black coffee in the hour of chaos

end of an affair

2009-11-06T02:37:00.000-08:00

SUBMIT. Maybe it was the David Lynch-like surreality of the situation, maybe it was the gnawing hangover, maybe it was the physical exhaustion, but the word etched itself first into my retina and microseconds later into my cerebral cortex. my mate and i had just spent the previous week covering a rather heroic distance (when considering our complete lack of anything even remotely reminiscient of an acceptable physical condition, that is) trekking through the andes, a feat we had then celebrated the previous night at our final camp with copious amounts of pisco sour and red wine. now we had returned to puerto natales, a remote, windswept fishing town, bathing in the immensely intense light of the sub-antarctic patagonian summer sun. staggering through the empty back streets of single-story wooden houses on weary legs and in a strange disposition of mind, both of us were taken aback when suddenly a midget was walking in front of us. wearing a black woollen hat, a purple anorak and grey sweatpants, the chilean dwarf had a message for us, written in hand-size letters, across his ass, in gothic script: SUBMIT

fast forward a few years and the same word has defined my life over the past few months, kept me awake at night, gotten me out of bed before sunrise, putting me into a strange state of mind and generally taking over my personality and my life. the word "submit" hung over my life like the sword of damocles, defined my interaction with the outside world (or what little was left of it) but now the deed is done, at last. i am finally there. i have sent the final electronic version of my phd thesis to my university in durban, signed the papers, ticked the requisite boxes - i have submitted. surreal.

for all its relieving qualities, its an odd feeling. picking up my reference books from the floor, the sofa, the bed and wherever else they had ended up over the last few days of my push to finish my thesis, closing them and putting them back into the shelf had an odd melancholic air of finality about it, like when packing up your things when a relationship has ended.

and what do i do now with my life? with all the extra time on my hands? start reciting old norse poetry? learn to play the ukulele? master the art of landscape architecture? i have the creeping suspicion that my boss might already have an aswer up his sleeve to that question...

northern exposure

2009-09-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

combining the need to gain some headspace with the opportunity to visit a place i had wanted to visit since i was a child, i found myself on a plane cruising towards the faeroe islands into a pastel-coloured sunset over the north atlantic. a sea, as james joyce poignantly observed, was both 'snot-green and scrotum-tightening' (but more about that later). while the occasionally visible natural gas rigs flaring off their excess produce were a sight in their own right, i was more fascinated by the alcoohol-consumption patterns on board. eventhough i am more than familiar with the attitude of finnish and other eastern european air travellers confronted with possibility of limitless booze on a flight, i must respectfully say 'chapeau' to the faeroe islanders. standard orders for the first round to go with the flimsy sandwich of a meal were along the lines of "two akvavit, three beers, and two baileys please. oh, and two bottles of red wine too if you dont mind. and maybe a whisky, just in case." the second round was no different and during descent my neighbour ordered three beers and two red wines which he heroically downed before disembarking approx. 7 minutes later. like said, chapeau!

if there was a recurrent theme in my conversations with faeroese, however, it was the weather. i have yet to find a society as weather-obsessed as the one here. on ethe one hand, it is of course more than understandable. sitting precariously on some steep cliffs in the middle of he north atlantic and completely at the mercy of the raging elements, it is an obvious issue to worry about. nowhere else have i been served a print-out of the updated weather forecast for the next three hours with breakfast in a hostel. but, and here's the crux, it was completely off. well, not completely. sun, clouds, rain and wind are constants; low fog, high fog, sleet are variables. all one can do is guess (and discuss, at length and to no end, as i found out) is in what order they will be comning in and for how long. from my experience so far 10-15 minutes seems a good bet, leading to scenes like the one today where an older villager told me, within a space of 20 minutes, first "ah, tis a pity you come now, such bad weather" to be followed by "ah, tis wonderful weather here, no? lucky you're here now!" and not be wrong in his statements.

apart from discussing the weather, chasing sheep and doing far too little work on my thesis, i decided to go beneath the impressive, pounding waves of the north atlantic. beautiful, colourful and immensely rich with life, which surprised me somewhat. but it was also quite heavy-duty. next time i dive off the balmy waters of bunaken in a t-shirt, i'll reflect back on how i was ungraciously struggling to clamber up a kelp-covered concrete pier in the pitch-black night with almost the equivalent of my bodyweight in equipment strapped on to me, pulled back down into the icy atlantic by the relentless surf and pushed back down by gale-force winds whipping the rain horizontally into my face. in and of itself a beautiful experience, though, and one that reminded me of how easy i often have it. and not just in terms of diving...

l'été indien

2009-09-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

i'm basking in the luxury of gliding along on my bicycle on crisp, radiant autumn mornings through the tranquil, tree-lined streets and alleys of old copenhagen to retreat into my cloistered room in the academic ivory tower. two weeks to go to finalise my dissertation and i'm wondering if i'm not feeling too over-confident about the prospects of meeting the deadline.

but be that as it may, it is refreshing to spend some weeks in the rarefied air of academia, be it here or last week at a conference in a faux-tudorian country house in the rolling hills of wales. these settings are so far removed from the realities of the places i write about and so are the theoretical discussions we're engaging in here in these serene surroundings. perhaps that distance is necessary to be able to reflect and analyse, but it does seem to be at least a planet away.

but enough musing for now, the deadline looms.

not in bruges

2009-09-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
où des diables en pierre décochent les nuages
avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
avec le vent d'ouest écoutez le vouloir
le plat pays qui est le mien

- jacques brel, le plat pays

unlike colin farrell who was afraid of having to spend eternity in bruges, the forces of destiny (or more precisely, my workload combined with the the occasional hiccups in the services of la société nationale des chemins de fer belges) seem to want to prevent me, not from the first time, from visiting bruges. so the eternal question of whether its a 'shithole' or a 'fucking fairytale' will have to remain unresolved for the time being.

so instead of wandering in the cobblestoned streets of bruges, sampling the gay beers or checking out the alcoves (not to mention some of the more extravagant activities apparently on offer there), i have been criss-crossing le plat pays by train, taking in the immense flatness of the landscape, the medieval villages huddled around medieval churches, the networks of canals, bridges and dykes, the lone monasteries and estate houses.

what i find striking especially in the netherlands, less so in laissez-faire belgium, is the stark geometricity which has been imposed on nature over the course of centuries and which also defines the parts of the cities which have been built since the war. clear lines, marked angles, monochrome colours. in the best cases, the result conveys a hyper-modernistic sense of transparency and lightness, in the worst cases its more like a bad acid trip in legoland.

speaking of bad acid trips, i was also hoping pay homage to the works of hieronymus bosch and pieter breughel the younger. alas, it was also not meant to be, but instead i did find an old statement by werner herzog which is highly appliccable to their works as well:

"es handelt sich hier um ungeheure, gültige metaphern. ich habe nur keine ahnung, wofür."

kulturkritik

2009-08-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

lost the culture, the culture lost
spun our minds and through time
ignorance has taken over

- take the power back, rage against the machine

i continued my journey from the dusty back streets of dili to a city-state which has often evoked contradictory emotions in me - and did not fail me in that respect this time around either.

it is in a way The New Jerusalem, the shining city on a hill, the model which other cities in the region want to emulate. jalan casablanca in my current hometown claims it shall become the new orchard road of jakarta when its newest shopping malls and exclusive condos are ready. its stylistic influence is more than visible in the futuristic, optimistic dreams of dilis urban utopianists displayed on posters in front of the perhaps-to-be-built shopping malls, office towers and casinos.

the real thing, in the meantime, is busy re-inventing itself with more glitzy malls, more high-rise, executive style living, more high-end shopping, and, inevitably, more rules and regulations. more courteously silent but politely insistent 'assistants' to show you with understated handsignals which side of the corridor you should walk on or which entrance you are not allowed to use. more public commons turned into private territory, more notices to make sure you abide by the rules. never is a voice raised, for they never seem to be need to be raised, be it in admonishment or in protest, for pretty much almost everyone except for me seems to not only accept the reglementations but positively embrace them - another trend the airconditioned nation has been exporting to its regional neighbours.

the benefits are of course obvious and i was able to enjoy them myself: an extremely efficient and functioning medical service; impeccable public transport services which are being constantly improved; well-kept parks, renovated old buildings and well-stocked bookstores in which to wander around; even a blue sky on an almost daily basis - a rare treat in jakarta. yet something seems amiss.

maybe its just me and my knee-jerk leftie instincts, but something to me does not seem to be quite right in a society where apparently the average consumer has six credit cards and the government has announced that spending seven times your monthly salary on a designer handbag is not excessive in these times of crisis, yet on the radio you have adverts for personality enhancement and management courses and senior government officials worry whether the average citizens 'might know the price of everything but the worth of nothing.'

i was particularily struck when i was wondering through the extremely worthwhile, eclectic and highly (overly?) ambitious museum of asian civilisations. the museum, in one of those twists of post-colonial irony is housed in a british colonial building lovingly refurbished by the former colonial subjects and which, in addition to the museum, has a franchise of a french-owned global bar which openly draws on the orientalist romanticism associated now by ex-pats and locals alike with the french colonial subjugation of cambodia, laos and vietnam. but enough about indochine, back to the museum: its excellent displays of what were basically snapshots of the immense cultural wealth of the region, of intricately crafted 3 000 year old east javanese bronze drums, of hmong hill tribe child-care and the non-linear geometry of ancient gujarati mathematics, the centuries of chinese political history, the tree-bark books of batak magic and traditional medicine written a mere 70 years ago but now almost forgotten...

all of this reminded me of something i at times forget, especially in places like singapore, jakarta, kl, manila, medan, shanghai, etc.: that there is so much here apart from the ubiquitous obsession with bmw, louis vuitton and prada; the fetishisation of western luxury goods and material wealth. yet i have a lurking suspicion that much of that rich cultural history is being lost, very fast, as the young urbanites spend their days in air-conditioned shopping malls slurping super-size soft drinks, eating western fast-food while playing online games on their i-phones.

culture, is of course not a museum but an interactive, ever-changing process of inventions and re-inventions, of appropriations and adaptations. but still the contrasting of what was on display in the museum and what i saw outside in the shopping district struck a melancholy note with me.

and yes, i do sound very old saying that.

new beginnings

2009-08-18T21:55:00.000-07:00

WHOOOMP! BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCE... SCREEEEEECCHHHWHIRRRRRR.... KLONK! it was a smooth landing at nicolau lobato intl airport. a smooth landing by merpati standards, that is. so i'm back to dili, almost to the day 10 years after i first got here. and somehow it feels like a good place to restart my blog, now that i've finally found the inspiration to do so again, an inspiration that had dissipated out of me about 1,5 years ago for a number of reasons i haven't fully explored but do have a vague sense of. but, be that as it may, the drive to publish the outpourings of my cerebral cortex is back again.

so its back to t-l, and this time i'm here as a mere lowly tourist, with (almost) no other agenda, and i'm seeing the country from a wholly new perspective. instead of trying frantically to arrange research meetings or trying to get my head around the latest political developments, i finally have the time and headspace to appreciate the beauty of the morning mist enveloping the fishing boats and vietnamese freighters in dili harbour, the dignity of the old villagers sitting in the late afternoon sun, the exhilaration of cruising along the hilly coastal road on a motorbike, the colours of the vegetable market, the strong coffee, the casual conversations.

nonetheless, the place has a peculiar, almost surreal touch to it, things which i have written about earlier here as well. the co-existence, in such a small geographical space, of the parallel worlds of the ex-pat malae, the non-ex-pat foreign laboureres and traders, the nascent local upper and middle classes, the urban under-classes and the rural population. and the heavy militarisation of the place, the striking, deliberate and calculated casualness with which the young local and foreign men (and on occasion, women) in uniform strut their assault rifles in public, implicitly displaying their readiness to use violent, lethal force.

since the last time i came here over half a year ago, the stability seems to have taken root in a more, there seems to be more confidence that it might last, but the fear of a communal 'relapse' is also evident. symptomatically, the sound of the siren of a passing ambulance had the cafe staff freeze, with grave worry etched on their faces. and as always, there is a sense of foreboding in discussions about the future. 'if all goes well in october,' then we will be ok was the refrain this time, the previous time it was 'if all goes well in january,' previous to that it was 'if all goes well in august...' nonetheless, things are moving on here, places are being fixed up - strikingly, especially those with a religious connection: the statue of jesus, the cathedral, motael church, the statue of mary. i hope the reconstruction will turn out to be more than just a fresh coat of paint, in more ways than one.

to sleep, perchance to dream... (aka freud would cry)

2008-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:00

since the conscious part of my brain seems to have switched off for the summer months, i'll go on autopilot, let my sub-conscious take over and jot down some dreams i've had, two older ones and two more recent ones:

old dream 1, approx 1994

i'm sitting in the backseat of a late-1970s model mercedes, dark green, the kind that are still popular as taxis in the middle east, which is rather fitting as this particular mercedes is indeed a taxi in the middle east, more precisely in lebanon and we are driving down the beirut corniche, the seaside promenade. and thats about all i remember...

follow-up in real life: interestingly enough, at least for me, when i actually did visit beirut about 13 years later, they still had the same kind of taxis and the corniche looked much like it did in my dream

old dream 2, approx 1997

i'm sitting on a couch in my friend's old flat in downtown helsinki (where i was actually staying at the moment) reading some textbook or other when a pink flamingo flies onto the balcony and then struts into the living room, which in reality as in the dream is full of books and dvd's. and thats about where the dream, or my memory of it, ends.

follow-up in real life: when i recount the story to my friend and his wife the next morning over breakfast, they laugh and say some words to the effect of "well, you know what they say about guys who dream of pink flamingoes..." later that day i find a book on interpreting dreams in a second-hand bookstore. no mention of flamingoes in it, though. my friend, in the meantime, was diagnosed as having a third nipple in a chilean navy hospital, but that's another story.

new dream, approx. half a year ago

i'm standing inside a multy-storey car park on the channel island of jersey, discussing with a british government official as to whether or not the alleged dumping of lightly radioactive materials by russian submarines within the 200 nautical mile zone claimed by britain in the north atlantic would constitute a breach of international environmental law.

follow-up in real life: none as far as i can tell, unless there is a court case pending at the international court of justice in the hague that i am unaware of (but perhaps sending somnambulant legal opinions to in my sleep)

new dream, few nights ago

am driving around ljubljana in a light-blue battered ex-yugoslav van that used to belong to the managua office of my ex-employer with a friend, looking for a restaurant that we used to visit when i was a child in the mid 1980s. seeing as i've gone veggie since, i couldn't help but wonder what i should order since their signature dish (pljeskavica sa sirom) wasn't really on my menu anymore, until i remembered, with a certain degree of relief, that my parents had visited the restaurant a few years ago and had mentioned that they now had other dishes (the ubiquitous pizza & pasta) on their menu these days as well.

follow-up in real-life: received an invite to visit belgrade again the other day. not quite slovenia but ex-yugoslavia nonetheless....

reality check

2008-07-07T16:01:00.000-07:00

a quick injection of non-fiction into this series of half-baked, semi-fictional, middling attempts at writing short stories:

the other day i (finally) managed to send out the first draft of my phd-thesis to my profs. when i clicked the "send" button, i was overcome with a sense of euphoria, of lust for life, which completely overtook the fatigue i had been feeling all week. but after about three minutes the euphoria subsided, leaving me with an empty feeling inside. having finished the draft, what should i now do with my life? (answer being: enjoy it. soon enough the profs will be back with their comments and you can lock yourself up in your academic chamber again and write the second draft)

due to circumstances, i've also been having a "home improvement"-month over the past few weeks and i can honestly say that no, i'm just not the type for that kind of lifestyle. and i've got the cuts and bruises to prove it, not to mention the new curses i came up with when i managed to both hit my thumb with the hammer and cause the bookshelf to collapse on me simultaneously.

l’humanité

2008-07-07T15:26:00.000-07:00

as i was listlessly poking at the tasteless nasi goreng which was technically my breakfast in the afternoon heat of jakarta, a man sat down at my table. all the other tables were free, so in spite of my slow hangover mood i was able to draw the conclusion that he probably wanted to talk to me. he was a whitey, in his late 50s judging by his looks, but he might well have been younger. he had a gaunt, drawn face, and the etched lines of his face and burst capillaries led me to jump to the perhaps unfair conclusion that the large bintang beer in his hand was not the first one in his life. he was the kind of person that this street, jalan jaksa, seemed to attract like a magnet. the human flotsam and jetsam of the industrialised countries that falls overboard at home and finds itself, 20, 30, 40 years down the line, washed up in sleazy, second-rate bars such as this one. lost, lonely, hanging on to the last scraps of their dignity.

without any further ado, apart from a swig of his bintang, he told me that he had thyroid cancer. he had been diagnosed just the other day, he couldn't quite say when, though, as he had been on a drinking binge ever since. and in the end, did it really matter now what day he found out? he didn't have any money for therapy, no health plan, he had burned his bridges in britain decades ago but had not been able to build any new ones on indonesia either. nor did he see his chances of finding a loving partner for the last few years of his remaining life as being too great: a dying, old, impoverished, alcoholic man does not really score very high in the highly competitive jakarta social scene.

i had in the meantime stopped eating my fried rice and wondered if i should say something, but there was no need for that, he was the one doing the talking.

and then he stopped. his eyes were fixed on something far away, metaphorically speaking, for in the grubby street that is jalan jaksa there isn't anything one could look at thats more then 25 metres away. after a moment's silence, he turned to me: "where are you from, anyway?"

"finland," i said, adding my first and last word to what had now become a conversation. "oh, finland...," he started, with a new-found dreaminess in his voice... "i remember finland well," he continued, almost as if transfixed, "the olympics in helsinki in 1952." he paused to sip his beer and his gaze was now fixated not only on a place far away, but also on a different era. "i remember it well," he said, looking through and past me with his glazed eyes, his back suddenly ramrod straight, as if in a past memory of better times, of more self-dignity, perhaps even of pride in himself.

lost in his own world, he continued slowly. "it was the marathon. i remember it well. it was the helsinki stadium, and emil zatopek came running in. it was the cold war, you know, and he was czech, but the crowd stood up and chanted his name... ZA-TO-PEK, ZA-TO-PEK, ZA-TO-PEK! cheering on the one who was supposed to be the enemy... oh, the humanity of it! the humanity!!!" tears started rolling down his worn face as he mumbled "the humanity, the humanity..." to himself a few more times, bleary eyes focusing on a better, other life. he then quickly finished his beer, stood up and continued walking down jalan jaksa as if in a trance, leaving me speechless and dumbfounded with my now-cold nasi goreng.

don't think twice, its all right

2008-06-30T04:31:00.000-07:00

the incongruous smell struck him as soon as he stepped off the train. that smell shouldn't have been there, not in that place, not then. it was the smell of coal being burned in stoves and it took his mind back to long train rides on cold winter nights, inching across the frozen ukrainian landscape. but this was germany, and it was now the middle of summer... looking across the tracks he saw the source of the smell - it was indeed a ukrainian train, the carriages were being heated up for the nocturnal journey to kyiv. the name of the city and the smell of the coal also brought back memories of the girl he had chosen to leave a year ago. he had wanted to let her go, to not waste her time, to not drag her down.

when they had parted at kyiv airport a year ago, a bob dylan song had been playing in his head. as if in a cheesy movie, a busker was now playing exactly the same song now as he stepped on to the metro, leaving the smell of the past behind him.

changi airport, poolside, 2004

2008-06-27T09:50:00.000-07:00

the gambler wiped the sweat off his brow and looked at the fake filipino passport lying on the table in front of him. idly he pondered whether or not he should use it when entering cambodia in the afternoon. in younger years, the thought of traveling with fake documents, the potential danger of it, would have made him giddy with anticipation. but now, he noted with a tired smile, even the question of whether to order a pint of tiger or heineken involved him more emotionally than the passport issue. too many years on the run already...

he took a gulp of the cold beer in front of him (he had settled for tiger) and lit up a cigarette. he thought about the girl. she had driven him to the airport and asked him to call once he got back. he wouldn't. not that there was anything wrong with the girl, at some other point in his life he might even have started some kind of serious relationship with her. but not now. he did not have the emotional energy left for a relationship. he was drained. he had nothing left to give. he exhaled the sweet smoke of the kretek, scrolled through the phone numbers in his mobile and erased her number.

a tribal gathering

2008-06-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

they had come from across the northern european plains, some even from beyond the alps, from beyond the pyrenees, from the plains of pannonia. most wore their hair long, beards left unshaven, tattoos and piercings all around. they wore the same tribal costume - t-shirt (preferably black), combat trouser-style shorts, old trainers. they had come together to the old citadel to pay homage to their idols, buy a ticket and a few beers and to communally vent their futile frustration against The System, a system which is able to co-opt even those who oppose it most, turning their teenage rebellion into a commodity like any other to be bought, sold, marketed and consumed. "the revolution is just a t-shirt away..."

****
post-scriptum: sitting around on the grass before the rage against machine concert i was once again struck by the "binary" attitude of the berlin police to their job. it seems to be either "full on," for example when their cracking skulls on may 1, or they go into their "off" mode, adopting a very lackadaisical attitude to keeping up law and order. the latter was the case in the car park and lawn in front of the concert, with hundreds of people drinking and urinating in public, illegally hawking tickets and openly taking various kinds of recreational drugs. just as the young czech fans next to me had lit up their joint, two cops showed up. the czechs froze, joint in hand. the cops gave them a quick look, then looked at the car that was parked next to them, picked up their radio and called hq: "this is foot patrol 5, we checked the situation out. its ok, the car does indeed have a handicapped sign. over." and left, leaving the smoking czechs completely dumbfounded.

bridge

2008-06-12T00:34:00.000-07:00

as it seemed a bit out of place to return to the "normality" of blogging and my original plan of writing more fictional stories after the previous two entries, which were about as rooted in reality as it gets, i felt that some kind of bridge was necessary before moving on.

as sad and painful as dealing with the recent deaths have been, they also have shown the beauty of life, as trite as that may sound. though i will be thanking you all in person in real life as well, i'd like to collectively thank you all already here for the support i have received from you.

sharon

2008-06-03T04:04:00.000-07:00

my last words i wrote to her were to take care. she said that she would try. twenty-four hours later she was dead. car crash. (again).

through my numbness memories come back - the sound of her bracelets jingling, her cooking, her sms'es from her night shift in some rural hospital, her striving to do good, her calling me the ice queen.

it seems somehow odd that her name and picture are still there on my skype-console. offline. forever. my last words to her were not delivered. and never will be.

in memoriam

2008-05-22T10:34:00.000-07:00

had things worked out differently, he would almost certainly have become a close friend. but we only met a few times, too briefly for deeper friendship to develop. and now his young life came to an end in a violent car crash. only a few days earlier, i had heard the news of the death of another man, this time of someone whom i had known for a much longer time but also had not been in contact with for as much as i now feel i should have.

if there is a lesson for the living that i can make out, it is that we can never know when it will be too late to reach out to other people.

frühlings erwachen

2008-05-11T07:32:00.000-07:00

as i returned from a brief trip britain the other day, it would be facile or me to go on my usual diatribe about how britain is a third world country with first world prices, with the exception that third world countries usually have better weather and food, friendlier people, functioning public transport systems, use the metric system, have a written constitution, better health care, and mostly have democratically elected locals as their heads of state instead of the wacky offspring of imported german and greek feudal overlords ruling based merely on some bizarre pre-medieval concept of god-given privilege. but i decided not to engage in my typical pastime of britain-bashing, even if the majority of the ludicrously overpriced trains i took broke down or got stuck in tunnels mere minutes into the journey, double-glazing or central heating still haven't made a breakthrough on the isles and there was a tb outbreak (!) in neighbouring birmingham while i was in coventry.

instead, with the coming of spring and all, i've decided to try a new format here on my blog: in lieu of my normal pontificating here i've decided to write little snippets of semi-fictional stories, mostly involving a character who bears a striking similarity to myself.

on to chapter 1, "the letter"...

it was a gloriously sunny day in berlin and having gotten most of his errands done quicker than expected, our protagonist decided to sit down by the spree in a small street-side cafe for en espresso and do something he had not done in a long time - write an actual hand-written letter. the letter was for an old, good friend of his, who by all accounts was quite ill at the moment, possibly very seriously so. the trouble was that his friend was too afraid to do a proper check-up, too afraid of hearing the verdict from the doctors - The Verdict, the one that says that your life is no longer consists of a carnival of opportunities that are out there waiting for you but that you are much closer to that inevitable ending point, much closer than you thought, that your life is soon over. for ever.

while he was writing the letter, hoping, wishing that his friend's condition was not that critical after all, his thoughts went back to the trips they'd gone on together, the evenings spent chatting away, his friend's duracell energy, the way his friend would (quite justifiably), chastise him for his crap dress-sense and puerile humour... while our hero's thoughts drifted across to the other side of the world, ships full of tourists drifted past the cafe and an old man stood on the bridge, singing "o sole mio" in a booming operatic voice...

the truth and nothing but...

2008-04-21T07:11:00.000-07:00

both in haiti and venezuela the initial reaction of people when they have seen me with a camera has been to assume that i'm a journalist, instead of the usual reaction of assuming that i'm a tourist. perhaps a dozen times, people in caracas urged me, assuming me to be a reporter, to 'tell the world The Truth about what is really happening in venezuela.' since i consider telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth both a philosophical and practical impossibility, i usually mumbled something spineless along the lines of 'i'll try my best...' only once did i actually falsely 'promise' to Tell The World The Truth, as that particular, slightly drunk chavista was getting increasingly aggressive in his demands that i promise to do just that.

so what's my version of The Truth about the bolivarian revolution? talking about latin american revolutions conjures up images of young, strikingly handsome, fatigue-clad guerrillas, male and female, somewhere in the cordilleras, kalashnikov in hand, battling the forces of oppression (visually exemplified by overweight, mustachioed latifundistas and brutal cops with cheap shades) and defending the rights of the down-trodden campesinos. what seems to be happening in venezuela is, however, much less melodramatic. the stated goal of building 'a venezuela, a present for everyone' consists of mundane measures such as installing wheelchair ramps at metro stations, drafting new zoning laws, building cable cars that will allow the people in the barrios which cling precariously to the steep hillsides surrounding caracas to travel into the city at subsidised prices, of providing cultural activities for free, of subsidised medicines and basic food stuffs, increasing access to education, instilling a sense of pride in the heritage of the previously marginalised non-european sections of society...

soppy leftie that i am, these all seem sensible to me and will maybe make more of a difference in society than the nationalisation of the odd steel mill or yet another fiery anti-american speech. there are some things which i am not completely comfortable with, though, such as the prominent role of the military, the cult surrounding chavez or his coziness with people like putin or lukashenka. but as for the goal of achieving a more just, inclusive, humane society, i wish the venezuelans the best of luck.

saints and spirits

2008-04-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

the walls of the little, side-alley shop are filled with bottles, statues, amulets, powders, potions and books. a young couple, assisted by the old lady behind the counter, is pondering which amulets they ought to buy, which ones would best serve their needs, fulfill their wishes...

the artefacts in the shop are all part of the local yoruba (or orisha) religion. like its counterparts in the caribbean and other latin american societies, yoruba is a mixture of catholicism, indigenous beliefs and african religious influences brought over by west african slaves. the catholic church saw these religions as pagan cults while the more earthly colonial masters feared the revolutionary potential of these movements which were beyond their control (and were quite possibly spooked by the undertones of black magic involved). and with good reason, as these various religious movements did in fact often provide an important structural basis for slave revolts, such as the 1804 revolt in haiti which eventually led to haitian independence.

being more or less forbidden religions, these syncretic movements often 'hid' their message in an accepted catholic packaging. for example, the west african trickster god eleggua has taken on the form of saint anthony of padua while the gifts given to santa barbara are actually meant for the goddess shango.

in venezuela, this veneration of saints, spirits and gods also involves the veneration of historical figures considered to have special powers, such as simon bolivar, guaicaipuro or the doctor jose gregorio hernandez. intriguingly, the yoruba pantheon also includes the figure of a viking, symbolising the norse settlers of vinland. unfortunately i was not able to elicit much more information about the figure, apart from that it is an auspicious figure and apparently a relatively popular one at that.

coming back to the young couple in the shop, i could not help but notice that they evidently didn't put all their faith in supernatural powers. in order to deal with more mundane problems of everyday life in caracas, they were quite conspicuously 'packing heat,' with a 9 mm automatic on her belt and a revolver on his...

roots, rock, reggaeton

2008-04-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

as mao famously said, the revolution is no tea party. but the great helmsman hadn't said anything about street parties... and so it happened that i found myself yesterday in a sea of red t-shirts and baseball caps, venezuelan flags and revolutionary slogans on a closed off stretch of one of the main streets of caracas.

by pure coincidence i seem to have arrived here in time for the celebrations marking the 6th anniversary of the failure of the anti-chavez coup in 2002. the occasion has been marked by above-mentioned street party, speeches, concerts, demonstrations and a military parade (assault helicopters and fighter-bombers screeching across the sky in the name of 'world peace,' of course...)

on the streets were about a dozen stages with salsa, reggae, reggaeton, rock, political speeches etc., stands were selling trotsky's books and popcorn, chavez-puppets and beer, revolutionary newspapers and ice cream. while the usual revolutionary suspects such as che, fidel and bolivar were feted, one could also see a concerted effort here to raise awareness of (and pride in) indigenous heroes such as cacique guaicaipuro who led a successful revolt against the spanish.

later on, the man himself, hugo chavez frias, gave a speech to his faithful, calling for a true bolivarian revolution, socialism, dignity, equality and vigilance in the struggle against The Empire...

while the chavistas were dancing in the streets, those not so positively inclined towards the revolution spent the weekend spending their money like there's no tomorrow in the shopping centres, restaurants and night clubs of east caracas, cruising around in oversized suv's, just like the nouveaux riches anywhere.

money is the root of all evil

2008-04-11T13:29:00.000-07:00

from a purely visual point of view, caracas presents itself as a slightly schizophrenic city. on the one hand, banners and murals 'welcome the socialist delegates to insurgent caracas,' urge the people to 'cultivate the seeds of the socio-cultural revolution,' remind us that 'the present (as in 'the now') belongs to all of us' and announce that 'under chavez, the people are the government.' these revolutionary slogans are, however overshadowed by 20 metre tall luminous nescafe cups, equally enormous pepsi signs, ubiquitous multinational beer commercials sporting scantily clad blondes and so on...

in a sense, the simultaneous struggle and co-existence of the two world views exemplified by the slogans could perhaps be seen as a reflection of where things are at in venezuela as a whole. one of the upshots of this struggle for the future of this country has been an economic crisis, with high inflation and an exodus of capital out of the country.

the detractors of the bolivarian revolution claim its due to chavez' propensity to use state funds based on political rather than economic calculations, the chavistas claim its due to the detractors themselves, who, being in the upper and middle class of society control the economy and, being no friends of chavez, have been putting the breaks on economic development themselves by taking their money out of venezuela and placing it in offshore accounts. both possibilities sound plausible enough and are not mutually exclusive.

be that as it may, the way this all has impacted my life is that the government has now moved to curb currency flows in and out of the country and a currency black market has emerged. i don't know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but in any case changing dollars into bolivares is trickier than one might think. as i couldn't find an official exchange office anywhere close by, i decided to try to tap into the black market, which had the added allure of offering me almost twice as many bolivares for my greenbacks than the official rate. and what better way to try and do something shifty than to go and talk to the experts on the issues: taxi drivers. as my luck would have it, though, i stumbled upon an extremely rare kind of human being: an honest, law-abiding taxi driver. so instead of offering to change my dollars at some dodgy rate, he took me to an official exchange place. what's more, he didn't even try to rip me off and even lowered the price from what he had initially said. shocking.

the official procedure for exchanging money was also quite complicated, with my passport getting photocopied, me having to sign a declaration that i was acting according to the provisions of regulation 185/01 of the supervisory agency of banks and other financial institutions of the bolivarian republic of venezuela and had my fingerprint taken before i received my bolivares. in a sense i could have understood the procedure if i was trying to take money out of the economy, but i was bringing money in, and legally at that... but then again i should have learned by now not to try to understand the logic of bureaucratic procedures.

another upshot of the economic crisis seems to be that food prices are high. not necessarily in the absolute sense (depending on whether you exchange money legally or on the black market, its either a bit higher than the central american average or actually quite cheap), but more in the relative sense. for example, a small pizza in a streetside restaurant costs about as much as a night in my hostel, 1,5 trips on the airport shuttle bus, 5 beers, 6 hours on the internet, 12 espressos or 36 rides on the metro. either those pizzas are something really special or something strange is going on.

one possible explanation could of course be that the chavez government might be subsidising the price of public transport, internet, coffee and beer - if that should turn out to be the case, i just might turn chavista myself...

in the ivory tower

2008-03-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

one day i'm sitting in a battered jeep, sweating in the mid-day heat, surrounded by street children outside, waiting to pass a military checkpoint manned by sri lankan peacekeepers who are trying to clamp down on the wave of kidnappings that is plaguing haiti. the next day, i'm sitting in an air-conditioned conference room on the 34th floor of a glass and chrome hotel in san francisco, listening to the same phenomenon being discussed by eminent academics. only this time the daily, ordered chaos of port-au-prince is called "challenges of external intervention in areas of limited governance." welcome to the academic ivory tower.

i'm in s.f. for an international studies conference, fascinated and a bit jet-lagged by my journey from planet praxis to planet theory. the panels at the conference range from the incomprehensible ("unfortunate performativity: towards a co-fertilization of the economy of qualities and polyheuristic theory") to the dubious ("different time, different place: insurgencies in contrast" chaired by the u.s. military academy); from the quirky ("the international relations of middle earth: learning from the lord of the rings") to the ballsy ("amitai etzioni meets his critics," chaired by: amitai etzioni, the panelists: his critics).

my favourite panel discussion was the one linking u.s. military policy and neo-colonialism with the lack of body hair on american comic superheroes and the size of vampirella's breasts. why did i ever choose to study something as down to earth as engineering?

pimp my ride

2008-03-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

in haiti, like in many other poorer countries of the planet, public transport vehicles are often turned into elaborate works of art. jeepneys, tuk-tuks, bemos, tap-taps and gua-guas on all five continents are adorned with blinking lights, oversized sound systems, dozens of rear-view mirrors, elaborate paintjobs, extra-wide wheels, pictures of saints, gods and superstars, and whatever else strikes the fancy of the driver as being cool. one of the things i like best, however, are the slogans and names the drivers put on their vehicles. there's nothing like a motto to the tune of "fate alone guides me" to instill trust in your passengers...

going through port-au-prince today, i jotted down some of the slogans on the tap-taps. many were religious, such as "dieu est eternel," "psaume 94, verse 17," "le don de dieu" or the bit more puzzling "sel jezu ki ka fe sa" (its only jesus who can do that). some were a mix of the religious and the mundane, such as "no problem, god bless me, you speak i work." another one that had me puzzling was "marianne say me thank you my mother," while "pensez vous a demain" seemed like sound advice. "u don't know me, oke?!" sounded a tad menacing but the main prize of the day goes to the two tap-taps with miniature jet planes on their roofs, one labeled "air argentina," the other "air florida."

my all-time favourite, however, is still the minibus in rural rwanda which proclaimed, several years after the end of his presidency, that "bill clinton is a mighty force in the world."

die jecken sind los

2008-03-24T17:23:00.000-07:00

it was textbook, cliche haiti: under a canopy of tropical trees and bathed by the light of the full moon, the drums were playing a wild rhythm, the people round us were chanting and dancing, drinking rum and, after a suitable while, giving us the nod that we could also join in.

easter being a spiritual holiday and haiti being a very spiritual country, the past weekend has been marked by a range of rites and activities, mixing local beliefs (more commonly referred to as 'voodoo') and christian influences. one of the most visible manifestations of this melange of spiritual influences are the ra-ra bands.

these are basically bands of about a dozen musicians playing a variety of drums and other percussion instruments as well as horn instruments (such as conch shells, improvised trombones and instruments called vaksen, sort of akin to digeridoos), accompanied by rhythmic chanting. they are preceded by a flag-bearer as well as a choreographer setting the rhythm and followed by a dancing audience who join in or drop out at will.

from roughly the carnival time to easter, the ra-ra bands march through the cities, towns and villages as well as on mountain paths, clearing the paths commonly used by wandering spirits. in addition to their spiritual role, they also have the social function of spreading political messages, news and gossip, and importantly providing communal entertainment.

as per usual, i was told that 'back in the day,' it was all more authentic and spiritual and that nowadays people (especially of course the youth) were just in it for the entertainment value. and not only that, the ra-ra phenomenon is also becoming visibly more commercial, as popular bands are sponsored by for example the transnational bouillon-producer knorr or by the irish-owned cell-phone operator digicell. ach ja, früher war alles besser, in haiti as elsewhere...

market day

2008-03-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

"hey, come over here so that i can cut your balls off," the guy wielding the knife shouted, cackling.

not understanding his creole, i smiled, waved back and said "bonjour, monsieur!"

when my guide translated the greeting for me, it was my turn to laugh. it was the most absurd way i've been ever been greeted upon entering a market. welcome to cayes jacmel market.

the market itself was teeming with sellers and buyers, getting supplies for easter weekend. weaving through the low, rickety structures made of bamboo poles covered with tarps, we made our way past sellers sitting on low stools in the almost dry river basin, hawking plantains, onions, pineapples, goats' trotters, dried fish, shampoos and hair lotions, second-hand clothes and shoes, prepaid cellphone cards, rum and cigarettes, lemonades and ice cream. in the low waters of the river, children play around, the small mountain horses of the farmers quench their thirst while women wash clothes and tap-tap drivers their multi-coloured communal taxis.

in many ways haiti reminds me of timor leste, though everything, both in the negative sense and positive sense, seems more pronounced here. or at least that is my initial reaction...

invisible monsters

2008-03-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

its back to the city again after a beautiful weekend spent in the cordillera central of the dominican republic, driving around on bumpy dirt roads on the back of a beat-up pick-up truck, walking around in the forests and swimming in mountain streams. i was secretly hoping to get a chance to catch a glimpse of a very rare and elusive beast: the hispaniolan solenodon (solenodon paradoxus), a strange-looking nocturnal animal which in addition to having an odd latin name is one of six types of venomous mammals.

in the end, we were not fortunate enough to see any solenodons but we did unfortunately make contact with another barely visible type of animal, apparently some bizarre kind of mosquito. while we did not see these little monsters themselves, we soon noticed their extremely itchy bites which then turned into several dozen bright red spots in my case and into brown-blue bruises in my friend's case. so while my arms now look like those of a hapless amateur junkie who's been desperately trying to find a vein, my friend's legs look like those of a torture victim who's been roughed up by some third-world dictator's henchmen.

the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie

2008-03-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

while my time in nica was, mas o menos, spent "with the people," my stopover-day in san jose was more bourgeois. i spent most of the day sitting around in cafes, consuming espressos and trying, almost successfully, to catch up with work.

and in a sense that was perhaps a suitable way to spend my few hours in costa rica, as the country does like to pride itself of being the least impoverished spanish-speaking country (including eu-member spain). that is not to say that costa rica does not have poverty, slums and marginalisation, but the country has a lesser degree of inequality than its neighbours, and more stability. this might well be linked to the fact that the country has no army. no army = no coup d'etats, less outside interference and more money to spend on more useful things.

central san jose has a mixture of fin-de-siecle neo-classicist buildings and 1960s-70s concrete towers. the former, adorned with symbols drawn from the french revolution and freemasonry, are monuments to the classical liberal goals of enlightenment of its european-oriented social and political elite. the latter are the monuments of a by-gone economic boom, and both old and new combine to give the city a slightly melancholy air of faded glory.

speaking of faded glory, on my way out at the airport i had the joy and honour to meet up with those old travelling companions of mine, the scorpions. and yes, they played my song.

mosquito coast

2008-03-13T05:32:00.000-07:00

semi-unexpectedly, most of my time here in nicaragua has been spent with costeños, or people from the autonomous regions of nicaragua's atlantic coast, both on the coast and with the 'diaspora' in managua. 'the costa' is quite a fascinating area, being for a long time more influenced by events in the caribbean rather than the spanish-influenced rest of nicaragua. the mosquito coast (named not after the pesky animals but in a corruption of the name of the largest indigenous group, the miskitos) was for a long time under nominal british protection/rule and along with the indigenous languages such as miskito and garafuna one of the main languages is creole english.

the costa creole sounds (at least to me) quite similar to jamaican english. i was given plenty of opportunity to get into the vibe of the language, listening to family antics, stories from the revolution and contra war, gossip, memories of migration, jokes and the like while sitting out on the porch with my friend's extended family. and yes, rum did flow, with the family making sure that i also got more than my fair share of 'las copas de las americas...'

por la carretera

2008-03-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

navigating one´s way around managua isn´t the easiest thing on the planet, especially for newcomers like me. places are usually not identified by addresses but by their relation to landmarks, specified further by their geographic location (north, east, south, west) or with respect to other landmarks, such as the lake. for example, the address of the place i´m sitting in right now is: by the military hospital, one block towards the lake then 1,5 blocks down the hill. a pretty logical system if you know where the landmarks are, which ones to use and what direction east is etc.

the other day, taking a taxi to the place i´m staying at was an indication of how complicated it can get if you´re not "in the know:"

me: to altamira please, over by the central hospital

taxista: the what? the central hospital? but thats not in altamira. maybe its a new private one?

me: could be...

taxista: oh, then i don´t know where it is. what else is there? is it by the police station?

me (full of hope again, remembering someone did indeed mention a police station at some point): yes, i think it is.

taxista: ok, then i know it. to the south or to the north of the police station?

me (nonplussed): i have absolutely no idea...

in the end we did find our landmarks, around the corner from the korean store next to the roundabout near the la plancha restaurant.

my favourite one, however, is the legendary "little tree," apparently often used as a landmark eventhough it is not there anymore, used in the sense of "go to where the little tree used to be, then go 2 blocks towards the lake, then 1 block south..."

mexican underground

2008-03-06T19:05:00.000-08:00

in addition to running around mexican beach wedding parties in a javanese sarong, i have been spending much of my time over the past few weeks deep in the heart of yucatan. more precisely up to 15-20 metres deep, diving around in underground, water-filled cave systems called cenotes. the most extensive cenote system is ox bel ha, of which approximately 170 km have been explored. there are a number of different theories as to how these limestone cave systems have developed, due to the ice ages, rising and falling sea levels and/or meteoric impact. they are filled with both fresh- and saltwater, the two being separated inside the cave by haloclines. from the outside, they look like circular ponds at the bottom of sinkholes in the jungle, though some of the more popular ones nowadays have platforms for swimmers, snorkelers and divers.

while today's tourists pay to jump in, some of the ancient inhabitants of the yucatan peninsula ended up in the cenotes in a more involuntary fashion, as the maya sacrificed the occasional human by throwing them into the cenotes together with sacred artifacts to placate the rain god chaac.

but so much for the dry facts. as an experience diving in the cenotes is what the italians would call troppo bello, too beautiful, one of the most magnificent things i have seen so far, especially the light effects produced by the haloclines.

ach wie schön ist panama...

2008-02-29T04:41:00.000-08:00

little mishaps are the spice of life, they are entry points to new discoveries. i learned two things today, one new lesson and the other was a refresher lesson. the new lesson: my german atm card is useless in panama. the old lesson: don't bother planning, things will turn out different anyway in the end. diverging from my usual modus operandi, i had booked a hotel in advance as i knew i'd be arriving late at night for my stopover. i jumped into a taxi at the airport, got downtown and learned the new lesson. and then i spent the next 2 hours cruising around town in a taxi i couldn't pay for, with an empty wallet and unable to get cash anywhere, looking for a hotel that would be willing to give me a cash advance on my credit card. which eventually i did. needless to say, the hotel i stayed at in the end was nowhere near the one i had originally booked. and though i know they will never read this blog, i'd like to take this opportunity to thank diana and ignacio for their help and patience.

in spite of the minor inconvenience, the episode was also an indication of how easy travel is nowadays if you belong to the more fortunate 20 % of humanity - no need for me to sell off a kidney, pawn jewelry or go work in a maquiladora to pay off my debt.

based on what little i've seen of panama so far, it has the feel of a town that has seen a lot of globalised money arriving lately, drawn by low taxes and few questions asked. geography helps, with the canal obviously drawing international trade and the lucrative trade in certain agricultural goods from neighbouring colombia bringing in megabucks to the offshore banks. next to my hotel bed, where one usually finds tourist brochures, was a 600+ page catalogue (!) praising the colon free zone, the world's second biggest special economic zone, producing cheap textiles and electronics, mainly for chinese companies. like other similar towns, panama city is therefore a magnet for all kinds of wheelers and dealers, hustlers and contractors, aspiring movers and shakers from all corners of the world, congregating in the hotel lobby bar, sitting around in polyester suits and cradling beers, hoping to make it big this time around...

bailando, bailando...

2008-02-25T14:21:00.000-08:00

"ven, bailalo
ay, ven, bailalo
ven, gozalo
ay, ven, gozalo
que la rumba esta buena
y contigo, morena
pa' santo domingo
es que me voy yo"

- angel y khriz

from what limited experiences i've had in latin american countries, it seems that there are two things you can't escape here: the music and dancing. i really don't mind the former, but the latter is something of an anathema to me. i am honestly a very, very bad dancer. bachata, salsa, merengue, rumba, compa... i can neither tell them apart nor, if even i could, i am not able to figure out the rhythm with which i'm supposed to move my clumsy feet. not to mention moving the hips and turns and what-have-you-not.

in the sunny caribbean as much as in freezing patagonia, in ill-lit port-side taverns and in kitschy tourist cafes, in front of bottle stores and in colonial-era parks, i have had the same conversation as in front of a local colmado (sort of kiosk/mini-market) last night:

local young woman: come, i'll show you how to dance the bachata!

me: ummm.... no gracias....

local young woman: mira, its real simple: 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3...

me (sweating blood and tears): umm... well... no, mira, i honestly can't dance...

local young woman: oye, it's 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3... what could be simpler?!

well, the result was, as expected, a complete disaster. even the fact that i had additional encouragement from a somewhat drunk portly elderly lady behind me who was pinching my ass and telling me to "shake it, shake it!" didn't help me find the right rhythm...

mundo latino

2008-02-23T15:56:00.000-08:00

lying on the couch on the porch and closing my eyes, the audioscape is so stereotypical that it makes me smile: the wind rustling through the palm trees, the waves crashing on the beach, crickets chirping, the sounds of latin dance music wafting over from the bars and the loud shouting match in spanish between the husband and wife from the house next door...

my mind has not quite yet been able to completely plug into what little spanish i was once able to speak. instead, indonesian tends to come into the way, with my mind forming indo-spanish phrases such as: "si, besok voy pa' santo domingo karena tengo amiga yang kerja alli"

¡vamos a la playa!

2008-02-19T01:06:00.000-08:00

tomorrow morning i shall be heading out to the tropics again, this time to the west rather than the east, first to the caribbean and then to central america, followed by north america. the exact itinerary of my trip is still a bit open, will be playing it by ear a bit. rest assured, however, that this trip has absolutely nothing to do with recent developments in cuba...

in the meantime, if you have a bored moment, check out the video to that song in the subject header of this post on youtube (it's the one by righeira). it just possibly might the the most bizarre anti-war song video ever.

knowledge is power

2008-02-18T13:40:00.000-08:00

if any of you are wondering whether or not you should go ahead and do a ph.d., my answer is: absolutely! there is probably no other time in your life when you have chance to expand your mental horizons in quite the same way as when as you're writing a ph.d.

i, for example, have learned over the past few weeks that:

- saskatchewan is approximately as big as southern sudan
- ren hoek's accent (from the cartoon show ren & stimpy) was inspired by peter lorre (casablanca, the maltese falcon, 'm' - die stadt sucht einen moerder)
- the seven years' war (1756-1763) was the first european conflict fought on 5 continents
- prenzlauer berg, the part of berlin i live in, has an average population density of 13 176 inhabitants per km2
- both johnny depp and amy winehouse appeared on the bbc series 'the fast show'
- while the eu's next expansion will consist of officially integrating the netherlands antilles islands of aruba, bonaire, st. eustatius and saba into the eu on dec. 15 this year, the caribbean islands of turks & caicos have considered joining canada. curacao and sint maarten will gain a special status as associated states
- the album 'lust for life' by iggy pop & david bowie was recorded in a small studio close to potsdamer platz, berlin
- the olm (proteus anguinus) uses mostly non-visual sensory systems such as photoreceptors in the skin, chemoreceptors, mechano- and electroreceptors in order to find its way in the dark
- peru is latin america's biggest potato-producing country
- chris cunningham's video for aphex twin's song 'come to daddy' was shot in the same housing development thingie as stanley kubrick's clockwork orange
- the official languages of the netherlands antilles are dutch and papiamentu; the official language of the turks and caicos islands is english
- the 1,59 eur bottle of chilean la cara cabernet sauvignon from the plus market is better quality for money than the 1,79 bottle of montepulciano d'abruzzo from kaiser's
- judge dread was both the first white recording artist to have a reggae hit in jamaica and the artist with the most banned songs in the u.k.
- famed indian actor amitabh bachchan has played in 172 movies to date, winning 18 film awards and 27 nominations. burt bacharach of kansas city (mo), on the other hand, has so far had 70 top 40 hits in the us and 52 top 40 hits in the uk
- while the latin name for the animal known as cicak in indonesian is hemidactylus frenatus, the tokek is classified as gekko gecko
- actor lee marvin's mother descended from the brother of george washington while his father's forefather was the founder of hartford, connecticut

rest assured that i have not merely picked up these gems of information by idly wandering around the internet when i was supposed to be focusing on my ph.d. topic of masculinities and violence in timor leste. all of the above-mentioned facts are absolutely essential to the fundamental argument of my thesis.

my life story in a nutshell

2008-02-14T04:13:00.000-08:00

the other day on the radio i heard a book review of a collection of autobiographies - all of which are six words long, a brilliant concept that has kept my mind busy and off my thesis ever since. here's a few 6-word autobiographies i came up with:

mumble, grumble... not a morning person
absent-minded, i drift through my life
will be late for own funeral
glad i changed course early on
protestant work ethic? not quite...
chilies, garlic, lime juice, salt, coriander
gigantic carbon footprint - that defines me

a desperado goes down in flames

2008-02-12T02:37:00.000-08:00

"desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
oh, you're a hard one,
and i know you've got your reasons,
but these things that are pleasing you
can hurt you somehow."

-johnny cash, "desperado"

the other night as i was working away on my ph.d. and writing a sentence to the effect of "one shouldn't overgeneralise about violence being the main way in which political differences are settled in timor leste..." when the bbc world service that was running in the background reported that "according to reports just coming in from dili, there has been an armed attack on the residence of president jose ramos horta..." i stopped mid-sentence... so much for that well-meant caveat on my part.

the attacker was none other than the mercurial major alfredo, who as some of you might remember has made his appearance on these pages as well. in what was a dual attack, reinado and his men attempted to kill both the president and the prime minister, but in the end it was alfredo himself who got killed. jrh was shot in the chest and stomach and is, at the time of writing, in intensive care in australia. a further man was killed, though it is unclear whether he was one of the attackers or one of the president's bodyguards.

so the man went down in flames and perhaps it was the only way he could go if he wanted to preserve his almost mythical aura, an aura that was already in the process of losing its shine. did he really think he could pull off a coup? was he "manipulated"? did he just lose the plot? i guess we'll never know.

other questions also remain and from what i hear dili is (surprise, surprise) abuzz with rumours, gossip and conspiracy theories. why was only 'unlucky alf' killed? what about the time discrepancies? why did the attack happen now? how and why were all the attackers (minus alfredo) able to escape? wasn't alfredo's death just a bit too convenient for 'some people'? those wishing to discuss these matters further over a beer or three are more than welcome to contact me anytime...

on a personal note, i tuned in to bbc world service again late last night for the latest update. i was mentally so immersed into the broadcast that i had one of those audio flashbacks that i haven't had for about 10 months: while listening intently to the news broadcast from dili, a woman walking past my window down a cobblestone street in high-heeled winter boots made a steady clack-clack-clack-clack sound with her heels and a part of my mind immediately thought: sustained automatic rifle fire, single-shot mode... i snapped out of it within a fraction of a second, but the unwelcome feeling of having been touched by the ghost of christmas past lingered on for a while longer

a small town in germany

2008-02-08T05:39:00.000-08:00

i am back in bonn for the first time in five years, a town that used to be home for a while a while back... i am stunned by how little has changed in 5 years, the only noticeable changes were that the greek resto round the corner is now an indian eatery and that the couple running the korean grocery store have become friendlier.

then as now, bonn is an affluent, orderly, administrative town for affluent, orderly, administrative people. suits and ties, expensive handbags, wealthy old ladies with nip-n-tuck tight faces, small dogs. fenced-off, well-kept front lawns. no alarms and no surprises, please...

at times, especially during the dark and dismal days of november-december, the strict bourgeois orderliness would become oppressive, "bonn jour tristesse" if you excuse the pun.

today however, the town is resplendent. a cloudless sky, a brilliant sun, majestic victorian houses, the first birds are singing and the first trees down by the rhine are in bloom. (never mind the fact that this should actually only be happening in two months time...)

through western eyes

2008-01-31T14:11:00.000-08:00

perhaps it was just a bit too close to home.

the other night i stopped by a cafe to re-read a draft of an article that i was working on. unfortunately i was not able to concentrate on my paper but found found myself drawn into listening to the conversation at the table next to me. anything else would have been impossible, given the highly audible volume level of their discussion and their clear and emphatic enunciation of their main arguments. in addition, the topic which they were discussing with their eloquent, polished, nasal voices was one that's been close to my heart for a while: southeast asia.

the two men, both with obviously above-average incomes and higher-level education were discussing "the essence" of vietnam and thailand, of the nature of the thai and the vietnamese "an sich," generalising and simplifying at every turn. in all its eloquence and intellectual aspirations, the discussion struck me as being plainly arrogant and ignorant, with the two snooty young well-heeled european men being convinced of their economic, cultural and intellectual superiority vis-a-vis the south-east asian locals and other westerners, lacking all empathy for those who they felt were below them - which was pretty much everyone.

walking home i wondered what it had been about the pair had irritated me so badly. perhaps, i thought, it just really had been too close to home: the two were engaging in what i do so often, in fact, in what i do for a living: generalising and simplifying, talking eloquently on behalf of south-east asians instead of really listening to, let alone creating space for their own voices, placing myself into the position of the all-mighty western know-it-all and getting paid for it. its not always nice to look into the mirror.

death of the patriarch

2008-01-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

indonesia's long-time dictator suharto died last sunday. for some he was "the butcher of jakarta," for others "the father of development," or, in between these two poles of opinion, "the smiling general."

he was feted and armed by the west and "diverted" somewhere between 15-35 billion us dollars into his own and his family's pockets (i admit that that used to sound like a whole lot more before this week's banking scandals).

thanks to his openness to foreign business interests and his proven anti-communist credentials (at least half a million dead suspected leftists) he was bestest buddies with the leaders of the free world. as late as 1995 bill clinton's administration called him "our kind of guy." more honestly, henry kissinger allegedly described suharto and the likes of him such as marcos, pinochet, duvalier and mobutu sese seko as "bastards, but at least they're our bastards." and like so many of "our kind of guys," suharto did not have to face justice for the estimated up to 1,5 million people killed during his reign or the billions he and his family are thought to have embezzled.

this morning i was asked to write an obituary of suharto, which i agreed to. coincidentally the amount of money i will get for the obituary is exactly how much my health insurance will cost me next month. i pondered the irony of paying for my own health insurance with the money that i will indirectly get thanks to the death of a man who had been responsible for having several of my friends and acquaintances jailed and decided to put that money into a fund that helps his surviving victims instead.

trans-europa express

2008-01-25T08:41:00.000-08:00

"the passenger
he rides and he rides...

he looks through his window,
what does he see?

he sees the bright and hollow sky,
he sees the stars come out tonight.
he sees the city's ripped backsides,
he sees the winding ocean drive..."

- iggy pop, "the passenger"

hues of grey, green, brown... the earthy shades of a landscape formed by centuries of agriculture and industry pass by my window. i am cocooned inside what looks, from the outside, like a high-speed silkworm, gliding smoothly across the continent with its cargo of students and pensioners, metalheads and businesswomen, migrants and those that would unfortunately rather get rid of them, tourists going skiing and conscripts heading home for the weekend.

we pass through towns of stunning beauty, of brutal functionalism, of mind-numbing mediocrity. medieval churches walled against marauders, red-brick ruins from the days of the industrial revolution and post-fordist logistics hubs consisting of pre-fab materials glide by.

a voice crackles over the intercom:

"naechster halt: muenchen hauptbahnhof..."

alphabet city

2008-01-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

over the past few days in geneva, i've been walking around town past the WMO, the SNCF TGVs, the WHO, ITU, MSF and WIPO, talking to people from UNOG, UNIDIR, ICRC, DCAF, UNDP-BCPR, IOM, OCHA, UNHCR, WTO, SAS, ILO, CPCC and HDC about things like SNAP, SALW, DDRR, ALD-3, MONUC, GenCap, MINUSTAH, SSR, UNMIT, BIT, MINURCAT, FDI, SPLA, IDDRS, EPA, UNMIS, OECD-DAC, GBV, DPKO, ODA, DR, P-11/PHP and SRSGs.

in addition, i've had a wonderful time meeting friends, sitting in outdoor cafes, walking in the surrounding hills and feeling like an extra in "the shining" (or in a surreal short story by kafka or harms) when wandering through the vast, empty maze of corridors of the UN's palais des nations looking for a non-existent fifth floor...

180 degrees

2008-01-22T00:46:00.000-08:00

in a "dramatic" turn of events, i have now temporarily put down my writing and am concentrating on reading instead for the next few days - oh, the exciting life i lead!

i have also temporarily traded the "poor but sexy" streets of berlin for the "rather rich but subtly so" streets of geneva for the week. all countries have their idiosyncrasies, of course, but i often have the feeling that there's something particularly peculiar about switzerland. not in a bad way necessarily, but just slightly odd. maybe its the habit of placing brutal 1960s concrete blocks in the middle of pictoresque alpine pastures? or the quaintly antiquated habit of closing all shops (and many restaurants) on sundays, monday mornings, wednesday afternoons and saturday afternoons as well as for extended lunch breaks and at six every evening? the courteous way people interact? i will have to ponder the issue over a fondue tonight....

cabin fever

2008-01-09T13:30:00.000-08:00

"i think the writing is eating up my self,
preventing any togetherness with anyone,
... recycling [texts] over and over again.
how much longer, how many more?"

- iggy pop, "afraid to get close"

no worries, i haven't quite reached the stage that mr. pop described there, but i fear i might be getting there soon. as some of you might know, i placed myself under house arrest about two weeks ago in order to get through my backlog of articles and, more importantly, to finally get somewhere with my ph.d. thesis.

as far as the writing is concerned, it's been a fairly successful plan but i'm growing a bit concerned about the side-effects: cabin fever, anti-social behaviour and delusions of grandeur.

i've decided to allow myself one trip per day out of my flat to interact with reality, which usually means that i end up in a cafe somewhere around the corner. so far so good, but the problem is that cafes tend to have other customers: noisy children running around with their frustrated young mothers shouting after them, youngish men in suits discussing their investment portfolios, smokers complaining about the new stringent smoking regulations, young lovers discussing where to go for a weekend break... and all of them are conspiring to break my train of thought with their insolent, endless cacophony! all of them are conspiring to get between me and my thesis! nay, all of them are conspiring to get between Humanity and My Thesis, for isn't it humanity that stands to gain the most from the masterpiece i am creating? fools, do they not understand?!?

i drown my four double-espressos in quick succession, pay up and shuffle back into the safety of my own four walls, cursing the other customers under my breath....

travels with my niece

2007-12-25T04:46:00.000-08:00

since my sister is spending her vacations in india, i, together with my parents, have been tasked with looking after my niece. she's a hairy lesbian from sweden and is currently going through a phase of teenage rebellion. walking around town with her inevitably draws attention from people, especially women. they look at my niece and then at me, with a warm and fuzzy glow in their eyes. complete strangers stop to talk to us, asking all sorts of questions and giving unasked for tips as to what i should feed her, whether she's a half-breed, why i have her on the leash, etc. (to avoid any undue confusion i should perhaps add here for those of you who do not know it already that my niece feliz is a fuzzy little dog who's way too cute for her own good).

some people claim that people over here are kinder to dogs than to children. my experiences with feliz tend to support that claim. a case in point was when i went hiking with her and my sister in the alps a few months back. we had forgotten to take a waterbowl for feliz along and stopped at the souvenir store of a bavarian monastery to buy a bowl. the saleslady, an antediluvian crank, was shouting in a gravelly voice at the children not to touch anything, to keep their dirty fingers away, to shut up, and so on. when it was my turn, she barked a "so what do you want?" in my general direction. i said that i was looking for a water bowl for my dog, her scowl became a smile, her eyes lit up and her voice became soft and sweet as she started asking me about my dog and waxing lyrical about her own dogs. in between, she'd revert back to her gruff command voice to curse any and all children that dared enter the shop. she even offered to give me a bowl for free if she could find a suitable plastic one, but unfortunately they were out of stock.

in the end i settled then for a kitschy cup with an alpine motive even though the iconoclast in me was egging me on to buy the dog a water bowl with a picture of the pope on it...

end of an era in timor

2007-12-21T12:15:00.000-08:00

it was with a heavy heart that i heard the sad news from timor leste today: aaj's (pronounced "double-a-jay's"), dili's premier establishment for the desperate, destitute and very drunk; the place where warm beer met crap karaoke; where poorly made-up transvestites mingled with gay cops on the pull; where underage sex workers and overage foreign contractors swayed awkwardly to what passed for music; the place that put men back into mendicant; the cape of no hope; the beacon of dim neon light in the dark tropical night has closed its doors forever. or at least for the time being.

alle jahre wieder

2007-12-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

wham's "last christmas" on the radio, overcrowded shops, frosted windows, people with santa hats. its that time of year again.

being in munich as per usual, i have a chance to see what the rich and beautiful of this world are up to in terms of christmas shopping. there's a cartier watch on sale for a mere 19100 euros, but to be honest its so ugly that they'd have to pay me 19100 euros to wear it. there's toasters for 900 euros which will make your toast taste 45 times better than the toast from a 20 euro toaster. but perhaps i'll just settle for the exclusive wine bottle opener for a mere 179 euros, cheapskate that i am.

i wish you all a peaceful holiday season, be it idul adha, hannukah or christmas!

shades of grey

2007-12-17T03:12:00.000-08:00

back in europe again.

a pale grey light is flowing in through my window. outside, the grey dickensian rows of houses tower over the dark grey cobblestone street, lined with grey, skeletal trees on the branches of which the odd grey birds are huddling. above it all, a leaden grey sky hangs low over the city. its inhabitants seem to want to blend into the greyness, wearing grey overcoats and sporting ashen faces.

the cafe is an oasis of light and warmth, the glass of shiraz a welcome spot of colour.

its always fun to stay at the...

2007-12-10T22:51:00.000-08:00

i'm supposed to give a talk at the university here in singapore tomorrow and they've booked me for the night in the... YMCA!!! predicatbly, that had me chuckling to myself all morning.

but in spite of what the village people might have you think, its not filled with buff tom-of-finlandesque guys in flamboyant uniforms. so far no handlebar moustasches, no leather vests and the only one sporting tasteless retro shades is (unsurprisingly) me. instead, the clientele consists mostly of middle-aged american women and pious-looking korean spinsters. so i guess they don't insist on the Y and the M when admitting guests anymore. mind you, with me there, the C doesnt seem to be much of a criteria either.

singapore is as per usual - the "air-conditioned republic" (both literally and figuratively) which is hooked on shopping. so now, in between the chinese autumn festival/deepavali/hari raya shopping extravaganza of the other month and the year end sale and chinese new year's shopping festival, we have the christmas shopping wonderland thing going on, with loads of styrofoam snow and plastic christmas trees.

there are two things i severely dislike about christmas, and thats the shopping and the schmalzy christmas songs. unfortunately they tend to go hand in hand...

doomed megalopolis

2007-12-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

jakarta. its an acquired taste. its ugly. its crowded, noisy, filthy. rats and rubbish, rickety buses and raucous vendors. the stuffy humid air is noxious. the very rich flaunt their money openly while dozens of children die in the slums of perfectly preventable diseases such as diarrhea. there's corruption on a massive scale. sleaze. vice. calling the traffic system dysfunctional would be making a compliment. the city is flooded annually, spreading the waste and sludge that's deposited in the city's canals across town. there's earthquakes. bombs. riots. its in your face, nothing subtle about it.

...and i have grown to love the town, its spice, its edge, its cast of bizarre characters. though having to spend three and a half hours in traffic this morning to travel 25 km was a bit excessive...

heal the world

2007-12-03T19:48:00.000-08:00

i'm taking a break from hanging around with the timorese bad boys to cover the climate conference thing here in bali. with approximately 10 000 people attending, its probably the biggest and most hyped environmental happening since the rio summit in 1992.

so why has everybody and their dog (incl. myself) rocked up in bali? good question. what this meeting actually is is the 13th annual revision meeting of the kyoto protocol. anyone who can remember the previous 12 gets a beer from me. and like the previous 12, this one is in fact a technical meeting for technocrats who will try to work out the technical details for the framework of how to proceed with the negotiations for the next phase of international climate negotiations. in other words, dry procedural stuff in the best un tradition, hardly the kind to raise the interest of anyone except the most hardcore international politics junkies and bureaucrats.

so that brings me back to the question: are all 10 000 of us really that keen on the technical details of the negotiation framework? or is it because we couldnt resist the offer of a free ticket to bali, a chance to feel good about healing the world one workshop at a time and the chance of a photo-op with al gore?

on the more serene side...

2007-11-27T02:42:00.000-08:00

there is of course much more to yogya than the social darwinism of jalan kaliurang at 4 in the afternoon described below.

i have the good fortune of being able to stay once again in the wonderful house i used to live in for the past few years (now with the added luxury of w-lan!) and am once again able to enjoy a cup of coffee while watching the sun set beyond the mango trees and sugarcane fields, listening to the gentle splashing of the stream and the maghrib-calls of the muezzin wafting over from the village...

get your motor running...

2007-11-27T00:42:00.000-08:00

our engines sound like a swarm of mechanical wasps, buzzing and waiting for action. the sun beats down on our skins. the heat is reflected off the hot asphalt. our number grows by the second as more and more motorbikes edge their way to the front of the column.

we are students and farmers, accountants and soldiers. girls with headscarves, girls with piercings. young men in suits, young men in black t-shirts. old men in batik, old ladies in batik. singles on their motorbike. young couples on their motorbike. families of five on their motorbike.

the bikes and helmets display an eclectic melange of stickers: scatological messages, religious texts, anarchist slogans. heavy metal bands, nightclubs, spongebob squarepants.

some of us are gazing around. some are smoking. some are fixing their make-up. some are sending smses. all are waiting for the signal.

then it comes: GREEN!!! simultaneously, we all twist our right wrists and turn our accelerators south. those who react half a nanosecond too slow are mercilessly honked down.

its now a dog-eat-dog race. bikes overtaking you on the left, bikes overtaking you on the right. oncoming traffic on both sides of you. the sidewalks become auxiliary lanes for overtaking the slow. dust, exhaust fumes, noise...

...until we reach the next stoplight.

mungkin bila nanti kita akan bertemu lagi...

2007-11-24T23:19:00.000-08:00

so its time now to say good-bye to timor-leste, good-bye to friends and acquaintances, good-bye to extraordinary people in an extraordinary place, good-bye to the mad dogs who try to run in front of my motorbike at night and to the squealing suicidal piglets who try the same during the day, good-bye to aussie blackhawks waking me up in the morning with their low altitude flights, good-bye to the gang leaders i've been meeting and to the idps who've been pushed out of their homes, good-bye to excellent coffee and breath-taking mountains, good-bye to fording rivers with a bust-up jeep in the moonlight when the bridge has been washed away. its "ate logo" to all of that.

and a special, heartfelt good-bye goes out to one mr alan jackson, hailing from "way down yonder on the chattahoochee, where it gets hotter than a hootchie-cootchie." alan has accompanied across the breadth and width of this country and been on my mind a lot. alan, i hope by the time we meet again you will no longer be "up to your ears in tears," no longer "in a tropical depression," that eventhough your "hair is still a little too long, got a big harley and listen to a country song," and your girlfriend has left you again (you know, the one who's got the rhythm while you got the blues), in spite of all i hope you'll be ok enough with all of that to not need to sing about it again. or if you do feel the compelling need to sing about it, that i don't need to listen to it. you know, maybe you really should buy yourself that "mercury '49 and go cruisin' up the roooooo-hoooooo-ad." if you need a bit of extra cash, i might even send you some just so that i won't need to hear about it again.

so now its off to indonesia. the calls of "malea, malae!!!" will be replaced with "bule masuk kampung," or, more embarrasingly, shouts of "bon jovi, bon jovi..."

p.s.: i suspect that dili intl airport is perhaps the only one on the planet where the shopping and dining facilities are located inside an idp camp...

here is something i can't understand

2007-11-19T17:25:00.000-08:00

i've spent the past four weeks or so here studying violence and i'm still at the point encapsulated in cypress hill's lyrics:

"here is something you can't understand:
how i could just kill a man."

a case in point is a murder on sunday in downtown dili. it made the international news as a beheading, but based on the grainy photo of the corpse on the front page of timor post, that isn't quite true. it was a brutal, nasty murder but technically not quite a beheading.

asking around, it seems that it was either a gangland revenge murder and/or had something to do with a girl. having looked at the gangs here for my research, both seem quite plausible reasons. which is where i come to my "disconnect point:" i just don't see the connection between the reason (heartache) and the deed (attempting to chop someone's head off). or burning your neighbours house when there is no rice in the shop, as was happening during the rice crisis earlier this year. or attempting to chop someone's leg off because someone from his posse apparently disrespected someone from your posse in the neighbouring country 3 weeks ago as happened in baucau last week.

of course, irrational violence is an issue the world over, not just in timor. half of rome goes up in flames because of a game in which 22 millionaires in shorts kick a ball on a grass field and even finland has had its own high-school massacre...

candlelight flashback

2007-11-18T16:57:00.001-08:00

the other night i was taking a candlelight mandi in a small timorese village close to the south coast. for those of you who are not familiar with the term,its indonesian for washing oneself in the traditional way by scooping cold water out of a basin and pouring i onto oneself.

as i was washing myself in the candlelight i was reminded of a mandi which i took a few years back in aceh, in ujong muloh, a small fishing village on the west coast, down the road from lamno. the village was completely destroyed by the 2004 tsunami and about two-thirds of the population had been killed. i was staying in the idp camp with our project workers there and in order to wash, you had to go to where the village had been before it was wiped away by the waves.

there, in between the ruins of the houses and the odd palm tree, we went to one of the wells and washed ourselves in the moonlight. washing myself under the stars in the ruins of what was once a house, taking water from the well of a dead man was a calm, surreal, almost mythical experience. it felt almost like an epiphany, though i don't know of what.

a simple case of arithmetics

2007-11-13T17:22:00.000-08:00

the other night, a man was shot dead with an arrow up the road from where i am staying. this was duly reported by reuters news agency who also put the killing into a bit of a context by stating that since the start of the crisis here in april/may 2006, at least 37 people have been killed and 150 000 are internally displaced.

the trouble with those figures is that they reflect the situation as it was 1,5 years (!) ago, but still almost every single news item on the timorese crisis uses those completely outdated figures. is it too much to ask of professional journalists to do a bit of background research or, at the very least, to add the casualty they are reporting in their piece to this total figure? to say that by now there's at least 37 + 1 = 38 dead?

as far as i can tell no-one has collected the total number of casualties since the beginning of the crisis. my own estimate is at least 50 (tallying up the cases i remember hearing about) have died, perhaps closer to 100. as far as the idps are concerned, the current official figure is down to approximately 100 000 from 150 000, though some would dispute that number.

and as always, each of those figures consist of individuals whose stories and fates will in all probability remain unreported by the local or the international media... but the very least they could do is get their numbers straight.

striking poses

2007-11-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

travelling across the country i've been getting a chance to see a lot of men in uniforms and brandishing weapons. on occasion, you might see the occasional woman in unifrom, but their numbers are far smaller, so i'll concentrate on the men here.

you've got the local police (pntl) with its various sub-units, the local armed forces (f-fdtl), the un police (unpol) and the international stabilisation force (isf) just to give you the main categories. many of their number, though by far not all, do seem to enjoy showing off their military gear, especially the ones who are in the more "special" units, such as the unpol's formed police units (fpu) or the pntl's rapid reaction force (uir). the average street cops tend to be the least intrusive of the lot.

each one of these units tends to have its own way of showing off its militarised masculinity. while the average pntl cop walks around in a simple uniform with a handgun, the uir riot squad members seem to take a special delight in wearing as much body armour as possible even when there are only little kids and old ladies around. compared to the street cops, they also have a lot more gadgets attached to their webbing - pepper spray, torches, a baton, handcuffs, etc. a further step up from this in terms of displaying muscular machismo and military gadgetry is the special "bodyguard" unit of the pntl. their uniform consists of black t-shirts, black combat trousers, a black bandana, shades and headsets. they carry numerous gadgets which i could not figure out the purpose of on their webbing gear, have a handgun plus a brand new steyr assault rifle and often a jungle knife on their belt.

in comparison, the f-fdtl members look like the poor rural cousins of these decked out cops. no extra gadgets, baggy unifroms and assault rifles from the 1970s. some of them don't even have designer shades, a faux pas unheard of in the cooler units.

the international forces tend to also have their own sub-cultures of displaying their military masculinity. the aussies tend to go for the "matey"-look (baggy uniforms, floppy hats, slouch, designer shades) mixed in with military gadgetry (headsets, techy assault rifles with all sorts of stuff on them). the portuguese gnr, on the other hand, tend to prefer the buff mediterranean macho look: biceps bulging from beneath tight t-shirts, designer shades (of course), swagger. the malaysian fpu is more into the "malaysian idol"-pop star type of look: fingerless gloves, bandanas, black t-shirts, the occasional necklace and yes, designer shades. sporting a more old-school approach are some of the older south asian officers: moustaches, ram-rod straight backs, even the occasional british colonial-style baton, though i havent seen them around here this time...

morning impressions

2007-11-11T16:58:00.000-08:00

the other morning, taking a night bus from viqueque on the south coast to baucau on the north coast i had the good fortune of watching dawn break over the beautifully-named "mundo perdido" mountains. the sun rose slowly over the crest of mt. matebian, the sacred mountain of the timorese, bathing the landscape in a soft light. groups of people wrapped in blankets against the cold were making their way to the market, carrying bundles of vegetables and other produce. the lush vegetation of the highlands was a welcome change to the dry coastal strip which is now more reminiscient of dry african savannahs than of the equatorial tropics.

its on mornings like these when i think i really should make more of an effort to enjoy them more often. as jim morrison put it, "no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

add-on to the previous one

2007-11-08T00:45:00.000-08:00

after 5 relentless hours of driving on winding roads with one country music tape repeated over and over again, four hours spent in the midday sun listening to a town-hall style village meeting with el presidente, a chat with a gang leader and only one cup of coffee later, i am not sure if i am any more lucid than at 5 am this morning.

i did however remember a few more things about The Man, that repository of dreams and hopes of a better, more just world, that i had wanted to jot down as well. eventhough timorese society apparently does not have a similar messianic myth of its own, the two societies which have arguably influenced timor the most over the centuries do: the portuguese and the javanese (who exerted their influence more indirectly through the indonesian "new order" system which arguably did have many javanese elements in it).

the portuguese version of The Man is king sebastian I., who was killed at a young age when he decided to mess around with the north african moors in 1578. legend, of course, has it that he never died and will come to the rescue of the portuguese nation in a time of crisis and establish the fifth empire. meanwhile, the javanese have the ratu adil, the just king, who will reveal himself at the appropriate time, put an end to the times of chaos and establish universal peace and justice. another messianic figure is of course jesus christ, who is omnipresent in timor leste, from the big rio-style statue in dili to tacky plastic clocks you can find in houses in the remotest of villages (big plastic pink things with a garish picture of the last supper as a background). so there area number of outside influences to draw upon and it certainly does not do any harm to further bolster your image by looking like two modern day icons which are very popular here: che guevara and bob marley.

when the man comes around

2007-11-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

since i will be overexposed to country music over the next few days (timor leste, like some other parts of eastern indonesia, is country country), its perhaps only apt to start this one with a quote from the man in black himself:

"the wise men will bow down
before the throne
and at his feet
will cast their golden crowns
when The Man comes around

whoever is unjust
let Him be unjust to
and whoever is righteous
let Him be righteous to

whoever is filthy
let him be filthy still
listen to the words
long written down
when The Man comes around

...

its alpha and omega's kingdom come...
when The Man comes around."

(J. Cash, When The Man Comes Around)

like many other societies, timorese society seems to have a longing for The Man to come around in times of crisis. and one of the words i hear most when discussing the current situation with the educated elite, farmers, taxi drivers, bar staff, gang members, etc. is Justice. when i have try to unpack this notion of justice (i.e. is it legal, social or economic justice they long for) i have gotten nowhere. what people seem to be looking for is a millennerian, a higher kind of justice, one that will undo all the wrongs, punish the wrongdoers, reward the righteous and finally fulfill all the dreams of a better life people had when they struggled for this country's independence.

and many societies, the all-knowing wikipedia places them at 766, have myths pertaining to just this kind of a situation, when in times of a crisis a figure (usually male, usually bearded, usually hiding up in the mountains till the time is right) will come and save the day. interestingly, according to a man i spoke to who is well versed in timorese mythology, timorese society did not traditionally have this myth. now, however, there are multiple contestants for it.

for one, you have timor leste's most wanted (or least wanted, depending on your stance) fugitive, major alfredo reinado, hiding up in the hills in the west (and apparently occasionally in dili's seedier clubs) with his group of armed supporters, casting himself as a defender of justice and righter of all wrongs, defying all attempts to capture him. and secondly, the country is now awash with rumours that some of the most charismatic guerrilla fighters of the struggle against indonesia, such as vicente reis (aka sahe) or nino konis santana had not actually been killed in battle in 1979 and 1998, respectively, but had been living incognito in the hills and had now revealed themselves in this time of crisis. unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case and the dead remain dead, but the hope for The Man to come around and make it all right remains.

...and now its off to the hills again....

p.s.: i'm posting this at 5 am so my apologies if there are gaps in my argumentation, havent had any coffee yet...

rumours revisited

2007-11-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

no sooner had i posted my rumour-thing yesterday that i coincidentally had three separate discussions on the topic with three very astute, long-term observers of timorese society. once again, we discussed the power and pervasiveness of rumours here and how both the national and international media have a tendency to amplify them without double-checking the facts first. the end result of this climate of rumours and insinuations is a society permeated by fear, a fear that in a sense is disproportionate to the actual level of violence - but not to the rumoured level of violence which is of course much higher.

all these discussions got the puritan in me thinking whether or not participating in this national pasttime through my blog was in a way reprehensible or not, even if i do it tongue in cheek for a very limited audience. well, i have a long overland journey again tomorrow to think about that one.

but before i leave for that trip, i'll post one last rumour piece later today, one which has some interesting implications.

rumours, the spice of life

2007-11-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

given the very limited access most people (especially those living in rural areas) have to independent information about events and their limited ability to independently verify the information for themselves, rumours tend to abound here. and with the advent of the cell phone, these travel fast across the country by sms, in spite of timor telecom's best efforts at providing suboptimal phone services...

rumours, even the wildest ones, quickly become "fact," in the sense that people will shape their perceptions of reality according to the rumours, often for their own safety. if for example there is a rumour that there was a shooting with 3 dead in suburb X, people will act accordingly and avoid that area even if in actual fact there never was a shootout.

at times, this rumourmongering has been used to either mobilise crowds (e.g. when the aussies tried to capture major reinado in march this year) or to keep them off the streets (e.g. during the indonesian occupation when rumours of mysterious "ninja" sightings kept people inside while the special forces went about their dirty work).

of course not all rumours pertain to such serious issues, there's a lot of the "oh, did you hear so-and-so was seen with so-and-so at the beach last saturday"-chatter going around, not least in the small ex-pat community.

thus, following the maxim "when in rome, do as the romans do" i have decided to add a new column to my blog and call it 'malicious rumour of the day' in which i'll jot down the best rumour of the day. its all 100 % proof unverified and unverifiable grist to the rumour mill that is dili. take it with a grain of salt.

today's rumour: the increased helicopter activity by the austrailan defence force in the skies above timor leste is due to the fact that its november and they havent spent enough of their annual budget yet. like in any organisation, money's gotta burn so that the budget doesnt get cut next year.

homes away from home

2007-11-04T23:04:00.000-08:00

i've often wondered what it feels like to be a citizen of an ex-colonial power visiting one of the former colonies. sitting in the lobby cafe of hotel timor the other day, i was surrounded by portuguese cops and teachers who addressed the local staff in portuguese; the coffee, wine, mineral water, beer, etc. were imported from portugal; the pastries were made locally but according to portuguese recipes and the tv in the corner was showing portuguese folk dances on rtp, the portuguese national tv channel. i wonder what i would feel if i'd come halfway across the globe to a dusty little city on a small island and would find cops, teachers, coffee, pastry, even folk dances from my country? would i feel that it was absurd? or would i feel warm and fuzzy all over? or would i think that its the most natural thing in the world?

mind you, you don't have to be a former colonial power to be in the business of carving up these little niches. at least both the australian and (mainland) chinese communities have also established similar homes away from home here...

a hard rains a'gonna fall...

2007-11-01T01:19:00.000-07:00

while i'm on the topic, i might as wll continue talikng about the weather.

the word from the un is that the early onset of the rains is due to the la nina-phenomenon, which promises to bring more and heavier rainfall this season.

like said, this is not exactly welcome news for the idps, especially since the governmentr and aid agencies are, for a number of reasons, behind schedule with getting new tents to replace the unuseable ones. so as soon as the rain started yesterday, stuff started happening. in the metinaro camp, the idps blocked the country's main road from dili to baucau and started stoning vehicles. the un responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and by arresting the camp manager. meanwhile, at the airport idp camp there was a shooting incident with one man wounded. as the un likes to put it, "the situation remains calm but tense." not that you could really tell that there was any tension if you stay in the better parts of town. all quiet on the beachfront, so to say...

mau hujan

2007-10-31T02:00:00.001-07:00

the air is hot, heavy and thick, but you can hear the rumble of thunder rolling down the hills already. then, a breeze picks up and the palm trees start to rustle. dark violet clouds move in overhead. "mau hujan," it wants to rain, as the indonesians put it. then the wall of rain comes in, bringing respite to the parched coastal strip. looks like the rain season is on time for once, after years of erratic behaviour.

unfortunately, though, this is not good news for everyone. while the farmers will welcome it, the close to 100 000 idps here in their makeshift tent cities will find life increasingly difficult, already for a second rainy season in a row.

scorpions

2007-10-31T01:50:00.000-07:00

in 1984 the scorpions recorded "still loving you." i wonder at times whether the boys from hannover had any idea that they had created what would soon become the global anthem of bus and taxi drivers? that classic hairmetal masterpiece has accompanied me on endless overland journeys on five continents. but in spite of all the hours i've spent listening to klaus meine's nasal, heartfelt whine and rudolf schenker's over-the-top guitar solos, i have yet to fully understand what it is they are trying to say. i've got about 85 % of the lyrics down by now, but the rest eludes me. ah well, i'm sure i'll have many more hours of travelling waiting for me in which to contemplate the issue.

on a different musical note, i had the joy and honour of seeing the timorese police force's special mobile K2 squad in action the other day, with K2 standing for Keyboard and Karaoke. this flying squad travels around the country performing at various functions, delighting the crowds with timorese pop songs. i must say that they weren't half bad. they did an excellent job of breaking the ice and getting the community involved at a reconciliation meeting up in the matebian area the other day. diak loos!

power to the people?

2007-10-29T17:22:00.000-07:00

as was to be expected, i've had endless discussions here about The Crisis (as it is generally called here) and the ones i have found the most depressing have been those in which several timorese themselves have stated that their country is simply not ready (or ever will be) for western-imported ideas such as democracy or human rights, especially freedom of speech and gender equity. while i do agree that 'the west' can not claim a monopoly on the one true path for societies to follow and that a one-size-fits-all imposition from the outside is not in any way desirable, i find the alternative that is being presented rather depressing. it is a neo-traditionalist harking back to a mythical 'golden age' where men and women 'knew their places' in society, there was one leader and everyone had to toe the line (and presumably did so ungrudgingly).

these are calls for national unity, justice, harmony and peace to be essentially imposed by dictatorship, which at times is expressed exactly in those terms. of course, timor leste is not the only transitional country where such sentiments are rife. i've heard the same argument in many of the post-socialist countries of central and eastern europe as well as in the former soviet union. in the mid-90s, many there talked enthusiastically about the 'pinochet model,' combining autocracy and neo-liberal market policies. personally, thats quite far from my vision of a society i would want to live in. but if "the people" want it, should i not then accept it, especially if i am merely an outsider here? and have not other countries had at least economic success with that model? the tricky part is of course is in determining whether "the people," that elusive concept, actually want it as much as the would-be leaders.

anyhow, its time for me to leave the dusty streets of dili behind for a while and go the the greener pastures in 'the districts'....

dili's three cities

2007-10-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

within its relatively small confines, dili houses what basically amounts to three different cities which lead more or less parallel lives.

first, of course, you have timorese dili, inhabitated by the locals and which can be subdivided into those few living the life of the upper and middle classes, the majority that lives the life of the lower classes and thirdly the still very large idp population living in various camps spread throughout the city.

secondly, you have what could be termed the ex-pat bubble, or, as many of those living inside the bubble call it, 'the fishbowl.' this consists of all of us 'malae' staff of intl organisations, ngos, journalists, contractors, etc., again with various sub-groups, pay scales, nationalities and so on.

the third 'city' that lives in parallel with these two more visible ones is the one inhabitated by those non-timorese who are outside of the ex-pat bubble. these are mostly indonesians and chinese, labourers, small-scale merchants, and, yes, also sex workers. the itinerant underclass of the globalised economy.

though we all inhabit the same geographical space, we map it very differently. ex-pats for example refer to places as being in relation to landmarks they are familiar with from their everyday ex-pat life, be it an ngo office, a hotel or a bar. however, even timorese taxi drivers, let alone less mobile members of the community, have difficulty figuring out where "around the corner from the oxfam office" or "50 metres from one more bar" is.

there is of course some level of interaction between these three cities, be it for example the foreigners who make an effort to understand the local language, culture and society or the timorese who work with foreigners, be it in an international ngo or for a small-time surabayan trader. often, however, these contacts between the three different populations involve a transgression of lsocial (or even legal) norms, be it the stoning of foreigners' 4WD cars by timorese youth, the timorese girls who smoke and drink openly in the bars and discos favoured by the foreign community, being involved in the underground gay scene or the visits by un staff (in violation of its ineffective "zero tolerance policy" on un staff & prostitution) to the mainly chinese-run massage parlours.

massive outside interventions such as this one inevitably shake up the economic, social and cultural set-up of the "host community." based on my own personal views, i might see some of these processes as being rather positive (e.g. slowly increasing gender equity, more tolerance of minorities) and others as being much less desirable, but many might take a different view. the un and several ingos are trying at least in theory to strike some balance between the desired and undesired, often unforeseen, impacts of their presence. the question arises then of course who defines what is desirable, acceptable, avoidable, undesirable or unacceptable?

so much for my random sunday morning thoughts, time for a coffee...

bule pulang kampung

2007-10-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

if bali felt like a "home-coming" in a more abstarct sense, returning to dili has all the concrete elements of coming back to your home village: friends, acquaintances and vaguely familiar faces everywhere. even the otherwise rather surly lady at timor telecom flashed me a smile of recognition.

something has changed in the atmosphere in dili over the past 5 months that i havent been here. i cant put my finger on what exactly it is and i'm tentatively venturing to say that its been a change for the better. on the up-side of things, theres a lot more people out on the streets, some of the most lethal potholes have been covered up, theres less vehicles with windows smashed by stoning going around and there seems to be a bit of an economic recovery (or at least theres a lot of construction work going on). on the down side, you still have the idp camps and you can see some newly torched buildings in town, burned in the post-election violence. in the ambiguous category is the fact that the presence of us foreigners is more visible than last time.

some things havent changed, though, such as the constant buzz of blackhawks, having rocks land on the roof of the cafe i was in last night, or, more positively, the beauty of the whole place and of the people.

home sweet pineapple

2007-10-24T03:23:00.000-07:00

though i was born and have grown up far from these shores, coming back to the tropics after 5 months in europe does seem like a home-coming of sorts. the sweet smells of incense and kretek, the chirping of the cicadas and the calls of the geckos, the rattling of the motorbikes and the short but intense patter of a tropical rain shower... the tropics do seem to have a way of growing on you. (which reminds of a long discussion i had years ago about the colonial age concept/fear of "going native" and joseph conrad's 'heart of darkness,' but maybe more about some other time....)

for all the criticism that bali rightly gets about being over-run and spoiled by the tourism industry, it is, at the end of the day, not such a bad place to chill after an intercontinental journey and prepare for a return to timor leste.

speaking of which, my hopes that the denpasar-dili flights would no longer be flown by merpati but by some other, more trustworthy airline, have not been fulfilled...