Ankurbhai
c/o CHEZ UZUREAU
108 blvd la Villette
Paris 75019
France

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/upa

The directory has them both in screen form (the order makes sense) and publishing form (the order does not)

Due to a request from some compadres in CEDICAM (Nochixtlan, Oaxaca, Mexico) I could be translating them into Spanish soon. Either way, Ill try to put the Srcibus files online soon so other people can have their way with it.

Please let me know if theres any other adjustments you need for your work

- Ankur Delight

The document is, of course, outdated, but it gives enough of a sense. Basically, QGis is the root, and you can use this Google Satellite Maps Downloader to get large offline data chunks of your African city.

http://www.somethingconstructive.net/gis

There should be a one-page summary and the full document in that directory. If this is useful to you, but harmfully out of date or otherwise wrong, please dont hesistate to email me…

Ankur Delight

but first, just a little reminder about the InYourHeadNess of it all. as in, the 36 hour bus ride from tucson to mexico city with salsa music and meteors still reverberating in my mind and even sticky on my body, and the occasional darting field mice of doubt –

why are you here?
what are you doing?
what other names do you have under these southern stars?

once again, the amorphous facade of a plan, just enough to slip by the bullet-proofs vests of the border patrol without a full-on interview (as I here him whisper to his partner, he’s got all kind of stamps from weird african countries, like li-BEER-ia), but certainly not enough to convince me what i’m doing is actually worthwhile. but then, it just take fifteen seconds off the bus in the polluted mexico city area, florescent lights of the bus terminal, pay phones, ATMs, and tamale carts, to remember why it is we do anything — whether it’s travel disguised as work, work disguised as travel, orange juice, or sunset walks to the tailor:

we love it.

there’s this linguistic concept here, the “mandado”. it translates to errand, but is a form of “mandar”, to be sent. to have been ordered. so “ive got to do some errands” becomes, for me, “i have been given a sacred mission”. and that mission, walking down the streets between the lush vegetation, honking bicycle carts, aggresive drivers, and street musicians, is to love every moment. standing with the juiceman this morning as he squeezed (literally) dozens of oranges for the two liters of juice i desired, watching him methodically grab oranges from his mobile (shopping-cart) juicing station with his right hand, and return them to a jute compost bag with his left. interminable cycle of creation and destruction with the delicious juice of life in between.

it happens to me everytime i travel. i’m on the plane, wondering why i’m going where i am, and why not somewhere else. why i’m making these decisions myself without the gentle cradle of obligation to support me. and then i get there, i smell the air, i see the people, and i know, i just Being there. nothing more and nothing less.

so that’s it. small distinction still between thinking and being. anxiety and relaxation. the future hanging out in the corner, smoking, with coincidence and the other NOTs.

happy holidays. don’t let them end. 2012 is just the beginning. the dawn of a new era. or, as I tried to express yesterday to some new friends in Mexico (at Isla Urbana, an urban rainwater-harvesting project):

A veces,
puedo ver pequenos rayos de luz,
el amanecer que nos espera cuando
unamos y juntemos nuestros trabajitos,
cuando lleguemos a tejer
nuestras passiones y conciencias
en una tapestria gigante,
la cual cubre
todas
las sombras pendientes
con amor

or,

Sometimes,
I glimpse those first tender rays of a waiting dawn.
We’ll get it together, throw in our pieces of the puzzle,
untangle the strings and weave together
our passions and our conscience
into a giant quilt,
smother any tempted shadows with love

*

gifts include: pictures, a schedule, a poem, one meandering canyon’s thoughts, and a recipe for egg curry, from niger.
1] ginga egg curry recipe, from niger
==========================

courtesy of mlle balkissou of bruxelles and niger. but, like the rest of us, she really lives in the Heart.

[preparation]

0. West-african music on the ra-di-o
1. You take some onions and peel them and cut the ends off. (“pro-tip” follows) sometimes it’s easier to peel them after you cut the ends off.
2. Cut the onion in half, from end to end, so it has the widest and safest cross-section on the board.
3. Align the onion with the stars and your knife and cut it in thin strips from end to end, taking pleasure as it all falls apart.
4. Prepare gnger and garlic. Garlic is crushed together and ginger is julienne rather small. Let’s say you have two onions. Then you might have one cubic inch of garlic. And, the intense part : almost as much ginger as onion.
5. One large tomato for your two onions, cut into big pieces. One small can of tomato paste, at the ready.

[fascination]

0. Heat some oil in a pan. You might be healthy but this _is_ west african food, so you can put a little more than normal. the entire bottom of the pan (once the oil is hot) perhaps. If you have some palm oil, or dende, it would go well.
1. Fry the onions for a bit. Once they begin to brown, add the tomato paste. Mix it all in. Add half the garlic, half the ginger, and the tomato. Stir it together
[1.5 Optional small green chiles, minced, could enter the picture here.]
2. There are two kinds of water in the world. Small water and Plenty water. Add small water, so everything is incorporated, happy, and in communal harmony.
3. Crack your eggs (one per person? more?) into the soup. Let it thicken. As the eggs cook, add the rest of the ginger and garlic.
4. Let it cook until everything has firmed up a bit. If you need more time, add more water or oil, depending on whose looking.
5. Salt.

2] a few pictures
==========================

from this fall in sequim. mainly demonstrating the incredible power of water in different ways. and horses

https://picasaweb.google.com/mangolandia/Fall2011Sequim?authuser=0&feat=directlink

3] one meandering canyons thoughts
==========================

perhaps because i don’t have a camera, i’m just going to tell you we want walking before the new year through the canyonlands national park in utah. stepping through the fractal of rock across colors and cultures. the red zone. the white zone. the tan zone. sometimes, through the grace of geometry and water, trees and bushes, a season wash, the movement of water etched into sand, pebbles, cliffsides, and the whole domain. carved by time.

and somehow, in this magical and brutal landscape, people had been paid to make trails, to guide young trippers through the magic of the world in such a way they had a reasonably good chance of finding the vehicle again. and on this trail, sometimes only marked by small cairns across huge slabs of rock and ice, i came to understand how often and how deeply guided we are, in so many of our experiences. there you are, in the middle of the nothing, scrambling over boulders in pure amazement, following a track of small towers that somebody you’ve never met left for you. winding across the mountain to the left — take the high road or the low road? both are reasonably passable, both a little scary. but somebody chose the low road. why? to show me something. to take us by the old skeleton of a goat, or get a view of a specific needle rock miles away, or to make our heart beat just so?

this notion of the individual, the path, that i so cherish. where is it? every article we read is guiding us through a discipline, every trail through a landscape, every tool through a craft. and, suddenly, it pops out into high relief — if we’re so often guided, around corners, averting death, through certain ways of thinking, judgments even… then it’s our responsibility to understand who these guides are, why they’re guiding us, and who to thank.

looking sideways at the spectacles to see what shade they are. a last-ditch effort to understand why everything seems green, or depressing, or what have you.

luckily, out in the Needles, it was pretty harmless. they nailed iron ladders into the rock at times to give us the inexperience of scaling the unscalable, and subjected us to breathtaking views and humbling realizations of scale, space, and time. i could relax into their intentions, their mentality. they’re taking us on a trip. a guided tour of wonder, so we could relax more fully into the wow, knowing their must be a way down.

sometimes it’s not that way. maybe with the news. but anyhow, we all know that. as the man says,

“You who choose to lead must follow
But if you fall you fall alone,
If you should stand then who’s to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home.”

4] schedule
==========================

ankur is really trying to do something this year. focus more on understanding interactions between soil and water, humans and our environment, through the lens of the gift economy, applied to the world around us. the gift ecology, perhaps. as such, he’ll be receiving mail in paris a few months this year, and in india for the rest. specific details to come, but the departure seems to be march 1st. mexico until february 4th. sequim until february 11th. san francisco until february 25th. a few days of free time.

perhaps back in the states for july. depends on the oil economy. please let me know if you’re getting married. that kind of stuff is important.

5] poem: Salty Green Tea
==========================

Morning light over the mountains warms the eyes
Salty tea from desert water in hand
We both are strangers here.

Eyes shut, the mind leaves to visit
The best people it has ever known.
Sun continues his rise.
Everything dissolves.

Is it possible? –
these accolades, judgments, predicates
are merely outstretched hands,
empty and grasping?

It is possible.

Nouns and adjective themselves collaborators in
a vast internal conspiracy tacking up
the facade of certainty, of permanence.

Let me try to peel the onion
without shedding more tears:

i. He is a great man
ii. He was so good, for me.
iii. He spoke to me with Such Kindness*
iv. Once, when he placed his hand atop my head,
I could feel the coursing divinity
v. A brief moment, love.
(* with kindness, you must tie your shoes)

6] healing notes
======================

Thank you for your prayers and response and laughter at my bike accident. It was really terrible for a while there. I don’t even remember the flying through the air part, and that must have been the best/worst of it. But I’m really much better. I owe incredible amounts of gratitude to the “surgical immobilizer” industry, which probably produced hundreds of thousands of neoprene movement constraint devices in 2011, one of which I wore stylishly for almost a month. Lots of gratitude as well to Mark Spencer, whose healing touch and massage skills I credit with my recovery on the physical side, and to the magic of ICE, which somehow reduced the inflammation on my right knee so I can run again, and almost sit in full lotus. Injury has a lot to do with a fear, and even now, I hesitate to make movement I know I can. A learning process. But anyhow, I’m better. Thank you thank you thank you.

love
Ankur Delight

www.mangolandia.org

There’s the arid, yes. But there’s also the woman from the National Committee for La Raza, some sort of Hispanic lobbying group, who sat next to me on the plane and felt compelled to _whisper_ about the antics of a policeman named “Joe” and racist laws that reminded her of being persecuted in the 60s when she first started dating (hold on to armchairs and trackballs) a black man, after high school. She was seriously afraid other people on the plane would here us talking about the rights of immigrants. And then there’s my time with Jocelyn in Phoenix, me trying to understanding the intricacies and difficulties of applying principles of conservation and rationality to the political and legal realities of the state.

There’s a lot more on all of that, and the course as well — which I can best describe as “The Future” — but I’m going to hold off until a little bit later, to be able to focus on the importance of awareness in our everyday life, and the dialectic between the protective halo of the material world (and its financial derivations) and the gift of presence.

If that doesn’t make sense, I mean to say: you don’t need shoes that protect your ankles if you take each step with care. And you don’t need a rice cooker if you can plug yourself into the rice, detect the subtle changes in smell and sound when the water has gone. And you don’t need the new mephone to tell you the weather in paris if you live there and can look out, or go through, the window.

But, on the other hand, even if you have been cultivating awareness for months and years, you still might be biking down the road in Phoenix, having visited a beautiful mountaintop (still looking for patience), and submit to a daydream. And, even for a moment, if you placed your consciousness in the far and there as opposed to the here and now, you might not notice the weird pointy spiky teeth in the ground that regulate car entry on your side of the road.

And when you did see them, a dozen feet ahead of you, you might not know which way they were pointed, and whether your bike could handle it, and it might not be your bike to risk anyways. Because you’re in Phoenix for the first time, exploring the arid American southwest. Looking for mangos. Dolphins. etc. So — as a result of this momentary lapse in awareness — you might hit the brakes a little too hard, observe yourself flying through the air, the bicycle behind the teeth and you (thankfully) in front of them, landing with face shoulder and hands on backpack and asphalt.

Casualties of Phoenix Mountain Park Autonomous Bike Wreck:

- one shattered bansuri (key of C)

- one battered but still possibly functional voice recorder

- wounded pride

- inability to dig

- separated shoulder ligament, possible fracture

- big “ow” left wrist

- small “ow” right wrist

- vivid but not quite fractal bleeding/scarring on left shoulder

- huge bump above left eye

- nasty but “manly” cut slightly to left of left eye

- confidence

Which is to say, humdulillah. We’re all alive over here, and grateful. Been taken care of is amazing. Not being able to put on a shirt is humbling. The hospital experience — which I was convinced to submit to by my hosts, Jocelyn and Sam, both EMTs, was hilarious enough to warrant its own writing. Maybe tomorrow. The course started yesterday, the digging doesnt start until Tuesday. I have a surgical immobilizer and a climber’s worth of of motrin. We’ll see what happens.

Pray for my health. Thanks.

- ankurbhai

Luckily, everything else about this month has been a Smashing success.

So if you’ve got letters and haven’t sent them, use the permanent address:

83 Lost Meadow

Sequim, WA 98382

usa

And if you already sent it to DC, I can get my old-roommates to forward them on to me, no problem.

I will be in transit for 1/2 november, and arrive in Sequim on Nov 15th, where I will rester until Dec 4, most likely. After that, it’s the road again

ever

beckoning.

That’s right, I’m neighbors with JFK’s body and the Brazilian embassy in Washington DC.

Parties and letters to:

2912 16th St. NE

Washington DC 20018

Directions for the car-free and bike-impoverished:

Take metro to Rhode Island on the red line and walk up the hill on Rhode Island avenue until 16th st,

turn left, and walk a block and a half. Blue house on your left. i live on the top floor. You can yell my name.

Or take capital bikeshare to 12th and Monroe (near Brookland metro stop) and walk from there. My house is at 16th and Hamlin.

anticipated staying until october 15, 2011, possible extension, with minimal travel during that time.

ie: sent lots of letters.

- ankur

It’s extremely unlikely you’ll have another opportunity to chill in our spare bedroom on an awesome (“a punishing teacher” according to one local veteran) beach, chop vegetables grown by the farmers I’m meeting every day on our new “kitchen island”, and get in a good dose of disaster/humanitarian tourism/understanding. After almost seven weeks, I’m still unclear on how to synthesize many aspects of this experience, but I can say that

a) The people are cool.

b) The vibe is weird.

c) I don’t feel unsafe.

So there’s that. I also have been trying to get at the root of “The African Question”, with little success. You know, “The African Question”. As in, “How’s Africa?, man”. Whereas nobody has ever asked me “How’s Asia?” or “How’s South America” or “How’s North America”. I guess there was a little bit of “How’s Europe”, but maybe that’s because we were taking smallplanes and tinycars and longtrains to visit different countries every weekend or two. I’m trying to understanding this “Africa” consciousness, to what degree it’s invented, to what degree it’s imposed, to what degree it’s embraced. I saw a Liberian guy the other day with a gold bling-bling Africa-shaped pendent on his gold bling-bling necklace chain. That answered some questions. And I tried to voice my questions to a colleague at the German Agro Action office in Tubmanburg yesterday, about why so many nations, tribes, languages, and cultures could be lumped together so often as Africa, and what exactly do they have in common? I wish I had recorded the patience and certainty in his voice when he told me, “You see, we are all on the same continent. That is how we are all African.”

But, you see, it’s the truth.

Point being: This is what you need to visit:

1. Time. Two weeks is good. One week makes sense if it’s remotely “on your way” to somewhere else, or if you’re coming from nearby (Africa, Europe, sailboats).

2. Money. We have most of the expensive things covered (ie housing and cutting boards) and the vegetable shopping and local beer is on the house, so don’t worry about that one. But you’ll need some money for the plane ticket.

3. Plane ticket. We have benefited from the services of Charles Fernandez, specifically getting tickets from and through Brussels. He is apparently based in Pennsylvania, but is very responsive with phone and email:

Charles Fernandez
Travel Consultant
MTS Travel
124 East Main Street, 4th floor
Ephrata, PA 17522

866-315-2136
Tel: 772-283-1298
Fax: 772-283-1539
Email: charlesf@mtstravel.com
http://www.mtstravel.com

4. Yellow Fever Vaccination. This is generally not covered by insurance as it’s a sort of luxury item (yeah right). So it could cost you 100 usd or more. I know. I know. I know. Think of it as a tax. If your local County Health agency doesn’t have it, they will know who does.

5. The Visa. Appsarently, no matter what visa you buy, you get a 30-day visa when you get to Liberia. So, if there’s any way you can just get a 30-day visa from the local Liberian consulate (I didn’t see it on the menu, but then I was stuck on the multiple-entry variety), do that. I’ve heard from people it’s free, which is 200 usd cheaper than what I paid (and was useless to me when I got here). I think the point is, you should have _a_ visa, but don’t need anything more specific than that. Ie: go for the cheapest option.

6. The Weather. The rains begin to end at the end of September, so anytime from October through December would be awesome. We leave sometime around New Years I imagine.

Those are the details. That is the love. I’m writing this from the “Mosquito Room” at the Welthungerhilfe office in Monrovia, so-named because of the Mosquito net propaganda posters on the wall, supposedly. But I can feel the biting at my feet, now up-crossed in the fancy swivel chair, and I’m thanking my lucky stars I took my Chinese malaria medicine this morning… I’m probably 1/3 of the way through my project of research and writing agricultural training manuals for local farmers, due on the 25th of August. I’ve met with some incredible people and eaten some incredible fruits (and vegetables) of their labors, and now begins the time where I must earn the respect I’ve been given and produce something beautiful and relevant to their lives.

together,

Ankur

ps The title is apparently a common phrase here. It means, “Arab Money Never Ends”. Common enough that the phrase ARAB MONEY was emblazoned on a taxi we saw last week, leaving the passerby to mouth the implied “Can’t Finish” to himself in a pleasant chewy wonder.

I’ve also done a great job – if I do say so myself – in not producing the little audio segments I’ve been assembling out of bleating goats, coughing generators, laughing children, frying chiles, and various other aurals and ends that decorate our West African existence. I haven’t pounded out lengthy complaints and analyses of power dynamics among the different ethnicities, classes, and stati here, though I’m often going over it in my head. I haven’t spent any time on the Humanitarian Industry and what a disaster its existence is in many ways (perhaps fitting, because its non-existence was and would also be another set of disasters). And I certainly haven’t bitched in written form about US AID contractors furnishing themselves 3,000 USD apartments with taxpayer money and then winking and clinking glasses over it.

So I suppressed writing about meeting my neighborhood kids and even the neighborhood farmers (Alfred and Clinton, who are awesome), about running with my new friends on the beach and listening to their songs. I even didn’t make time to write when I was applying for consultancies with the aforementioned Humanitarian Industry, and neither when I got the jobs I wanted (I am now a sort of West African Desktop GIS specialist and Agricultural Training Manual Designer, á la fois).

But here I am,

on the balcony

in the rain,

with sugary juice

and the sweet fragrance

of burning plastic in my system.

And the thing I can’t not write about anymore is the little girl I just meant. I don’t remember her name (I’m terrible with Liberian names so far, I can’t understand why, perhaps it’s true that I’m getting older) but she was small and wearing a green dress (maybe it’s called a frock) and had no shoes and was dragging a plastic garbage can as large as she was, away from my “compound” (the 10 foot high wall that surrounds this three-story cement house, looking over the beach, the Atlantic, the Chinese embassy, and a score of abandoned unpainted concrete buildings that, I have learned, are not-at-all abandoned).

I see the little green girl dragging the big green plastic garbage can and I’ve got nothing to do so I offer to help her and she accepts. I haven’t seen her before and assuming she is a neighborhood kid getting some water or something for her mother. The “abandoned” buildings are probably innocent of running war, so it’s not such a strange idea to get from the neighboring “bossman” compound. But we go past the first inhabited ruins and down a small gully, cross a road, and start heading down a worn path through the bush. I haven’t seen any houses that way – I know the lagoon is up ahead soon – and am curious to find out where she, and I guess we, are going.

But it isn’t until we right up to a stinking pile of plastic and scraps do I understand that we’re not carrying water in the green garbage can but we’re actually a funny not-black man and a small green black girl carrying garbage. I release the can, she tosses off the lid, overturns the contents, and says “Thank you”. I am too taken with seeing the remnants of my way of life to respond.

The same plastics, bottles, wrappers, and food scraps that I haven’t pushed my “family” (6-8 expatriate United States citizens wrapped up in the now-famous Humanitarian Industry) to separate, reduce, or more efficiently dispose of, now right in front of my eyes, and under the bare feet of this small green black frocked girl.

We fed the food scraps to the downstairs neighbor’s goat until they ate it three weeks ago. Now it’s all just a big mess. I save some of the seeds to plant, and reuse all the good plastic bags, and save the beer bottles for local kids who want them, and try to reuse the juice bottles for spice containers. But you wouldn’t guess it from looking at this pile of rubbish, rapidly decomposing and toxifying, at the edge of this local lagoon where my neighbors fish and bathe.

So there’s that. A moment for that. Please, just a moment.

And a strengthened awareness of the immediacy and power of a zero-waste lifestyle, how “humanitarian” it could be for this little girl’s life, and my own. Tonight, enshallah, Kate and I are moving into a new home, just 200 meters away, bordering the same lagoon. I am prepared to reuse, upcycle, save, compost, and burn anything I need to, but I don’t want another piece of my consumer lifestyle to touch the hands or feet of that little girl.

Of course, the only real solution to the Trash Issue is through developing the consciousness that “There is no such thing as away”. “Away” is a fiction. We are throwing our garbage onto other creatures: human creatures, animal creatures, plant creatures, soil creates, planet creatures. There is no away that’s not somebeing‘s home.

okay. Not so cheery. And I’m not even going to make the time to get into a harangue about how REDUCTION (not induction) is the only solution, because I’m going to make some popcorn for my home-coming lover, and dress it with tahini (whose plastic container I will use to store fresh peanut butter from the local market).

one love through it all,

ankur

All I need is for
everybody I have ever Loved
to be here
with me
Right Now

Running off the far end of the day
Twilit surf hard hitting the striated sands
at 20 degrees

The cascade of scrambling crabs
diving into the wreck
one after another

Even as their sandy canvas
In its patterns of tan, beige, and charcoal
Watches the salt water wick away,
shade out into lightness.

Of course,
You’re already here.

In the hanging gibbous moon
the imprint of each footstep
each knee high over the surf
and the cheap love of Brasilian sandals
in my hands, I hold you.

It’s as clear as night
that I couldn’t have woken up without you.

No, I would never stand for such a thing

And yet,
every moment that remembers me
who I truly am,
pushes me
to share.

[ ankurbhai delight / congo town / monrovia / liberia / west africa ]