New Zealand Mexico

On Friday, March 11 we left the Nelson Lakes region and boarded a plane for Auckland. As soon as we landed we found out about the earthquake in Japan, but quickly boarded another plane before we could really find out what was going on. Sometime during the 11 hour flight we flew over the smaller version of the tsunami that caused flooding in Hawaii and landed safetly in LA.
Being back in the US after almost 6 months felt strangly normal, like nothing had changed. I took the opportunity to pick up a New York Times and found this tucked away on one of the last pages. It reminded me of all the energy Vermonters put into stopping the relisencing of the plant last year. Fortunratly, the state legislature has the last say on this, not the Federal government. The irony, of course, is that this decision came the day before the earthquake in Japan caused an unfolding nuclear disaster.
I had little desire to stay in LA and boarded a plane to Mexico City after only a few hours --phew. Its my 4th (I think) visit to Mexico thanks to my parent´s near obbession with traveling when I was child, although it´s the first one in 14 years.
Its great to be back. The first morning I spoke with members of Mexicos electrical workers union who have set up a camp in the Zocalo (city center) to protest Presidente Caldarons decision to dessolve their union to make is easier to sell off Mexicos utilities to ¨tansnacionales,¨ (foreign corporations).
Then, I went with a Mexican friend of another girl on the trip to a meeting of student organizations called Colocam, which are trying to organize against the increased violence and militarization caused by the war on the drug cartels. The stories are terrifying. 35,000 people have been murdered since the ¨war¨ began 3 years ago. The lines between government and cartel are have blurred and both have commited atrocities. There is an enourmous police present in Mexico City, which I have only seen rivaled in Colombia and Venezuela, who both have their own histories with narcotraficantes.  We are in a relatively safe part of town and head to Oaxaca in a week, which shoud be very safe. More to come soon

 

Gustavo in the Guardian

Here is a piece written by Gustavo Esteva, our coordinator in Mexico. 

Nicky Hagar

"I left home with only the following instructions. Fly to Britain, take the Heathrow Express to a station in central London and, once there, buy a new mobile phone to call a number I had been given by secure means before leaving home."
It's a line out of a James Bond film, but those are the words of New Zealand's investigative journalist Nickly Hagar on his December visit to Wikileaks headquaters. After making the specified call, he was given instructions to take another train to a rural area outside London, where a car would bring him the rest of way. He had been brought in to help prepare for a massive release of US government diplomatic cables. He spent a week in England and had this to say about the mysterious organization, "The small inner core of WikiLeaks' workers was mainly journalists and computer specialists: competent, strikingly free of egotism and personal conflict, and very focused on the work that needed to be done."
The Hollywood style security was a attempt to avoid an inevitable raid by British or US authorities who were growing increasingly annoyed. The White House has called Wikileaks founder, Jullian Assange dangerous and wreckless, while some on the political right have said he should be hung. When the release finally took place, the resident computer expert had to fight off cyber attacks for a half hour.

Hagar, on the other hand, had this to say about Assange, "Working in that crowded room, he was very focused, but also good humored and thoughtful of others. For someone at the centre of international news attention, and an international man-hunt, he seemed calm and considered, and not to be taking himself too seriously... He is a likable person who, in my opinion, is simply using his considerable skills and strengths, and the opportunity provided by WikiLeaks' successes, to try to do some good in the world. Whatever went on in Sweden – a confused controversy with elements reminiscent of the Swedish Millennium trilogy – my instincts told me that he is, fundamentally, a good person. "

I had a similar impression of Nicky Hagar when he spoke to IHP this morning. He was friendly and modest, only speaking about his trip to London in a cafe after the lecture. Instead, he spoke about his background as a activist. Starting with anti-nuclear campaigns and anti-logging campaigns, he eventually went into investigative journalism and published Secret Power in 1996, which detailed New Zealand's involvements in the US-led international eavesdropping system Echelon. In 2006, he published his latest book The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception, which led to the resignations of New Zealand's Prime Minister. To the class he stressed the importance of working with enjoyable people, building trust with informants, and inclusiveness in public campaigns.

** After a long hiatus from blogging, I am going to pick it back up. A few other projects have been occupying my internet time, but I will try to do the occasional post on my experiences in Tanzania and continue through the remainder of New Zealand and all of Mexico. Cheers.

The Official Take

http://www.ihp.edu/page/letter_home_rg1011/#ind

IHP Part I

Go here for a few more photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/tyler.wilkinsonray/IHPPartI?feat=directlink

Saying goodbye (tata in hindi) to India

I arrived in Zanzibar a few days ago, and already India feels like a distant memory. The blue ocean, relaxed atmosphere, friendly people, and overwhelming heat is reminiscent of Colombia's Caribbean coast. I am just starting to put my mind to learning Swahili, but the few words I already know go far with the locals. Interactions here are more relaxed, more familiar than they were in India, as if my brain runs on the same wavelength as the Zanzibaris. In India, I often felt like I was trying to communicate with a different species entirely or had woken up on another planet. So what about the last month in India? I'll try to summarize what still hasn't settled in my head. 
I left India from the Mumbai airport. The last thing I did in India was drink a towering glass of hot chocolate at three in the morning in an airport cafe, while the beast of Mumbia was just beginning to stir outside. The drive to the airport (unfortunately the only time I got to spend in the city) did not fail to exceed my expectations. The entire city seemed blanked with wooden scaffolding rising out of the dust and disorder of street life. Children slept on cardboard side by side on the door step of towering office buildings. I was exhausted but couldn't let my eye lids shut.
How does one describe India? The underworld of Mumbai's slums, street children, and communal violence found a place in the American consciousness with the movie Slum Dog Millionaire, but unfortunately for the people actually living in the slums there is no possibility of game shows.
What did result is that Westerners with a few extra bucks can now get a tour of a Mumbai slum (a safari of India's charismatic macro-fauna?). There is a Facebook application called "Slumlords of Mumbai," so now Indians across the country can "cheat their friends" and rise to the top of India's now famous underworld.
Yet, these fleeting images hardly illustrate the complexities of the roulette with modernity that India is caught in. Friedman said the world is flat, but if you venture to leave your hotel room, such an analogy with be forgotten instantly.Other people have borrowed the opening from Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" to give perhaps a more accurate description:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way"
The government in Delhi, businessmen in Mumbai, and the growing middle class welcome India's bid to becoming an emerging superpower. Their main concern is rivaling China in its quest of regional supremacy. As I write this, India is seeking a spot on the UN Security Council, which would be a symbolic affirmation of their growing power by the West and also give them considerable diplomatic weight. As the Indian elites put development into overdrive, the rest of the country is wondering how much of the burden is going to be put on their backs. If India's past is any clue, the answer will be most of it.
It is this struggle over development-- for whom and on who's terms-- that we explored these past two months.
We arrived in Delhi to see India display its achievements, of which there are many, during the Common Wealth Games. We also saw the slums where those who don't fit into India's modern image have been hidden away to fend for themselves. We visited cotton farmers who have to compete with U.S. agriculture subsidies and inspected their failed crops supplied and engineered by Monsanto. We also visited organic farms that are fighting for the ability to plant their own seeds.
We visited Gandhi's last home before he died where he preached truth and non-violence, and we visited his home state of Gujarat. Its capital, Ahmadabad is known for its brutal history of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. It's a strife that has been encouraged and incited by the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, which has ruled the region for the past 20 years.
We visited dams -- "the temples of modern India" as India's first prime minister once proclaimed. Among the dams we visited was Sardar Surovar, the last dam on the famous Narmada river, which displaced 40,835 families by official counts and still hasn't reached its full height. We also visited one of the 800 communities displaced by the Ukai dam, then visited a community downstream that used the dam's irrigated water to grow 4-5 times the amount of food to gain considerable wealth. Further down chemical companies use a huge amount of the electricity produced and water to dilute the their industrial effluence to meets the regions loose environmental regulation. Dilution or simply paying the small fine is much less expensive than treating industrial waste.
We met "forest tribes," Their nomadic livelihoods halted by India's growing environmental consciousness and it's affinity for pristine forests.

We also saw resistance-- an academic from one of India's most elite business school supporting a slum's quest to avoid displacement, a formerly denotified tribe that uses theater to raise awareness of tribal issues, slum women who weathered blows from the police to protest the Common Wealth Games, and a farmers movement struggling to reverse the damage caused by GMO seeds, the green revolution's reliance on chemical fertilizers, and neoliberal agriculture policies to reassert their autonomy.
After two months in India, I am less sure of what to make of it. Yes, the food is fantastic and didn't make me nearly as sick as I had feared, but how can an outsider make sense of such a surging subcontinent. Overwhelmed by its shear size and foreignness, my first reaction is to block it out of my mind completely. It defies sense. Try as I may, I couldn't begin to enter the ethos, or plethora of ethos, that make up the contemporary state of India. One that is so diverse, yet young enough that its differences still show through the awkwardness of nationhood.  However foreign India remains in my mind, such distances are no long significant. I can't stir a spoonful of sugar into my coffee without thinking of the masked children in the sugar factory we visited, nor can I buy a tee-shirt without thinking of the daily struggle of cotton farmers. I was hoping I would come up with something less cliche, but what I am taking with me from India is that every decision I make, from what I buy to who I vote for has more serious repercussions for those outside the US than it does for us inside. Behind the comfort we enjoy in the US, there are people toiling in the rest of the world to make it possible. I can't say I didn't know this before IHP, but the serenity of Vermont is far too strong of a sedative and makes the rest of the world seem more distant than it actually is.  As for India, it is more than capable of deciding its own fate.

As always, please share your thoughts and experiences

Out of the city

On the 19th of October we left Delhi by train for an organic farm in Maharashtra. We stayed on the farm for a week before heading to Gandhi's Ashram. I'll work backwards.

To be brief, Gandhi was born in 1869 to a well to do family. He was married at 13 and went to England to study law at 18. After his studies he briefly returned to India before leaving for South Africa. There, he fought institutional racism for years before returning to India. Upon his return he was already seen as a Indian hero and was soon given the name Bapu, which means father. From then until his assassination in 1948 he fought for the Indian people, specifically their right to self-determination, which was won on August 15th, 1947. Gandhi's way of fighting for independence was markedly different than many of history's other independence movements. He embraced the idea that British rule was only possible with Indian submission and that violence was no way of creating a new country. He led a non-cooperation movement, and when it turned violent, he fasted until there was peace.
When asked what his message to the word was, he responded, "My life is my message." Cognizant of the violence caused by industrialization he spun is own thread and grew his own food, Gandhi was not just an Indian back-to-the-lander. He extrapolated his views to every aspect of his life. His messages were not complex or abstract; he was honest with himself and when he made a decision, he followed it unwaveringly. What I think is most relevant to us today is the courage Gandhi had to eliminate contradictions in his life. There was no dissonance between what he held as truth and the way he behaved.

He wrote on numerous topics from education to technology. Truth and non-violence have become the tenets modern Gandhianism. It does not prescribe a specific way of life beyond these two tenets and people have adopted his views worldwide. The farm that we visited was one example. Disturbed by the destructiveness of modern industrial Agriculture, Vacent and Karuna started one of the regions first organic farm after reading "One Straw Revolution" by Fukuoka. Their goal is to produce food without the use of chemical fertilizers or tractors and rebuild the fertility of land that had been constantly degraded since the Green Revolution. If there is one thing that he could give to his children, he said its topsoil. Walking through his forest garden I could spot orange trees, papaya, custard apple, and many other plants growing harmoniously next to each other without any intensive care. The plants may have been very different (papaya, mango, millet, and cotton)  and the farm followed to a concise ethic of truth and non-violence behind them, but it was a mentality that I have seen all over the world. I reminded me of the growing permaculture movement in Vermont and how a combination of a Japanese farmer /writer, Gandhi, and the global permaculture yielded such an amazing oasis that farmers, school groups, intellects are all looking to replicate. It was yet again another bazaar child of globalization, and a beacon of reclaimed self-determination in an age of increasing complexity and interdependence.