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 ]

http://mdiv.wordpress.com/2010/06/22/lost-meadow/

one love

Ankur

Let’s get something straight here. There’s going to be a lot of talk about “black” people. Not like “black people like mayonnaise” or anything like that. More like “That black person is very black”. And when I talk about black people, in the following words, paragraphs, days, and months, I will mean someone whose skin is very near to the color black. Not black in terms of race, ancestry, heritage, or anything like that. Black like the color.

Now.

The first image I have is from this morning’s expedition (rolling in the President’s taxi, comme toujours) to Waterside, a district in downtown Monrovia whose streets are crowded with water, running and still, trash, goods, and services. Everything cloth plastic and metal a consumer could consume. Complete with MAERSK freighters on the backs of semi trucks stopping ahead of unload boxes of who knows what all and everything else (too).

At the top of the hill, we see a wildly painted motorcycle with Jamaican colors and two black men stop at a policeman’s request. The policeman (black) puts his hand on the motorcycle, turns the key, shuts down the bike. I can’t hear him ask for money but the President fills me in. As we roll down the hill I turn to see the driver push away the policeman’s hand, start the bike, and go through the intersection. The power is there, but neither just nor respected. One hopes for a connection.

What is most clear to me here, and why perhaps I couldn’t write anything before today, is know less about this place than I do about any other. And, to tilt the ratio even further from understanding – I have been told so much in relation to what I know. So much about the mythical Africa. So much I have been told, been read, and so much I have soaked up just from thirty decades of reading the news and histories.

When I got here, for perhaps the first time in my life, I felt trepidation. I have been told so many times that “Africa” is dangerous. Unsafe. Insecure. I have to be careful. So I get here, to a cheap hot airport, amidst red clay soil, and wait for bags expecting to get robbed or accosted. And what happens? Nothing. Fewer touts and distractions than everywhere I’ve been in Asia, safer roads and fewer drivers than I’ve seen in Central America. Not that it’s not dangerous, it’s just that all of the hype leaves me in a position where I can trust none of the hype. It’s the same story – so much of what they taught me in school was wrong (or plain lies), so much of what I read in the news was wrong (or deceptions), that I get to a point where I desperately want to trust what someone, of us or them I care not, says, and – once again – I can’t.

So here I am, in the one place in Monrovia where I can get some internet, an air-conditioned hotel serving me an excellent (as too oily as it would be in India) plate of vegetable biriyani, and all I know is I’m committed not to talk about Africa or Liberia in any general terms at all.

What I do know, though, as always seems to be the case, is what I love. So that’s what I can talk about today. And this is what I love: the President, the Ocean, and the Market.

The President started off as a humble taxi driver, christened Anthony, born in Liberia, exiled to Guinea and the rest of West Africa during years of civil war, and now back in the country, living with his mother (who never left, all through the war), and driving a taxi. So, to be fair, he was Kate’s driver when she came on her exploratory visit back in March, and was our driver back from the airport a week ago today, last Monday. But pretty soon it became clear to all of us – Kate, Anthony, and myself – that Anthony knew everything that we needed to know, could do anything we needed done, and was fair, just, vigilant, and compassionate in the way a leader must be. So he became the President, and we became his ministers. Naturally, Kate is the Minister of Gender. And I am the Minister of Culture. All the Presidents humans. Well, you know, there’s only three of us know. But good government starts small, that’s our theory.

The Ocean is what keeps it real, pulls my head out of the fog of prejudice and the general sense of Lost that dogged me for the first few days here. I can’t go out at night (it’s “dangerous”). I can’t walk long distances by myself (it’s “dangerous”). But I can go down the Ocean, a five minute walk past the few neighboring houses and children. I cross as the neck of the lagoon, crest a ridge of stand, and mind myself face to face with ferocious blue-brown water, just an eternity of sound and storm and water between us and Brazil, past and present, here and there. Just one eternity. The same red palm oil, the same huge mango trees, the same traditional blouses and hats of the women. So I go to the Ocean, run along the beach and surf, splash up to my knees, dream of frisbees, smile at the couples making out in the sunset, and literally feel myself forget what I’ve been told…

The Market of course is the antithesis of the air-conditioned Internet hotel. Everybody is black and bustling. In the morning all the produce is vibrant, before being sapped by the heat. Here’s a brief catalog of what I’ve found so far:

eggplant (five or six kinds, sized from raspberry to plum, colored white, yellow, orange, and green).

eggplant, four inches long, purple, striated

okra

chiles (pimenta malagueta, like in Brazil), big piles for 5 LD each

plantains (four for 50 LD)

cassava, potato, and other tubers

greens (a whole section devoted to them: the greens from cassava plant, from potato plant, and various others I don’t recognize, all sold as 5 LD for a two-hands-full, or processed through a machine (looks like what comes out the wrong end of a juicer) for use in soup (pictures to follow)

peanut butter (homemade, for use in soup, 10 LD for a small plastic pouch the size of a plum, maybe 50 g)

palm oil (looks just like dende in brazil, 40 LD for 500 mL)

rice from the USA (parboiled and not), China (parboiled and not), and Liberia. we have the Chinese stuff at home, and while it’s tasty and somewhat brown (maybe parboiled but not husked?), it’s also the dirtiest rice I’ve ever had. eight washes and I still feel like I taste something old and musty when we eat it. bought the Liberian stuff today.

all kinds of beans and lentils – including what I recognize as chori from India, pinto beans, and some kind of scarlet runner beans, in addition to black eye peas and other split peas.

generally a trend I’ve noticed in markets all over the world: beans cost about twice as much as rice. seems to imply the conventional nutritional wisdom is that you should cook twice as much rice and beans to get your complete proteins…

*

So there’s that. First impressions of my time here on the third floor of a house, sharing a bedroom with Kate and common space with four other US ex-pats in the NGO world. Listening to the roar of the Ocean and the snap of lightening. The rainy season delivers. I’ll have some audio soon, and recipes to boot. I’m keeping it real. That much we can be sure about. I’m keeping it real.

Also, as a post-script, Kate and I saw “Good Hair” last night. It’s a movie made by Chris Rock about African-American hair culture. I’m hesitant to say “black” hair culture because I’ve just learned that the “black” people in the US, though browner than I am (mostly), are still pretty much brown. These people, all around me, are Black. Like, the color, you know.

Ankurbhai

I am in Liberia with Kate, as of Monday June 14th, and until the end of 2010, it seems. There will be a trip to the US for perhaps around a month (in August/September) during which time I can pick up mail and what not. Still have not figured out exactly what I’m doing here (it’s been four days) besides eating mangos (which are copious).

There is so much I feel I want to share, but it’s been difficult to process the time here, very overwhelming. Heaviness. I’m just not sure about much. But I’m sure that will come.

Love,

Ankur

contact information a

www.mangolandia.org/contact

one love

- ankur

*

Dear Friends,

I have been living in India with my brother Ben for almost a month, and only now have caught up with myself enough to write to you all.  I am in the small southernmost state of Kerala, proud and tropical, and anyone here will tell you that Kerala means “Land of Coconuts” and that there is no place better.  In fact, it is the land where the Gods themselves reside: “God’s own country” is spread across billboards and brochures far and wide.  In the frequent temple rituals at this time of year, a man will dress in the outrageously gigantic red black and silver tradional costume of a god, and in turns he will dance ecstatically to the manic beat of the temple drummers, roll his eyes about as if possessed, hand out turmeric powder for anointing one’s forehead, play with fire, and walk over hot coals.  It is believed that when someone takes on this costume, they are no longer human and actually become the god.  The ritual is of man turning into a god.  It is serious business, and the Malabaris crowd neck to neck inside the temple grounds to watch, sweating and waiting to receive their individual blessing from the god with solemn intensity.

I am on the Malabar coast, the dazzling region Columbus dreamed of when he ran ashore in the Bahamas in search of Indian spices.  I was here six years ago, when I stepped off the bus in a town I’d never heard of simply because it was so beautiful, I felt I need go no further.  Drinking chai on a streetcorner later that day, I, Jess the younger, befriended Jijo, a local boy my age who I decided to take a chance and trust.  As a 21 year old white girl traveling alone, making friends in India was extremely difficult for me.  The men generally had obnoxious motives and the women rarely talked to me.  So Jijo was unique, and I looked him up last week when I found myself back in Kerala.  He was so thrilled that I remembered him that he adopted every waking moment of our lives for the next five days. This became very frustrating by the end, playing polite at the house of every ever-more-distant relative, posing for photos with strangers who wanted to show their friends they’d seen a foreigner.  And this brought back into focus one of the most pervasive themes of my experience of India.

I have adoped Indian dress and mannerisms here and taken to heart as many of the cultural eccentricities as I am aware of.  I do this because I want to blend in as best I can, to not offend, to learn, and to be able to walk between worlds.  I did this continuously the first time I was here.  But India is a particularly difficult place to travel, despite the widespread use of English, because your foreignness is constantly, poignantly reflected back to you, no matter how well you attempt to blend in.  When you are white, you are treated as a freakish anomaly.  Everyone wants a piece of you while seeming either uninterested or unable to learn who you really are.  I was trying to figure out the reasoning behind the phenomenon of strangers asking to have their photos taken with you.  To Ben I mused, “It’s like you’re walking through a forest and you see a bear, and the bear is friendly and doesn’t want to kill you, so of course you want to take a picture of yourself with the friendly bear so you can go home and show all your friends.”  It is exactly like that.  Exciting, weird, alien.  As a foreign visitor in India, you have two options:

1- You can go to all the famous tourist spots, where you will meet other foreigners, and you will relate primarily with foreigners, most of whom you easily could have met in your hometown, and you will get taken advantage of by the Indians, or they will be your servants.     OR,

2- You can be a complete alien, and will be treated as such.  There is no way you can appear any more of a freak than you already are, Indian dress or no Indian dress.  So you can sing gaily down the street at the top of your lungs and people will stare only just as much as they already were.  Six years ago, sailing on this freak status, I rode a bicycle across Tamil Nadu, a state where it is unthinkable for a lady to ever ride a bike.

So yes, there is a freedom in this anonymous casteless status, but it also means there is nowhere for you to fit in the fabric of society into which the Indian is elaborately woven from birth to death.  And here is the paradox.

At 21 I was more flexible, more enduring, and more full of wonder.  I took it all as it came, with gratitude, because that trip was my initiation and for it I’d offered up my life, praying all the while, half believing I’d never come back.  Every experience, good or bad, was a flake of divine grace communicating with me.  I became aware of backpacker culture for the first time, and as a pilgrim I was offended and humbled by it.  I had believed I was unique.  On a pilgrimage, I was searching for that carnivorous, dangerous edge beyond which one may catch a glimpse of the sacred.  I was devastated to find myself reflected in so many who came to this place for vacation, whiling away the days drinking mango lassis, smoking hashish, and playing chess.  Now I have softened.  These people have probably become my friends.  But then, nurturing a dream of wild magic haunted India that I’d cherished since childhood, I could not bear it.  I set off for places uncharted, and spent six months as Alien– very, very alone.  And India was extremely kind to me, aided and protected me, as it has done for true seekers for longer than all my lifetimes.

Now I am completely different.  I seek real friends, lasting connections, a place of my own, and the peace and time to focus and work.  I am here to hang out with Ben and to design my new clothing line, with the added bonus that I can drink fresh grape juice and eat coconut chutney every day.  Vast mysterious gaudy outrageous playful odorific hot dirty India is a royal distraction, and I realized almost immediately upon arriving here that I did not want to travel.  Yet here we were.  Ben and I weighed our options.  Either we could join the ranks of other tourists and expats who peopled the known hotspots or we could strike off for unreviewed territory and attempt to settle somewhere off the tourist map.  Of course, die hard individualists that we are, we opted for the latter.  Which, we discovered, is harder than we thought.

Indians are familiar with the meme of the itinerant foreign traveler passing through on a grand India tour.  And in the well trodden places, there is an understanding of the long term visitor kicking it for a month on the beach.  But there is no blueprint for the foreign pair who want to rent a house for a month in a town no one’s ever heard of, where the only residents are families that have lived there for 8 generations.  We asked Jijo, our Keralan ambassador, and rather predictably, he invited us to stay at his uncle’s house.  We didn’t want the burden of being guests, and Jijo couldn’t think of another option, so we turned to Google.  Google gave us one option with a phone number, which I called, and in lightning Indian style, a man shows up at our door half an hour later with photos of his available rentals.  He interviews us: who are we, what is our business, what do our parents do, why do we want to stay for a whole month?  He explains that there are many other houses available at much lower cost, but that no one will rent to us because we are white.  There is a great distrust and suspicion regarding foreigners.  They will think we are spies. Oh.  Spies.  Ben and I crack up over this after he leaves.

The only house within our budget is a little one room cottage by the ocean with an open air kitchen and bath.The closest neighbor is a local police officer, so there is some concern that if anything went wrong, it would reflect poorly upon the police.  Today we went to see it.  The neighbor, who introduced himself as “Sargent”, wore a lungi and a t shirt and grinned at us amicably, laughing when I shrieked at the sight of a spider the size of my hand dashing across the kitchen floor.  Again we got the friendly interview, why do we want to stay so long?  what is it that we do?  Ben tells him he was a student at Delhi University, studying international relations.
“What?”
“Politics.”
“Hmm.”
And me? A clothing designer.  “Here, here’s my card.”  In a classic instance of brain lapse, I hand him my business card.  My business card has the image of a woman on all fours wearing a voluminous fur coat and very obviously nothing else, flexing a naked leg as far as public America would allow. He glances at it, still smiling, but pauses to carefully look me over.
“Hmm.”
Ben points out that he hopes he will still rent to us, the pornographer and the spy.  We think this is hilarious.  We ponder that the only way this house thing is working out at all is because we have each other.  Ben alone would surely be a spy.  And me, a lady alone for so long, would be unthinkable here.  But brother and sister, ahh, well that makes sense.  We want to make matching shirts that say, respectively, “Brother” and “Sister in Mallayallam (local language) on the front and “Spy” and “Pornographer” in English on the back.  Ironically, the Indian steriotypes in our case are not so far off.  Ben, a political major from Brown, was interviewed extensively as a candidate for recruitment by the CIA.  And I, well, I have partaken in some naked photos in my day.  But for now, the pornographer and the spy are merely American tourists, a clothing designer and a graduate, seeking the solace and solitude of the sea.

The house is quaint and so close to the ocean I can hear the waves crashing from my bed.  There are a number of young boys, who I have dubbed the Coconut Boys because their first question to me was whether I liked tender coconuts.  They climb the trunks of the palms that canopy my front yard and bring me green coconuts every day.  We have started to become acquainted with the neighborhood.  Late tonight we heard drums outside our door and got up to watch a procession of people with flickering lanterns and long curved swords passing by Sargent’s house.  They bless each house in their sub-caste in turn, throughout the night, even hours later I could hear the drums in the distance.  Ben was out on the porch, watching.  I join him a minute later. “Did you see a god?” I ask, without a trace of irony.  We look at each other and smirk.  When you can say “Do you see a god?” seriously, you must be in India.

I love you all,
Until soon we meet again,

Jess

dear fellow passengers

voyage is fractal. every space ship in every compart ment holds a flotilla of no-less-spaceships. and you’ve known all the pilots, or will.

I find myself wrapped up in interstate bus travel, enjoy the wilds and snows of connecticut and new york, the surprising springtime in boston, ahead of schedule and surely asking for a stern rebuke, and comfort and glory of travel itself, that precious time to ourselves, wherein we can discover whether we truly

enjoy

the company

we keep.

nothing like the metro north trains up the harlem line to the western tip of new york state, connecticut, and massachusettes, passing schoolchildren sledding and frozen swamps, whose barren trees poke out of their icy skirt, willfully demonstrating, it seems, that we have no idea how deep and tall they actually are. as a guest here, and a farmer, I wonder what people eat, if agriculture is possible in such climes, why – if indeed those scarred cones were once hale and productive apple trees – there aren’t still farmers coming out every wednesday to sell a new variety of apples they had been storing for

just

this

moment

winter apples and storage apples that don’t even ripen towards february. as it is, all the humans I know insist on shopping indoors, at big corporate organic supermarkets, where the apples come from washington or chile or new zealand. what ever happened to buying bulk in season? storage and preservation? shouldn’t there be a warehouse full of dirty local beets and cabbage and potatoes and carrots from earlier in the season, to buy 20 pound boxes of? isn’t that how we’re going to train people that you can always eat locally and of the land, that it’s not such a boogie fashion trend to breed new slivers of identity? are we talking about food or just another commodity?

the answer, of course, that the god’s always throw to us in times of need, is

MAPLE SYRUP

during my estancia with lizzie and baba (www.lizzieandbaba.com), the best music on either side of the mississippi, as far i’ve been concerned, we went out daily to harvest and drink the sweet coconut-water of the northern climes, cold as the driving snow, right from the tree. raw, unpasteurized, innocent of refineries and rbgh, non-gmo or anything but divine.

and then you can boil it, down down down to the 40:1 recommended ration (that’s 2.5 gallons to the cup) to get the hot sticky syrup that contains (I swear to the gods, all of them)

vainilla, butter, caramel, pine, butterscotch, rum

in every warm mouthful. maple syrup. it must be what these strange northeastern native survive upon for the winter season, because god knows there’s nothing else around but snow and firewood.

anyhow, back to the voyage at hand. fellow sojourner and truth-seeker

(responsible for these photos of our bicycle trip through india: http://mangolandia.org/photos/twopass/

)

TOMAS WERNER

TOMAS WERNER

(www.tomaswerner.com)

has departed his native slovakia and temporary asylum in mexico to run rough-shod over the north of amerika, by bus and photography, through the following states of the union:

NY-DC-VA-NC-SC-GA…..all the way to San Francisco

(which is a state)

He is a consummate artist and (easter) european. You will not be disappointed. Please host him on his travels, or at the least, send the modern de Toqueville a message of support (not more than 160 characters, please).

His phone number is: 347-574-6862

As for my own self, I’m in Boston for the week and entering the fog thereafter. Perhaps a weekend in DC in mid-march, and totally lack of clarity for April. I’ve started working for The Man again, a few hours a week, in the material form of two cool Michigan dudes based in San Cristobal (I can’t imagine a better look for The Man), so I may head back down there for a spell.

As always, tomorrow never knows, but the idea of actually living out a season on a farm calls to me deeply, and it’s unclear how long I can, or should, resist.

one love

many instruments,

ankurbhai

]]> http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/326/feed 0 http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/323 http://www.mangolandia.org/archives/323#comments Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:36:54 +0000 ankurbhai http://www.mangolandia.org/?p=323 feb 20 / norfolk ct / usa / 2010
dear(est) friends

It’s an eventful life. The book reading in philadelphia went really well, with beautiful conversation around the book. I’m growing more comfortable with the idea of talking about this thing I did as if it has some interest to others. A dangerous comfort, perhaps.

Anyhow, I’m doing another reading here with my friends Lizzie and Baba in CT. It’s tuesday at 5-8 at their home. If you want to come, let me know, and I’ll give you the address.

If you are not in Connecticut for some reason (why? it’s where the action is. if by action we mean snow and lack of fresh fruit), then there is actually some kind of

LIVE (free or die)
TELEVISION
INTERNET
SHOW

that Lizzie and Baba do every Sunday. It’s called This Abundant Life, and I recently found out that I’m going to be on it, with or without a haircut it seems, this Sunday (tomorrow).

check it out here:

http://tiny.cc/W2UB8

(special guest ankur shah)

The fact that’s it’s LIVE (free or die) means that you can’t watch it later, I think. 7pm Eastern, 4pm Western. Fill in the blanks, Australia.

Apologies for the events-oriented nature of this email, more storytelling and some photography from Mexico lindo y querido coming next week. But I’m really delight for some measure of rural stability after the last three weeks in north american megapoli, and here I can wake up to the meditation, music, and woodstove that do me well.

one love
ankurbhai

ps never stray from the funk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHE6hZU72A4

There is book reading in Philadelphia at 7pm at Wooden Shoe Books this Thursday February 18th. They contacted me after the reading at Bluestockings last summer, and I’m excited that we finally organized a day together. If you happen to be in or near Philadelphia, it would be great to see friendly/known faces in the audience, or if you think somebody might enjoy the event, please let them know.

Usually with book readings I try to get everybody’s name and a sense of what people want to hear about, there’s no predetermined sermon or anything. Although, sometimes, true to the name, I will read. And I take requests.

After that, I’ll likely be doing some other readings in Connecticut and maybe down in Baltimore next month, as part of my East Coast estancia. As they say, the hacienda must be built. Mexico was three trips in one and I have old napkins and Gandhian cotton paper full of stories and ruminations that I may or may not put together in the coming times.

It feels like I’ll be on the East Coast until May and I’m excited to visit the Beautiful people, so please send me an email if you’re down. And if you want to organize a reading in your hometown, that’s a great excuse as well. And I have a phone. And if I haven’t called you yet, it’s entirely my fault.

All love

Ankurbhai