by | 18 July 2005 · 7:26 am

Collaborative Writing with Srebrenica Survivors

Last Monday, Tim Lindgren of The WhereProject described his personal experience helping refugees from Srebrenica.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the massacres at Srebrenica when nearly 8,000 Bosnian Moslems were killed and the international community stood by without intervening. The last couple of days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Bosnian co-workers and clients I got to know as a refugee resettlement job developer in Chicago….

The anniversary evoke strong emotions for me, not simply because of the horrific nature of this event, but of all the other stories I heard from clients as I helped them find jobs. Many of these stories came out in the process of writing resumes for clients attempting to find their first job in the US. As a 23-year-old in one of my first jobs out of college, I learned a quite a bit about the nature of work as tried to construct resumes, resumes not only to represent 20 years experience as a machinist but also to account for the three year gaps in work history created by time in a concentration camp. This was perhaps my most profound experience of collaborative writing, listening to a client’s story through a caseworker’s translation and then trying to tell that story within the generic constraints of the resume.

* Jusuf was one of my first clients, a gentle and appreciative man in his late fifties, who was looking for his first job in the US. He had experience as a welder in Bosnia, so I took him to apply for work at Homaco, Inc. specialized in telephone jack towers. In the process of gathering information for a resume, he told me that he had been in the Trnopoli concentration camp for three months with his sons. He dropped 25 kilos and was eating grass by the end. Friends he had known for 50-years became his captors….

These stories continue to haunt me, not only because terrible to have heard, but because I feel like I walked away from them. In stead of remaining in Chicago, in proximity to these people and their stories, I felt compelled to move half way across the country to become a professional student of literature, to immerse myself in the canonical texts of Western civilization, to consume countless critical articles, and learn to create my own critical texts. In contrast to the subject matter of literary studies, the refugee stories were highly situated, located in specific communities and place, and I was lucky enough to find myself in the midst of it for a time. But when I had the chance to stay in Chicago, to stay local, in proximity to all I had gained, I wasn’t able to make a connection between my graduate studies and the value of staying nearby.

I realized yesterday how deeply I still regret this decision, and how closely my interest in place is tied to this formative moment. When I moved to Boston, the transition was so difficult because I began to feel the loss of that deep sense of place I had gained in Chicago, in part through the people and places I encountered as job developer: the factory where airline meals were assembled; the laundry rooms and back entrances to every major hotel in downtown Chicago; the factory where women sewed fine silks; a floral shop on the west side; the factory where fire extinguishers glowed read in the sweltering air; the tannery that smelled so bad we were relieved to find out they weren’t hiring; the plastics factory in Skokie where I learned the difference between extrusion and injection molding.

via Rhine River

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by | 17 July 2005 · 6:56 pm

Bulgarian Topples Mongolian Grand Champion!

The Japan Times headline says it all:

Bulgarian Kotooshu upsets Asashoryu

Bulgarian Kotooshu upset grand champion Asashoryu Sunday to end the Mongolian yokozuna’s winning streak and topple him from his position as sole front runner at the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament.

Komusubi Kotooshu rallied from a powerful blow to the face at the start, which had sent him reeling backward. Recovering his balance, the two wrestlers locked intensely in the center of the ring before Kotooshu threw Asashoryu over his right shoulder and sent him head first into the dirt to roaring cheers from the crowd.

It was the first defeat for Asashoryu, who has won 13 cups, after 24 straight victories.

The Mongolian wrestler is now tied at the top of the tournament’s standings with Wakanosato with seven wins and one loss. Kotooshu is 6-2.

“I’m happy,” Kotooshu told reporters after the upset, saying he had just thought to do his best before facing off against his powerful opponent.

UPDATE: Now the Georgian Kokkai has toppled Asashoryu, leaving the Mongolian Asashoryu, Bulgarian Kotooshu, and Japanese Wakanosato tied for the lead at 2 losses each, with Kokkai, Tochiazuma, Kaio, and Takamisakari just 1 loss back.

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by | 17 July 2005 · 7:25 am

Minh Matsushita, RIP

Tamara Jones of the Washington Post profiles the lone American killed in the London bombings of 7 July.

LONDON — Minh Matsushita was a man forever in motion, an adventure always in progress. His passport was a pocket-size accordion of pages bearing faded stamps and mysterious visas.

Even as his boyhood friends from the Bronx settled down, got married, pursued careers and started families, the 37-year-old Matsushita just kept reinventing himself. He might be a beach bum in San Diego one year and a tech geek in Manhattan the next. You could find him snorkeling in Australia, or hiking across minefields in Cambodia.

Dude, what are you doing?, friends would remember asking time and again, when he would alight between trips on someone’s back porch to drink through the night and tell his tales. Minh always smiled, shrugged and gave the cavalier answer his buddies came to think of as his personal motto:

“No worries, man.”

For the past 18 months, Matsushita had been living out the dream of the perpetual wanderer, exploring remote corners of the world as a tour guide for an Australia-based agency called Intrepid Travel. Leading tourists on treks through the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia, he also found for the first time in his life something more than adventure….

The details that would define Matsushita in death were flat and one-dimensional, predictable, prosaic, so very much not like Matsushita himself.

No one would know that he loved thick steaks and cheap beer and heavy metal music from the ’80s and rafting on wild rivers. No one would know that he diverted tourists from the prescribed itineraries to introduce them to the kids he befriended in Cambodian orphanages. Or that he himself had fled war-torn Vietnam as a little boy with his widowed mother and the Japanese American businessman she would marry, Minh’s adoptive father.

His family has set up a fund now to benefit the orphans, with Intrepid Travel promising to match any donations.

via LaurenceJarvikOnline

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by | 16 July 2005 · 8:15 am

Is Live 8 an Insult to Africa?

Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme, a consultant on international law and a columnist for Le Messager, a Cameroonian daily, has published his reaction to the Live 8 concert in the New York Times.

LIVE 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated, would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn’t realized that it was an insult both to us and to common sense….

Don’t insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led. Instead, insult its leaders, who have ruined everything. Our anger is all the greater because despite all the presidents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn’t hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.

Don’t the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers like Yoweri Museveni (who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely) and Omar Bongo (who has become immensely rich in his three decades of running Gabon)? Don’t they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo and the Central African Republic? Don’t they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?…

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers. We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution. Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer….

But the truth is that it was not for us, for Africa, that the musicians at Live 8 were singing; it was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences, and whether they realized it or not, to reinforce dictatorships. They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don’t realize ourselves what the source of our problems is.

Well, big-name musicians know a whole lot more about money than they do about democracy. And what do the UN, EU, or most national bureaucracies know about ending corruption? Ending dictatorships by military force is the easy part. Nation-building is nowhere close to being an Olympic sport yet. Not even an exhibition sport.

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Filed under Africa, NGOs

by | 16 July 2005 · 5:39 am

Child Labor Trends in Vietnam

Dynamist blogger Virginia Postrel has a column in the New York Times on evolving research about child labor.

WHEN Americans think about child labor in poor countries, they rarely picture girls fetching water or boys tending livestock. Yet most of the 211 million children, ages 5 to 14, who work worldwide are not in factories. They are working in agriculture – from 92 percent in Vietnam to 63 percent in Guatemala – and most are not paid directly.

“Contrary to popular perception in high-income countries, most working children are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing establishments or other forms of wage employment,” two Dartmouth economists, Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, wrote in “Child Labor in the Global Economy,” published in the Winter 2005 Journal of Economic Perspectives….

Some of the best data, and the most noteworthy results, come from Vietnam, which tracked about 3,000 households from 1993 to 1998. This was a period of rapid economic growth, in which gross domestic product rose about 9 percent a year….

The effects were greatest for families escaping poverty. For those who crossed the official poverty line, earning enough to pay for adequate food and basic necessities, higher incomes accounted for 80 percent of the drop in child labor. In 1993, 58 percent of the population fell below the poverty line, compared with 33 percent five years later….

The results from Vietnam suggest that families do not want their children to work. Parents pull their children out of work when they can afford to, even when the wages children could earn are rising. Poverty, not culture, appears to be the fundamental problem.

Rather than simply banning child labor, then, policy makers should concentrate on alleviating poverty. That includes not only encouraging economic growth but also improving access to schools and to credit markets. Borrowing could allow families to buy equipment to substitute for child labor, to weather short-term declines in income and to pay school fees….

“Most child labor policy even today is directed at trying to get kids into unemployment – to limit working opportunities for kids,” he said in the interview. But, “if households are already in a situation where they don’t want their children to be working, but they’re forced to because of their circumstance, taking additional steps to prevent the kids from working is punishing the poorest for being poor.”

I suspect most child labor policy is designed to protect child laborers in one region from competing against adult laborers in another. Concentrating instead on economic growth in the poorer region would in the longer run be more likely to create new wealth, new markets, and therefore new jobs in other regions as well.

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by | 15 July 2005 · 8:34 am

Sea Trade under the Pax Mongolica

The failed invasions of Japan and Java taught the Mongols much about shipbuilding, and when their military efforts failed, they turned that knowledge to peaceful pursuits of commerce. Khubilai Khan made the strategic decision to transport food within his empire primarily by ship because he realized how much cheaper and more efficient water transportation, which was dependent on wind and current, was than the much slower land transport, which was dependent on the labor of humans and animals that required constant feeding. In the first years, the Mongols moved some 3,000 tons by ship, but by 1329 it had grown to 210,000 tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others.

En route, the ships also called at the ports of Vietnam, Java, Ceylon, and India, and in each place the Mongol representatives encountered more goods, such as sugar, ivory, cinnamon, and cotton, that were not easily produced in their own lands. From the Persian Gulf, the ships continued outside of the areas under Mongol influence to include regular trade for a still greater variety of goods from Arabia, Egypt, and Somalia. Rulers and merchants in these other areas outside the Mongol system of influence did not operate within the system of shares in the Mongol goods; instead, the Mongol authorities created long-term trading relations with them. Under Mongol protection, their vassals proved as worthy competitors in commerce as the Mongols had been in conquest and they began to dominate trade on the Indian Ocean.

To expand the trade into new areas beyond Mongol political control, they encouraged some of their vassals, particularly the South Chinese, to emigrate and set up trading stations in foreign ports. Throughout the rule of the Mongol dynasty, thousands of Chinese left home and sailed off to settle along the coastal communities of Vietnam, Cambodia, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra. They worked mostly in shipping and trade and as merchants up and down the rivers leading to the ports, but they gradually expanded into other professions as well.

To reach the markets of Europe more directly, without the lengthy detour through the southern Muslim countries, the Mongols encouraged foreigners to create trading posts on the edges of the empire along the Black Sea. Although the Mongols had initially raided the trading posts, as early as 1226, during the reign of Genghis Khan, they allowed the Genoese to maintain a trading station at the port of Kaffa in the Crimea, and later added another at Tana. To protect these stations on land and sea, the Mongols hunted down pirates and robbers. In the Pratica della mercatura (Practice of Marketing), a commercial handbook published in 1340, the Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti stressed that the routes to Mongol Cathay were “perfectly safe, whether by day or by night.”

SOURCE: Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), pp. 223-224

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Filed under China, Vietnam

by | 15 July 2005 · 8:04 am

Mandarin, Merchant, …, Prostitute, Scholar, Beggar

The Mongol elite’s intimate involvement with trade represented a marked break with tradition. From China to Europe, traditional aristocrats generally disdained commercial enterprise as undignified, dirty, and, often, immoral; it ranked with the manual trades beneath the interests of either the powerful or the pious. Furthermore, the economic ideal in feudal Europe of this time was not merely that each country should be self-sufficient, but that each manor estate should strive to be as self-supporting as practical. Any goods that left the estate should not be going to trade for other goods for the peasants on the land but to buy jewelry, religious relics, and other luxury goods for the aristocratic family or church. The feudal rulers sought to have their peasants supply all their own needs–to produce their food, grow their timber, make their tools, and weave their cloth–and to trade for as little as possible. In a feudal system, reliance on imported goods represented a failure at home.

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars.

SOURCE: Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), p. 225

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by | 14 July 2005 · 8:05 pm

Pearsall’s Books on a Roll

The blog Pearsall’s Books has been on a roll lately, with demographic studies, editorial analyses, and its trademark book reviews. Here, for instance, is a perceptive column Pearsall analyzes by Jason Burke in Sunday’s Guardian Observer about the lifecycle of terrorist movements.

Historically, this first attack usually prompts the state security machine, after a short delay or period of indecision, to swing into action. Repressive legislation is introduced, intelligence agencies boosted and key militant leaders are killed or imprisoned. This results in more indiscriminate, brutal violence as the terrorist movement, leaderless and rudderless, mutates and fragments. With resources scarce and security high, soft targets are favoured.

What follows is crucial. Egypt and Algeria suffered Islamic militancies in the early 1990s that followed the above pattern. After nearly a decade of increasing horror, they peaked in grotesque violence. In Algeria, more than 100,000 died. But rather than boost the militants, this had the opposite effect. Public support for extremists collapsed; the ‘martyrs’ became ‘murderers’. Reviled by former supporters, the militants became easy prey for security agencies. Now, only a criminalised rump of violent men remains in both countries. Movements that once threatened the existence of the state are effectively finished. And the critical factor throughout was the support of the bombers’ own constituency.

The insurgency labelled ‘al-Qaeda’ fits this paradigm in many respects. The spectacular attack (9/11), then the response (the Patriot and anti-terrorist Acts, Guantánamo Bay). The degrading of the leadership (the invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of arrests ), now a brutal, indiscriminate phase as individuals buy into a hate-filled ideology (Madrid, the Beslan school massacre, London) and conduct freelance operations.

It may be argued that, as Algeria and Egypt (and Northern Ireland and the Basques) were on a national scale and the ‘al-Qaeda insurgency’ spans the globe, we are in untrodden territory. But I believe the basic conclusions drawn from smaller-scale examples remain valid. No one can claim, given the diversity of this attack’s victims, that they were striking simply at the West. The casualties, in our wonderfully varied city, are as globalised as the ideology that caused them. This is a global militant movement working to an agenda that can inspire or repel anywhere on the planet.

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by | 13 July 2005 · 1:49 pm

Naadam: Mongolia’s Three Manly Games

Mongolia’s 3-day Naadam period of traditional summer games ended today, but fans of Mongolian wrestling can console themselves for another ten days by watching Mongolian yokozuna Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj (aka Asashoryu) thrash Japanese, Russian, Bulgarian, Georgian, and fellow Mongolian opponents in the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament that started Sunday.

via Ulaan Ken Baatar and The Marmot’s Hole

Intrepid book reviewer Danny Yee is now in Mongolia. Pathologically polymathic though he be, I didn’t realize he was into archery, wrestling, and horse-racing! Be sure to look for his travelogue. It’s sure to be a treat.

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by | 13 July 2005 · 6:32 am

A Steppe Inside the Forbidden City

Ultimately, at the heart of [Khanbalik], Khubilai created a Mongol haven where few foreigners, including Chinese, could enter. Behind high walls and guarded by Mongol warriors, the royal family and court continued to live as Mongols. The large open areas for animals in the middle of the city had no precedent in Chinese culture. This Forbidden City constituted a miniature steppe created in the middle of the Mongol capital. During the Mongol era, the whole complex of the Forbidden City was filled with gers [yurts] where members of the court often preferred to live, eat, and sleep. Pregnant wives of the khan made sure that their children were born in a ger, and the children received their school lessons in the ger as they grew up. While Khubilai and his successors maintained public lives as Chinese emperors, behind the high walls of their Forbidden City, they continued to live as steppe Mongols.

When the Franciscan friar Odoric of Pordenone visited the Mongol territories in the 1320s, he described the Forbidden City in Khanbalik: “Within the precincts of the said palace imperial, there is a most beautiful mount, set and replenished with trees, for which cause it is called the Green Mount, having a most royal and sumptuous palace standing thereupon, in which, for the most part, the great Can is resident.” In a passage that sounds very close to earlier descriptions of Karakorum, he wrote, “Upon the one side of the said mount there is a great lake, whereupon a most stately bridge is built, in which lake is great abundance of geese, ducks, and all kinds of water-fowl; and in the wood growing upon the mount there is a great store of all birds, and wild beasts.” …

Inside the confines of their Forbidden City, Khubilai and his family continued to act as Mongols in dress, speech, food, sports, and entertainment. This meant that they consumed large amounts of alcohol, loudly slurped their soup, and they cut meat with knives at the table, thereby disgusting the Chinese who confined such acts to the kitchen during preparation. With the emphasis on alcohol and rituals of drinking and drunkenness, the scenes at court must have been somewhat chaotic as the free-roaming, individualistic Mongols tried to imitate the complex and highly orchestrated rituals and ceremonies of the Chinese court. In contrast to the Chinese imperial tradition of courtiers lining up according to rank, the Mongols tended to swarm chaotically, and, perhaps most disturbing to the Chinese, the Mongol women mingled freely among the men on even the most important occasions. The ceremonies in the Mongol court became so disorganized that sometimes the khan’s bodyguards had to beat back the crowds of officials and guests with batons.

SOURCE: Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), pp. 199-200

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