The changing life of a village in Yunnan Province, China.

June 30th, 2009

An Zhong, Yunnan Province, China

An Zhong, Yunnan Province, China

An Zhong, Yunnan Province, China
June 30, 2009.

Twenty five year old Mu Yun Zhan lives with his parents, his wife, and his 7 month-old daughter in the small village of An Zhong, about a half hour’s drive south of the town of Li Jiang, in China’s Yunnan province.  Yun Zhan was my guide when I visited Lashi Hai Wetlands Park today. He was supposed to take my traveling companion and me on a horseback ride to the top of a nearby mountain, from where we could view the Park and surrounding farmlands. But it was a cloudy and drizzly day, and so three quarters of the way up the mountain, he asked whether would like to continue to the top, or visit An Zhong instead. That’s how we got to visit the Mu family home, and see something of the village.

Riding along the tea horse road, 2009.

Riding along the tea horse road, 2009.

The sixty families who live in An Zhong are mostly members of Naxi ethnic minority, one of the fifty six minorities recognized by the Chinese government. The are just over 300,000 Naxi people in China, living mainly in the Li Jiang area, but also in parts of neighboring Sichuan Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Region.  In the past, the Naxi relied largely on farming as well as trade, plying the ancient tea horse road between Yunnan and Tibet. Mu Yun Zhan’s grandfather was just such a trader, crossing the mountains with small, sturdy Lijiang horses carrying tea, salt, and sugar and other goods to Tibet, and returning home with furs, musk, and other Tibetan products.

A mudbrick farmhouse in An Zhong village.

A mudbrick farmhouse in An Zhong village.

Reliance on horses skipped a generation in the Mu family; Yun Zhan’s father was an accountant working for a government-owned store in the days before the capitalist marketplace came to the country.  But today the Mu family has returned to a dependence on horses as its main source of a livelihood, albeit a livelihood more lucrative than that of Yun Zhan’s grandfather. Like fifty other families in the village, the Mus own four horses (the maximum allowed in An Zhong) which they use to take tourists like me around the Wetland Park and mountains.

Although capitalism and the tourist economy have come to An Zhong, a strong communal spirit remains among the families. The 220 yuan (about US$ 32) that Yun Zhan earned for guiding us today will go into a common pot, to be shared equally among horse-owning tour guides of the village.  The village also rents out a building housing a small store selling drinks, snacks and local craftwork to tourists (and, by the looks of things, copious quantities of beer and spirits to locals.) Tour packages generally include lunch at a small restaurant next to the store, where families take it in turns to cook, serve food, and clean.

The Mu homestead consists of two courtyards, encircled by buildings and walls. We entered the

Part of the Mu family farmstead.

Part of the Mu family farmstead.

business side first: in it half a dozen chickens scrabbled in the dirt, two pigs grunted in dark and malodorous pens, and a small dog strained at rope holding it to a post.  A covered hole in the center of the yard used to be a well, but now the village is served by a government-run water supply. A doorway leads to the next courtyard, where we found Yun Zhan’s mother, a woman in her mid sixties, washing clothes in a metal tub. This courtyard is paved with concrete and is spotlessly clean. Along one side of the yard is a barn, piled high with straw, and adjacent to it is the family home. It is a single story building at the moment, but between the existing rooms and the roof is an open space ready for a second story when the family’s means allow it.  A large living room takes up much of the house; one side of the room is dominated by a stereo system and  television set, a gift of Yun Zhan’s in-laws when the couple was married last year.

The Mu family living room.

The Mu family living room.

Next door is a house belonging to Yun Zhan’s older brother, and beyond are a few hectares of farmland devoted to corn, fruit trees, and the hay used to feed the horses through the winter.  As we passed the fruit trees on our way out, Yun Zhan picked a few green plums for us from one of the trees. The fruit was sweet and delicious.

By the standards of rural China, the Mu family and the villagers of An Zhong are very well off. Their prosperity is newfound, coming recently as a direct result of the advent of large-scale (primarily domestic) tourism.  Most of China’s rural dwellers, however, are not so lucky. They live far from tourist attractions, and from the job opportunities that have proliferated in the country’s eastern coastal regions.  For this half of China’s population, a lifestyle like that of the Mu family remains a distant prospect.
_____________________

James Ke and Mu Yun Zhan

James Ke and Mu Yun Zhan

Note: My thanks go to Mu Yun Zhan for his hospitality and for sharing his family’s story with me. Yun Zhan speaks no English, and I speak neither Mandarin nor Naxi. I am therefore indebted to my friend and translator, James Ke, for making it possible to me to learn about the Mu family and the lives of the villagers of An Zhong.

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On privacy and the use of public space

June 26th, 2009
Playing mahjong in a park on Shamian Island

Playing mahjong in a park on Shamian Island

Shamian Island, Guangzhou. Thursday June 25, 2009.

I took a walk today around Shamian Island, a picturesque and somewhat upmarket district on the banks of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, China. I then came back to my hotel where I spent some time catching up on news from back home on the Washington Post website, news dominated by the sad tale of the adultery and tearful public confession of yet another U.S. politician. And, of course, I caught up on the latest news from my 128 friends on Facebook.  All of this got me thinking about notions of privacy, and how they differ with place, time, wealth, and culture.

Taichi on Shamian Island, Guangzhou.

Taichi on Shamian Island, Guangzhou.

Consider, for example, the use of public space. In China, it is common to find people using parks, sidewalks, and public squares to do things that most middle class Americans would never dream of doing outside a home, enclosed yard, or members-only gym. In the park along Shamian Island’s waterfront, for example, I found an old man doing a tai chi routine alone, arms outstretched, eyes closed, and a serene expression on his face. A short distance away, a boom box was playing and several couples, who appeared to be in their sixties, were

Resting in a park, Shamian Island

Resting in a park, Shamian Island

waltzing.   I walked a bit further and found a group of women of a certain age sitting on plastic stools being led in song by a conductor moving a baton over lyrics hand-written on a large sheet of paper posted to a wall.  Nearby, two park benches were occupied by well-dressed people stretched out taking a nap, and four women were sitting around a table playing mah jong.

A few blocks away from Shamian Island is a bustling street lined with open-front stores displaying herbs, spices, and traditional medicines.  Behind and above the stores are apartments, and today each one had windows open and clothing hanging outside to dry. On the sidewalk, men sat shirtless on stools and folding chairs, reading newspapers, eating, or playing board games.

By contrast, in the American suburbs where I have spent much of my adult life (or the suburbs

Singing, Shamian Island

Singing, Shamian Island

of Johannesburg where I grew up), I have never seen senior citizens of sound mind dancing or singing in public, gainfully employed people sleeping on park benches, or the ladies of the local bridge club playing anywhere where they might be seen by passers-by. Nor, even in the heat of a Richmond summer, have I witnessed the middle-aged men of the Fan district sitting bare-chested in folding chairs along the sidewalk.

Even in the ‘private’ space of the suburban American yard, there are certain things that are Simply Not Done. In unfenced front yards, for example, I have seldom seen homeowners doing anything except tend to their lawns and flowerbeds. It would be rare indeed to see a suburban family on the lawn in front their house eating dinner, taking a nap, or playing a board game. And even if a neighborhood resident was so brash as to wish to hang undergarments out to dry in public view, the practice would probably be forbidden by local covenants or zoning regulations (Indeed, in townhouse complexes and apartment buildings where I have lived, hanging laundry anywhere, even indoors, where it might be seen from outside was expressly outlawed.)

Playing cards at 11.30 pm last night in People's Park, Guangzhou

Playing cards at 11.30 pm last night in People's Park, Guangzhou

What we can perhaps conclude from all of this is that we Americans are a modest, even prudish people who prefer to live our lives in private rather than in the public gaze. We are driven to public slumber only by homelessness, to public singing and dancing only by insanity or inebriation, and to sitting outside in front of our homes only by poverty.

But are we really so modest? How can we be shocked at the sight of a neighbor’s drying briefs, but feel compelled to learn about Governor Sanford’s adulterous affair in Buenos Aires, Senator Ensign’s or Edwards’s extramarital dalliances, Governor Spitzer’s indiscreet transactions, Senator Craig’s airport antics, Bristol Palin’s incomplete understanding of abstinence, Rush Limbaugh’s predilection for prescription medications, Oprah Winfrey’s weight gain, or the source of the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress? (Americans of course aren’t alone in their fascination with the private lives of others. Also in the news today is Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi’s proud announcement that he has never paid for sex, because it takes away the thrill of conquest.)

Ah, but that’s different, I hear you argue, these people have all voluntarily surrendered their privacy by entering the public arena; living in a goldfish bowl is the price of celebrity and/or power. Most Americans are modest and privacy-loving people; we don’t choose such lives, just as we prefer not to cavort, nap or dance in public parks or on our front lawns.  The fact remains, though, that we choose to – no, insist upon – knowing the details of celebrities’ lives. This may make us voyeurs, you might say, but surely we remain modest and private at heart?

Which brings me to Facebook. I have no reason to believe that, in most respects, my 128 Facebook friends are not reasonably normal people, albeit probably skewed to the left politically, to the eastern part of the U.S. geographically, and to the wealthier rather than the poorer echelons of society.  In terms of modesty and social sensibilities I would venture to guess that they are mostly pretty average folks, not prone to public emotional extravagances or hanging up their damp undergarments in public view.

Let’s peruse today’s Facebook postings to find out what these average, privacy-loving folks have chosen to tell the world.  Here’s one who announces that she is suffering from a stomach ache, another who’s sprained an ankle, and one who is feeling overwhelmed at work. Another misses her college friends, while several shares details of their latest meals (complete with uploaded photographs. Wait, didn’t I just post that picture?) Others include friends who tell us all that they are preparing to buy a car, boarding a plane, getting ready to take a nap, or feeling happy.  Another describes a dream she had last night. Several announce that they have taken quizzes that reveal what color, mythical creature, film star, or national identity best matches their character. Many of my friends choose to tell me and the world what their relationship status is (and whether or not it is complicated,) and whether they prefer men or women.  But I know that neither I nor any of them would ever be caught taking a nap on park bench.

What we grow up and live with is what we consider normal, and we generally accept it unquestioningly unless we are provoked to do otherwise. Something I particularly enjoy about travel is that it provides such a provocation.  When I saw the man doing his tai chi in the park this morning, my first reaction was to feel a bit embarrassed for him. Then I realized how utterly unselfconscious he was, and got to questioning my own feelings. This prompted me to notice all of the other aberrant activities that were going on in the park. Eventually I got to thinking about which behavior was aberrant, that of the Chinese people in the park, or of my own compatriots who would never indulge in such exhibitionism.

I have never danced, sung, or slept in public park and, to the best of my knowledge, since leaving the store where I bought them my undergarments have never been in public view. But, as I watch the citizens of Guangzhou enjoying their parks, streets, and sidewalks, I can’t help thinking that my society is missing out on something. We have surrendered too much of our privacy in our intangible and virtual worlds, and we guard it too much in our real and everyday lives.  We would do well to learn from those folks on Shamian Island, and reveal more of ourselves in the park, and less of ourselves online.

____________

P.S. It wasn’t only the streets and parks of Guangzhou that got me thinking about notions of privacy. On my flight to China, I read Ben Elton’s novel Blind Faith, in which he paints a depressing picture of London at some indeterminate point in the future. In this society, public ’sharing’ and public emoting are mandatory and a desire for privacy or modesty is seen as a dangerous and sinister perversion.

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This blog is no longer censored in China!

June 26th, 2009

Guangzhou

When I last visited China in January 2009, I was unable able to post entries to or read this blog from anywhere in the country. The reason was that access to my website, regionalgeography.org, was blocked by the so-called Great Firewall of China, the electronic filter that supposedly shelters Chinese internet users from salacious and subversive material.

This put me in the company of Amnesty International, The Huffington Post, Penthouse Magazine, and the companion website to the PBS documentary The Tank Man, all of which had also incurred the opprobrium of the Chinese state.

But it appears that I have now redeemed myself in the eyes of the authorities and their censorship algorithms; I can now access my site and post entries such as this one. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered or insulted at this change in status: does this mean that I have been officially declared to be innocuous?

Censorship is one of the most insidious weapons of an authoritarian state. This is because, unlike bullets, tear gas, arbitrary imprisonment, or disenfranchisement, censorship’s victims seldom know that they are victims, except in the most general sense.  After all, how can you possibly know what you don’t know? Of course, the people of China are fully aware that their media are censored. But they don’t know what is being censored, or when.

Today’s edition of the government-controlled English language newspaper China Daily is a case in point. The paper carries a front-page story on a dispute between the government and Google.  The search engine, it appears, has been insufficiently diligent in removing undesirable materials from the search results it delivers to Chinese users.  “Google’s English language search engine has spread large amounts of vulgar content that is lewd and pornographic, seriously violating China’s laws and regulations,” the paper reports a government official as announcing yesterday. Authorities had therefore “summoned representatives of Google in China and urged them to remove the content immediately.”

There are several interesting aspects to this story. First, it is notable that it was published at all, highlighting as it does the issue of internet censorship. One must therefore conclude that the authorities want the public to know that their web searches are being screened. But notice the emphasis in the story: it’s not the Chinese government that is reported as blocking access to undesirable materials, it is Google that is “spreading” this information around China. Nowhere in the article is government blocking of internet access mentioned.  Second, the article reports that the government is concerned about “lewd and pornographic” material, a concern probably shared by most people in this socially conservative society. There is no hint, however, about the government pressure on Google to remove politically sensitive sites from the search results it delivers in China.  So the average Chinese newspaper reader, after perusing this article, might be forgiven for failing to recognize it is not pornography that is the government’s main concern, but rather the much broader and pervasive censorship of politically sensitive information.

2009 marks the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. On June 5, anniversary of the brutal crackdown on the protesters, news media worldwide carried stories commemorating the event. China Daily did not mention the anniversary or the event itself*.  This omission isn’t unique to the government-controlled media: enter the words “Tiananmen Square” in the search box of Chinese version of Google and you will see links to articles on architecture, tourism, and monuments, but not on the 1989 protests.

I tried entering the words in the English language version of Google here this morning, and a strange thing happened.  At the top of the list of results was a Wikipedia entry on the protests. I clicked on the link, and was taken to the Wikipedia page, which included the iconic photograph of the young man standing in front of a convoy of tanks leaving the Square after the crackdown. But before I could read anything on the page, it disappeared, and was replaced with an ambiguous error message:

site blocked

The sad truth about censorship is that, to a surprising extent, it works. When the PBS program Frontline showed a group of Chinese students the famous photograph of “Tank Man,” none of them recognized it or knew what it was.  I had a similar response when describing the photograph to young Chinese friends recently. The events of 1989 had been mentioned in their history classes, but only briefly; they had no idea of the brutality of the crackdown, the extent of the protests, or the worldwide response to it.

A diligent researcher in China could, despite the Great Firewall, find lots of information about the protests online, and perhaps even a photograph of Tank Man. But that presupposes that he knows what to look for.  If you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you look for it?
_______

*You can’t easily go back and check this. As far as I can tell, China Daily doesn’t have a searchable online archive. Journalism is, after all, the first draft of history. Official histories are polished drafts, palimpsests at best, purged of those inconvenient elements which do not conform with the approved narrative.  Allowing people to go back and read the initial draft would subvert the whole process.

Update, July 1, 2009. I was in a hotel today, watching BBC News as a report came on dealing with the twelfth anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China. Apparently demostrations took place today in Hong Kong demanding a greater degree of democracy in the territory. But as the report began, my television screen went blank, and came on again only when the report was drawing to a close. When the report was repeated an hour or so later, the same thing happened. (It’s worth noting that BBC, CNN, and other foreign news channels are available in some hotels, but not to most Chinese television viewers.

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A Note on the Value of Travel

May 20th, 2009

The world looks different depending on where you look at it from. This, as all of my  students know, is a central theme of all of my regional geography courses.

We in the United States live in a very, very unusual place, and so we view the world in a very unusual way. If we are to understand the way others see the world, we need to know something about them, and something about the places they live in.

There is a world of difference, however, between knowing about a place through reading about it, and knowing about a place as a result of having traveled there. In my experience, not even the very best geography courses or the very best books can compete with the first hand experiences that thoughtful and observant travel can provide.

And so I strongly encourage students – and anyone else who can – to travel. It’s not as difficult, as expensive, or as dangerous as you might think, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his blog, On the Ground. Take a look at Kristof’s May 18 blog entry, written after his return from a trip to Africa, and at his previous blog entries. If he can’t convince you of the value of travel, then probably nobody can.

Transcend parochialism. Travel!

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“Dude, I just got bangalored,” or the job market and you in a globalized world

April 17th, 2009

When the great-grandparents of today’s college students entered the job market, they probably had to compete with other job seekers from their home towns or counties. If they did not join the family business or work on the farm, they probably looked for jobs somewhere close to home. Employers usually only advertised in their local areas, and most people seldom if ever traveled very far from home.

When my students’ grandparents started looking for jobs, they may have faced competition from others throughout their home states or regions. Perhaps they moved from a rural area or small towns to a larger city or  a neighboring state in search of work.

College graduates of my generation increasingly found ourselves competing in a national marketplace for employment; applying for jobs other parts of the country and relocating to take up employment had become commonplace. (When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, most of my peers were applying for jobs all around the country, and most academic positions were advertised nationally.)

College graduates in the early 21st century face a very different prospect. The competition they will face as they look for jobs comes from around the world. And, increasingly, this applies across the job market from unskilled jobs to the positions seeking the most highly trained experts.

A few years ago, for a newly graduated medical doctor looking for a job in the U.S., any foreign competition would have been from doctors in other parts of the world who would have had to relocate to take up the job. In addition to being offered employment, they would have had to obtain visas for themselves and perhaps their families, and undertake the formidable task of emigrating and settling into a new land. In other words, local applicants had a considerable advantage over foreigners in the US job market.  Some less skilled workers in the US, such as farm laborers, faced somewhat stiffer international competition from migrants coming to the US – many illegally – in search of jobs.

The foreign competition that both the aspiring doctor and the aspiring farm worker faced was from foreigners coming to the U.S. What has now changed is that now it’s not people that are moving into the country to find jobs, it’s jobs that are moving out. And among these an ever-increasing number of highly skilled jobs.

I was reminded of the during recent trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia. A friend of mine was taken ill, and had to go to a local hospital for an examination that included an x-ray. But there was no radiologist on duty at the time to read the x-ray. Solution: the x-ray was sent electronically to Bangkok, read by a radiologist there, and the results were back in half an hour. Consider the implications of this: if a Thai radiologist can read an x-ray from a Cambodian hospital because there is no local radiologist, then a Thai radiologist just can just as easily read an x-ray from a Virginia hospital because Thai radiologists are cheaper. In other words, the job of the technician in Virginia who takes the x-ray is safe; it’s the job of the more highly trained radiologist that’s in jeopardy.

We are familiar with the outsourcing of customer service jobs to call centers in India, the Philippines, and the Caribbean. Indeed, Bangalore, the city in southern India famous for its hi-tech industry and call centers, has, according to the Urban Dictionary, given rise to a new verb, to bangalore, as in “Dude, I just got bangalored! Now I’m gonna have to train on flipping burgers at McDonalds.” (In 2007, the news agency Reuters bangalored the jobs of journalists reporting on company news on the New York Stock exchange. Reuters now employs about a hundred financial journalists to cover Wall Street from their desks in Bangalore.)

Here is the challenge for today’s US college graduates. If  you want to prepare yourself for a secure job in the U.S. you need to do one of the following:

a) Pick a job that requires you to be close to the marketplace. A job flipping burgers at McDonald’s is safe; those burgers have to be flipped at the place where they are consumed. An x-ray image has to be taken at the place where the patient is, and potholes can only be filled by workers at the site. But if the job can be performed someplace else – reading an x-ray, taking a customer service call, writing software, or designing an aircraft – it can be done anywhere. And it stands to reason that these jobs will tend to migrate to the locations where people with the necessary skills can be employed most economically. But, if you don’t want to be a hairdresser or a cook, you should…

b) Be prepared to accept pay equal to or lower than that being paid to your competitors in India, Thailand, or China. On a recent visit to Cambodia, I learned that the going rate for a professor at a state university in Phnom Penh is $120 a month. At ten times that salary, it would presumably be easy to hire the very best professors in Cambodia, and get them to teach classes anywhere in the world via video hookup. At, even at that salary, the Cambodian professor would be earning less than a quarter of the starting salary of a new faculty member at UMW.  (Just imagine the savings this would produce for UMW students!) I’m sure that similar pay differentials apply to doctors, accounts, and computer programmers. So another path to a secure job in the US is to offer your services for a wage that, in real terms, is less than those earned by your parents and perhaps your grandparents.

But if you don’t want to do this, there is another choice…

c) Make sure that you are much, much better than your competitors in other countries. If you want a U.S. employer to hire you at several times the cost of your foreign competitor, you had better make sure that you are several times better than that competitor. You can do this in part through your own individual effort: making sure that you hone your skills, get good grades, and the like.

But that won’t be enough. If we as a society want our college graduates to be competitive in the global marketplace, we need to provide them with the world’s best education. And that means that we, as a society, need to make sure that, from kindergarten to Ph.D, our educational institutions are the very best in world*. We need to make sure that a top-notch education is available to all, not just the children of the wealthy. We need to create a society that respects ability and accomplishment over wealth, education over fame, and knowledge over ignorance. We need realize that we are global citizens, that the people of the rest of the world are our peers, not our inferiors. And we need to understand that simply being American (or European, or Chinese for that matter) doesn’t entitle us to any special privileges – individually or as a nation – in the global marketplace of ideas, business, or employment.

So, 21st century college students, what are you doing to make sure that you are ready to compete in the global marketplace when you graduate?

______

*Update: Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times (April 22 2007) about a recent report that

“in the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. dominated the world in K-12 education. We also dominated economically. In the 1970s and 1980s, we still had a lead, albeit smaller, in educating our population through secondary school, and America continued to lead the world economically, albeit with other big economies, like China, closing in. Today, we have fallen behind in both per capita high school graduates and their quality. Consequences to follow… If America had closed the international achievement gap between 1983 and 1998 and had raised its performance to the level of such nations as Finland and South Korea, United States G.D.P. in 2008 would have been between $1.3 trillion and $2.3 trillion higher.”

_____

Some recent news stories have highlighted some of the issues around the international labor market. A New York Times story reported on the problems highly-skilled workers have had in moving to the U.S.; a fasinating series of maps accompanied this article, showing the countries of origin of foreign skilled workers currently in this country.

(I posted a slightly different version of this piece on the Geog 101 blog Thoughts and Notes.)

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The Cambodian Genocide

March 28th, 2009
Stupa at Chuong Ek, near Phnom Penh, site of one of Cambodia's "killing fields."

Stupa at Chuong Ek, near Phnom Penh, site of one of Cambodia's "killing fields."

March 2009

Chuong Ek is a quiet and peaceful place, a far cry from the noise, bustle, and traffic of the center of Phnom Penh only a few kilometers away. It was a sunny day when I visited a few weeks ago, with just a few puffy clouds in the sky.  The only sounds I could hear as I walked around were birds and, in the distance, the shouts of children playing in a schoolyard nearby.  The other visitors to Chuong Ek – twenty or so of them – walked around mostly in silence.

There really isn’t any other way to respond to a place where more than 20,000 people were killed with machetes, axes, or gunshots, then dumped into mass graves.  Today the mass graves are marked by depressions in the otherwise flat landscape. Some are cordoned off, some bear wooden markers: “Mass grave,” “Mass grave of 450 victims,” “Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women majority of whom were naked.”

Chuong Ek is one of Cambodia’s many “killing fields,” place where victims were brought to be killed and buried during the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 – 1979. Today is it a memorial to those who died during this period; a place whose bucolic setting somehow makes it all the more stark and shocking.

Some of the hundreds of skulls in the stupa at Chuong Ek

Some of the hundreds of skulls in the stupa at Chuong Ek

At the center of the memorial park is a stupa, a tall white monument topped with the spire and roof of a Buddhist temple.  A sign asks visitors to remove their shoes before climbing the steps to the glass door of the monument. Inside is a tall set of wooden platforms, extending all the way to the ceiling.  Each platform is filled with skulls, exhumed from the surrounding mass graves. Gashes and fractures in some skulls are evidence of the hammer blows or machete wound that killed their victims; others have small round bullet holes. On the bottom shelf is a pile of tattered clothes; these too came from the mass graves.

As I walked away from the stupa along a narrow path that leads between the mass graves, I looked down. Beneath my feet, in the brown dirt, I noticed the remnants of clothes. There were also what look like white sticks or splinters; closer inspection reveals that these are bone fragments. When the graves were exhumed, only the skulls of the victims were moved to the stupa; other remains were left here.

Clothes, teeth and bone fragments exposed after the rain at the site of a mass grave.

Clothes, teeth and bone fragments exposed after the rain at the site of a mass grave.

It was when I realized that I was walking on bones and clothes of genocide victims that the real horror of this place – and of the Cambodian genocide – suddenly hit me. Reading about the deaths of two million people is horrifying, but the scale of it makes it incomprehensible. Looking down and seeing that I was standing on a victim’s shin bone, though, made my blood run cold.

A half hour tuk-tuk ride from Chuong Ek is another memorial to the Cambodian genocide, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Before 1975 this place was a high school; after the Khmer Rouge took power it was converted into a secret prison (called S-21) where suspected enemies of the regime were brought to be interrogated and tortured.  Only a handful of the 20,000 or so prisoners brought here survived. The rest either died here or were taken to Chuong Ek to be executed.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh.

Like Chuong Ek, the museum here is stark and simple. Some of the interrogation rooms have been left just as they were when Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979.  In one of the former school buildings, classrooms had been converted into interrogation chambers for “high-value” prisoners, many themselves senior Khmer Rouge officials who had come under suspicion.  In each of the first floor classrooms was a single metal bed frame; prisoners were shackled to these frames twenty-four hours a day. A metal bin served as a toilet.  These remain in the rooms today; on the wall of each room is a photograph of the body that lay on the bed when Vietnamese forces arrived.

In another building, classrooms were divided up into cells, separated from one another by crudely built brick walls. Each cell is barely large enough for a person to lie down, but some prisoners spent months here, shackled to the floor.

Equipment used for waterboarding at Tuol Sleng Prison.

Equipment used for waterboarding at Tuol Sleng Prison.

Also preserved at Tuol Sleng are some of the instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge to obtain “confessions” from their prisoners.  Some prisoners were tied to a sloping wooden platform, a bit like a tilted bed. Hoods were placed over their heads and water poured over them to give the illusion of drowning (This practice is known as waterboarding.) Prisoners were also suspended upside down from a piece of outdoor gymnastics apparatus, then lowered head first into large pits of dirty water.

A prisoner, photographed on arrival at the Tuol Sleng Prison.

A prisoner, photographed on arrival at the Tuol Sleng Prison.

The Khmer Rouge were thorough and systematic in documenting who was imprisoned here. Arriving prisoners were each given a number and photographed. Some of the photographs are on display at the museum; row upon row of black-and-white headshots, male and female, young and old. Some prisoners look terrified, as though they knew what lay in store for them. Others look defiant.

Also on display are photographs of Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them children. (Many of the photographs are displayed on the Museum’s website.)

In four years of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia, about 1.7 million people lost their lives (more than 20 percent of the country’s population.)  Perpetrators and victims were, for the most part, Cambodian, but outsiders too were complicit in setting the scene for the tragedy, and mitigating adverse consequences to the perpetrators of the genocide. Without the war in Southeast Asia, and more particularly without the wide scale U.S. bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power, and the genocide would not have happened. The Khmer Rouge could not have remained in power without support from China.  The United Nations, with the support of the U.S. give its Cambodian seat to representatives of the Khmer Rouge, even after the regime had been deposed. The trial of someone charged as a result of the genocide began just this week, thirty years after the end of Khmer Rouge rule (The man on trial is former Khmer Rouge official Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, who has admitted to condemning thousands of people to death when he was head of the Tuol Sleng prison.)

In the wake of the Second World War and the Nazi Holocaust, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  Signatories to the Convention affirmed that “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.”  But in Cambodia the world did not live up to its undertaking: the Cambodian Genocide marked the first great failure of this noble convention.

But it was not the last. In 1994, in a one hundred day orgy of killing, some 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda in an apparently well-planned and coordinated effort to exterminate the country’s Tutsi population. This was a stark act of genocide, and the outside world knew that it was happening as it took place. But, deliberately, the international community chose not to act.  Once again, the Genocide Convention had failed.

In 1995, Bosnian Serbs systematically killed 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica; the killing was found by the International Court of Justice to have been act of genocide. The Convention had failed to prevent this, too.

Today, in Darfur in the west of the vast African country of Sudan, government backed Janjaweed militia are systematically killing or displacing local black African farmers. According to the United Nations, 2.7 million people have been displaced from their homes in Darfur over the past six years, and some 300,000 have died from the effects of war, famine, and disease. Despite extensive worldwide publicity, governments have again been reluctant to act and the dying in Sudan continues.

Thousands killed in Bosnia, hundreds of thousands in Sudan and Rwanda, nearly two million in Cambodia, six million in the Holocaust. These numbers are overwhelming, so large that they are numbing. How can anyone possibly appreciate what the deliberate killing of so many people means? I can’t. But that moment at Chuong Ek when I realized that I was standing on a shin bone protruding from the dirt helped shock me into realizing the horror of the murder of one person, the person who used to walk on leg of which that bone was part.  A million is a number, one is a person.

All of this is why I think that it is so important for as many people as possible to visit places like Chuong Ek, Tuol Sleng, Auschwitz, Srebrenica, and Kigali.  Standing in the place where such terrible atrocities took place, seeing the skulls and the photographs of the victims, we can begin to comprehend what genocide is. It is a crime against humanity as a whole and a crime against our individual humanity.   Only when enough people comprehend this can we ensure that it does not happen again.

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Phnom Penh and Svay Rieng

March 7th, 2009

March 8, 2009

On the highway from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

On the highway from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh

When I first visited Cambodia in 2005, I did what most tourists here do. I flew in to Siem Reap, spent a couple of days touring the famous ancient temples at Angkor, and then left the country.

I came back for a few days in October 2006, this time to visit the capital city Phnom Penh. All I knew about the city was that it was the site of Tuol Sleng and Chuong Ek, and I wanted to visit both. Tuol Sleng was a prison during the Khmer Rouge era (1975 – 1979), and the place where more than 20,000 people were brutally interrogated and tortured. They were then usually taken to Chuong Ek, one of Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” where they were killed and dumped in mass graves. Chuong Ek is today a museum and a memorial to those who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Visiting these two places was, as I had expected, a powerfully moving experience (They will be the subject of a separate blog entry, coming soon.)

On the river, Phnom Penh

On the river, Phnom Penh

What I had not expected was to be charmed by the city of Phnom Penh. It is a poor, crowded, and somewhat ramshackle city of about 1.3 million people at the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers. There are foreigners here, to be sure, but Phnom Penh is not a favorite destination for visitors to Cambodia. The tourist contingent seems to consist mainly of adventurous-looking backpacker types, many of them here to visit the genocide sites, and some East Asian tour groups. There also seem to be quite a lot of diplomatic and NGO personnel here, many of them moving around the city in large SUVs (The largest and most impressive SUVs in town, though, are those black vehicles with military or government license plates or, most impressive of all, those at the top of the traffic food chain, Lexus SUVs with no license plates at all. Many of these have the word “Lexus” emblazoned on their sides in foot-high letters, presumably to avoid the embarrassment of being mistaken for Toyotas.)

As a person with unusual travel interests (I’m a geographer, after all) Phnom Penh’s lack of “tourist attractions” makes it all the more interesting. It is a very lively, vibrant place, full of people living their lives (in many cases very tough lives.) I found the people I met here almost unfailingly friendly, frequently charming, often with a great sense of humor.

Take for example the young boys selling (apparently pirate) copies of books about Cambodia to diners at riverfront sidewalk restaurants. They are very persistent salesmen, badgering people waiting for meals to buy their wares (but seldom approaching anyone whose food has already been served.) When a dining companion declined to make a purchase, the twelve-year old salesman looked him in the eye, and said with mock seriousness, “Then I will kill you.” Each time he walked by for the rest of the evening he would stare at my friend and make a throat slitting gesture.

During my 2007 visit to Cambodia, I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of two brothers; Vita was then a student, and Pheap worked for an NGO. They live in Phnom Penh, but their family home is in Svay Rieng province, near the Vietnam border. After we had met a few times, they invited me to travel home with them for a visit, and I readily accepted.

Taxi on the road to Svay Rieng

Taxi on the road to Svay Rieng

And so Vita, Pheap, a cousin of theirs and I set out in a sturdy Toyota Camry taxi one morning for Svay Rieng. I know the car was sturdy because, aside from a punctured tire, it survived the journey. The four-hour trip took us along Route 4, apparently the main road from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam border and Ho Chi Minh City. Much of the road was in the process of being upgraded, courtesy of Japanese aid funds. The upgrade hadn’t come moment too soon. The journey over the unimproved sections of the road reminded me of a friend’s description of a journey somewhere in east Africa: “it’s like being dragged naked over a xylophone.” Only this xylophone was mounted on a roller coaster.

Making the journey immeasurably more hair-raising was the fact that the traffic on the road consisted of Cambodian vehicles. This means a motley collection of motorcycles, trucks, minibuses, cars, ox wagons, and an array of vehicles occupying intermediate positions between these various categories. (On a trip to the coastal city of Sihanoukville, I even saw a large elephant being steered down the road with a full load of passengers and cargo.) What the vehicles had in common was that they were all overloaded, and none of them would pass a vehicle inspection examination in any country which has such things. And by overloaded I mean really overloaded. Minibus taxis in my home country of South Africa are not overloaded; they just make full use of 12 seats by squeezing 20 people onto them. Cambodian minibus taxis make equally efficient use of their interiors, but they then also put six or eight passengers on the roof. A fully laden motorcycle might carry four or five people, or three people and two large bird cages, or a driver, a passenger, and a large live pig bound to a couple of planks of wood,  or perhaps a driver, several large sacks of rice, and an old woman on top of the rice.

But the story doesn’t end there. Cambodian roads not only carry Cambodian vehicles, they carry Cambodian vehicles driven by Cambodian drivers.

In a moment of what I now realize was great naiveté on my first visit to Phnom Penh I asked a hotel concierge whether I might rent a car to travel to Sihanoukville rather than taking a bus or taxi. He raised his eyebrows, and said “No, Sir.” “Do you mean that there are no rental cars available, or that it’s not a good idea?” I asked, “Not a good idea, Sir,” he replied, indulgently but very definitively.

After five visits to Cambodia, I still cannot claim to understand what rules of the road Cambodians follow. Perhaps there aren’t any rules, or at least any written rules that are enforced. On one occasion I was riding with two other people on motorcycle, for example, when we

Phnom Penh traffic

Phnom Penh traffic

passed through a police roadblock. Three people on a 125cc motorbike, none of us wearing a helmets The police didn’t even glance at us, nor did they pull over motorbikes with four passengers. I don’t think I have seen anyone stop at a stop sign here, whether or not there is traffic approaching. And driving on the wrong side of the road toward oncoming traffic doesn’t seem to constitute an infraction.

There are obviously numerous unwritten rules, or at least guidelines, that Cambodian drivers follow. I have managed to figure out only a few. The most important is that drivers here are amazingly calm and very considerate. Despite congestion, agonizingly slow traffic flow, and ubiquitous traffic jams, I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling road rage. Drivers cut in front of each other, trucks back out of driveways and block the street, and tuk-tuks (motorcycle-drawn taxis) stop everywhere to pick up and drop of passengers. But nobody seems to get upset or impatient. The reason that it’s possible to go through a stop sign and merge into oncoming traffic is that oncoming drivers let you in. If you are turning left into a road of busy two-way traffic, it’s okay, as a first step, to turn into the oncoming traffic, then gradually ease your way across to the correct side of the road. Oncoming drivers will avoid you.

It took me a while to figure this all out. To someone like me, used to driving in the USA, first impressions are that Cambodian roads are full of very angry drivers. Horns honk incessantly. The driver of a car passing a motorcycle, bicycle, or a pedestrian will almost always honk. A honk in the US is a reprimand, or an expression of anger or frustration. But in Cambodia, where bicycles and many motorcycles don’t have rearview mirrors, a honk is a kindly warning, “I’m coming up behind you and about to pass.” Indeed, it would be most inconsiderate, even dangerous, to pass a motorcycle without honking.

On display at the open-air butchery, Svay Rieng

On display at the open-air butchery, Svay Rieng

But back to my journey to Svay Rieng, where we eventually arrived after a four hour journey.  As in most Cambodian towns, it consists of a bustling area of stalls at which one might buy vegetables, fruit, fish (often still – barely – live,) skinned frogs (cooked or raw,) even spiders (food, not pets.)

And meat. Meat dangling from hooks on the ceiling of the stalls, maturing in the tropical heat and open to the elements. Or lying unwrapped and uncovered on wooden tables, passing the hours until it is purchased by providing sustenance to local flies. At one butchery store, the upper halves of two pigs’ heads lay on a table, exposed brains on display for the customer’s inspection.  Mercifully, my hosts passed over the brains, and selected a large slab of beef lying alongside. This was, it appeared, to be part of our lunch. I was apprehensive.

With my hosts, Svay Rieng

With my hosts, Svay Rieng

But lunch turned out to be delicious. The hunk of beef was transformed by my hosts’ mother into tasty slices, fried with onions, garlic, and other spices, and attractively garnished with lettuce and slices of green tomato. Another dish was piled high with pieces of roast chicken, whose relatives pecked around on the ground below the table as we dined. (As in other parts of East and Southeast Asia, the cooked chicken here was hacked into pieces rather than being dismantled into legs, wings, breast, and other constituent parts. The bird’s neck was on the plate, as were the feet.) The rice that accompanied the meats was grown by the family in the paddies surrounding the house, and tasted better than any other white rice I have eaten.

Rice paddy, Svay Rieng

Rice paddy, Svay Rieng

While the meal was being prepared, Pheap took me for a walk around the area. We crossed the road in front of the house, and made our way along a narrow strip of raised land separating the rice fields. I saw rice in various stages of growth, some about 30 days old, and a couple of weeks away from being ready for transplanting, some younger. I saw tiny fish, not much bigger than mosquito larvae, their big eyes out of all proportion with the rest of their bodies. In a couple of month’s time, Pheap told me, the paddies would be full of large fish – he indicated their size by clenching his forearm – which I would certainly get to eat if I were to visit the family again later in the year.

On what appeared to be an island in the midst of the rice fields, connected to the rest of the world by a narrow path, was the house of the oldest brother in the Hy family and his wife. Like most houses in this area, it was on concrete stilts. In the shaded and protected area beneath the house was a raised platform, about a meter above the ground. We removed our shoes, and sat down here. Around us was a small courtyard. At one end was a small structure on low stilts, used to store rice. Alongside it was a hand operated pump, the source of the family’s water supply. The house was not connected to the electrical grid, although a fluorescent light was attached to a beam over the platform where we sat. I asked Pheap what powered the light, and he pointed to a small car battery. The family takes it into town periodically to be charged, at a cost of about 25c (the exact price depends on how fully it is charged.) This is enough, as I understood it, to provide light for four hours.

My hosts’ house was similar in design, but somewhat more substantial and better appointed (see photograph). The house itself consisted of a single large upstairs room, its floor made of a smooth and very study tropical hardwood. There were shuttered windows on the sides of the room (no glass,) and the walls were made of wood. The house sat on a dozen concrete stilts, underneath were tables, benches, and a raised sitting platform. The roof of the house was covered with terracotta tiles, and a gutter ran down the side of the building into a large clay pot used to collect water for drinking and washing (the pot was half full when I arrived at the house, and overflowing after the brief downpour that arrived during our meal.)

Several smaller structures surrounded the main house, all of them with walls and roofs of palm leaves. One housed a cow, which peered out at us as we ate. Another, without walls, sheltered a large pig. There were also several other buildings whose functions I could not discern. The house did not have an indoor bathroom.

This makes it a typical home in Svay Rieng province, According to the Atlas of Cambodia, only 4.7% of homes in the province have electricity, safe drinking water, and a toilet; 5.1% have a toilet and safe drinking water, and 70.9% have safe drinking water. 16.1% have no amenities at all (2005 data.) Svay Rieng is by no means the poorest province in Cambodia: indeed, it is one of the better off. Only in Phnom Penh province do a majority of homes have electricity, a toilet, and safe drinking water. In most provinces, most homes have no amenities at all.

On each visit to Cambodia, I have become more fascinated with the country, its people, and its history.  The reason for my current trip to the country is that I am confident that many of my students will share my fascination with this place, and so I am here to set up a study abroad program that will bring students from the University of Mary Washington to Cambodia during the Summer of 2010 and, I hope, regularly thereafter.

The program will include time in Siem Reap, a chance for the students to learn about the history of the Angkor Kingdom, and see the magnificent Angkor Wat and some of the other temples in the area. They will visit Phnom Penh, and learn about the tragic Cambodian genocide.  But they will also learn about more than ancient history and genocide. I hope to arrange a service learning experience for the students, in which they will work with NGOs and others on development projects (such as those working with street children,  or promoting awareness of HIV.) And, most important of all, the students will meet and get to know Cambodians of their own age, through homestay arrangements and a “buddy program,” where each UMW students will start getting to know a Cambodian student prior to traveling to the country.

I will be working on arrangements for the program over the next couple of months, and I will post information on this blog and at regionalgeography.org as soon as I have it. In the mean time, if you think you might be interested in traveling with me to Cambodia in 2010, please let me know, and I will make sure that you get regular updates on our plans.

____

I have posted additional photographs from my current trip to Cambodia on Facebook; these include photographs from Kampong Phluk (see my previous post,) and from some of Phnom Penh’s markets.

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From Kampong Phluk, Cambodia

March 5th, 2009

House on stilts, Kampong Phluk

House on stilts, Kampong Phluk

Tuesday March 3, 2009

It isn’t easy to get to Kampong Phluk, particularly at this time of the year.  My journey began with a 20 minute taxi ride along the paved road heading south from Siem Reap. The taxi then turned off onto a dirt road, taking us past small villages and houses made of palm leaves, standing on wooden stilts. The road got progressively rougher and the ride more bumpy, until the driver announced that he could go no further, and pulled over.

Miraculously, at this point several motorcycles drew up alongside, offering transportation for my two traveling companions and me for the next leg of the trip. After negotiating a price, we each climbed onto a motorcycle, and headed off down the road. Well, not exactly a road. It was more like a pitted track, punctuated by the occasional pool of water or sandpit. At one point along the road, we had to squeeze past a convoy of three carts, being drawn very slowly by cattle.

Fishing, Kampong Phluk

Fishing, Kampong Phluk

Next we boarded a long boat, expertly maneuvered by our young Khmer boatman along a narrow, shallow, winding, sometimes congested, and very muddy channel. Ten minutes into the journey, we came upon the first of the three villages that comprise Kampong Phluk.  The village was unlike any place I have seen. It consists of rows of palm-leaf or wooden houses, each precariously perched atop thin wooden stilts, some up to 10 meters above the ground.  At least, that’s where they are stand today, during the dry season. In the wet season, the village is surrounded by the waters of Tonle Sap, Cambodia’s remarkable great lake and the source of sustenance for this any many other fishing communities.

Tonle Sap is an extremely unusual body of water. In the dry season, it is a shallow lake, about 2,500 square kilometers in size. At its southern end it narrows to a river which joins the Mekong River at Phnom Penh. During the wet season, however, fed by rains in Southeast Asia and China, the waters of the Mekong rise to such an extent that the flow of the Tonle Sap reverses, draining water from the Mekong into the lake.  The lake deepens from less than 2 meters to up to 11 meters, and expands to six times its dry season area, flooding the lands alongside the lake, including the land where Kampong Phluk is located (see map below.)

Tonle Sap in the dry season (dark blue) and wet season (light blue.)

Tonle Sap in the dry season (dark blue) and wet season (light blue.)

The lake is one of the world’s richest inland fishing grounds; Cambodia’s 14 million inhabitants rely on fish from the lake for more than half of their protein intake. For the people of Kampong Phluk, the lake is the source of sustenance, income, employment, and a central part of life and culture. As we passed through the village and into the lake on our boat, it seemed that just about everyone was involved in fishing or something related to it. Boys folded fish nets or swam in the muddy water tending to fish traps; men stood on the shore with hand nets, on the lookout for fish, or fished from boats on the lake. Women laid out shrimp to dry on the dry ground, and girls repaired nets.

Floating house, Kampng Phlug

Floating house, Kampong Phlug

For all of the bounty of the lake, it was clear that Kampong Phluk is but no means a wealthy place. Four out of every five Cambodians live on less than $2 a day, and there can be little doubt that the people of Kampong Phluk are among them.  Sixty percent of the country’s population does not have access to clean water, and this almost certainly includes the people of this village. There was also no sign of electricity here (unless you count the television set I saw running off a car battery in one of the houseboats we passed.)

In Kampong Phluk

In Kampong Phluk

In recent years, Kampong Phluk has acquired a new source of income: tourism. My two-hour boat and motorcycle adventure cost me $16, and at those rates my driver and boat captain must be among the wealthier people in the village.  But for all the friendliness I encountered along my journey (and there was lots of it) I found myself wondering about the price that the villagers pay for the dollars of visitors like me.  Tourists come here to see an unusual way of life, some striking vernacular architecture, and some beautiful natural scenery. But they also come to indulge in poverty tourism, gawking at people because they are poor, invading their privacy by pointing lenses into their homes, and perhaps leaving with a romanticized notion of both poverty and the “traditional” lifestyles of rural Cambodians.

I believe that people like me take on an important obligation in exchange for the privilege of visiting Kampong Phluk and the myriad other places in the world where some people engage in a daily struggle for survival and others visit them as tourists.  That obligation requires us to do our best to understand – and not simply enjoy – the places and the people we have seen; it requires us to learn about them and the societies in which they live, and to try to figure out how our lives are connected with theirs (and they almost always are, whether that connection be economic, political, environmental, or perhaps spiritual.) It also requires us to try as best we can to imagine how the world must look from the vantage point of those who lives we have glimpsed, and how we must look to them.  And finally it requires us to transform our understanding into action.

__________________

In writing this blog, I consulted the following sources:

Tonle Sap: The Flowing Heart of Cambodia (December 6, 2005.)

Map by Matti Kummu (Helsinki University of Technology ) Wikipedia Commons 2006.

Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve Environmental Information Database

Human Development Report: Cambodia (United Nations Development Program.)

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From My Window Seat

February 26th, 2009
siberia-2

Mountains in Eastern Siberia

Above Siberia, February 26, 2009.

Right now I am looking at an expanse of white, stretching as far as the horizon, broken by an occasional jagged dark line. A few hundred kilometers back, the vast plateau of white had a shattered appearance, like a broken frosted mirror.  Now it is more solid, but with hundreds of small rills running across it.

I had no idea that ice could be so fascinating, and so varied.

This white expanse is the northern polar icecap, and I am over the Chucki Sea northwest of the Bering Strait, at about 77 degrees north, 170 E.  My view is from the window of United Airlines flight 803, bound from Washington DC to Tokyo.

Unfortunately, the moving map that is supposed the location of our aircraft on the screen in front of me isn’t working, so I have been guessing our location. Eventually, though, my curiosity got the better of me, and I asked a flight attendant if she could find out our location. A few minutes later she came to my seat accompanied by the First Officer, who gave me a copy of the navigation chart for our flight and showed me the route we are taking.

… In the time that I spent talking to the First Officer, the landscape below changed.
We are now over land. It’s still all white, but the jagged cracks in the ice sheet have given way to sinuous curves as the contours of the snow follow those of the river courses below. We are now over [Yakutsk] in far northeastern Siberia.

When I travel on a daylight flight, I always ask for a window seat.  And, for much of the journey, I sit with my nose pressed to the window like a child on his first flight, with my camera at the ready. This behavior occasionally embarrasses my traveling companions, and I usually miss out on in-flight movies. But it’s worth it.

Southeast of Kabul, near the Pakistan border (near Tora Bora.)

Southeast of Kabul, near the Pakistan border (near Tora Bora.)

Whenever I read news of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces hiding out in the mountains of Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan, I remember the view I had from a Qatar Airways flight from Washington to Doha. It was a summer day, the rugged mountains were capped with snow, and looking down at that landscape I began to understand how it might be possible for some with nefarious intentions and a taste for mountain scenery to elude capture here.

It’s one thing to read about Indonesia’s perilous location atop one of the most active plate boundaries in the world, but seeing the volcanoes of Bali from above, peeking through the clouds, adds another dimension to an understanding of plate tectonics.

Volcanoes on the island of Bali, Indonesia.

Volcanoes on the island of Bali, Indonesia.

The intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” becomes a lot clearer after viewing the West Bank from above. Israeli settlements sit perched on hilltops, their orderly layout making them look like suburban American housing developments. Asphalt highways link the settlements with one another, and with Israel proper. These roads bypass what are clearly Palestinian villages, with their haphazard street patterns and minarets.  Anyone who thinks that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be easy or perhaps even possible would do well to take the short-hop low-altitude Jordanian Airlines flight from Amman to Tel Aviv.

It is possible, of course, to see all of these views and a whole lot more on Google Earth (and anyone who doesn’t have Google Earth installed on their computer is missing out on a real treat.) But I find that what the view from an aircraft has gives me, and what no map or satellite picture could, is an appreciation of scale. I know that the Sahara Desert is big, but I didn’t really appreciate how big until I had flown over it for three hours. Nor did I understand China’s size until I took a five-hour flight from Guangzhou in the east to Urumqi in the west. And I didn’t appreciate Israel’s small size until, from a vantage point above the West Bank, I saw the Mediterranean Sea.

Jewish settlements and a Palestinian village on the West Bank, May 2008.

Jewish settlements and a Palestinian village on the West Bank, May 2008.

I could write also about the understanding of U.S. urban geography that I have gained from looking at cities, suburbs, and interstate highways from above, or the understanding of the fractured nature of the Caucuses that comes from seeing their mountainous topography from above.

But that will have to wait for another occasion. I have to put my laptop aside and return to my window and to the snow-covered mountains of Siberia.  They’re too good to miss, not just for a crazy geographer, but for anyone. That’s because, like so much of the earth, they are not only fascinating but also breathtakingly beautiful.

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Made in China: Buttons, socks, sofas, and electric scooters

January 26th, 2009
Foshan City, Guangdong Province.

Foshan City, Guangdong Province.

During my visits to China, what has struck me most is the scale of the place.  It’s big, its population is vast, and its economy is immense and growing fast.

At 9.6 million square kilometers in area, China is significantly larger than the 48 contiguous states of the U.S.  Flying non-stop from east to west takes five hours, going by train takes three days. The country’s population is huge: at 1.3 billion, it is four times the population of the United States, or one fifth of the world’s population.  600 million people, less than half of the country’s population, live in cities, but by some estimates China’s urban population will rise to a billion people by 2025.  Already, China has some of the world’s largest cities: Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin each have over ten million inhabitants. Perhaps 100 cities have a million or more inhabitants.  “One of the amazing things about traveling in China is that you suddenly come across a city you have never even heard of before with a population of more than four million people – that’s twice he size of Dallas,” notes NPR correspondent Rob Gifford.

China’s economy is vast, and growing fast.  Figures released in January 2009 revealed that the country has now overtaken Germany as the world’s third largest economy, after the United States and Japan.

Much of China’s economic growth is a result of the country’s manufacturing sector, which has expanded in leaps and bounds over the past two decades.  Economic reforms have encouraged the growth of a thriving private sector, anathema in the China of Mao Zedong.  The creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) along the country’s east coast have encouraged foreign investment and the growth of manufacturing industries. And relaxation of strict controls on movement of people has allowed tens of millions of poor rural dwellers to come to the cities as migrant workers to work in the new factories.

It is not just government policies, though, that have allowed China’s industrial sector to grow so fast. It’s also wages that are very low in comparison with the country’s main competitors. A 2004 report notes that at that time companies spent about 92 cents an hour for each worker in China, versus $1.20 in Thailand, $1.70 in Mexico and about $21.80 in the United States. Even though wages in China have risen since that time, the country remains a formidable competitor for established manufacturers worldwide.

It took me a flight across China to comprehend the country’s physical size, and visits to some of its teeming megacities to appreciate the enormity of the country’s population.  I didn’t really start to comprehend the scale of China’s economy, though, until I visited a wholesale market, a factory, and a trade show.

Negotiating the price of glass beads.

Negotiating the price of glass beads at the clothing accessories market.

The clothing accessories wholesale market in Guangzhou is an amazing place. I was here in October 2008 with James, a Chinese friend who works as a buyers’ agent for foreign companies. On this visit he was looking for small glass beads for a manufacturer of African beadwork. As he negotiated on the price of beads, I wandered around exploring the market.

From the outside, the eight-storey building is nothing spectacular. The inside, though, is remarkable. Every floor is a warren of small stores, each a showroom for a wholesaler of some kind of clothing accessory. I gave up trying to count the stores, but I guessed that there were probably at least 800 wholesalers doing business here. There were purveyors of buttons, zippers, beads, fasteners, sequins — even two stores dedicated to the sale of feather boas.  The first floor of the market was devoted largely to buttons: probably a hundred wholesalers, each taking orders for buttons. They seemed to sell every kind of button imaginable buttons, large buttons, brass buttons, and glass buttons, all of them made in China and for sale here in wholesale quantities to buyers from around the globe.  It seemed to me, as I marveled at the site of all of these buttons, that this place should surely be able to supply all of the button needs of the galaxy.

I wasn’t far wrong, as I discovered when I did some further research on the geography of the world’s button manufacturing industry. In 2004, sixty percent of the world’s buttons were being made in 200 factories the Chinese town of Qiaotou in Zhejiang province.  China seems also to have cornered the world zipper market: the trade site alibaba.com lists 4 951 Chinese manufacturers of zippers. And this was just the clothing accessories market.

In another part of Guangzhou are the sock wholesalers, where buyers from Buenos Aires to Brisbane come to view merchandise and place orders.  Most socks made in the coastal city of Datang (aka Socks City) which produces nine billion pairs of socks a year (that’s about one and a half socks annually for every foot on the planet.)

And then there is Underwear City, part of the city of Foshan, not far from Guangzhou, where some 300 underwear manufacturers are located, churning out a sizeable share of the world’s undergarments.

sofas

Making sofas, Foshan City, Guangdong Province.

My factory visit took place in January 2009, when I paid a visit to Foshan City as a guest of a friend who goes by the English name of Sarah. Her family owns a factory in the Shunde district of the city.  They don’t make intimate apparel, though; this is Furtinure City, and Sarah’s family is in the sofas and recliner business. On this visit I met Sarah at the factory’s showroom, or, more correctly, their part of a vast complex of showrooms where local manufacturers compete to earn the custom of buyers from around the world.  When I arrive at the showroom, Sarah is engaged in animated negotiations with two buyers from Azerbaijan, who end up signing an order for leather-covered recliners.

factory-workers

Workers sewing covers for sofas and recliners.

Later, Sarah drives me to the factory itself, located in a part of the city that only a few years ago used to be area dominated by the large ponds of fish farms.  The factory is indistinguishable from the hundreds of others around: a mid-sized low-rise building, with a nondescript exterior. Inside, young men assemble the wooden frames of sofas, attach padding, and staple leather and vinyl covering. In another building, young women sew seating covers. Sarah tells me that most of the workers are migrants from rural areas.  Most live in dormitory-style accommodation near the factory, and a handful stay in rooms in the factory building itself. Many come from the same region, since word of mouth is the factory’s main means of recruitment.

Sarah’s family’s factory is part of the reason that China’s furniture exports grew from $3.5 billion in 1999 to $16.6 only six years later.  It’s also part of the reason that employment in the furniture manufacturing industry in North Carolina and Virginia plummeted by more than 25 percent during the same period.

The wholesale fashion accessories market and the furniture factory gave me an idea of the size of two pieces of China’s manufacturing economy. To comprehend the big picture, I had to go to the China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair.

The Canton Fair takes place twice a year at a vast new exhibition center in Guangzhou. My friend James, the buyer’s agent, was scouting out electrically powered scooters for a potential customer from Arizona at the 104th Fair, in Fall 2008, and I tagged along.

toilet1

Inspecting the merchandise, Canton Fair,

Our welcome to the Fair took the form of dozens of young Chinese translators, lined up along the approach to the exhibition’s registration center, waving signs and loudly announcing their services to foreign visitors. Registration was a quick and efficient process, and within a few minutes we were inside the first cavernous hall and on our way to the exhibits of the manufacturers of electric scooters. We must have visited the exhibits of a dozen companies, each showing its line of rechargeable electric bikes and scooters. And this was just a small part of the Motorcycle section of the Fair, which was part of the Vehicles and Spare Parts exhibit, which occupied part of one of the pavilions during Week One of the three week Fall Fair.  All in all, there were over ten thousand exhibitors at the 104th Import and Export Fair, showing everything from motorcycles to kitchenware, dolls, and purses. Also in attendance were shipping agents that could arrange to transport goods to Iran and Ghana, translators to facilitate communication between Mandarin-speaking manufacturers and Spanish speaking buyers, renters of mobile phones, and even an office to deal with trade disputes (identified on the Fair’s slick website by a smiley face logo.)

Despite its evident economic prowess, however, China still faces significant problems. Its economy, though still growing fast by world standards, has been hit hard by the global recession. Sarah’s family’s factory employed a hundred workers in mid 2008, by the start of 2009 its workforce was down to sixty. Those forty laid off workers are among the millions now returning to their rural homes, where prospects of employment are dim.  This prospect raises a red flag (of the wrong kind) for Chinese leaders.  For the past few decades, the government has been able to use the country’s economic growth and increasing living standards to fend off demands for political change.  But unless the rest of the world recovers its appetite buttons, socks, and sofas, China will surely face some serious challenges at home.

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A day in Macau, China.

October 26th, 2008
The facade of St. Paul's Church, Macau

The facade of St. Paul's Church, Macau.

October 2008

About a thousand people, by my estimate, were crowded into the cavernous waiting area on the Mainland China side of the border with Macau. I stood in the only line designated for foreigners; the remaining lines were for Chinese citizens. I was one of the only people who appeared to be traveling with luggage; most of my Chinese fellow travelers carried only purses, or were empty handed.

Map of Macau (from the New York Times.)

Map of Macau (from the New York Times.)

This scene was my first indication of the strange nature of Macau. This tiny territory – it’s about 1/6 of the size of the District of Columbia – was settled by Portuguese seafarers in the 16th century, and remained a Portuguese colony until its return to China in 1999. In an arrangement similar to that adopted in Hong Kong, China designated Macau as a Special Administrative Region (SAR,) a strange political hybrid in which the territory is regarded as part of China, but retains much of its autonomy in most matters other than defense and foreign affairs. Among these matters is gambling: Macau has been allowed to continue its policy of allowing licensed and legal gambling, first introduced in the 1800s.

Macau’s garish and glitzy twenty-first century casinos are, however, as a far cry from the gambling dens of the Portuguese colonial era, and wouldn’t be out of place in Nevada. Indeed, in 2006 Macau surpassed Las Vegas in gambling revenues, and the reason for this was clear to see at the border post. Gambling (aside from state-controlled lotteries) is banned in China, and many Chinese area inveterate gamblers. Getting to Macau now requires only a bus ticket and a travel visa, both cheap and easy to obtain. But small-time players are not the source of Macau’s gambling boom. According to the World Casino Directory, “Macau casinos seem to attract the super-high rollers. While Las Vegas remains more family oriented, although as we all know there are high-rollers there, too, Macau really rakes in the ’serious gamblers.’”

Maybe. But there is no doubt that geography also plays a vital part in the Macau gambling boom. Macau is part of the Pearl River Delta region, one of the most populous and prosperous parts of China. An hour’s ferry ride away is Hong Kong, China’s other SAR, with its thriving (until recently, anyway) financial sector, its busy port, and its history as a free port. Right across the border from Macau is Guangdong Province,  heartland of China’s booming export-oriented manufacturing sector and home to 100 million people, many of them relatively wealthy urbanites living in mega-cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzen, a short drive or bus ride from the gambling tables.

Graffiti artists at work in a Macau alleyway.

Not all of the center of the city is "historic," at least not yet. In a side alley, I came across these graffiti artists hard at work.

I spent only a day in Macau, and I have to admit that my distaste for casinos outweighed my intellectual curiosity about the landscape of the territory’s economic base, so I can’t write too much more about it. I opted instead to stroll around Macau’s historic center, designated by UNESCO as World Heritage site on the basis of the fact that Macau “bears a unique testimony to the first and longest-lasting encounter between the West and China,” (I guess the Silk Road doesn’t count) and the fact that the territory “has been associated with the exchange of a variety of cultural, spiritual, scientific and technical influences between the Western and Chinese civilizations.”

The interaction between East and West is well illustrated by some of the fascinating exhibits at the Museum of Macau, where I spent some time wandering around. Adjacent to the museum is the remaining and much-restored façade of St. Paul’s Church, designed by an Italian Jesuit and built on a hilltop in 1602 with the help of Japanese Christians who had fled Nagasaki to escape persecution. The existence of these Japanese Christians was a result of the efforts of St. Francis Xavier, who memory is honored in picturesque chapel a short distance from St. Paul’s (the chapel also purportedly houses part of a bone of the Saint’s arm, as well as the bones of martyrs from 17th century Vietnam.)

Night scene, Taipa

Night scene, Taipa.

I spent my only evening in Macau walking around the streets of Ilha se Taipa, an island connected to the city center by three modern bridges. It was a warm evening, and along the tranquil Taipa waterfront, a few people sat silently on benches, looking across at the skyline of Macau. Behind them were several early twentieth century Portuguese residential buildings, surrounded by large trees. The atmosphere was tranquil and quite charming.

But not entirely. Look to the side, and looming there (in the words of Daniel Altman) “out of all human proportion, [is] the gargantuan hulk of the Venetian. It blots out the sky — just try to take a photograph! — with a menacing cement silhouette only faintly lit by fluorescent construction lights. As the darkness of evening descends, few sights come closer to the postapocalyptic nightmares of Orwell’s novels, Pink Floyd’s videos or Terry Gilliam’s films.” Since Altman wrote these words, the Venetian has been completed. It is no a longer a dimly lit construction site, but a vast wall of bright white light. Across the water, though, rises an even larger silhouette, lit with construction lights and topped with construction cranes. It is, of course, yet another casino in the making.

The Venetian Casino looms over part of Macau.

The Venetian Casino looms over part of Macau.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

In writing this post, I drew on information from the following sources, all of which are worth taking a look at

• Macao: Where Developers Are Gambling on Gambling, New York Times Travel section, December 21, 2006.
• Macau Government and Tourist Office.
• BBC regions and territories profile: Macau.
• CIA World Factbook entry on Macau, a good source of statistical information.
• UNESCO World Heritage Center page on the Historic Center of Macao, and the accompanying panoramic scenes from the area.

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Sarah Palin, John McCain, and Geography

September 3rd, 2008

According to Senator John McCain, my World Regional Geography course rests on a spurious assumption. That assumption is that in order to be an educated person and a responsible citizen you need to know about and understand what’s going on the world.  In order to acquire such knowledge and understanding, you can’t just take a crash course in world geography.  The world is too big and too complicated for that, and things change too fast. You need to cultivate an ongoing curiosity about world affairs. An educated person needs to learn how to learn about the world. And an educated person wants to learn about the world.

There are many ways to acquire such knowledge. One is to read about or study world geography and history. Another is to follow international news.  Another – potentially the most valuable of all – is to travel. By travel, I don’t mean simply transporting yourself to a different location. I mean going to places that are different from the places that you know, and working hard to try and understand how and why they are different.  How is the landscape different? How are the people different? How is their history different from yours? How is their culture different? Finally, once you have begun to learn some of the answers to these questions, you can attempt to answer the most difficult and most important question of all, how might the world look from the perspective of people living in other places, and coming from different backgrounds? For only when we understand where people come from – literally and figuratively – can we understand why they believe as they do, and why they do what they do.

But back to Senator McCain. This week, the Senator nominated Governor Sarah Palin to be his Vice Presidential running mate. The Vice President of the United States has only two prescribed duties. One is to preside over the Senate and exercise a casting vote in the event of a tie. The other is to be ready to assume the responsibilities of President should the elected President die or be incapacitated.

Governor Palin’s experience no doubt qualifies her quite adequately for preside over meetings of the U.S. Senate. She has, after all, presided over meetings of the Wasilla City Council.  But do her experience, knowledge, and curiosity qualify her to assume the presidency at a moment’s notice, beginning on January 20, 2009?

Arguably, the most important responsibility of the president of the world’s most powerful country is to guide the country in its dealings with the rest of the globe, whether these dealings be economic, political, military, diplomatic, or anything else.  George W. Bush’s most significant job as President has been to oversee wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to direct the so-called war on terror.

The Governor’s resume provides no evidence of experience in international affairs. Alaska doesn’t have a department of foreign affairs, and since its economy relies overwhelmingly on oil, it has relatively little foreign trade by comparison with larger and more economically diverse states.  So although Governor Palin may have done a sterling job in her twenty months as governor, her job didn’t present too many opportunities to learn about foreigners, their governments, or their countries. But that’s not Sarah Palin’s fault.

What is more disturbing is that Governor Palin, who is 44 years old, has apparently left North America only once.  That trip was a trip, after she became Governor, to visit members of the Alaska National Guard in Germany and Kuwait. She only acquired a passport for the first time in 2007.

It is difficult to imagine that her lack of international travel experience is the result of her – or her state’s — economic circumstances. Even though she and her husband have a large family, surely she could have, if she wanted to, found some way to visit a country aside from Canada at some point during the quarter century of her adult life?  The fact that it wasn’t until 2007 that she traveled overseas, and then only to see Alaska National Guard members, leads to the inevitable conclusion that she really hasn’t been that interested in the rest of the world.  Is this really the kind of person we want a heartbeat away from the presidency, especially when that heart is 72 years old and is in a body that has suffered several bouts of cancer?

But even if John McCain’s heart beats flawlessly until he is 76 years old and at the end of his first term, what does his choice of running mate say about how well he understands the world, or indeed the presidency? What it says clearly is that he believes that a paucity of knowledge of international affairs is no problem for a president of the United States.  Either that, or it says that he has a dangerously unrealistic view of his own mortality.

Survey after survey has shown that, as Americans, we are woefully ignorant of some of the basic facts of world geography.  A 2006 poll revealed that 37% of 18 – 24 year olds in the U.S. could not locate Iraq on a world map. Half couldn’t even find New York. This level of ignorance isn’t just a problem, it’s a crisis. When a democracy that claims the role of world leadership has an electorate that doesn’t know much about the world, not only the U.S. but the world as a whole is in trouble.

Responsible leaders should be doing everything they can to impress upon the citizenry that we are part of a broader global community, and that if we want to have any chance at all of maintaining our leadership position in that community, we had better be sure that we know something about the rest of the world.  John McCain’s choice of the globally incurious Sarah Palin, however, sends precisely the opposite message. It says either that he believes that an understanding of the rest of the world doesn’t really matter that much, or that it is the kind of understanding that a novice can pick up in the few months between now and January 2009.  This isn’t just troubling, it’s downright dangerous.

September 3, 2008.

Update September 25. For an good discussion of Palinism and American exception, see Roger Cohen’s piece in today’s New York Times.

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On the limitations of English in Xinjiang

August 18th, 2008

Trilingual sign, Urumqi

China, August 2008
As a native English speaker, I don’t think I have ever experienced complete linguistic isolation. Regardless of where I have been, I have almost always been able to find someone who could speak at least a little English. But that was before I visited China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

I knew I was in for a difficult time as soon as I left the main terminal building at Urumqi International Airport. I managed to get a taxi without any difficulty, but my taxi driver spoke no English at all. Fortunately, I had taken the precaution before my visit of asking a Chinese friend to write down the name and address of my hotel on a piece of paper in Chinese, so I could let the driver know where I wanted to go. He was a friendly man, and tried his best to communicate with me, but to no avail. As far as I could gather, the driver spoke only Mandarin and Uyghur, the two languages I saw on most road signs and billboards in Xinjiang. He also seemed to know a little Russian, the third language that occasionally appears on signs here. But no English. I can say only “hello” and ”thank you” in Mandarin, “goodbye” in Russian, and I don’t know so much as a syllable of Uyghur, so our conversation was unfortunately limited. But I did make it to my hotel in the heart of Urumqi.

At the hotel I discovered that none of the reception staff could speak English, and it was only thanks to the few words of English spoken by a bellboy that I managed to check in. So far, so good. But then came dinner, and I went to the hotel restaurant where I was not surprised to find that everything I said was just as baffling to the staff as their words were to me.

Some restaurant menus in China are printed in English and Chinese. Such was not the case at the restaurant of the Century Prosperous Hotel. Some restaurant menus have photographs or even plastic models of their culinary offerings. Not here. There is a lot of Chinese food I find delicious, but there are also a fair number of dishes for which I have not yet acquired a taste. This is in part due to the fact that numerous creatures and parts of creatures that I have up to now not generally thought of as food show up fairly frequently on Chinese dinner tables. And so, I am ashamed to admit, two of my dinners in Urumqi consisted of instant noodles from the mini bar in my hotel room.

Next day, I decided to visit the museum in Urumqi. But – you guessed it – the taxi driver spoke no English. I eventually succeeded in communicating with him by calling a Chinese friend on my mobile phone, telling him where I wanted to go, and then handing the phone to the driver. By this means I got not only to the museum, but also to Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar. At the bazaar, I decided to negotiate a price for a small woven rug with a merchant. I started by using my fingers to indicate numbers. I had though, naively, that holding up seven fingers indicates the number seven, and nine fingers means nine. But not in China. It is quite possible to use hands to show numbers, but here you use only one hand. Hold your thumb down and your index finger out, and you are saying “seven.” But I didn’t know that at the time of negotiations. This was embarrassing. It’s one thing to be unable to speak Mandarin. It’s quite another to find out that you don’t know how to count to ten with your fingers. But eventually, the very friendly merchant and I reached agreement on a price by typing our offers into a calculator, and I headed of with my purchase.

My visit to Urumqi lasted three days, and, despite my linguistic limitations, it was fascinating. A week or so later, I came back to Xinjiang, this time for a longer stay. I was accompanied my Chinese-speaking friend, and thanks to his language skills I managed to discover the delights of Uyghur-style barbecued lamb, Xinjiang sweet melons, and the deliciously spicy local dish “big plate chicken.” (My friend did have some trouble understanding the Mandarin of some Uyghur-speakers, though, which he told me the locals spoke with heavy accents and often not very well.) He also helped me buy a ticket at the local bus station, find the bus to Turpan, and, after a week in Xinjiang, to check in to the flight to Guangzhou. When we got there, my friend’s Cantonese helped me buy some delicious Oolong tea from a small neighborhood store. On the phone, he told his far-away family about our Xinjiang trip, this time speaking his home tongue, the dialect of a small region in northeast Guangdong Province.

My Xinjiang visit reminded me of how pitiful we English speakers often are. We have been spoiled by having grown up communicating in the world’s widely spoken language, and as a result many of us haven’t bothered to learn any other. We just assume that everyone will (or perhaps should) be able to speak English. We may be saving ourselves the effort of learning a second (or third or fourth) language, but we also miss out on a huge amount that other cultures, people, and places have offer. Our linguistic laziness confines us to the equivalent of instant noodles when, with a little effort, we could be enjoying spiced barbecue.

Although English language skills are rare in Xinjiang, I found that it wasn’t too difficult to find people who could speak English in the other parts of China I visited. It was usually very easy to find signs written in English words, although this did not necessarily mean that they were intelligible to English speakers. (A notice at the pool in my hotel in Guangzhou, for example, informed guests that “Pepole with infections disease or skin disease are not available.”)

But I am certain that if I visit China in a few years time, fluency in English will be widespread. I saw a sign of what is to come in a small park across the road from my hotel in Chengdu. There, on Friday evenings, the city has an “English corner,” where young local people come to practice their English skills in conversation with one another. Just imagine the locals gathered at a “Mandarin Corner” in Richmond, a “Hindi Corner” in Springfield, Illinois, or, for that matter, an Arabic corner in Edinburgh, Scotland.

It may seem that, as English speakers, we are winning the battle over an international language. But I would suggest that we are the ones who are losing.

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Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province: In the wake of the earthquake

August 6th, 2008

Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province.
Saturday August 2, 2008

SAccording to Mr. Jiang, our taxi driver, Dujiangyan was not the city worst hit by the May 12 Sichuan earthquake. That distinction belongs to Wenchuan, another two hours drive from here. We can’t go there today, though, because yesterday’s 6.1 magnitude aftershock in the region had caused some rock falls that made the road very dangerous and in some places impassable.

The epicenter of the earthquake was only 32 kilometers from Dujiangyan. The quake was massive; it registered 7.9 on the Richter scale (about the same magnitude as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.) Estimates are than more than 69,000 people died as a result of the earthquake, 374,000 injured. 1,129 are believed still buried in the ruins. More than 17,400 people are still missing. A total of more than 46 million people were affected by the earthquake.

I knew all of this before I came to Sichuan. I had seen some of the numerous television reports on the quake, and read much of the copious coverage of the event in newspapers and online. But statistics such as those from the Sichuan earthquake are so huge that they are almost meaningless. I want to get a better idea of the impact of the quake; that is the main reason for my visit to Sichuan province.

And so, on this, my first day in the area, I find Mr. Jiang, a taxi driver willing to help me, and I ask him where the most badly damaged areas area. That’s how I find out about Wenchuan, yesterday’s aftershock, and the closure of the roads. He suggests we go instead to Dujiangyan, about an hour’s drive northwest of Sichuan’s large and modern capital of Chengdu, where are staying. The drive this morning is easy; most of the journey is along a modern six-line highway, and there isn’t much traffic. This is normally a toll road; the journey to Dujiangyan should have cost 20 Yuan (about $3.) After the quake, though, tolls are been suspended to facilitate the movement of vehicles involved in relief and reconstruction efforts.

I am traveling with two companions today, one of whom is a friend from Guangzhou who is a professional translator. His help on today’s trip proves invaluable. Without him, I would have no idea of what is on the numerous billboards we pass on the road to Dujiangyan. Instead of the usual advertisements for cars and new apartments, there are large red signs carrying messages of support and encouragement to the people in the disaster area.

  • “Guangzhou’s and Wenchuan’s hearts are linked in fighting against the disaster and rebuilding home hand in hand.”
  • “Rebuild our home, reconstruct our splendid Dujiangyan”
  • “Honor to those from all walks of life who help fight against the earthquake and carry out relief efforts.”
  • “Carry on Chinese civilization through love, and rebuild our splendid land with unity and strength.”
  • “Fulfill instructions from the Communist Party, the Central government and the State Council, rebuild home with concerted efforts.”

Roadside billboard

Honor to those from walks of life who help fight against the earthquake and make relief efforts.

As we enter the city of Dujiangyan, we see the first evidence of the impact of the disaster: rows of square blue tents, temporary shelter for those whose homes have been destroyed. We also see soldiers and military vehicles (the military has been heavily involved in relief and reconstruction efforts.)

We head further into Dujiangyan. For the most part, the city looks quite normal. The streets are busy, there are pedestrians on the sidewalk, and stores appear to be open for business. But there are some signs of the earthquake. Several buildings have cracked walls. Some are vacant. We pass a five-storey building with large chunks of its façade missing; the windows are gone, and the building is empty. On the roof is the logo of a Sichuan restaurant chain.

After stopping a few times to ask for directions, Mr. Jiang eventually turns off the main road and we find a completely different landscape. Wenchuan may be a town worst affected by the earthquake, but it difficult to imagine how any area could be worse of than this part of Dujiangyan. This is – or rather, was – a densely populated part of the city, its streets lined with five storey buildings. At street level were businesses; the upper floors were all apartments, home to some of Dujiangyan’s 600,000 residents. Today, this is a neighborhood of empty buildings and parts of buildings, of vacant lots piled high with the remains of buildings. We get out of the car and walk around.

It’s been nearly three months since the earthquake, and the rescue workers have long gone. Cleanup and reconstruction is underway in some areas: I saw bulldozers and construction machinery at work elsewhere in Dujiangyan, but not here. This area is all but deserted; the only people around are those scavenging through the rubble for anything salvageable.

Photo of man standing in rubble holding steel rodWe come across a family searching in the debris on a lot where an apartment building used to stand. A man of about sixty is digging into the earth with an iron pole; a few meters away his wife hacks at the ground with a pick. Their two small grandchildren squat nearby, combing through the dirt. My Chinese-speaking friend asks the man what he is looking for. Metal rods, the man says, the steel reinforcements used in the construction of the concrete building that once stood here. I ask if I can take his photograph and he readily agrees, smiling as he poses for the camera. Nearby is a whiteboard, propped up with pieces of broken concrete. On it is a handwritten sign announcing that the Wen Yi clinic has moved

I walk further down the road. Here, part of a building remains standing, but the front is completely gone. The building seems to have contained apartments with the same floor plan; it seems that the living rooms all collapsed in the quake. Concrete floor beams dangle precariously from those parts of the floor that are still intact. On the third floor, a large photograph of a waterfall still hangs on a living room wall. On the sides of the picture are some lines from a famous poem describing the natural beauty of a waterfall in the Lu Mountains of Jiangxi province.

Photo showing apartment debris

Next-door is another vacant lot, or rather a lot piled high with what is left of a collapsed apartment building, and also the remains of the lives of some of the people who used to live there. A woman’s high heel shoe, some broken cups, a child’s dress.

Photo of rubble and remains of people\'s belongings, including a child\'s toy bear

A block away, we meet a former resident of the collapsed building, now living under the awning of what looks as though it may once have been an open-air market. His wife was badly injured in the quake. She is now in a hospital in Shenyang; the man’s white t-shirt bears the name of the hospital, and the words “Our hearts are linked together forever.”

A short distance away is a building with a white brick façade. Somehow the building is still standing, but the columns at street level supporting the structure lean precariously to one side. A sign warns that this is a danger zone, passers by should keep their distance. There is an older sign on an interior wall of what seems to have been a restaurant: “Please pay before leaving.” Lettering on the wall of the store next door indicates that these used to be the premises of a professional matchmaker. I can’t tell what the next business used to be, but its management clearly was service oriented. A sign on its wall reads, “The customer is always right.”

We are used to seeing stories of disasters, natural and otherwise. Just about every week we learn of a hurricane that kills hundreds, a flood that leaves ten of thousands homeless, or an explosion or train crash that leaves many injured. Like the statistics of the Sichuan earthquake, these numbers are usually difficult to comprehend.

I find the statistics of the Sichuan earthquake even more incomprehensible after today’s visit to Dujiangyan. I met one man whose wife was injured in the quake; to try and think that there are another 374,000 like her is overwhelming. I saw buildings where people died; I saw what could well be remnants of their lives hanging from the remains of living room walls and lying in the rubble of collapsed buildings. I cannot even begin to imagine what the victims and survivors of the disaster must have been through.

But I also saw evidence of the tremendous outpouring of support for victims of the quake. Not just here in Sichuan, but around the country. In Urumqi and in Xi’an I saw posters expressing solidarity with the people of Sichuan. In Chengdu I saw a remarkable photo exhibit documenting the aftermath of the quake, and prominent in the photographs were members of the Red Cross, the army, and volunteers from around the country helping rescue and treat the injured, carry away the dead, Other photographs showed aid shipments from around the world being unloaded from cargo planes.

In my World Regional Geography course, we discuss natural disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. Textbooks and atlases usually include phenomena in their physical geography pages, and discuss their severity in measurable physical terms. Earthquakes are measured by the amount of energy they release, hurricanes by the force of their winds. But my visit to Dujiangyan is a reminder that there are few purely natural disasters; most are first and foremost human disasters. The correct way to quantify them would be on a scale that measures their impact on the lives of people like those who live – and used to live – in Dujiangyan.

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A Fascinating And Unusual Part Of Guangzhou, China.

July 31st, 2008

Guangzhou, Thursday July 24, 2008 (Updated June 25, 2009)

This is my first visit to the city of Guangzhou. Since I knew very little about the city when I made my travel plans, I chose a hotel the way I usually do in such circumstances. I picked what looked like the best accommodation deal in a reasonably central location in the city. And so I ended up at the Guangdong Victory Hotel at No 53. Shamian North Street.

Tree lined pedestrian boulevard, with a statue in bronze of an adult woman being followed by five small children. Each child is holding on to the one in front, and the child at the front is holding on the to woman’s skirt

A pedestrian street, Shamian Island.

Shortly after checking in, I set out on a walk around the hotel’s environs. What struck me first about the neighborhood was that it didn’t look as though it was part of a Chinese city at all. Most of the roads on the island had been closed to vehicle traffic and turned into gardens and tree-lined pedestrian walkways. It was late afternoon, and there were people ambling around the area, sitting on benches, or with their children in a small playground. There were small bronze statues dotted around the island depicting life in the area, past and present. One statue showed a small girl standing on tiptoe as she put a letter into a mailbox; another showed a woman walking along and playing a violin, with five children following behind her.

Most of the buildings in the area had the staid appearance of 19th century European banks rather than buildings in booming Chinese city of the 21st century. And although most of the pedestrians were Chinese, a sizeable minority were apparently Westerners, most of them couples with small children in strollers.

It turns out that, by luck rather than good planning, I ended up at a hotel located on Shamian Island, a fascinating and very unusual part of Guangzhou.

Actually, Shamian is more of a sandbank that an island (the word shamian means sandbank.) It is located on the northern short of the Pearl River at the confluence of two branches of the river, in the heart of Guangzhou. Shamian itself is small, but has played a disproportionately large part in the history of this city, and of China as a whole.

Satellite photograph showing Shamian Island, the Pearl River, and part of the city of Guangzhou.

For about a century, from the first half of the 18th century until the end of the Opium Wars in 1842, China was largely closed to Western trade and (the Chinese authorities hoped) to Western influence. Chinese were forbidden to travel abroad, Chinese shipping was confined to the country’s coastal waters, and foreign trade was severely restricted. The only link with the West was via a trading post in Guangzhou. Here a small group of Europeans were allowed to facilitate the trade of Chinese silk, cotton, lacquer ware, and porcelain, for products such as wool, tin, salt and honey from Europe and European colonies. This small European trading post was on Shamian Island.

After the Opium Wars, when China was forced to open up to trade once again, Shamian expanded its role as a base for foreign trading operations. British, French, and other foreign trading companies and consulates set up operations here, and the buildings that today dominate the island’s landscapes were built. In 1959 (according to the Guangzhou Government website) Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai directed that the area be preserved “as historical witness to [this] semi-colonial place.”

Today, thanks to the Premier’s foresight and the vision of the local city planners Shamian is an oasis of calm in this large and bustling city, and a reminder of the important story of China’s relations with the colonial powers.

Parents and baby, June 2009

Parents and baby, Shamian Island.

But it’s not only Shamian’s past that is interesting and unusual. Those Western couples I saw walking around with their small children are an important part of the modern landscape of the island. I didn’t pay much attention to them at first, but that evening I noticed that several of the tables in the restaurant where I had dinner were occupied by American couples with Chinese-looking babies in highchairs. And as I ate breakfast the next morning at my hotel, Westerners with Chinese infants made up four of then ten groups in the dining room. Later I noticed an English language sign in a local souvenir store offering to loan strollers free of charge to its customers. This all warranted further investigation, so when I got back to my hotel room, I consulted Google for some answers. I found that the parents and infants of Shamian are part of a much bigger picture.

It turns out that in recent years Guangzhou has become a major foreign adoption center; . It is

Shop, Shamian Island, June 2009.

Shop, Shamian Island, June 2009.

here that many foreigners come to adopt Chinese babies, and the hotels of Shamian are the places where a significant proportion of them – particularly Americans – choose to stay while they complete the numerous formalities involved in foreign adoptions. Much of the paperwork involves an office of the US Consulate that is located in Shamian, and so this is a convenient place Americans adopting Chinese to stay during the Chinese portion of the adoption process.

I noticed that nearly all of the adopted infants I had seen were girls. The reasons for this lie in both culture and government policies. The children come largely from rural areas, where they have been abandoned or given up for adoption by their parents. This is in part a consequence of China’s one-child policy, in terms of which most couples are restricted to one child each. In rural areas, parents may have a second child if the first is a girl. In Chinese culture only a boy can continue the family line; this is one of the reasons that the number of girls abandoned or put up for adoption outnumbers boys.

For the same reason, far more female than male fetuses are aborted, even though abortions for the purpose of selecting the sex of a child are illegal. This practice has given rise to a significant imbalance in the sex ratios of China’s younger age cohorts; in 2000, for example, there were 5 million more males than females in the 0 – 4 age group (see the population pyramid below.) This carries serious implications for Chinese society in the future, as marriageable young men come to outnumber women.

Population Pyramid for China in 2000, showing fewer females than males in the younger age cohorts.

If you have read this blog before, you will know that I frequently marvel at how much it is possible to learn about a place by the careful observation of its human and physical landscape. Shamian Island proved this to me yet again: it contains clues not only about the history of China, but also about some of the current demographic challenges the country faces.

Shamian, however, comprises only 2.7 square kilometers of China’s 9.6 million square kilometer area, so I clearly have a long way yet to go in this country. In the weeks to come, I will visit China’s ancient capital of Xi’an, the earthquake-ravaged Chengdu, and the Xinjiang region in the far northwestern of the country. Please come back here to find out what more I am able to learn about this fascinating country.

(I have posted more photographs from Shamian Island on Picasa.)

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In writing this blog entry, I consulted the following sources:

• Population Pyramid Summary for China. U.S. Census Bureau International Database.
• Shamian Scenic Spot. Guangzhou Government website
• Website of the Consulate General of the United States – Guangzhou. I looked in particular at the page of the Adopted Children Immigrant Visa Unit.
• Woodruff, William. 2005. A Concise History of the Modern World. London: Abacus.
• The satellite photograph of Shamian comes from Google Earth.

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A Very Strange Society

July 28th, 2008

The State of Qatar is a most unusual place.

For starters, it is a really wealthy country. In 2007, Qatar’s oil and natural gas wealth gave it the fifth highest per capita income in the world, $67,000 (according to the US State Department’s Background Note on Qatar.) Then there’s the composition of the country’s population. In May 2008, a month or so before my most recent visit, there were about 1.45 million people in the Qatar, three quarters of whom were male. The population pyramids below (from the US Census Bureau) makes this clear. They also reveals that a large share of the country’s male population is in the 20 – 50 year old age range, and that this share is projected to increase significantly by 2025. A country where females are outnumbered three to one by males; how can this be?

Population pyramid of Qatar in 2000, showing a disproportionate number of males aged 20 - 50
Projected population pyramid of Qatar in 2025, showing an even larger proportion of males aged 20 - 50 than in 2000

The picture gets even stranger when we look at the ethnic composition of the population: Arab 40%, Indian 18%, Pakistani 18%, Iranian 10%, other 14%. Yet Qatar is part of the Arabian peninsula and the Arabic world. In terms of nationality, only a quarter of the country’s population is Qatari, the rest are foreigners. An Arab country where citizens are outnumbered three to one by foreigners, and Arabs two to one by non-Arabs; what’s going on here?

In June 2008, I made a brief stop Doha, Qatar’s capital, and there I met a few members of Qatar’s largest demographic group, foreign males, who helped me understand the country’s rather unusual demography.

Raoul

Raoul is man in his late twenties who works for a Qatari taxi company. He was the driver who took me from the airport to my hotel in Doha. He told me that his home is in the Philippines; he had been working in Qatar for eight months. Yes, he admitted in response to my question, he did miss home a lot. “Especially today,” he said, “This is the first time I have had to spend my birthday away from my wife and son.” They were back home in Manila; his work visa does not permit him to bring any family members to Qatar with him.

Raoul was recruited for his job by an agency in the Philippines. The agency paid for his airfare to Qatar and will cover his return home at the end of the contract. He may go home for a visit after a year if he wishes, but he would have to pay for that trip himself. His passport was taken from him by the recruiting agency as soon as he arrived in Qatar, so he would not be able to leave the country without the cooperation of his employer. What is the longest amount of time he would be allowed to work in Qatar, I asked him. “I don’t know,” he says, “I don’t want to think about that.”

Like many guest workers, Raoul lives in accommodation provided by his employer. He shares a room with four other men. He tells me that he wants to leave his current employer at the end of the first year of his contract, because the company doesn’t treat its employees well. Specifically, he says that he is being paid less than the going rate, but he didn’t learn this until he arrived in Qatar and compared notes with other foreign workers.

Samuel

The cab driver who took me back to the airport the following day was a very garrulous young man named Samuel. He is another typical Qatari, since he isn’t a Qatari at all, but hails from Kerala (in southern India) where all of his family still lives. Like Raoul, he was recruited and interviewed in his home country by agents for the cab company for whom he now works. They were interested first and foremost in his ability to speak English. He adds that workers in the service sector come largely from Sri Lanka, Philippines, and India, since people from these countries are most likely to speak English. Nepalis and Bangladeshis apparently do a lot of the manual labor here, particularly in the burgeoning construction sector.
(Samuel can now speak Arabic, but that wasn’t a requirement for the job, he told me in answer to one of my many questions. He learned Arabic in his previous job, a two-year stint in Saudi Arabia.) He earns 900 Riyals, he volunteers (about $250, I presume he meant per month.) Rent on a one room apartment is 3000 Riyals. Qatar is expensive, he says, much more expensive than Saudi Arabia. He works the night shift; it is now 6 pm, and I am his first customer. He will finish work at 5 am, go home, eat breakfast, and go to sleep. He will get up at 3, have lunch, and start work again. He thinks he will be in Qatar for 7 years and then he will go back to Kerala.

Five dead Sri Lankans

From the front page of “The Peninsula,” an English language daily, published in Qatar, the day I arrived in Doha (June 20, 2008):

Inferno Claims Five Lives

Doha – Five Sri Lankan workers were charred to death and four others were seriously injured when one room in a building burst into flames on Wednesday night…

The very old building has four flats with three bedrooms each. Only one room on the left side of the first floor was completely burned; amazingly, the other two rooms, the kitchen and the bathrooms in the flat were left virtually untouched by the razing (sic) inferno…

The room, which was entirely gutted, housed 11 labourers, whose belongings were all consumed by the fire.”

Photograph of part of the front page of The Peninsula newspaper, showing a photograph of a burned out room. The article below is headed <em>Inferno Claims Five Lives.</em>
An accompanying photograph (see above) shows the charred remains of the room, with two sets of bunk beds still standing, and what looks like the frames of several others piled against the wall. Above are the burned remains of a ceiling fan.

A large white building behind an iron fence.Picture of the Qatar Advisory Council building during a duststorm: The building where Qatar’s Advisory Council meets (the country has no legislative body.) The Council’s 35 members are all appointed the Emir. Emir Hamad bi Khalifa al-Thani came to power in 1995 when he overthrew his father, who came to power in 1972 after deposing his cousin. The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs is Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir al-Thani , the Deputy Prime Minister is Abdallah Al-Thani. The Cabinet also includes Ministers Fahd Al-Thani (Economy and Commerce,) Ahmad Al-Thani (Communications and Transport,) Nasir al-Thani (Cabinet Affairs,) and Hamad al-Thani (State.) The Governor of the Central Bank is Abdallah bin Saud al-Thani.

A Recipe for Economic Success?

Qatar is not alone in relying primarily on foreign workers to keep its economy running. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait have similar population structures to that of Qatar. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia also rely heavily on foreign workers to fill lower paying jobs. This relieves these countries’ economies of the need to provide education, health care, or retirement benefits that would come with a native work force. It also makes for a very disciplined and hard working labor force: there are a lot more workers eager to come and work here, so employers can easily replace slackers or troublemakers. And the governments of the Gulf States, not known as bastions of democracy, don’t have to worry about satisfying the political demands of their labor forces, since foreigners don’t have the right to make any demands, and if they do they can be sent back home.

Sounds like an ideal kind of labor market. I wonder why other wealthy countries haven’t thought of it.
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Note: I have borrowed the title of this entry from the title of a 1967 book by Allen Drury, A Very Strange Society: A Journey to the Heart of South Africa. South Africa’s apartheid economy relied on migrant workers from rural areas of the country as well as from neighboring states These workers were housed in crowded barracks, forbidden from bringing their families into the cities with them, and denied political rights.

Update February 2009:  The international economic recession is having a profound impact on migrant workers. This article from the New York Times describes the impact on Dubai, as skilled and wealthy migrants are laid off and leave the country (as well as their cars, apartments, and debts.)

Another update, June 24 2009: According to a news story from the BBC, the economy of the  tiny Pacific Ocean country of Tuvalu (population 12,000) is heavily dependent on a particular kind of migrant labor. Forty percent of Tuvualan men work on foreign freighters; in 2006 they sent home remittances of $4 million, more than a quarter of the country’s annual national revenue. Recently, eleven Tuvualan seamen were kidnapped by Somali pirates, who are demanding a ranson of $15 million, an amount which exceeds the entire country’s national income.

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Obama Does Israel

July 24th, 2008

Geography is about the “where” of things. As a geographer, I know that that where places are matters and where things happen matters. I also know – in large part from my own experience – that where we live and where we travel plays a powerful role in shaping the way we look at the world and the way we understand it.

Inevitably, we care more about places that we know. I know that I am much more likely to read a news story if it deals with events in a place I have visited. I feel more of a connection with such a place. I have images in my mind of it and of the people who live there.

Right now, Israel and Palestine are fresh in my mind, thanks to my recent visit. I find myself closely following the news from the area. A lot of the news makes so much more sense to me now than it did before my visit. I followed the news of the “bulldozer attack” in Jerusalem very closely, in part because a week earlier I had walked along the very part of Jaffa Street where the attack took place, I had seen the light rail construction project where the attacker worked, and I had visited East Jerusalem, where he lived. I care more about what goes on in Ramallah, in Hebron, and in Tel Aviv, because they are now places I know, however slightly.

The geography of travel is even more important for politicians, world leaders, and would-be world leaders than it is for mere mortals like me. Where a politician chooses to go not only affects that politician’s understanding of the world, it also sends a powerful message about his or her priorities. Those in high office, and those aspiring to high office, use their itineraries as a way to stake out their interests, their priorities, and their opinions.

Barack Obama’s recent visit to the Middle East makes an interesting case in point. Over the past few days, Obama has chosen to signal his interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by visiting the region. But where, exactly, did he go? How long did he spend there? What places did he choose as the backdrop for his photo opportunities? And what message does the geography of his travel send?

According to the Obama Road Blog, posted on July 23rd, 2008 on the candidate’s official website:

Barack made the most of his day in Israel. He met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Likud Party Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem, met with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem and then Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah. He toured the town of Sderot with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, met the Mayor of Jerusalem, and had dinner with Prime Minister Olmert. Not a bad day’s work.

Let’s examine the geography of this hectic itinerary in a bit more detail. What the blog doesn’t say is that during Obama’s 36 hours in Israel, he spent less than an hour in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian administration, with Palestinian Authority leaders. The rest of his time was in Israel proper, meeting not only with Israeli government leaders, but also with the leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, and with Israeli citizens. There was, I would suggest, a clear message in this.

There was also a message in Obama’s visit to Sderot, the small town in southern Israel which has been the frequent target of Qassam rocket attacks from nearby Gaza. In Sderot, Obama spent time with a family whose home had sustained a direct rocket attack. He also visited the “Qassam Museum,” which contains remnants of rockets fired at the city, and it was in Sderot that he held his only press conference in Israel. The message of the visit was clearly that Obama sympathizes with Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks, in itself an uncontroversial sentiment.

But did Obama’s visit include any geographic clues that he has a similar sympathy for Palestinians? Did he visit any of the Palestinian villages where homes have been demolished by the Israeli military? Did he meet with any Palestinian families who have lost loved ones in Israeli attacks? It wouldn’t have been difficult to find such villages or families: many more Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces than the other way around (In the first five months of 2008, 362 Palestinians were killed by Israel in Gaza alone, while six Israeli civilians and eight soldiers lost their lives.)

In Jerusalem, Obama visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, quite rightly a required stop for all foreign politicians visiting Israel. (Indeed, this powerful monument should be a required stop for all visitors to Israel.) What I found telling about the Yad Vashem visit, though, was that it was here, at the monument to a cataclysm perpetrated by Nazis against Jews in Europe, that Obama chose to meet with the policeman who stopped the rampaging Palestinian bulldozer driver in Jerusalem a few weeks ago. The meaning of having this meeting at Yad Vashem is as clear as it is disingenuous. It is a signal that Obama sees a connection between an attack by a Palestinian in Israel and the carefully orchestrated Nazi murder of Jews in Europe.

(Obama is not alone in making this spurious connection between the Holocaust and Israel’s conflicts with its Arab neighbors. An exhibit at Yad Vashem during my recent visit made a similar point. It dealt with the contribution Holocaust survivors have made to the State of Israel. Holocaust survivors made up about half of Israel’s fighters and a third of those who died in the country’s 1948 war against its Arab neighbors, the exhibit notes, and continues:

Despite the tragedy of the deaths of those who barely knew the country for which they were fighting… most of the survivors who fought for the Homeland felt that being part of the rebirth of their nation was their true revenge. (my emphasis; see photograph for original text)

Photograph of the original exhibit from which the quote was taken.

One of the main objectives of Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern trip was clearly for the candidate to make it clear that he is a supporter of Israel, a position that most US politicians see as critical to their electoral prospects. The places Obama visited and the people he met in Israel and in the Occupied Territories were designed to underline this point, and in this they succeeded.

But the geography of the Obama trip also reveals that Obama is conflating support for the existence of the State of Israel with support for Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians. He is indicating that he sees Israel and Israelis as the victims in the current conflict and, more egregiously, that he does not recognize that Palestinians have been and continue to be at the receiving end of Israeli brutality.

The British newspaper The Guardian argues that when any US presidential candidate visits Israel “he willingly dons a jacket designed by Israeli tailors.” One might add that the candidate also willingly views a map drawn by Israeli cartographers, and follows a route planned by Israeli travel agents.

Obama’s recent trip was a great success if it was supposed to show the world and the American electorate that, as President, he would be an unquestioning backer of Israel in its ongoing conflicts with Palestinians (and others). But if Barack Obama was hoping to cast himself as someone who might be an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, his trip was a dismal failure.

__________________

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I have donated money to the Obama for President campaign, and I can occasionally be seen sporting an Obama for President t-shirt. This is despite my opposition to his apparent views on many Middle Eastern issues. At least Obama went to Ramallah, however briefly. During his visit to the region, John McCain was content simply to make a phone call to the Palestinian leadership.

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Tensions in Jerusalem

July 21st, 2008

Police officer in green military-style uniform, covered by bright yellow vest. A rainbow flag on a lamppost behind him.There was a heavy police presence in Jerusalem on the fifth day of my recent visit to the city. I first saw evidence of this from the windows of my tour bus as we passed through the central part of the city at around noon: a group of about twenty armed police standing alongside a white armored vehicle with a water cannon mounted on its roof.

During the early afternoon, more police appeared. Some were wearing bright yellow vests covering their green military-type uniforms and carrying large rifles. Others, presumably sharpshooters, were perched atop buildings, armed with rifles and binoculars. A pair of rather ominous looking men in black rode the streets on a motorcycle; the passenger had a very large and very lethal looking rifle slung over his shoulder.

Later, barricades appeared across some of the city’s streets, with vehicles and pedestrians forbidden to enter. A surveillance blimp was launched over the downtown area, tethered to a base adjacent to the tennis courts of the historic King David Hotel.

Could those who had told me that Jerusalem is a dangerous place be right after all? Could Mossad have picked up intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack? Was another suicide bomber on his way to Jerusalem? Was the Third Intifada about to begin?

No, what was about to begin was Jerusalem’s annual Gay Pride Parade. And 2,500 police were there to protect the marchers. Not from Palestinian terrorists, but from Orthodox Jews. Three years ago, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man stabbed three marchers. Last year – when 12,500 police were deployed for the march – another ultra-Orthodox man was arrested for carrying an explosive device that he admitted he had planned to plant on the parade route.

Against such a background, I knew that I had no choice: I had to take part in the parade.

And so, at 4 pm, my friend Abe and I headed for Independence Park, where the parade was to begin. En route, Abe chatted with our cab driver, an avuncular man who seemed to take particular pleasure in the fact that the Parade was provoking the ultra-Orthodox community. “You’re a Jew, I’m a Jew,” he said to Abe, “But according to them, neither of us are Jews.”

We had to walk the last couple of blocks to Independence Park because the roads were blocked off to traffic. When we got to the park, we found that barricades had been erected around it too; parade participants had to pass single file past a security check point and metal detector, and then past parade organizers who gave a numbered purple bracelet to each participant. (”I just wanted to touch you,” joked the young man who wrapped the bracelet around my wrist.)

Upper body picture of a young man, smiling broadly, wearing a white t-shirt with the word <em>Feygeleh<em> in rainbow-colored lettering across the chest.Inside the park, the atmosphere was very different from that on the surrounding streets. There were no uniformed police here, just a few thousand members of the GLBT community and their supports, carrying banners and wearing t-shirts in many ways like those I have seen at similar parades in the US. Some, though, had a distinctly Israeli and Jewish flavor: one man wore a t-shirt with the word “Feygeleh” emblazoned across his chest in rainbow lettering, a woman wore a t-shirt proclaiming “I * shiksas,” where the * was a Star of David. Others wore slogans of a more political nature, such as “End the Occupation.” I’m sure there were lots of other interesting messages on the attire and banners of the marchers, but I couldn’t read them, because they were in Hebrew.Upper body picture of a young woman holding a rainbow flag in her left had and wearing a t-shirt with <em>I<em> followed by a Star of David, then <em>shiksas<em>.

At about 5 pm, some of the barriers on one side of the park were removed, and we all set off down the now-deserted streets, banners waving, rainbow flags flying, and chanters chanting. As the march began, I was at the rear, marching just behind a group of very vocal people carrying red flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. During the course of the march, though, I made my way forward, so that by the time the march reached its destination, I was at the front.

The destination was Liberty Park, and access was limited to those wearing the numbered purple bracelets. At one end of the park was a stage, and behind it a billboard proclaiming the name of the march: “The 2008 Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance, ” as well as “Infinite Love shall build Jerusalem,” “Awareness,” and “Tolerance.” There were also words in Arabic and Hebrew, which I assume said the same thing. As the park filled up, the music started with large speakers booming out a rendition of “By the rivers of Babylon.” Members of the crowd swayed, danced, and bounced up and down.

A short while later, a drag queen took the stage to act as the mistress of ceremonies. Unlike the billboard, the speeches at the march were not multilingual. With the exception of one rather insipid speech by a visiting English cleric, all of the speeches, as far as I could tell, were in Hebrew, and so I have no idea at all of what they were about. The atmosphere, though, was one of celebration. This seemed to be tinged with defiance, perhaps because the march had taken place despite fierce opposition, and despite legal action by its opponents to try and stop it.

These opponents included a rare coalition of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious leaders, united in their abhorrence at the idea of a parade celebrating, as they saw it, the willful violation of God’s law. Members of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community were the most outspoken, although their protests were more restrained than they had been in previous years. Apparently they had decided that their earlier protests had only served to give the event more publicity. But this did not mean that there wasn’t vociferous opposition to the march. Right wing activist Baruch Mazel was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: “”They should do this outside of Israel. They’re sick people and their sickness should be treated, not flaunted.”

Comments posted by readers of Ha’aretz included many comments in a similar vein:

  • “So much money wasted that can be better used to treat these queers.”
  • “Make no mistake Homosexuality is from the worst sins against Almighty. Why in Jerusalem of all places. The truth is that Jerusalem is a holy city and that just as it would not be appropriate to have a celebration of Pork products, it is similarly offensive to flaunt homosexuality.”
  • “Tonight another 20% will be injected with hiv. Soon no more parade”

As things turned out, the parade was entirely peaceful. Perhaps it was all those police. Perhaps it was the fact that this year’s march took place away from residential areas. Perhaps it was the decision by religious conservatives to steer clear of this year’s march. Or was it perhaps the march was a sign that Israel really is a western-style liberal democratic society, which upholds the rights of its citizens to assemble freely and to protest.

What is certainly true, though, it that the parade highlighted the fact that Israeli society is anything but monolithic. There are stark divisions between ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jews of a less dogmatic persuasion. These laws, many ultra-Orthodox believe, should apply only to the personal behavior of those who believe in them (keeping kosher and observing the Sabbath, for example) but also to those who don’t believe in them but live in Israel. The fact that Israel is a Jewish state means that it should be governed in accordance with Jewish religious law. Hence their belief that the Gay Pride Parade should not be allowed.

Many secular Jews, in contrast, believe that Israel is a Jewish state in the sense that it is a home for the Jewish nation. It is possible to identify as part of this nation, they believe, without agreeing with the ultra-Orthodox interpretation of the Torah. Indeed, it is possible to be a member of the Jewish nation without being religious at all.

There are, of course, many other points of view aside from those I describe above, which reflect two poles of the argument about what it means for Israel to be a Jewish state. It is no wonder that this is a society riven with internal divisions. These divisions are reflected in the wide variety of political parties in Israel, and in the fractious nature of Israeli politics. Sometimes Israel’s internal divisions move beyond debate and disagreement and into violence. The starkest example of this is the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Orthodox Jewish extremist who objected to Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords, an agreement with Palestinians.

As far as the 2008 Jerusalem March for Pride and Tolerance was concerned, peace prevailed, as did the views of secular Israel. The fundamental democratic principles of freedom of speech and assembly won out over the arguments of those who regarded that March as violation of God’s law. But I am sure that both sides will be back next year for another round of the battle.
Very large rainbow flag, about 4 meters by 10 meters in size, being carried horizontally by about a dozen marchers in the parade. In the center of the flag is the flag of the State of Israel, and a word in Hebrew. In the background are some trees lining the road, and a some limestone-colored Jerusalem buildings.

Update, June 23, 2008: For another example of the ongoing debate between religious and secular Israelis, see this report from Ha’aretz and, more importantly, the comments posted in response to it. The article reports that, during the recent visit by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to Israel’s Knesset (Parliament,) female singers were excluded from a choir that sang Israel’s National Anthem. The reason was to avoid offending ultra-Orthodox members of the Knesset (MKs

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I have drawn here from coverage of previous Jerusalem Gay Pride parades on the web sites of BBC News, Ha’aretz, and the Jerusalem Post.

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A ride on Bus 106

July 16th, 2008
The Cave of the Patriarchs, Hebron

The Israelo flag atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Hebron.

If you want to get some idea of the complex political geography of the Israeli occupied territories, consider taking a ride on bus no. 106 from Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station. For a fare of 16.30 NIS (about US$5) the bus will take you on an hour-long ride to the Jewish sector of the town of Hebron, about 30 km to the south of Jerusalem. You will pass the shopping malls and apartment buildings of suburban Jerusalem, then along a newly paved highway past olive groves and fields of grape vines, villages dominated by tall minarets, and hilltop settlements with modern apartment buildings in neatly planned rows. But there is a lot more to bus no.106 and its route than meets the eye.

I rode bus no.106 on a Monday morning during a recent visit to Israel. Soon after boarding the 11.45 am bus, I noticed that the view through the windows wasn’t very clear. This turned out to be a result of the fact that the bus windows were made of double-paned bulletproof glass. About half of my fellow passengers were soldiers, most of them apparently on leave and their way home but still carrying very large weapons.

My first clue that the road to Hebron is no ordinary rural highway was the large wall that appeared alongside the road shortly after we left Jerusalem. It began as a concrete barrier, about 3 meters high, separated from the main highway by a service road. Then the wall became higher, perhaps 6 meters tall, its top half slanted towards the highway. I discovered from my map that this is the section of the highway passes the predominantly Palestinian town of Bethlehem, and the wall is to protect traffic against projectiles hurled at the passing vehicles, apparently a common occurrence in this area.

I also learned from the map that this part of the road — in fact most of the road to Hebron — is an Israeli-only road, with access forbidden to Palestinians. It heads south and west of Jerusalem, past Palestinian villages and towns, but does not provide access to any of them. Indeed, at points where the new highway has cut across pre-existing local access roads, these roads have been blocked off with large concrete blocks.

This is a strange landscape indeed; in most parts of the world, rural highways have intersections or interchanges to serve local population centers, not barriers to cut them off. But this is the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and the route taken by bus no.106 provides a fairly good idea of the political geography crafted by Israel since its occupation of the area in 1967.

The highway does not bypass the Jewish settlements that have been built in the area since 1967. Our bus detoured on several occasions to stop at some of these settlements, in each case passing guard posts and checkpoints before entering. At each stop, soldiers with their rifles and women with shopping bags left the bus, heading to their homes in the settlements.

The last Jewish settlement before Hebron is Kiryat Arba; here bus no. 106 left the main highway. With a population of some 6,000 people, Kiryat Arba is almost a small town. We passed low-rise apartment buildings, several shops, a new building under construction, a synagogue, and a small park where women sat on benches watching their children at play on slides and swings.

Hebron itself is one of the largest towns in the occupied West Bank. It is a market and commercial center, and about 150,000 Palestinians and about 530 Jews live here. The town is also home to a site revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It is here that the prophet Abraham, the father of all three religions, is reputed to be buried, together with his sons Isaac and Jacob and their wives.

The Palestinian city of HebronIn 1968, the year after Israel captured the West Bank in the Six Day War, a group of Jews, intent on re-establishing a Jewish presence in what they regarded as an important historic Jewish place, rented out a Hebron hotel from its Arab owners to celebrate Passover. Two days later, the leader of the group announced that they would refuse to leave. After some vacillation, the Israeli government allowed the group to establish the settlement of Kiryat Arba just outside Hebron. Twelve years later, the government allowed the establishment of several Jewish enclaves in the city, making it the only Palestinian city on the West Bank with such enclaves.

But the picture gets even more complicated. In 1997 under the Hebron Agreement, the city was divided into an area under Palestinian control (H1,) an area under Israeli security control and Palestinian civilian control (H2,) In 2001, as tensions rose during the Second Intifada, the Israeli Defence Force re-entered area H1, and in 2003 began building fortified posts in Palestinian neighborhoods overlooking Jewish areas.

Shuttered shops in HebronSince then, the geography of Hebron has changed markedly, particularly in the H2 zone, the area in which the Jewish settlers live, and which I visited. In five years, some 25,000 Arab residents have been cleared from this zone, largely in an effort to secure access and security for the area’s new Jewish residents.

I saw plenty of evidence of this. My journey on Bus 106 through part of Hebron took me past abandoned, demolished, and half-demolished buildings, apparently former Palestinian homes and shops, now lining a corridor linking the Jewish settlers of Hebron with Kiryat Arba and the Israeli-only highway to Jerusalem.

In an article published two months before my Hebron visit, Peruvian writer Maria Vargas Llosa described the area:

[Hebron’s] centuries-old market, which was once as multi-coloured, varied and bustling as that of Jerusalem, is now empty and the doors of all the shops are sealed. Traveling around, you feel in limbo. So too when you walk through the surrounding deserted streets, with shopfronts shuttered with metal sheets and on whose roofs you glimpse military posts. The walls of this entire semi-empty neighbourhood are filled with racist inscriptions: “Death to the Arabs”.

In the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood alone, where there is a settlement of the same name, barely 50 out of 500 Arab families remain.

The extraordinary thing is that they haven’t already gone, subjected as they are to systematic and ferocious harassment by settlers, who stone them, throw rubbish and excrement at their houses, invade and destroy their homes, and attack their children when they return from school, to the absolute indifference of Israeli soldiers who witness these atrocities.

It is important to add here that the violence has not all come from one side; the Jewish settlement has been the object of repeated attacks by Palestinians as well

(For more information on the depopulation of Palestinian parts of Hebron, see the website of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)

The geography of transportation has changed too, at least for the area’s Palestinian residents. A map published in 2005 by the UNCHA shows that what was 15-minute journey between Hebron and a village to its east in 2000 now takes 40 minutes. This is thanks to a circuitous 7 km detour designed to keep Palestinian traffic away from Israeli settlements in Kiryat Arba and Hebron. This detour, and many others like it throughout the West Bank, are a response to increased Palestinian attacks on Israelis during and since the Second Intifada, and have profoundly changed the geography of daily life for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Considering Hebron’s political, religious, and cultural geographies, it is hardly surprising that this has been a contentious and often violent place. In 1929, during the British Mandate period, Arabs killed 67 Jews in the town, and ransacked homes and synagogues. After the settlement of the Jewish community in the town in 1979, tensions have been high between the new community and its Arab neighbors, with acts of provocation and violence common on both sides. In 1994, an Israeli extremist and resident of Kiryat Arba opened fire on Muslims at prayer at the Cave of the Patriarchs, killing 29 and wounding 129 others. In another incident, 12 Israelis were killed in an ambush of worshippers on their way to the same site.

And the violence continues. A week after my visit to Hebron, an Israeli soldier shot dead a Palestinian who had allegedly attacked an army post.

As I rode back to Jerusalem, I reflected on the ease with which I, a foreigner, could travel unhindered to Hebron and back. Nobody questioned me as I boarded bus 106, and nobody asked me for identification. My fellow passengers and I traveled unhindered along roads that local Palestinians are not allowed to use. Our bus passed through the guarded entry points to Jewish settlements without being stopped, searched, or its passengers questioned. On this journey, I was assumed to be an Israeli (or at least I was assumed not to be a Palestinian) and was treated accordingly.

The contrast with my journey from Ramallah to Jerusalem was striking (see my post on this topic. At the Kalandia checkpoint, the assumption was that all passing through were Palestinians, Everybody was searched, everybody had to produce identification, and everybody was questioned.

I cannot claim, though, that I had no interaction with the Israeli soldiers assigned to protect my route from Jerusalem to Hebron. As I walked past the military guard post at the Cave of the Patriarchs with my camera, I asked the soldier on duty whether I could take a photograph of the post. He stepped out of the guard post, smiling, and offered to pose with me for a photograph.

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If you are interested in learning more about Hebron, its changing geography and its contentious history, you may wish to take a look at some of the following sources, which I have used as the main sources for the factual information I have presented here.

The website of the Jewish Community of Hebron, particularly interesting for its perspective of the history of the city.

This article on Hebron from the Jewish Virtual Library, another Jewish perspective on the history and significance of the town.

Closure maps of Hebron, from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Hebron: One City, Two Nations. A video (on YouTube) of an Israeli family living in Hebron (1996) From Journeyman Pictures.

The short video Aftershock contains a few scenes from an Israeli patrol in Hebron, part of a personal perspective of the occupation by a former Israeli paratrooper.

I believe that It is important for me to note — as I did in my previous post — that I have written here about some contentious issues. There are numerous different perspectives on the confict(s) between Israelis and Palestinians and on the interpretation of the history of the region. I have read the landscape in Hebron and along the route of bus 106 in a way that is no doubt very different from the way that others might read it. So if you disagree with what I have written, or if you see the situation differently, I encourage you to post a comment here.
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Footnote: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof visited Hebron about the same time that I did. It’s worth looking at the column he wrote about it, as well as his blog entry on the subject.

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A tiny glimpse of life under occupation: Israel’s Kalandia checkpoint

June 29th, 2008

Jerusalem. Wednesday June 25, 2008.

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I had a truly memorable experience today, the fourth day of my visit to the Middle East. I passed through an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, and got a tiny glimpse of the everyday lives of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

I am in the region to try to learn more about this complex and fascinating part of the world. In particular, I came here to try to understand better the region’s complex political and cultural geography. The lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River today consist of a hodgepodge of different jurisdictions and areas of control. There’s Israel proper, that is Israel as defined as the land controlled by the State of Israel between the end of the 1948 war and the beginning of the Six Day War in 1967 (bounded by the so-called Green Line.) Then there’s the area under ultimate Israeli control since 1967, that is Israel plus the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem. Of these areas, Golan and East Jerusalem have been annexed by Israel, and are regarded by Israel (but nobody else) as part of the State of Israel. The Gaza Strip is under the control of a Palestinian government controlled by Hamas, except that Israel controls all of Gaza’s borders, its coastline, and its airspace. And if all of this seems complicated, consider the West Bank.

The West Bank is divided into several types of territory, including:

• Areas under the security and civilian control of the Palestinian Authority (so-called Area A.) Under Israeli law, Israelis may not enter these areas.
• Areas of joint Israeli and Palestinian security control, but where the Palestinian Authority has civil control (or where, as a Palestinian put it to me, “Palestinians are in charge of anything that costs money.”) This is Area B.
• Areas where Israel has full control of security, planning, and construction (Area C.)
• Israeli settlements and outposts occupied by Israeli citizens and controlled by Israel, but on land outside the Green Line. Most of these settlements are linked to Israel proper by roads which Palestinians are not allowed to use.
• Israeli military installations.

(For some excellent maps showing these areas, take a look at the web site of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The movement of Palestinians within and between these various areas is strictly controlled, and is enforced by means of numerous military checkpoints. I have read about the West Bank, seen maps of the checkpoints, and looked at photographs of the area on Google Earth. But I wanted to visit the place for myself, to try to understand it better, and to try to get some insight into what life is like for the 2.5 million Palestinians who live there.

And so it was that yesterday I traveled from Jerusalem to Ramallah, the commercial capital of the Palestinian territory and seat of the Palestinian Authority. I was there to meet with Sam Bahour, a business consultant who runs the e-mailing list and website epalestine.com (I will write more about Sam and Ramallah in another post.)

Although Ramallah is only about 10 km from Jerusalem, the complex political geography of this part of the world makes travel between the two cities a complicated business. Ramallah itself is defined as Area A, under Palestinian control, whereas my hotel in West Jerusalem is in Israel proper, inside the Green Line.

What makes travel so complicated, though, is that Palestinians from the Occupied Territories (including Ramallah) may not travel to Jerusalem. Israelis, in terms of Israeli law, may not enter Ramallah. And to get from the city of Ramallah to the main road to Jerusalem, travelers must first pass through the massive concrete barrier that snakes through parts of the West Bank. It is here that the Kalandia checkpoint is located.

Getting from my West Jerusalem hotel to Ramallah was easy. Ismaeil, my taxi driver was a Palestinian citizen of Israel, an Israeli Arab, and so could travel within Israel as well as West Bank. He picked me up at my hotel at 10 am, and even though we took a photographic detour en route, I was in my room at the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah by 11.15. We stopped briefly a checkpoint, but were waved through without any questions.

I could have asked Ismaeil to come and pick me up this morning for the return trip to Jerusalem. We would have been stopped at the Kalandia checkpoint, but with Ismaeil’s Israeli ID and my US passport I assume that this wouldn’t have taken too long. But, at Sam Bahour’s suggestion, I decided to pass through the checkpoint on foot, the way most Palestinians have to. He said this would be an interesting experience for me. He was right.

At 9 a.m. I took a cab from my hotel in Ramallah to the large complex that is the Kalandia checkpoint, Even if I had wished to travel further by taxi, I wouldn’t have been able to, since my Palestinian taxi driver lacked the necessary permissions to pass through to the other side of the check point.

The Kalandia checkpoint (or Kalandia terminal, as it is officially called by Israel) is a large complex of buildings, fences, vehicle checkpoints, and holding areas. Stretching away from the checkpoint on either side is the huge concrete “security barrier” constructed over the past few years by Israel for the stated purpose of preventing terrorist attacks inside Israel. Overlooking the checkpoint/terminal is a tall concrete military watchtower, with cameras and floodlights atop it (The photograph below shows the entrance to the checkpoint complex, not the complex itself.)

It was 9.25 am when I entered the terminal/checkpoint. Inside, I found five lines of people, separated from one another by steel fences. At the head of each line was a locked turnstile, operated remotely by the Israeli soldiers running the checkpoint. Every ten minutes or so, a buzzer sounded, and the turnstile unlocked. The line would surge forward, a handful of people would pass through, and after 10 seconds of so the turnstile would relock. Usually there was at least one person in the turnstile when it relocked; at one point three men were crushed in, and had to wait ten minutes until the next unlocking to get out.

The southern entrance to the Kalandia checkpoint. The checkpoint itself was behind me as I took the photograph.Needless to say, I was rather overwhelmed and more than a little confused about what was going on around me, particularly since most of the signs and all of the announcements over the public address system were in Hebrew or Arabic. A woman standing in front of me, recognizing my predicament, explained to me how the procedure worked. As we waited, she told me that she lived in East Jerusalem and worked for the United Nations. She was on her way from Ramallah to Bethlehem to make a presentation at a UN conference. She usually passed through checkpoint in her official UN vehicle, and with her UN identity document; her car had broken down this morning, though, so she had to pass through the checkpoint on foot, a much lengthier and more cumbersome process.

I asked how long it usually takes to get through the checkpoint. “It all depends,” she said, “on how long the line is, what soldiers are on duty, and what kind of mood they are in. Women soldiers are worse than men, because they want to show that they are strong. But the worst are the new immigrants, especially Russians and Ethiopians.” (In recent years, there has been an influx Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and a much larger influx of Russian Jews.)

After about 45 minutes, I got to the front of the line, and after being stuck inside the turnstile with my bag for ten minutes or so, I made it through to the other side. There I found myself in another line, waiting for another turnstile to open. This time, instead of steel bars on either side of the line, there was bulletproof glass. By now, my new friend was getting anxious. Her conference in Bethlehem was already underway, and she was late for her presentation. She had called her UN agency on her cell phone, asking them to send a car for her, but so far it hadn’t arrived.

After another 20 minutes or so, we were buzzed through the second turnstile. On the left was a booth where the Israeli soldiers sat. There were three or four of them, behind large panes of bulletproof glass, with computer terminals and microphones in front of them. Outside the booth was an airport-style metal detector and x-ray machine for baggage. My UN friend put her handbag on the machine’s conveyer belt, and approached the window, holding up her UN identity document. “I am UN,” she said to the soldier on the other side of the glass. “You can’t come through here!” shouted the soldier, a young man who couldn’t have been more than 19 years old. “X-ray machine isn’t working.” There had been no sign and no announcement indicating that this line had no functioning x-ray machine. The only way to find out was to stand in line, and wait to get to the front. My friend picked up her handbag and held it open for the soldier to see. “It’s just a handbag,” she pleaded, “You can search it if you like.” “You can’t come through here!” He yelled again, more loudly, his tone both aggressive and abusive. Now she was getting angry, “I am UN,” she said again, holding up her ID, “I want to talk to your supervisor.” “You can talk to the supervisor,” the soldier shouted back into his microphone. “But only in line 1, line 3, line 4, and line 5.” We were in line 2.

I held up my overnight bag and US passport. “You can’t come through,” the soldier said to me. This time his tone was emphatic rather than abusive. “X-ray not working.” “What must I do?” I asked. “Go out, go out.” He waved his arm. The turnstile clicked, and my friend and I returned to the holding area, and joined the back of line 5. A few minutes later, after some discussion in Arabic with the men in front of us, my friend said, without explanation, “We can’t stay in this line,” and we moved to the back of line 4. Ten minutes or so later, her phone rang. “The UN car is here,” she said to me, and rushed off, back to the Ramallah side of the checkpoint. I hope she made it to her conference in time.

After she had left, I was adopted by a new translator, a young engineering student from Hebrew University in Jerusalem (He didn’t say what his residency status was, or where he lived.) After ten minutes or so, there was an announcement over the public address system, and about half of the people in front of me left the line, and went to the back of one of the other lines. Apparently it had just been decreed that this line was for residents of East Jerusalem only.

Eventually, I passed through the turnstile, put my bag through a functioning x-ray machine, showed my passport, and passed through the checkpoint.

At the exit to the parking lot was a sign in Hebrew, Arabic, and English: “Have a safe and pleasant stay.”

In the parking lot, I found a small bus, heading for Jerusalem. I climbed on board; as far as I could tell, I was the only non-Arab on board. Half an hour or so later, after passing through some of the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, we came to the American Colony Hotel, where Sam had told me I could get a taxi to West Jerusalem.

The first taxi driver I asked told me he couldn’t take me my hotel. “I cannot go there,” he said, “No license.” Apparently he, his taxi, or both are not allowed into West Jerusalem. I had better luck with the second taxi, which delivered me safely to my hotel. Arrival time 12.15 pm. My journey had taken me three hours and fifteen minutes, and I was exhausted.

Passing through the Kalandia checkpoint today was an eye opener for me. It gave me a very small insight into what the occupation means for the Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation. I got a glimpse not only of the mechanisms of the occupation, but also its character. That Israeli soldier barking orders through his microphones said a whole lot more than “You can’t come though here.”

Above all, though, I came away marveling at the patience, peacefulness and dignity that so many Palestinians manage to maintain in the face of the indignities they are forced to endure.

Sign at the exit from the Kalandia checkpoint. I took the picture surreptitiously, hence the weird angle.

I am of course aware that I am writing here about some controversial and deeply divisive topics. There are not two sides to the issues I raise here, there are numerous sides. In many cases they cannot even agree on a common terminology to discuss the issues that divide them (Is it the West Bank? The Occupied Territories? Disputed terrtitories? Judea and Samaria? Palestine? The Palestinian Territory? Are the people living there Palestinians? Arabs? Both?) I am therefore quite certain that many will disagree with what I have written here and in my other posts on the region. If you disgree with me, I encourage you to respond to this post. Tell me where you disagree with me and where you think I am wrong. Post your views here so that other readers of the blog can read your perspective as well. I look forward to hearing from you

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