Archive for August 14th, 2008
Three border crossings
The border by foot
There are two bridges that cross the river between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, called Bridge One and Bridge Two. They have other names, if you look at the signs more closely, something like Bridge of Fraternity and Solidarity or International Friendship Bridge. But everyone here seems to refer to them by their numbers. On a recent Friday night I was one of the only people crossing Bridge One on my way to Laredo, passing a line of informal merchants who looked bored and ready to go home. The last of these was an accordion player propped up sleepily against the bridge rail, the hat at his feet bearing barely any change. As soon as he saw me approaching he started pumping out a Mexican love song, and then abruptly stopped after I walked by him. Fleeting love, I suspect.
When I approached the end of the bridge it became clear that there was a crowd, a line of people and families in that linear pose of conversation that only happens in crowded hallways and slow lines. I asked the rear guard of the line what people were waiting for, and the answer was one word: “Permiso”. Two hundred plus people were waiting for permission to get into the U.S. Nothing unusual or special, but it is hard not to feel a bit of something (guilt? empathy?) at moments like this when geopolitical realities are laid bare by long lines of real people. This was compounded by an unfortunate linguistic coincidence: I then had to make my through the crowd saying con permiso, “excuse me” in Spanish but literally meaning “with permission.” Kind of embarrassing.
By the end I started to say perdón, but by that point it just seemed like an admission of guilt: pardon me.
The Border Patrol officer on the other side looked quickly at my passport and asked me what I was doing “over there”. I briefly told him where I was working. He then asked me how crime was these days “over there,” and a couple more “over there” questions. He was talking about it as if it were a town somewhere in Spain or in Puerto Rico. We were standing about 200 yards from “over there”, mind you.
I had a desire to take him by the hand, lead him over to the line of people waiting for permiso, have a short conversation with each of them to see what they had to say about “over there”, walk across the bridge (pointing out its short length and the pleasant river breezes) and then treat him to tacos in Mexico.
The border by water
I remarked in my first posting that the river that acts as the U.S. – Mexico border seemed neither big (Rio Grande) nor angry (Rio Bravo), especially considering what a well-known international demarcation it is. I have since been corrected that the Spanish name translates more as “rough river.” And I have since been told that its placid look is deceiving, especially when it has just rained.
I live about 4 blocks south of the Rio Grande/Bravo. The river still looks tame to me, nevertheless, and on a hot desert day its water looks pretty inviting. I have been told by a family that lives next to the river – the second house in from the border – that even good swimmers have been drowned by the strong undercurrents. Still, would-be migrants arrive at the border wanting to cross over; some don’t have money or don’t want to pay a coyote to cross them over clandestinely, so they decide to try their luck at crossing what seems like a short distance.
Just a couple weeks ago, said the mother of this family, they pulled two men’s bodies out of the river. She called the river a “traitor” given the way that it looked so smooth but could be sinister.
I recently chatted with a Texas journalist who just did a tour of the border with the Border Patrol. (She said they’re a lot nicer than the INS, or BICE, as they’re called now.) They showed her the strategic points where people cross clandestinely. When people swim or wade across they get really muddy. So when they reach the other side, she explained, they remove their clothes and put on a change of clothes that they bring along.
At some point along the banks of the Rio Grande there is apparently a long colorful string of wet discarded clothing, forming its own kind of borderline. I’d like to take a photo of that.
Generic border shot to replace the photo of the discarded clothes that I haven't taken yet.
Border by train
When I walk home in the evening I come to a railroad track that takes commercial trains across the border, loaded with goods coming from other parts of Mexico and the world, from factories and Pacific ports. I prefer to just walk across the tracks rather than duck down into the foul-smelling underpass.
With the slow-moving train blocking the way, I stopped to talk to a guard there the other day. The train slowed down at this point in order to pass through a big sensor that could supposedly detect the heat of a human body. I noticed the signs warning you not to remain for an unnecessarily long time in the area. Never did I think that small talk could have a slightly dangerous edge to it.
Northbound train
He told me that about 1,000 train cars passed across the border rail bridge every day. Since the track across is only one lane, there was a schedule for going north and schedule for going south. He said that right before the border every northbound train was checked by U.S. Border Patrol and Customs officials, four men and two dogs on each side of the train, inspecting the contents car by car for drugs and I’m not sure what else.
As I write this, my next door neighbor’s dogs are marking their third hour of almost constant barking. Either they don’t like my music, or something serious is happening in Dogland. I wonder if the K-9 squad accepts unsolicited deliveries of mutt poodles and chihuahuas.
To see all currently fundraising loans from FVP on Kiva.org, please click here.
Add comment 14 August 2008
Abdugaffor and Me
“Hello Daniel. How are you? I remember you said that you were willing to help some of my students out with their English lessons and…well, I have a nephew whom I would like you to meet.”
It was 9am on Monday morning. I was drinking Nescafe and checking email, when the MicroInvest English teacher came in to see if I was still willing to fulfill the pledge that I had made the day before to give some of the locals a chance to chat with a native speaker. I was expecting one, possibly two hours of tea with an eager, fresh-faced teenager, a Central Asian devotee of American culture who listened to hip-hop and watched old reruns of “Friends” on Russian TV. What I got was something far different. What I got was Abdugaffor. A 38-year-old doctor-turned-“biznezman” with anti-Semitic tendencies and a David Letterman-like gap between his two front teeth, Abdugaffor did not fit my preconceived mental image of the typical English student. He was not amongst the Western-looking vanguard of Tajik youth, but was instead a well-intentioned, yet bumbling caricature of his country’s isolation from the rest of the world, earnest in his efforts to learn English and clueless about America and the world in general in a simultaneously endearing and shocking, “Borat”-esque sort of way.
Caught between two worlds , the stable Soviet society in which he had come of age and the cutthroat(sometimes literally), winner-take-all world of “kapitalizm” into which his country has been unwillingly thrust in the early 1990s, Abdugaffor is, in certain ways, representative of his generation. He was in medical school in Dushanbe when the brutal Civil War broke out and had to abandon his studies due to this violent struggle for the reigns of power in the newly formed Republic of Tajikistan. When he finally received his degree, salaries for medical professionals had plummeted to below subsistence levels, and Abdugaffor spent six years in the local hospital, working for a pittance before calling it quits. The $40 he received every month didn’t provide him with much of an incentive to stick with his chosen profession and the exigencies of life led him to a career in the bazaar, the only viable option in the constrained economic landscape of Tajikistan. Throughout the course of my time here I have interviewed dozens of individuals trained as economists, engineers, mathematicians teachers, etc., who now work baking bread, selling children’s clothing, or hawking watermelons at a stall in one of the countless markets of northern Tajikistan. The refrain of wasted talent is a constant one. In Abdujaffor’s case, however, the bazaar allowed him to discover his knack for business, and he now has three shops within Panjshanbe Bazaar, selling various food products. Business for him is good as evidenced by his silver ’97 Mercedes.
Here in Tajikstan, the Mercedes is de rigueur for anyone who can afford it, a conspicuous status symbol that doesn’t necessarily mean that one is rich, just not poor. There must be more “Mare-say-days” (as they say the name here) per capita here than anywhere else on earth, most of them coming from the Baltic states where used and damaged vehicles are repaired before being shipped off to the marketplaces of Central Asia. In this part of the world people tend to care less about performance than they do about image. As long as it has the classic emblem on the hood, what’s underneath is not much of an issue and these casualties of Europe’s roads are thus given a second life in the “’stans.”
At 5pm, the time of our first meeting, I walked out onto Sharq street, the bright and chaotic thoroughfare where MicroInvest’s offices are located, lined with a jumble of food-stalls and smoking shashlyk grills, and packed full of speeding minibuses and porters pushing their overloaded carts through the incessant pedestrian traffic. Two minutes later, a silver Mercedes pulled up to the curb, its middle-aged driver turned off the engine, excitedly leaped out of the vehicle, and vigorously shook my hand, exclaiming in slow and labored English, “Helllloooo. My name Abdugaffor. Very niiiice to meeeeet youuu.” A slightly mischievous, yet bewildered smile lit up his face as I returned the greeting, annunciating every syllable to make sure my new pupil understood me.
“I am very glad to meet you too. My name is Dan. I am from America, from Washington, the capital of the United States.”
“Ohhh…veeeery niiiice. I am very happy… very, very happy that you are teach me English. Let’s….EAT!”
What followed was a night of non-stop food accompanied by a endless cups of green tea. The first two hours were spent at the depressing Tajiki-Turkey café, a “fusion” restaurant that turned out to be a dimly lit cavern whose fading green walls probably hadn’t been painted since Stalin died. The conversation started off fairly simply. I asked Abdulgaffor what his favorite food was. “Fried…SHEEP MEAT!” he responded enthusiastically. “Yes..fried sheep meat very good..very tasty…I like. But not very good for you. I doctor so I know these things.”
“What kind of doctor are you?”
“I doctor for children. But I not very good doctor!! Hahahaha,” he said playfully poking me with his elbow and giving me that mischievous smile that was slightly disconcerting. I silently thanked God that I never had to use the Tajik healthcare system.
Next stop was meal number two, this time at Abdugaffor’s friend’s house in a distant part of the city. Plov was served, copius amounts of alcohol were consumed by our hosts, and Tajik poetry was recited. All around me were drunk doctors, practicing their poor English and telling me about the virtues of the USSR and traditional Tajik medicine.
“European Union, Soviet Union….same thing!,” the man sitting next to me exclaimed.
“We Tajiks,” one of the more inebriated ones began, “We discover everything before Europeans. The great Avicenna, one thousand years ago he say baby need to drink milk from mother…and now all Europeans say same thing. They steal from Tajiks! What do they know? Nothing, that’s what!”
The evening was a typical night out in Tajikistan, a heady stream of overwhelming and boozy hospitality, and I left late that night with Abdugaffor demanding that he pick me up after work the next day, same time, same place. Having little choice, I reluctantly agreed.
The following evening, when the Mercedes pulled up right on time, I saw that Abdugaffor had brought along one of his friends, probably to show him that he was actually meeting with a real, live American. We proceeded to my favorite restaurant in town, that wonderful oasis of deliciousness called “Zaitun,” where I had, to say the least, one of the more interesting meals of my life. Abdugaffor began by asking me questions about America such as the following gem that seemed to be taken straight from a script written by Sacha Baron Cohen: “My friend, he live in America. I think he live in Los Angeles. He tell me that he kill sheep in yard and then police give him fine.” A look of earnest confusion swept over his face and he asked “Whyyyy?!! Why not allow kill sheep in yard in America?”
After then going through a 30-minute explanation of what to do in an American airport (“You give the customs agent your passport.” “And then?” “And then he stamps it.” And then? “And then you go to collect your luggage.” “And then?……”), our comedic conversation took a turn for the worse when Abdugaffor and his friend jumped headlong into the subject of Jewish conspiracies.
“You know Putin is Jew and Medvedev, he also Jew.”
“No they’re not,” I futilely replied.
“Yes, they are! So is Bush and…what his name?… oh, Al Gore, he also Jew. You not know? America is Jewish country!”
His friend then piped up, “Why Hitler no like Jews?”
“I don’t really know, that’s a very complicated question and I don’t have time to….”
Abdugaffor immediately corrected the record. “No, no, no, Hitler not that bad. It just story…skazka like we say in Russian. It just skazka made up by the Jew.
Being a Jew myself I was left somewhat speechless at this moment, my face was bright red and my ears were hot. I had heard of people spewing such nonsense before, but it is one thing to read about it and another to experience it laid out in front of your own two eyes in a strange country, with strange people, after too much plov and green tea. My head was spinning and I needed to calm down before I did something I would regret. I just shut my mouth and waited until the tirade had subsided until I berated Abdugaffor’s ignorance in English that was spoken too quickly for him to understand. He drove me home soon afterwards, and at this point I thought that my days with Abdugaffor were over. I was wrong.
A week later I picked up my phone and was greeted by an excited voice on the other end asking, “Oh, Daniel, how are you? It Abdugaffor! You remember me?”
“Of course. How could I forget?”
“Oh, good…veeeerrrry gooood, I happy you remember me. What you do this evening? I want meet with you and practice …ENGLISH!”
Although our last meeting had left a bad taste in my mouth it was hard to say no to his boyish enthusiasm and I chalked up his previous comments to the ignorance that can come from living in such an isolated place like Tajikistan. I didn’t sense any hostility from him, just an utter lack of understanding about the world, that in many ways was a product of his environment. I decided to give him another chance, and as time passed I became less frustrated with Abdugaffor’s narrow view of things and just tried to learn what I could, observing him with a degree of detachment that helped me deal with some of his more unsavory remarks. Things went quite smoothly for several weeks, and I was beginning to think that maybe Abdugaffor was even somewhat “normal.” Needless, to say, these false illusions were shattered fairly quickly when at one of our recent dinners he dropped the following bombshell:
“Ohhh, in America you have lots of gay. It very baaaad…men sleep together, very very bad. In Tajikistan, we don’t have. I never met gay in life. In America you need to….cut them!” he says making a slashing motion with his right hand.
“Cut them? You mean kill them?! But they’re human beings!”
“Yes, yes…zarezat nado!,” he said affirming his opinion in Russian, “Need to kill the gay. Maybe you can cure them, but if not….” He left this sentence hang ominously in mid-air as he made the slashing motion again.
As I picked my jaw up out of my soup I realized that the old Abdugaffor was still alive and well and that maybe some cultural gaps were never meant to be bridged. Yet, what is so strange is that despite his incredible statements of ignorance he could not have been more kind or generous (at least to me, that is). Although I am viscerally opposed to his philosophical viewpoints and I feel that people should be held accountable for their opinions, I have learned to simply throw my hands up and accept Abdugaffor, like so many things in Tajikistan, warts and all.
4 comments 14 August 2008
Where’s my parachute!
Hello all! My name is Mark Disston and I am the newest Kiva Fellow to head to the field. I am writing this on my flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia where I will be joining Maxima Mikroheranhvatho. Maxima is one of the smallest MFIs in Cambodia but has ambitious plans to expand their services. I have the fortune of teaming up with Amy Killian, the current Fellow at Maxima, whose work most of you have likely already read about (if not, see Straws and Sandpaper – my favorite post).
The past week has been a whirlwind. In quick succession I bought my ticket to Phnom Penh, quit my job, packed and subletted my apartment, and sprinted to my plane. Whew. However the upside was that in not sleeping for the 50 hours before my flight I managed to be devoid of all jet-lag when I landed. I just slept the whole flight.
Since I haven’t done anything as of yet, there isn’t much to post. But this is what I’m excited for (no particular order):
1. Meeting the borrowers and hearing their stories – not only those about how Kiva loans helped them, but really any story they feel is important enough to share. I think these small interactions will help me learn the most about the people of Cambodia.
2. Understanding the mechanics of how Kiva loans are implemented on an operational, financial, and technical level.
3. Seeing first-hand the impact, positive and negative microfinance has in people’s lives.
4. Living in a developing country with a scary past – definitely a learning experience.
5. Meeting others who share my passion.
6. Having time to consider my own path in the future and whether living and working in the developing world is something I want to continue.
7. Discovering when I’ve returned to the U.S. how much this experience has changed me in ways I didn’t notice day-by-day until I was re-immersed back into New York culture.
Well here I go! 10 minutes out and descending into Phnom Penh. I’m really not sure what to expect in the months ahead. I wish I had done more research! My thoughts are stuck on the half-completed to-do list sitting in my pocket and the myriad of things I forgot to pack. Oh well. The safety of home is behind me. I’ve made the leap – nothing to do now but enjoy the ride. I just hope I remembered to pack my parachute!
4 comments 14 August 2008
The Last Time I Was Considered Tall I Was 14 Years Old
I proudly remember how for the first 2 years of high school I was considered quite tall and got to stand for the annual class photo. From the 3rd year onwards however I was eclipsed as puberty prevailed in others. From then on I sat in the front row, demurely folding my hands in my lap. Not that I am short – I am 167cm tall – which by western standards makes me an average height. I would also describe my build as average – you will have to take my word for it as I have no intention of publically disclosing any vital statistics! So I pretty much blend into the crowd. But in Vietnam I am tall. In Vietnam I would go so far as to say I am Amazonian. In Vietnam I am exotic.
This week I have been contemplating what it’s like to be - what I romantically like to call - exotic. I have yet to reach the stage where I do not notice that people outright stare and heads turn as I walk by. I do not live or work in the tourist centre or in a heavily expat populated area and have yet to encounter another westerner as I walk my home and office neighbourhoods. The reactions of the children particularly delight me as they look in awe. The more confident ones wave and shout “hello” and when I respond back with a “hello” and a wave they squeal with delighted laugher. The shier ones stare with quiet concentration as they peak out from behind their parents’ legs. Even though I am an obvious object of attention, I have never once felt remotely scared as the attention is either of a curious ( what is she doing here? is she lost? ) or delighted ( how wonderful! a westerner is here! ) nature.
Even simple things like demonstrating proficiency with chopsticks are an act of diplomatic wonder. I try to tell them that Australians eat a lot of Asian food and we all have basic chopstick skills, but still they are enchanted. My name also scores brownie points, as ‘Xan’ and ‘Thi’ are not uncommon Vietnamese syllables. In fact Thi is a very common middle name, so when people see my name written out they exclaim “your name Vietnamese”. I quite like the way it is pronounced ( “Suntee” ) and have no problems responding when that name is used.
The reactions that humble me most are when I go to the villages to visit the Kiva clients. There a westerner is definitely exotic! Word spreads as I attend a community meeting or go to a client’s home and from nowhere an army of children appear and a choir of “hello, hello, hello” reverberates. The SEDA staff introduce me and I am automatically given VIP status – the best chair is dusted off, fans are brought out turned on and pointed in my direction, cups of tea are thrust into my hands and refilled the split-second they are empty. The first few times I tried to tell them to please ignore me and not make a fuss, but that provoked even more fuss, so now I have learnt to graciously accept and thank my hosts for their hospitality. I think that throughout the entire length of my stay, the pride, hospitality and industriousness of our clients will continue to humble and inspire me.
To see more loans from my Kiva clients, please click here.
2 comments 14 August 2008
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