a glimpse of Africa, and other travels

So I'm a bit behind the times, but my friend Jimmie has finally updated his blog with some images from Sudan, and I wanted to put a link here for anyone interested in seeing some great photos. Jimmie, a college buddy and photographer extraordinare, is documenting church construction in Sudan for Samaritan's Purse. Read more about his work on his blog.

In other news, I'm heading for Beijing next week for the Chinese New Year ... but also now skipping over to Japan for a few days this weekend. Most of our vacation falls around the winter sessions, so I'm cramming a lot of my travel into these couple months. Pictures and posts to come.

Meanwhile it's been back to the routines of teaching and living in the Village, wrangling with Korean studies and boisterous kids, and the exquisite torture of making Asian children say "parallelogram" (I've been teaching math this session).

On Sunday I helped chaperone a field trip to an indoor amusement park of blow-up slides, playgrounds and obstacle courses, and then to ice skate, with meals and other logistics throughout. It was enjoyable - if not easy - extra money, but also a case study in how kid-oriented this country is. Being out in public with 37 random children, it's really clear how much people here seem to view child-rearing as a collective endeavor. Any child is everybody's child - and people go out of their way to talk with, comfort or chastise any little one in their vicinity as they see fit. In our case, many of them did their best to do all that in English, which really is a heroic effort.

It's a marked difference from the States, where many people do their best to avoid public interaction with unknown children - not without reason.

For one thing, Americans have many more fears of pedophilia and other improprieties involving children and strangers. No one knows the actual rates of such crimes in either country, but (like most crimes) it's reported far more in the United States, and people are generally less worried about it in Korea.

For another thing, Americans tend to more support the right of parents to choose how their children are raised, and to criticize anyone who would interfere that. In Korea, people may have just as strong opinions about the way things should be done - though I'd doubt it - but they will rarely contradict a senior person (in rank or age) about anything, and group harmony is far more important than individual freedoms.

And in a less concrete influence, but perhaps the greatest one, Korean culture seems to prize childhood more as a golden era, and Korean people tend to go to far greater lengths to ensure their children the most opportunities and enjoyment. It's not uncommon for parents here to work dawn to dusk to afford to send their children to the best private institutes for English and other skills. They push their children hard, but they also devote a lot of energy to making sure the kids have fun and are happy, both in daily life and weekend activities.

But I don't think this group effort to raise children happens only here (though I imagine Koreans have their own brand of it). I remember a story one of my friends told me about being on a bus in Latin America somewhere, and a woman who got on just handed her a baby to hold while the woman fished change out of her purse - and no one looked twice. And I remember children playing in the streets of Madrid becoming collective charges. And from anecdotes and writings about even other places, I think maybe this is the way most of the world works, to some degree.

There's good and bad to all these things, which you could argue forever, like most points of any culture. But everything else aside, it is extremely refreshing to feel so supported in doing your job - especially when it involves taking care of children.

Bali Top 10

A la my iconic countryman David Letterman, here's my Top Ten Things Learned in Bali.

10) Every single Balinese person needs to know where to place you on their mental maps. Where are you from? When did you arrive in Bali? Where are you staying? When are you leaving Bali? Just go ahead and print business cards with your answers - it will save loads of time.
9) You might want to consider putting a "No, not interested" on that card, too ... for whatever gadget or service they're peddling.
9) You can't put on a Santa hat or blow a noisemaker without hitting an Australian during the holidays.
8) How to add "yeah?" to the end of every sentence, like a good Aussie. (I've still got the holdout European "no?" popping up every so often in my speech, so maybe it will cancel out.)
7) Go to the Gili Islands. And Ubud. And the rice paddies. And the volcanoes and lakes. And the black beaches on the east coast. Leave the traditional beach zone (Kuta, Legian) to neighboring Java's old hats and candy wrappers, the incessant merchants and the Speedo-clad Russians.
6) Bali is a great place to gain five pounds on the fabulous banana pancakes, mango lassis, Baileys Comets, tuna steaks or the peanut sauce at Nomad's restaurant in Ubud. Bali is a great place to lose five pounds to the Bali Belly ... just don't get caught on Gili when the whole island's plumbing is out.
5) Bali is perhaps the best place in the world to shame yourself into learning another language. Even the beggars know a minimum of three.
4) You ought to suspect something when every single Balinese person says "rain" with an Australian accent.
3) Bali's rainy season is not, in fact, "no big deal," as so many guidebooks and tourists are fond of saying. Good thing we had three weeks to wait out the clouds.
2) Sea turtles are cool. Especially when seen underwater from a few feet away. Komodo dragons are freaky. Especially when they launch spittle like bullets from yards away.
1) Know when high tide is. Try surfing for the first time then. Make sure there are plenty of small children to mow down as they're playing in the shallow water, and plenty of real surfers to annoy by stealing their waves. You'll provide an afternoon of entertainment to an entire beach - and take first place in the Technicolor Bruise Competitions.

and we have visuals

So, at last, here are my first pictures from Asia - and some lifted from my friends - showing some of the highlights of our holiday trip to Bali. (Click the link above to get to the gallery of all the images, or to see them one by one as a slideshow, click the picture of the tree at right. You can change the speed of the slideshow at the bottom of the screen.)

My Christmas present to myself this year was breaking down and buying a point-and-shoot camera. It did a pretty good job, for what it is, and the fumblings of the person behind it. I swear manual settings are easier to do than programs, even though people get impressed by folks lugging around manual cameras.

I kept the pictures small and put credits on a lot of them because I have a paranoia of the images turning up as postcards somewhere and then wanting to do something with them later down the line ... hope y'all can still make out enough to keep you entertained.

so this is economics

Just a few hours remain of my three weeks in Indonesia. Having signed away my rights to a shower, and with a day's journey ahead, I'm hiding away from the tropical sun in an Internet cafe in Bali touristville, aka the Kuta beach area.

Two J-school friends and I met here for the holidays and spent the many sun and rain-filled days sampling the sites, tastes, hobbies and escape of Indonesia's Number 1 island for tourism - in fact, one of the top tourism destinations in the world. This little island - about 90 miles wide by 55 miles deep - and other neighboring locales (we stayed three nights at the Gili Islands, off the west coast of Bali's neighboring island, Lombok) house all the classic tropical-island attractions: reefs, volcanoes, beaches (black and white), famed surfing waves, ancient artforms, teeming markets, legions of resident artisans, lush vegetation, exotic animals, and that relaxed island culture.

It's a beautiful place, undoubtedly a little oversold as a tropical paradise, but still fascinating and multifaceted. Known for its tolerance in oft-militant Indonesia, Bali has the country's most diverse religious climate (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity), and the tourist machine there represents Indonesia's main outreach to the Western world. The Dutch have been regularly visiting for centuries - one of which they owned the place - and it's a major Aussie holiday destination. Several Japanese frequent the island; Koreans, South Africans, Russians, Brits and other Europeans come in lower numbers; and you can even find the occasional odd American. Estimates vary, but some say tourism makes up as much as 80 percent of Bali's economy, which makes the island - in the middle of an impoverished nation and region of the world - extremely vulnerable to threats to that industry, such as the terrorist bombings here in 2002 and 2005. Each shopkeeper, each cabdriver has a before and after story, particularly about the 2002 blast, which killed an estimated 200 people in a nightclub. Twenty were killed in 2005.

Since the blasts, tourism has slowly regained steam, with an estimated 5 million people visiting the island each year (statistics from the Indonesia's bureau of statistics). Bali is once again claiming its place as one of the wealthiest territories in the country. But it's still an island where poverty and luxury intertwine in an uneasy co-dependence.

And I find I am still a naive traveler.

In American eyes, I'm working-class, earning my own living in the lower white-collar trades. In European and Korean eyes, it's something at least similar. I travel, edging me into the realm of elite, but on my own it's mostly a no-frills style ... staying at budget hotels, navigating public transport and schlepping my own bags. It's a role I've felt mostly comfortable with, smugly self-righteous and benignly ignorant in. But this world is brown and (almost entirely) white, and coming here marked the first time I independently, irrevocably found myself part of the part of the rich, Western world. The served. The employers. The ones who buy adventure, who purchase culture. Who have more in their wallet than their waiter makes in a month.

I'm not sure how I imagined it would be ... can't say with any certainty that I thought about it at all, short of anticipating some sun, beautiful sights and good social time. But it definitely was a jolt upon arrival to find myself so classed for the first time of my adult, independent life. It's something that makes me uncomfortable, and yet right or wrong (some of both, I think) won't stop me from traveling, from spending, from hiring. I understand the business aspect of things, the fact I bring valuable cash and other benefits to struggling people. I just don't want to entirely lose that shock, to expect to live in this role. I don't want to relish my happenstance boon in social order, or to forget it. Mostly that.

It's a world of gray, this tourism business, especially to impoverished regions, but one I want now more than ever to explore. And I will bring my dollars, my camera, my glasses and my empathy.