Discovering the World Cup in 2008

I saw my first World Cup match in July of 2008. On a military base. In Kyrgyzstan. Having never been in the military, only a series of strange events would have put me there that summer.

From July 2008 to August 2010 I was a Peace Corps volunteer in a small mountain village in Kyrgyzstan. In early summer of 2010 peaceful protests began with the goal of forcing the president of Kyrgyzstan out of office. The protests were met with violent government repression. Hoping to deter the protestors, the president contracted snipers who stationed themselves on the rooftops around the capital city. As the protestors, mostly university students, marched down the streets, the snipers aimed and fired. 81 Kyrgyz youth were killed over several days, and violence broke out across the country. The Peace Corps program determined that the volunteers were at risk, and the evacuation plan was set into motion.

A military base is the last place on earth you would expect to find a group of Peace Corps volunteers. And it would have been the last place on earth we wanted to be, except that there was lots of food there. After surviving for two years on very meager village diets, most of us would have done just about anything for a balanced meal.

I don’t want to paint an inaccurate picture here. I definitely hadn’t been starving. But I had been hungry. A lot. My primary diet consisted of bread and tea. Breakfast was bread and tea, lunch was bread and tea, and dinner was bread and tea. The next day started out the same, with bread and tea, except that lunch was boiled sheep meat and potatoes. While the male volunteers lost lots of weight and started to look gaunt, the female volunteers didn’t. Apparently male and female bodies metabolize carbohydrates differently. So while their malnutrition was obvious, ours wasn’t.

That was our physical state when we were evacuated to the military base. We were a motley group of about 30 malnourished volunteers, who had become used to bucket-bathing on a weekly basis during the summer (and less often during the winter). I can only imagine what the military men and women thought of us. We often spoke Kyrgyz or Russian among ourselves, made constant reference to strange Kyrgyz village traditions, and gorged ourselves on the mess hall food. And we were shameless about it. When you’ve been an outsider long enough, you get used to being ‘strange,’ to the point where you stop caring what others think of you. So we got seconds on Steak Night in the mess hall and took multiple showers a day. It was hard not to when the food was free and we had almost forgotten what running water felt like.

Then one night, one of the massive tents on the base was particularly loud. I remember standing outside in the dark and wondering what was going on there. The sound drew us in, and when we entered the tent, we saw hundreds of men and women in uniform seated facing a large screen, where a soccer match was being projected. The U.S. team was playing. Looking back now, I wonder how many of the people there knew the rules of the game. Certainly less than half. Probably less than a quarter. I definitely didn’t. But when the U.S. team scored a goal, the room erupted into cheers. A round of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants began and didn’t stop for a full minute. While I cringe when I hear a “U.S.A.!” chant now, at that moment it made me grin ear-to-ear.

Today was the last semi-final match of the 2018 World Cup, and while I watched the game (well done, Croatia!), I couldn’t help but think back to my first World Cup match back in 2008. Although almost everything about my life is different, the happiness that the World Cup ignites in me remains the same. 

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. 

Goodbye Peace Corps

Where to begin?  This is always the hard part.  I only sit down to write in my blog once a month and I have to man-handle myself to keep me seated in my chair long enough to produce something.  And as those of you who have been following my blog this year can testify, that something is just about anything. 

This is probably (almost certainly) the last blog I will write as a Peace Corps volunteer.  Who knew when I joined Peace Corps in July of 2008 that it I’d still be serving in December of 2011, 3 ½ years later?  Peace Corps has been good to me.  My life in Kyrgyzstan was tough.  Really, really tough.  But I learned so much through my experience there that I otherwise may not have ever seen or understood.  Now Peace Corps has brought me to another continent, this time in my hemisphere, to teach me more about the world and about humanity. 

Everything has been different this second time around.  Instead of freezing winters huddled around coal-fed stoves, the tropic sun warms my skin and bleaches my hair.  Instead of visiting a public bathhouse (with all the women of my community) once every few weeks, I have a private bathroom and I shower daily.  Instead of travelling 2 hours to a neighboring city to use the internet, I have wifi in my house.  And instead of going months without access to fruit or vegetables, I buy the most delicious and exotic fruit from street venders and eat it wherever and whenever I like. 

But there are some similarities.  In both countries, divided by oceans, culture, climate, and religion, one similarity is that the education system is completely broken.  Students who don’t study, still pass to the next year.  The biggest lesson to be learned in school is that studying isn’t important, because no matter what everyone passes in the end.  While no teenager in the world wants to study, it’s their parents’ responsibility to make sure that they do it.  To make sure that they understand that one has responsibilities as well as rights.  That success requires effort and determination.  Without those lessons at home, the teacher’s work in the classroom multiplies 100 fold.  And if that teacher doesn’t have disciplinary support from the school’s principal and vice principal, the task nearly impossible. 

And just like in many places in the U.S., schools focus on preparing students for standardized tests and not for real life.  The teach them to memorize facts and quickly find key information in a text, but don’t teach them to be critical of the source of those “facts” or to analyze the information contained in the text to be able to apply it to real life situations and decisions.   Parents, family, friends, citizens, I appeal to you!  Education is the foundation of a healthy, rational, flexible, and industrious society. An investment in education (quality based) is the best investment we can make. 

Having stumbled into education, I continue in it as something I love and am passionate about.  I still haven’t decided where I’ll be working or living next year, but somewhere here in Colombia (si Dios quiere).  After two months of sending my resume to anyone and everyone, I received two job offers that are both very appealing for different reasons.  Before I got any job offers, I was having to serious think about a border-jump to get a new visa.  I was considering crossing the border into Venezuela, Panama or Ecuador so that upon re-entry I would be given a tourist visa that would give me more time to find work.  Thank God it now looks like that won’t be necessary. 

I have been very blessed to be able to live like I do.  I hope I never take it for granted. 

Goodbye Peace Corps.