Free Hugs Scotland

AARP's current cover story is 6 Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick." Secret #1 is to Smile. This video should help keep you healthy.

Confucius Institute

The University of Alaska Anchorage has had its proposal for a Confucius Institute accepted for the first round. Now they have to submit a revised proposal to get it funded. Germany has the Goethe Institutes and France has the Alliance Francais, and the US sponsors libraries and other programs through their embassies to promote the understanding of their languages and cultures. Japan also has some programs. And now China is getting into the game too, though they seem to be going about it a little differently. The others, as I understand it, are direct arms of their respective governments. The Confucius Institutes are being set up and run through foreign partners - usually Universities. There are already a number in the US and other parts of the world. The Chinese government will sponsor one or two Chinese language teachers from a Chinese University (UAA is partnered here with Changchung Normal University) who will work on various projects. The basic areas we are looking at are University language teaching, community outreach into the public and private sector (such as workshops on Chinese culture and doing business in China), and the Anchorage School District, which has a proposal to create a Chinese immersion school (there already is one for Japanese, Spanish, and Russian.) If the funding comes through, the Chinese government, through the Confucius Institute organization, will be supporting Chinese language and cultural programs in Anchorage. As the US state closest to China, this is could be a good start for us.

Einstein Alive, Ginger, Bear Tooth

We went to see Marc Spiegel Friday night, in his Einstein incarnation. The Alaska Junior Theater brought him up, and since the Yom HaShoah performance, he's been to Dillingham, Barrow, Cordova (I think), and the Anchorage School District as Einstein. This picture was taken after an hour performance in which he explained - with song and sorta dance - the special theory of relativity to an audience at least 50% young kids. This picture is after the show when he invited anyone to stay after and ask him questions. These are just some of the kids who stayed to hear even more.


Afterward we tried out Ginger, a new restaurant on 5th Avenue with our camera shy ZZ buds. It didn't feel like being in Anchorage until we realized it was 11pm and we were the only people still there.


And tonight we saw Pan's Labrinth at the Bear Tooth and I couldn't resist this shot as we came out at midnight. I enjoyed the movie, despite the graphic violence, but have to think about it. The overlapping underground and underworld was a bit heavy handed, but I liked the praying mantis that turns into a fairy. And hidden in the credits was an homage to Cheech and Chong. The credits were in Spanish so I'm just guessing they were the two fairies that got their heads eaten.

Diverse Voices Anchorage

Last spring, Professor Kerry Feldman invited a group of faculty to help him develop a small grant proposal to fund students to take independent study classes in which they would develop a project to help give voice to communities that usually were not heard on campus. While the original intent was to highlight different immigrant populations, that was quickly broadened to allow students to define community. Goals included reaching out to students who might feel that the university was not interested in people from their community, to raise awareness of these different cultures among other students and faculty, and to improve the interaction between the campus and the community at large. At the beginning the faculty were not sure what the students would be able to accomplish. Each student would be assigned a faculty mentor, would get tuition waiver for the class, and $200 to spend to help cover costs. Interested students could also get a faculty to help them develop their proposals.

Yesterday the students presented their final projects, which were far more consistently excellent than the faculty dared to hope for back at the beginning.



Cassandra explored the "Diverse Artistic Voices of Mountain View," a low income neighborhood. Her excitement about being able to do this project with faculty support and class credit bubbled over in her presentation. She's been busy in the community interviewing artists and community leaders and clearly is going to keep working on this. Celeste Hodge, a community member on the steering committee and member of the Mayor's staff, gave Cassandra her business card and asked her to call her because she wants to expand the project to other parts of town.

Robin interviewed students in her Alaska Native Studies class as well as the elders who helped teach the class to determine the roles elders play in an urban setting. The elders' participation in the class went a long way in getting students to explore not only Alaska Native culture, but their own, and made them realize the urgency of beginning similar dialogues with older people in their families and communities.

Lauren looked at the adjustments military familes have to make when moving into Anchorage. Her findings suggested that Anchorage is a pretty good posting, in part because of the strong community support for the military, the great natural environment, and the general convenience of shopping, community activities, and recreation.

Austin was so excited he couldn't hold still. A music education student, he explored Carnatic music of India with two Indian-American residents of Anchorage. He discovered a whole new way to experiencing music and his enthusiam got the audience excited as well. And then he played Swagatam Krishna which he had transcribed for the clarinet.

Shelley explored how her upbringing affected her world view. Born in Columbia on a Christian farming community, she came to the US as an infant when the guerilla activity forced the community to abandon their land. Eventually they made their way to a similar community of 50 people in rural Alaska.

And although today's event began at 11am and went until after 5pm, steering committee member Phyllis Fast and her students prepared plenty of food for all and beautifully decorated the room.

Tafi's presentation focused on male Samoan children who are early identified as Fa 'afafine and raised as girls to have a unique place in their cultural life, crossing between gender roles. The particular focus was on what happens to them when the come to study in the US. He interviewed Fa 'afafine of two different age groups to see if there was a difference.

Isaiah grew up in Unalakleet where he started videotaping in 8th grade. He's now an accomplished film maker and used that talent to document how villagers are adapting to life at UAA. The group of students he followed seemed to be adjusting pretty well, though they find the bus system in Anchorage really inconvenient.


There was also a presentation on "Birthing from Multicultural Perspective" and on "Anchorage's Political Refugees." A number of the students told us how significant this class was in their academic and personal lives. And those who didn't say it explicitly demonstrated it in the enormous amount of work they did and how well they presented their findings.

Anchorage's First Day of Spring

What factors figure in determining the first day of spring? The temperature is one; 65F in the shade on the deck is fine.













Blue sky is important.










Sunshine in which to sit, have lunch, read.





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Unstick the rake from the ice in the last snow patch dumped from the roof in January onto the north side of the house











Then rake up the leaves that have mulched the rock garden.













To expose some green.















Then put all the leaves into the compost pile.

Raven and Magpie Square Off

Wild screeching in the back yard. A magpie hopping around the in the trees scolding a raven who seemed to be gathering twigs.




These are two birds who spend the winter here. The magpie's a pretty good sized bird, but next to the raven it looks puny. A second magpie joined the ruckus and eventually the raven lifted off.

What is it about cigarette smokers?

I walked around the back yard the other day as the snow is mostly gone (except where it piled up when we had the roof cleared in January) looking for signs of life. In addition to the tulip stalks and some stray green stems of grass, I found signs of human life.

I like our neighbor. He's friendly, he watches over our house when we're away, he insists that we tell him if his music is too loud. I don't think he smokes. And that may be part of the problem. His buddies do. And they stand on the deck outside his door all winter to smoke, and then flip the butts into our yard. I know that smokers smoke for different reasons, but I suspect one part of why all smokers start is to rebel against authority. And some never get past that phase. It seems to me that's when people are focused only on themselves and if they even consider that their behavior may cause problems for others, they take some pleasure in that thought. But I doubt they ever think of someone having to clean up their butts for them. Do they think maybe they are biodegradable? When I helped the Covenant House kids clean up the garbage on a few blocks of downtown once, by far the the single most numerous piece of trash was cigarette butts. They were everywhere. I bet we collected 50 or 100 butts for every other piece of trash.

This makes me think of the Japanese couple we met in Laos. They both smoked. But part of their equipment was a portable ashtray that was clipped to his backpack. Never mind the irony that they were not going to pollute the enviornment but that their own lungs were fair game.

So I'm thinking of giving my neighbor some coffee cans full of sand that he can put on his deck so his friends don't have to throw their butts into our yard. I wonder if that would help.

Good Bye David Halberstam

The Best and the Brightest was an incredible book that meticulously told the story of how Kennedy put together his dream cabinet, that blundered into the Vietnam War, and under Johnson continued that blundering. The Powers That Be examined the media in the US. These were huge books that gave both endless detail and an understanding of the big picture. Not an easy task. As this article shows Halberstam was still active, and he was killed in a car accident on the way to an interview on his next book about the Korean War. This isn't a bad time to go back and read The Best and the Brightest. What will be the name of the Bush era version of how we got into Iraq?

Let's remember Halberstam as a great journalist whose reporting contributed to ending a bad war.

And let's remember how quickly everything can change - one bad left turn in this case.

Incandescent versus Fluorescent

As we come up on Earth Day 2007, I keep hearing about the new lightbulbs. Our local public radio station has been playing some slogan about replacing three incandescent bulbs with three fluorescents. Walmart has a big ad to go fluorescent, and there have been several other mentions. I'm pretty much convinced it will save energy, because every hotel we stayed at in Thailand only had the new fluorescents.

Shantaram

The book was calling to me from the cabinet in the big open breakfast room of the Chiengmai bed and breakfast. I opened the glass door and started reading the book with my breakfast. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.” After reading a few pages, I was done with breakfast and put it back into the glassed cabinet.

The next morning I read a few more pages. “The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air...It smells of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It’s the blue skin smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers.” Now this may sound bombastic to some, but if you’ve been in Bombay, or anywhere in India, you recognize it immediately as a reasonable attempt to describe the undescribable. A few months out of India and still trying to make sense of it all, I thought this book might fill in a few of the many huge blank spaces of my understanding. I wrote down the name - Shantaram - and auther - Gregory David Roberts. I was going to have to buy this book.

The next morning I’d brought a book to breakfast to trade for Shantaram. I couldn’t wait until I found it somewhere in a bookstore. This book was sucking me in, and at 931 pages it would easily carry me through the long plane rides back to the US and to Alaska.

I’ve been living in parallel worlds - my ostensibly 'real' life and Roberts' India - almost a month now. Flying back to the US from Thailand got me a long way into Roberts' world. By the time I reached LA, I needed to look it up on the internet. Was this fiction or autobiography? The morning after seeing Mira Nair’s The Namesake, I discovered Shantaram was loosely autobiographical fiction, soon to be a movie directed by Mira Nair starring Johnny Depp. While I assume that Depp will play the narrator - named Shantaram while living in a Maharashtra village for several months - it would be really delicious to see him play Prabakar, the Indian guide who picks up the narrator as he gets off the bus from the Bombay airport with his incredible smile. "There was something in the disk of his smile - a kind of mischievous exuberance, more honest and more excited than mere happiness - that pierced me to the heart. It was the work of a second, the eye contact between us. It was just long enough for me to decide to trust him - the little man with the big smile. .. "I am Bombay guide. Very excellent first number Bombay guide. I am. All Bombay I know it very well. You want to see everythying. I know exactly where is it you will find the most of everything. I can show you even more than everything."

I finished Shantaram last night with the help of a couple days of some sort of stomach ailment that’s kept me in bed. Having finally finished, I must say that the end was not nearly as beguiling as the beginning, though it is never boring and old characters reappear clarifying questions I'd long forgotten - though in a book about India, such tying of loose ends is totally unnecessary, since we know we will never get it all. The book is best when Roberts lushly evokes the life of the city (Bombay) and its inhabitants - mainly the slum dwellers and underworld. Having flown over and driven by the massive shanty towns, I was hungry to learn about the lives inside. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Robert’s version of these lives, but its ability to see the richness of the human social and spiritual infrastructures that counters what outsiders can only see as squalor is consistent with my own experiences living in rural Thailand. It constantly reminds us that even the poorest of the poor, is a full human. [I took the shanty picture as we flew into the Bombay airport. It's from an earlier post on Farmer Suicides]

There are lots of reflections on life, death, and in-between. A few are profound, many sound more profound than they probably are. The language is generally rich, and if it often goes a little over the top, well, India is over the top. There are lots of excellent books about India in English by the Indian authors. Can an Australian writer capture something they cannot? His living in the slums and working for gangsters gives a view of parts of India I haven't seen elsewhere. And if this is all a hoax and he really didn't live these lives, then his imagination is truly incredible.

This book fits nicely into my “Airplane Reading” category. Requirements for this are simple: 1) it’s hard to put down, and can carry one through long bouts of travel and 2) it readjusts my brain, fills in blank spaces, or better yet, makes me rethink what I know. This one clearly did both.