Remembering the SAAB 96

SAAB automobile company has died - another victim of the recession. But instead of performing a requiem mass, I prefer to remember Judith's favorite car: The SAAB 96 light gray monster that nearly bankrupted us.

Not our SAAB, but one like it - same color - no roof rack.

Don't get me wrong. I loved the car too and we had many happy trips in New England.  It was the essence of a "touring car", comfortable to ride inside, with a feeling of safety that our previous VW bug "Xenophon" could not provide, and with a reliability that the Oldsmobile F85 station wagon "Hog" failed to deliver.  There were lots of stories associated with each of those other cars, but with the SAAB 96 - which we never named - it felt that we had finally "arrived" in a vehicle that reflected our burgeoning personalities as young, rebellious, serious students of life. It was a car designed by geeky Swedish engineers who seemed to understand that an automobile's personality was a gift to the drivers.

On one trip, down to North Carolina School of the Arts, we picked up Judith's sister Margot and her friend Tommy Hulse - who later earned fame playing the part of Mozart in "Amedeus". Tommy was so impressed with the car as we drove north. He watched me shift the car with its egg-beater gear shift that stuck out of the steering shaft - free wheeling, allowing us to coast down the hills, never using the clutch - and spontaneously proclaimed "What a wonderful car!"  Ah, music to our ears as proud owners, and it was true.  The insides were spartan but with just enough engineering panache' to make one feel like the car was designed for humans.  The front seats were angled slightly towards the center to provide more leg room.  There were little buckets clipped in the foot well for trash. The seats adjusted easily. The floor was absolutely flat.  The rear seats folded down so there was access to the trunk and more cargo room (we slept in the car overnight more than once on long trips - often while one or the other continued to drive). One felt you were driving a flying machine instead of a car.  Everything seemed to have a more reasonable design, including the hood, which opened backwards so that, if covered with snow, the load would fall off in front of the car when inspecting the engine.

And then there was its revolutionary front wheel drive: a novelty at the time.  We lived on a back road in Southern Vermont that was seldom plowed in the winter.  Driving down the mountainside after a snow the car cut a path like a duck through water, waves parting to either side in a spray of white. It's a memory I'll never forget.  Or when we visited a friend who lived in a holler in Kentucky: We had to drive up a creek in the middle of the night that was - in places - about a foot deep to reach her house. We were following penciled directions sent to us in a letter.  Judith was 8 months pregnant with our first child.  We paused, wondering if we'd made a mistake, since there were no signs on the road that now ended at the creek.  We both gulped, then drove on up the creek for several miles.  The SAAB 96 handled it remarkably well, spraying water along the sidewalls, never hesitating, the front wheels finding their track beneath the rushing stream.  Our friend later told us she'd lost a couple of cars in that creek. This knowledge affirmed our faith in our magnificent SAAB 96.

We'd purchased the car for $3700 with the trade-in of the Oldsmobile "Hog", whose transmission had failed and whose floor boards had rusted through in Vermont.   We'd bought the SAAB back in Munster, Indiana from the only SAAB dealer in the state.  (The Hog was still in his used car lot five years later when we passed by.)  It was the car of our dreams and we were convinced that it would be the last car we would ever buy.

Of course, we were naive', both 22, and we thought of cars not as machines but as inventions designed for the ages. We also bought a heavy-duty steel roof-top cargo basket that was our best investment. (Great for hauling firewood). We also ended up carrying twenty feet of logging chain and a ten gauge shotgun (inherited from Judith's father) in the compartment under the back seat.  And some metric wrenches and a couple of screw drivers in the pouch that was designed for the wheel jack.  These were essentials for us during that time living in rural Vermont while we attended college.  And we used them all.

As luck would have it, Indiana also killed the SAAB 96. After college we moved to Washington, DC, and then to Northern Indiana to live on a little farm.  The only mechanic in LaPorte, Indiana who would work on it was employed at the local tractor dealership outside of town.  The odd little problems that a car develops over time started to create serious difficulties for us with a new baby - such as the time that the carburetor float developed a pin hole and would fill with gas and then choke out the engine.  Ah, the humiliation of calling my father in the middle of the night to come haul us home - baby wailing in the back seat. My dad never said a mean word about the car, but there was a sadness in his eyes as he hooked the logging chain to the undercarriage and dragged us back to the farm.  It took the tractor mechanic more than a week to figure out what was causing the problem and he was ecstatic that he'd diagnosed it and fixed it so easily. He was like a kid who had worked on Lionel electric train sets all his life, and had suddenly been promoted to Swedish Rocket Engineer. 

The mechanic was so interested in the car that he special-ordered the factory manual for tuning the engine.  Unfortunately, all the measurements were metric and the manual was in Swedish, so that when he adjusted the valves, he kept tightening them too much, and we went through a series of burned valves before I realized what his problem was.  The SAAB 96 -- our dream car - "The Last Car We Would Ever Own" - was going to achieve its title simply because - if we didn't do something soon -- it would bankrupt us with repairs.

Eventually we were forced to trade it in for a new VW Rabbit - a mistake, but one that we lived with until it rusted out through the floor boards.  It was a sad day to say goodbye to the SAAB 96 in South Bend, Indiana.  Then, about two years later, I remembered that I'd left a 10 gauge shotgun under the rear seat along with the logging chain.  I never forgave myself and I wondered if it were still there, hidden out of sight from its new (imagined) owner.

The SAAB 96 was a great car for a young family: we'd hauled trailers with it, dragged birch logs down the icy roads for firewood, slept in the back during cross-country trips, crashed it at 40 miles per hour without injuring any passengers, and generally learned a lot about owning cars.  Judith still remembers it with fondness and pride.   

We've long ago stopped seeing old SAABs of that era here in California. There were never that many out here anyway.  The later models held no interest for us.  They cost far too much, and seemed to be designed for yuppies.  They were too plush, too artificially "modern".  By comparison, the SAAB 96 was like a car that one wanted to hand down to your children and your children's children.  It wasn't "retro" because it was exactly what it meant to be: basic transportation designed with a utilitarian bent for practical people.

Since the SAAB days we've owned a lot of cars: 3 VW bugs, 2 VW vans, a VW Rabbit, a Datsun station wagon, an old MGB, a Honda CIVIC, a Mercury minivan, an Isuzu Trooper, a couple of Toyto Corollas, two Toyoto Prius, and one leased Subaru Outback. And I've probably missed remembering at least one more.  Just listing out all the cars leaves me with  a sense of guilt for buying so many vehicles (imagine the carbon we've pumped into the air over the years).  But we've always bought "used", and I suppose that's some indication of our environmental consciences and our financial priorities.

Still, I have these dreams - nighttime revelries actually - of returning to my parents' two garage.  In this dream I open the door and discover all the cars that I and my family have ever owned.  They're all jammed in there somehow, as the garage extends mystically back into an ever deepening space.  Every car.  Chryslers, and Dodges, and Oldsmobiles, and Buicks, and more modern vehicles, parked side by side.  The smell of engines, and the feel of cold enameled metal penetrates my senses as I slip sideways between their silent hulks.

And in this dream I always head over to the little light gray SAAB 96.  It's exactly as I remember it, complete with the dented front fender and the rear bumper that is slightly out of alignment from dragging a ten foot long birch log along the ice.

I slip behind the wheel, and somehow manipulate it out of the garage.  I start down the road, convincing myself that the burned out valve that has left the car with such poor acceleration and compression, can be fixed once and for all.

And then, I pull the car over to the side of the road, lower the back seat, and take a nap as the sun beams through the rear bubble windows, with the leaves of trees swaying above my head.  I don't nap long.  Just a little cat nap, the smell of the seats mixing with the smell of autumn that streams through the cantered  back side windows.

And then something occurs to me.  Is the ten gauge shot gun still under the rear compartment?

I wonder.

I get out of the car and start to lift the rear seat to see.

But then I wake up.

RIP SAAB.

How to overcome your anxiety about the long wait for Peace Corps

I continue to get messages from other Peace Corps applicants who are waiting for their formal invitations to serve. Everyone asks the question - since our wait has been difficult - for our most current status. Each time I wish I could respond "It's a GO!" But not yet.

We continue to check with the placement officer about once a month. The last time we checked was at the beginning of November when she wrote back the following:

I wanted to just give you an update on the medical approvals I’ve requested. I sent for medical approval for the eight remaining programs to which you could serve as a couple for the 2012 year. I’ve gotten three negative responses back so far. We have given the remaining five programs a reminder to give us their responses soon. I will let you know as soon as I hear back from the remaining countries. Thank you for the amazing amount of patience you have exhibited in waiting for your placement. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will have some good news from the remaining five programs. Sincerely, (name not posted)

The issue again seems to be medical approval, but - from our perspective - it's difficult to understand what's holding the assignments up. But we've got to trust that the people in the field are more knowledgeable that we, and keep our fingers lightly crossed.

So how are we managing the wait? Our strategy is to continue to engage the placement officer by trying to keep our profiles in front of her. So I wrote back to her the following:

Thanks for this update. We are keeping our fingers crossed that at least one of the five remaining programs will accept us. It's been a long road, but I sincerely appreciate that you're pushing the portfolios out to prospective programs.

Our daughter returns home (permanently?) Monday after 3 1/2 years working in Cambodia, with her new, 9 month old baby. That's a great Turkey-day treat.

So that will keep our minds and bodies busy while we await the outcome of Peace Corps placement process.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to work on projects for our son's NGO, Human Translation. org. As you probably know, Northern Cambodia is really suffering from the flooding that occurred several months ago: Crops gone, roads lost, live stock decimated. My son has started a new relief fund, and we're managing the fund-raising. So far, we've raised about $25 K. He'll be returning to Siem Reap where his naturalized Cambodian NGO called Community Translation Organization (CTO), is trying to mount the relief effort. He'll be there during the month of December before returning to the states. The good news is that the 600 hectare reservoir significantly helped mitigate the flooding in the villages of Balangk where the organization is working. Unfortunately, two of the six canals that were dug from the reservoir collapsed during the flooding, but as the water recedes, they can be rebuilt by hand and there's a possibility that - with the right instruction - the villagers will be able to "dry farm" another crop of rice in the next few months. CTO has several grants from Australia Aid and the UN's work for food projects. So, with some more hard work, I think the villagers will make it through. But not unscathed. Part of the relief fund will be spent on restoring clean water and sanitation. It's a mess.


So, while we're waiting for PC's determination of a placement, we're relatively busy here. Judith is continuing to teach at a local college, and they've offered her another term, and I have financial work coming in too. So we're not sitting on our hands. Nonetheless, we're extremely hopeful that PC will find a place for us. We both feel that the skills we will learn will substantially help us achieve our own goals, and I'm confident that we have something to offer, where ever PC might send us.

Our health continues to be very good and our spirits could not be stronger.
We both wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. And thank you for your work on our behalf.

Sincerely, Tom

So is this strategy working? Well, we still have no more news, but I did receive the following back from the placement officer last week:

Tom it is great to hear you are both keeping busy. I’m very glad you and your family are able to help with relief efforts in Cambodia. Your attached photo is a real eye-opening---I can almost imagine the difficulty of living in such a situation.Thank you for you the update. I will be in contact with new information as soon as I can.

And why are we continuing to push on Peace Corps placement when we have this other NGO to occupy us?

The answer is pretty simple: Peace Corps offers a chance to learn more, to do more, and to build our skills in this important area of service. At the same time, it's just one avenue of service. And if one avenue becomes blocked, it's important to us to seek others. It's like any job that needs doing: you persevere until you find the path that works. There's no romance about it. You just do it.

One of my favorite "old" movies that we recently watched was 1958 production of "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness" with Ingrid Bergman. No doubt it seems terribly romantic - this woman applies to work as a missionary and is rejected over and over again. The missionary stuff doesn't attract me, but the real-life personage of Gladys Aylward is inspiring. She's somebody who wouldn't take "No" for an answer.

I have no inclination to be a missionary, but I do have a desire to make a difference in some of the places where I know my skills can be of use.

Meanwhile, we're settling in now with our daughter and her significant other and her baby, who have just returned from Cambodia after almost four years. Our son Tobias was here too, as well as our son Dagan with his two boys. It was the first time in a long time that we were all on the same continent, in the same country, in the same town, in the same house, at the same time. It was an overwhelming experience - chaotic, exhausting, and terrible fun. Who knows how many of these will be left to us?

We sat around the table, made a toast to our recently departed cat Gus, and drank a bottle of 1981 Robert Mondavi Cab Reserve that I'd been saving for a special occassion since the time I worked there. (And it was still drinkable after 30 years.) A good time was had by all, and it was a Thanksgiving to be remembered.

Status on Peace Corps - October 17th, 2011

Thanks to those who send their encouragement as we await Peace Corps placement. This is an update of that process.

What's happened since the last post
At the most practical level, nothing has transpired: We still are awaiting for a placement.
But behind the scenes there has been activity at the DC headquarters, so our hopes have not been dashed, and we're still getting encouragement (from you and from PC).

Since our last posting we've sent emails to our placement person at PC.  The temptation, at this juncture, is the tap our foot with our hands on our hips and chide her with questions like "What's taking so long? ! ?."  In fact, many of our local friends roll their eyes at the delays.

But we have cordially requested explanations, and then when the answers we received didn't exactly match what we understood to be happening, we dug deeper (and deeper) to try to figure out what went awry. 

For instance, last time around (when they were placing couples) they submitted our portfolios to a number of programs in North Africa.  But there was something in our medical profiles that wasn't accurate.  In my case, it was a very slight allergy to certain kinds of sea foods.  In Judith's case, it was a limitation in the weight she could lift (nothing over 25 pounds).  As a result, (we believe) the portfolios were returned with a rejection for placement by these programs.

But the placement officer had no visibility into why we were rejected, other than a sort of blanket "because of medical restrictions."  She had no visibility, even, of what was in our medical portfolios.  And of course, because we also have no visibility into their records, we were really at the mercy of whatever the medical sector of PC had written about us.

So we went back to the PC evaluation nurse, got her on the phone, and "cordially" argued that there was something amiss. 

Poor Nurse!  We've spent so many phone calls with her, trying to get past the obstacles that she saw in our medical evaluations.  But, because we were pleasant - but persistent and insistent - she had begun to listen to us.  We'd overcome a number of these obstacles in the past, and each time she seemed just at thrilled as we were that our health "on paper" seemed to be "improving".  So, this time, she said point-blank, that probably the reason our portfolios were being rejected by the programs was NOT my wife's restrictions, but my incredibly minor food allergy to certain shellfish.

So, the long and the short of it is that I had to explain to her that I never died from this allergy, but merely had the usual problems people do when they eat something that their body doesn't like.  And since, in Cambodia and Laos, I've eaten things that Poor Nurse would probably not even consider as food (frogs, red ants, crickets, snakes, pre-historic-looking bar fish that stared at me with jaws filled with a mouth full of sharp teeth, etc.) and suffered only from the usual maladies of "bodia-belly" and other lower intestinal parasites, I actually laughed over the phone at her deep and sincere concern.  And I realized that absolute honesty on the medical evaluation forms is unquestionably a hazard if one really wants to go into PC. 

Fortunately, Poor (lovely) Nurse said "Oh! Well, I'll remove that restriction from your records!" 

Wow!  I felt like Kafka, in "The Castle", getting permission to move into the next waiting room. A victory! "I really am NOT a crippled, decrepit, lunatic with grandiose dreams of serving in Peace Corps. I'm just a healthy world traveler with something to offer!"

So Lovely (but previously misunderstanding) Nurse then went down through our entire medical records and said she would consider removing all restrictions.  It was like listening to a recalcitrant J. Edgar Hoover suddenly turning into Bobby Kennedy over the phone.

And I realized that she must have the most thankless job in Washington, DC: A job of rejecting hundreds (thousands?) of people who sincerely want to serve, but are not physically up to the challenge.  Her voice softened over the phone. Her affect of "sympathetic sternness" shifted in key, and it actually seemed as though she were thrilled to "white out" those restrictions.  A thankless job, being Nurse. How many arguments has she gotten into over the phone? How many people has she had to disappoint over her years as PC Nurse?  How many people have hung up on her "Bang!" after they lost their appeals?  What a thankless job!

So I said, in my most sincere voice, with a light ironic laugh, "Thankyou!  I really appreciate your special effort on our behalf."

And she said, quite simply, "You're very welcome.  I KNOW they want to place you. You had a placement, but the program got canceled.  I KNOW they are trying to figure it out.  You have real skills that can be useful!"

Wow! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU I was thinking.

Kafka, eat your hear out!

So we hung up the phone.  And waited. And waited. And waited.

Then last month, as we were returning from a trip from Colorado, in the waiting area between flights, I got a brief email on my cell phone from the placement officer.  A couple who had been assigned to Central Asia had suddenly dropped out of placement.  "Would you be interested?  You'd leave in January or February! Can't guarantee anything. Have to send them your records. What do you think?"

Would we be interested? WOULD WE BE INTERESTED? I immediately key-in "Yes! Fingers Crossed! Hope to hear from you soon!"  And then Judith and I sat in our cramped airline seats, hoping the answer would be "Go!" and what we would Skype to our daughter in Cambodia who is returning home in November "You'll have the whole house to yourself!"  And trying to remember which "stan" is in Central Asia where the Peace Corps has projects.  And trying to keep our enthusiasm under control.

A couple of days passed.  The email was received.  "No! For medical reasons!"

Whose medical reasons?  What happened?  Why - if our medical portfolios have been purged of restrictions - have our portfolios been rejected?  The placement officer could not tell us.  But, she said, the next round of placements will begin in Jan. 

So that's where we are now.  We've made progress! But only to the next room within the Castle. 

Are we disappointed?  Yes! We never thought that trying to get into Peace Corps would be a career path, but here we are. 

Are we discouraged?

No! This is not a whim for us. This is a very strong desire for both of us.  A kind of calling. And maybe with some added fortitude we'll make it yet.

Besides, maybe it's time to talk to my congressman again.

Peace Corps Status - An update in August of 2011

A reader is interested in our progress with Peace Corps.  Today I'm writing from our house in St. Helena.  We are still awaiting an assignment - the "invitation" in Peace Corps parlance.
While we were in Thailand we finally received our medical clearance, and conducted our "placement" interview over Skype. The placement officer said that we would probably receive our placement invitation in May. We're still waiting.

The process of clearing the medical evaluations was particularly harrowing. First I was rejected because of hypertension. The nurse was kind in her call, but said my blood pressure levels were not within their guidelines.  She said I could reapply after it was controlled for a particular period of time.  So I returned to my doctor and told him of the problem.  He said "But your hypertension is under control."  He pointed to the last three readings conducted by his office, and though they were not within the levels PC had indicated, he showed me that, for a person of my age with my history, I was within the recommended guidelines of the medical establishment.  I asked him if he'd write a letter to that effect, which he gladly did. I was extremely grateful.  I then sent the letter onto PC as a fax (they don't recommend sending things by mail) and asked - cordially - for their reconsideration.  After several weeks, on Xmas Eve, of last year, the nurse called me up and said they would give me medical clearance.  We were ecstatic, of course.

We had planned a trip to Thailand and Cambodia in February to attend the birth of our daughter's first child, and we were looking forward to the Spring, when we anticipated that we would receive an invitation. Unfortunately, several weeks before we left, Judith received a call from the PC nurse.  Unfortunately, she said, Judith's back condition would prevent them from giving medical clearance. They were afraid that she would not be able to handle squat toilets or the rigors of possible assignment in a rural country with few medical facilities.  Judith was, naturally, disappointed and angry - not because she didn't believe they were concerned, but because they had misunderstood her physical capabilities.

Consequently, we both were now rejected, and it also made me angry and defiant.  As luck would have it, our son Tobias had been befriended by the former head of Peace Corps in Asia, and he graciously introduced us to him and his lovely wife.  We exchanged a few stories about our various histories and travels, and then I asked him if he any suggestions to overcome this obvious bureaucratic roadblock.  He said it might be a good idea to contact our congressman, Mike Thompson, and ask him to have his office "monitor" our process.  That's what we did.  We also went to two back specialists to confirm that there was no medical necessity for Peace Corps to be concerned, and forwarded letters from them as well. 

By the time we arrived in Bangkok on our visit, we'd received an email telling us that we had then been medically cleared for service.  We then arranged to have our placement interview with the Peace Corps placement officer while we were in Bangkok - awaiting our granddaughter's birth - over Skype.  The placement interview went fine, and we were told that we'd probably receive our invitation to PC sometime in May.

When May rolled around and we had still not received the invitation, I contacted the placement officer via email to check our status. Were we going to receive an invitation? Or had something else created a roadblock?

She wrote back that indeed they had found an assignment for us. But unfortunately, budgetary restraints had forced PC to cancel that particular program.  All assignments for the Summer and Fall had been made. The soonest we might expect a possible invitation would be January of 2012.

So that's the current situation.  At this juncture we're not certain if we would accept an invitation after such a long trial.  We're not certain because it may be that the window of opportunity in our lives to do PC has begun to close.  I'm still very interested, as is Judith, but my business is starting to move again with many commitments, our daughter is returning from Cambodia with her new baby, and our experience with the bureaucracy has been so very mixed. 

Is agism the cause of these roadblocks? It makes one wonder. We knew the road would be long and difficult - and for our age, perhaps even more difficult than the assignments. But....
We'll see.

Fish at Elk Cove

Human Translation New Website has lots of photos

Arwen and Tobias at Reservoir Stocking Ceremony

I've been working a lot with Tobias on developing the new Human Translation website, and my favorite part of it is the photo record of the Trav Kod water gate.  There's several hundred photos up now in albums at www.humantranslation.org/media.html .  Scroll down past the video, and you'll see the albums laid out. These photos were taken during and after the building of the dam.

Releasing the Protein

My favorite album, at the moment, is the last one that is entitled "Stocking Trav Kod Reservoir Ceremony" which occurred in July of last year.  You'll see the reservoir, and the hundreds of locals who showed up to release fish and frogs into this reservoir.  Click on the album picture, and you'll be walked through a slide show of the ceremony.

This was a great project that is still on-going.  I'm hoping that Tobias will put up some news in the blog about what's going on at the offices of HT really soon.  There's a lot of news, but I'm not at liberty to report it. (Mum is the word).  But look at the About page (www.humantranslation.org/about.html) and click on the Partners link.

Lot's of surprises in store.

Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to you all.

Met Sin at theTrav Kod Reservoir

In June of 2008 I toured the rural community of Balang, Cambodia, inspecting a reservoir dam that had recently been constructed by Human Translation and Engineers Without Borders.  As noon approached, the Buddhist monk who traveled with us, Mean So Meth, needed to eat as prescribed by his order, so we approached an elderly man who was shaping a timber under a tree with a hand adz.  His name is Met Sin. 

 

Met Sin stopped his work, greeted So Meth with a respectful prostration, laid out reed mats for us, and joined us with four of his grandchildren.  When he learned that I was the father of the man he had come to know through Human Translation, he became curious.  He inquired of my age and we discovered we were both approximately the same age.  He inquired about my health, as he was obviously proud his own good health. He inquired about my grandchildren, as he was proudly supervising four of his own grandchildren. How many did he have? I asked.  He couldn't say for certain.

My son sat beside me, acting as translator, as well as my wife – whom Met Sin respectfully ignored. His youngest grandchild looked to be about two – precisely the age of our own youngest grandchild – standing naked before us while his sister cleaned him off with the water from our water bottle. 

I'd seen several hundred photos of Met Sin's grandchildren through the HT website, so I immediately felt attached to them in a special way: Beautiful children, each with a unique, individual curiosity.

As the monk finished his meal, he got out a piece of paper and began drawing on it, showing it show Met Sin.  My son explained that the monk was demonstrating how voting worked because the historic second national election in Cambodia was coming up.  Met Sin, my son explained, was illiterate and had never voted, and the concept of voting was new to him. His grandchildren listened and watched the exchange with intense attention.

Later I reflected on the parallels between our lives: our ages, our good health, our grandchildren, etc. We both lived in rural, agricultural communities of precisely the same size. He had been rice farming for subsistence in Balang while I had been working in the Napa Valley for wineries and grape growers.  His children might have been my children; his grandchildren might have been my grandchildren; his small house might have been the same house where I had lived for the past 25 years.

Met Sin was even preparing to vote, as we in the U.S. were preparing to vote in our Presidential election. 

But then I reflected on the differences between our histories: Met Sin had lived through Cambodian independence, the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the Killing Fields, the imprisonment of the entire population on  forced labor communes, and the recent Civil War that had left his land riddled with land mines and unexploded munitions.  And yet, when the Civil War was over, he had returned to his ancestral land at the side of this reservoir -- ruined and now rebuilt by Human Translation, EWB, and the community.  He is a survivor.

In 2009 we returned to the Trav Kod Reservoir, and I'd hoped to see Met Sin again.  He was away, working, but we met his wife who showed us the new fish pond where she was raising catfish - another community project sponsored by HT and it's local Community Translation organization.  The little pond was a plastic-lined hole that had been dug beside their hut, and she proudly showed us how they fed the fish with the special fish food that HT had provided.  It seemed like a small thing to my eyes -- a hole in the ground -- yet it's an important addition to their resources: A source of reliable protean. And if there is extra, they can sell the fish for cash.

The reservoir itself was full.  The Army had improved the road and ox carts were crossing the water gate with loads of rice straw.  Children slept in the carts on top of the straw as the caravan moved slowly towards the village.  The previous year I'd seen ox carts carrying wood scavenged from the forests surrounding Kulen Mountain.  At the time, I'd thought that the carts filled with wood was picturesque, until I realized how quickly the land was being denuded of forest.  This site of the rice straw seemed like another small improvement: One that was less severe to the ecology.

I took this photo of the reservoir and one of the current HT team right before my camera's battery failed.  HT had come a long way, and Met Sin's family had come a long way in a few short years. 

When Tobias had first come home from Cambodia on his first trip -- committed to helping the community at Balang rebuild the reservoir -- I was as skeptical as the next person.  But it had come together -- as it still is coming together -- and it makes me proud to know him and his work.  Proud as a father, but also simply proud of another human being.

This Feb and March Judith and I will be returning to S.E. Asia, and I hope to be able to travel out again to meet Met Sin and see how his extended family is growing up.  He's had the pleasure of seeing my family -- at least Arwen and Tobias -- mature these past six years.  I want to see how his grandchildren are fairing too.

Two Years of Change After the Train Wreck

How can I get you to vote in the next couple of weeks.

You've heard the reports: The Republicans are counting on a mid-term landslide to return their candidates to Congress.  They're counting on the frustration of voters of a growing but still small conservative constituency to be so outrageous and noisy -- promulgating lies and innuendo -- that voters who supported Obama's election two years ago will lose heart and stay at home.

I find this tactic really annoying, and it's making me mad.  Really! This is the party that screwed us, and now they're trying to get back in power.

But maybe I'm being too harsh on the Republicans.  Is that possible?

So I started doing a little research on the history of Republican actions -- using their words and reports -- to see if maybe I'm just being too partisan.

I wanted to see if maybe I missed something that might change my mind.

The following clips are -- except the last one -- I found on YouTube.  What I found might help you decide to get out and vote.

The Warnings in 2006

In 2006 -- after six years of Bush-era economics -- economist Peter Schiff was warning that we were heading for a massive recession.  But it wasn't the message that the US wanted to hear.  In fact, Bush economists were telling us that everything was hunky-dory.  Listen to this debate. It's amazing how the two world views diverge: One listing out the reasons for concern, and the other pooh-poohing those concerns. It was a heated debate, so the piece is long.  But watch it.  If you memory of that time is a little flakey, this will bring it back into focus.




My view in 2006
So what was my personal response to the dire warnings that the housing bubble was going to kill the economy?  Like every good American, I listened to the Bush economists, and I went out an spent more!  We bought a second house, and piled on more debt.  It was a nice house, and it helped us out at the time.  But as the housing bubble started to collapse, it became harder and harder to find a buyer for it when we needed to sell.  Fortunately, on a bright day in September of 2008, it finally sold way below what we paid for it.  Our teeth gritted, we lost at least $20,000 on the sale.  But the day the papers closed, we didn't realize how lucky we were.  Why?

The Meltdown Melts Down

Because the very next day Lehmann Brothers collapsed.  And the Dow Jones Industrial Average took one of the biggest nose-dives in history, dropping well over 400 points on a single day.

Remember that day, in September of 2008?



Goodness! But isn't Henry Paulson watching this?  Aren't the Republicans concerned?  Well here is Hank Paulson's response to the crisis:



"It's Not Our Fault"

So it wasn't their fault. It was, according to Paulson, because he couldn't go to Congress -- then in the hands of the Democrats -- to ask for help.

And yet, a few weeks later, that's exactly what Paulson and Bush did. And then Bush explained this thing called TARP to the nation.

Below is the entire address to the nation that Bush gave to us.  In it, he details not only what's going on, but how we got to that state of chaos, and what they were planning to do about it.

Watching this clip is really kind of sad, because for the first time, it seems, Bush actually seems to take some interest in the economy and the real lives of Americans. 



But wait, isn't Bush's address right out of Peter Schiff's portfolio?  Didn't he say the same things?

Well, yeah. His economic policy of "no-regulation" created an environment by which the entire financial structure of the US was threatened.  Everybody -- from Wall Street to Main Street -- was suddenly about to go down the drain.  So they had to act, and they intended to act swiftly. 

The TARP: The Fed to Save Us All!

Bush and Paulson made us a pledge: The troubled assets would be purchased from the banks by the U.S. Govt, and the Govt would hold onto them until their value rose, at which time they would be resold at a profit.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Crisis averted? Right?

Well, not exactly.  Just a few weeks later, Paulson changed the rules: Instead of actually buying the failing assets -- the mortgage backed securities -- the Govt would simply buy the banks for a period of time, letting the banks keep the assets on their books.  This would let the banks reap the benefits of any upward shift in the housing market, and later -- ideally with the money they gained from those sales -- they would buy back their businesses from the Govt.

Nationalizing the Banks -- The real bailout.

But wait! Isn't that the bailout that Bush said he wouldn't support?  Isn't that "Nationalizing" the banks themselves. Well, yeah.  Sort of.  Except the Govt. wouldn't buy all the banks.  In fact, it just meant that the Govt was going to bail out Wall Street.

And when asked about this, Paulson had this to say:



Before Obama
All this happened before Obama even took office. And if you're a conspiracy theorist, you might conclude that the Republicans -- knowing that the Democrats were going to win the election in 2008 -- decided to trash the country's finances so badly that nobody could fix it before the 2010 elections.  (Personally, I don't think that even the Republicans could be that diabolical, but there are some people out there who do.) 

So what did the country look like before Obama was sworn in? The following video, made in October of 2008, tells the story:



What the Republican's Help For America

Obama inherited a three trillion dollars budget deficit when he was sworn in.  The country was mired in two wars. The economy was on life-support.  The unemployment situation was (and is) devastating households, while Health Care costs were rising at a such a rate that 17% of the population had no insurance coverage.  Moreover, the infrastructure of the nation -- both physical and educational -- had been allowed to deteriorate to its worse condition since the 1930s.  


Normally, one would think that both legislators from political parties would see the challenges facing the country, roll up their sleeves, and go to work.  

But it didn't work that way.  Here's a political video purportedly representing where the Republicans were at in  March of 2009:



What the Democrats Did.

So, with no help from Republicans, what did the Democrats accomplish in the two years since Obama was elected?

Here's an abbreviated list of laws signed, aimed at rebuilding the U.S.

• American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - Signed on February 17, 2009
  
• Small Business Act Temporary Extension - Signed on March 20, 2009
  
• Serve America Act - Signed on April 21, 2009
  
• Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program Act of 2009 - Signed on April 24, 2009
  
• Helping Families Save Their Homes Act - Signed on May 20, 2009
  
• Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 - Signed on May 22, 2009
  
• Veterans Health Care Budget Reform and Transparency Act of 2009 - Signed on October 22, 2009
  
• Worker, Homeownership, and Business Assistance Act of 2009 – Signed on November 06, 2009
  
• Human Rights Enforcement Act of 2009 - Signed on December 22, 2009
  
• Emergency Aid to American Survivors of the Haiti Earthquake Act - Signed on January 27, 2010
  
• Jobs for Main Street Act, 2010 - Signed on February 24, 2010
  
• Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 - Signed on February 27, 2010
  
• Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act - Signed on March 18, 2010
  
• Health Care and Education Affordability Reconciliation Act of 2010 - Signed on March 30, 2010
  
• Haiti Debt Relief and Earthquake Recovery Act of 2010 - Signed on April 15, 2010
  
• Haiti Economic Lift Program Act of 2010 - Signed on May 24, 2010
  
• Disaster Relief and Summer Jobs Act of 2010 - Signed on June 03, 2010
  
• Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act - Signed on June 17, 2010
  
• Preservation of Access to Care for Medicare Beneficiaries and Pension Relief Act of 2010 - Signed on June 25, 2010
  
• Homebuyer Assistance and Improvement Act of 2010 - Signed on July 02, 2010
  
• Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act - Signed on July 21, 2010
  
• Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2010 - Signed on July 22, 2010
  
• Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act Effective Date  - Signed on July 27, 2010
  
• Temporary Extension to the Small Business Act and the Small Business Investment Act - Signed on July 30, 2010

We still have a long way to go -- especially with unemployment at record percentages.  But there's been a sincere effort to rebuild the U.S., and considering the size of the hole that was dug by Republicans, we've made some real progress.

The idea of returning Republicans to power in either the House or the Senate is madness.  But that's what they're selling.

We have to get out and vote.
It's easy to see we're still on the way out of this mess.  It's easy to mistake progress in this atmosphere of lies and innuendo as no progress at all. 

But please consider where we've been, and how far we still have to go.  We're coming through a valley of despair right now and it's hard work.  But we're headed in the right direction.

Maybe you don't like Obama. 

Maybe the Bush years look really romantic, with all the money we were borrowing, and all the junk we were buying.

Maybe the Republican ideology has its attractions.

But the idea that a nation without government or a nation with a government of business hedonists will be our salvation is crazy!  And that's crap Republicans is serving.

It's really important to vote, to keep the momentum going.

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A Facebook Page for Duch - Kaing Guek Eav

Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) is an assassin. He oversaw the detention, torture, cruel death of an estimated 14000 Khmer citizens.  Today his sentence for the crimes he committed equates to less than one day for every 2 people he murdered.  

Anyone who has visited the Tuol Sleng prison knows that this sentence is a travesty. 

Tuol Sleng was originally a public school in  Phnom Penh.

After the Khmer Rouge victory in April 1975 Duch and his men set up prisons throughout the capital including the infamous Tuol Sleng prison.  As the party purges increased towards the end of the Democratic Kampuchea period, more and more people were brought to Duch, including many former colleagues including his predecessor at Tuol Sleng, In Lon. Throughout this period Duch built up a large archive of prison records, mug shots and extracted "confessions".

The routine was atrocious. Any person who fell under suspicion within Democratic Kampuchea was sent to Tuol Sleng.  Suspicion was enough to send you there.  Once at Tuol Sleng, you were photographed and sent through a serious of interrogations that always included torture.  The purpose of these interrogations was to get more names of individuals who were suspicious.  This included relations, children, acquaintances, anyone. If you survived the torture, you were taken out to a ditch, and a hoe was embedded in the back of your skull. Your body was thrown into a mass grave.

14000 people suffered through this routine. 

How do you imagine the impact today?  Think about these:

• If you came under suspicion today, you would never see your family again.
• You would be tortured daily until you gave up the names of every person you have ever known.
• If you had a baby with you, it too would die.
• Your parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins would be implicated.
• You would end up providing these names in full knowledge that they would be following you to this end.
• Eventually, the torture would overwhelm you and there would be nothing that you could recall.
• Then you would be led out to a field where you would dig your own grave, be told to kneel down, and your end would come.

So I created a Facebook Page for Kaing Guek Eav.

This is it:

Daniel Schorr, I'll miss you....

Daniel Schorr passed away yesterday and already I miss him.  He was the feisty, principled journalist who was number 17 on Richard Nixon's famous enemies list.  In fact, he was the reporter who revealed that such a list actually existed, and I imagine his surprise and pride at discovering his name on it.

He literally worked his way up through the ranks of broadcast journalism from the ground floor, starting by sending in tips to a local newspaper at the age of 15.  Then he worked his way down through the same industry to end his career broadcasting on NPR.  His concerns were my concerns -- as a citizen and a student of American politics.

His sonorous voice on TV or radio tended to sound professorial as he grew older, but he earned my respect as a viewer and a listener year after year.  As I learned to listen to him over so many years (and one had to really learn to listen) he became, for me, a kind of extension of the voice of Edward R. Murrow -- the extension of the idea that a primary role of journalism is to speak truth to power.

I was listening in my car to his last broadcast on NPR, just a few weeks ago, wondering how much longer I would hear his voice. I found myself stopped at the intersection, saying to myself "Thank God NPR is keeping his voice alive  after he was driven off of broadcast TV." His commentary was as strong on the last broadcast as it had always been. Only Bill Moyers today garners a similar respect from me, and right now Moyers too has gone off the airwaves. 

Schorr's contribution to journalism is difficult to understand in the current climate of corporate broadcasting and the daily Internet news cycle.  He was not particularly photogenic. His voice had a slightly unnerving quality about it.  He was not funny -- rather a bit erudite.  But his commentary provided context, knowledge, and insight -- and not a small amount of wisdom -- as he laid out his perspective on current events.  He seemed to muse about what was happening, sometimes awestruck that his craft had sunk to such depths of frivolous nattering. When so much was at stake for humanity, how can shows like Entertainment News and the Daily Show represent the heart of reporting today?

He reminded us that there is a kind of insanity in the reporting of current events today that too often propels personality demagoguery in journalism.  He was not of that school: Indeed, he seemed to go against that grain.  His reporting and commentary demonstrated that journalism should be more about substance than style; that news anchors and reporters should actually think about what is being said before they open their mouths or read a prepared script.  His instincts were often right: We're living in an age of propaganda now, and not an age of information delivered through news broadcasts. But sometimes he was wrong, and we took him for a honest person, fooled like the rest of us, by the twists and turns of history.

If there were truly an enemy of the Conservative Right, Schorr seemed willing and capable of taking on the role, without bowing to mud-slinging.  When something was wrong -- as is so often the case -- Schorr looked for the historical angle to describe it, and then constructed an argument, often nuanced and detailed, to cut it down to its bone.  But the Progressives couldn't take him for granted either. If he disagreed, they were warned that trouble was in the offing. His commentaries on the Obama Administration were filled with such warnings.  His continual critiques of the Clinton Administration were also usually on the mark.

But most of all, it was a sense that he couldn't be bought or co-opted.  I think that's why radio and NPR became his final formats for expressing himself: Corporate sponsors could no longer reach him; Politicians could not intimidate him.  They couldn't influence his words.  Instead, they chose to try to marginalize what he was saying, believing no one really cared any more.


I cared.


I will miss Daniel Schorr.  His voice was the voice that glued a past excellence in journalism to its present sad state, and I -- as a writer working in a completely different realm -- admired him.  I admired his detailed reporting, his thoughtful commentary, and his feisty sense of right and wrong.

More importantly to me, I admired his courage to speak truth to power.

Peace Corps Calls Up Memories of East Capital Street in Washington, DC

5:30 AM. I stumble to the phone that has awakened me from a deep sleep. It's Peace Corps in Washington, DC. Somebody name Danielle Smith. They've received our medical forms, but -- on mine -- there's a problem. They had my SS# wrong, so I'd crossed it out on the forms and put in the right one. Now they want to know why. I told them the preprinted SS# was inaccurate. So they want me to fax them a signed statement explaining why I had changed this. Argh! Bureaucracies!

The voice on the other end is patient as I struggle to find my glasses and then careen through the house looking for something to write down their fax number. Finally she says "I'm sorry if I woke you or sumtin."I said, "It's okay! I had to get up to answer the phone anyway!"

Sumtin! The inflection of Ms. Smith's voice makes me remember the inflections of friends we knew back in DC in 1972. A flood of memories comes back, when we lived on East Capitol Street, ten blocks from the Capitol, on the edge of Lincoln Park.

 We lived on the top floor of a three story house amid brownstones, directly across from the park, where a large statue entitled "Emancipation" stood.  It was a statue of Lincoln reaching down to a slave. Every morning I arose early to move the car because the street changed direction to accommodate the influx of traffic.  If I slept late, my car would be ticketed and towed, and many a morning I arrived just in time to prevent the tow trucks from hooking up to our old Saab 96.

And every morning the park was the playground of greyhounds that ran the length of the green, chasing the pigeons that roosted everywhere.

Judith wrote a beautifully frightening poem about Lincoln Park during our time there. 

Our housemates were the Baycotts - an African American family with five beautiful young children.  They lived on the bottom two floors, and Mrs. Baycott took a special interest in Judith, who was nearing full term with our first child, Dagan.

The inflection of "somtin" by Ms. Smith made me start thinking of Mrs. Baycott and those beautiful kids.

One evening, as we climbed the stairway up through the house to our third floor apartment -- as we reached the second story loaded down with groceries -- our eyes were caught by a single brown finger of one hand wriggling beneath the door of the second floor bedrooms.  First one finger wiggling, then a second, then a third -- waving a silent hello.

Then there was a second hand, then a third, then a fourth, each hand wiggling fingers.  Before we reached the landing, five pairs of hands, fingers wriggling, shown beneath the old wooden door.  "Hello!" the fingers said. "Ssh! Don't tell Momma we're here doing this! Hello! Goodbye!"

In February of that year our son Dagan was born, and Mrs. Baycott daily came up to attend Judith and to see the new baby.  I recall how she sat in the chair by the third story window, baby between her hands, looking deeply into his newly opened eyes.  She was such a help, curious about the name we'd given to him, present but distant, somehow separated from us, but deeply engaged in our new adventure.

"Isn't he sumtin!" I remember her saying.  "He's such a beautiful boy!"

After Danielle Smith has hung up this morning,  I lay in bed unable to fall back asleep. I can't stop thinking about those old days more than 30 years ago.  Ms. Smith would be just about the age of one of those Baycott children, I think to myself.  All grown up. And it makes me wonder how their lives have gone, thousands of miles away, growing up in the nation's capitol.  Do they each have their own children now?  Is Mrs. Baycott a grandmother too?  How has life treated them?  Do they even remember us, the arrival of the new baby?  The chaos of our sudden departure? Did they ever wonder what became of us, just as I now am wondering what became of them?

For me, growing up as I did in the Midwest -- amid racial segregation and cultural stereotypes, in a middle class white family -- trying to emotionally navigate an era of riots and prejudice -- that moment on that flight of stairs so long ago was a kind of milestone of a personal emancipation. The barriers between us seem to break by the simplicity of their silent, waving greetings.  Were I to meet one of those grown up children today, I know my fingers would wriggle their own silent "Hello! How's it been for you?"

And then I would whisper "Don't worry! I never told your Momma! But then, I know she wouldn't mind either."

The Endless Peace Corps Application Process

Today Judith and I finally mailed off our medical clearance forms to Peace Corps. It was a process begun last March when we received the pile of forms from Washington, D.C. It was a relief to finally get each group of records into the SASE, lock it down with tape, and send each packet off as certified mail. The Post Office window clerk, seeing the address, put both hands together in a prayer salute and wished us luck.

Luck! How we've needed it these last five months as we navigated the forms. One might suppose that they would have sent a cohesive package of forms, numbered and lettered, with the appropriate check-off lists to make certain everything was there.

And indeed, the materials they sent could be seen as having once had a sort of maniacal order. But it must have been at some distant moment in the past. Perhaps back in the 1980s or 70s or 60s.

Unfortunately, as the forms currently appear, they are a hodge-podge of requests for information, each request clearly devised by a separate internal entity within the medical establishment of the Peace Corps offices.

On some level I imagined it would be like going into the Army. But now I suspect the Army must have the medical process down to a science, using their own physicians. How else could we have built us such a large military?

By comparison, the Peace Corps medical forms process would seem archaic at best. Were Peace Corps to fight a war by drafting Peace Corps recruits, the processes of getting everyone through the medical forms would, in itself, eventually cause us to suite for peace.

For example, we are responsible for getting the various doctors to fill out the forms precisely, and for paying those doctors their going rates for their services. Imagine trying to fight in Afghanistan if each soldier were required to go back home and have his/her doctor complete a half-inch sheaf of paper forms. Then, when the whole examination process is complete, the soldier was required to pay up out of his own pocket.

Peace Corps does provide a small remuneration, but we haven't gone through that process yet. The reimbursement amounts listed are small, I'm afraid. So I'm really hopeful that we don't end up being eliminated because of some minor issue with our health. Then the whole process would seem like a waste of money.

So how bad was the overall medical examination process? Not too bad!

The basic exams are pretty simple: A physical exam, providing an immunization record, a few blood tests, an eye exam, and a dental exam.

Thereafter, the unique medical history of each applicant is queried with specific tests, based upon what the applicant has revealed in his/her medical narrative that was a part of the in the initial Peace Corps application.

For instance, I have high blood pressure, and I identified that I had this condition on my initial Peace Corps application. This led the medical screening staff to request more specific information, and a separate form was enclosed which need to be filled out. Likewise, I used to faint when I was younger -- a condition called Vasal Vagil Syncop. I used to faint whenever I became overly stressed, and my blood pressure would suddenly descend. The condition is harmless, but this too had to be explained by a specialist, even though today I no longer experience this condition.

But for a young person - someone who has not yet suffered tribulations that life inflicts upon each of us - the medical screening process would probably seem pretty straight forward. By comparison, for older applicants -- 50 or greater -- the battery of tests and proofs tend to multiply. Colonoscopy, Electro Cardiogram, additional blood work: All to prove that you are in fact alive and will not succumb during deployment.

The worse part for me was obtaining the past medical records from a hospitalization more than 10 years ago. I emailed, phoned, faxed -- but to no avail. Finally, they told me that I actually could not have my own records. According to their rules, only a physician could receive copies, and only if I were physically present at the time the hospital faxed them the records. That entire episode of record retrieval took four months to work out. Then, after my doctor gave me the records, I had to go to a local specialist who could review the old records and vouchsafe that I was still alive and unencumbered by the old ailment.

Some requests for information related to illnesses or conditions that I experienced back when I was 15 years old. Peace Corps wanted to be certain that I was no longer afflicted. Puberty? Don't even ask!

Unfortunately, those medical records -- and all the people who treated me back then -- have long since disappeared. And so, after speaking to the medical coordinator back in Washington, DC, it was recommended that I simply enclose a "personal statement" explaining the circumstances.

We were very lucky that our own local doctor, Barry Brown, was so patient and understanding with us. When he first heard us talking about going into the Peace Corps more than a year ago, he smiled and shook our hands. His encouragement has certainly made the whole process much easier. Over and over again we traipsed through his examination rooms as we tried repeatedly to complete the endless medical clearance processes. Each test resulted in one more question, which required more tests, etc. By the end of it I'm sure even his nurse Erin was relieved to see the end of us. We can't thank them enough for their good will, patience, and professionalism.

But what will we say if we still don't get into the Peace Corp?

During the midst of all this coming and going to the doctors' offices we received a notice that we were taking too long, and that if Peace Corps did not receive our completed forms by July 8th, our applications would automatically be placed on hold.

Argh! July 8th was yesterday! Our medical packets shipped today! What now?

We'll have to wait and see.

And if they reject us because we're too "feeble and frail"?

Oh yes! They can still reject us!

Stay tuned. We have been told that -- now that we have sent the medical forms -- it will take them up to six months to process them. That puts us into December.

What Lions Are Made Of

This morning, on the concrete step, beside the pots of plants and flowers that still await their turn with the gardener, there sits a small Cambodian lion. My son Tobias brought it home to us long ago on one of his trips, and at first I didn’t know what to make of it. It’s a curious gift – another curio to join the herd of wooden elephants and the other assemblages of bric-a-brac that inhabit our book shelves.

The lion is very crudely made of an indeterminate metal, somewhat greenish in color, and still black with the grime of a recent forging. It was forged in the shape of the Khmer lions that stand guard over the headwaters of the Siem Reap – a temple lion of the Khmer kings. Its a dog-like figure, with a narrow Khmer dog waist and a large Chinese-style head full of sharp stylized teeth, has a dragon-like ruff running down its spine to the tip of its curled, tufted tail.

When I first held it, I thought it might be made of bronze because of its heft. I thought all it needed was some metal polish brushed on with an old toothbrush to bring out the golden patina that I believed lay hidden beneath the grime. So I went to work on it, polishing and brushing, until my fingers turned an aching green. This lion is no bigger than a mouse in my hand but the grime was so deep and the forging so rough that I could only barely get the slightest glimmer out of the metal. And within a few days, that glimmer was gone again, lost in dark green oxidation. In the end, I gave up, and then sent it on a surreptitious journey across many different stations throughout the house: First it went to the fireplace mantle, then to the oak bookcase in my office, and then, several years ago, to the concrete step where it now guards the front door. How, precisely, it ended at the front stoop is mysterious to me. Perhaps Judith relocated it there, or maybe even Tobias or Arwen. But there it sits, guarding the door, and that’s where I found it this morning.

Meanwhile, my son Tobias has gone off to Cambodia again and again. At first he had gone on a lark, but as each trip ended, he came back a bit more somber. It disturbed me because I couldn’t understand what was changing him.

Then two years ago, just exactly at this time, we went to visit Cambodia where he and his sister Arwen are working. The town is Siem Reap, near the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor, and it was a trip filled with many awakening things.

Arwen took on the role of being our hostess, putting us up and helping us get our bearings. She even became our point person as we bartered in the markets: Too much, too much, she would say. Only two dollar, only two dollar, was the response. Somehow she knew that if she persisted, she’d strike the bargain right where she wanted it.

Meanwhile her brother Tobias – present but in the shadows of our conversations – came and went and came and went again. He was like a kind of ghost; a face remembered; a silent, thoughtful presence just beyond our reach.

Then, near the end of the time he was able to spend with us, he drove us out to the project where he had been working – a great dry basin where a trickle of water ran in the creek, and where two young boys were throwing a net to catch minnows for food.

It was here that I felt we had at last found him. His NGO was constructing a large concrete water gate to dam this creek and flood a reservoir, so that rice paddies could fill and flourish once again. But right now, where we stood inspecting this massive construction site, we were nowhere and in the heart of nothing, as the sun beat down on us on the dry red Cambodian soil, and the boys threw their torn and crudely patched net again and again into the shallow water. His cohort, the monk named Somet, covered himself with his crimson robe, to shade his shaved head from the heat. We looked about, took photos of this moonscape, and tried to imagine the place where we stood someday flooded with water. A water buffalo plied the reeds in the distance. The boys threw the net again. Nothing.

Later, he drove us to Somet’s wat, where there were the ruins of a Khmer monastery, and where stone lions once guarded the temples of the monks. But these lions had been tipped off their pedestals, and their wide mouths had been broken by the rifle butts of the Khmer Rouge years before. Then they dragged an artillery cannon up the rise, up the sacred steps of the monastery, and mounted it on the roof of one of the temples. The roof eventually collapsed, crumbling under the weight. So the canon had been dragged clear of the rubble and now stooped in the grass like yellow giraffe at a water hole, barrels pointing down, waiting for more nothing.

The temples were built in typical Khmer style: Small rectangular rooms called “libraries” connected by long enclosed corridors. Their roofs were made of carefully hewn stones that were tilted against one another to form triangular pyramids. The Khmer engineers had not yet discovered what we today call the Corinthian arch when these building were built. Now many of the libraries and corridors have collapsed and are merely blocks of stone piled through the forest.

In the gray-green jungle, brilliant red signs stuck on spindly poles displayed crude drawings of skull and crossbones to warn of the land mines that still riddled the paths.

The grass was alive beneath the leaves with termites, eating through the forest litter.

Tobias and I climbed down into one of the long ruined libraries of the Khmer monastery. The stones were fitted within a hair’s breath of one another, but the great window lintels had long ago cracked and were now held in place by giant wooden timbers, fourteen inches thick. It was a desperate attempt to save these ancient temples from final collapse, but this technique made the buildings look even more decrepit.

In this damp, cool shade beneath the ground, it struck me how far this solemn young man had come. I remembered how once years ago he had stood leaning against the door jam of my VW bus on a Halloween night half a world away, watching the full moon rise above the vineyards where we lived. Back then, it seemed that door jam was a threshold to his life, and he said “This is the last time I’ll see a full moon on Halloween here.” He was at that time 14. Now he was a full grown man, six feet six inches tall, skinny as a stork, living his life 10,000 miles away, in a haunted place a thousand years old, more frightening than any haunted house we might have imagined. It seemed truly an ancient place of the dead.

But it was the experience in the mine field that focused my attention that day, visiting the site where the CMAC crew was clearing canals that led from the dam. Tobias had driven us as far as he could along the rutted red sand road, through the stumps of brush and trees that had been leveled to the ground. The truck could go no farther because the ruts were deeper than the axel of his truck, and we had to climb out and walk the remaining mile: Tobias and Somet leading the way while Judith and Chai and I followed on the foot path. Along the path all plant life had been mercilessly cut down twenty feet on either side. Every 30 feet a concrete pillar documented that CMAC – the Cambodian Mine Action Committee – had swept for mines.

Eventually we came upon the CMAC crew: Ten men in blue uniforms, some standing beneath a makeshift blue tarpaulin roof strung between two enormous termite mounds. Others were sweeping the area ten yards ahead with metal detectors. They wore no protective clothing other than a plastic face shield. They were searching for anti-personnel mines and unexploded munitions – things they called UXOs for “unexploded ordinances”. I asked if they had found any. “Yes,” Chai said. “10 anti personnel mines and 14 UXOs.”

Where, I inquired. “Where we just came walking,” Chai replied. “Yesterday.”

This news seemed to silence Somet who, sitting down in a folding chair, looked blankly off into the scrubby jungle. Four years earlier, Tobias had asked him about mines in this area, but Somet had assured him there were none left. “No, no mines here! No mines here!” Now this CMAC crew had revealed the hidden truth: Had Tobias or his engineers strayed this way to clear the canals, they might have been maimed or killed. It was a thorn in his friendship with Tobias, though it was not clear if he had betrayed Tobias, or if Cambodia itself had betrayed them both.

But Tobias said nothing now, and took photos of the men, the termite hill, the cases of UXOs that had been found, and the map showing the crew’s progress. He looked pale, perhaps from the heat. And he looked solemn and wasted.

Somet, who called me Father and who called Judith Mother, said nothing more. He held my hand as we walked back through the mine field towards the truck. He held my hand tightly, like a child who was frightened, but who was pretending that he was being brave. He is 34 years old – the age of our oldest son Dagan – and had grown up in this place: Knew it like the back of his hand. Tobias – who led us now back through the mine field – was 27. He walked casually, almost sauntering, across the ruts in the road, talking with Chai.

When we arrived back at the truck Tobias made an announcement. “I have to turn the truck around, and in order to do that I have to leave the road here. So I want all of you to stand back 30 feet while I do this.”
But the mines have been cleared, we said. There’s no danger now.

“They have swept for anti-personnel mines and UXOs”, Tobias replied. “They didn’t sweep for anti-tank mines, so you’ll have to wait while I turn this around.”

And then it was that I awakened from the dream of Cambodia into the realities of the place.

It’s one thing to visit the rubble of an ancient nation as it struggles to right itself from its long history of civil war and to marvel at the changes that are taking place. It’s another thing to visit the ruins of Khmer kings and Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries that lay deep in the bush and contemplate the enormity of history that permeates the place. And it’s still another to walk a mine field where men in blue delicately scour the earth of plants so they might pick out the detritus of war.
But to watch your own son navigate the ruts of a road – not knowing what lay beneath the crust of red dirt as the wheels of the truck spin and the engine roars – is a transcending experience that focuses your mind to the present.

“One time, they set off an anti-tank mine,” Tobias had told me. “It was an explosion I will never forget.”

Here, there was no telling what might happen in this moment. But this time, there was nothing. Tobias threw the truck into reverse, and then pulled it from its rut, out onto the embankment just within the concrete markers. And so we climbed back in, drove the long red road back through the villages, through the fields of saw grass so sharp it can cut one’s arm, as naked children waved to us “hello, goodbye”, and women pulled their bicycles to the side to let us by. We drove two hours back into the city of Siem Reap. And then on to the airport where we boarded our plane and flew 30 hours home, here, safe.

The small Khmer lion on my step now has a different place in my mind’s eye. I now guess of what it is made. I now know that the dark patina of green will never shine like gold and that the days of the Khmer kings are over. No. This lion came from Cambodia, and is made of melted brass artillery shell casings, re-forged in a small hot fire by the side of the road, poured into a hand-carved mold in the red sands along the Siem Reap, and sent to market for a tourist to buy.

My son Tobias bought it for me, and now it guards my home.

Internet: Rewiring the Brain? Or Just Evolving?

A recent article in Wired Magazine by Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains is talking about the impact of the Internet and the World Wide Web on our abilities to focus our brains.  The point of the article is that, as we access the Internet to gain information, we’re shattering our abilities to retain that information.

The impact of Internet access on our minds is being studied at a number of institutions and the outcome of these studies is still inconclusive and mixed.  For instance, one study at UCLA resulted in an article entitled “First-time Internet users find boost in brain function after just one week”

The UCLA team worked with 24 neurologically normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 78. Prior to the study, half the participants used the Internet daily, while the other half had very little experience. Age, educational level and gender were similar between the two groups.

 Study participants performed Web searches while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during this activity. This type of scan tracks brain activity by measuring the level of cerebral blood flow during cognitive tasks.

After the initial brain scan, participants went home and conducted Internet searches for one hour a day for a total of seven days over a two-week period. These practice searches involved using the Internet to answer questions about various topics by exploring different websites and reading information. Participants then received a second brain scan using the same Internet simulation task but with different topics.

The first scan of participants with little Internet experience demonstrated brain activity in regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities, which are located in the frontal, temporal, parietal, visual and posterior cingulate regions, researchers said. The second brain scan of these participants, conducted after the practice Internet searches at home, demonstrated activation of these same regions, as well as triggering of the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus — areas of the brain known to be important in working memory and decision-making. 

Other research is less positive, and inconclusive about the impact. Yet Carr’s perspective about the Internet is pretty clear:

The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. There’s the problem of hypertext and the many different kinds of media coming at us simultaneously. There’s also the fact that numerous studies—including one that tracked eye movement, one that surveyed people, and even one that examined the habits displayed by users of two academic databases—show that we start to read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online. Plus, the Internet has a hundred ways of distracting us from our onscreen reading. Most email applications check automatically for new messages every five or 10 minutes, and people routinely click the Check for New Mail button even more frequently. Office workers often glance at their inbox 30 to 40 times an hour. Since each glance breaks our concentration and burdens our working memory, the cognitive penalty can be severe.

Brain Paradigms: Mechanical to Electronic

When my son brought this article to my attention, I immediately thought of a number of readings and experiences in my own past.  For instance, in the 1980s when personal computers were just starting to gain wide use, the popular paradigm of how the mind work seemed to be changing from a “mechanistic”, Rube Goldberg, chain-reaction-style model to an electrical circuit model.

People were obsessed with the concept of AI, and thought that computers were becoming a threat because they removed some aspect of control by obfuscating normal processes.  One of the most famous AI programs at that time was “Eliza” which purported to imitate a conversation with an artificial intelligence. (Click here to talk to "Eliza".)

The fact that we’re now rapidly embracing another generation of technology (Internet) with the use of evermore embedded mechanisms causes me to wonder: How did our meager brains survive before the Internet?

Methods of Embracing the World that We Experience

This thought was on my mind last night as I was looking at Google’s Sky Map and comparing this to a navigation map made of sticks that Polynesians used to find their way from island to island in a trackless sea.

Google uses GPS satellites and the GPS coordinates of the querying device (cell phone) to provide a view of the stars above.  The Polynesian map used sticks to represent  stars, currents, and wave formations to identify where one might be while crossing the Pacific in an outrigger canoe. 

Would Carr consider Google’s Sky Map a possible threat to the ancient practices of Polynesian navigation? Or is it technology itself that is concerning him, as society shifts its focus to newer methods of understanding?  Did the use of Polynesian stick maps change the brain function of ancient navigators? 

Probably.  

Memory Palaces: Soft-Wired Brains

How the brain functions may not be something that is hard-wired anyway.  Consider that for thousands of years humanity transferred knowledge from generation to generation merely by word-of-mouth.  In fact, one could argue that throughout the human experience gaining knowledge required that the brain’s neurons be reorganized and reoriented to be able to grasp the perceived reality and transform that understanding into mechanisms for survival.  Whether the mechanisms for obtaining knowledge was external or internal will perhaps forever remain controversial.

For instance, one of the techniques used in ancient Greece was called “loci”.  The “Method of loci” was an eidetic technique by which an individual associated a fact, experience, or memory with a location.  In this practice, one first conceives of a place with numerous familiar locations – imaginary or real – where one can visit in one’s mind.  This is often referred to as a “Memory Palace”.  The technique requires the person to virtually walk into this imaginary place/room/etc. and populate it with other objects: tables, chairs, trees, etc.  The technique’s first step is to thoroughly familiarize one’s self with this location, until the mind can navigate the location and remember every object that is contained in each “room.”

When the time comes to actually commit a thought or experience to memory, one then walks through the location and virtually places the memory beside one of the objects within that room.  This act of mental association “fixes” the memory by associating the object with the memory of the thing one wishes to remember. 

Using the method of loci permitted scholars to store immense amount of information over time – much as the retelling of a story reveals an experience that may long ago have been forgotten.  The brain, in this model, is not a mechanism, nor a circuit, nor a network, but a vast storage area composed of rooms or other locations, each containing virtual objects that are associated with memories or stories of experience. 

How does it work?

A YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NROegsMqNc demonstrates this technique in memorizing random words.  Watch it. It’s fun!

So, is the Internet rewiring the human brain?  I hope so!  And in my opinion what we are doing is using the Cloud as a vast, communal memory palace.  Devising new methods of navigating it is now the effort that technology is addressing through various devices. 

Is it good or bad?

I guess we’ll find out.