Scars

I went to a presentation today about the military crackdown of the recent uprising in Burma. Terrible, and disturbing in and of itself. But I managed, somehow, to sit and look pictures of beatings and corpses. Until one image flashed on the screen and I nearly had a breakdown.
It showed the inside of a monastery raided by the military, with broken glass, upended furniture and a pool of blood on the floor.
It wasn’t, by any means, the most graphic picture in the series. But it triggered ghosts of a trauma I thought I had managed to lay to rest.

It looked so much like images I still carry burned into my retinas that I almost vomited. I wanted to run out, but didn’t trust myself to squeeze out of the crowded room without freaking out worse, so I stayed in my chair and rode it out.
Just over six years ago, when I was 19 years old and living in Barcelona, I went to Genoa to join protests against the G8 summit. The entire experience was incredibly intense. What I remember most, these years later, is the feeling of menace. I’ve been to some fairly dodgy places in my life, but nowhere has compared to the palpable sense of danger I felt from the moment I set foot in the city until the moment I left, speeding out of the city through back roads afraid for my life. The pinnacle for me, or perhaps more accurately the darkest pit, was the raid on the Diaz school on July 21, where people participating in the Genoa Social Forum, including myself, had been staying during the summit.

I reprint below –typos and all-- an email I sent out the afternoon of July 22, 2001, which describes the situation with much more immediacy than anything I could possible write now.

hey. first i want to let everyone know that i am okay(physically at least). so are cj, shira, macia, soren,alessia and everyone from la fabrica. (sorry for thoseof you who don,t know these people, but i don`t have time or energy to write 2.
i dont know if youve heard anything about the raid on the indymedia center and the school across the street here in genoa. theres some pretty good general information about it at www.indymedia.org.
when it happened i was sitting outside in front of the indymedia center, where there were some meetings going on. things had been pretty tense but it was late and i was very tired, and thinking about going to sleep. all of a sudden, somebody shouted police, and we looked up and saw lines and lines of riot police running down the street towards us. for a minute we nearly ran into the school that had been used as a sleeping place for GSF activists, but at the last minute we turned and ran into the indymedia center, just before the gate got shut. we closed the building up, and ran to the windows. i didnt get a good view, but people who were looking said that they saw the police drive a truck through the gate of the school, then run towards the building, screaming and throwing bottles. just after that the police came into the media center. they made all of us sit on the floor next to the wall, and then searched and trashed the building, taking as much legal support and networking databases as they could. the floor where i was was very tense, with the police walking up and down with sticks and yelling in italian, but after a while it relaxed a bit, and nobody got hurt. they kept us there for about 45 minutes without searching or id-ing anybody.
then they left and someone ran into the hall saying really shaken up saying they had massacred the people across the street. we ran out and there were lines and lines of riot police between us and the other building. they starting bringing stretchers into the building. they were going in and out for over an hour. people saw large black bags being carried out as well. it was hard to see much, but i know for sure that i saw one person being carried out on a stretcher still in his sleeping bag, with a bleeding headwound. it was awful. it just kept going on and on and on. and the tension kept mounting with the police as we were all screaming and crying. after they carried all of the stretchers out, and arrested everyone who could walk out, they ran back to their vans and left, leaving the building open.
when they were gone, we went to the building to tru and get peoples things out, and to try to see what had happened. there was blood everywhere, peoples bags dumped out and scattered, doors to anywhere someone could hide smashed open. everywhere it looked like people had been sleeping there were pools of blood. then the journalists came in and starting filming everything and anyone who was crying and it was even worse. i tried to keep focuse on saving peoples personal things, but i had to leave the building for a while after being in a stairwell with a bloody board lying in a huge pool of blood with a handfull of hair next to it. everywhere that in looked like people had been sleeping was covered in blood. there was blood all down the stairways and smeared all over the walls. there was a radiator with a big circle of blood on it and drips on the floor below. and the police left the building open for everyone to see it.
there were some people in the building who managed to get out by climbing onto scaffolding, and some who managed to hide. everyone has said that when the police came in everyone was just running and trying to get away, or asleep.
when the police would come into a room people would lie down on the floor and try not to provoke them, but that the police were obviosely enjoying themselves.
there still hasnt been a full list of everyone arrested and hospitalized released. crusty from petrushka in defenitly in the hospital with a head injury.
im afraid of being in this city, but the people from GSF seem to have abondoned everyone, so im staying to try and help with legal support. ive been really lucky so far and i hope it will last. people have been organizing safe places to sleep for those of us who are staying, so i should be fine.
but please, tell everyone you know about what has happened here. the media is really shutting it out and its really important that people know. anything you can do to try to raise attention (even forwarding this email if neccesary, removing the beginning bits) would be really appreciated by everyone.
take care
izzy

The end of this story is that there was no safe place to sleep in Genoa that night. The list of those arrested and hospitalized did come out that afternoon. 62 people were beaten into the hospital, nearly all of them with head trauma. Almost everyone involved in the demonstrations had fled town, with most of the organizers from the larger NGO’s regrouping in Milan.
My instinct for self-preservation is stronger than this story may suggest – though I did, after all, at least have the sense to run to the building full of journalists when the riot police showed up – but after what I had witnessed, leaving town while people were still in the hospital seemed unconscionable. It came down to just a few of us left in the media center trying to coordinate some sort of local clearinghouse for information and to get the arrestee’s belongings to safe places.
As night fell, though, it became clear that staying in Genoa any longer would’ve been suicidal. We were being tailed by police as we tried to go to a place to sleep. Some signals were made which, according to my Italian friends, were unambiguously death threats. I don’t even remember exactly how we got out of the city, but I remember almost not being able to breathe from fear until we got onto the autostrada towards Torino.
In the immediate aftermath, the degree to which I’d been traumatized was clear. The next day was the only time in my life I’ve ever gotten so drunk I couldn’t take my own shoes off. I was living in a fog I couldn’t crawl out of until I went into the Alps to sit in the forest for a few days. When I visited Torino a few years later, I recognized nothing in the city. I still haven’t been back to Genoa.
But I thought I’ve been able to put the experience behind me. It’s not something I ever talk about. I honestly don’t think I’d even thought about it in years. But I learned today, it still cuts pretty deep, and probably always will.

If the description above isn’t graphic enough, there’s a film at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zYW5riU81o&v3

Music

I listen to classical music so rarely that I sometimes forget how much I love it.
But an afternoon spent trying to drown out background library chatter has reminded me that certain pieces, like Satie's Gymnopedies, can transport me in a way that almost nothing else can.


When I got home this afternoon I was inspired to play my violin, for the first time in longer than I care to admit.
At times, I'm frustrated by the limits my diminished motor skills impose. I simply no longer have the kind of precise muscular control I had when I was 15. I struggle through music I mastered as a teenager, and it's hard to imagine having the drive -- or the time -- for the consistent, disciplined practice it would take to get back up to a reasonable level of proficiency.
It's still a joy, though, just to play. To draw my bow across the strings and hear the bright, clean sharpness of a perfectly-tuned E string, the murky complexity of a minor scale, or the exacting precision of a Bach Minuet.

The eucalyptus grove -- my favorite place on the UC Berkeley campus.
I wish these photos could capture the smell of sunlight hitting the leaves drying on the forest floor.

Oh, I am so bad.
Looks like I'm back to posting about how I don't ever post.
School seems to do this to me.
What can I say? By and large, I find what I'm doing in school interesting. Which is why I'm here. But it doesn't make for great narrative. As in -- I actually spent a fair chunk of my day in a very involved discussion about how to best diagram the fluid and variegated nature of the plural society that existed (according to some, but not all scholars) in the Burma Delta in the early twentieth century.
Actually though, today was a rather more interesting day than usual. I had the opportunity to have lunch with Zainah Anwar, the executive director of Sisters in Islam a feminist group based in Malaysia. Apart from offering a very interesting vision of Islam, one that manages to be both iconoclastic and devout, she was a fun person to get to hang out with for a bit. I am planning to write a profile of her for a class assignment, so more on her later.
I also had the chance to attend a screening of Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem by Masako Sakata, a visiting scholar from Japan at the J School. Her husband, an American Vietnam veteran, took ill and died, quite suddenly, at the age of 54. Masako's search for insight into the underlying causes of his death pointed increasingly to his exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Eventually, her own personal quest to survive his death led Masako to travel throughout Vietnam, meeting Vietnamese villagers who suffer from diseases they believe are caused by the dioxin in Agent Orange, and whose children suffer from horrible birth defects, even 3 generations after the war.
It was a difficult film to watch -- lots of long, lovingly shot cuts of terribly deformed children -- but very moving, especially because Masako's personal journey is so much a part of the story.
Unfortunately, the film is unlikely to get much distribution in the U.S., but keep an eye out for it.
...And now that I've cracked the guilt barrier about posting, perhaps I'll be writing more.

It never gets any easier.
A friend...can I say friend? For someone I once wanted, had, lost? Someone who did terrible harm to people I love?
And I hesitate, because it seems wrong to speak ill of the dead, but worse to speak falsely.
So, I’ll say he never had a chance. He was utterly destroyed by this world. Broken, beautiful, desperate, angry and lost.
I wish I was more surprised, and less heartbroken.
In all honesty, I never thought he’d make it to 25.
26. Suicide.
Words fail – RIP Shane Russell Martin.

walking home, bone tired, the air tastes of rosemary
this city has its own consolations

2 weeks in.

I feel a lot better about school than I did a week ago. My schedule is more or less set, about half my classes are in the Journalism school, and I have keys, computer access, a mailbox, a webpage, and even a locker there now. It’s a good thing I have so much practice at being a squeaky wheel.

There are a lot of things about grad school that still make me uncomfortable. Or, to be more precise, about academic culture, in which so much of what goes on seems to be purely self-referential.
I’ve gone on about this before, but it hasn’t stopped bothering me that there often seems to be a tendency among academics to be completely divorced from reality, to the point of being concerned more about the field than the subject.

I don’t want to think this comes down to a lack of faith in knowledge in the abstract. There is, and I think will always be, part of me that is inspired by any pursuit undertaken out of genuine passion, even if it’s not demonstrably useful. After all, it’s pretty hard to justify art in concrete terms, but I’d hate to live in a world without it. And you could definitely make a case for even the most esoteric study of literature or prehistory as rooted in a desire for insight into the human condition.

But I’m very discouraged by a lot of work and talk that seems to be motivated by one-upmanship, making a name for oneself, and the other petty vices of academic politics. The academy can seem like an airless world, where whatever spark of curiosity students start off with is more easily extinguished than ignited.

It makes me more certain I was right to kick and scream until I got more access to the journalism school. The field of journalism is definitely not innocent of back-stabbing, self-aggrandizement, intellectual laziness and a thousand other crimes great and small. But because of the very nature of the profession, the public, the wider world, is always at the forefront of journalists’ minds.
And people here, so far, do seem to be very concerned not only with trying to explore, understand and explain the world, but also with the impact their work has on society as a whole.
After a few hours discussing what someone said about someone else’s article about pre-modern history, it’s refreshing to go to a class with people who write, or intend to write, about Asia, and be forced to examine how media coverage of non-violent vs. violent protests feeds into social instability.

I’m hoping a balance between the two will keep me sane. And honest.

Q: Who assigns a thousand pages of reading in the first 2 weeks? Excuse me, 994 pages. Wouldn't want to get overdramatic here.
A: One of my history professors, who shall go unnamed. Grad school is awesome.

On the other hand, I will no longer have the pressing problem of what to do with my free time in a city where I still only know a few people.

And it's kind of nice to get back into a familiar routine, even if that routine involves spending a lot of time in the library hating life.

Grad School...

So, I start grad school on Monday. Academically, I don’t expect it to be too big a jump, since I was taking mostly graduate level courses last year. But it still feels like a huge step to be taking, and the past few days haven’t been very reassuring.
I’m in an odd position, because I’m doing a program that almost nobody else has ever done. Both the Asian Studies program and the Journalism school promote their dual degree programs, but neither seems terribly prepared for students to actually enroll in them. Asian studies doesn’t quite know what to do with me, because I’m a journalism student. On top of that, I’m doubly isolated by being a Southeast Asianist in a program that’s dominated by Chinese and Japanese studies. On a more positive note, though, it’s a very small class [4 students this year, the other 3 studying Japan], so we do all have access to a lot of personal attention, and my advisor in the program seems very supportive.
The journalism school, on the other hand, appears to have written me off completely. I won’t start taking their sequence of intensive reporting classes until next year, so apparently, I do not exist to them. Which means, for example, that I was not invited to attend the orientation session and get to know the faculty and other students. I only found out about it because I happened to stop by the school looking for some information, and noticed signs pointing the way to “New student orientation.” Which, by then, was pretty much over. Fantastic. And then I was told that I’m “not really a journalism student yet.” Which was the first I’d heard of this, and a bit of a surprise, considering that one of the major selling points of the dual degree program is that students are supposed to have full access to both departments [which in the case of the J school includes career services, a lot of really nice equipment, and other perks I’ve been eagerly looking forward to] while studying here. So, once again, I find myself having to fight with the administration of the Journalism school before even getting started. A situation, eerily, and unfortunately, reminiscent of Madison. And a great way to get started.
Do other people have to do this? I feel like my entire academic career has been marked by epic battles between me and the administration.
I’m trying to stay positive, though, and look at the school’s disorganization about dual degree programs as an opportunity to design my own course of studies the way I want it.
Provided, of course, that I don’t mind butting heads with bureaucrats at every step of the way.

Visiting the DC area has become an exercise in disorientation rather than nostalgia. Getting off at my old metro stop, there is almost nothing I can recognize. The supermarket down the block from my parents’ old house now has a Starbucks in it.
I spent most of a day walking through the city, barely able to navigate neighborhoods I lived in as a teenager, getting hungrier and hungrier because all of the places where I could think of to eat aren’t there anymore.
Virtually no one that I grew up with lives there now, and of those who do, a (to me) shockingly high percentage of them live with their parents, even if they have “grown up” jobs. The rest have basically become, to their discomfort, the shock troops of gentrification -- living in marginal neighborhoods where they can still afford the rent, finding their presence as young, mostly white, artists and activists makes those neighborhoods more attractive for development, at which point they (along with the rest of the neighborhood) can no longer afford to live there, and have to move somewhere else and start the cycle over.
There’s something a bit sad about realizing that even if I were so inclined, nothing in my near future makes it look economically feasible to settle down where I grew up. I mean, it certainly doesn’t cost more to rent in DC than in the Bay Area, but it’s not like there are interesting old fixer-uppers to buy in reasonable neighborhoods. They’ve all been torn down to build condos and McMansions.
It seems like most of my friends feel this way. That, or they’re from small towns where moving back is impossible, not because of an influx of money that has priced them out of the market, but because as manufacturing and family farms dry up, there is simply nothing to move back to.
I wonder which feels stranger?

Dancing Prisoners

Prisoners in an overcrowded cell, La Trinindad Prison, Benguet


I'm usually pretty well insulated from the latest internet sensations, but given my interest in prisons and prisoners in the Philippines, friends have seen fit to alert me to the youtube phenomenon of the dancing inmates of Cebu jail.
[For those even more clueless than I am: a thousand or so elaborately choreographed inmates dancing to an odd assortment of music from the eighties, most notably Michael Jackson's "Thriller."]
And I really can't decide what to think.
Part of me can't help but love it for being so bizarrely, quintessentially Filipino. In a country where daytime television shows open with routines by groups with names like "Viva Hot Babes" and the "Sex Bomb Dancers" and cabbies unwind after their noon to 4 am shifts by tunelessly moaning along to schmaltzy pop songs at sidewalk eateries cum videoke bars, the sight of a thousand orange jump suited inmates dancing in unison to the Village People makes a certain kind of sense that I suspect it probably wouldn't anywhere else in the world. [I miss my hyphen key]
Not to mention that the lead role in some of the ensembles is danced by a bakla [neither transvestite, transgendered or drag queen quite precisely translates, but you get the picture], in prison and surrounded by a thousand or so inmates, and no one seems to find this the least bit odd.
And then, of course, I'm always in favor of dancing, and of things that help to humanize prisoners in the eyes of the public. And just about anything is better than sitting in a cell all day.
And yet, I suspect there's some back story here that we're not getting. I did a somewhat desultory search [hey, i'm also trying to move, write, establish residency, etc.] and really couldn't figure out if participation was voluntary or compulsory, how many hours of practice people were doing a day, how people were chosen for roles, or really any details at all.
More than anything else though, I'm afraid these videos trivialize the problems of prisons in the Philippines and in the third world in general. [the larger problem of the entire concept of prison systems is too big an issue to tackle right here and now]
It's possible, and I sincerely hope, that the prison in Cebu is an exception. But when I visited prisoners in the Philippines, I was confronted with brutalized, hungry, ill inmates kept in conditions so appalling that thinking about it still shakes me up. A few excerpts from a report I wrote last summer:
The prisoners lack even basic necessities. They are not provided with soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent or other toiletries. Each cell is given food rations, which they are responsible for cooking for themselves. The rations are insufficient and sometimes arrive only every other day. Some of the prisoners report that at times they have nothing to eat but rice and salt.... Overcrowding also increases the physical hardship in the prison. The cells do not have enough beds for all of the prisoners, so some double up and the rest ... sleep on the concrete floor. The cells themselves are exposed to the elements. One wall and the ceiling are just bars facing an open corridor. Benguet province is one on the coldest parts of the Philippines, and in the winter months the temperature can be close to freezing. The prisoners are only allowed to leave their cells once a week for a 15-minute sunbath, which is cancelled if it is raining at the scheduled time. Consequently, colds, flu’s, and fevers are rampant in the prison. Medicine to treat these problems is not easily available.

You get the idea.




torture victims [since released] in La Trinidad


18 year old torture victim [since released]


this little corner was the designated "bed" of the prisoner above.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I really don't have enough information to know whether these dance routines, and the attention they've gotten, are a good thing for the specific prisoners involved in them, I suspect that it's going to make serious debate about prison reforms in the Philippines even more difficult than it already is.

I have mostly been doing things that, while important, don't make for very interesting reading.
I got a new [old] bike yesterday, I sign a lease tomorrow, and will start moving to the East Bay after that. I finally made up my mind and made plans to go out to the East Coast for about a week in August.
Otherwise, I've been trying to explore the city, get a feel for the social scene, catch up on correspondence and generally enjoy having time in which I can do such things without feeling stressed or guilty about unfulfilled obligations.
I've been reading a lot as well. On my desk right now: Andrei Makine's Dreams of my Russian Summers, and Miranda July's No one belongs here more than you, very different books, both of which I've been enjoying.
I thought about putting up a picture of my bike, but decided I'm not feeling like that much of a nerd today. Maybe some time in the next few days, I'll try to take a picture of it somewhere more interesting than the hallway.

At last...

My desk, upon completion of my article on Basilan
Now I just need a place to live...
[Because as nice as this desk is when it's not totally overrun with books and tapes and papers, it's in the wrong city]

Writer's block. A fancy word for procrastination?
I just know that I'm having to rip every single word of the article I'm working on out of me like I'm pulling a tooth.
I often wonder if everybody sometimes hates doing the things they love quite as much as I do.
I spent some time this afternoon biking around, trying to clear my head. I think it's going to be good for me to live in a place where I have easy access to open water. It always makes me feel less nuts. Even in Manila, I would go down to the bay when I felt like I couldn't handle the city any longer. It's still polluted and congested, but if you close your eyes and listen to the water against the rocks, you can almost forget




This is actually probably the most awkward shot I took of the bridge, but the only one that came out reasonably in focus. I'm excited that I'll have access to fancy professional digital slr cameras once the semester starts!

Transcribing, transcribing, transcribing

"If I look at the provisions of the antiterror law, I would not trust even the most upright government with them, much less a government which has actually a very questionable track record with respecting human rights and the civil liberties of its citizens."
Interview with Atty. Ibarra “Barry” Gutierrez, Director of the University of the Philippines Institute of Human Rights, on the new antiterror law in the Philippines. [modeled after...you guessed it...the USA PATRIOT ACT]

"At the very least, there was a certain measure of shame before....The brazenness now is really something else, and that is actually particularly alarming as far as I’m concerned. ... Before, if you raised concerns, at the very least the government would attempt, even on a very shallow surface level, to make some sort of conciliatory gestures. It would not say, ‘well, sue us,’ which is the attitude right now, by many many officials in government."
Gutierrez on impunity under the current administration

"There were human rights abuses before. Illegal arrests, torture, detention. But what is different now under Arroyo is the extent of killings of political activists. In fact, there’s an ugly joke going around that they don’t anymore have to feed them. Because during the Marcos time, and Ramos and other administrations, they would arrest an activist, or torture him at the most. But at least they were alive, they kept them in detention later to be released. But now, they’re not arresting them anymore. They just kill them."
Prof. Ronald Simbulan, UP Diliman, on the rise of human rights abuses under the Arroyo administration.

Some quotes that may not make it into anything else. Just to give an idea of what I'm doing with my time these days.
One of the lovely things about doing research in the Philippines is how generous people are with their time, once you've gone through the rigmarole of getting in touch and establishing some sort of credentials.
Even busy people with titles will sit and talk to you for hours on end.
The thing is though, you've got to transcribe it all later. And trust me, after hours of listen/stop/type/rewind/double check/repeat, dozens of pages, aching wrists and watering eyes, you start to wish for a few thirty second sound bites.

Readapatation

"My street" in Quezon City

Apparently, I am now a real Californian, having slept through my first earthquake last night. I've been horribly jetlagged, wasn't able to fall asleep until around 4 am, and the quake came through around 4:45, so I must have been completely passed out.
I've generally been feeling a bit disoriented since I got back. Somehow, the disruption to my body flying east in always much worse than flying west. I set an alarm for 11 am, and still didn't manage to get up until after 1 pm when someone called and woke me up. And I could fall asleep right now if I let myself.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and felt like a slack jawed yokel. I had a moment of slight panic faced with the selection of thirty different kinds of olive oil. I was only away for three weeks, there are big modern grocery stores in Philippine cities, and I was in the neighborhood coop here, not some fluorescent lit behemoth chain store, so it shouldn't have been such a shock, but it was. Even the best appointed grocery stores in the Philippines, while they may have a wide variety of products, do not have anywhere near the variety of brands. You can buy vegetable oil in a pouch, a small, medium or large bottle. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you can find a bottle of olive oil. But that's the extent of it.
So there I was, standing in front of an entire shelf full of olive oil, utterly at a loss. In the end, I just grabbed the smallest bottle and called it a day.
Complaining aside though, while I'll never dispute the charms of shuffling through a public market with tarp roof 3 inches shorter than me buying deliciously fresh produce off of blankets and carts, it was certainly nice to be able to push a cart around a bright clean store and pull food I've been fantasizing about for weeks off of the shelf.

Arrived in California earlier tonight.
It was actually supposed to be yesterday, but the flight was overbooked, they were offering a free roundtrip ticket between San Francisco and Manila to anyone who could fy out the next day, and I had an extra day on my visa, so...
Looks like I'm going back next summer, maybe even for some vacation time.
I'm a bit too jetlagged to write much more, and using a borrowed computer in someone else's room, so I'll write more later.

Photos from Zamboanga

Blogging as work avoidance.
In any case, here are some photos in the thirty minutes I was able to spend as a tourist in Zamboanga city. Not the best composed, but I was conspicuous enough without waving a camera around all over the place.

Fort Pilar

Rio Hondo Mosque

The very tip of the Zamboanga Peninsula

Near the Zamboanga City port. If this photo were a bit higher resolution, you could see Basilan in the background. It's the second island away.

Homesick. For any home.

I have just 4 days left in the Philippines now. And I have to say, I’m ready for this trip to be over. At the moment, it’s not even so much that I feel like I want to be out of the Philippines, as that I’m totally sick of not having my own space. I haven’t slept in a bed that I could call my own since May. No matter how genial the hosts, it’s always exhausting being a houseguest. And the few nights I’ve spent in hotels haven’t been much better, especially since going out to eat alone is a particularly excruciating experience here. I just want to cook my own food, eat as much or as little as I feel like, go home or go out when I please, shower or wash clothes without asking permission, sleep late or be antisocial and sit in a room with a closed door without feeling the need to justify myself, and the thousand other small comforts of home. I’m not terribly particular about the material conditions I’m living in (though I will confess to a rather embarrassingly first world loathing for Philippine plumbing] but my need to feel like an autonomous person is really strong. Add to that the fact that I can’t go anywhere, anytime, without being under constant scrutiny from the staring throngs, and yeah, San Francisco sounds pretty good.
I’m so, so glad that I sublet a room for July, even though I’ll have been away for more than half of the month, because the thought of another couple of weeks of being a guest makes me want to cry...

Safe and Sound

I imagine the news about what happened in Basilan over the past few days [attacks by rebel groups on the Philippine marines that left at least 14 dead, including at least 9 beheaded] may be trickling in to the Western media.
In case my last post wasn't clear enough, I'm back in Manila, and fine. I did not, in fact, even know about what happened until today. Which is actually pretty bizarre. I was at the Philippine military base yesterday, speaking with a public affairs officer from the US Joint Task Force, including a fair amount of discussion about Basilan, and didn't know what had happened until it came out in the press.
I still don't really understand. I can only assume that the person I was talking to was also unaware at the time, because he said a few things that, in retrospect, look pretty foolish. i.e.:

"And this is where a big part of our involvement with the AFP [Armed Forces of the Philippines], and our work with the AFP really began was in Basilan where they had significant successes against the Abu Sayyaf and JI [Jemaah Islamiyah] to the point where the US no longer maintains any sort of presence there. They have for most practical purposes...I won’t say that they have eliminated the threat, but they have certainly taken great strides to counter the threat in Basilan."

So, yeah. I didn't watch the news last night, but usually the grapevine is all you need here, and I was out and about until after 8 last night. Didn't here a murmur. I'm still trying to figure that one out. Basilan is just a few miles from where I was, visible over the water.
But in any case, just wanted to reassure that any pondering I'm doing is being done from a nice long distance.

On a much lighter note, my computer is, as usual having some difficulties with the weather, and thus I've lost the use of certain keys. Most irritatingly the zero, the hyphen and the close parenthesis. Thereby depriving me of some of my favorite punctuation.

Photos

Back in Manila. Exhuasted. But happy to be back.


Samal Island, near Davao City, Mindanao

The pictures below are from the 7th anniversary celebration of Davao food not bombs

Mindanaoan Dance
Fire Dancer
Art session for street kids

Would you believe there's a coffeeshop with wifi here? A good place to kill time during the endless waits to get anything done. I've generally found Zamboanga to be frustrating. As everywhere in the Philippines, doing anything requires going through an excrutiating mix of formal and informal procedures. For example, to speak to the US military, I first had to get clearance from the Philippine Military. Of course, theoretically, one could just send a fax ahead of time. But in order for the fax to get read, I had to have someone here to put in a word. So I couldn't even do that until yesterday. This morning, I found out that I have been given permission by the Filipinos. But still no actual contact. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow morning, because I already have appointments set in Manila tomorrow afternoon. Now it looks like I may have to delay leaving here if I want to get a chance to talk with people. Which means choosing between letting this whole trip to Zamboanga be basically a complete waste of very limited time, or breaking other appointments that were not so easy to make either.
Not to mention the fact that I really, really want to leave Zamboanga. It's hard to get around much by myself, and the communication barrier here is pretty high. Unless people are well eduated, they don't even speak Tagalog here. Mostly Chabacano, which is a mix of broken Spanish and Malay, which I can somewhat understand, but can't speak.
Okay, just now finally heard from the Military people. So I'm going to end this here.

Sorry for the communication gap. It's not as easy to stay in touch in Mindanao as it is in Manila.I'm in Zamboanga now, after 5 days in Davao. Everything's been going well so far. I had to wake up kind of distressingly early for my flight, but I'm still mostly functional, was able to pull off an interview with the chief of staff of the local congresswoman. It would have been the congresswoman herself, but she was called away for a meeting with the President. People and their priorities, no?Davao is also a pretty fascinating city. It's basically under a kept under an elightened reign of terror by the Mayor and his death squads. So, it's very safe, very clean, the mayor is open to dialogue or rallies on issues related to the environment or globalization, but one step over the line, and you're likely to end up with a bullet in your head. Especially for drug use, theft, other common crimes -- or criticism of the Mayor,Which most people, naturally are afraid to do. There has been almost no one willing to speak out against him -- one radio host did, survived having his station bombed and his house ambushed, only to die when his long-time card playing buddy was paid to stab him. All rumors of course, because the local press isn't suicidal enough to report on it. (Although the mayor is broadcast every Sunday reading his list of people he's giving a last chance to turn themselves in for rehabilitation, or, basically, be get shot) But everybody knows whats going on, and several people I talked to had witnessed people getting shot or stabbed by the death squads. The going rate, apparently, is a bit less than $100 a head for an assassination, conducted mostly by Rebel returnees or common criminals cut a deal to escape summary execution themselves.
I can write this here, because I know that it's basically just family and friends that read this, but to go into more detail in a more public forum would be a decision never to return to Davao. And I can't document anything, and couldn't without a long time to do slow, deep, careful investigative work.
On the lighter side, I stayed out of trouble, and thus managed to actually have a good time in Davao. It's much less chaotic than Manila -- fewer people over a larger area. Mindanao is one of the few islands in the Philippines that's not highly overpopulated. And has some of the cleanest municipal tap water, which is a nice change. When you get thirsty downtown, instead of having to get bottled, you buy a plastic bag full of water for a peso, rip it open with your teeth, and try to drink it before it spills all over your shirt. I've learned all kinds of new things to do with plastic bags. Eat rice and soup for example. Or, rice and noodles, since you must eat rice with everything here, even if you have another starch.
I was in town for the 7th anniversary of Davao City Food not Bombs, so got to help out with a mass feeding and an art session for street kids. I have a lot of photos, but will probably have to wait until I get back to Manila to post them, as it would take hours with this connection.
Zamboanga City, so far, does not seem as fearsome as its reputation. Part of the problem, I think, is that Zamboanga City is actually quite a bit safer than the surrounding areas, so the media always report from here. Thus, any reports on incidents in Basilan, Maguindanao, Sulu, will be filed with a Zamboanga dateline -- ironically, because it's relatively calm rather than because it's a hotspot of insurgency. In any case, I have hosts here from a local NGO, so nobody's letting me wander off alone into any stupid situations. Now I'm just trying to figure out how to get the US military here to talk to me...

Perhaps...I would be more motivated to post if I was getting a bit more email. Lots of excitement today, but I'm going to make you work for it.

I'm in between appointments right now, was wandering around Quezon City and found a bizarre little internet cafe to kill time in. It's tucked away somewhat improbably on a residential street, and seems to cater primarily to children under 10. Perhaps it's just a function of the time of day. In any case, the internet connection, though slow, is functional, and they're letting me charge up my recorder.
I've been running around pretty much non-stop since I've been here. Two appointments a day may not sound like so much, but trying to get anywhere in Manila is always a bit of an enterprise, so it gets exhuasting quickly.
It's also hard to keep my factions straight. You'd think that the left in this country has enough external problems that infighting would seem like a bad idea, but it seems to be an endlessly popular local passtime. I'm trying to remain as willfully ignorant as possible, but it complicates things. For example, I had an interview with a representative from one organization this morning. It went very well -- he was very friendly and articulate, sat and talked with me for almost an hour and offered to help get me in touch with other people. And yet, when I was leaving, I had to be vague about where I was headed, because I'm going to go talk to another group -- which to me seems very similar in political orientation -- that I do happen to know falls on the other side of a factional split.
To an extent, it's possible to stay out of it as a foreigner, but I do know that it could catch up with me that I've essentially been making contacts through two different networks. Ach, well.
On another front, I finally went to the dentist yesterday. The good news: no cavities. Even the weird hole in my back molar that I was trying vainly to convince myself was just a chipped tooth was, in fact, just a chipped tooth. The bad news: I'm looking at some wisdom tooth extraction in my near future. Again: Ach, well.
I'm in an environment where it's entirely impossible to think. The kids are kicking off. Not to mention reading over my shoulder, staring, etc. So, I think I'm going to give up on this post, try again another time.

Manila

So, this is my mass email style post to let everyone know that I arrived safely in Manila, after a long, hungry, uneventful flight.
(Side notes: Percentage of flights I have requested vegetarian meal for: 100%. Percentage of flights on which I have actually gotten said meal: 0%. On the plus side, they took one look at me towering over everyone else at the check in counter & offered me an exit row seat for extra legroom, which meant that I was actually able to stretch out my legs and get a bit of sleep)
It's crazy to be back here. I'm sleeping in the same room I was in last summer, so everything's simultaneously familiar and alien in my jet-lagged, half-asleep state.
It was funny even getting on the plane in San Francisco. I didn't even have to check where the Philippine Airlines counter was, just followed the hordes of people pushing luggage carts overflowing with Balikbayan boxes. Never fails to amuse me that flights to the Philippines have a higher baggage allowance than to pretty much anywhere else in the world. The airline industry has thrown up its collective hands in defeat.
My flight arrived early (despite PAL inc's reputation as P-lane A-lways L-ate, i-f n-ot c-ancelled) but the ridiculous lines to get through customs more than made up for it. Decided I was too tired to haggle, and took an official airport taxi, paying a premium for an easy life. You get thrown back into the city pretty much immediately upon leaving the airport. Slums, throngs, traffic. The route up to my friend's crosses almost the whole city via EDSA, so I went past little shacks built over the water, the looming, oversized billboards of Makati, the string of military camps in Quezon City, Tagalog coming back to me in fits and starts.
Lots of signs forbidding pissing and throwing rubbish. Lots of rubbish and piss.
And the air. It's hard to describe. Not so much the heat or the humidity, but the absolute filth of it. It just sort of hangs, drapes itself over you like a dirty wet blanket. The rains are late this year.
Does it sound like I hate Manila? Because I don't. I'm not really sure what I'm doing here. I feel like a fraud, an imposter. I would've rather had a few more weeks to recover from being sick, plan out my stay. But I'm here, and a part of me will always love this city, both in spite of and for all of its imperfections.

p.s. I have a cell number now. email for it.

Torpor

I've been approaching my last days in Madison with an air that can only be described as "torpor."
Moving -- especially given my lack of access to a vehicle and ludicrous reluctance to ask anyone for help even though I know they wouldn't mind -- seems to be sucking out what little motivation I have.
Half the time I'm sitting in my apartment asking myself questions like "Will x/y be upset if he/she finds out I've thrown this away?" or "Why do I have so many books? Am I really going to read this ever again or is it just a trophy book? How did I let this happen?" The rest, I've been going out with friends for ambitious ventures like napping on the capitol grounds.
It seems I run at two speeds -- idle and overdrive -- and have a hard time managing anything in between.

In the spirit of trying to post more regularly even though I don't have exciting things to talk about every day:

Noticed the following on the flyleaf of a library book ("Small Island" by Andrea Levy -- not great but not bad):

"....in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life."

Unremarkable, you might think (and believe me, you're glad I cut out the treacle that preceded that). And it would be, except that the book has nothing to do with the American experience. The story is about Jamaican immigrants in post-war London. As in: London, England. There is virtually no mention of America, except for a few brief anecdotes about a Jamaican serviceman's experiences of America and Americans as torn by even more brutal, overt racism than Britain and the British.
So why do the publishers feel the need to do this? Do they have so little respect for American readers of literary fiction as to assume the book won't sell if it isn't labeled as an American story? (I assume the blurb was different in the British editions.) Did they just fail to actually read the book before trying to market it?
I'm expecting some guidance from my readers in the publishing industry...

War on Terror, Reign of Terror

So, the reason I haven't been doing this lately, apart from the usual reasons, is that blogger now requires you to sign up for an account with Google to sign in. I finally did it, just now, and it took about ten seconds, but that proved to be enough of a barrier to keep me away for a few months.
I'm feeling a bit more motivated to try and start posting again, because I'll be finished with school in a week, and, I hope, having a bit more going on, at least for the summer. I'll be heading out to the East Coast for the first few weeks of June, making a brief pit-stop back in Madison, mailing myself and all my belongings out to San Francisco, and then jetting off to the Philippines.
Among other things, I'm hoping to work on a few articles about how U.S. policy on the "War on Terror" is affecting the Philippines. I've spent the past year doing research on the resurgence of human rights abuses under President Arroyo (several human rights groups have said that 2006 was the worst year since the fall of Marcos...and 2007 isn't looking a whole lot better). One of the themes that I keep running into is how the War on Terror facilitates this trend, in a number of ways. It's largely forgotten, but in the early days of the War on Terror, the Southern Philippines, home to alleged Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf, was considered one of the prime targets of anti-terror efforts. Throughout, Arroyo has been one of the U.S.'s staunchest allies (despite pulling out of Iraq), ensuring that the Bush administration will block any attempts, within the U.S. or the U.N. to sanction Arroyo for her human right's record. Furthermore, the New People's Army (communist guerillas that have been running an unsuccessful insurgency, concentrated in the North, especially Luzon, since 1969), has been officially listed as a terrorist organization. Essentially, what this has meant is that the United States gives Arroyo unstinting support (politically and financially) to fight terrorism, which Arroyo has been taking advantage of to crack down on the left (legal/reformist and revolutionary) in Central Luzon.
My apologies for all the parentheses.
In any case, it's an interesting (to me at least) aspect of the War on Terror -- the corrosive effects on all countries involved in it. There are also some pretty interesting parallels to the support the United States (even under Jimmy "the Carter Doctrine" Carter) gave to the Marcos regime during the Cold War.
I'm not planning to go to Basilan and get beheaded, but I am hoping to use contacts in the safe areas of Mindanao to get a local perspective on how the conflict is playing out in the South, and also to spend a week or two in Manila and Central Luzon to research the legislative aspects (there's a new anti-terrorism bill) and the social costs of the Philippines' involvement.
Once I get back from the Philippines, I'll have a few weeks to decompress and find a place to live before I start school in Berkeley at the end of August. Perhaps, somewhere in there, I'll take a lesson on how to have a vacation.
I'm excited though.
All I need to do is figure out how to get through two major paper revisions and a ruin-my-weekend 16-page take-home final by the end of next week, and everything'll be great.

The sky was so beautiful this evening that I almost fell flat on my face looking up at it. There was a crazy storm last night -- thunder, lightening and hail -- and it seems to have driven all the dirt and humidity out of the air. The horizon was an absolutely luminous cerulean, fading up to the softest blue-black overhead. The moon was a perfect, delicate crescent, balanced by one bright star, and the clouds on the horizon were a shade of indigo just lighter than the sky above.

I feel like a write about the weather a lot, but it really does dominate my life and my moods, especially here in the extreme Midwest, where it is such a huge, overwhelming force to be reckoned with. It’s too early to hope the weather will stay warm, but I don’t think it will get bitterly cold again, and I feel like a burden has been lifted off of me.

It’s very, very nice to be able to think that this was the last midwestern winter I’ll have to endure – if not forever, at least for a long, long time.

I’ve been pretty stressed out the last few weeks, but all of a sudden, walking outside this evening, I found myself sliding into a warm ooze of calm and well-being. Beyond just the weather, I have finally completed or subdued a couple of projects that were dragging me down. I don’t exactly get a reprieve from schoolwork, but at least for the next few days it’s back down to a level where I can eat, sleep and enjoy myself without feeling like I’ll have to pay for it later. It helps, too, to know for sure that I’ve gotten into grad school, and that all the work and stress has paid off.

I found myself walking down the street, talking a friends ear off, flicking out my fingers and holding out my arms to release energy in a way that I associate with another self, in other, freer, times and places. Realizing that I’d been practically sleepwalking for the last month.

I’m sure it won’t last. It will get cold, gray and rainy again. I have two term papers, a magazine article and a complete revision of my thesis due in the next month and a half. But it’s nice to remember, just for a day or two, that there’s more to life.

Contrition

(me, before the most recent blizzard completely broke my spirit)

Nothing to say. More snow. This is the hardest time of year, when the back of winter has been broken, but it just keeps dragging itself, slowly, along, smearing its mess all over the place.
I was trapped home, alone, most of the weekend by a blizzard that threw itself against my windows, howling like a wounded animal.
I realized Sunday night that I hadn't had any significant face-to-face interactions with another human being in over 36 hours. Not good, so I made more of an effort today, actually sending a text message that included the phrase "desperate for human contact."
To make up for having nothing to report, below is a piece of writing I've been working on for my creative non-fiction class, a brief visit to another time and place:


Flying east from Manila, I lose a night, and arrive the same time I left.
This morning, which was also tomorrow morning, I pulled the gate behind me and stepped into the humid darkness. On an ordinary day, I would be greeted by a chorus of squatter children, bright eyed but toothless like old women. “Hello, Hello, Isabel-po! Where are you going today? What are you doing? When are you coming home?”
Instead, hours before dawn, I find the city eerily still, its chaos muted in the brief pause after nightlife ends and before the markets open. Eyes still sticky with sleep, I marvel at the silence as I brace myself for the long taxi ride to the airport.
Traffic enforcement was abandoned years ago, and EDSA, this vast highway slashed through the heart of the city, is innocent of stoplights, crosswalks or left turn lanes. By dawn, cars, trucks, busses and jeepneys will careen through like pinballs in a chute, horns blaring, yielding to no one; but in the stillness of 4 a.m., traffic flows smoothly, and I can hear the gentle rush of rainwater sluicing beneath the wheels as we pass through Cubao, Mandaluyong, Makati and Pasay.
The airport is harsh, bright and noisy. I submit to a cursory body search and take my place in line, cross-eyed, bent double, bags on my back and around my neck, dragging a cardboard box tied with string. I arrived three months ago with perfectly respectable luggage, and wound up dragging home a used water-filter box full of coffee mugs, unspeakably hideous t-shirts, a handmade cell phone cradle cleverly shaped as a rocking chair -- useless tokens of affection I was powerless to refuse or dispose of.
Approaching the gate, the guards check my bag one last time. No water, toothpaste or fingernail scissors – just tape recordings, reams of paper wrapped for me with infinite care, and photographs of thin faces, tattooed with suffering and unbearably young, looking straight into the camera from behind bars.
This country tears my heart out. The great, green, cloud-wrapped mountains of the north and the shantytowns of Manila, mazes of shacks over brackish water. People, children, staggering under the weight of hope or despair. The rain and the sea and the small boats on open water, held together with zip-ties and bright blue paint.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said again and again. An easy thing to say when I have a government grant and a return ticket to a country where drinking tap water doesn’t feel like Russian roulette and I will probably never have to worry about being swept out to sea through an open manhole. I can’t help feeling like I’m abandoning a sinking ship, waving politely as I unfurl my own private lifeboat.
My last impression of the Philippines is the same as my first – the damp, vegetal air seeping into the gangway, so thick I can feel it on my teeth and my hair.
On the airplane, it’s already a new world, cool and quiet and clean. We cross the international dateline, chasing the pink of dusk, long cloud shadows on the sea as we head into darkness, hurtling towards yesterday morning.

Makes the heart grow fonder

I'm really trying to avoid starting every post with an excuse about why I don't post more often, but don't seem to be making a very good job of it. I always sort of assume that nobody actually reads this anyways, until I get a surprise complaint about how I haven't written anything in weeks. It's strange, like when people tell me they've heard me on the radio (an even more public activity that I usually treat like a private exercise).
In any case, I'm fully back in school mode, to the point where it's hard to imagine ever being out of it. I have a pretty light schedule in terms of actually having to show up for class (Tuesdays & Thursdays, plus one discussion section Wednesday), but that's balanced by taking two seminars that each require 300+ pages of reading a week. By the end of the semester, my eyes will either be buff, finely honed machines or weeping holes.
It's not even February yet, and I'm already sick to death of snow. It's hard not to view it as just a hassle, making the roads slippery, getting in my eyes. On the way home today, though, I slowed down and took the time to watch how softly the flakes settle down out of the sky, to recapture a little bit of the wonder snow awoke as a kid, in a place where it was rare enough that housewives got into scuffles over milk at the threat of a few inches.
I have such mixed feelings about the Midwest. Most of the time I feel smothered here, uncomfortable, like my edges are too sharp to be able to fit in. It was immensely reassuring to visit the East Coast and feel at home again, like maybe my problems are geographical rather than temperamental.
At the same time, though, I've gotten incredibly attached to the physical feel of this region, especially in winter. The flat, wide expanses and great gnarled oaks. Frozen lakes, dun fields, lurid pink sunsets and the moiré of snow blowing on pavement.
I miss mountains, sometimes, and the ocean so badly it hurts, but I have come to love the simple, generous, open space in this part of the world.
It's easy, though, to feel affection for a place I know I'll be leaving in just a few months. The expectation of absence, evidently, makes the heart grow fonder.
Which should not, in any way, be construed to mean that I'm not absolutely dying to get the hell out of this place.

This page was getting a bit text heavy, so here's a recent self-portrait of me not working on grad school applications...
I actually wrote a very long post last week, only to have it disappear when my computer crashed (a problem which has become increasingly frequent and disturbing).
In any case, there’s not a great deal new in my life. Being on “break” basically means doing the same things I do during the semester, but at a lower intensity. I still have to work on grad school applications and my thesis, but in between I get to do a bit more sleeping, eating, socializing, and reading (just finished “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” about an epileptic Hmong girl and her family’s misadventures with Western Medicine – highly recommended) and watching movies (the lowest descent being “Legally Blond 2” the bizarre animal rights film of the decade and highly NOT recommended, though probably less brain damaging then a night of heavy drinking).
I’ve also recently gotten the news that all 9 of the prisoners I visited in the Philippines have been released without charges. I was very worried about their physical and mental health in prison, so it’s fantastic news, though slightly marred by the fact that they lost 10 months for a crime it was stunningly obvious they had nothing to do with, and will never receive any restitution for the jail time or the physical and psychological torture they received at the hands of the police and military.
On a totally selfish note, it means that a rather large commitment I made to translate interviews from Tagalog no longer needs to be fulfilled -- or at least not with any urgency -- so I have more time for loafing over my break.
I’m also preparing for a much needed escape from the Midwest, a trip to New York and DC that begins next week. I’m sure that Madison will be a fantastic place to come back and visit, but living here is driving me nuts and I’m champing at the bit to get away for good.
Incidentally, for those that read my previous post, I finally got a new bag. It’s less chic than the old one, but I can carry my belongings with confidence, and I’m sure that in time I’ll become irrationally attached to this one as well.

I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel...

Or is that an oncoming train?

Aquino slasher movies, and other effects of higher education

I had the most bizarre and disturbing dream last night – Corazon Aquino (post-People Power Philippine President) was forced to fight off a group of ninja assassins, cutting them up with a kris and eventually triumphing, in full slasher-movie style.

I think this probably means I’m working too hard. School anxiety dreams are nothing new, but when my research subjects start popping up in my nightmares, I think it’s gone to a whole new level.

I don’t feel like I’ve got much of a choice about it at the moment. I got through the GRE’s and the first round of grad school applications this week. I feel like I should be able to relax, rest on my laurels a bit.

Instead, I have to finish a draft of my entire thesis (about 20 pages to go), write 2 big articles for journalism, a 13 page ethics paper, and another SEAsian studies research paper, all in the next two and a half weeks.

I’ve got this bag I really like. It’s a fancy, vinyl pseudo-messenger bag. Big enough to fit my computer and books, and distributes weight well, so it rides on the small of my back when I’m biking. But its been falling apart for the past few months; the strap is ripping through from carrying to much weight for too long, and because of the material, there’s not really anything I can do to fix it. Thing is though, it still does exactly what I need it to do, so I keep on using it (though I’ll admit that I avoid carrying my computer in it). It works as well as it ever did -- better than any other bags I have -- but there’s no ignoring that one of these days it’s going to break. It’s completely inevitable. The accident will stop waiting to happen, and it’ll go, spilling its contents into the street.

In any case, the point of this is that I was walking down the street yesterday, bowed under a load of books, and I got to thinking about what a good metaphor for my brain this bag is. I’m still completely functional, but there’s no question that I’ve been pushing myself way too hard for way too long, and you don’t have to look to hard to find the places where the strain is starting to show. It’s only a matter of time.

I’m just hoping (like I’m hoping with my bag) that it’ll get me through the next couple of weeks, at which point it can snap at will, and I’ll have enough time to put the pieces back toghether before I start over.

Not terribly profound, mostly just kind of pathetic. But true.

Restorative Justice

I don't have time to write, largely because I'm so busy writing all the time. So, I thought I'd resolve the dilemma by posting some of the writing I've been doing. This isn't the greatest piece of writing I've ever done, but for something written on a tight deadline, I'm pretty pleased with it, and it's kind of a nice change to explore solutions instead of problems.

p.s. - any suggestions for headlines?


The .22 caliber bullet that pierced her skull took a lot of things away from Jackie Millar. Shot in the back of the head and left for dead by teenaged car thieves in November 1995, Millar will never recover full use of her body. She’ll never be able to go back to the job she loved, or take any more of the photographs of forests and mountains that decorate her apartment. She can’t walk in high-heeled shoes, or see clearly as her sons Chad and Derek mark their passage to adulthood.

“I should be dead,” she said. “I am legally blind. I am paralyzed on the right side of me. I. talk. slow. My long- and short-term memory is hit-and-miss. All because they wanted my car.”

But Jackie didn’t lose her ability to forgive, and to love. She keeps framed photographs of Craig and Josh -- the teenagers who laid her on the floor and calmly discussed which of them was going to shoot her -- to show to visitors. “I love Craig and Josh,” she said.

“They tried to eliminate me,” she said, and she’ll never forget it. But, “I wanted to get my life back, and I knew that forgiveness was something I’d have to do.”

Working with mediator Bruce Kittle, the former director of the Restorative Justice Project at the UW-Madison Law School, Millar began to communicate with the boys who shot her. “I love restorative justice. It played an important part in the healing process for me,” said Millar. “It is a chance for the perpetrators and the victim to meet side by side, for the perpetrators to ask for forgiveness and for the victim to get to forgive them.”

Millar has visited both of the boys who shot her, and writes them regularly. This process has been instrumental in giving her closure and in forcing her shooters to take responsibility for the damage they’ve done to her and her loved ones. “Craig and Josh won’t forget me. Craig said it best. He said it doesn’t matter if he’s in prison or not, it will plague him until the day he dies.”

The practice of victim-offender dialogues draws on Maori and Native American traditions that focus on bringing victims, perpetrators and their communities together to find ways to repair the harm caused by crime, instead of emphasizing punishment or revenge. According to the web site of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation at the Prison Fellowship Institute, the concept spread from these traditional practices to social service and police agencies. At present, the group’s Web site estimates about 300 programs in the United States operate on these principles.

UW-Madison’s program, the Restorative Justice Project, started in the late 1980’s, when law students and professors searched files at minimum-security prisons for cases where victims and offenders might want to meet, said program director Peter DeWind in a telephone interview. Today, DeWind said, the project works on about 10 cases a year, accepting only victim-initiated requests – partly because they already receive more from requests from victims than they can handle, and partly because he fears pursuing offender-initiated cases risks re-victimizing crime survivors.

The program now works primarily on cases involving severe violence, including homicide. “These cases are often the most valuable, because there’s such emotional trauma and damage to people that there’s often no other way to really relieve,” said DeWind. Giving crime victims a chance to express their emotions --whether anger or forgiveness -- “often eases a lot of those negative emotional effects”

Because most of the offenders remain in prison, it is difficult to gauge the program’s success by traditional markers like recidivism, said DeWind. But, he said, “I just treat it as successful if people are glad that they met.” Follow-up interviews, he said show “virtually without exception, that’s been the case.”

Shelley Justiliano, a victim services program specialist for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections said the DOC fully supports the work of the Restorative Justice Project, adding that victim-offender dialogues are “just one tiny aspect” of the restorative justice model the department embraces.

“Lots of things are restorative that we’ve doing forever, like paying restitution,” Justiliano said in a telephone interview. The Department of Corrections also offers victim impact classes, where prisoners spend as many as 16 weeks examining the effect of crime on society – looking at everything from insurance fraud to homicide and sexual assault. Prisoners listen to victims who come in to speak about their experiences, and go through exercises like calculating the cost of their stay in prison or writing their own obituaries as though they were homicide victims. In some prisons, she said, inmates have donated crafts to be sold to benefit victim services programs. The state also tries to give victims the options for input, allowing them to write victim-impact statements for the trial or to appear at parole hearings.

“It’s not a class or a specific program, it’s a way of looking at crime,” Justiliano said. “The model is a triangle, an equal sided triangle. The three sides are occupied by the offender, the victim and the community, and the restorative justice model alludes to the fact that they’re all affected equally.”

Restorative justice is “a lot more meaningful than just fining people or putting people in jail,” said Merry Kay Shernock, a probation officer from Northfield, Vermont who has collaborated with programs in her district since 1997. In a telephone interview, Shernock emphasized the practical value of restorative programs. “Punishment is expensive. If you want to incarcerate people to punish them you have to feed them, you have to give them a place to live. Restorative justice actually makes money, creates value, especially when the offender gives community service.”

The townships Shernock works in offer a number of restorative programs aimed at facilitating offenders’ re-entry into society and finding ways for them to make amends for the harm that they’ve done. The most common, she said, are reparative boards -- citizen volunteers who meet with offenders to draw up contracts for how the offenders can repay the damages they’ve caused to their communities.

“It’s a really ancient idea -- You make a mess, you fix it, you clean it up,” said Shernock. “If you got drunk and drove over Mrs. Johnson’s petunias, the right thing to do is go over and replant them.”

The contracts, which are decided by consensus between the board and the offender, seek to include the needs of as much of the community as possible. In one case, Shernock recalled, “A man got terribly drunk and plowed into a pedestrian bridge and destroyed it.” Before the accident, elderly people stood on the bridge to throw crumbs to ducks, and one consequence of the accident was that the ducks went hungry. As a result, said Shernock, “Part of his contract was that he had to feed the ducks until the bridge was rebuilt.” After all, she said, “One of the biggest impacts of his offense was on those poor ducks.”

In the end, added Shernock, the ducks got fed, and the offender later told her that having to get up in the cold every morning “really made him think about things.”

And that, she said, is the best she can hope for. “We don’t ask, ‘Does this reduce the crime rate?’ The question we ask is ‘Was the victim compensated, were amends made to the victim?’ That’s what we care about -- that wrongs were righted, to the extent possible.”

The restorative justice model can also help societies recover from human rights abuses or mediate international conflict, said Kyle Leighton of the Restorative Justice Initiative at Marquette University. Bodies like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where offenders publicly took responsibility for crimes committed under the apartheid system and victims were given an opportunity to tell their stories, move beyond a dialogue between offenders and the state, he said. “I think it can be really healing for a society, for all aspects of a community, to take part in that conversation.”

In honor of restorative justice week, which begins Nov. 12, Marquette University will host a sold-out international conference on the 13th, titled “Healing after Political Violence,” bringing together people from around the world to share their experiences with restorative processes. Separate events, with the theme of ‘creative partnerships, collaborative action,” will be held throughout the week at prisons across the state.

Just one damn thing after another

Finally catching up on email after being away for the weekend and finishing up a chapter of my paper, I found myself reading through news briefs ... Indymedia reporter shot dead in Oaxaca ... thinking "shit, that's awful" and then "wait, Brad Will...is that..." yeah. it was. Brad from New York, the lunatic who stayed inside his Lower East Side squat and tried to face down a wrecking ball. Brad who I used to sleep next to in Seattle. Just one more person I let slip away over the years. I never even knew his real name till I read about him lying on the sidewalk with a bullet in his chest.
I wish I could say that it just inspires me, makes me more determined to keep walking the path I'm on, keep telling the truth about the bastards, but it doesn't. It just makes feel sad, and tired, and old. Wishing that, just once, I could get through this time of year without having to deal with the horrible death of someone I care about.
I've been thinking though, about this conversation we had the first time I met Brad, in Minneapolis in 1999, talking about planting flowers at squats, sowing seeds you'll never see bloom, just because it's a good thing to do, putting a little more beauty in this world.
So I'm just going to try and think about that for a while.
More about Brad: http://www.narconews.com/Issue43/article2223.html
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/bradleywill/archive.html

The Ivory Tower

Note: I wrote this a couple of days ago, but coulnd't get it to post until now. See, even why I try to do this more often, I fail.

The combination of dealing with grad school applications and attending a Southeast Asian Studies conference this weekend has me thinking a lot about academia in general. Specifically, the way in which some people seem to educate themselves into irrelevance.
I mean, I'd like to think I'm pretty well read, and I've basically completed the requirements for a degree in Southeast Asian studies, but there were a couple of papers presented that left me scratching my head, wondering a) what the hell they were on about and b) why I, or anyone else, should give a shit. Papers where people descended so deep into theory that any connection to reality seemed at best tangential, that seem like they could only possibly be of interest to other academics.

(I'm not condemning the conference as a whole, there were a few really good panels, where people seemed to be making a sincere effort to use their knowledge about a subject to contextualize current or past events -- particularly coups in Thailand -- in a meaningful way, and seemed to want to contribute to a larger public dialogue.)

I've generally been questioning the purpose of higher education, especially since deciding to stay in academia for at least a couple more years.
I'd like to think of it as a way to better prepare myself to be of some use to society -- partly because, as a student at a public university and the recipient of thousands of dollars of grant money, my education is heavily subsidized by society, which seems to me to create an obligation to give something back. More broadly though, I guess I can't imagine feeling satisfied with myself or my work if I wasn't doing something at least slightly useful to other people. Granted, probably nothing I ever do will have as much tangible value as a paramedic or a garbage collector, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.
On the other hand, there's a part of me that feels like anything that people do with their lives that's done out of genuine passion makes a positive contribution to society as a whole, if only because it means there are fewer bitter people roaming the streets. I mean, practicalities aside, I'd rather live in a world full of people who feel intellectually fulfilled by publishing arcane articles in obscure journals than in a world full of people who hate whatever it is they spend the majority of their conscious life doing. At the same time though, considering how few people really have the opportunity to spend decades in school, to do nothing more with it than sit in a small room and talk to people who are just like you seems like, to put it mildly, a bit of a waste...

I’ve been quite slack about posting lately, mostly because I’m not really sure what to say. I’ve just been busy with school, work and the radio station. It’s all interesting to me, but not the kind of interesting that makes me feel compelled to write about it.
The satisfactions are small, but not to be discounted – encountering a new idea in an article, finding a perfect quotation to support a theory, moments of competence at work. I’m still working out how best to balance work, school and loafing.
Fortunately, I have no social life to worry about, at least not here in Madison. It’s funny....I do vaguely recall having had social skills at some point in my life, and still have the old friends to prove it, but I seem to have checked them at the Wisconsin border. Some of it’s just being busy, and consequently lazy about socializing. Even when I have the chance to go out with people, I usually would rather just go home, be by myself and rest. And then, I wonder why I haven’t made any close friends here...
There is definitely something about Madison though...I’ve been here nearly two years now, but have fewer friends than I did after a month in Manila (where I was equally busy), or really pretty much anywhere else I’ve ever spent more than a week. I suppose it’s because I didn’t come to Madison because of any interest in the people here.
In any case, my (non-superficial) contacts with other humans have been boiled down to communication with people who I already have close enough relationships with to communicate with long distance or travel hours to visit, and who tolerate me no matter how strange, intense, spastic or withdrawn I become. So, I’m afraid, I’ll only get worse until I finish school, and, with luck, go somewhere very, very far from here.
In the meantime, look for me at the library. But don’t expect to find me, especially now that I’m working there and have keys to even more isolated and far away rooms than ever.

Summer is over. It will almost certainly get warm again, but the back of summer has been broken. Two days in a row now I've found myself regretting not putting on gloves before leaving the house.
It's odd to have moved so quickly from the stifling stickiness of the tropics into flannel sheet and hot drinks season. ... I was going to say at least the rain is the same, before realizing how patently false that is. This cold, endless drizzle is absolutely unlike the temperamental bursts of monsoon fury.
In many ways, it's wonderful to be back here, to a place where drinking out of the tap doesn't feel like Russian roulette, where I can walk down the street without feeling like a space alien or worrying about falling in open sewers or having my heart broken (or, for that matter, my pockets picked) by street-children. At the same time, especially in the Midwestern blandness of Madison, I find myself missing the energy, the almost indescribable chaos of Manila.
Being home though -- there's no bitter in that sweet. Not "home" in the sense of back in Madison, but home in the sense of not being a guest in somebody's house. Indulging in the innocent pleasures of putting things where they belong and wearing clothes out of a closet instead of a suitcase, and the slightly guilty pleasures of staying in bed reading until noon and making a mess if I damn well please. I'm settling back into my old routines, and trying to develop some new ones as well. My schedule is almost entirely self-directed this semester. I have only two classes that actually meet, and the rest in all independent work. I've actually been at bit bogged down the past week, the inevitable consequence of changing my thesis topic in the middle of the summer. I'm scrambling to get back to where I was at the beginning of the summer. On which note, I should probably actually be working