vogue.

Oh man you guys, here's what happened a couple weeks ago when I skipped across the UVillage to meet Ashton at Starbucks and this creepy dude was WATCHING OUR EVERY MOVE.  I had to hiss at Ashton to check him out, but poor boy never could figure out where creeper even was, probably because the guy was sooo good at being "sneaky."  Seriously, I thought he might be the next up and coming Green River Killer, especially when we got into the car later and he ran after us. 

Fortunately, he ended being our friendly local photographer who wanted to "shoot us for a new ATT phone ad" (as you can tell, the phone is the opposite of fancy).  At first we could best be described as skeptical, because when someone tells you they like your "energy," you feel a little like those poor midwest girls who move to the Big Apple and accidentally get into the porn industry because they think people are just being nice to them.  Next thing you know, BLAMMO, innocence lost.  However, he sensed our hesitation and chose that moment to drop the financial stats on us.  I've previously mentioned that we have the combined income of two people who should be living in a grass hut, so we couldn't say no.  We just could not say no.

So here we are, shots stolen straight off some dark corner of the ATT website that I won't even try to explain since it's so far down the rabbithole.  This is after three solid weeks of apartment hunting, living on couches, and wearing the same outfit three days in a row (he asked if we had a change of clothes and we could barely contain the church giggles).  Thanks, Creepy Starbucks guy who ended up being a total delight to spend an afternoon with, and who then let us make a week's worth of cashola on the spot without even taking our clothes off!  Three cheers!

PS. Ashton would actually murder me if he knew I put the "casual glasses in mouth" shot of him on here, let's keep that our little secret, k?

*All photos courtesy of Marc Carter, thanks Marc!

the kids are all right.

I've been very confused lately. We flew from Saigon at midnight last Wednesday, had a 12 hour layover in Seoul, a 10 hour flight to Seattle, and somehow landed at noon on the same day we left?! My body responded in what I thought was a charming manner: like I'd had an adrenaline injection right to the heart. I cooked a couple of dinners and baked cookies, went running, got beers with some friends, read a whole book, cleaned and unpacked, went back to work on Friday on 3 hours of sleep (waking up at 4 am makes you feel like a superstar CEO or something)... until the weekend, when I totally crashed and slept til 1 pm both days. I think I might be back on track now, but I don't want to count my chicks and whatnot.

The truth is, a lot of my busy-ness has been a thinly veiled effort to avoid processing some of the things we saw in Asia. I've been having a stare-down with my journal because I'm not interested in discussing child labor and war atrocities with it quite yet, and I can't really think of anything else to talk about because those things have consumed my mind the past few weeks.

It's cliche to talk about the grinding poverty in a place like Southeast Asia because it's kind of like, "Duh. Find a new soapbox." It's obviously one of the least developed areas of the world, so what can you say about it that's unique? I don't have a new angle on it, but I was just totally struck anew by how the poverty in any given place is made so much more vivid when it's being lived by children. A few mental images that stand out in my mind:

Hmong girl selling bracelets in Laos: "You can buy 5,000."

There's no escaping child labor in Cambodia.* If you're white, you'll get swarmed by men lounging on motorcycles calling out "tuk-tuk, ladyyy?" and kids selling copied books and dime-a-dozen bracelets. They're relentless, because poverty makes people relentless. So many parts of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh were just cacophonies of garbage on stilts; huge teeming masses of people and stray dogs and dirt. There is a 15 km road from Phnom Penh to the Killing Fields, which is a chaotic study in development. As we scooted along in our tuk-tuk, a factory opened its doors for lunchtime and hundreds of face-masked young girls streamed out, having finished their morning stitching or gluing and preparing for an afternoon filled with more of the same. I wondered what they were making in the factory, what expensive items were being created cheaply so people like me can buy them for less. But I was soon distracted by a new olfactory assault, rising above the old fish and urine smells. We were driving over the river, into which was gushing forth a broad stream of aparently untreated sewage. On the shore, a garbage dump, on fire. And wandering amidst all of this, a shirtless 13 year old boy. What an apocalyptic scene this was, unpleasant for eyes and ears and heart. But our tuk-tuk zipped past all of this, leaving the tottering houses and shops on stilts above the river to fend for themselves.

"Being a baby is sooo BORING sometimes."

Later, after a long day scrambling up the wats, Amy and I set out with a mission to find margaritas at the Mexican restaurant in Siem Reap and ran into a couple of the same boys twice in a row, each time begging us to buy postcards from them. We chatted with them for a while and learned that Hou, age 14, and Phi, age 16, were a couple of the sweetest kiddos in the country. They had been selling bracelets all day without eating, so we took them to the restaurant with us and taught them the word "happy hour" and how to eat tacos. They had never had Mexican food before and Hou practically bathed in the salsa, he loved it so much. We asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up and Hou said "tuk-tuk driver!" while Phi chose, "teacher, and I want to start an orphanage as well." As we parted ways later, Hou said "thank you so, so much for dinner. Here is how we say it in Cambodia: Akhun, akhun, akhun." Later, they ran after us and pushed the little woven bracelets onto our wrists as a parting gift.

The next night, we saw them again. We had been drinking a bit of Angkor draft at dinner and feeling lighthearted, but that quickly faded as we wandered into a street food alley to buy the boys dinner again. We got swarmed by about a dozen other kids, and two girls holding a naked baby, begging for food and money. Fine, easy enough, we can buy noodles for ten kids and spend less than what we would have spent on a round of beers at home. The baby, though, was another issue. He slept peacefully throughout the turmoil, but his sisters gripped our hands with surprising tenacity and begged us for milk. Eventually they clung neatly to our torsos, all four limbs wrapped tightly around our waists, after they handed the dozing baby (who had long since learned to sleep amidst noise and motion) off to Amy. We had a 20-second span in which we thought, "OH MY GOSH, this is what Angelina Jolie felt like before she stole** Maddox!"

We eventually pried ourselves away from the group but felt silly as we walked away. So some kids got dinner-- big deal. What will they do for breakfast?

Today she may be a toothless Vietnamese girl, but she's leaving this one-horse town for Hollywood.

This brought us to the last, most disappointing thing we saw in Cambodia. Having made friends with another kid selling books, we bought "Buddhism Explained" from him one night in Phnom Penh. He rushed over to a middle aged man with a money basket on a bike to toss his cash in. Mom beckoned him back over to our table to ask what would happen to that money later. "That man buys my school uniform and pays my tuition and buys me dinner," our new friend insisted. Essentially the guy was a pimp reminiscent of the newspaper barons who were the source of the newsies strike (historical fact courtesy of Christian Bale). Shortly after, as we lingered over dinner, we heard a shouting match and saw another kid, whose block was being infringed upon by our friend and his pimp, trying to regain his book-selling territory. We watched wide-eyed as a grown man and a kid no more than ten fought loudly in the street, which ended with the man hitting the kid and throwing him to the ground. Wiping away furious tears, the kid regained his footing and kept screaming. All this, just so they can sell a few photocopied books for a couple bucks a pop. I am as speechless now as I was at that moment. What can you do, as a foreigner who doesn't speak the language, when you see such a thing happening? There really is no such thing as childhood when people fight as equals for the right to work.

*I've long since left behind the idea that it's terrible to let kids work. In most parts of the world, it's just a fact of life, and something that often provides education for them rather than preventing it. Although it's not ideal to let kids wander the streets at midnight trying to sell postcards, a better question than "how can we stop poor kids from working?" is "how can we make it safe and profitable for poor kids to work in order to attend school?"

**"Adopted."

liveglocal.

"Oh man, every time I hear about a new non-profit starting up, 25% of me just wants to tell the do-gooders to pull their heads out of their asses and link up to something that's already being done rather than reinventing the wheel every single time." -Anonymous dude, telling it like it is.

Usually, that's my first reaction to brand new non-profits too-- like, cool job guy, way to make it look like you are such a saint among men when really you could be more effective finding another fistula/illiteracy/gang/ingrown toenail prevention group and joining forces with them. Which is why I'm so excited that some cool people started LiveGLOCAL because it's not only an original setup, but something brand new in the areas they work in. Let me expound on how proud I am of these people by listing a few of my favorite things in the world, ever:

1. Books and being able to read them

2. Kiddos

3. Organic coffee
4. Documenting life via photography

LiveGLOCAL, in a nutshell, does the following: support local coffee growers in Laos by purchasing beans for resale, and the One Bag One Book campaign donates a book to schoolkids for every bag purchased. In turn, they are seeking to expand the base of non-profit involvement by using the coffee as a fundraiser base, so everyone wins: kiddos get books, more direct trade coffee gets sold, and talented people like Pavel* get to move to Laos to take pictures and keep the train moving.

I would highly recommend you go to the website and watch the video of Tyson explaining his vision and be inspired. It's incredibly moving to hear a teacher telling him how thankful she is for their help, and that she had never been helped by anyone like that before. The launch party last weekend was a beautiful collection of a couple hundred successful and passionate people, who are also some of my most favorite people alive, and I'm genuinely excited about the project because they aren't reinventing the wheel-- they're inventing a lot of it for the first time, and it's going to be so exciting to see how far this could go.

http://www.liveglocal.com/

*Photos courtesy of Pavel Verbovski, Esq.

bolivian babies: now on your christmas shopping list

Check these adorable kiddos out! No, you can't buy the babies as gifts, but you can help them have enough to eat between now and February. They get food, you don't have to adopt them, everyone wins.

Here’s the deal: Ciruelitos Guarderia is a little nursery/daycare in the valley outside of central Sucre that is funded by the Bolivian government 10 months out of the year. Unfortunately, the government cuts off funding for December and January, but the kids have nowhere to go because their parents are mostly poor workers who get ZERO days off. The women who run this place are absolutely the most lovely people you will ever meet, and decided to keep working without salary in order to keep the kids in a safe place during the days. Fox Institute, the language school Marlo and I are working for, has raised enough to pay the women almost as much as they normally make, but there’s no money to feed the kiddos. Marlo and I are working on getting them set up for the next two months with at least enough food for the roughly 30 kids that spend their days there, but we can’t do it by ourselves.

Dear friends: what better time than the holidays to help people out who don’t have very much?
The upside of donating to Ciruelitos is that literally 100% of your hard-earned dough goes straight to the little ones. Seriously. Marlo and I go to the market with the girls who run the place, they haggle for every last boliviano, and literally work miracles in feeding so many kids with so little money. You have my personal guarantee that your cash will be spent on weird food that Bolivians like.

Examples of how far US dollars go:
--$10 will buy enough red meat to feed the kids for a week
--$7 will buy enough chicken for a week of soup
--$20 will buy enough vegetables and pasta for the week

In conclusion, don’t forget that God’s wrath knows no bounds and He is reading your mind right this second. That’s right, we would be so grateful if you'd just click “donate” to the right there and give us a day’s worth of latte money so everyone can have a Feliz Navidad.

Sincerely, your local nunnery

election weekend!

It's election weekend in Bolivia and tomorrow's vote will decide whether or not Evo gets to stay in office. We went to a rally for the opposition party in Sucre's town square the other night, and it's like Obama came to town: Manfred is the next big thing!

Fun fact: Bolivians aren't allowed to buy/have alcohol for the 40 hours leading up to voting! NO DRUNKIES IN THE VOTING BOOTHS, POR FAVOR.

As we spent long days in the desert last week, our driver Sergio and I passed the time in the freezing Altiplano talking about the government (strange thing about a second language: I can carry on a detailed Spanish conversation about politics but sometimes forget how to tell a simple joke. Oy vey). Our first night, as we huddled next to an open stove in an adobe hut, Sergio told me in his slow, round Bolivian drawl about how so many campesinos, including his mother, didn't have a national identity card until Evo mandated that they be free of charge. With that, she joined the masses of poor workers, previously disenfranchised, who put him into office four years ago.
Great deal, right? I always thought the story of Evo's election in 2006 sounded like what politics should be: a poor Aymara campesino makes good, and uses his trailblazing presidency to unite a country in a more equitable system and remind Bolivians that the Quechua and Aymara have significance as well. Oh wow. I'm so idealistic sometimes. As usual, politics are WAY more corrupt and human nature WAY shadier than I want to admit.

My Spanish tutor JuanJose just rolls his eyes when Evo's name comes up, and he is fairly indicative of the even divide between "city Bolivians" and "country Bolivians." Yes, as Sergio told me before, Evo did provide free carnet cards to the campesinos who didn't have them before, but he also did it illegally, since many of them were given double cards. He also traded the identity cards directly for votes. In the villages, elections were not a private affair, as campesinos had to hold up their vote for public review after casting it in the booth. If they didn't vote for Evo, they were punished; for example, public beatings with a belt. And with such measures, he naturally had a landslide victory with the previously disenfranchised villagers. "He has also succeeded in dividing those in the city and those in the campo," JuanJose said with disappointment. "He wants to change the constitution, and when city-dwellers protest (as they did in Sucre recently) they are beat down. Three people died here and many more were injured, but Evo never once acknowledged it or apologized for what happened. People in the city don't like him at all, for good reason."

Later, I chatted with Marisol about the same thing and she shook her head sadly at the unjust government that is just "otra cara de la misma moneda"-- another side of the same coin. She also mourned the lack of education outside of the cities that prevents the majority of Quechua and Aymara villagers from seeing beyond charisma, as well as the placation measures that give them the false sense of progress (for example, a new 50 boliviano monthly stipend for pregnant mothers. 50 bolivianos is about $6: "that's not help! That's an insult!" Marisol cries. But because it's 50 bolivianos more than they got before, they are deceived into thinking the government is progressing).

Voting is on Sunday, and emotions are running high in Sucre.

deudas y prestados.

Rick Steves says the only thing that means anything when travelling is the people-- you can buy a ticket to Dubai, Dublin, or Fez and if you never meet a new person or hear a new story, you aren't really travelling because your mindset hasn't been altered at all. Conversely, you can cross the street and hear a new story from your neighbor and consider that travelling.

So interesting people and their stories are most of the appeal in clicking "purchase" on a shiny new plane ticket. Our first was the gorgeous blonde sitting next to us on the plane from DC, an Argentinian who used to work for the World Bank (I suppose I knew that people from all over the world work for the World Bank-- it makes sense, right? But it also surprises me when people from Latin America admit to it!). So I had to ask her how socially acceptable it was for her to admit to such employment. She laughed a little.

"Right, well I think the thing is that most people don't know that the World Bank and IMF are sister organizations. Argentina's default on their IMF loan in 2001 caused massive discontent and in the public mentality, the IMF was just the devil. Just terrible. But since most people didn't know how closely connected the two organizations are, it wasn't an issue for me. And also I was running with the international finance crowd in DC for most of that, anyway."

Unfortunately our plane landed before I could ask her more. I wondered if she really thought that the IMF truly knew better than Argentinians on the issue of national economy. And if she didn't, how did she feel to be gainfully employed by what is essentially the same organization that was causing such economic chaos for her country? I laughed to myself when I thought of Argentina telling the IMF to take a hike.

Last night, after wandering down the Avenida 9 de Julio (supposedly the largest street in the world-- and learning how to walk on it is a lesson in putting your life on the line), we found a cafe in the shadow of the Obelisk. As usual when Marlo and I start laughing really hard, we found new friends, and in this case it was the owner of the bar. Howard spent a long time in California and likes speaking English because he's "so hard-headed." He wanted to help us find an apartment and insisted we come back in the morning, "but not before ten! Americans work too hard; it's part of the reason I came back here. Let's enjoy life more and work less, ok?"

Don't have to tell us twice!

So having early afternoon cafe con leche at the cafe today found us in the middle of businessman lunch hour. A bearded accountant started chatting with us from an outside table and I couldn't resist asking a little more about the economic woes of his country. After throwing up his hands in frustration at the "six presidents in five days" and "inflation that just wouldn't get under control" and the way the president just can't seem to get a grasp on things, the conversation turned to America, and this man and I had a little disagreement (Conversation paraphrased. My business Spanish could use some brushing up).

"America is so GREAT! You can have anything you want!" he gushed, looking a little weary after recounting the last decade of Argentine economic insecurity.
I snorted. "De veras? Is that really such a blessing? It's fake money we're using, and I don't see how having massive credit crises on an individual level is any better than having it happen with the government, because people have nothing to fall back on."
"No no, it's not the same. How old are you? At 25, Americans can have a house, a car, a spouse and kids, no problem. It's not like that here. The peso used to be pegged to the dollar at a one-to-one rate. Now, no one your age could even think about getting a house, because one day the peso is worth a dollar, the next it's worth four. How can we rely on a system like that?"

So what do we think about this? I have to admit that despite the skewed and selfish way most Americans view money (and our right to have material items), the mentality of freedom with money, based on the reliability of knowing your dollar will still buy the same thing tomorrow morning, is unparalleled in most places. But is it worth it, in light of what this past year has shown?

PS. Marlo's blog is a lot funnier than mine. She can be found at http://www.putacandleinthewindow-marlo.blogspot.com/ telling jokes about the people in our hostel who are a total grab-bag of randos.