Time Travel

There’s a folder in my old computer’s D-drive that’s titled “Smart.”  It’s between a folder called “SamsungRecovery” and another called “SMART Notebook 11.”  Curious of its contents, I clicked it open.  Inside reads: “This folder is empty.”  Figures.  ;)

Solo existimos por un momento porque en el siguiente, ya somos diferentes: cambiados por el momento que vivimos.

I keep a journal.  It's a Word file that I’ve kept it since 2007 and it's my most valued material possession.  It turns out that we don’t remember things as they were, because we aren’t who we were.  Our memories are tainted (airbrushed, embellished, whittled down, etc.) by all the experiences that separate us from that time, that moment.  My journal allows me to step back in time, into a world written by my former self.  It’s not objective, and that’s the point.  It is my history, as I perceived it, as I experienced it, unaltered by subsequent knowledge and perspective.  

I haven’t written in the journal since January, marking the longest stretch of time without an entry since I began writing.  These last 4 months have been a whirlwind.  I was taking 5 classes and doing a 16/hr./wk. internship during my last semester.  I only needed 3 ½ credits but there were too many classes that I wanted to take and I couldn’t resist.  So I was caught up in dealing with Boston’s snowiest winter on record, writing papers and doing projects, socializing, and suddenly, one by one my classes ended and final project were submitted and it was over.  My year at Harvard – finished.

It was a great run!  The International Education Policy program pulled people from all corners of the globe together; people who’ve seen, experienced and done amazing things and know how to live hard: people who imagine a more perfect world and believe that education can take us there.  People who, by birth, breeding, or dumb-luck, have learned to be shameless in their celebrations of life and full of love for people known and unknown.  While sometimes too ambitious, sometimes too diplomatic, sometimes too traditional in their ways of thinking and ways of being, they are kind and exuberant to the core. 

I went to Cambridge with many prejudiced expectations.  I thought that I’d find myself surrounded by students of privilege, self-importance, and arrogance.  I worried that I wouldn’t belong, that I would rage against this school for the elite, while nevertheless secretly feeling lucky that I had been accepted by it.  What I found was that many others had those same fears.  Many were, for better or worse, a lot like me.

I won’t summarize my experience here.  Summarizes are like inkblot images compared to the real thing; they never do it justice.  I will, however, offer some highlights:

- Dancing a choreographed Bollywood-style dance at the HGSE Multicultural Celebration

- Pre-gaming, gaming, and post-gaming the Harvard-Yale football game

- Singing “A Whole New World” and playing games around the Thanksgiving leftovers

- Performing “Stay with Me”- a rendition of “Stand by Me” that we wrote for our economics professor

 - Crashing every Kennedy School Friday Social during Fall semester

- Crashing every Design School Friday Social during Spring semester

- Freezing, being ambushed, and planning an emergency evacuation during a humanitarian disaster simulation in the national park

- Dancing at the Latin America Learns conference after-party

- Editing the “Greatest quotes” surprise video for Prof. Felipe’s spring course

- Preparing for and pulling off the IEP graduation flash mob

So another chapter in my life is over and while time will alter my memory of it, it represents another amazing experience that I feel overwhelming grateful for.  

My Memories, My Master's, My Idea

This blog consists of 3 parts:

My Memories: contains personal reflections about life

My Masters: describes the Master’s program that I'll be starting in the fall and what I hope to do after I graduate

My Idea: humbly proposes a solution to exploitative labor conditions around the world

Read the parts that you want to read; this is not required reading. :)

MY MEMORIES

My memories are stored in a folder on my desktop.  That thought crossed my mind and was almost gone before I realized how strange it was.  I have a folder that’s titled “Memories with M” and in it I keep pictures and conversations that I’ve saved and don’t want to forget.  My memory has been ‘externalized’ to my computer.  I know that with time my memory of those events, of those moments, will fade, and because now it’s all still too fresh, too poignant, I can’t stand the thought of losing those memories.  So I’ve stored them.  Whether I will review them later or not, time will tell.  But for now it’s comforting to know that I have them: that they are there, still real and still vivid and I can relive them when I want to. 

(Spoiler alert for SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5)

That reminds me of a book I read: Slaughterhouse 5.  Without giving away too much of the story, in this World War 2 book (based on real events), the aliens who abduct the principle character pity the human race because of our narrow perception of time: we only can experience the present.  For us humans, the past cannot be re-lived and the future cannot be experienced at will.  They describe this as if we were living life with a tube attached to our eyes that only allows us to see a small fraction of our lives at a time. The aliens in the book have a less linear timeline, and can experience any moment of their existence whenever they choose to.  How they manage to do anything is not quite clear.  For most of us, if we were able to step back (or step forward) into the happiest moments of our lives whenever we wanted to, it would hard not to spend all of our time there.  We have no choice but to continue forward, hoping that many wonderful moments are waiting to be discovered.

I’m continually amazed by how quickly memories can fade.  For 2 years I lived in a small village in the Tian Shan mountain range, in the middle of the largest land mass in the world.  My life consisted of going to school, teaching classes, making bread, serving tea, and walking around town visiting neighbors.  Nobody in my town had running water, our bathroom was a wooden box built over a deep hole and was 20 yards from the house.  The place where I bathed with the rest of the women in my community was on the other side of town.  In winter there was no salvation from the extreme cold reaching to negative 40degrees Fahrenheit.  It was an intense and very valuable experience, but when it ended it was as if a door closed to that world and that life disappeared.  When I left Kyrgyzstan, I traveled on to India for a few weeks, returned home for a couple of months, and then came to Colombia.  And I’ve been here since then (except for a 6-month excursion to Brazil).

This world exists completely separate from the world of Central Asia.  Everything is different: the climate, the language, the food, the clothes, the social norms, the gender roles, everything.  There are so many things about Colombia that I love, and so many that I hate.  Here is where I fell in love for the first time, where I experienced my first heart break, where I learned that life goes on, where I discovered that who I am is constantly changing.  Where I realized that experiences don’t define me (though they do shape who I am).  Some advice:

Don’t define yourself by your failures.  Don’t define yourself by your successes.  Define yourself by your friendships and by your kindnesses.

MY MASTER'S

This fall I’m going to begin a Master’s in International Education Policy.  According to the website, the program “is designed to develop students' capacity to think critically and systematically about educational inequality and educational reform, to analyze policy alternatives, and to evaluate policies and programs.”

Upon graduating my goal is to return to Colombia and work with community activists, nongovernmental organizations, and policy makers to reform education in order to provide Colombian youth with the analytical skills that they need, not just to make better lives for themselves, but to make a better country for all.  

MY IDEA:

Lately (all the time) people tell me “The problem is that there’s just not enough work for everyone.”  While that is generally accepted as a feature of today’s world, it actually makes no sense whatsoever.  How can lack of work be a bad thing?  Now we have machines that can plant, harvest, process, produce, fabricate, etc. most of the things that we need on a daily basis, reducing the physical labor that is needed.  We have computers to do much of our calculations, data processing, graphing, etc.  And so, now that technology can do so much for us, we have to do less.  The comment: “There’s just not work for everyone” should be met with applause!  Yay, less work for everyone!  But what we’re seeing is that many people get trapped working a lot while others are un-employed or under-employed.  Those who have jobs feel a constant pressure to work longer, harder, faster, better because if they don’t there are 10 people lined up who could replace them. 

So my solution is the 4-hour work day.*  Everyone would work 4 hours a day and be paid a living-wage for those hours.  The government would ensure that all of their basic needs are met (education, health, housing), and they would receive promotions/bonuses based on performance.  The better you work, the more you would earn.  Those 4 hours would be much more productive because people would be more energized and focused, and they would have more free-time to focus on other things outside of work.  The additional costs of employing twice the number of workers would be made up in reduced chief officer salaries.  In order for everyone to have basic living and working conditions, others would have to earn substantially less.  The top 5% could no longer enjoy the extreme wealth they currently have. 

We have the capability to produce everything we need without so many people subject to harsh, exploitative conditions.  It’s time to change the system.  All our “advancements” are not contributing to a higher quality of life.  It’s time to ask ourselves “why not?” and begin to demand that changes take place.  “There’s not enough work” should be a cause for celebration, not for preoccupation.  With a 4-hour work week, we would have more time to educate our children, explore, discover, invent, cure, entertain, create; the possibilities are endless!  But until we begin to question the assumptions that this system is based on, we will continue to belong to the most advanced slave plantation in history.

*I don’t know how feasible this really is, but surely there are better ways to organize labor than the current system.