UMW Regional GeogBlog

My students, I want to introduce you Sarah, James, Jack, and Tra. They and people like them will be your competitors in the job market when you graduate.

James negotiating the price of glass beads at Guangdong's clothing accessories wholesale market

Sarah and James are both around 27 years old and live in Guangzhou, a megacity in the heart of China’s manufacturing heartland, the Pearl River Delta. They both graduated from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies where, among other things, they learned to speak and write fluent English. They also adopted English names, in part to make it easier for them to communicate with foreigners. Jack is in his early thirties, he is a college graduate and he works for a public relations company in Bangkok. Tra lives in Phnom Penh; he is also a college graduate and works for an international shipping company.

James began his career as a free-lance translator, accompanying foreign buyers when they came to Guangzhou to shop for clothing, jewelry, electric motorcycles, and other products of this area’s remarkably productive and diverse manufacturing sector. He found himself becoming more interested in the business side of his activities, and today he works as a buyer, guide, and all-round facilitator for companies ranging from retailers of ethnic jewelry in Manchester, England, to semi-precious stone dealers in Hungary.

Fluent in his home dialect, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, and able to conduct a rudimentary conversation in Japanese, James decided after graduation that he needed to improve his language skills.  When I last saw him in December 2009, he was taking night classes to learn Spanish.

I met and became friends with James during my first visit to Guangzhou in 2008; he served as my translator, guide, and very patient teacher on topics ranging from Chinese history to Chinese dinner-table etiquette. I tagged along with him to Guangzhou’s huge wholesale markets, where I first came to appreciate the vast scale of China’s manufacturing and export sectors. He also took me for a walk around the campus of his alma mater, and told me tales of his college days, only a few years ago. He showed me the classrooms that, in the weeks preceding final exams, were still full at 2 am every night, as students like James and Sarah studied there.

Workers in Sarah's family's sofa and recliner factory in Foshan City, Guangdong Province.

Sarah’s family owns a furniture factory in “Furniture City,” a part of Foshan City not far from Guangzhou. James took me to meet her; we found her hard at work in a massive (100 000 square meter, or a million square feet) sofa showroom, where her family’s business, along with hundreds of other manufacturers, displays its products. She was busy talking to two buyers from Azerbaijan, in Foshan City to finalize a deal on a shipment of recliners. She later drove me the family’s factory, where up to a hundred migrant workers toil six days a week cutting, hammering, sewing, and gluing. This factory is part of the reason that China’s furniture exports rose nearly fivefold from 1999 – 2004, and have continued to increase since then. During the same period, employment in the U.S. furniture manufacturing industry plummeted by 25 percent.

So, my students, if you were thinking of a career as an executive in a furniture manufacturing business, forget it. Sarah just took your job. (I had an e-mail from Sarah a few weeks ago. She is doing graduate work in Spain; like James, she feels that in her line of business she needs to become fluent in another language.)

Jack, in Bangkok, is a few years older than James and Sarah, and he is worried. He started his career writing for television, but he found the market for Thai scripts is limited, and so he decided to use his writing skills in another field, public relations. Today he writes press releases and other public statements for foreign corporations operating in Thailand. When I last saw him in 2009, Jack was concerned that his career wasn’t progressing as much as it should. So he made sure that he was in the office late, often until midnight, and back again at 7 am. He also decided that he needed to brush up his (already very good) English, and was taking night and weekend classes at a local language institute. Over dinner in Bangkok, he had numerous questions for me on graduate study abroad. A higher degree in public relations at a foreign English-language university, he had decided, was a necessary next step in his career. But, now in his early thirties, he was worried that time was getting short.

Tra at his family's home in Takeo Province, Cambodia.

Tra is a Cambodian in his late twenties (I have written about him elsewhere.) He grew up on his parents’ small farm a few hours bus ride from Phnom Penh.  The family home still has no running water, no electricity, no toilet, and the nearest clinic is a 10 km bike ride away.  Thanks to the support of a relative living in Australia, Tra managed to complete a degree at a university in Phnom Penh. He worked full time cooking and serving in a restaurant while he was a student, and lived on an open balcony outside a relative’s apartment. Today he has a 5½ day a week office job with a shipping company, where he earns a salary of $170 a month, close to the average for all Cambodians.

Like James, Sarah, and Jack, Tra decided that his college degree was only a start; to succeed in life, he would need to study further. So he is now attending night classes studying French at the local Alliance Française.

Why do these young people have in common? First of all, they work really hard in their jobs, just as they did in college. (I saw James taking calls from buyers at 11 pm on a Friday night, and calling local suppliers afterwards; Sarah had to excuse herself from a dinner with me to attend to business; when I was in Phnom Penh a month or so ago; Tra had to cancel our Sunday meeting because he had to go in to work – with no overtime pay.) Second, they have all realized that purpose of education is to learn how to learn and to acquire useful skills, and not just to get a degree. That’s why they’re all still studying.   Third, they all speak several languages fluently, but all feel that their language skills are inadequate. Fourth, three of the four earn less today than the U.S. minimum wage.  Finally, all four of my young Asian friends work in jobs or even sectors of the economy that didn’t exist in their countries a few decades ago.  And there are millions of other young people like them their countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and dozens of other countries in the developing world.

When my grandfather opened his small convenience store in Johannesburg in the 1920s, his competitors were other small convenience stores in his neighborhood. When my father completed his engineering degree in South Africa in the early 1950s, he had to compete with job applicants from the region where he lived.  His contemporaries in the U.S. probably had to compete in the job market with other recent graduates statewide. When I was finishing up my graduate studies at Penn State and looking for my first job in 1988, most of my competitors were from the U.S., and a handful were foreigners who were prepared to move to the U.S. to work.

But when you, my students, graduate in the second decade of the 21^st century, you will be entering a job market far different from anything than older generations could ever have imagined. You will be competing with people from all over the world: people younger and perhaps even more skilled, educated, and motivated than Tra, Jack, Sarah, and James.  And they won’t have to come here to take your job. Your job will go to where they are.

Twenty years ago, the kinds of jobs that were leaving the U.S. and moving to cheaper locations were mainly in low- and semi-skilled parts of the manufacturing sector; textiles, clothing, furniture, and the like.  The high-paying manufacturing jobs requiring special skills stayed here.  But those days are over. Today, China is a world leader in the manufacture of high-speed trains and wind turbines for generating clean electricity. Three years from now, an industrial development outside Chengdu will produce 80 million laptop computers a year, about a third of the world’s supply. In 2010 it produced none. So the skilled manufacturing jobs are leaving too.

That has left the U.S. economy relying largely on the service sector: financial services, education, medicine, law, and the like. But those can move too. Indian accountants already process U.S. tax returns, Thai surgeons operate on Americans in the country’s expanding “medical tourism” sector, even the grading of college student papers is now being outsourced to a company in Bangalore.

The bottom line, my students, is that you will be entering a job market far more challenging than that facing any generation that preceded you. It won’t be easy, and I don’t see any way you can avoid it. You can, however, do your best to prepare for it. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Recognize that just being an American isn’t enough. Our society has long assumed that we’re better at most things than most other people are, and that we are blessed with resources, markets, and ingenuity which put us ahead of the rest of the world.  Even if this was true in the past, it’s not true any longer. In almost all fields of endeavor, we are either now or will soon be competing with others who are just as good as or better than we are.  In this environment, national pride doesn’t help. Humility and a willingness to learn from others do.
2. Study hard, and study smart. If you think that you are in college to get a degree, and that the degree will automatically get you a good job, forget it. Although a degree may help you get your foot in the door, it won’t guarantee you a job. Employers won’t hire you because you have a degree, they will hire you because you have the skills and the ingenuity they are looking for. Employers in the kind of job you aspire to almost certainly want to hire literate, lucid, numerate, and globally informed people who can solve new and different kinds of problems. So don’t just about grades, think about skills.  Make sure you acquire good writing and mathematical skills, with at least a basic understanding of science, and fluency in a second language. Make the most of your years in college to learn, and to learn how to learn. My four Asian friends aren’t studying foreign languages to earn degrees or high grades, they are studying them because they are know they need them.
3. Learn about the world. Those young people who are your competitors in China and India and Brazil almost certainly know more about your country, your culture, and your language than you do about theirs.  That puts them at an advantage over you in the global marketplace. If you want to compete successfully with them, you need to know about their countries, you need to speak their languages, and you need to get to know them. (And you most certainly have to be fluent in the international system of measurement – often erroneously called the ‘metric system’ – since it is used in every country in the world except the U.S and Burma.) One of the best ways to make use of your time in college to learn about the world is to study abroad, preferably for at least a semester or a full year. Take geography, international relations, anthropology, or any other courses that help you learn about the world.  And consider joining the Peace Corps for a couple of years after you graduate. Remember that you can’t think outside of the box until you know that you are in a box, and what its dimensions are. If you are an American, the U.S. is that box. Unless and until you know something about how other people in other places live and view the world, you won’t be able to compete with them.
4. Be prepared to move. The U.S. owes a lot of its success to the efforts of people who left their homes, families, and all that was familiar to them in search of better opportunities elsewhere. You may need to be prepared to do the same thing, and consider looking for employment abroad.  This isn’t easy, and it gets more difficult as you get older. But it may be your best shot at a good job in your chosen field.
5. Recognize that you may not be as well off as your parents or grandparents. There’s a good chance that you will earn less, in real terms, than people in your profession earned a generation ago. The reason is simple: your competitors will be in countries where wages are lower. A good English-speaking professor at an Indian university might earn $500 a month. With a video hook-up she could teach classes anywhere in the world, and people starting off in my profession will soon be competing with her and people like her.  In these circumstances, it will be very difficult for American universities to justify a starting salary of $48,000 for an assistant professor.
6. Make sure that you are much better than your competitors. This is perhaps the obvious solution to the dilemma you face, and it is the one that to many might seem the most American of all. But it is also by far the most difficult. The main reason is that there are more of them (foreign graduates) than there are of you (U.S. graduates.) In 2007, China alone had twice as many university graduates as the U.S. (the country that used to head the list only a few years ago.) There are now 50 million college graduates in India; many of them are very smart and their universities are very good. Another reason is that in many fields foreigners are better prepared than you are. (In math and science, for example, eighth grade students in Singapore, South Korea, and Japan significantly outperformed those in the U.S.) So what can you do? You can start by choosing a career where you – as an American and as an individual – are most likely to be successful. (Success in life depends to large extent on how well you choose your competition.) Choose a field of study in which U.S. universities excel. And work at least as hard as those students that shared a study room with James and Sarah in the middle of the night in Guangzhou.

I realize that I am not delivering good news here, and I am not presenting a message of hope and optimism. I am also not offering any definite answers. Today’s students are already having a hard time finding jobs, and that’s not just because of the current recession. Things are going to get worse. Even when the recession ends, most of the jobs that have disappeared from the U.S. over the past few are not going to come back. Ever.  Simply being hopeful, optimistic, and trusting in the American spirit is not going to solve this problem.

I am not writing this to discourage you, but rather to encourage you to prepare and adapt. What you need to do is take a long, hard, and realistic look at yourself, your aspirations, and your plans. Figure out where you want to go, and whether your ambitions are attainable. Then do everything in your power (including but not limited to 1 – 6 above) to get there. And keep your fingers crossed.

(Note: I encourage comments and suggestions from students, recent graduates, educators, any anyone else who has ideas or suggestions on the important problem I have highlighted here.)

Pattaya

From a distance, the Thai city of Pattaya looks like many other seaside resorts. Straight sandy beaches several kilometers long stretch out along the eastern shore of the Gulf of Thailand. Behind them are high-rise hotels and condos. The climate is tropical, the vegetation luxuriant.

On closer examination, though, it becomes clear that there is something different about Pattaya. I arrived here shortly after noon on a sunny May day, and what struck me right away was that there was hardly anyone on the beaches. Admittedly this was low season, and Thailand’s political troubles had cut tourist arrivals, but still something wasn’t right.

A Pattaya beach on a a balmy May afternoon

After checking in to my guesthouse in the southern part of the city, I decided to defy what was clearly conventional wisdom, and go for a swim. So I headed for the beach. I soon discovered one of the reasons for the paucity of bathers: the sea isn’t very clean here. The water was a murky brown color, and bits of plastic floated in the water. Pattaya, it turns out, is not a great beach resort.

Another oddity: among the few tourists on the beach, and the many more than I saw wandering around during my visit to Pattaya, there were hardly any children. Again, this seemed unusual for a beach resort.

I was in Pattaya with two friends; one was from Cambodia, a first-time Pattaya visitor like me; the other, from Paris, had been here many times and knew lots of people in the area. On our first night in the city, he offered to show us around, and so we hopped onto the back of one of the ubiquitous pick-up truck taxis that ply the city’s roads and headed downtown.  Here, the mystery of Pattaya tourism was quickly solved.

Pattaya's "Walking Street" by night.

Pattaya by night, it turns out, is not the same as Pattaya by day.  On an off-season night, when Bangkok and much of the rest of Thailand was under a curfew and state of emergency, the streets of Pattaya were teeming with visitors. The city’s famed “Walking Street” was particularly busy. Closed to traffic by night, it becomes a neon-lit avenue of bars, restaurants and massage parlors. On either side of the walking street were scantily clad and unusually friendly young women. Inside some of the bars, visible from the street, some of their colleagues served drinks while others gyrated around poles atop the bars.

The Pattaya tourist landscape by day

Pattaya, it turns out, is indeed a tourist resort, but a resort of a rather particular and primarily nocturnal kind. The city could in all likelihood justly claim the title of the World Capital of Sex Tourism.

Pattaya’s specialized economy is not an accident of either history or geography. It dates back to the era of the Vietnam War (known in Southeast Asia as the American War,) when hundreds of thousands of (overwhelmingly male) U.S. military personnel needed a safe place for what was liberally and euphemistically termed “rest and relaxation” (R&R.) Such a place should ideally a) be in a friendly country, b) be not too far from the theater of war, c) have a safe and easily defensible location, d) be pleasant and attractive, and e) be in a cultural and economic environment which would could provide for the physical and emotional needs of the military personnel.

The location of Pattaya

Pattaya fit the bill perfectly. The town’s location on the Gulf of Thailand, on the opposite side of the Southeast Asian peninsula from Vietnam, in a friendly country, and with conveniently located offshore islands protecting its port from enemy vessels, and its (then somewhat cleaner) beaches provided an ideal location.  The long-standing non-judgmental nature of Thailand’s predominantly Buddhist culture on sexual matters was a major advantage (especially when compared with attitudes in predominantly Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia, or even the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines.) Finally, the relative poverty of the population provided a plentiful supply of young women (and presumably also some men) to work in the sex industry.

The Vietnam War ended in 1974, but Pattaya and its particular brand of tourism continued. The clientele changed from U.S. military personnel to visitors from Europe, Australasia, and other parts of Asia (including other parts of Thailand, especially over weekends). During my visit I noticed an abundance of signs, advertisements, and restaurant menus in Cyrillic writing, a result in a boom in Russian tourism in recent years.

The sex industry expanded in scope as well as scale. Walking Street is the center of the heterosexual sex industry, but there are several smaller but similar streets that cater to gay visitors. My friends and I went to one of these areas – Boyztown – where we had a drink at a bar and chatted with the manager and some of the staff, all friends of my Parisian traveling companion. After the bar closed, we all headed to a late night disco, which on this night appeared to cater mainly to a clientele of bar and restaurant employees rather than tourists.

Boyztown by night

I learned that most of the so-called “bar boys” (just about all of whom are men, aged between 18 and 25) working in Pattaya come from Thailand’s rural areas (I assume the most of what I learned from the men working in Pattaya applies also to women.) One of the young men I spoke to had returned two weeks previously from tending to livestock on his family’s small farm near the Cambodian border.  This is apparently a common practice: working on the farm during the planting and harvest seasons, and in Pattaya when tourists are plentiful. There is no doubt at all which of these occupations in more lucrative. Despite the crowded living conditions (four to six young men to a room) and meager base wages, the pay is much better than it would be in just about any job back home.The basic wage for this bar job is about $100 per month, with one day off per month (the basic wage for a bar job is about $100 per month, working seven days a week, with one day off per month.) And, of course, there is the particularly attractive appeal of additional income opportunities from older, wealthier tourists. Some of these opportunities might involve a brief encounter, in other cases might involve accompanying the visitor for a day or even for his entire stay in Pattaya. Regardless of the details, though, the work allows many young people to earn a living and to help support families back home on a scale that would not be possible if they worked on a farm or in a garment factory.

A slow night at the bar

Prostitution is, strictly speaking, illegal in Thailand. But lines are blurred and laws seldom enforced. The way many of the bars work, I was told, is that the bar-boy’s job is to attract and welcome customers, serve them drinks, and ideally get the customers to buy drinks for the “boy” as well.  If the employee decides that he wants to leave work at the bar early, the bar must be paid a fee, purportedly for his lost services. Any further transactions between the customer and the “bar-boy” are not the business of the bar management.

Pattaya is a place that invites hasty judgments. I have no doubt that for many of my fellow Virginians this place would be Gomorrah incarnate, a place of unbridled sin with no moral ambiguities at all. For those of a different ideological bent Pattaya might, I suppose, seem liberating.

But I left confused. On the one hand, I have no quibble – moral or otherwise – with the career choices of those who have opted to make a living in the sex industry. I have respect for those who work hard in the industry openly, honestly, and unapologetically to provide for themselves and their families (Indeed, in the days of Pattaya’s nascent sex trade during the Vietnam War, I have no doubt whose jobs – the clients’ or the sex workers’ – I would have found more morally objectionable.)

On the other hand, I recognize that for, for many, entering sex work is not a choice freely made. Some are compelled by economic circumstances to enter a career they find exploitative or unpleasant (as do some who work in factories and mines.) Others are forced into sex work, either as children or through adult trafficking. But abuse and trafficking are not the same thing as sex work, nor are they inevitable consequences of it (any more than child soldiers are an inevitable consequence of conflict, or slavery a necessary concomitant of a demand for cheap labor.)

I am more confused – and perhaps more judgmental than I would like – about the sex industry’s clients than I am of its workers.  I had to face my own prejudices and confusion in this regard simply by deciding to write this blog. After all, to write it I would have to admit to having been in Pattaya. What would that lead my readers to think of me?

After visiting and thinking about Pattaya, I can offer three conclusions.

First, there is a geography to everything. Most things – including sex tourism – are where they are for a reason (or, more commonly, many reasons.) These reasons are frequently very interesting, and well worth exploring.

At work in Pattaya

Second, traveling to interesting places (or studying interesting issues) almost always produces more questions than answers, and often more confusion than clarification. But that’s what makes these pursuits interesting.

Third, the world is a morally, economically, socially, and culturally complex place. Clinging to simplistic moral absolutes does not reduce this complexity, it does not help us understand it, and is certainly does not solve the problems that underlie it. And, like the skimpy clothing of the bartop dancers on Walking Street, it is at least as significant for what it conceals as for what it reveals.

Donald N. Rallis
Pattaya, May 2010.

For more photographs of Pattaya, please visit my Picasa web site.

At Yangon's Shwe Dagon Pagoda

One of the great advantages of travel is that it helps travelers understand what’s going on in the countries they visit. One of the great pitfalls of travel, though, it that it can leave visitors under the impression that they know what’s going on, when in fact they don’t.

Take my recent visit to the Union of Myanmar (also called Burma), for example.

On the outskirts of Yangon

I have just left the country after spending five fascinating days in the former capital of Yangon (previously known as Rangoon; this country abounds in akas and previously known as’s.) I entered the country without any problems (a recently implement visa-on-arrival system was in effect at the airport, just as in Indonesia or Cambodia.) I found a city remarkably serene by East Asian standards, a built landscape that is unusually dated by comparison with its neighbors, and a country that is undoubtedly poor.  I saw a surprisingly orderly place, without the noise or chaotic traffic of Bangkok or Phnom Penh. Not only did I survive my wanderings around the streets, alleyways, and markets of central Yangon (alone and camera in hand,) I also felt very safe and I not discern any threats to my person or my property (nor did I see many police officers around.) In three days of walking and photographing, nobody challenged me, obstructed me, or prevented me from going anywhere.

In short, if I had known nothing at all about Myanmar before I came here, I might easily have concluded that this was a peaceful place populated by people facing challenges of poverty common to most developing countries, but otherwise going about the daily business without any unusual challenges.  I would have been terribly wrong.

According to just about any reputable entity concerned with human rights or governance, the government Burma is one of the most egregious violators of human rights in the world. It tops Freedom House’s 2010 list of  “worst of the worst,” the eight countries with the worst human rights records in the world. The Global Justice Center ranks Burma as one of the top two ‘red alert’ countries, second only to Sudan where risk of genocide is concerned; the United Nations has placed the country on a genocide watch list. A recent Harvard Law School report holds the country’s government responsible for “epidemic levels of forced labor in the 1990s, the recruitment of tens of thousands of child soldiers, widespread sexual violence, extrajudicial killings and torture, and more than a million displaced persons.”  Over 3,000 ethnic nationality villages have been demolished over the past twelve years – more than the number destroyed or damaged in Darfur. There are more than 2,100 political prisoners in the country, many convicted under a penal code that criminalizes free expression and peaceful demonstrations.

The government that is responsible for all of this is a secretive and xenophobic military junta that calls itself the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC,) led by a shadowy general named Than Shwe, a man who is so paranoid that even his birthday is a secret. The SPDC is the latest in a series of military governments that dates back to 1962, when a coup led by General Ne Win overthrew a civilian government. The current junta came to power in 1988, and put its popularity to the test in general elections held in 1990.  The opposition National League for Democracy, led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won 80 percent of the vote. The junta ignored the election result, and Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for most of the time since then (She won the Nobel Prize in 1991.)

All the news that's fit to print. From a Yangon daily newspaper.

I saw precious little direct evidence of any of this during my brief visit. Not many police or military, no obvious video surveillance, certainly no signs of popular dissent of the kind that I saw in Bangkok a few weeks ago. Perhaps this is in itself testimony to the regime’s brutal effectiveness; maybe when police are nowhere to be seen they are actually everywhere. A small glimpse into this came when I was driven past the government offices where, hundreds of people were waiting, apparently to apply for passports. I lifted my camera to take a photograph, but my guide advised me not to. “Too many information people around here,” he said.

What I did notice, though, was that Yangon is a place that is a little odd.  The repressive nature of the Burma’s ruling junta may not be readily apparent, but that wackiness of the regime is.

Take, for example, the location of Burma’s capital. Until 2005, the capital was Yangon. Then, without warning, the government announced that it was moving to Naypidaw, a city built from scratch in a remote inland location nine hours drive from Yangon (along a purpose-built eight line highway which apparently carries very little traffic.)  It turned out that the new capital had been under construction secretly for some time, and the announcement was of a fait accompli. In this frequent power cuts and crumbling infrastructure, the new capital has landscaped traffic circles and a zoo with an air-conditioned penguin house. (Maybe I am wrong on the reasons for the capital’s location. See Richard’s comment below.)

It’s not unheard of for countries to move their capitals. Some former colonies have done so because the capital’s old location suited the interests of a former colonial power rather than those of the country itself, or because the government wanted to promote development in an undeveloped part of the country (Brasilia, Abuja, and Dodoma are some examples of new capitals.) Naypidaw’s location, though, seems to be a result of the paranoia, secrecy, and xenophobia of Burma’s governing generals. The remote location and inaccessibility of the capital are the reasons for its establishment; it’s away from coast (the generals are fixated on the idea of being invaded), away from the prying eyes of foreigners and enemies of the regime.  It’s not often that a city’s location is chosen for its inconvenient location, but this is Burma, and weird things happen here. (The capital’s location is so inconvenient that it provoked a rare public complaint from Burma’s only major ally, China.)

But the wackiness of the Burmese generals doesn’t end with their novel approach to regional planning. During the ride from Yangon International Airport – in a dilapidated Toyota Corolla taxi significantly older than most of my students – I noticed something unusual. Traffic in this country travels on the right hand side of the road, but with very few exceptions vehicles have their steering wheels on the right side. I asked my driver why this was the case. He replied, “Many foreigners ask that,” and said no more. This confirmed that my question was a reasonable one, but didn’t get me any closer to an answer. Two other taxi drivers later gave me identical responses.

I did some digging around, and managed to establish that the country switched from driving on the left, a legacy of British colonialism, in 1970 (Burma gained its independence in 1948.) The only explanation for this I been able to find (but not verify) is that the change was decreed by the notoriously superstitious military leader, General Ne Win, and was the result of a dream or a soothsayer’s advice. In most other countries this explanation would be absurd, but in Burma it is quite plausible.

Unoccupied old and new buildings. My guide tells me that the buildings in the background are unoccupied because the owners don't have "government permission" to fill them.

I found that arriving in Yangon was a bit like going back in time. My taxi didn’t seem unusually old by comparison with the rest of the vehicles on the road; most cars, trucks, and buses appeared to date back to the 1970s or before; evidence of much of the world’s uneasiness at doing business with this pariah state. A lot of the buildings, particularly in the central part of the city, seemed be of colonial vintage. There also weren’t many high-rise buildings (although the city has some 5 million residents.) I saw very few tourists, and hardly any westerners. No McDonalds or Starbucks; KFC may have made it to Urumqi in far-western China, but it hasn’t come to Yangon.

Or maybe it has, but it has left. An apologetic note in my hotel room asked me to “please be advised that credit cards under Master Card, American Express, Diners Club and JCB have ceased operations in Myanmar, until further notice.” I turned on my cell phone, and got a “no service available” message on the screen. AT&T encourages me to roam in Mali and Mayotte, but not in Myanmar. (The phone in my hotel room would let me call the U.S., though, for a cost of $7.99 per minute.)

My hotel did, however, offer wireless internet. The receptionist warned me that the connection might be slow, and also that I would not be able to access Yahoo mail or MSN. Nor, as it turned out, could I access lonelyplanet.com or the website of Amnesty International. Trying to reach any of these sites produced a red banner across my screen with the message “the access to requested URL has been denied.”  This remarkably honest message was presumably a result of internet censorship, and was another small clue to the repressive nature of the Burmese state. (In China, try accessing a blocked site and all you will get is a more obscure message telling you that the connection has been interrupted.) It was also a sign of the ineptitude of some of the regime’s efforts: the Amnesty’s site amnesty.org was blocked, but the organization’s British site, amnesty.org.uk, including its links to information on Burma, were not.

Access denied

After five days in Yangon, I headed for my flight to Bangkok. As I had done on my arrival, I traveled along the smoothly paved multi-lane road from the city center to Yangon International Airport.  During my various taxi rides in and around the city, I had discovered that this road was an aberration. Turn off this main road, or leave the city, and you’re in for a bone-rattling experience. And it is on the side roads that most Burmese people travel.

________________

For more photographs of Yangon and its environs, please visit my Picasa web album.

Central Yangon

I am about to leave Burma after an all-too-short visit of five days. This is a fascinating place, and it will take my a long time to process all that I have seen, sort through my photographs, and collect my thoughts sufficiently to write a thoughtful blog entry (Update: Now done, though I don’t know how thoughtful.)So, in the mean time, here are some random and undigested scribblings from my travel notes.

• Arriving in Yangon is like going back in time a few decades. Most of the cars on the road seem to date back to the 1970s, many of the buses look even older. Much of the taxi fleet in this city seems to consist of ancient Toyotas, very few of them with air conditioning.

• Mysteriously, although the traffic drives on the right hand side of the road in Myanmar, most vehicles are right-hand-drive. I have asked three taxi drivers about this. All gave the same answer, “Many tourists ask that.” Pressed, two of three told me that the government had decided in the 1960s to switch traffic to the right side of the road, but they could not explain why vehicles of later vintages were still right hand drive.

• Most buildings are a lot older than the cars on the road. There are lots of colonial era buildings around, the kind that have been demolished to make way for newer structures in cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.

• On my first day, I wandered the streets of central Yangon, taking pictures. During my hours of wandering, I didn’t encounter any other westerners, nor did I see many people who looked as though they might be tourists. I certainly didn’t see anyone else with a camera (I suppose I should read too much into this. Most tourists I know don’t spend their time walking down narrow streets lined with stores selling school exercise books, vendors selling rubber stamps, and the makers of plastic signs.)

• Despite that I was clearly an oddity on the streets of Yangon, nobody appeared to pay much attention to me at all. I took photographs without any problems and, most surprisingly, hardly anyone tried to sell me anything. Quite a few people, however, did ask me whether I had any dollars to exchange. When I did need to exchange dollars, I was hustled down an alleyway and into a small shop, where my hurried transaction took place.

• On my second day in the city, I took a taxi to the Shwe Dagon Pagoda on a low hill in middle of the city. Of all of the temples and pagodas I have visited in Southeast Asia, this was the most impressive.  It is dominated a large gold stupa, surrounded by huge courtyard containing numerous shrines and small buildings. Hardly anybody here appeared to be a tourist, and again, hardly a westerner in sight.

• A few hours after visiting Shwe Dagon, I was walking along a street in the city center, a few kilometers away, when a Buddhist monk carrying an umbrella, greeted me. “Weren’t you at the pagoda this morning?” he asked me. “I saw you there.” He asked me where I was from, and where I was headed. “May I walk with you?” he said, and we chatted all the way back to my hotel. As we parted company, he told me that I should come back to the pagoda in the evening. “That’s the best time to see it,” he said. The monk was one of the few people who chatted openly with me here.

• As I toured the city with a taxi driver today, I noticed at least four new high rise buildings in Yangon that were apparently unoccupied. I asked my driver, who told me that they were all empty because the owners did not have government permission to occupy them. Government permission, he suggested, was dependent on money changing hands. His driver’s license, he told me, had cost him $300.

• If corruption is indeed endemic here, as my guide intimated, I didn’t see the kind of evidence of its fruits as I have seen in Cambodia. There is lots of evidence of wealth in Phnom Penh, most notably in the extraordinary number of late-model Lexus SUVs driven by people (often government officials) whose salaries could not possibly cover the costs of such vehicles. I saw very few such displays of wealth in Yangon.

• My driver pointed out a part of the city where a large number of people appeared to be hanging around on the sidewalks. He told me that they were waiting to apply for passports. I lifted my camera to take a photograph. “No, no!” he said, “Too many information people around here.”

• Our first stop was a large park in the center of Yangon. In the middle of the park was a lake, and on the lake was what appeared to be an ornate floating restaurant. I photographed it from afar, and as we approached the entrance to the building, I prepared to take another picture. A woman who appeared to be the restaurant hostess waved her hand at me, “No pictures.” As we walked away, my guide explained the reason, “Lots of important people come here.”

• After visiting the park, my guide suggested we visit a temple an hour or so away, just outside Yangon. I agreed, and we headed off in the rickety taxi, the driver and me in front, and my guide in the back seat. (I shouldn’t call him my guide. He told me that if anyone asked, I was his friend, since he didn’t have a permit to be a guide.)

• As we headed out of town, the road got bumpier and bumpier.  There didn’t
  

  Taxis on the road to Kyauktan

  appear to be too many provide cars on the road; most people appeared to be getting around in old, crowded buses and taxis consisting of pick-up truck with benches in the back. (The capacity of these taxis is not limited by the number of people who can sit on the benches. When the benches are full, passengers stand between them. When there is no more standing room, they hang out of the back.)

• The electricity supply in Yangon seems to be shaky, to put it mildly. During each of the four nights I have been here, the power has gone off at least ten times, usually for no more than a thirty seconds or so. Staff in my hotel carried on about their duties as though nothing had happened. It was with some trepidation that I took the elevator to my seventh floor room.

• Good news for the makers of carbon paper. You still have a market in Burma.

Donald N. Rallis
June 3, 2010
Yangon, Myanmar/Burma.

For more photographs of Yangon and its environs, please visit my Picasa web album.

Africans have this thing called UBUNTU. It is about the essence of being human, it is part of the gift that Africa will give the world… We believe that a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up, inextricably, with yours.  When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into its own in belonging.

Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Emeritus

One of the greatest challenges I face as I teach introductory regional geography courses is explaining to my students what geography is, and why it is important as a discipline. Pick up just about any introductory geography text and look at some of the turgid definitions of geography that you find in the first chapter, and you will quickly learn that the difficulty I have in explaining my discipline is by no means unique.

This isn’t because geography lacks intelligent and articulate practitioners. On the contrary, I think that some of the brightest minds in academia are to be found in geography. The reason that geographers have so much difficulty in explaining our discipline is that the study of geography begins with the breathtakingly obvious, but proceeds very quickly to the mind-numbingly complicated. Not only that, but both its simplicity and its complexity are essential to the discipline.

To put it another way, the essence of geography lies in dialectical relationship: places are different (that’s the simple bit), but at the same time they are connected (more complicated.) But there’s more: places are often different because they are connected, and connected because they are different.  The real value of geography lies in simultaneously appreciating differences, similarities, and connections, and how each affects the others (really complicated.)

I have for many years taught an introductory course in World Regional Geography (WRG). For most of my students, it is the first encounter they have had with geography at the college level. I have found that WRG can be really easy to teach if I focus only on the simple part of what geography is: how places are different from one another.  North Africa and Southwest Asia are mostly dry, predominantly Arab, and overwhelmingly Muslim. Sub-Saharan Africa consists of tropical and sub-tropical environments populated predominantly by black Bantu-speaking Christian peoples. I can list ten major geographic qualities of Southeast Asia, and ten different geographic qualities for South Asia.  And in an exam I can ask my students to list these qualities, to compare and contrast North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, and I can get them to label the capitals and major rivers of South Asia on a map.

If I take this approach, I have an array of willing accomplices in the form of World Regional Geography textbooks. Just about all of these texts divide the world into twelve or thirteen major regions, a number determined primarily by the number of weeks in a college semester rather than any disciplinary consensus on how best to slice up the globe (a week for introductory stuff, a week for each region/chapter, and a week for tests and exams.) Ever-helpful publishers often provide instructors with packaged PowerPoint presentations, multiple choice and true/false test questions, and map quizzes; students get study guides, maps, and lists of key concepts and place names.

Taught this way, World Regional Geography may give students a very good understanding of what makes world regions – and perhaps even places more generally – different from one another. They may even have a good appreciation of why some of these differences exist; they may, for example, be able to explain the atmospheric processes that produce deserts in North Africa and tropical rainforests in central Africa, or the ways that relative location has affects trade and culture in South and Southeast Asia. What they would probably not be able to do, though, is explain how South and Southeast Asia are (and always have been) connected to one another.  Students would not have an understanding of the fact that it is dry in North Africa in part because it is wet in tropical Africa, and that Europe is wealthy and developed region largely because Sub-Saharan Africa is not.

In short, it is easy to list how places differ from one another in discreet and definable categories such climate, demographics, culture, and levels of economic development. It is more difficult to explain why these differences exist, and it is an almost impossibly complicated task to explain how, in the real world, it is the interactions among places than result from their differences and their similarities that make places what they are. Yet that is what geography is about.

An old African notion, most popularly propounded by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is that of ubuntu, a word that tries to express the essence of being human. In its simplest form, it is explained in the Zulu phrase, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. As the Archbishop explains it

Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can’t exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. You can’t be human all by yourself… We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world…

More simply, people are people through other people.

Maybe geographers can learn something from this. Maybe it’s not only people, but also places that can’t exist in isolation. A place can’t be a place all by itself.  Perhaps it is this quality of what we might call utopu that best expresses the essence of geography: places are places through other places.

Donald N. Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
May 24, 2010.

Gazing at the Malaysian mainland from the island of Penang

It was a twenty minute walk to my destination in George Town, on the Malaysian island of Penang.  I walked out of the hotel, turned right along Jalan Penang (Jalan is the Malay word for road), and walked past a Chinese seafood restaurant and the Indian eatery where I had a really good curry last night. Then across the intersection with Campbell and Hutton streets, and past the Hare Krishna temple. A right turn down Jalan Burma past the Chinese Buddhist temple.  I had an unscheduled stop here, as an Indian man greeted me, shook me by the hand, and asked me where I was from. He encouraged me to go inside the Chinese temple to look around. “But then you must also go to the Hindu temple, just a short walk from here,” he said.

Penang's Jewish Cemetery

But I had another destination I wanted to visit first. According to the information I had, I needed to turn left on Jalan Zainal Abidin (formerly Jalan Yahud, “Jewish street”), and on my left I should find it, surrounded by a three meter high wall. Sure enough, there it was. Right across the road from the street vendor selling Thai food.  Penang’s Jewish cemetery.

In a sense my short walk this morning told the story of the island of Penang, and more generally of the Strait of Malacca, the strategically important shipping lane at whose northern end Penang lies.  The Strait has for most of the past millennium been the most important route for sea traffic between East and Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. As a consequence, the ports along its length have become some of the most culturally diverse places in Southeast Asia.

Statue of St. Francis Xavier in Malacca, with the Strait in the background

For centuries, Arab and Southeast Asian traders plied this strait as part of the maritime trade link between the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia and the markets of the Middle East and Europe. The famed Chinese naval admiral Zheng He reputedly dropped anchor at Penang during one of his 15^th century voyages to the Indian Ocean and East Africa.

Location of Penang, Malacca, and the Strait of Malacca

In 1511, little more than a decade after first rounding the southern tip of Africa, the Portuguese set up a base at Melaka (Malacca,) a port some 400 km southeast of Penang, at the narrowest point on the Strait. At that time, this was a bustling port, and an important transshipment point. Malay traders would bring spices from what is now Indonesia to Malacca, where there would sell them to Arab and Indian sailors who would carry them to their ultimate markets in the Middle East and Europe.

A 16^th century visitor to Malacca marveled

“No trading port as large as Malacca is known, nor anywhere else do they deal in such fine and highly priced merchandise. Goods from all over the world are sold here. It is at the end of the monsoons that you find what you want, and sometimes more than you are looking for.”

With such commercial importance, it is no wonder that town and Strait of Malacca were seen a strategically vital by the big powers of the day. There was more than a grain of truth in the pronouncement by a 16^th century Portuguese writer that “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.”

With the decline of Portuguese power in Southeast Asia and the rise of the the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) control of Malacca passed to the Dutch. Soon after the demise of the VOC at the end of the 18^th century, Britain took over as the colonial power.

Statue of Captain Francis Light, Penang.

A few years earlier, in 1786, the British had established their first presence on the island of Penang. At the site of what later became Fort Cornwallis, Captain Francis Light hoisted the British flag, and so began more than 170 years of British rule.

Under British rule, Malacca formed part of the Straits Settlements, comprising the three strategic ports along the Strait of Malacca: Penang, Malacca, and Singapore.  This was the period during which all three Settlements acquired the multicultural character that to this day distinguishes them from the rest of the region. Overseas Chinese had been in Southeast Asia before the arrival of the British, but it was during the colonial period that their numbers increased dramatically, particularly in the Straits Settlements. Today, people of Chinese ancestry make up the majority of the population of Singapore, and in Penang their numbers are about equal to those of indigenous Malays. (In Malaysia as a whole, ethnic Malays account for just over half the population, and Chinese for about a quarter.)

It was during the British period that a significant number of Indians also came to the area, many to work as indentured workers on plantations. Today, their descendants are a significant part of the cultural tapestry of Singapore and Penang. Their influence and tastes are evident in the number of Indian restaurants and food stalls near my hotel, the Indian ancestry of several members of the hotel staff, and the posters advertising Bollywood productions at the movie theater near my hotel.

Although the main cultural influences here are Chinese, Indian, and Malay, they are by no means the only groups to have inhabited or helped shape this area. The colonial imprint remains strong and several layers deep. In Penang, the British were the only colonial power (aside from a brief period of Japanese occupation during World War II.) Colonial architecture abounds, and many of the street and town names remain English (I am now in George Town, the capital of the province of Penang. The second largest city in the province is Butterworth.) A clock tower commemorating the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria still stands in a street near the waterfront.

In Malacca, the colonial cultural imprint is more varied. At the center of the town’s historic area are the remains of an old Catholic Church, dating back to the time of Portuguese control. Much of the architecture of the Dutch period remains, including the old Stadhuis (town hall.) Perusal of the names of pastors serving at Christ Church over the past two centuries reveals Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Chinese names.

Bollywood comes to Penang

Several smaller cultural influences are also evident in the landscape of Penang. This brings me back to my morning walk to the Jewish Cemetery, the only such cemetery in Malaysia. It is not large, containing only some 160 graves, but its presence is evidence of the cosmopolitan population that has lived in this part of the world. It appears that many of Penang’s Jews came originally from Baghdad, part of an exodus prompted by persecution in the early 1800s.  The oldest grave in the Penang cemetery is dated 1835. The Jewish community here seems to have peaked at about 170 at the end of the nineteenth century, most of them being involved in trade of various kinds. During the Second World War, and particularly during the Japanese occupation of Penang, most members of the Jewish community fled. The most recent burial in the cemetery was in 1978.

Narrow, important seaways are almost always contested places with interesting histories. Gibraltar, Aden, the Bosporous and Dardanelles, Panama, and the Strait of Malacca have all been fought over because of their strategic importance. Most of them have also become important trading centers, attracting sailors, settlers, traders, and fortune-seekers from all over the world.  And, as my visit to Penang has reminded me, they are ideal places to come to be reminded of the importance of the simplest of geographic adages: location matters.

____________

For more on Jewish history of Penang, see Raimy Ché-Ross’s 2002 paper A Penang Kaddish: The Jewish Cemetery in Georgetown (pdf.)

In  writing this blog, I also drew on Milton Osbourne’s brief and very readable Exploring Southeast Asia: A travelers history of the region (Allen and Unwin, 2002.)

The map I use to locate Penang and Malacca comes from Goode’s World Atlas, 21st edition (Rand McNally, 2007.)

For more of my photographs of Penang, see my Picasa album.

Welcome to The Mall

I visited The Mall a couple of days ago. You know the one: you go through the big automatically opening glass doors, the air-conditioned interior hits you as you walk in across a marbled floor just after the mall opens at 10 am. On your right are huge posters of improbably skinny and impossibly pale people wearing bored expressions and Calvin Klein underwear. On your left is the Body Shop, and next to it is the Polo store. But you are looking for the Apple Store, so you take a look at the back-lit and color-coded mall guide next to the chrome railing surrounding the atrium. The store listing and map look clear and well organized, so you feel really stupid when you can’t find the store you are looking for, and when you eventually do, you can’t figure out how to get there because you don’t know where you are on the map in front of you.

Can't find what you're looking for?

So you know the mall I am talking about. It’s in Jakarta, and I was there this past Thursday. I was there again this morning, but this time it was in Kuala Lumpur (in two different parts of the city.)  I went there a few weeks ago, but then the mall was in Richmond, Virginia. It’s also in Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Shanghai, Manchester, and San Francisco. It is the generic, ubiquitous, up-market shopping mall, and it is everywhere. If it isn’t there yet, it will be. And nearby will be the generic glass and chrome office/hotel tower, replicating with the occasional minor mutation across the global urban landscape.

Let's go and see whether they have anything different at this Body Shop.

Yes, there are some details that differ from country to country. In the US, you can find the mall in the suburbs, near where those two highways intersect. It sits like a giant amoeba in the middle of a vast parking lot, and is utterly inaccessible by any means other than a private automobile.  In Asian cities, it is more likely to be in the city center, close to the subway (or the monorail, or the Skytrain.) But inside, it’s the same mall, no windows, with the same stores, the same overpriced designer merchandise, the same layout and mall guides deliberately and carefully designed to make you wander around rather than find your way directly to the store you want to visit.

There have been times in my life when I have realized that much of the rest of humanity seems to be in on something that I just don’t get. Growing up, I never understood what satisfaction there was to be gained from throwing and catching things (then running to a different place and throwing and catching them again.) It seemed to me like a thoroughly pointless exercise. I just didn’t get it, and I still don’t. But clearly, I am in a minority.

Why do you always have to walk all the way around to get to the next up escalator?

Maybe the generic upmarket shopping mall falls into the same category. Obviously, there must be millions of people around the world who love these places. And millions more who would love them if only they had the means to do so. Millions of people who will travel for hours to go to a different mall to see exactly the same goods in exactly the same kind of mall as they have seen a hundred times before.

I love to travel. The reason I love it is because places are different. All of us think that what we grew up with is normal; we don’t question it and we don’t think too much about it. But different places have different normals, and they make us realize that perhaps our normal isn’t so normal after all. I think that’s exciting. But if the urban planners and architects who have been let loose on the world’s major cities have their way, travel will become redundant, because all places will become the same. Think it’s impossible? Just look at America’s suburbs.

But maybe I am just weird. Maybe what most people aspire to is a galactic middle-class comfort zone. A universe where there is always a McDonalds nearby, which will look the same as serve food that tastes much the same as it does everywhere else. A universe where the movies and the television shows are the same, music is the same, where everyone is on Facebook, and where everyone shops at The Mall.

OK, so it isn't everywhere that the mall security guards march in formation (well, almost) through the main entrance to the mall as it opens (This is in Kuala Lumpur.)

Red Shirt protest, April 2010. Photo: Gavin Gough (see note at the end of this blog entry.)

I am writing this in Bangkok, having decided to ignore the U.S. State Department warning that I not come here. I’m glad I did. The dire warning read, in part

Due to escalating violence in central Bangkok, demonstrations in Chiang Mai, and other incidents throughout Thailand, all U.S. citizens should avoid nonessential travel to Thailand.

The reason for the State Department’s consternation was a protest by anti-government demonstrators (or, as they would have it, pro-democracy advocates) who have been camped out in part of Bangkok’s business district for some seven weeks.  These so-called “Red Shirts” have barricaded themselves behind bamboo fortifications, and by some accounts have set up a mini-city, complete with food vendors and first aid stations, in a park, along some streets, and in a major intersection. They have so far successfully repulsed efforts by security forces (who enjoy the support of loyalist “Yellow Shirts”) to dislodge them.

Although the demonstrations have severely disrupted life in parts of Bangkok, for most of the city, as far as I could tell, life is going along pretty much as usual.  This is a very big city, with some 10 million residents, or about a third of the country’s urban population, spread out over nearly 8,000 sq km of land. Bangkok is by far the largest city in Thailand, the economic and financial heart of the country, and the seat of political power. It is, in short, a classic primate city.

Generations of geography students have dutifully written down and memorized the definition of a primate city: a city  ”at least twice as large as the next largest city and more than twice as significant” (The definition was coined by geographer Mark Jefferson in 1939.) But why bother to identify primate cities? Why does urban primacy matter?

The current political conflict in Thailand provides a vivid answer to this question. Although the conflict is complicated it is, at its heart, a clash between a political and economic elite, based mainly in Bangkok (largely the Yellow Shirts and their supporters) and a poorer, marginalized, and predominantly rural populace (represented by the Red Shirts.)

By the late 1990s, the Southeast Asian economic boom had brought rapid growth to Thailand and some of its Southeast Asian neighbors.  The benefits of this growth, though, were not evenly distributed. Educated urbanites have become a lot wealthier, and the streets of Bangkok are today lined with modern skyscrapers, multinational hotels, and stores selling imported electronic gizmos and designer clothing. The rural and small-town poor, though, feel that they have largely been left behind.

Around the turn of the century, Thailand’s rural poor found a new and unlikely champion in Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire cell-phone entrepreneur turned populist politician. Thaksin was elected Prime Minister in 2001, and quickly set about seeing to the needs of his political base by promoting cheaper health care and education, especially in rural areas.  He was re-elected in a landslide in 2005. Thaksin’s election and his policies greatly displeased Thailand’s Bangkokian elites and, importantly, their allies in the military. In 2006 Thaksin’s government was overthrown in a bloodless coup, and in 2007 a new government was elected, headed by Eton- and Oxford-educated Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva (Thaksin’s party was banned from participating in the election.) Thaksin and his wife were both were convicted on corruption charges (trumped up, his supporters say) and he was stripped of his Thai citizenship. To avoid imprisonment, Thaksin fled the country, and now lives and holds court in Dubai, and has, intriguingly, become a citizen of Montenegro.

The government and its Yellow Shirt supporters claim that Thaksin is bankrolling the Red Shirts’ protest. A friend in Bangkok muttered darkly to me last week that the reason for the Red Shirts’ protest is that they are each being paid 300 baht a day – about $9 – to protest, more than they could make if they were working. He went on to describe the Red Shirts as “disgusting,” and said that he is “ashamed” that the authorities have not acted more decisively to put an end to the protests (Update: Two weeks after I wrote this, the authorities did just that, with bloody consequences. See my note at the end of this piece.)

The main demand of the Red Shirts is that the current Prime Minister dissolve Parliament and hold new elections – elections which the Red Shirts believe that they would win.

As I left Bangkok on May 6, the Red Shirts were still camped out in central Bangkok. Violence had flared up two weeks earlier, and 25 people – protesters and police – were killed. Another two died the day I left Thailand. But the Red Shirts and the government appeared to be inching toward a compromise. The Prime Minister agreed to hold elections in November; the Red Shirt leaders welcomed this but demanded more guarantees before dismantling their barricades.

Perhaps this phase of the conflict is drawing to a close. But the basic economic and political geography of Thailand’s troubles, and the profound imbalance between the primate city and rural areas, remain. If elections are held in November, and if they are free and fair, it seems likely that parties championing the rural majority would triumph over those representing the Bangkok elite.  It is difficult to imagine that an era of political stability would follow. I hope, though, that if political instability does continue, it is the kind of peaceful instability that seems to be a Thai specialty.  It was epitomized in the bloodless 2006 coup, after which the military general who took charge appeared on television to apologize to the Thai people for any inconvenience caused by the coup.

Meanwhile, life in most of Thailand and most of Bangkok proceeds as normal. The streets are clogged with traffic, sidewalk vendors sell some of the world’s most delicious street foods, and thriving day and night-markets ensure that the city bustles 24/7.

Except that is, for those who rely on the country substantial tourist industry for their livelihoods. The demonstrations, and the recommendations of the U.S. State Department and others, have hit the tourist industry hard. For the first time ever, I did not have to wait in line to pass through immigration or customs at Bangkok’s Suvarnambhumi Airport. A friend and I were the only diners in large tourist-oriented restaurant near my hotel (which was offering 40 percent discounts in an effort to attract visitors.)

Update – June 2010

I was back in Bangkok a couple of weeks after I wrote this blog entry, and the situation was very different. On the day I arrived, government forces had acted forcibly to eject the Red Shirts from their encampment in central Bangkok. Red Shirt leaders surrendered, and protesters set fire to Thailand’s largest shopping mall, near the protest site. The government imposted a curfew, prohibiting anyone from been out of doors overnight in Bangkok and several other parts of the country.

I arrived in Bangkok late on the first night of the curfew.  I had been advised by a friend in the city not to try to go to the city center; it would be too dangerous, he said.  As it turned out, I wouldn’t have been able to get there. Although taxis transporting foreigners were exempt from the provisions of the curfew, there were hardly any taxis at the airport, and as far as I could gather none of them would have taken me into the city center anyway. I eventually found an overpriced airport limo to take me to a hotel on the outskirts of the city.

I have been to Bangkok many times, and in my experience, there is always traffic on the roads. On this night, I had the surreal experience of traveling along a six lane highway from the airport, with no other cars on the road for most of the 20 minute journey. As left the airport, I saw a small pile of burning tires on the roadside; in the distance I could see plumes of smoke rising above the lights of the city center. My taxi was stopped twice at military roadblocks, but we were waved through without incident. Next day, I returned to the airport, again without problems, to catch a flight to Cambodia

A week later, I returned to Thailand, this time to visit the city of Pattaya. Much of the country was still under curfew, but Pattaya had been exempted after two nights because its economy depends so heavily on the kinds of economic activity that take place primarily by night. Although the town was bustling, some local business people I spoke to told me that they had been seriously affected by Thailand’s political troubles during the preceding months.

My advice to would-be visitors to Thailand – or any other ‘troubled’ part of the world – is that they look at a map, do the math, and understand that the advisories issued by the U.S. State Department sometimes tend toward the paranoid.  Thailand is a country the size of Spain and home to nearly 70 million people. Protests – which despite the violence that ended them were primarily peaceful – took place in a small area of the very large city of Bangkok. Around 40 people died in the protests, none of them foreign tourists (most of whom were far away the beaches of Phuket, Koh Samui, and Pattaya) For Americans or Europeans coming to Thailand on vacation even at a time like this, the greatest danger will be the same as it has always been in Bangkok and London: looking left instead of right when crossing the street.

____

The photograph at the top of this post is from an excellent collection by photographer Gavin Gough, who also provides a compelling description of the events and atmosphere in the streets of Bangkok during the protests.

It's not bribery, it's anticipatory gratitude. (The bar is in Sihanoukville, Cambodia)

“Two men appeared before a Gaborone Village magistrate charged with “living beyond their means”, an offence contrary to Section 34 of the Corruption and Economic Crime Act Cap 08:05, Laws of Botswana.It is alleged that Victor Basinyi, aged 34, and Omphitlhetse Mmoloki Tsime, 26, on the 12th May 2004 in Gaborone, were found in possession and control of assets that reflected a standard of living that was not commensurate with their present or past known sources of income or assets. The accused failed to give a satisfactory explanation as to how they were able to maintain such a standard of living, or how so much money and property came under their control or possession.”
Botswana Gazette, November 24, 2009.

__________

Some of the Lexus SUVs I photographed in the space of 30 minutes around Phnom Penh's Central Market, January 2010.

I rather suspect that, were Botswana’s Corruption and Economic Crime Act to apply in Cambodia, more than a few Cambodians would run afoul of it. Exhibit A in just about every trial under the Act would be a Lexus SUV. Nowhere in the world have I ever seen so many of them as I have in Phnom Penh. And in many of them, displayed on the dashboard, is card identifying the driver as a government – and frequently a military – official. Some of these vehicles have government license plates but most do not; they are the personal property of the government officials driving them.

To put this in context: according to the World Bank, Cambodia’s Gross National Income per capita was $600 in 2008. Around 70 percent of the country’s population is engaged in subsistence farming. 35 percent of the population live below the country’s official poverty line. Of the 182 countries ranked the the United Nations Development program on the basis of their Human Development Index, Cambodia comes in at number 137. But mid-level government bureaucrats can afford Lexus SUVs. It just doesn’t pass the smell test.

But here is a clue: just two weeks ago, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen announced the formation of 42 “official partnerships” between the military and private businesses. A government memo explains that the partnerships will help “solve the dire situation of the armed forces, police, military police, and their families through a culture of sharing.” Well, that explains the Lexuses; it’s all about sharing.

In a 2009 report the group Global Witness offered its explanation:

“Cambodia today is a country for sale. Having made their fortunes from logging much of the country’s forest resources, Cambodia’s elite have diversified their commercial interests to encompass other forms of state assets. These include land, fisheries, tropical islands and beaches, minerals and petroleum. The country is rapidly being parcelled up and sold off. Over the past 15 years, 45 per cent of the country’s land has been purchased by private interests. The economic wisdom of the sell-off has yet to be proven. The social and environmental consequences have already been devastating.”

Rights to exploit oil and mineral resources have, according to Global Witness, “been allocated behind closed doors by a small number of powerbrokers surrounding the prime minister and other senior officials.”

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I have never witnessed any corruption first-hand in Cambodia (unless you count a request from an immigration official at Phnom Penh airport for “a dollar for a cup of coffee”) although I have ridden in the Lexuses of a military police officer and a university deanlet. But I have heard and read allegations of corruption from Cambodians from all walks of life.  From a taxi driver who reports on persuading police officers to overlook traffic violations in exchange for small gifts.  From a student quoted in today’s Phom Penh Post: “I have had experience with corruption since I was in high school [when] I gave money to the teachers to cheat on the exams.” (“How else can they survive?” a Cambodian asks me. “They aren’t paid enough to live on.”) From a report in yesterday’s paper in which a shantytown resident tells of firefighters letting her home burn to the ground while saving the home of a neighbor who paid them a bribe (a Cambodian friend tells me that this is common fire department practice.)

Part of the shantytown destroyed by fire in Phnom Penh this week. The area is slated for 'development' and residents will not be allowed to return.

Actually, the whole shantytown burned down; I saw the flames as I passed by a few nights ago, and visited the area the following day. The fire destroyed 158 homes as well as a dormitory housing Buddhist monks at a neighboring temple. The neighborhood in question had apparently been targeted for removal for some time, but residents had successfully resisted pressures to move. Now, fortuitously for the authorities, the shantytown has gone, and officials were quick to announce that residents will not be allowed to rebuild their homes. The eviction of poor city residents is not something new; the BBC reported in 2006 on a pattern of “slum clearance” followed by the building of upmarket housing projects by politically well-connected developers.

The anti-corruption group Transparency International lends credibility to allegations of widespread corruption in Cambodia. In its 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index, the country comes 158th out of 180 countries ranked (New Zealand is the least corrupt country at number 1, Afghanistan and Somalia are at the bottom of the list.) According to US Ambassador Carol A. Rodney, corruption costs Cambodia $500 million a year, enough to build 20,000 six-room schools or pay every civil servant $260 per month.

But perhaps help is on the way. Cambodia’s parliament yesterday passed a government-sponsored anti-corruption law (fifteen years after such a measure was first proposed.) The law will create a commission to keep tabs on corruption in the private sector and in government. The Commission’s members will be appointed by the government and report to the government. Government officials would be required to report their assets to the Government, but these reports would be kept secret. I suspect that Phnom Penh’s Lexus fleet is in no danger.

Sihanoukville, March 2010

The iconic image of Cambodia is that of Angkor Wat, the largest and one of the best-preserved temples in the huge complex that made up the city of Angkor. From the 9^th to the 14^th century, this was the capital of a Khmer Kingdom that included not only modern-day Cambodia, but also most of Laos and Thailand and a good part of southern Vietnam.

Angkor may have marked the heyday of the Khmer Empire, but it certainly was not its beginning. According to historian David Chandler, Cambodian history goes back at least two thousand years, and a lot more than that if we take into account archaeological evidence of Khmer-like people living in the area around 1500 BCE.

Against the backdrop of this long and illustrious history, the city of Sihanoukville is an oddity: a city less than six decades old. At the time of the French withdrawal from Indochina in 1954 all that existed here were a few small fishing villages. It was the end of French colonialism in Southeast Asia, though, that led to the establishment of Sihanoukville.

One of Sihanoukville's beaches, this one popular with foreign tourists

During the colonial era modern day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia comprised the territory of French Indochina. Access to Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh as well as to the country’s hinterland was primarily along the Mekong, the premier river of Southeast Asia (access to Laos was essentially non-existent.) With the coming of independence, though, Cambodia needed unfettered access to its own seaport.  With its sheltered location on the Gulf of Thailand, about 180 km from Phnom Penh, Kompong Som (“agreeable port”) was chosen as the site of Cambodia’s newest city. Construction on the port began in 1955, and the town was renamed Sihanoukville, after then-King Norodom Sihanouk.

I did not realize it when I made my plans, but my visit to Sihanoukville coincided with a holiday weekend. The Phnom Penh bus station where I began my journey was crowded, mostly with Cambodians heading home for the weekend, but there were also a few foreigners like myself heading out of the city.

A inter-city bus journey of 180 km would take two hours on a US interstate or a Chinese highway. But Cambodia’s Route 4 is not a US or Chinese road. It is two lanes wide, mostly shoulderless, its surface corrugated and pitted by the heavy trucks carrying cargo between the capital and the port.  Not surprisingly, this road is known as Cambodia’s most dangerous (a tourist brochure in my Sihanoukville hotel warned that although it is possible to make the journey from Phnom Penh by car or on a motorcycle, visitors need to be aware that accidents are frequent and emergency services unavailable on Highway 4.) My bus journey to Sihanoukville took four and a half hours, the journey back nearly six.

The trip began on the crowded and chaotic streets of central Phnom, and continued on to the crowded and chaotic streets of suburban Phnom Penh. On the outskirts of the city stores and apartments gave way to low-roofed factories, many of them housing clothing manufacturers drawn to the country by the availability of very cheap labor (My Cambodian traveling companion informed me that workers in these factories earn about $60 a month of six day weeks, and amount they might be able to double with overtime pay.)

Smoke rises from a forested area close to the Phnom Pehn - Sihanoukville road.

After the factories came flat expanses of dirt baked hard by the sun; this is the dry season, and in a few months time this area will be transformed into rice paddies. Another hour into the journey and the terrain became hilly, with slopes in the distance covered with forest. This is the wettest area of Cambodia; monsoon winds blowing off sea and up the mountainsides drop more than 3,000 mm of rainfall here each year, and the dry season in this area is short. The Cardamom Mountains and Elephant Ranges of southwest Cambodia are home to some of the most species-rich habitats in mainland Southeast Asia. Luckily for the local environment, much of the area is difficult to reach (other parts are still made hazardous by the presence of 1970s-era landmines.)  Large tracts of this area have been designated as national parks, but parks are poorly staffed and enforcement of protections is so that the World Wildlife Fund has described these as “paper parks.” Logging and the trade in endangered wildlife are threatening more and more of this area.

I saw some evidence of the destruction of forests through my bus window. As we approached the mountains, the sky became hazy, and I could see plumes of smoke on the horizon. These were probably signs of illegal logging; large sacks of charcoal for sale on the roadside provided further evidence.  Close to the road, forest had been cleared to make way for small farms and large plantations of that ubiquitous tropical Southeast Asian crop – oil palm.

The gleaming new entrance to the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone. If I had been here just 24 hours later I would have been able to witness the official inauguration ceremony of this gate, attended by luminaries from the Sihanoukville Provincial government and the Chinese embassy.

Tracts of recently cleared and leveled land dotted with brand new single story factories were the first signs that the bus was approaching Sihanoukville.  A tall and modern-looking structure marked the entrance to the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone, a joint economic project between Cambodia and China, inaugurated in early 2008. The project’s developers claim that by 2015 the Zone will house some 300 companies, provide 80,000 jobs, and generate $2 billion worth of exports.

The developer’s projections may be wildly optimistic, but there is no doubt that Sihanoukville is a booming town. Nowhere outside of China have I seen so many construction projects underway in such a small area: shopping centers, office parks, industrial buildings and, near the beach, guest houses and hotels.

Guest houses and hotels are evidence of another large industry in Sihanoukville: tourism. The is Cambodia’s main beach resort, and attracts both locals and foreigners (Though, for the most part, they go to separate beaches. I saw Cambodians relaxing under cover and out of the sun, many of them swimming clothed. Foreigners – mainly European and Australian – lay in the sun or under umbrellas, wearing speedos and bikinis.)

Entrance to Sihanoukville port

Despite its calm sea, sandy beaches, magnificent offshore islands, and low prices, Sihanoukville has not yet become a major destination for visitors to Southeast Asia (the backpackers’ bible, Lonely Planet, includes it in a “Roads Less Travelled Cambodia itinerary.”) But I suspect that this is going to change, and soon. The new and luxurious Sokha Beach Resort has rooms starting at $160 a night, and additional rooms are under construction (a far cry from my $35 a night accommodation.) There is talk of direct flights from Siem Reap (near Angkor, currently the only Cambodian stop for most visitors to the country); this would allow upmarket visitors to avoid the bone rattling and nerve wracking journey along Cambodia’s Most Dangerous Highway.  I would hazard a guess that Sihanoukville – now blissfully free of fast food vendors, souvenir shops, and t-shirt sellers – will be a very different place five years from now.

Sunset at Sihanoukville

Ironically, it seems that Sihanoukville’s port may be one part of this city that is not booming at the moment. According to the Phnom Penh Post, 70 percent of the port’s freight traffic is linked to the US, Cambodia’s export market. As a result, port revenues slumped in 2009, although they show signs of improving in 2010. But the port has also seen its business cannibalized by Phnom Penh’s port which, although smaller, has been growing since the opening of a new deep water port at the mouth of the Mekong in southern Vietnam (and much closer to the US by sea than Sihanoukville is.)

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to visit Sihanoukville’s port. Like ports worldwide, this one is very picky about who is allowed to enter the premises. Geographers with cameras, I learned, don’t make the cut. So I had to gaze from afar at the port and the two ships docked there (a cargo vessel and an aging passenger ship apparently abandoned when its owners went bankrupt.)

Shut out of the port, I had no choice but to return to my hotel, don a swimsuit, and head to the beach to sip on a locally manufactured product, share a $10 local meal (grilled whole snapper, squid, and prawns) with a friend, and watch the sun set over the Gulf of Thailand.

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In writing this review, I drew on David Chandler’s A History of Cambodia (Westview Press, 1966.)

In most parts of the world, traffic laws are fairly similar. Stop for red lights, stay on your side of the road except in passing zones, only pass when it’s safe to do so, obey the speed limit, and so on.

What differs from country to country is driver behavior and, more generally, road culture.  In my travels, I have reached the conclusion that road culture is every bit as important as religion, economics, politics, or food when it comes to understanding what makes a place and its people tick.

I pondered this as I stood for twenty minutes or more just watching the traffic at an intersection near my hotel in Phnom Penh. What I saw was a distinctly Cambodian scene.  Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself:

I find two things most striking about what I witnessed at this intersection. First, despite its superficial chaos, whatever is happening here seems to work. Second, nobody gets mad.

There are some lessons here for drivers all around the world to learn. Australians might notice, for example, that the functionality of this intersection does not depend on rigid adherence to traffic laws by all drivers (I have never come across drivers – or pedestrians – as law-abiding as those in Australia.)

Israelis might note that nobody is shouting, swearing, or waving fists at anybody else in this scene (The US State Department has gone so far as to issue a warning to visitors to Israel that drivers are dangerous and don’t obey traffic laws.)

Americans likewise might take heed at the fact that there is no evidence in this Phnom Penh scene of road rage, or even road irritation. (It is also noteworthy that despite someone being cut off virtually every second in this scene, nobody gets shot.)

I have never driven in Cambodia, and I don’t think I am likely to do so. I am not laid back enough behind the wheel.  A near miss on the road shakes me up. If somebody cuts in front of me I take it personally. I lack the gumption to push in front of another vehicle. And I don’t have the courage to drive on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic.

But above all, I am unsuited to driving in Cambodia because I lack what seems to be the essential prerequisite for driving in this country: faith.  Cambodian drivers, it seems, just know that they will get to the other side of the intersection, even though other traffic may be converging on them from all directions. They believe that other drivers will avoid hitting them, just as they will avoid hitting others. They have the serenity to accept that that the conduct of other drivers is something they cannot change. They understand the difference between cutting off and cutting in, and appreciate that the latter is not motivated by any aggressive or personal intent whereas the former is (and is therefore to be avoided.). They have the utmost faith that despite the laws of physics and the immutability of statistical probability that they will get to their destinations today, just as they did yesterday.

And, on most days in this city, most people do.*

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*But not everybody does. Update March 5, 2010: According to an article in the Phnom Penh Post today, the Minister of Public Works and Transportation (who also heads the National Road Safety Commission) the road fatality rate in Cambodia is 12.6 per 100,000 population. The US rate is 14,2, the UK rate is 5.4,  Japan’s is 5.7.  Considering that very few Cambodians drive vehicles, though, Cambodia’s road fatality rate might suggest that faith alone isn’t enough to protect the country’s drivers.

Cruise ship at Labadee, Haiti (AP photo from The Guardian)

“Sixty miles from Haiti’s devastated earthquake zone, luxury liners dock at private beaches where passengers enjoy jetski rides, parasailing and rum cocktails delivered to their hammocks.”
The Guardian, January 17, 2010 (Five days after the Haiti earthquake.)
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NPR interviewer: And what do people do when they go ashore at Labadee? [Royal Caribbean’s custom-built resort for cruise ship passengers in Haiti]

Adam Goldstein: [CEO, Royal Caribbean International]: They have fun and they enjoy themselves… We’ve just invested $50 million into the property. I think Royal Caribbean is Haiti’s largest foreign direct investor in any industry. We actually have a pier there now. We also have put in some fairly significant attractions, like a long zip line over the water and an alpine-style coaster on the hill, as well as cabanas and restaurants. So it’s a very full day, and now our guests understand in coming there that they are proximate to the affected area.”
National Public Radio, January 19, 2010
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“Monies that are coming in as part of tourism are going to trickle down throughout the local economy at a time when the local people need it the most,” said Brian Mullis, president of Sustainable Travel International, a nonprofit organization that promotes responsible travel. Because visitors can have a positive effect during their stay, tourism should still be taking place in Haiti, even at this terrible time, Mullis said.”
CNN, January 21, 2010
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I can understand the economic reasoning, and I accept the argument that Haiti needs those tourist dollars now more than ever. But at the same time I find the thought of tourists frolicking on the beaches of Haiti less than a week after the earthquake disturbing. What do you think?

Updated January 14, 6 am.

I am writing these words less than 24 hours after the disastrous January 12 earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince in Haiti.  I have CNN on in front of me, and it seems to that despite the non-stop coverage of the disaster, nobody really knows what is going on, how many people have lost their lives, or how many have been injured. But what is clear is that this is a disaster of epic proportions, and that its human impact will be at least as severe as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and possibly even as profound as that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

In order to understand the impact of this earthquake, though, we need to go beyond the live reports and graphic photographs, and ask why this  earthquake in this place has been so devastating. It was a powerful quake, to be sure, but other quakes as or even more more powerful than this have done less damage and killed fewer people. The answer to this question lies in the physical and human geography of Haiti.

The Physical Geography of the Earthquake

To understand the Haiti earthquake and its consequences, we first need to ask why the earthquake (and its powerful aftershocks) occurred here rather than anywhere else. The answer to this question can be found by examining the structure of the earth, and in particular the geographic configuration of the earth’s tectonic plates.

The earth's tectonic plates (from U.S. Geological Survey. Click to enlarge the image)

Most earthquakes are caused by movement along the boundaries of the massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. Yesterday’s Haiti earthquake was caused by movement at the boundary of the Caribbean and North American plates. In this area, the Caribbean plate is moving eastward with respect to the north American plate at an average speed of about 20 mm per year. This movement doesn’t take place smoothly, but rather in a series of jolts, which can produce earthquakes of varying sizes. In the area where yesterday’s quake occurred, there had been little movement for 250 years, according to a British geologist. “It’s been gathering stress all that time as the plates move past each other, and it was really just a matter of time before it released all that energy. The question was going to be whether it would release it all at once or in a series of smaller earthquakes,” he told the BBC.

Yesterday’s quake had a magnitude of 7.0 (this is a measure of the amount of energy released by the quake,) and was followed by numerous aftershocks, many of them with magnitudes of over 5.0.

The location and intensity of the earthquake, and the location of aftershocks. (Source: Washington Post)

Earthquakes can take place at various depths below the surface, and be caused by either vertical or horizontal movement of rock (or a combination of both.) The Haiti quake was caused by horizontal movement, and took place at a depth of about 10km below the surface. This is a relatively shallow earthquake, and its shallowness contruibuted to its devastating power (earthquakes that take place deep below the surface tend to cause less damage, since the rock between the quake and the surface acts as a buffer, absorbing some of the quake’s energy.)

The topography of the area affected by the quake appears also to have contributed to the devastation. Many of the of  Port-au-Prince’s residential area have been built on hillsides surrounding the city, and early photographs of the damage show that many homes appear to have tumbled down the slopes under the force of the quake (see below.)

Physical geography has been unkind to Haiti not just in terms of seismic activity. The country also lies in the path of North Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms. In 2008, four such storms hit the country, causing widespread damage and the loss of several hundred lives. early a tenth of the country’s population needed humanitarian assistance as a result of the storms.The effect of storms in Haiti is exacerbated by the fact that most of the country’s trees have been cut down to make charcoal, which is used, particularly in the poorest households,  for cooking. Today, only 3 percent of the country’s original forests remain.  Deforestation, by removing the natural ‘sponge’ that absorbs rainfall, means that storms would otherwise have done little harm now cause floods and landslides.

The Human Geography of Haiti

Population Geography. Not all earthquakes cause disasters. In fact, not even all powerful earthquakes cause disasters. If a quake takes place in an unpopulated area it may cause little or no damage. Earthquakes are fairly common in parts of Siberia, for example, but seldom make the news because the hardly anybody lives there.

The Haiti earthquake, however, struck a densely populated part of a densely populated country. Haiti’s population of 9.2 million people live in a country about the size of Maryland (making it the second most densely populated country in the Americas, after El Salvador.) The epicenter of the quake was just south of Port-au-Prince, the country’s  largest city and most densely populated area. Had the epicenter of the quake been a rural part of the country, the damage would have been considerably less severe.

Economic geography also plays a role in determining the extent of damage and loss of life in earthquakes. Wealthy countries like the United States, Japan and New Zealand are located near tectonic plate boundaries, and are also periodically struck by earthquakes. But these countries can afford  geologists to assess where quakes are most likely,  and engineers and architects to design earthquake resistant roads and buildings. When earthquakes occur, they have the expertise and resources to mount effective search and rescue campaigns, hospitals and medical personnel to treat the injured, and funds to rebuild in the quake’s aftermath.

In 1995, a shallow earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 struck near Kobe, a Japanese city larger and more densely populated than Port-au-Prince. Many buildings were damaged, a highway collapsed, and 5,100 people lost their lives. This was a terrible disaster, to be sure, but even at this early stage it seems certain that far most people in Haiti will lose their lives or their homes. The reason: Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and Haiti is one of the poorest. And, as Nicholas Kristof observes in his blog “Frequently what kills people in … disasters isn’t just nature but its interconnection with poverty.”

Every year United Nations Development Program ranks the countries in the world on the basis of their Human Development Index, essentially a measure of human material wellbeing. In 2009, Haiti was came 149th out of 182 countries ranked by the UNDP. Its ranking was ahead of that of most of Sub-Saharan Africa, but far behind other Latin American and Caribbean countries. Average life expectancy in Haiti is 61 years, and four out of ten Haitians are illiterate. According to the World Bank, the country’s Gross National Income per capita was $560, and more than half the population lives on less than one dollar a day and 78% on less that two. Not everybody in Haiti is poor, though. One percent of the country’s population controls nearly half of Haiti’s wealth.

Shantytown at Canapé Vert in 2004 (Photo from AFP.)

In this earthquake, it appears that  the worst hit areas of  Port-au-Prince are also its poorest areas, where tens of thousands of people live in densely packed shantytowns. Like shantytowns anywhere, Haiti’s shantytown are usually on the least desirable land. The Canapé Vert area of Port-au-Prince is such a place; steep hillslopes make the land useless for most purposes, so poor people have moved in and built their homes here. The photograph on the left shows Canapé Vert in 2004. Residents of shantytowns usually build their homes themselves, with whatever they can afford and whatever is available nearby: wood, mud, cheap concrete or bricks. This means that the homes are often not very sturdily constructed. In an earthquake-prone area like Haiti, this means that the poorest and most densely populated areas are often also the most vulnerable to damage. The photograph below shows part of Canapé Vert after the earthquake (it is impossible to tell, though, whether this is the same area pictured in the photograph above.)

Collapsed buildings on a hillslope in the Canapé Vert area of Port-au-Prince.

But it is not only the poorer areas of Port-au-Prince where buldings are poorly constructed. According to American architects and engineers who have worked in Haiti, “most if not all of the buildings have major engineering flaws.” Because of large scale deforestation, wood is scarce and expensive, so most buildings are made of poured concrete or block. But concrete is imported and therefore expensive, so it is frequently diluted by adding sand to the mix. Steel reinforcing is also expensive, so builders often skimp on it too. It is hardly any wonder that so many buildings succumbed during the earthquake.

Political Geography. Haiti is not only the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it has historically also been one of the most unstable politically. The country managed to throw off French colonial control – and slavery – in the early 19th century, making it the first country in the Caribbean to attain its independence. But for much of its subsequent history, the country has been wracked by conflict between its small French-speaking minority and its poor, Creole speaking black majority (decendants of slaves brought to the country under French rule.)

During the late 20th century, the country was forced to endure near three decades of dictatorship under Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc.” Their rule was brutal, and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The election of a civilian leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1990 gave many hope, but he was soon overthrown in a military coup. Backed by US military intervention, Aristide was restored to power in 1994, but in the following decade years of his rule, the situation in Haiti did not improve much. He was eventually ousted in 2004, and a UN stabilization force was sent to the country to help end widespread clashes between gangs and political groups. But widespread violence continued to plague the country, and the human rights situation remained bleak.

A Natural Disaster?

There is no such thing as a purely natural disaster. When the earth shakes, a volcano erupts, or a hurricane strikes, we measure its impact mainly by the toll it exacts on human beings and the infrastructure that sustains them. This impact is partly a consequence of the intensity of the natural event, but that impact is either exacerbated or mitigated by the various geographies of the disaster. How many people live there? Where, exactly, do they live – on hillslopes, in valleys, on flat land, or along the ocean? How wealthy are they? How well are there homes built? What building regulations exist in the area, and how well are they enforced? How extensive is the  transportation and communication infrastructure in the area? How well developed is the medical infrastructure of the area?

Yesterday’s earthquake was not only powerful, but it also struck just about the worst possible place at the worst possible time. It struck the most populated part of one of the world’s poorest countries less than a year after a series of damaging storms. It struck a place where a history of political instability and ineffectual government meant that infrastructure was meager, urban planning was poor non-existent, and building codes were weak or weakly enforced. Rescuing quake survivors will obviously be very difficult, as will treating their wounds and tending to the needs of survivors. Finally, reconstruction will require far more resources than Haiti has or is ever likely to have.

What it already clear is that Haiti will need all the help it can get in terms of material resources, human expertise, and political support. The devastation will be severe no matter what happens, but each one of us can help Haiti, albeit in small ways. For a start, we can share our resources with those in need (I have listed below some worthy organizations that are now accepting donations to help the residents of Haiti.) Second, we can make sure that we educate ourselves about this tragedy, and what makes ‘natural’ disasters so disastrous. That way we will be in position to foresee them, and help others do likewise. And third, we can make sure that we, and our political leaders, don’t forget Haiti after the camera crews and reporters leave.

Update: For a persuasive response to the pernicious argument that there is no point in sending assistance to Haiti, take a loook at this column by Nicholas Kristof.

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For more information, see…

Country profile: Haiti, from BBC News.

Information on the Haiti earthquake from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics (USGS)

And also look at Google Earth’s images and information from Haiti.

To help. consider making a donation to…

Partners in Health “At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone.”

Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders)

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

World Food Programme.

Save the Children.

Note: I am not an expert on Haiti, or on earthquakes. If anyone reading this post spots any errors or significant omissions, I encourage you to contact me or post a comment here.

Donald N Rallis

Tra in Phnom Penh, January 2010

Note: This post was updated on March 6, 2010.

Tra was born in 1982 in Cambodia’s Takeo Province, a predominantly rural area two hour’s bus ride south of Phnom Penh. His parents were – and are – farmers, living in a small village, and raising rice on about 3 hectares of land surrounding their home.

I visited Tra’s family in March 2010, and spent a night with them in their home. Theirs is a typical Cambodian rural farmstead: a small house, sitting on 3 meter high stilts, with a sheltered area beneath that is used as a living and cooking area, and also for keeping some livestock. Water comes from a well behind the house, operated with a handpump. Alongside the pump is a large urn of water, used for bathing. The home has no electricity, and no sanitation facilities. (I have posted photographs from my visit here.)

Tra is the second oldest of four siblings. For most of his childhood he lived with his parents and his maternal grandmother. He grew up with the legacy of two recent conflicts, the Vietnam War, and the genocide that took place during the four year rule of the Khmer Rouge.

To call the conflict in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and early 1970s the ‘Vietnam War’ is to do a grave injustice to Cambodians like Tra’s family. The war wasn’t restricted to Vietnam; in the 1970s it was expanded by the US to include the widespread bombing of parts of Cambodia and Laos, in particularly the Vietcong resupply route known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Tra's family home in Takeo Province. One of the advantages of having a house on stilts is that the design provides a cool and protected living below. Upstairs is the family's sleeping area.

Tra was born nearly a decade after the American bombing ended, but he grew up with its legacy. He and his siblings used to swim in craters left by US bombs, now filled with water. Some, he recalls, were up to three meters deep. More ominously, his two younger brothers had a close call when playing in the forest near their home. There they came across a round object they thought was some kind of fruit. The younger brother wanted to cut it open with a knife to get to the fruit inside. The older boy, more suspicious than his sibling, instead took it and threw it into the undergrowth, where it exploded, showering them with dirt and mud. Miraculously, they escaped injury. Numerous other Cambodians and Laotians have not been so lucky, losing limbs, eyes, or lives to UXOs, unexploded ordinance.

Pol Pot’s murderous rule, from 1975 – 1979, had a more lethal impact on Tra’s family than did the Vietnam war. Tra’s grandfather died of starvation, the most common cause of death among Cambodians during this time. Some of his more educated relatives – including a great uncle who was a lawyer, and a great aunt who was a professor – fell victim to the campaign by the Khmer Rouge to rid the country of its intellectuals and wealthier classes. They were arrested and presumably killed. I met Tra’s 87 year old great uncle during my visit to Takeo Province: he told me that he lost all nine of his children under the Pol Pot regime.

As a child, Tra worked on his parents' farm, replanting rice shoots in a paddy like this.

Another relative, severely beaten by Khmer Rouge soldiers, somehow managed to survive, her baby in her arms, and made it across the border into Thailand. There her fractured skull was treated by members of a humanitarian group, which also helped her to gain asylum in the US. She made a home for herself in southern California, selling cakes to the local Cambodian community and working in a local factory to earn money to support herself and her young son. Life was a struggle, but she and her son worked hard, and today that son has a Ph.D. and a good job in the U.S.

Tra owes a particular debt to another aunt – I’ll call her Ra – his mother’s younger sister. After completing high school, Ra moved to Phnom Penh and found a job working in the post office, then obtained a government scholarship to study in Moscow. Upon her return – now proficient in Russian, French, English and Cambodian – she obtained a job in the Ministry of Agriculture. Then, thanks to the sponsorship of a relative who worked at the Cambodian embassy in Canberra, she managed to apply for a visa to emigrate to Australia.  Her application was successful, and today works as a social worker with drug addicts and homeless people in Sydney.  She has told Tra that she doesn’t need much money or a fancy home. Instead, she prefers to help other members of her family gain the kind of education that will allow them to escape poverty and succeed in life.

Part of the living area underneath Tra's family home.

Tra lived with another aunt for several years when he was a child, since his parents lacked the resources to support their four children. But it was Ra who took a particular interest in Tra; she thinks of him, he says, as her son. Ra made sure that Tra finished high school, and encouraged him to continue his studies at a university.  But more pressing concerns intervened: Tra’s sister had been diagnosed with a mental illness, and the money sent by his aunt for his education had to be used instead for her treatment. So it was three years after his high school graduation that Tra eventually began his studies at university in Phnom Penh. Without Ra’s help, he says, he would never have been able to afford the $382 annual tuition costs for the first two years (rising to $500 for the third and fourth years.)

University was a struggle for Tra.  He had always done well in school, was a diligent worker, and was intellectually more than competent to cope with university work.  But there were challenges, among them the fact that he had never before used a computer (Neither his childhood home nor the nearby village had electricity, let alone internet connections.) When a class assignment required him to use a word processor, he was at a loss. When required to do some internet-based research, he had no idea what to do. So he went to an internet café and asked for help.

Academically, he did fine, but economically and socially he faced significant challenges.  First, he had to work at a full time job; his aunt was paying his tuition, but he needed to find money for his living expenses. He found a job with a relative: in exchange for working in her small restaurant for six hours a day, she provided him with accommodation on an open balcony, plus a salary of $5 a month. For several years he lived on that balcony, studying at night by candlelight, rising early to work in the restaurant, then heading to campus on his bicycle at noon.

As a student, Tra was something of a recluse. Although his classmates invited him to socialize with them, he felt that he couldn’t do so because of his financial circumstances.  If they invited him to join them for lunch, he had to make up an excuse, since he didn’t have money to buy lunch. After school, he would wait until his classmates had all left campus on their motorcycles before pedaling home on his bicycle. But he managed to graduate in four years, and set about looking for a job in Phnom Penh.

Finding a job wasn’t easy. His first job was as a cleaner in a café; after being dismissed from that job he was unemployed for a year, before finding employment as a bartender at a local hotel.

Tra found his current job in 2008; it is an office job with a shipping company, and he works on arranging the shipping of goods in and out of Cambodia. He works 5½ days a week, and earns a monthly salary of $170.

He could make a lot more money, Tra says, in government service. The customs service is particularly lucrative; he knows of people making up to $4,000 a month. Their salaries are not much different from his, but their incomes come from the opportunities that positions of power and authority provide in Cambodia. For a person who wants to make a living honestly in this country, it appears that opportunities are limited. (Even Phnom Penh public school teachers, Tra tells me, supplement their income by selling stationery and supplies to students, levying a 100 riehl (about 3c) daily fee on each student, and accepting payments for increased grades. He didn’t encounter this kind of corruption in his rural school; students simply wouldn’t have been able to afford the payments, and would have dropped out of school if forced to pay.)

Today Tra lives in a room he rents for $100 a month in a building not far from his place of work. Cheaper rooms are available on the city’s outskirts, but since he still has to rely on his bicycle to get around, he has to live here. The room is about 20 square meters (200 square feet) in size, and has a small cold-water bathroom. Water and electricity cost about $30 a month.

Tra could not afford a place like this on his salary alone, and so shares the room with his sister and a 22-year-old cousin. His sister and cousin sleep on beds, he on a mat on the floor. His sister suffers from mental illness, and cannot work, so she takes care of the room, does the laundry, and buys food (he gives her $2.50 a day to shop for the three of them. He provides another $20 per month for her medications.) The cousin is a current beneficiary of the Aunt Ra’s largesse; she is paying for his college tuition. Tra worries about him, though, and has taken him to task several times for not devoting enough time and effort to his studies. “You are here to study,” he tells his cousin, “Not to hang around with friends.”

As I listened to Tra’s story, I reflected on my own background. My primary and secondary education at one of South Africa’s best private schools, undergraduate work at the country’s top university (free because my father was a faculty member there.) What I thought of as a poorly paid teaching assistantships saw me through my Masters and doctoral studies in the U.S. (In the 1980s, I was earning three times as much for my part-time assistantship as Tra earns tweny five years later for his 45 hour-a week job.) I thought back on the “struggles” I had during those years, and how much I had bemoaned my impecunious circumstances as a graduate student and young faculty member, and about how much I complain now about the poor pay of a US college professor.

I felt humbled as I realized that my accomplishments pale by comparison with those of a person like Tra (and there are millions of Tras around the world.) I had to work for my successes to be sure, but they came relatively easily, my path having being smoothed by the accidents of my birth, geography, and circumstance, by the efforts of my parents, and by the various networks I had access to. Although my parents were not particularly well-off, and I am today far from wealthy by American standards, I have never had to worry about whether I could afford a meal, whether I had enough money to make the journey to school or work, or whether I could pay for a place to live.

I learned Tra’s story over the course of a few days, in conversations over meals and as he showed me around Phnom Penh.  He related the facts of his life in a matter-of-fact way, without a hint of complaint or self-pity. I was awed by his determination to get an education and his resilience in overcoming the enormous obstacles that faced him during his childhood and youth, and that face him now as he tries to fashion a career for himself in 21^st century Cambodia.

I told Tra of my respect and admiration for him and his achievements, and I asked him whether I might write about him for this blog. “Why?” he answered, “I’m just a normal guy.”

Donald N. Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
January 5, 2010

Update: When I visited Cambodia again in March 2010, Tra invited me to visit his family’s home in Takeo Province, and to attend the wedding of a relative. I spent two days with the family, and got to see the farm and meet members of Tra’s family. I have posted photographs from this visit on my Picasa site.

Updated (again) on January 8, 2010.

This is my fourth visit to Phnom Penh, and I have been here for three days. For reasons I haven’t yet been able to pinpoint, I really like this city. Among the many sights, sounds, and experiences that have made an impression on me so far on this visit are…

• Meeting a person intimately affected by the Cambodian Genocide within minutes of leaving the airport. My taxi driver, after asking me about my family, tells me that he lost both of his parents under the Khmer Rouge. He was a child of seven when the Khmer Rouge seized power.

• “It’s the Ministry of Corruption.” The same taxi driver’s answer to my question about a modern and lavish looking building on the road from the airport into the city.
• A designer label seems to be attached to just about every item that might reasonably display one. To visit a Phnom Penh market is to be assailed by logos of Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Louis Vuitton. And all at bargain prices! Polo shirts for $10 a piece (less if you bargain hard.) If everyone knows that these items are fakes, though, why do they want the designer labels? (I don’t know why people want designer labels when they are genuine, either, but that’s another matter.)
• Honesty in retail is alive and well in some sectors. The mobile phone dealer on the sidewalk outside the Central Market shows me the latest model Nokia phone/camera/whatever. Price: $170. Then she pulls out an identical looking item, and tells me it is a Chinese copy of the Nokia. Price: $80. Take your pick.
• 

  Download guy installing music on a customer's mobile phone.

  Another intellectual property item: A young man sits on a plastic chair under an umbrella outside one of Phnom Penh’s electronics malls. In front of him is a computer. His business: downloads. For a few dollars, he will install a few hundred songs on your new iPod, MP3 player, or mobile phone. Videos also available.

• And another: The recently released movie Invictus is available for a dollar or so in Phnom Penh’s Russian market. It hasn’t been released on DVD in the US yet. Also available at the same store: Rosetta Stone language DVDs, Apple and Microsoft software, and video games. All for the price of a blank DVD plus a few dollars at most.
• 

  Picking a mobile phone number. "Better" numbers command higher prices. I chose a cheap - and therefore inauspicious and easily forgettable - number

  Photo  yesterday’s Phnom Penh Gazette: A road roller crushing thousands of illicit DVDs confiscated from local retailers. The accompanying report explains that the government has promised to get tough on music and video piracy.

Fireworks and a full moon as 2010 begins.

• The sight of thousands of Phnom Penh citizens gathered in a park in the center of the city under a clear sky to listen to live music and celebrate the coming of 2010. The obvious boredom and impatience of the crowd as the city’s mayor takes to the stage and drones on interminably as the clock approaches midnight.  He apparently exhausts his list of people to thank and city accomplishments to trumpet just in time, and surrenders the microphone to an MC who counts down the seconds to midnight.  The brief but spectacular fireworks, exploding against the backdrop of a full moon.
• A news story in the Phnom Penh Gazette reporting on the winner of this year’s “Miss Landmine” competition, an attracting young woman with one leg. Her prize: $1000 in cash and a new prosthetic limb. (The contest had to be undertaken surreptitiously after being banned by the Cambodian government.)
• Another story in the Gazette reporting on the controversy over how to commemorate 31st anniversary, on January 7th, of the overthrow the Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge by invading Vietnamese forces. The political opposition in Cambodia claims that it is the anniversary of an invasion and the beginning of the “malevolent presence of Vietnamese forces” (who remained in the country until 1989.) Prime Minister Hun Sen (a Khmer Rouge defector who fought alongside the Vietnamese and who assumed office during their presence) maintains that the day marks “a victory for all Cambodian people.” Those who oppose the January 7th celebration, he says, are “sinful,” they are “not human. They are animals.”

• My pleasant but unremarkable Thursday night dinner of Cambodian food at a sidewalk restaurant on the Mekong riverfront. $11 for two people, including a large bottle of Angkor beer.  The patrons of the restaurant all appear to be foreigners.

• My Friday lunch of Cambodian noodles, served as I sit on a plastic chair at a metal table in a small restaurant near Phnom Penh’s central market. My Cambodian dining companion suggests that I may not want to eat the large gelatinous red cube sitting atop the noodles; it is apparently blood. He is right. He takes the blood, and I consume the chicken and noodles. They are delicious. The bill is $2 for both of us. I am apparently the only non-Cambodian in the restaurant.  After lunch we purchase a delicious dessert from a roadside seller; it consists of a banana nestling inside a cocoon of sticky rice and coconut, wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked over a fire. I formulate a hypothesis that the quality of restaurant food served in Phnom Penh is inversely proportional to both the number of foreigners eating at the restaurant and the price of the meal. (I test the hypothesis at lunch on Saturday with a dish of chicken fried with ginger at a foreigner-free restaurant. It seems to hold up.)

• The sight of barefoot street children, plastic baskets of books hanging from their necks like food vendors at an old-style movie show, hawking their wares to diners at sidewalk restaurants along the riverfront.  The oldest of the vendors, a boy of 18, tells me he has been doing this work for ten years. He now attends school in the morning and sells books at night to pay for his high school studies.

• A gentle tapping on my arm. I turn, and see the wizened face of an apparently very old woman, raggedly dressed, cupped hands outstretched, asking for money. Then an old man. Then a child. Then a man with one leg and a crutch. Then a man with no legs and one arm, in a wheelchair. I don’t think I have seen so many people begging on the streets anywhere else.

• 

  These are some of the Lexus SUVs I saw in the space of half an hour near Phnom Penh's Central Market.

  Lexus SUVS. Dozens of them. Big ones. They almost outnumber the beggars on the streets of Phnom Penh. They come in two colors, black and tan-brown. Some have the word LEXUS emblazoned on their sides in very large lettering, presumably lest someone mistake them for mere Landcruisers. Many have official government tags displayed on the dashboard, and these apparently bestow immunity from traffic regulations on their drivers. I see one LEXUS with not only a government identification tag, but alongside it a card reading “VIP” in large purple letters. The vehicle pulls up outside a clothing store, a man and a woman alight and go into the store, leaving the LEXUS double parked and blocking traffic.
  
  Update, from an article in the Cambodia Daily on March 5, 2010.

  Sok Vanny drives a behemoth Lexus LX 570, the largest and most luxurious of the Japanese brand’s SUVs, which she imported from the US for more than $100,000. She says it makes her proud.
  “We had been living with empty hands for four to 10 years since the collapse of the Pol Pot regime,” the 53-year-old explained at her automobile spare parts shop in Phom Penh…”We have to buy something that makes us feel proud.”

  
  

• 

  Outside a tailor's shop in Phnom Penh.

  Large numbers of Phnom Penh’s citizens either resting, waiting, or quietly engaged in some  stressless activity I am unable to discern. Some stand on the sidewalk, others sit on park benches. Store owners sit on plastic stools outside their businesses. Tuk-tuk drivers sit with feet up in the back of their vehicles.  To my untrained foreign eye, this all looks to me like guilt-free idleness, and it is an attitude I both admire and envy.

• My encounter with US Embassy security personnel. I am strolling around the park that surrounds Wat Phnom, a shrine a top a small hillock (“phnom”) from which the city takes part of its name.  Standing in the park, I raise my camera to take a photograph of a tuk-tuk (a motorcycle-drawn open taxi) on the street in front of me. Behind the tuk-tuk is the US Embassy, where man in a very official looking uniform starts gesticulating wildly and shouting at me. His colleague comes out of a guard booth, and motions to me to come across the street to him. In the course of my various travels, I have learned that it is generally wise to obey the instructions of people in uniform, so I cross the street. Guard #1 informs me that I am not allowed to take photographs of the embassy, and appears unmoved by my insistence that I was photographing the tuk-tuk. I hand him a copy of my business card and my Virginia drivers license, even though he has not asked for identification from me. He tells me to delete the picture. I ask him whether he works for the US embassy or the Cambodian police. He tells me works for the US embassy. I am irked by the notion that a US government employee should claim authority to decide who may take a picture from a Cambodian public park of a Cambodian vehicle on a Cambodian street. I tell him I will not delete the picture. He talks into his radio, which crackles in response. He tells me to wait. As I wait, I realize that nothing good will come of my sole display of passive resistance, so I delete the picture. When a more senior security officer emerges from the embassy, I tell him that the photograph no longer exists, and offer to let him peruse the 400 pictures on my camera. He demurs, but does invite me to take a photograph of the US flag flying outside the building. I decline, and return to my room on the fourth floor of a large hotel directly across the road from the embassy. I take three pictures of the view from my window, confess it here, and await the arrival of US government contractors at my door.

The view from my fourth floor hotel window in Phnom Penh. The tall building on the right is, I think, a bank. As to the building in the foreground with flag outside... I don't know what it is.

• The strains of “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” still tinkling over the plane’s public address system as I board at Phnom Penh International Airport, temperature 31 degrees Celsius. Over the past three weeks I have been in a Muslim country (Malaysia), a Hindu enclave (Bali) in another Muslim country, and now two Buddhist countries (Thailand and Cambodia.) None of them provided any refuge from the onslaught of Christmas carols (or Christmas displays in stores.) Clearly the mid-winter festival that Christians purloined from pagans has now been re-appropriated by the heathen disciples of the dollar (or Ringgit, Rupiyah, and Baht)

Donald N . Rallis
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
January 2010

A collage of scenes from Kuta, Bali.

In 2007, the magazine Travel + Leisure published a ranking of the world’s “Top Ten Islands.” At the top of the list was the Indonesian island of Bali, which, according to the magazine,  ‘stands alone in its lushness and incomparable beauty.’ Among its attractions are ‘long sugary beaches,’ ‘hillside terraces with jewel-green rice paddies,’ and ‘forests dotted with ancient temples.’ Then there are the Balinese people, mostly Hindus whose ‘daily routines are punctuated by prayer, blessings, and rituals.’ Bali, Travel + Leisure concludes, is a ‘compelling, authentic, and utterly singular destination.’

But wait! Is this the same island whose prime tourist centers of Nusa Dua and Kuta were described by the National Geographic Center for Sustainable Destinations as representing ‘the ugly face of crass commercialism?’ The place that specializes in providing young Australians with ‘a cheap, close destination that offers the chance to sample booze, sex, sun and surf before they knuckle down for a university or city job’ (Geographical Magazine.) Is this the place that, according to author Michel Picard, is ‘rife with air and water pollution, beach erosion and reef destruction, water and electricity shortages, saturation of solid waste disposal, not to mention endless traffic jams on the main thoroughfares?’

Pura Ulun Danau Bratan temple, surrounded by the waters of Lake Bratan in Bali's Bendugul region. The temple was built in 1633.

Yes, that is Bali. As I discovered during my visits, it is all of these things. It is an island that attracts tourists with images of picturesque mountainside rice paddies, and then gobbles up agricultural land to make way for more hotels, resorts, restaurants, and souvenir shops to cater to them. A place that invites visitors to experience its forests, mountains, and coral reefs, then accommodates and transports these tourists in pollution- and energy-intensive ways that threaten the same natural environment that they have come to see.

Another contradiction is to be found in Bali’s policy of promoting ‘Cultural Tourism,’ which aims to use Balinese culture as a tourist attraction, thus generating revenue that can be used to foster that same culture, ostensibly without debasing it. Balinese culture is indeed distinctive and interesting: this is a society that was first exposed to Hinduism nearly two millennia ago, and has remained resolutely Hindu despite the fact that it is now part of Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country.  The island’s cultural landscape is unmistakably Hindu: temples abound, and it is hard to find a hotel, shop, or home without a small shrine.

Sunset, as seen from a Bali hotel

Although the tourism authorities don’t say so explicitly, it is clear that Bali’s relatively tolerant social environment creates a space where alcohol-swilling bikini-clad tourists tourists can be separated from their dollars without causing undue affront to Indonesia’s relatively conservative Muslim majority. And, for Westerners, Bali is an unthreatening part of this large and perhaps somewhat alien country. (Perhaps I’m being ungenerous, but I suspect that many visitors to Bali probably think that Bali is a country and don’t know that they are in Indonesia. Their Balinese hosts certainly do little to disabuse their visitors of this notion. Among the thousands of souvenirs and clothing items I saw on display in Bali not a single one contained the word ‘Indonesia.’ All of the t-shirt vendors I asked sold dozens of t-shirts with the name of the island emblazoned on them, but none could find any that confessed the name of the country. )

A consequence of ‘Cultural Tourism,’ though, is that Balinese culture has inevitably mutated. As Michel Picard notes,

‘the very decision to promote ‘cultural’ tourism has rendered the Balinese self-conscious about a thing they possess called culture. It is as though, thanks to tourism, the Balinese have discovered that they ‘have a culture’–something at once precious and perishable, which they ought to preserve as well as promote.’

For sale on the sidewalk, Kuta. Presumably there is a market for this stuff.

It is difficult to imagine, though, how it is possible to ‘preserve’ culture while at the same time marketing it as a commodity. As Leo Howe, another student of tourism in Bali, has observed

Tourists may not know much about the host society, but for tourism to be
successful the hosts must educate themselves about the tourists in order to present themselves and their society as attractive tourist objects.

What constitutes an attractive tourist object depends on the nature of the tourist. I am certain that whatever the advocates of ‘Cultural Tourism’ envisaged, it was not the kind of tourism that has engulfed the town of Kuta. This is the destination of choice for those young visitors on limited budgets, largely from Australia, looking for ‘booze, sex, sun and surf.’ Most are here because it’s tropical, it’s cheap, and it’s the closest ‘exotic’ destination to home. This has produced what is without doubt the tackiest and most tasteless place I have ever visited. I offer as evidence some of the photographs on this page (with apologies to readers of a delicate disposition.)

Traditional Balinese craftwork?

The result of all of this is that, for better or worse, Bali’s economy is now dependent on tourism for 40 percent of its jobs and more than half of its income, and these figures are increasing.  In 2008, nearly two million visitors came to the island, and despite the international recession, tourist arrivals in the first part of 2009 broke previous records. A cruise ship terminal is now under construction, and a new airport terminal, due to be completed in 2012, will have a capacity of 16 million passengers a year (the current airport can handle 3.5 million.) With all of these changes, Bali has moved from being one of Indonesia’s poorer areas to be one of its more prosperous.

Memorial to the victims of the Bali nightclub bombings, October 2002.

Tourism, though, is a very volatile industry, as Bali discovered in 2002. On October 12 of that year, two bombs were detonated in or near nightclubs in the town of Kuta, an area particularly popular with young visitors on limited budgets. 202 people were killed, 88 of them Australian, and all but 38 foreigners. Members of a group called Jemaah Islamiyah claimed responsibility for the blasts; the group deliberately targeted an area popular with Australians, apparently in response to Australia’s support for the US so-called “War on Terror,” as well as that country’s support for the independence of East Timor. Within three weeks, hotel occupancy rates in Bali declined from 70 to 15 percent, and tourist revenues plummeted. They started to rise gradually in 2003, only to be hit again by the SARS epidemic (which was particularly severe East and Southeast Asia.) Then, in December 2004, came the Indian Ocean tsunami, making foreigners jittery again about visiting the region.  And, since Indonesia is the most tectonically active populated area in the world, it is not unlikely that earthquakes or volcanic eruptions will have an impact on tourism in the future.

Planting rice in the Bendugul region of central Bali

I left Bali confused. Confused about the impact and desirability of tourism for places like Bali, confused about my role as tourist, observer, and polluter, and confused about notions of culture and history.  Then I remembered something I frequently tell my students: that the realization of how little we know is a sign that we are learning something. In the complicated real world, confusion can be an important part of understanding.

I guess this means that I will just have to go back to Bali some time to learn some more, and perhaps become a little more confused.

_______

In addition to the sources I have linked to above, I relied on the following for much of the information in this blog. I took the photographs on this page in December 2009 and July 2006. (For more photographs, see my Bali album on Faceboook. You don’t need to be a Facebook member to see it.)

Brace, Matthew. 2003. ‘The Road back to Bali.” Geographical Magazine (UK.) 26-34.

Hanna, Willard A. 2004.  Bali Chronicles: A Lively account of the island’s history from early times to the 1970s. Periplus. (First published under a different title in 1976.)

Howe, L. 2005. The changing world of Bali: religion, society and tourism, Routledge, New York.

Picard, Michel. 2003. ‘Tourism and Balinization in a Time of Reformasi.’ Indonesia and the Malay World. Vol. 31, No. 89. 108-118.

Wilms, Heinz. 2008. ‘Some reflections on tourism in Bali.’ Contours. 8-10.

Donald N. Rallis
Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia
December 2009

“Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton.”
Eric Hobsbawm, British historian.

Manchester, July 2009.

And, Hosbawm might have added, whoever says cotton says Manchester. For it was in this city in the English midlands that the modern cotton industry began, and with it the Industrial Revolution that would be pivotal in shaping not only the history but also the geography of the modern world.

By spurring a demand for raw materials to feed its burgeoning industries, the Industrial Revolution shaped 18^th and 19^th century colonialism, as Europe’s industrial powers sough to secure sources of essential materials from around the globe.

By drawing people together to work in factories rather than on farms or in artisan’s workshops, the Industrial Revolution transformed population geography and gave rise to modern cities, and, for the first time in human history, to sizeable states where city dwellers outnumbered farmers or hunters and gatherers.

To transport raw materials to factories and to take finished products to market demanded more that the foot-power of human beings and draft animals (on land), or a reliance on the oceans, waterways and winds provided by Nature. So with the Industrial Revolution came a transportation revolution, first in the form of canal building and new sailing technologies, in improved means of navigation, and steam power to drive ships and trains.  All of this led to more trade, locally, nationally, and globally, and ultimately facilitated process we know today as globalization.

And, of course, the Industrial Revolution was fundamental to the rise of capitalism, the economic system that continues to be the driving force of the world economy (and, many would argue, of global inequality.)

But why did this all begin in the English city of Manchester? In an effort to answer this question, and to learn something about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, I decided to make a stop in the city during my recent summer travels.

Why Manchester?

It was raining on the July day when I arrived in Manchester.  It rained the following day as well.  In fact it rained every day for the entire week I spent in the city.  I spent the week – rain jacket clad, umbrella in hand – riding city buses, wandering the damp streets, and visiting some of the city’s excellent museums, looking for the answer to my question.

19th century buildings of the Museum of Science and Industry, and the 21st century Beetham Hilton Tower

A good place to start, I decided, was Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI). So, on my first day in the city, I hopped on a bus and headed for the old railroad station, near the corner of Liverpool and Water Roads, which today houses the Museum.

MOSI’s address, it turned out, together with the rain that drenched me on my way to the museum, were the first clues to the complex answer to my question. Water and the nearby port of Liverpool, it seems, were two of the array of factors that combined to allow Manchester to develop the industry that launched a revolution.

Why Cotton?

Cotton has been used to make fabric for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Indians wore clothes made of the cotton that grew in their sub-tropical climates. The process of converting the dirty and seed-filled bolls of raw cotton into thread, and the thread into fabric, was cumbersome and labor intensive, and the finished product was therefore expensive.  In cooler climates, wool, flax, and hemp were used to make textiles; imported cotton fabrics were outside the price range of all but the wealthiest members of society.

By 1600 or so, a fabric called fustian was being made in England; it consisted of a linen warp (lengthwise fibers) and a cotton weft (crosswise.)  Fustian makers soon settled on the Lancashire region (including Manchester) as a good place to ply their trade, largely because of the very same damp climate that plagued my visit. Humid air, it turns out, helps thin fibers of cotton stick together as they are spun into thread. It was around this nascent local cotton industry that large-scale cotton production grew up later.

One of Manchester's early canals

In England, during the 17^th century, cotton fabric became less expensive with the rise of cotton textile production in India, where cotton grew and labor was cheap.

English textile makers couldn’t possibly compete with India; their labor costs were simply too high. One way out of this dilemma was to try to reduce local costs; another was to protect local textile makes by laws, regulations, and tariffs.

Some of the protectionist measures enacted by the English government were ingenious. The Burial in Wool Acts of the 1660s, for example, decreed that ‘No corps should be buried in anything other than what is made of sheep’s wool only.’ But clothing regulations for the departed weren’t enough. More effective were the tariffs and prohibitions on the importation of foreign cotton textiles, enacted in the early years of the 18^th century.

But tariffs alone proved insufficient too. Another way to counter the threat of cheaper Indian cotton textiles was to figure out a way to make them more economically at home.  Since there was no way that local labor could ever be had as cheaply as that in India, the only way to reduce costs was by reducing the amount of labor needed to produce cotton textiles. In other words, the solution was mechanization.

Whether by luck, ingenuity, or otherwise, England in the late 1700s was home to several capable inventors who were equal to the task.  In 1738, two inventors in Birmingham patented a rudimentary spinning jenny; a machine to speed up the painstaking task of spinning cotton fiber. More important was Richard Arkwright’s 1769 patent for his breakthrough ‘water frame,’ a machine which drew out and spun threads of cotton strong enough to be used as the warp – the long thread – in weaving cloth.

An early cotton spinning machine, on display at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Arkwright’s machine was powered by the only reliable non-animate source of kinetic energy available in his day: running water. In the damp climes of Lancashire, where Arkwright lived, there was no shortage surface water, running down the slopes of nearby Pennines toward the Irish Sea. So it was that Arkwright’s first factory was set up in his home village of Chorley, near Manchester.  Other factories, utilizing the same locational advantages, quickly grew up nearby.

Just as quickly, a spate of new inventions followed, many of them preserved and in display at MOSI.  In 1779, Samuel Crompton built his first ‘mule,’ a hybrid (hence its name) of a spinning jenny and a water frame, which spun such fine yarns that British weavers were able to match in quality the muslins made in India.

This early mechanization led to the very rapid expansion of the British textile industry; between 1780 and 1800, exports grew at an average of more than 10 percent per annum. Much of this production was for the export market: during the same period, textile exports grew at an annual rate of 14 percent.

With the rise of export markets, Manchester was able to capitalize on another geographic advantage, its access to the nearby port of Liverpool via the River Irwell (with the help of some small canals built in the 1730s.) Through Liverpool, textiles were shipped across the world, and in return came raw materials (notably raw cotton) and an increasing array of other products necessary to sustain a growing industrial town and its rapidly increasing population.

But soon textile production began to bump up against its limits technological limits, particularly where access to energy was concerned. Water power was better than animal power, but insufficient for the needs of modern industry.  At this point, the genius of a Scottish inventor, James Watt, came to the rescue.  Watt’s signal creation was a commercially viable steam engine, a device that converted heat (from burning coal) into kinetic energy (the motion of a piston and wheel.) Now it was possible for a textile factory to power numerous spinning and weaving machines via a system of belts and wheels all connected to a (relatively) reliable steam engine, running on coal.

Once again, Manchester was at an advantage. Nearby, in central and northern England, lay deposits of easily accessible coal, ample to supply the growing needs of the textile industry.  Also locally available was iron ore, a critical raw material in the manufacture of steam engines and other machinery.

It didn’t take long for other local inventors to recognize the potential of Watt’s steam engine as a power source for motorized transportation. By the 1820s, not far from Manchester in the coal-mining town of Newcastle, the Robert Stephenson was at work on designing and building his trailblazing steam locomotive, the Rocket. At the same time, Robert’s father George was overseeing the building of the world’s first inter-city passenger railway, between Liverpool and Manchester.

In 1830s, amidst great fanfare, a train drawn by Stephenson’s Rocket pulled into Liverpool Road station (the station is today part of the Museum of Science and Industry.) A crowd of eminent persons including the Prime Minister was there to greet this, the world’s first passenger train.  In his exuberance at the occasion, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, one William Huskisson, failed to get out of the way of the oncoming train, and became the world’s first railroad fatality.

Manchester Town Hall

During the nineteenth century, England’s textile industry boomed, and by the 1830s cotton textiles had become the country’s most valuable export.  As the industry boomed, so too did Manchester, which came to be known as ‘Cottonopolis.’ The were some hiccups along the way, though. The American Civil War disrupted the supply of raw cotton, hitting the Manchester economy hard.  But when the war ended, the city soon recovered, and the cotton boom resumed.

As I walked around central Manchester, evidence of this boom was plain to see in the city’s magnificent collection of grand and unmistakably expensive Victorian-era buildings. Among the most striking of these is the opulent and imposing Gothic revival Town Hall (see photograph), with its spires, carvings, and grand windows.

Manchester Ship Canal, 2009.

Another hiccup in Manchester’s boom came in the late 19^th century, when levies imposed by the port of Liverpool started to constrain Manchester’s economy. A solution to was to make Manchester into a sea port, reachable by the largest vessels of the day.  A massive building project was undertaken – the biggest building project ever undertaken in England up until then –  and the result was the 58 km long Manchester Ship Canal. The canal was opened in 1894 by Queen Victoria, and its opening was marked by the arrival of a convoy of 71 ships.

One J. Archer Morton summed up the exuberance and the jingoism of the day in a poem which reads, in part

To cross no mighty ocean, to seek no foreign shore,
The merchant ships of England their anchors weigh once more.
To-day they sail our Ship Canal, to celebrate the worth
Of British pluck and energy, this triumph of the North…

And Manchester and Liverpool their merchant fleets combin’d,
New markets may discover, fresh benefits bring mankind.
Long may their commerce prosper, their full sails ne’er be unfurled,
Not till old England’s sun be set, the death-knell of the world.

Manchester had truly arrived.

( A Google search reveals no further entries for Morton, from which one might optimistically conclude that this was his last foray into the composition of poetry.)

Why no longer Manchester?

The Manchester I visited in 2009 was certainly not the booming industrial city of the 1894.  In fact, it was hardly an industrial city at all.  An economic fact sheet issued by the City in January 2009 reveals that the more Mancunians are employed in ‘real estate, renting and business activities,’ than in any other sector. Sales and education rank second and third, and manufacturing doesn’t make it into the top seven categories of employment.  In fact, industrial employment in Manchester is lower today than the UK national average.

The story of Manchester in the late twentieth century is, of course, the story of Pittsburgh or Chicago: manufacturing cities which have lost their major industries to the lower wage environments of the developing world.

Trendy and hip Canal Street, in Manchester's 'gay village.'

The textile industry, which propelled England into the Industrial Revolution, has virtually disappeared.   Hardly any of the advantages that served Cottonopolis so well still exist today. Production, transportation, and communication technologies has eliminated most of the initial advantages enjoyed by Manchester. Ironically, the most important influence shaping the global map of textile production today one of the same influences that led to the mechanization of production in Manchester two and a half centuries ago: cheap labor in the developing world. Today’s leading textile producers are China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Central America, and, yes, India.

What I saw very clearly during my visit, though, is that Manchester has certainly survived, even without its earlier industrial base. It is today a city known for its vibrant educational, arts, and health care sectors, and it prides itself on its music scene.  And today, there can be little doubt the city’s most recognizable brand is one that it quintessentially a product of cultural and economic globalization: the Manchester United soccer team.

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I have posted some more of my photographs of Manchester here.

There is no shortage of books, papers, articles, and websites on the history of Manchester. I drew heavily here on exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry, in addition to the links in above, as well as the following:

Aspin, Chris. 2004. The Cotton Industry. Risborough: Shire Press.

Broadberry, Stephen N. and Gupta, Bishnupriya. 2005. Cotton textiles and the Great Divergence: Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitve Advantage, 1600-1850. University of Warwick Discussion Paper No. 5183.

Marks, Robert B. 2007. The Origins of the Modern World: a Global and Economic Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty First Century. Lanham Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

Donald N. Rallis
October 19, 2010

Location of the earthquake epicenter and Samoa. This map is based on the Google Map 'Samoa Earthquake zone.' Click above to see the source map.

Two powerful and damaging earthquakes have taken place over the past day along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a very active belt of tectonic activity surrounding the Pacific Ocean. The first set of quakes took place yesterday 18 km below the ocean floor, about 200km southwest of the islands of Samoa. The second struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra, its magnitude was 7.9. Initial reports indicate that both events caused considerable damage and loss of life. In Indonesia, the damage came from the earthquake itself. In Samoa, however, most of the devastation was caused by a tsunami generated by the undersea quake.

As I write this, information on the Indonesian quake is still scarce (it took place only a few hours ago.) So I will focus on the Samoa quake here, since quite a lot of information about it is now available.

Most earthquakes are caused by movement along the boundaries of the massive slabs of rock called tectonic plates that make up the crust of the earth. Yesterday’s Samoa earthquake was caused by movement at the boundary of the Australian and Pacific plates. Here, the Pacific plate, moving westward at about 86 mm per year, is being forced downward (or subducted) beneath the Australian plate. This movement doesn’t take place smoothly, but rather in a series of jolts, which produce earthquakes. Yesterday’s was a particularly large jolt, with a magnitude of 8.0 (a measure of the amount of energy the earthquake releases.)

This map shows the deep Tonga Trench, which marks the subduction zone where the Australia plate (to the west) and the Pacific Plate meet. The epicenter of the quake is shown in red. Apia is the capital of Samoa, Pago Pago is the capital of American Samoa. The map comes from the USGS website. Click on the map to see the source.

Earthquakes can take place at various depths below the surface, and be caused by either vertical or horizontal movement of rock (or a combination of both.) If an earthquake takes place underneath the ocean, at a relatively shallow depth, and if it involves a significant vertical movement, it can rapidly lift or lower the ocean floor. This either lifts or lowers the ocean above the quake epicenter, producing a tsunami, usually a low but long wave that can cross the ocean at the speed of a jetliner (Geologists estimate that the Samoa quake lifted one side of the active fault up to seven meters higher than the other side.) On the open ocean, a tsunami would be barely noticeable, but as it enters shallower coastal waters, the front of the wave is slowed by the ocean floor, but the back of the wave speeds on, piling up water and producing a large wave of the kind that inundated Samoa yesterday. (Frequently tsunamis involve more than one wave; four separate waves struck Samoa yesterday. The largest seems to have been at least 4 meters in height. A person hit by a wave half a meter high would not be able to keep standing.)

Not all tsunamis, however, generate disasters. The impact a tsunami has depends not only on the size of the tsunami itself, but also on the shape of the ocean floor, and the nature of the coastline (a tsunami striking a cliff wouldn’t do much damage, whereas if the same wave hit a gently sloping coastline it might inundate large areas of land.) Whether the tsunami causes a disaster or not depends on the population geography, the topography, and the degree of preparedness of the communities in the affected area.

At this early stage it appears that the greatest loss of life and damage to property took place along the southern coastlines of the Samoan islands. A Google map of the damaged areas shows that the worst hit areas were on relatively flat land close to the ocean. Safe higher land was nearby, but in villages and resorts in these area, people probably would have had little warning of the coming tsunami, and insufficient time to get into the higher interior of the island. In the Samoan capital of Apia, on the north side of the island, early reports indicate that many people did receive warning of the tsunami, and were able to take refuge on nearby Mt Vaea.

All of the countries of the Pacific are vulnerable to tsunamis generated along the Pacific Ring of Fire. In the larger islands (such as the islands of New Zealand, and Fiji’s main island) people would be able to seek refuge from the waters inland or on high ground (assuming they receive warning in time to do so.) Small volcanic islands (such as those of Samoa) have mountains close to the coast where coastal populations might flee. But many of the islands of the region are atolls: flat, low lying islands which offer their populations little prospect of escaping a tsunami, even if they receive advance warning. The country of Kiribati, for example, consists of 33 coral atolls, most of them close to sea level; the highest point in the entire country of Tuvalu is only five meters above sea level.

To make matters even worse, all of the Pacific islands have to deal, even in the best of times, with the challenges posed by their remoteness. Most are very far away – from the world’s major landmasses and population centers, from each other, and in some cases one part of a country may be hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from other islands in the same country (Kiribati’s Kiritimati Island is 3,200 km from Tarawa, the national capital.) In the event of a tsunami or other natural disaster, such distances could make it very difficult to provide assistance to afflicted areas. (The country of Tonga was also affected, though not not very badly, by yesterday’s tsunami. Outsiders have had difficult reaching the country’s main island, though, because of rocks thrown onto the airport runway by the tsunami.)

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A little more about the Samoan islands…

The areas worst hit by yesterday’s tsunami were the country of  Samoa, and the territory of American Samoa.

The Independent State of Samoa (its official name) consists of nine volcanic islands, two of which are home to the vast majority of the country’s 190,000 people. Formerly controlled by New Zealand under League of Nations and United Nations mandates, Samoa attained independence in 1962.

Samoa seldom makes it into the news, but it did so  a few weeks ago, before the tsunami struck. At 6 am on September 7th, new traffic rules came into effect requiring Samoan motorists to drive on the left side of the road rather than the right. The reason for this was mainly economic: the government hoped that the change would enable Samoans to rely on used vehicles imported from Australia and New Zealand (or brought home by Samoans working there) rather than having to rely on more expensive American left-hand drive vehicles.

American Samoa lies to the southeast of Samoa, and consists of five volcanic islands other comprising an area a little larger than the District of Columbia. It is officially designated as an “unincorporated and unorganized territory of the US,” and is administered by the US Office of Insular Affairs, part of the Department of the Interior. Residents of American Samoa have a non-voting representative in the US House of Representatives, and they may vote in primary elections for President and Vice President. They cannot vote in presidential elections, though, and they have no representation in the US Senate.

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A great deal of good and interesting information is already available on the earthquake, the tsunami, and the damage it has caused in the region.  Google Maps has posted a map of the region, showing the location of the earthquake, and pinpointing the parts of Samoa and American Samoa that have been affected by the tsunami. Because of their (relative) proximity to Samoa, and their strong economic and historic links, Australian and New Zealand news sources have  the most comprehensive coverage of the tsunami.   BBC News has a number of good reports on the disaster, including photographs and video footage of the affected areas. The US Geological Survey posts up-to-date information about most earthquakes, and has already posted several maps of the affected area, together with an explanation of the cause of the earthquake.

For more information on tsunamis and what causes them, I recommend the excelled PBS Nova documentary Wave that Shook the World, which explains the causes and consequences of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami (the companion website includes an animated section showing the genesis of the tsunami, and its progress across the Indian Ocean.) For an excellent explanation of plate tectonics, including lots of good maps and diagrams, see the USGS online publication This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics.

I have posted some of my own photographs of the aftermath of ‘natural’ disasters here; I have also written about the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake..

The neighborhood of Silwan is adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem.

Updated April 2010

The neighborhood of Silwan lies southeast of Jerusalem’s Old City, just outside the city walls and in the shadow of the the Al Aqsa Mosque. It is a place of densely packed houses clinging to the sides of a narrow, steep valley. At the end of the valley closest to the Old City is a spring, a rarity in this dry region, and a pool that dates back to biblical times. It’s a pool where a fifty-something year-old Palestinian man I’ll call Samer tells me he used to swim as a child growing up in Silwan Village, part of the Wadi Hilwah (“beautiful valley”) neighborhood.

I met Samer recently during my second visit to Silwan in as many days.  He came up to me as I was looking at some old photographs of the neighborhood, pinned to the side of a tent alongside the narrow road that leads into Silwan from the direction of the Old City. The tent is a project of the Wadi Hilwah Information Center, established by local residents to tell the story of their neighborhood, and to fight for its survival as a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The neighborhood is threatened by an ongoing effort to remove Palestinian residents to make way for Jewish settlers and to establish a controversial “national archaeological park” operated by an Israeli settler group.

The location of Silwan

Silwan’s Past

To understand the controversy raging over this place, we need to look at its ancient and recent history, and the way these histories are told and retold.  It was in this small valley that, more than 5,000 years ago, King David established his capital, later moved up the hill to the location of what is today the Old City of Jerusalem.  Here, at the same pool in which Samer swam as a child, Jesus is reputed to have restored the sight of a blind man.

Then, as now, water was a critical resource in the area, and the stories of elaborate irrigation projects in the valley are to be found in many historical accounts, including the Old Testament. The best known of these is the Siloam Tunnel, commissioned by Hezekiel in the 8^th century BCE.  The village of Silwan itself is specially mentioned in writings by Arab geographer and Jerusalem resident Al-Muqaddasi in 985 CE.

Since biblical times Silwan, like the rest of Jerusalem, has fallen under the control of numerous groups and imperial powers. It was controlled by Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arab Caliphates, Byzantines, the Ottoman Empire, and, from 1948 to 1967, by Jordan. This area was populated early in its history by Jews, but for most of the time since then other groups have predominated here as in the rest of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. In recent centuries the majority of the population has been Arab (Indeed the Siam family, one of the largest families in the Silwan, claims that it arrived in the village in the 12^th century during the rule of  the days Salah Al-Din).  In Six Day War of 1967 Silwan, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, was captured and very soon afterwards annexed by Israel. Jewish settlers set their sights on Silwan, and began making plans to move in to the area.  That’s when the controversy began.

Silwan. The houses at the bottom of the valley are in the al-Bustan neighborhood, much of which is slated for demolition to make way for an expanded "City of David archaeological park.".

Changing the Geography of Silwan

The dispute over Silwan isn’t just about political control. It’s also about demography, religion, and also about who gets to tell the history of this place and to name it. It’s a controversy with international dimensions, and it’s probably no exaggeration to say that what happens in Silwan has the potential to help move the so-called ‘Peace Process’ in the Middle East forward, or to stall it in its tracks.  That’s why I wanted to visit this place, and learn something about it.

On my first visit to Silwan, my two guides were from the Israeli group Ir-Amim (“City of Peoples” or “City of Nations,”) a research and advocacy organization that does excellent work focused specifically on the city of Jerusalem. My tour focused on the way that the geography of East Jerusalem is deliberately being changed by Israel in an attempt to consolidate its hold over the area.

The first change was in the political geography of the area. Just seventeen days after the end of the Six Day War of 1967, Israel unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, incorporating some 70 square kilometers of West Bank territory captured from Jordan in the war. This territory included not only the previously Jordanian part of the city of Jerusalem, but also 28 additional Palestinian villages in surrounding areas (No country other than Israel recognizes the legality of this annexation.) The new boundaries drawn by Israel had three main goals: to control areas of military importance around Jerusalem, to include as much territory as possible around the city, and to include as few Palestinians as possible in the within the new ‘greater’ Jerusalem.

Following the annexation of East Jerusalem and its environs, Israel began the process of changing the area’s population geography.

The goal here has been to consolidate Israeli control by changing the population balance, in other words by making Jews a majority, particularly in those parts of preominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem they regard and most significant.  Silwan’s location (adjacent to the Old City,) and its importance in early Jewish history (the original site of King David’s Jerusalem) make it a prime target for the engineers of demographic change. This process involves an exceedingly complex array of different actors: the Israeli state, municipal authorities, settler organizations, foreign financiers and, in the case of Silwan, archaeologists and historians.

A Palestinian woman walks along a street in Silwan as an Israeli flag flies above a settler home in the background.

As I walked down the hill into Silwan, it wasn’t difficult to see evidence of what is happening here.  One of the first houses on my left had an inscription in Arabic above its gate; outside the house next door were three women in Muslim dress, talking in the yard. But above the next house down the street was a large blue and white Israeli flag, on the roof of the house opposite was small guard post, complete with armed guard, another Israeli flag flying overhead.  Settlers are not only moving in, they are also announcing their presence in no uncertain terms.

At the bottom of the valley is a small neighborhood called al-Bustan. It is an area of small homes, tightly packed together, the minaret of a mosque standing out alongside (this satellite image shows the al-Bustan and surrounding areas.) Al-Bustan is an area that, if the Israeli authorities are true to their word, will soon cease to exist. When I visited the area in late July, 88 households in al-Bustan, all of them Palestinian, had been served with official notices informing them that their homes are to be demolished, displacing some 3,600 people (Since then, demolition notices have been served on at least five more households.) According to a July 2009 report by Ir-Amim, the area is to be turned into an “archaeological park.” Municipal authorities maintain that they have no ulterior motive, and are simply planning to demolish illegally built houses. Residents claim that what is underway here is “ethnic cleansing,” part of the ongoing effort to purge this part of East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants.

Sign at a protest tent in Silwan.

“Archaeology as a tool of dispossession.”

The largest and most obvious sign of Israel’s attempt to refashion Silwan is to be found at the entrance to the neighborhood, the part closest to the Old City.  Here, partly completed and already open to the public, is a place its creators have called “The City of David.” This ambitious creation is part theme park, part museum, part archaeological site; all dedicated to the objective of telling a history of Silwan that emphasizes the role of Jews in the area’s history and the role of the area in Jewish history.  By 2008, the “City of David” was one of Israel’s top give tourist attractions, with 350,000 visitors passing through its gates.

The aim and effect of the propagation of the “City of David” version of history is, of course, to legitimize Jewish claims to the area, while minimizing those of Palestinians.

The “City of David” and its associated archaeological diggings have already claimed large tracts of Silwan (see satellite image.) Alongside Silwan’s main road is an area that has been cleared of houses; only the minaret of a mosque remains. A few cars were parked here when I walked by, alongside was a tented area where archaeologists were at work on a dig.  Underground, additional excavations are taking place, to the consternation of Palestinians living above who fear that their homes’ foundations are being undermined.

Archaeological work under way in Silwan under the auspices of an Israeli settler group.

But the archaeologists at work here are no ordinary archaeologists, and their dig is far from the archaeological norm. Unlike most archaeological excavations in Israel, this operation, in one of the most historically important areas of the country, is not being sponsored by an academic institution or museum. It is instead under the control of a group called Elad, an organization of right wing settlers, funded largely by foreign (mainly American) donors. Nowhere else in Israel has responsibility for such critical archaeological work been handed over to militant political organization.

Eilad not only controls archeology here, it also controls the content of tours of the “City of David” site, and maintains an elaborate website, telling its particular version of the history of the area.  Archaeologist Yonatan Mizrahi has noted:

“After three hours on an Elad tour, you are convinced that you are at a site that is solely Jewish.  Canaanite, Byzantine, Muslim and of course Palestinian findings are shunted aside.  Jerusalem has 4,000 years of history, and they concentrate on the glorious stories of Solomon, David and Hezekiah, for whom there are no archeological findings linking them to the site.  When you present the story this way to hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world, it is a tool with a great deal of political power and a way of justifying the act of settling the area.”

But Elad control of the archaeology has not only shaped the way the history of Silwan it told, there is also evidence that the organization may bolstering its version of history by ignoring or even suppressing evidence of non-Jewish settlement in the area. In 2008, for example, the Israeli news organization Ha’aretz reported that dozens of skeletons dating to the 8^th or 9^th century C.E. (two centuries after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem) were discovered at a Silwan site. In a violation of Israeli law, the skeletons were removed without reporting them to the Israeli Ministry of Religious Services.

I found this story all too familiar. As a child growing up in South Africa, I was taught the apartheid version of South African history.  Prior to the 17^th century, I learned, South Africa was devoid of human inhabitants. Then, in about 1652, just as white settlers arrived at the southern tip of Africa, black Africans crossed the Limpopo River moving south. As whites moved north into the central parts of South Africa, blacks settled along the fringes of the country, producing a “natural” geography of settlement and segregation that the policies of apartheid, I was told, recognized and respected.  My school syllabus didn’t include any mention of places like Mapungubwe, an archaeological site in northern South Africa where evidence had been found of a thriving African kingdom a millennium earlier. Artifacts from the site, including an impressive collection of gold objects, were closeted away in a safe at the University of Pretoria. Like the Muslim skeletons of Silwan, their existence would have undermined the settlers’ historical narrative.

Post at a protest tent in Silwan.

Resistance in Silwan

Not surprisingly, the Palestinian residents of Silwan are doing their utmost to make sure that their version of history is also told. Over a small cup of strong coffee at the makeshift protest tent,  Samer and a local imam tell me their stories, and show me historic photographs of the area.  They tell me about Al-Bustan, and show me some of the  demolition orders displayed on a poster. Stickers proclaim “solidarity with Silwan,” and  a visitors’ book is evidence that this place has been on the itineraries of various foreign luminaries (including a Vice President of the European Parliament and a South African diplomatic representative.)

Numerous NGOs, Israeli and Palestinian, local and international, have taken up the cause of Silwan.  My hosts from Ir-Amim have just published a report on the area.  Alternative archaeological tours are offered by local archaeologists and residents, and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has taken up the area’s cause. A Google search produces numerous news stories, reports,  and organizations focusing on Silwan and the plight of its residents.

Wall around a construction site at the "City of David." (Click on the picture for an article on the rather bizarre murals.)

But here, on the ground, it looks to me as though the residents of Silwan and their supporters are waging a losing battle.  During the half hour or so I spent at the protest tent, I was the only visitor. Meanwhile, up the hill, a steady stream of visitors passes through the gates of the “City of David.” Within a few days of my visit, I read that more demolition orders have been issued to residents of Al-Bustan. And, despite the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel to stop the building of new settlements, as I leave Silwan to return to my hotel, I pass a construction site where workers are hard at work on the building of a new apartment building – for Jewish setters.

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Note 1. I owe  great debt of thanks to Sarah Kreimer and Ela Greenberg of Ir-Amim for taking several hours from their busy schedules to show me around East Jerusalem, and for introducing me to Silwan. Thanks too to those friendly residents of Silwan who welcomed me as I walked around their neighborhood during my second visit (including the shopkeeper who came out of his store and handed me a peach as a walked by, and “Samer” and the imam who gave me coffee and told me their version of Silwan’s story) I’m glad that I ignored the advice of the Israeli taxi driver who refused to take me to Silwan. “It’s too dangerous to go there,” he told me.

Note 2. The more I read about Silwan (or Jerusalem, or the Middle East in general), the more I realized how little I know.  I have therefore written this piece as a student rather than an expert on this topic, and I’m sure I have got some things wrong here. So please feel free to post corrections, comments, and arguments here.

Note 3. It took me several weeks to write this blog entry, mainly because I kept finding more and more information on Silwan. I have included links to several good sources in the blog, but I am listing a few more below. If you want to know more, just do an online search for “Silwan” and you will find plenty to keep you going.

The website of Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine contains information and links on Silwan, as do the websites of  B’tselem and Ir-Amim (whose recent report on Silwan details much of the story I outline here; the map above is an excerpt of a larger map from Ir-Amim. Also see Ir-Amim’s blog.)

Jeffrey Yas:  (Re)designing the City of David: Landscape, Narrative and Archaeology in Silwan

Adina Hoffman: Archaeological Dig Stokes Conflict in Jerusalem.

Meron Rapoport. A Hate-Filled Morning, posted on the blog ePalestine. (Rapoport writes about the hostility of Jewish settlers toward their Palestinian neighbors.)

For a good overview of the process of dispossession in East Jerusalem, see the BBC documentary A Walk in the Park. Also see the BBC’s February 2010 take on the story I tell here.

Update: Also take a look at this news story from the New York Times, in which the Mayor of Jerusalem is reported as having made an offer to some of Silwan’s residents slated for eviction.

For a good visual explanation the geography of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem (and the importance of Silwan in this process), see this short video from the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions.

Jerusalem, July 27, 2009 (Updated July 30, 2009 and July 26, 2010)

To say that the map of Israel is complicated would be a gross understatement.  The map below, from a world regional geography text, shows some of this complexity. There’s the area initially delimited as the State of Israel by the United Nations in 1947 (shaded in brown.) Then there’s the area captured by Israel in 1948, and under Israeli control since then (in green.) And then there are the areas captured by Israel from its neighbors in the war of 1967. Shaded in yellow, these are the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank.

Map of Israel from a geography text.

And that’s only the beginning of the story. Not shown on this map is the complex political geography the West Bank, a hodgepodge of areas under exclusive Israeli control, areas under partial control of the Palestinian Authority, and areas under complete control of the Palestinian Authority. Except that the areas under the complete control of the Palestinian Authority are not under their complete control, since Palestine is not a sovereign state, and Israel retains a whole array of controls including control of air space, borders, telecommunications, and more.

Confused yet? Well, there’s more. Not shown on the map above is the complex population geography of the West Bank, where some 2.3 million Palestinians live. Since 1967, numerous Jewish settlers have moved into the territory, and their distinctive settlements are scattered around the West Bank, particularly in the area around Jerusalem.

Speaking of Jerusalem: the map of the Jerusalem area itself reveals a complicated story (which I talk about in more detail in another blog entry.) Suffice it to say here that the city was divided between Israel and Jordan between 1948 and 1967. Within weeks of capturing the eastern part of the city in the Six Day War, Israel annexed the eastern part of the city, claiming it as an integral part of the State of Israel (as distinct from the rest of the West Bank, which was occupied but not annexed by Israel.)

The complicated map of Israel and the areas under its control are at heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If the conflict is ever resolved, it will be resolved by drawing a new map of the region, acceptable to all parties. If this new map indeed drawn, it is likely to reflect the creation of a Palestinian State in Gaza and most of the West Bank, an Israeli primarily within the pre-1967 borders, and a divided Jerusalem.

But maybe I have it all wrong. Perhaps the map of Israel is really quite simple.

I say this because I am in Israel as I write these words, and spread out in front of me in my hotel room I have several maps. Some of the maps are on postcards and t-shirts I bought in Jerusalem’s Old City, and a refrigerator magnet from my hotel’s souvenir shop. Another is a very professional looking “Road Map of Israel.” All of these items contain maps of Israel. But in none of them is there even a clue of the contentious and contested nature of Israel’s boundaries.

A postcard, purchased in Jerusalem.

Let’s start with the postcard, at the center of which is a relief map encompassing Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and Israel. The word “Israel” is emblazoned across the map, but only I and the S lie entirely within the territory that is indisputably Israel.

Israel as depicted on a t-shirt.

The t-shirt shows four camels ambling from southern Jordan to the Sinai Peninsula across Israel, shaded in green.  The major cities of Israel area labeled, as are a few places of religious significance. No Palestinian towns rate a mention, and once again Israel is depicted as including all of the lands from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and it includes the Golan Heights.  The same map is on the refrigerator magnet from the shop in my hotel.

Israel as depicted on a refrigerator magnet.

I suppose that t-shirts and refrigerator magnets aren’t the kind of places one would expect to find accurate cartographic information.  A road map, on the other hand, must be more accurate. After all, if drivers could be heading from Israel proper into the Palestinian territories and back again, they might want to know about it.

Apparently not. My fairly large (1:500 000 scale) road map contains nothing at all to indicate that there is any distinction at all between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank or Golan Heights. The northern part of the West Bank is labeled Samaria, and the southern part Judeah, using the biblical names of the regions, but there is no hint of the political status of these areas.  But wait, there is something. They are both bounded on the east by a thick green line and a dot-dash-dot line than runs from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea and due south to the Gulf of Eilat.  The map key implies that this is an international boundary, and this line is supposedly Israel’s border with Jordan.  A small inset headed the “Near East” at the foot of the map sheet makes this explicit. It shows Israel bounded along its entire eastern border by Jordan. No Palestinian Territory at all.

Part of the Road Map of Israel

Interestingly Gaza is delimited on the road map by a dot-dash-dot line, but no thick green line. There is no corresponding symbol in the map key. Gaza is different, the map appears to be telling us. But it’s not telling us how.

(The map key also includes a symbol for “Armistice Line,” a thin red dotted line. But I couldn’t find the symbol anywhere on the map. It certainly didn’t mark the “Green Line,” or pre-1967 extent of Israeli control.)

The Near East: An inset from the Road Map of Israel

It is worth noting that the boundaries of Israel depicted on my selection of maps is that of so-called “Greater Israel,” territorially the most generous interpretation of the biblical Kingdom of Israel. It is an Israel not officially envisaged by any of Israel’s major political parties or its government, all of which would presumably accept the existence of some kind of Palestinian entity somewhere between the Mediterranean and Jordan. It is the map of an Israel propounded explicitly only by those on the extreme right of Israel’s political spectrum, and a map dependent either on the complete acquiescence of Palestinians or the ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories (‘transfer’ is the preferred euphemism among those who advocate such a solution.)

I can’t claim that my sample of maps is representative; I don’t know enough about popular maps of Israel to be able to make this claim. I can say, though, that based on my observations during two visits to the country over the past year or so, it’s a depiction of Israel that’s very common around here.

I am not for a moment suggesting that there’s any kind of conspiracy going on between Israel’s far right and the makers of maps and souvenirs. But these maps have to come from somewhere. I think that it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they reflect common notion of what Israel is, or should be.  Wittingly or not, they are a political statement, and in particular a statement about the status, role, or perhaps existence of a Palestinian people.

Update. July 30, 2009

I left Israel yesterday, and while I was waiting for my flight at Ben Gurion Airport I stopped by an airport bookstore and browsed through some of the tourist books on display. What I found led me to reconsider a part of what I wrote here three days ago. I wrote then that I couldn’t claim that my selection of maps was in any way representative. My perusal of the books and souvenirs on display at the airport, however, seems to indicate that my earlier selection of maps did indeed provide a representative cross-section, at least of popular publications on Israel.

Of all of the maps of Israel in items I examined at the airport bookstore, only one contained any indication that the Occupied Territories are not part of Israel, and that was a guide to Israel’s parks and nature reserves (see below.)

Below are photographs of some of what I found in the bookstore:

A map from the book 'Hiking in Israel.'

This map includes dotted lines surrounding Gaza and the West Bank (the northern part labeled by the preferred Israeli name of ‘Samaria’ and the south as ‘Judea’) , but no key to indicate what these lines mean. Interestingly, the map includes the Jewish settlement of Ariel, but not the largest Palestinian city, Nablus. It does, however, show the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jenin, and Hebron, but does not show any roads leading to them.

The next map, from a Culture Smart series book on customs and etiquette,  again shows an Israel which seems to include the West Bank (labeled as West Bank, but barely distinguishable from Israel proper.) It does, however, show Gaza, shaded in a different color from Israel. Interestingly, no towns at all are show in the West Bank.

From 'A quick guide to customes and etiquette: Israel.'

Map from 'Places in History: Israel."

The map on the right, from a book entitled Places in History: Israel, shows Greater Israel, including all of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. Gaza and the West Bank not labeled or shown as distinct, although some towns in the territories are on the map.

I found perhaps the most egregious (or perhaps frank) mischaracterization of the West Bank in the book Flying High: Israel, a collection of aerial photographs and descriptions of various parts of the country and occupied territories. No mention of the West Bank here; instead, the area is covered in a chapter headed ‘The Settlers’ Land.’

"The Settlers' Land."

Israel: Past and Present begins its discussion of ‘The Physical Setting’ with the words “There are no vast geographical features in the 10,000 square miles that make up the Land of Israel.” But the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics lists the area of Israel as only 8,522 square miles (22,072 square kilometers,) including the annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem. So it seems that Israel: Past and Present has taken it upon itself to annex the West Bank and Gaza as well.

From 'Israel: National Parks and Nature Reserves.'

Below is part of the key to the maps contained in Israel: National Parks and Nature Reserves. Its map includes as “autonomous areas” those parts of the West Bank designated by Israel as Area A (areas under Palestinian control, mainly towns) and Area B (Palestinian civil and Israeli security control.) Interestingly, the map and key don’t include Area C (areas of the Occupied Territories under Israeli control,) thereby giving the impression that Areas A and B consist of an array of cantons, all surrounded by Israel.

In short, in none of the maps I found in popular tourist books, maps, t-shirts, or souvenirs did I find anything approaching an accurate and complete map even of Israel as depicted in official Israeli government maps. All, without exception, included the annexed territories of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights (as official maps do,) but none indicated the status – or in many cases even the existence – of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Yet another "Greater Israel" t-shirt.

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Note: I am no expert on the politics, history, or geography of Israel-Palestine. It’s quite possible that I have this all wrong. So if you want to take issue with anything I have written here, I encourage you to do so. Just click on the comment link, and let me know what you think. I’ll post your comments here.

The map at the top of this post comes from Geography; Realms, Realms, Regions, and Concepts, by Harm J. de Blij and Peter Muller (13th edition, published in 2009.) The Road Map of Israel is published by Palphot, Ltd, and printed in Israel, and is undated. I don’t have the slightest idea how to provide a reference for a t-shirt or a refrigerator magnet.

Update (July 2010) The collection continues….

The biggest little country in the world (From an Israeli online t-shirt vendor.)

Tweety bird in (Greater) Israel. From another Israeli t-shirt vendor.

At Amazon.com (in the U.S) you can choose which Israel you want.