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.