Reading around the world: Mongolia

Mongol tavtai morilno uu! Welcome to Mongolia!

Hamid Sadar-Afkhami has incredible photography of Mongolia and its people! All the photos in this blog are by him - please look here for more of his work. 

As this country is a bit more obscure in western knowledge than North Korea, I'll begin with some basic facts:

• Mongolia is the least populated country in the world, with a population density of less than 2 per square kilometer.
• Most people are Buddhist with a small minority practicing shamanism.
• It is a parliamentary democracy with a directly elected president.
• Mining and herding are the major industries, and per capita GPD is $4,353
• 40% of the population remains nomadic, herding livestock through vast territories. This lifestyle is threatened by climate change which has further harshened the Mongolian climate.
• The capitol city, Ulan Bator, is the coldest capitol city in the world. 
• For more facts about Mongolia, check out the BBC country profile

A small nomadic tribe rides raindeer much the way the ancient Mongol armies rode horses.

This week I began to add patches of color to my whitewashed understanding of history. I was homeschooled, so as I child I was surrounded by Egyptian gods and mythology from around the world. But when I got older my education had to conform to national ciriculums, and the world became distinctly white. Roman empire. Europe. America. We learn history as if non-white people didn't exist until the Civil war. When our heritage demands we acknowledge the accomplishments a non-white man, like Jesus, we recreate him in our image. So this week I read about the greatest Emperor the world has ever seen – an Asian man we primarily remember as leader of a 'hoard', not a military and social genius. Genghis Khan.

Genghis Khan's empire, in black, versus Alexander the Great's in red. 

I read "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" : which, as the title suggests, argues we owe many thing we consider integral to our modernity to Genghis Khan. While he is primarily remembered as a tyrant, Weatherford writes that Genghis innovated many modern values. His army and court were meritocracies, with leaders of small groups of soldiers elected by their peers. Women held positions of power in his court, and sometimes lead troops. He allowed his empire freedom of religion. He was a brilliant social engineer who brought intellectual talent with him around the world, leading to an exchange of ideas which generated much of the innovation of his time. He even changed fashions: Europeans wore robes until the Mongol empire introduced them to pants. The size and scope of his empire was unparalleled until British colonialism many centuries later.

Perhaps the most incredible of all is Ghengi's personal story; which begins as the abused and ignored son of a kidnapped second wife. He and his family barely survived being cast out of their tribe, normally a death sentence in the nomadic Mongolian culture. They lived mostly by the sheer force of will his mother who hunted small game to keep her family alive. When he was 10 he killed his abusive older step brother to prevent him from marrying his mother, and from that day never stopped fighting. In his late teens his wife Borte – his love from childhood – was kidnapped and he forged an alliance with the most powerful Khan in Mongolia to get her back. That began his steady climb to Khan of Mongolia, and from there, a quarter of the world.

Borte, the woman who caused the creation of an empire. 

Art by my talented friend Wendi, check out more of her work here!

The history of a powerful Asian man is a dangerous one. While writers of his time usually described him with a mix of fear and respect, as the centuries passed Genghis Khan transformed into a savage barbarian in western literature. Under Soviet rule, discussion of Genghis Khan was so suppressed researchers were killed for attempting to learn about him. His burial place was turned into a militarized zone to keep out the curious. Academic historical research on him is just beginning.  I can only hope the research continues and the people of Mongolia are fully able to reclaim their heritage: inheritors of the birthplace of the most powerful man to ever live. 

New Worlds

On the train to Kandy 

Somehow I have been in Sri Lanka a month now. The little breakfast roti seller, who has told me every day which way to look before crossing the street, for the first time let me leave his shop unaided. I have officially passed the infancy stage. I'm just as enchanted with this country as when I arrived. Learning Sri Lanka is hydra-like: every mystery half solved opens up a dozen more questions Every new walk or exploration in the city brings something new and incredible. No longer an infant, I feel like a child just discovering a library for the first time.

New discoveries in Colombo - beautiful mosques and art 

We have become comfortable enough with Colombo to leave it. The past two weeks have contained two adventures – first to Kandy and then to Jaffna. Sri Lanka is small enough that a few hours on a bus or train can take you to a different world. That is what Kandy seems like: a town scooped out of the hills. The houses gather in the center of the valley like water in a bowl, sometimes wash up the sides of dark green hills. It a place for meandering. Families and lovers stroll around the lake – families in white from visiting the temple or lovers shyly holding hands. Time seems to calm like the surface of the lake. There is so much life – monkeys dashing along concrete walls and brilliant birds flash between the trees. Along the shoreline great monitor lizards smile in the sun and geese and herons pick for food in the mud. I feel it would be a haven for artists or writers – anyone for whom the interior of the mind holds more gravity than the exterior.

 The view from the train to Kandy

 Kandy from the hilltops 

By the lake 

There is a reason for Kandy's tranquility. It is a sacred space, one of the holiest in Sri Lanka, home to the temple of the tooth. The tooth itself fell victim to its own power – conquered and reconquered and eventually destroyed multiple times. But the metaphor remains holy – a memory contained in an ornate shrine carved with flowers and mandalas, and punctuated with clambering monkeys and lazy dogs escaping the sun in temple shade. Incense drifts around the temple with the chants of students praying before their exams.

Paintings on the inside of the Temple of the tooth and the outside 

We benefited from the enormity of Sri Lankan hospitality in Kandy as well. The father of a friend of a friend is an elephant veterinarian and took us to see elephant 'orphanages' around Kandy. I cannot recommend it to future visitors to Sri Lanka however, the elephants were mostly chained or caged in spaces far too small, clearly there for the benefit of their visitors not themselves. There was one beautiful moment though: when we got to wash an elephant. She loved it – sprawling in a stream while we scrubbed at her thick hide with coconut husks.

Galle was another world entirely, an old colonial town perched on the edge of of the ocean. A paradise woven in the past. We climbed to the top of the old fort – an imposing place softened by families playing in the grass and couples lounging in the sun. Like a stereotype sprung to life some men sat in the shadows with monkeys and cobras, hoping to tempt coins from tourists. Inside the fort is town of crumbling grandeur. Ornate churches and buildings that would look at home in the old city of Barcelona, the illusion broken only by the ferocity of the sun and the twisting flowery trees. Beautiful, the wide quiet stone streets surrounded by slowly fading plaster. Europe transported. We spent the afternoon sprawled on a beautiful beach enjoying a sunset over cheap juice and drinks. I have just begun to learn this new place –  I have only begun to love it.  

Galle Fort 

Sunset over Unawatuna beach 

Reading around the world: North Korea

In the great amount of spare time Fulbright grants me I've decided to embark on a project I've wanted to do for a long time: reading a book every week about a country I know nothing about. Despite a life and education that could easily be described as 'global' much of the world remains a blank for me. Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan. Mauritania. Uruguay. Gabon. Lithuania. Aside from perhaps vaguely gesturing the right direction on a map, I can tell you nothing about these countries. I don't know what language they speak, what food they eat, what form of government they have, what name they use for God. And yet they have histories and cultures as rich and deep as the places I know about intimately – though once upon a time Rwanda meant as little to me as Suriname. This part of learning – the growth of the rich multiplicity of meanings that Rwanda now holds for me – is my favorite. So in these months I am filling in my map. Shedding a little light on the places in the world yet dark to me. 

I won't just read – I will attempt to engage a little more fully by listening to music, catching up on recent news, and sometimes even cooking food from each country as I go. I will share my armchair journey around the world, as well as my physical one through Sri Lanka, on this blog, for anyone interested. If you know of any good books about obscure countries please tell me!

First Stop: North Korea

Book: Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

This country is a little more in the news than I would ordinarily like for this project, but my understanding of it falls so woefully short I thought it would be a good place to start. The need for deeper understanding really hit home as I searched for pictures and videos to include in this blog. Most media available on the internet really focuses on the freak show aspect of North Korea – surreal photos of Kim Jung Un with celebrities or babies, or inanely smiling soldiers in impossibly tight formations. What I loved about 'Nothing to Envy' was Demick's commitment to portraying the agency of the North Korean people. She began her book with a vignette about how young couples take advantage of the lack of electricity to sneak into the night together unseen – how technological deprivation can become a gift. And ultimately that is what the book is about: people who triumph against insurmountable odds, not a country of sheeple obediently starving and working themselves to death.

This aspect of North Korea does still baffle me. I am a scholar of evil. I have lived in the wake of war and genocide in 3 countries now, and I have begun to understand the forces and power that may shape a good human into a murderer – how hatred can be sown and reaped for the gain of the powerful. But the powerful in North Korean do not primarily keep their place through hate – they have built a dictatorship on love. Even after 2 million died of starvation in the 1990s. Even when there was no medicine at the hospitals. Even now, when a zipper seems like a magical object. Even the radicals of their society, the free thinkers who later defected cried themselves sick at the death of Kim Il-Sung. People comfort themselves with the belief that they are better off than any other country while they starve to death. Truly the banality of evil – a mother watching her child fade away and yet unable to question the system that is killing him.

Some North Korean Pop music - yes it does exist. 

I marveled at this, and then I considered my participation in the system that I was born in. I too, am part of a system of death. There is horror that generates my comfort. Child slave labor to keep my clothes and baubles cheep. The end of local industry and dignity in the global south as their livelihoods are taken by multinationals. The endemic rape and murder of the Democratic Republic of the Congo over minerals so that I can have a smartphone. In almost anything I purchase I am a tacit participant in evil. While ours keeps our bellies full, we too, are sacrificing ourselves to ideology. Ours is not the quick death of starvation or illness but an apocalypse of our making. Not just ourselves but our whole world may be sacrificed before our greatest God – consumption. Our greed is heating the planet to inhabitability - but we can't stop. Even after the Paris accords we have no plan to keep our world from heating beyond our capacity to withstand. 

I see the system I am in, and I can name it and critique it unlike so many North Koreans. But this an immense privilege – I see this because not only have I had the chance to go outside the world I was raised in, but I have been taught again and again to be constantly wary of the little acts of careless evil around me. Were I raised by MTV and sustained by flipping burgers I have no illusions that I would be challenging the system that kept me that way. In this light, the few hundred North Koreans that risk everything they have, and everyone they love, to slip across the border each year seem far more incredible than their compatriots, starving for the love of their leader.

For more on North Korea:

BBC North Korea 

Finding your feet

Today I am 23. It is not a monumental age in our culture – I can't suddenly vote or buy intoxicants, and paying a reasonable price for a rental car is still years away. But this birthday seems significant to me. I have at last broken out of the incubating cocoon of undergraduate life. I am exploring a new country. I am working, and getting paid for it (a novel experience in my service career!). I am hunting for my first apartment. I am finding my feet.

Me and my housemates out for birthday dinner. 

Very appropriately I think, I have spent my birthday finalizing this transition to semi-adulthood. I attended a presentation about development in Colombo at my internship, had a meeting about a paper I am co-authoring, and met with my supervisor at the University of Colombo to discuss my teaching schedule. It is a day full of gifts. My teaching schedule, as it turns out, is very light. I am teaching one class 4 hours a week to students about to graduate from the faculty of sciences. I will get to teach the fun things: practicing speaking and presentations and writing for jobs. It is a good use of a native speaker, as many students will work for international companies or apply for graduate schools abroad.

An outdoor hallway at the Faculty of Science 

It also leaves me a tremendous amount of free time. I knew my schedule would be light, but leaving the office I felt I should pinch myself: only 4 hours teaching a week?! One of the great gifts of Fulbright Sri Lanka is that we get free reign of our time, and are encouraged to expand our engagement with Sri Lanka beyond our teaching. So I have begun an informal internship with a think tank called the Center for Poverty Analysis, or CEPA.

CEPA researches questions which fascinate me – has economic development in Sri Lanka benefited the poor, and if so how? What is the relationship between environmental degradation and poverty? How can post war reconciliation be combined with economic redevelopment? My first project is to co-author a paper on forced displacement of the urban poor. Once this project is done I'll write blogs and news articles summarizing their research. This work, too, is a gift. I am in Sri Lanka officially as a teacher, but I have always thought of myself as coming here to learn. This partnership will ensure that I do! For more information about CEPA, check out their website: cepa.lk/home.html

So grateful today for everything that I have. Learning – from how to find the best curry I've ever had in tiny grungy concrete storefronts, to the politics of economic development in Colombo. Friends – the amazing and fascinating people exploring this country on Fulbright with me. Beauty – the deep greens and vibrant sunsets of Sri Lanka. Freedom – these luxurious days as we learn Sinhala and settle in to Colombo.

It is a happy birthday indeed.  

The beautiful beach near Colombo. 

This is unedited - around sunset the sky is really that color. 

Welcome to Sri Lanka!

Bo Tree at Bellanwila Temple

Sri Lanka hits you like a tropical blanket – the air is a wash of water and car horns and bird song. It is both lush and green and dirty and concrete; bursting with color from the people and buildings and plants. I have stumbled into this chaotic paradise courtesy of Fulbright, for whom I will serve as an English teacher at the University of Colombo for 8 months. I have this next month to work through Sinhala lessons while I luxuriate in the delicious dizziness of culture shock – not quite knowing where I am or what to do at any moment. This stage is one of my favorite things about traveling – for a few weeks you are a child again. You are unsure of how to get from place to place, what to eat, how to speak. That feeling, and the slow satisfaction as you learn to cross the street without looking like a fool, order food, find the right bus. Now I am living with four other English teachers in a house so large we feel like pinballs bouncing through it – a house surrounded by brilliant green and awash in the calls of birds. One night I was kept awake by the scampering of monkeys on the roof, and the next day I encountered them in the garden – we were each as startled and curious as the other.

The monkey encounter.

In my first day or two I think this cow was more adept at crossing the street than I. 

Some context for my new home.

Sri Lanka is a country of transitions right now. I count myself incredibly fortunate to be here for a fraction of their history as they move forward. Sri Lanka is recently out of war. The Fulbright director described it as “post war but not post conflict” - the fighting is done but for the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority conflict is still fresh in memory and continued discrimination and misunderstanding. We stand at this moment on the brink of possibility – a new president miraculously swept out the tyrannical reign of the former president Rajapaksa whose ruthlessness ended the war, but at terrible cost of life and human dignity. All the Sri Lankans who have spoken to us hail President Sirisena as the beginning of a new chapter for their country, but there is much work to be done and many decades of pain to be healed. Conflict between the Hindu minority in the North and the Buddhist majority of the south reached a head in 1983 when government enflamed tension erupted into riots through Colombo, and death to any Tamil who the riots found. The Northern response to this was to create one of the most effective guerrilla resistance groups the world has seen, the infamous Tamil Tigers. The two sides traded atrocities until 2009, when the Sri Lankan government bombed the North to ashes. When they were done, there was no one left to fight. Peace comes slowly, and perhaps has its first real chance under the new government who has changed inflammatory rhetoric about the war and sought to minimize the disparity between resources in the North and South. Whether this will be enough, whether stated intentions will fully materialize, remains to be seen.

Sri Lanka is an island about the size of West Vriginia off the Southern tip of India. I am living in Colombo, while the war and most of the damage remaining from it occurred in the North around Jaffna. 

Sri Lanka is in the midst of economic transition as well. My past two homes – Cambodia and Rwanda were squarely in the “third world” while Sri Lanka seems well on its journey on the imaginary line towards “developed country” . I find myself in shock at simple things like bus tickets, cross walks, functioning (and obeyed!) traffic lights, western style grocery stores – things I rarely would have encountered in my past travels. We went to a fancy hotel for a final dinner after orientation – an ostentatious kind of place with butlers in uniform to open the door for you, sparkling marble floors, and chandeliers complete with bland modern art. I normally hate going to this kind of place because i someplace like Cambodia or Rwanda the patrons would have been solely white, but here the majority of the patrons sipping coffee or cocktails in overstuffed chairs were Sri Lankan. It will take me some time to learn that this is Sri Lanka too – not just the open air markets and clogged streets full of Tuktuks. It is a well educated country with a growing middle class, and an upper class with connections all over the world. Colonial heritage lingers in the excellent English of the upper class which seeps into every part of the country – even the menu at the little takeaway restaurant near our home advertises its curries and rotis in English. But here, more than a reminder of Colonialism, English serves as a bridge between the languages Tamil and Sinhala which have divided the country for so long. I hope my time here will be a tiny fraction of that bridge.

(If you are interested in learning more about the history of my new home I suggest reading “The Cage” by Gordon Weiss who gives a riveting account of the end of the civil war. But please keep in mind that Sri Lanka is more than its tragedies.)  

Photos of the incredible beauty and diversity of this country: Ballanwila Temple, the Red Mosque, and Pettah shopping street. 

So, Anna... why are you still in Africa?

"Hello, my name is Anna, I am a researcher with the University of Virginia. I am hoping to schedule an interview with you on the cessation of Rwandese refugees -" *click*

So, this blog is to answer the question of what exactly I am doing still in Africa, a question I wonder myself sometimes! But the answer lies with several thousand Rwandan refugees living in a refugee settlement in southern Uganda. As of June 30th these people will be required to 'voluntarily repatriate' to Rwanda. I learned about this on my last trip to Uganda, and decided that learning more about semi-legal forced relocation would be one of the best possible uses of my summer.

Why this fascinates me so much is quite complicated. First of all, you need to know a bit about the Rwandan government. While it is officially a free and fair democracy, the reality of it is that opposition to the current regime is heavily controlled, and ethnic discrimination continues but invisibly and silently. We hear rumors of political disappearances, jail sentences that people never return from. Disagreeing with the government is now called 'devisionism' or 'genocide ideology', pushable by a sizable jail sentence. So this is part of the reason there are still so many people fleeing Rwanda. Rwanda wants these people back for a number of reasons: one, for reputation (being the 'development miracle' and still having people run from you doesn't look too good) another for control (the current regime is actually made up of former refugees who organized and invaded Rwanda from Uganda). This is made even more complicated by the refugees who are former perpetrators of genocide, and claiming political prosecution to avoid justice. The layers of lies and complications go on and on.

Now this has all culminated in a cessation clause, a technicality in refugee law which allows a host country to revoke refugee status when they (the host country) determines the reasons for fleeing have ceased. The refugees can't legally stay, but they can't be legally forced to return, and Uganda has set up no system for appeals. Many of the people effected by cessation will have lived in Uganda for decades, some where born here. To say that sending them back to Rwanda is sending them 'home' is a misnomer of huge proportions.

So this is why I have spent the past week running around the crazy city of Kampala doing research, which primarily involves sitting on the side of the road making phone calls and trying to get people to let me interview them. I have talked to the UNHCR secretary so many times I feel like I should meet his wife and kids by now. I am a bit stuck in Kampala, waiting for permission to enter the settlement to go through, but Kampala is not a bad place to wait. I am staying at a hostel full of interesting people, mostly also doing research, and I spent the weekend at an Island in lake Victoria with a lovely American woman I met there.

So, research in Africa: always interesting, never what I expect, and always an adventure!

A New World!

 (Pictures are mostly by other people – my camera was stolen last month)

Hello my dears! Apologies for the long absence. My life has been full of too many transitions of late to document properly, but things are slowing down at last.

At the end of our program we went to the beautiful lake Kivu, hidden in rolling green mountains. It was a fabulous adventure of swimming in the clear water, and took a boat to a mysterious island full of cows and 5 million bats, which we climbed to the top of.

 High on the mountain-island 

Making new friends everywhere. 

The cloud of Bats we hiked through! 

Bats closer up

Now that my study abroad program is over I have moved to a new house for the summer, where I am staying with Kevin and Lizzie, two students from my program who are also staying through the summer. It has been a week of goodbyes at our house, as people have lingered in our house after the program and before their flights to America. We have had between 5 and 7 people in our tiny three-bedroom house, and we have big family breakfasts and dinners together every day. But by Friday everyone but the three of us will be gone, and it will be time to settle in to the summer for real!

Our house is  in the same complex as a brilliant artist’s studio called Ivuka! It is a jumble of bright colors and sculptures and paintings, which overflows into our bright orange house. There are dance practices outside our house every few days, and our concrete ‘yard’ overflows with the half-wild children who play in the streets by our house and come to play soccer with us and tie knots in my hair and snuggle.

In front of the painting in our living room

The art studio across from us 

Our house is the orange one!

The art studio 

I will spend my summer here in Kigali, and leave in late July for Europe and then home. I am doing research on forced repatriation of Rwandan refugees from neighboring Uganda. It’s a project I am very excited about, and I hope it will serve as a basis from my senior project. It will be a good summer! 

Playing with the babies -- Perfect and Bonett