prey to plight syndrome.

Some excellent examples include Ted Conover, Barbara Ehrenreich, and the late Jorge Ibarguengoitia (mostly in Spanish).

By reading more—and more widely—you’ll begin to develop an appreciation and understanding for the variety and value of devices that are more subtle and complex than indignant, if well-meaning, ideologies.

Community Connection:

To see examples of Matador contributors who have written successfully about plights without falling prey to plight syndrome, check out Ryan Van Lenning’s “First Person Dispatch from the Chevron Protest” and Shreya Sanghani’s “India’s Pink Chaddi Campaign.”

Computer users in Rwanda. Photo: Colleen Taugher

“Gordon Brown claims Rwanda would never have happened if Twitter had been around….”

That was the first tweet I read when I checked my Twitter feed this morning.

“Bold claim,” I thought, before taking my first sip of coffee.

“Utterly ridiculous statement,” I said out loud as I took a gulp and thought about it some more.

*
The tweet, posted by @krishgm, a host for London’s Channel 4 news, referenced an article in The Guardian in which British PM Gordon Brown said the following:

“…the internet era [is] “more tumultuous than any previous economic or social revolution. For centuries, individuals have been learning how to live with their next-door neighbours…. Now, uniquely, we’re having to learn to live with people who we don’t know.

“People have now got the ability to speak to each other across continents, to join with each other in communities that are not based simply on territory, streets, but networks; and you’ve got the possibility of people building alliances right across the world. That flow of information means that foreign policy can never be the same again.

“You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken.

“Foreign policy can no longer be the province of just a few elites.”

*
I agree about the power to “speak across continents,” to form communities and networks that aren’t based on geography, but on common concerns. And that’s why I’m an ardent proponent of Internet technologies as a critical tool of social change.

But to think that the 1994 genocide in Rwanda or the thousands of other atrocities happening in the world right this second could have been prevented or could be controlled simply by exposing them and pressuring governments to take action is an argument I find both terribly naive and untenable.

Brown’s comment reflects a certain elitism that overlooks the fact that millions of people in the world have limited or no access at all to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or even a basic Internet connection. The people most likely to be affected directly by atrocities can’t tweet about them to the rest of the world– they don’t own the means to do so.

Even those who have access, notes the Digital Divide, tend to be using platforms and tools that are “low-quality and merely ‘localized’ versions of products and services intended for the rich.”

So how are we to reallyinterpret the true significance of technology as a tool for social change? Weigh in with your opinions in the comments below.

Community Connection:

Don’t know what Twitter is? Get some background information here.

Are you skeptical? Photo: cameronparkins

Here are seven ways you can evaluate Matador’s claims about big oil… and to fact-check online content in general:

1. Is the author transparent?
First things first: Who is the author? Does he or she use his or her own name? What background or biographical information does the writer give about himself or herself? How does this information provide insight into the information and perspective the author presents?

Sometimes, legitimate reasons exist for an author to obscure his or her identity, but generally, if a writer isn’t attaching his or her name to the writing he or she is publishing, then you have every reason to be skeptical about the claims the writer is making– or, at the very least, the writer’s motives.

2. Believe but verify.
Even if the writer is transparent, take some extra steps to learn more about the author if you’re still skeptical about his or her background or motives. A simple Google search is likely to pull up more background information about the writer… though a caveat is in order here: not everything you read online is true, so you’ll need to subject the “facts” you’re gathering against other sources of information.

3. Consider the article within its context.
Where is the article published? Who’s behind it? What are their stated values? If you can’t find this information, your skepticism may be in order.

4. Evaluate sources.
Does the author indicate the source of the information he or she is presenting? Are those sources primary? Does the author link back to those sources? In his article about his experiences at the Chevron protest, Matador author Ryan Van Lenning included publicly available source information about Chevron CEO David O’Reilly’s salary. You could check that information independently if you had any doubts about its accuracy.

Photo: quacktaculous

5. Can the writer spell? Can he or she construct intelligible sentences? Is the article subjected to any editorial process?
Almost anyone can post writing online these days. And almost anyone can say anything. But a few simple questions will help you screen some of the vetted writing and help you distinguish it from the Internet equivalent of scribbled musings of a raving lunatic. Is the writing clear and intelligible? Has it been subjected to any editorial scrutiny before it reached your computer screen? If the answer is no, you’re right to have some doubts.

6. Assess the tone.
The articles Matador publishes tend to reflect a particular viewpoint. My own articles about big oil clearly convey my belief that big oil–Chevron, Shell, and others–are responsible for environmental and human rights abuses… a belief I hold because of my experiences interviewing industry experts and witnessing environmental and human destruction firsthand.

But these articles are also free of hyperdramatic polemics. If the article you’re reading is hysterical in its tone, then you’re right to raise your eyebrows and search for some confirmation of the author’s claims.

7. Check yourself.
No one is entirely objective. But if your reaction to an article is unusually strong, check yourself as much as the author and site whose work you’re reading. What may be causing you to react so viscerally? The answer may be more about your issues than those of the author.

Community Connection:

Talk with us! How do YOU evaluate what you read on Matador and other online magazines? Share your suggestions in the comments!

Photo: albany_tim

As I read the news coverage of the California Supreme Court upholding Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, I couldn’t help but think about a short piece I came across the other day.

The title was What Should America Become? and came from the blog, A Couple of Things. The author(s) gave these options for the future of the country:

A. A softie nation who invites terrorists to bomb us with immunity?

B. A softie nation on the outside but some thugs ready to beat you secretly (if possible).

C. An angry nation where citizens can be picked on by high taxes so others can get free things.

D. An angry nation where there is no minimum wage and where you can dump dioxin in the river or street.

E. A scared nation who kowtows to any complaints.

F. A bully nation who invades any country it doesn’t like and is willing to have hundreds of thousands of troops dead in order to take over a country.

G. A lawsuit nation where anybody can sue and lawyers can shape the country.

Really, are these our only choices?

Time For Change

Photo: B Rosen

We are at a time in history where many countries throughout the world are having to decide a different course when it comes to their politics, human rights, and environmental choices.

The United States has employed obvious contradictions that are apparent in recent political decisions, such as Prop 8.

Yet I wonder, what is with the black and white mentality? Of course there are no simple answers to dealing with terrorism, economic collapse, healthcare, or turning back time on a polluted Earth.

But what about contemplating how some of our actions have, and continue to, instigate terrorist activities? And what if our taxes went to things like free higher education and healthcare so that a good chunk of the nation wouldn’t be saddled with loan debt?

Or how about a real move internationally toward sustainable forms of energy so the government can’t come out with a bogus reason to go to war?

Buddhist Philosophy At Work

On her blog, Jennifer Jones posted a quote attributed to Buddha that I think fits these dilemmas nicely:

The thought manifests as the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into habit. And the habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care. And let it spring from love, born out of concern for all beings.

What if we moved from a place of concern for ALL human beings, not just the ones in our family, community, or country? That might actually lead to a completely different train of thought as compared to soft vs. hard, angry vs. scared, bully vs. victim. It might lead to a simple respect for all beings.

And I sit with the thought that this respect might reach across the boundaries of faith and belief, and allow that everyone should be able to love – and marry – who they want.

Despite my parents’ worries about The Big City, shaped, as most parents’ worries are, by media hype and movie hyperbole, the New York I arrived in after graduating from college in 1999 was a city that had been transformed significantly since its days of gangs, graffiti, gratuitous sex, and sleaze.

Like any city, it had its rougher edges, of course (and, my father pointed out as he and I lifted a bureau over a group of my neighbors smoking ganja on the stoop of my South Bronx apartment building, I lived along those edges).

Photo: urban_data

But New Yorkers nostalgic for the bad old days considered even those edges to be tame versions of a storied past. They insisted on talking about their New York, and they can still be heard today, complaining about shiny, smiley Times Square with its Hershey Store and Hard Rock Cafe.

You might say Curtis Sliwa is one of those New Yorkers.

Photo: malyousif

Sliwa prides himself on (in his words) his “powerful, uplifting messages of overcoming fear and adversity to achieve self-reliance and contribute to one’s community.”

He founded the Guardian Angels, an NYC based civilian crime prevention and safety patrol corps that has inspired spin-off groups in Japan, Australia, Peru, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa.

But recently, I learned that Sliwa launched a new project: The New York City Underbelly Tour, which takes paying guests on a spin around the “mean streets” of the South Bronx. The three hour tour starts on the “Muggers’ Express” (the 4 train, apparently–my old commute), and drops you off at 167th Street, one stop south of where I used to live on 170th and Jerome.

Photo: chad davis

There, you’re met by a team of Guardian Angels, who will show you “active chop shops, drug houses in the shadows of police precincts, money laundering fronts, and murals dedicated to drug dealers.” At the end of the tour, you’ll “discover how the south Bronx has flourished and prospered”… though for whom, I’m not sure.

There’s been a lot of talk about this tour recently–it was written up in New York Magazine this week–so I’ll add my two cents. Is the Underbelly Tour–at least in concept–the developed world’s version of slum tourism? Would you take this tour? And is there something troubling about Sliwa’s do-gooder deeds, on the one hand, and his let’s-keep-the-gritty-past-alive money-making tour on the other? I’d be interested in your opinion–especially if you’ve been on the Underbelly Tour.

Community Connection:

Learn more about slum tourism in Dominic DeGrazier’s article about his experiences taking a favela tour in Brazil.

The highlight of opening night at Havana Film Festival New York was the presentation of Freddy Vargas’s 12 minute film, “Hispaniola,” which won HBO’s Best Short Film Competition Award in 2007 at the New York Latino Film Festival.

Vargas, born in the Dominican Republic and currently living in New York, returned to Santo Domingo to shoot “Hispaniola,” a docudrama that ambitiously–and successfully–tackles a number of themes relevant to Dominican society today, including racism, relations between Haitians and Dominicans, immigration, and economic challenges in the developing world.

The film depicts two families from drastically different economic, social, and cultural backgrounds. There’s the well-to-do family of a gruff Dominican politician–all light-skinned–who live in a beautiful home, albeit one that’s enclosed behind a gate. Right across the street is a family of Haitian immigrants, who have come to Santo Domingo to work. While they construct the home of a verbally abusive Dominican, they cook and sleep on the worksite and worry constantly about being deported by immigration, as they’re in Santo Domingo without papers.

The families, of course, would never cross paths were it not for the young sons of each group. While playing with the family’s maid in his back yard, the baseball of the politician’s son bounces outside the gate and across the street, into the hands of the excited young son of the workers. Remarkably, the politician’s son hasn’t yet been indoctrinated by his father’s ideology, and he invites the Haitian boy to play.

When the father comes home, though, he explodes. What is a black boy–a Haitian!–doing in his pool, in his yard, in his home? In the final scene, immigration swarm onto the worksite, picking up the Haitian family and carrying them away. Implied is the possibility that the politician called to report them.

It’s a tense, explosive 12 minutes, and one that accurately portrays painful truths about current social problems on the island.

Yet as interesting as the film is, so too is Vargas’s story of making it.

Vargas confronted a number of obstacles for such a short film. Following the screening, he explained,

“There was opposition from the government. The producer chickened out. A couple of the actors dropped out the night before we started filming. And then, a top filmmaker in the Dominican Republic said ‘I’ll help you out, but don’t put my name on it.’”

For someone who doesn’t know much about the Dominican Republic, the issues depicted in “Hispaniola” might not seem to warrant so much opposition from so many different sources.

But race in Hispaniola, the name of the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is anything but simple.

As Vargas explained to me after the screening,

“During the dictatorship, Trujillo [the Dominican dictator who ruled from 1930-1961] denied that Dominicans had any African heritage. He emphasized our European roots instead. And this ideology continues to influence Dominican society in many ways.”

Vargas’s goal in making “Hispaniola” was to raise consciousness about identity and race relations in the Dominican Republic, and to advocate social change by inviting conversation about these issues.

You can watch the full version of “Hispaniola” here.

Photos: Francisco Collazo

Clearly moaning in pain and surrounded by tearful family members, including a 10 year old grandson, it was hard to imagine why the agents would show up in force to remove John Demjanjuk from his home.

But the photos and video footage alone could not explain the backstory about Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant to the US who is accused of being a Nazi guard and accessory to the deaths of more than 29,000 people during the Holocaust.

Demjanjuk’s story is a complicated one. Tried and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an Israeli court in 1988, Demjanjuk’s conviction was subsequently overturned by Israeli Supreme Court. Then, a US judge revoked his American citizenship in 2002 after learning that Demjanjuk had concealed evidence about his service in the Nazi camps. Three years later, an immigration judge ruled he could be deported to the Ukraine, Poland, or Germany, where a warrant has been issued for his arrest. Yet four years later, Demjanjuk was still living at his home in Ohio.

Until yesterday, when ICE agents seized him and prepared him for deportation. But then, a surprise twist– three judges with the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay on the deportation order just six hours later.

It remains to be seen what will happen with Demjanjuk, whose family claims, somewhat ironically, that deportation would be “torturous” for a man in his condition.

Though the image of Demjanjuk being wheeled out of his home is one that evokes some degree of pity, one has to ask whether age should ever impose a statute of limitations on our sins.

The question is one gaining increasing relevance, and not just because of Demjanjuk.

Photo: Paul Mannix

In a March episode of the news broadcast, “World Focus,” it was reported that Cambodia had initiated a trial of Kaing Guek Eav, the man who ran the notoriously brutal Tuol Sleng Prison during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Kaing Guek Eav, now in his late 60s, is a self-proclaimed born-again Christian who seems harmless with his watery eyes, wrinkled face, and slightly stooped posture. Yet he is charged with aiding and abetting the deaths of more than 15,000 Cambodians during the 1970s. Family members of victims have shown up by the hundreds to witness the trial, and have described the process as cathartic because justice is finally being served.

What do you think? Legal considerations and mandates aside, is there a moral or ethical statute of limitations on our sins? Share your opinions below.

Photo: Mackenzie Stroh, Cooper Hewitt Museum

I was flipping through Smithsonian Magazine yesterday and happened across this Q&A with popular fashion designer, Isaac Mizrahi, whose dress designed of salmon skin is going to be on display as part of the “Design for a Living World” exhibit at New York City’s Cooper Hewitt Museum.

The exhibit, which opens May 14, was produced by the Nature Conservancy, which commissioned 10 designers to “develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials.”

Mizrahi’s dress is made of discarded skins of Alaskan salmon sewn onto chiffon. The result is an elegant, simple sheath dress, accompanied by shoes made of the same material.

Sounds good, especially when the Nature Conservancy says that Mizrahi’s design is “an ingenious and provocative ensemble that celebrates the tactile beauty and strength of salmon leather as a material salvaged from the abundant waste of the fishing industry.”

Yet the fact that the dress and matching shoes give new life to a material that would otherwise go to waste doesn’t necessarily make the dress an ideal expression of what can happen when fashion and environmental consciousness intersect. I was left with a few lingering questions not answered by the Q&A:

-What’s the carbon footprint of Alaskan salmon skins shipped from a processing plant to a New York City fashion design office?

-What other materials went into the creation of the dress and shoes? Surely, the salmon skin had to be treated with something in order to be wearable.

-What kind of energy was used to make the dress? There’s a big difference between hand-sewing a dress and using a sewing machine to make clothes.

-What’s the expected lifespan of the dress and shoes? Even if a product is deemed green in its design, is it truly green if it has to be replaced quickly?

Interestingly, Mizrahi makes no claims to being a green designer. In the Q&A he admits:

“Frankly, unless something is really glamorous and amusing, I’m not going to sell my artistic principles short for the sake of ‘going green.’”

What do you think about Mizrahi’s “green” dress? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Matador member Insolent Minx recently attended the Green Fashion Show 2009 in collaboration with Funkshion Fashion & Music in Miami and photo blogged from the event. Check out the green fashion here.

Feature photo: Needa Lind