Reflections: Honey Service Year Minus Day One and Still Counting

We are on the flight home.

When this blog is published we will begin Phase 1: 'Honey Service Year: Day Minus One and Counting.'

We are committed to service, exchange, responsibility and the types of footprint which tread softer on this planet. We have learned much and intend to keep this blog alive. We are just as committed, more.

Who knows though, what awaits us as we return to life as normal.

Here is what our last Day in Dublin looked like:

1.) Walks and riding the public bus
2.) Gallery walks and interactions with public art lovers
3) Buying consumable (ie food) local gifts as we could find them
4.) Free Guns and Roses concert on the River (surreal - cover act)
5.) Promoting forms of positive impact tourism
6.) Historic pub trail
7) Better understanding of Quantum Mechanics and Collective Interest Economics

If we take our own last day on this trip then trace it backwards as a lesson, as a tale of ourselves, at the end of the trail we find ourselves searching, accomplishing, finding; what we are; what we find in our humanity - what we find in others. That is, in the end, what we sought. A final reflection of what we sought and how we learned meant for us rekindling a message we continuously promoted this year - that we all seek the same things; and, how we are but reflections of our own best selves seen in the optics of others.

Until we meet again - goodbye dear Ireland!!

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Creating and implementing service programs

Creating and implementing service programs that are sustainable at home and abroad...

When we travel, we want to be at our best; and, we want to have our eyes wide open. To be sponges of interest and dynamism, to represent with confidence, humility, and genteel ambassadorship the best of the places we are from. We want to take in new cultures, habits, and customs; while not being unduly harsh and/or not accepting of the quirks and contrasts which are new to us.

But, if we are traveling with a sense of service, exchange, and equitability of economy or position, we may also want to use our skill sets, our interests, our profession, our social skills and ambitions for the benefit of the people we are visiting (and, thus, in turn, for ourselves). As experienced and ostensibly benevolent minded travelers, Brittany and I set off for our 10 month ’honey service year’ with the ambition of service right smack in the middle of our highest aspirations. We made a point in our wedding registry to include an option of donations to go towards projects we would find of the highest merit as we traveled.

The truth is, we have found some wonderful organizations - some formal, some informal - doing work in different arenas range. As anyone who knows us might suspect, we also build more informed critiques of NGO’s in general; mainly from perspectives of provenance, utility and sustainability.

Setting up sustainable programs that are sensible and beneficial to the community we come from, to the community we are exchanging with and/or to ourselves as individuals depends on many factors. How long do we plan to work or collaborate on the project. Is our local partner informed and willing to participate as needed. What is the long term ownership management potential for comprehensive oversight and growth. How necessary is the project? What are expected or unpredictable mitigation issues for damages and challenges of the project? How will financing be sustained and initiated? Is this a highest best use project for limited resources? How can our project partner, collaborate, exchange and reproduce in other ways?

There are infinite good program development possibilities brought on by cultural and multinational exchange. New ones arise daily. While possibilities are endless, fine tuning projects to match the culture sensibilities, timeliness, and appropriateness of countries we visit is equally confounding and inexact. Oftentimes, due to our backgrounds, we see project possibilities in government/civic collaborations, NGO/Non-profit, and community participation and engagement. Those with different backgrounds and expectations will have other challenges, dreams, and possibilities. We all have a responsibility to act.

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Service in Parks - or anywhere you go

We have found ourselves with an abundance of service projects everywhere we go. We love to look back down a beach, to gaze across a park or campground, or, look at the flowers of a roadside and enjoy a view without trash and plastics. There is something different about being in places where you can make a public difference; something about finding a space that is of a human scale which can be seen as approachable, conquerable, measurable. We have found these spaces in parks and beaches: essentially in the places which we decide ‘ought‘ to be clean.

While traveling, I myself stress that I would prefer not to let my own moral code define the interactions I have. (This has come in handy lately in lands where even wealthy, educated, business owners have not given a thought to tossing plastic bags and bottles out their windows onto the precious landscapes all around us.) In fact, though I am blogging about public clean-ups as service projects - one of there best qualities is that they are an invisible good. When done correctly, no one should have to know that we have done a service project at all. Leaving a place cleaner makes it more enjoyable without seeking recognition or reward.

So, I find service cleaning beaches, trails, parks, campsites, and roadways. And, while I wish that in many parts of the world people were more than jut beginning to get a grasp on the non-disposability of plastic (meaning: it does not go away); I do not take on this service with negativity or discontent. Instead, I mostly enjoy therapeutic and fast rewards of the calming exercise and my immediate betterment of the space. I love the feeling of improving a space which I was already enjoying..

As any passionate dishwasher, car washer, grass cutter, or vacuum maven will tell you, there is a meditative value in organizing and cleaning our environment. While it may not all be our mess, stewarding its utility and preservation is a kindness we do for both ourselves and others.

What I call the greatness of service in cleaning public places is the silence and invisibility of the act. While it would cause some discomfort to pick up trash (coming from my own society, the USA, where cleaning of public parks and roadways is often the purveyance of non-violent incarcerated offenders). It is my hope that people who see someone cleaning pubic places will choose one of two principle actions for their own life: (1) to not litter; and, (2) to leave our public (and private) places cleaner than we find them. If you question your ability to clean up a public mess, start smaller, clean a remote trail, clean a community garden, or the public ways of residence of someone you know infirm. Enjoy that small satisfaction; then let that small success motivate you towards other, more public places.

My theory behind why public places should be clean is a simple one: If the lands and special places which we all enjoy together are kept to a high standard, we will all expect the same in our own home lands.

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Honey Service Cyprus-Turkey

Honey Service Cyprus-Turkey

I.

Our trip to Cyprus has been a whirlwind. We have had highs and lows, mostly stemming from a lot of carrying our luggage further than we wanted to or needed to. That said, Cyprus has been a real honeymooner sopt for us. We were whisked out of the airport to downtown Larnaca in a late model Mercdes Sedan Limo-Taxi, our first night was spent in a untra modern very sleek hotel, and we have crisscrossed the island - meeting new friends all along the way. It is great.

The moments of agony sweating down charming streets carrying our heavy loads only to not find any ‘Panysions’ local guest house, will disappear and become positive memories. Our journey this year is to always be in service, though exchange and small actions, and, through this blog.

Cyprus was chosen by us not because it was a place we coveted visiting; but, more as a luxury weigh station on the way from Egypt to Turkey. We have picked up a much faster pace since leaving Africa as we are wanting to join our friend in Nice, France the third week of June.

So, how to be in service for such a brief visit to Cyprus?

We had arrived during the latest in a long string of peace conferences organized by the UN and various governments of Europe to try and reconcile the Greek/Turkish division which has taken place since 1974. So, our first idea was to talk peace, to bring an outside set of eyes and ideas to the island, and to promote Cypriot resolution in the context of the difficulties or successes we have found in other lands.

But, as I have said, we have had our own difficulties here. While it was so comforting to arrive in Cyprus at the brand new Larnaca airport; to glide along the walking escalators; to be greeted by gracious and efficient customs officials; to peer through windows of flat screen advertising in modern showy style; and, like I mentioned, tp take our first luxury limo ride as newlyweds (this was due to a 1a.m. arrival and not because of choosing this over our usual public transportation offerings); Cyprus soon grated on us. We were immediately discontent. My wife wondered aloud, ‘Is this what it is going to be like to be back in the USA? Surrounded by all of this stuff and disliking it? Have we become so accustomed to standards of living in poorer countries that the standards of our own culture repulse us?” It was a valid question.

In Cyprus, wealth is everywhere. It is an offshore banking capital for Europe, so there are banks and accounting firms. It is a resort island, so there are real estate offices selling condos in large new developments and waterfront towers. But I was not so sure it was only wealth, modernity, and the ugly side of ‘gold rush’ type Real Estate Development which was making us so ill at ease. We had been in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, also gleaming and new, Filled with wealth, but somehow they had a different class, the value of money was not the predominate aesthetic. Here it was pervasive, unbalanced.

So, we left Larnaca. We woke up, walked around town, dipped our toes in the ocean (where there was a wonderful contrast, teenagers frolicking on break next to rows of empty umbrellas and chairs lined up facing the ocean - from the front row back with front row seat clearly the ideal spot) ; and, at the end of the town beach, and old man, clearly a long time resident, carrying bags of trash which he probably collects daily out from the beach. The old man, and the children’s play both lifted our spirits.

We checked the bus schedule, headed back to pack [our hotel had an interesting concept, nice modern rooms but no frills: 10 a.m. checkout, 8 Euro remote control use, 3 Euro bag check, 2 Euro towel, 5 Euro per hous internet, 10 Euro room clean etc]. instead of walking to the bus, we decided to give an effort at hitching. So, here begins our service journey in Cyprus…

II.

Our first ride came quickly, we had moved up the street from Hellenic Bank, where we finally retrieved enough Euros to feel we could get through a day or two. In front of a local fruit truck, almost immediately a pleasant single woman, Leza, in a brand new Volvo sedan pulled over - offering a smile and a lift. Her first sentence was something like, “Cypriots don’t see to much hitchhikers, but, I lived in England until I was 21 and I am happy to giver you a lift.” She was on her way to work, but went out of her way to bring us to the right intersection, and we departed with her telling us that if we did come back to Larnaca she would love to have us over for some wine or a dinner.Leza said that tourism made it more difficult to enjoy Cyprus; but that she especially liked Larnaca’s working town vibe; and that it still preserved much Cypriot way of life. We applauded her kindness and promised to stay in touch.
Brittany the hitchiker

Our next ride arrived even faster. Out the (right) driver side door popped a pregnant blond woman who motioned for us to load our stuff in her trunk where she would make space for us. Her name was Dorotha. She was from Poland, a singer, a salsa dancer and instructor, and an expectant mom and soon to be bride. We learned so much from Dorotha as she drove us half way across the island to the capital of Nicosia.

Since Dorotha, we have wanted to hitchhike only. We did catch public transport from just outside the great walled city to get to Kyrenia. We were in the process of trying to hitch when a humbler Mercedes pulled up and motioned for us to get in. As it turned out, this was a sky blue stretch vintage limousine now converted into a shared taxi. It filled up quickly and we were on our way.

South Cyprus (known as Turkish Occupied Cyprus in most of the western world) had preserved the charms of what Cyprus was probably like before the civil war. There were old buildings, people gathered in the street at parks and cafes, and the high end brand stores and skinny busty dress were not as much in vogue. I commented to Brittany that at one public square in North Cyprus close to the edge of the border, I felt a seemliness that reminded me of Thompson Square in the east village of NYC before it reached the high pace of gentrification. Prostitutes, old men, high end shoppers, immigrant laborers, punk teenagers, and flocks of oblivious tourists all were using the square mostly unaware or through ignoring each other.

We have been picked up by two Nottingham Knights (in current incarnations as plumbers) who brought us to our lovely camp site. They told us camping would be fine, just to keep an eye out for vipers. We were picked up in a big Mitsubishi work truck by a local Cypriot who picked us up and drove us slowly across the island occasionally explaining that his truck was ‘engine too hot’ and overheating. Then, we were whisked back too quickly from this far flung peninsula by a younger Turkish Cypriot who shared his own success in the rental car business as a parable for how business has boomed and busted since the 2004 opening of borders. When I enquired if he could draw a parallel for us between the conflict in Cyprus and the occupations in Palestine and other parts of the Middle East. He gave us a very dignified and reasonable answer, ‘I could not answer that question because I do not know what happens in Israel and Palestine. I do not live there,” he began, “But I am from here, and I can tell you that Cyprus has a conflict between peoples who are the same people - but we just cannot live together.” He went on to say that he did not think there would ever be a resolution, “I have seen so many presidents and governments,” he told us, “They are all the same, nothing changes and none of them offer new ideas or prospects of peace.” “The problem,” he told us, “Is that the Greek population is four times as big as the Turkish population. And, the Turkish populations hass always been poor, while the Greek population is rich. They have more than 4 million visitors a year while we have less than 150,000.” As with all the people we have met hitchhiking, we gave him our card, asked him to read and respond to our blog posts, and to come and visit us in one of the places we live (where maybe the view of our own conflicts in the Americas would give some insight into ways to bring peace to this small, historic and sentimental island). We all act to exchange good will.


So we have found service, again, in Cyprus: We outspokenly discuss the prospect of peace and prod all those we meet to give us the reasons why it is not occurring; we meet people who will pick up hitchhikers and describe our journey (while at the same time, we wave to those who smile but point that they are not going our way; and, perhaps, we help those who cannot pick up hitchhikers for fear of encountering the other to productively question themselves and what it is that prevents them from wanting to pick up a couple of bright-eyed smiling, ostensibly innocuous people such as us).


And, then we look for our service projects where we can create them. I am writing this blog from our campsite on metamorphic rock cliffs high above the setting sun and the Mediterranean. I spent part of the afternoon picking up plastic bags along the cliffs. I would like to pick up more trash in the crevasses below, but the cliffs are treacherous, the rocks sharp, and I can do more on top than below. Brittany too picked up trash at a remote beach we visited near Turtle Bay. She tossed industrial plastic containers up from the tidal edge and carried an enormous diesel oil filter left leaking on the sands out to the side of the road. We try not to leave much of a footprint. We still struggle to not be given bags at stores and to have our items packed together or more lightly, we ‘pack it in pack it out’ much probably to the chagrin of a beautiful large red Cyprus fox which just approached me as I typed this. [Later we saw his mate with her four beautiful ox cubs rollicking in the sands and carved sea rocks below our camp].

We have realized that our service is often not so much in direct action, or projects, as it is in the promotion of ideas, in the rousing aptitude for harmony with peoples, in our cultural ambassadorship. We can leave the world in small ways better than we found it. For this journey, it is a start, it must be enough.

In about 72 hours in Cyprus, we have seen a lot, greened our travel a little further, heightened our awareness of the problems of rampant and unmitigated consumption, and worked for peace. At this pace, Europe will have a lot to gain by our visit.




III.

Hitchhiking in Turkey has been easier than we thought. We had some delightful and long rides, usually accompanied by generous hospitality in forms of exchanges of fresh fruit and chai tea. Some highlights have included: Brittany’s first ride in a ‘big rig’ which she hooked for us singlehandedly while I had my back briefly turned; a charming Turkish ex-pat Memet living in Zurich who really struggled with us to use German to make sense of the world; and a kind petrol operator who drove us 300k. - each of whom never tried to use English, nor us Turkish, but we all used a combination of charades, repetitious phrases at obvious moments, and all kinds of smiles and friendly gestures. With new friend Memet - Turkish chai and cherries for a break

We did break out our ‘Point It’ travelers universal language book during chai breaks causing additional good feelings as we saw together that when travel is put into photo images our common language needs are much simpler than we imagined. How do we make a picture for “Thank you.” to send to the ’Point It’ guides?

For those people who want to ‘green’ their adventure trail and go local, I think that team hitchhiking is a valuable way to experience ambassadorship, local hospitality, and share messages of interconnectivity. While Americans have a view of hitchhiking a dangerous and vagrant it does not have to be this way; the best way too change this is to break the mold and change the status quo; if hitching were to become as comfortable as it appears to us in Europe, we could all help dissolve barriers and build new friendships between peoples. In the process, you will: fill empty seats reducing carbon usage, find unexpected locations, make friends, and be an ambassador for how you want to represent your country.

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Be Just Football Club

Service has many names, many faces, many impacts, and many methods of success. My service project in Ghana was perhaps a bit more technical than usual, but the results are certainly positive.

On our second day in Cape Coast, just as we were deciding to pack up and depart for Kumasi, we met a new friend. Tony advised us that rather than traveling to Kumasi (which is larger than Accra and no less than 4 hours away), why not go to Winneba instead? Beaches, annual festival, and en route to Accra.

We learned that Tony is a football (soccer) coach in Cape Coast, and together with a few friends, began the “Be Just Football Club.” As a registered football club affiliated to the Central Regional Football Association, the Be Just Football Club seeks to participate in football to the highest level and produce quality footballers within the local and international football leagues as well as producing players to feed the national teams. The Be Just Football Club also works to use football as a means to assist the less privileged in the society (I.e. orphanages, prisons, and hospitals), and to keep teenagers engaged in positive and healthy activity.

Tony mentioned that he was anxious to have a website for his club; in fact, his players were pestering him relentlessly. He was trying to save money to hire a web designer.

I offered my paltry, but baseline, skills to help Tony create a free website using Blogger. We met at our hotel and typed up all of the content first, then spent an hour and a half at the internet café putting it all together.

You may visit the Be Just Football Club website to learn about their team! Tony and I included a Clustr visitor map to track the location of visitors to the website; please add your international location (achieved by simply visiting the Be Just Football Club website)!

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Bridge Building and Travel

written by Nathan

 

We have struggled to find our service options as we had originally intended them. We hoped to find ways in which we could use our skill sets to assist communities, and to share what we have discovered in our travels, in our interactions with different cultures, and in regards to disasters. We find that we may contribute to building bridges between cultures and between nations, and bridges of friendship with individuals, families, and businesses. When we make particularly strong and trusting contacts, we build bridges of intellectual and political rigor and dignity which we know support our new friends and their communities in sustainable ways.

However, what we have consistently written about through our blog is how we can effect change at home, within our communities, and between peoples we do not know, but who share some of the same education, privilege, status, wealth, and interconnectedness. We believe we institute ‘viral’ change through writing this blog. We know that our opinions and experiences remain searchable through the internet and continue to reach people and change opinions in actions in ways that we are not aware of.

One constant that comes from our western type of education and role models who have shaped our intellectual, spiritual, and professional lives is our gift for critical thinking. The scientific model of rational thought and critical inquiry allows us to question status quo relationships which exist in many different and similar forms across the planet. We have written about some of these; we hope to continue to deduce, research, and formulate new opinions on others which we still are discovering. Some of them may seem obvious to our readers - our blog continues to sprout new readership from across the globe, each of you comes for different purposes. We hope we are serving the purpose for which your ‘search’ found us; or, if not, that we are enlightening or just entertaining you!

We know you find us if you already know us or our connected to us. We also know you find us if you have similar interests in travel, greening the planet, sustainable development, photography, family, food, culture, adventure and the like. If you like all of this stuff, we will not let you down, everyday we are actively seeking more of it. You may also have found us because we share similar interests. Maybe you are like us because you travel but you gave up the guide book. Maybe you travel, but you feel compelled to find a way to do service, reduce your carbon footprint, or be an ambassador of your home community on the way. Maybe you also plan to travel to one of the countries that we have visited. Whatever it was that brought you to our blog, please do subscribe, bookmark, recommend. As old man Bob French, the DJ on WWOZ*, our home radio station and the ’best radio in the universe’ reiterates on his morning broadcast, ’if you like our show, tell your friends! if you don’t like it, don’t tell nobody!!’

Thanks - and stay tuned!

*For those readers who don’t already know of WWOZ, it truly is a fantastic radio station out of New Orleans. You can listed online by following this link.

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Action Aid in Kemba

Our trip to visit Action Aid Ethiopia’s field operations in the town of Kamba proved fruitful an rejuvenated our feeling for work taking place in Ethiopia. There, more than 70 projects display their commitments to useful, harmless work that improves the life of entire communities. They work diligently with few resources and smaller staffs to produce results that have social, political, and economic ramifications and should yield even more sustainable and long-lasting results far beyond their mission.

Their entire plan has no footprint except to honor and empower the community they are serving. While I found it awkward that they also aspire to affect cultural norms, they are careful to only tentatively, and with great community ‘buy-in’ take on what are termed by the NGO and the Ethiopian government as “Harmful Traditional Practices.” Some of these which were described to us go against the grain of western norms: wife and child beating, excessive slaughter of livestock at occasions of deaths, female castration of girls, all are much too violent and nonsensical to weestern minds and values but are actually very ancient tribal rituals here.
Action Aid’s staff is superb, from Birhanu the District Manager, to Markos (guard, farmer, general labor & resident dad). They employ locally as much as they are able and when they post positions for professionally qualified managers they receive 400 applications per position. This is a privilege of being ferenge (foreign) ngo’s and is also a burden of responsibility to make certain the right persons are selected to enhance their programming and teamwork.
Action Aid also has an affirmative policy of preferring women and other marginalized groups and classes (making their policy operational beyond secretarial, cook, or household positions is problematic, however, due to Ethiopia’s limited and recent history of allowing women’s education to exist; much less be encouraged).

We were truly inspired and amazed by our trip to Kemba with Action Aid; many thanks for the incredible experience and wonderful friendship.

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The Validity of Work and Rose Milk

I write this piece in a place of utter honesty: The Sevagram Ashram. This Ashram was established by Ghandi in 1936 to progress rural sustainability and service work. Our journey has led us here.

To tell the truth, the last month in India has been a struggle for me. I have felt uncomfortable and ill at ease here. I have wished that our departure was closer. I have despaired of my feelings and sentiments, which has only increased my discomfort. I am perpetually exhausted: my dreams are filled with anxiety and attackers and price negotiations and strife and struggle. I awake despondent and low. I yearn for peace.

I wanted so much to love this country: India had been on my “places to visit” list since I was a teenager, and I anticipated a country that would be easy for me to adore. I can pick out a list of things in India that I do love - rose milk, amazing textiles, lovely countryside, chai tea with cardamom, vegetarian food, the Chauhan’s, free-roaming and happy cows in the streets, beautiful women wearing intricate gold jewelry, sweet curd, the word “Namaste” and the prayer-like action that accompanies it, holy men in the midst of society, friends in Hindmotor - but the overall sentiment has not been a positive one. I cannot say that I have enjoyed the entirety of India.

A large part of my struggle has been our service, or lack thereof. Our goal for this “Honey Service Year” was ambitious and boldly stated, and although I believe strongly in our efforts, the responsibility of following our intent causes me anxiety. So many of our friends and family and acquaintances supported our mission both in spirit and in wallet; sometimes I feel that we are letting everyone down. Especially here in India, where our service has, thus far, been so absent.

But, in this heavy afternoon air, the hot Indian sunshine threatening to burst the clay walls of our Ashram guestroom, I understand. I realize why India has been so difficult. I realize how difficult our work has been, especially for me. I cry with the realization and the epiphany and the appreciation of us both.

For here, in Ghandi’s place, our journey makes sense. Our daily work seems real and valid and more poignant that I have understood.

This morning we joined seven other Ashramites before dawn, and sat upon the simple clay verandah of Ghandi’s hut. I listened to chanting and singing in Hindu, following the intonations and tones and rhythm, while understanding nothing of the words. Suddenly, to my thus-uncomprehending ears, issued forth an English version of the “Lord’s Prayer.” I could join in, my voice melding with gentle voices in the crispness that only lives in the air before sunrise.

After breakfast, we reported for service work: sunscreen applied and flip-flops ready for action. We were given the task of sweeping the cow paddock, using bundled branches as brooms, and working our way through the hulking, cud-chewing cows. One young cow followed me throughout my task, bumping her milky head against my body, seeking a caress. We swept the pasture clear of hay and branches, working around the mounds of manure. Then, the manure was picked up with our bare hands, and loaded into a large pit, where it is eventually gleaned of methane gas to fuel the kitchen.

While we worked, Indians passed: many people visit the Ashram to learn about and remember Ghandi. Soon there was a crowd of ten men standing in front of the paddock, watching the foreigners picking up manure with their bare hands. Although I was aware of their presence, I was mostly lost in my work, relishing the dust and the heat and the fragrance of cows that surrounded me. People were talking and taking pictures.

How can I explain, to all of you so far away, how monumental was our service in the cow paddock? India is built on caste levels that a person is born into, and that prohibit movement to higher or lower or different caste/class levels. In a land where classism and caste-ism dictate Indian culture, our work in that pasture, in front of a group of Indians, was profound. It was so much more than the physical act of sweeping a pasture. It was so much more than helping to fuel the stove that would cook our lunch and dinner. Our work was much larger than the act itself. It was a statement. It was a clear and literal act of Ghandi’s message and principles.

It wasn’t until we arrived here, at the Ashram, and I re-read Ghandi’s words and his mission and his beliefs, that our service work suddenly made sense. In the way that we present ourselves and how we experience India has resulted in daily work that questions and shows our disregard for a discriminatory and classist structure. Being here, in Ghandi’s home, I realize our work in India has been this, every day, every moment. Every day that we strive to see the world from the eyes of the common, the poor, the regular, the local, the “walas,” we say something about ourselves and the place that we are from. We have been acting out Ghandi’s message every day that we have been in India. I just didn’t realize the impact of our work, or understand how dramatic a statement our daily activities have been. Here in India, people like “us” don’t walk in the streets among the dust and the dirt and the urine. And they don’t eat street food. And they don’t have conversations with people of a lower caste. And they certainly don’t pick up cow shit with their bare hands.

I also now understand why India hurts me so, and why I continue to allow myself to be hurt. Because it is bigger than me.

Traveling through India is more intense and uncomfortable for me than it is for Nathan, although I know that my discomfort causes him, in turn, great discomfort. But it’s been truly awful. In a male-dominated society, filled with extreme sexual repression, I am ogled and oggled and leered at and the subject of unrelenting stares from the male population. It makes me feel vulnerable and objectified and uncomfortable and awful about who I am. I have been seriously considering a burka, no joke. It’s difficult to be caught in the middle: I can’t be who I am here, and I certainly can’t pose as an Indian, no matter how elaborate the saree or henna or tanning cream. And I have just wanted to disappear under a heavy burka and be an ostrich. But something has prevented me, and it’s been more than the reluctance to cover my body with dark cloth in such a hot land. It’s because the moment that I hide myself, I cease to deliver my statement about my view of the world and the role of women within it. We are not here to be oggled in a way that makes us feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. We are not here to be objectified. Just because my skin is fair, my clothing different, and my eyes a lighter color doesn’t mean that I don’t walk the streets instead of taking rickshaws, or eat at Thali food stands on the street instead of an indoor restaurant, wash my laundry by hand instead of sending it out. We are people, no matter what we look like or where we come from.

And it’s hard work, each day. Harder than you could imagine, but suddenly, I understand the work. And I will continue to work, though it makes me cry and feel awful. It’s the hardest work I think that I have ever done. But, again, it‘s bigger than me. And the feeling of being part of something larger makes me feel less vulnerable, less alone, part of something larger.

What a tremendous feeling.

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Service and Exchange on our round-the-world honeymoon

What is service? Service and exchange are two terms that we use to describe the practical side of our travel this year. But, how one becomes of service is a journey, far different from travel alone. I use a lose definition of service and combine it with the ideas of exchange, (idea exchange, economic exchange, cultural and political exchange, service exchange). The best way to be in service while a traveler is to indulge in regular interactions. These actions can be as light-footed as our presence in an unexpected place, or, as meaningfully complex as intellectual exchange about current affairs.

What comes naturally to us is the exchange of ideas. The construction, repetition, and/or building on philosophies, values, civic mindedness, even science and of life and our current world affairs.

Travel necessitates a willingness to indulge in new ideas, to try new things, to meet new peoples. Realizing how exchange becomes service is a different act. To be in service is to be at once open to influence of others and consciously encouraging critical and new ideas to emerge in the communities we engage with. While it is easier, and normally to be more productive, to exchange with folks who have similar educational or intellectual backgrounds, we cannot limit ourselves to what is easiest in India.

We are constantly approached for two-minute street interviews. Whether testing simple English, or from a desire to know how in the world a pair of funny looking foreigners made it to Jabalpur, Nagpur, Hindmost (or even more commonly visited places like Delhi, Kolkata, or Mussoorie) our smiles, friendly gestures, or backgrounds introduction beaks down common assumptions and makes the world smaller for all of us. Yet, sometimes, a larger gift is exchanged. People are interested in international relations.

Headlines in India recently focused on poor treatments of recent Indian immigrant communities in places as far away as Australia and France. We are able to use these examples to broaden perspective on modern Indian social dilemmas such as domestic terrorism, tensions with Pakistan, or interfaith biases that are common in daily news and conversation. 

Yesterday, at an ice-cream stand in the market here in Jabalpur, a young man approached us. He explained that he was interested in using a system which a movie star here promoted about engaging visitors to India and being a good ambassador for his country. However, when the conversation turned from India families being prejudiced against abroad to the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in within India, we were able to draw his attention to how economic disparity, globalized markets, international migrations, and race and religious discrimination are work which we must take seriously at home and abroad. Small lights of understanding seemed to go off that in order to protect our human dignity and rights we must treat people fairly and equitably, and how our respect earns respect. The better we practice engaging in service in our daily lives the more we become natural teachers and propagators of conscious change taking place

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Thailand is Booming with Tourism

I can say with certainty that I already love Thailand. Calm, friendly, honest people. A land of Buddhism that entices you quickly with its sweet flavors, fragrance of flowers, polite and gentle landscapes. It is entirely nonabrasive (we have stuck mostly away from the tourist path - 'walking streets,' the seedy brothel lore, the tired 'Cancun' and Disneyesque resort beaches to the south). Anyone with imagination or a taste for its rich history can easily see a charmed past and feel in its recent history, echoes. This is not a blog about that Thailand. This is what I wrote spontaneously on a slow diesel trawler as we crawled along the coast back to the furthest edge we could find away from Thai 'civilization.' After nearly two weeks on islands and in serene mangrove estuarine enclaves along the Thai Cambodian border here it is what I wrote. If it is for anyone, it is for the thoughtful and compassioned traveler. And, it is for the governments of Thailand, her neighbors, and the world community that flocks here. It is not meant as unfriendly. It is meant as a reminder to all of us who can ignore what role we play in the way the world develops.

It goes like this...


What would fix our world: By example from Thailand

Life has only ever taken me to moments.
In clarity in Evolutions.
I would see in a place all I loved and all at once.
Nothing like this ever came to me in Thailand.
Here, a debate with self, of new purpose, new pursuits.
China, India, Louisiana, ancestry vastly more polluted
These all ring with Life for me. Poor Thailand.
I am understanding very little here.
It sticks to my soul like a skin's lesion.

Thus, I reflect on other places, other times.
A first epiphany in Omaha, Nebraska. I am 17.
A urchin's port in Panama's Casco Viejo. I am 29.
Acrid sulfurs of country roads back home.
Distances of time. Memories held still.
Photographic emotional stillness.
Friends and acquaintances long gone.
Distances grown to revolutions.

Thailand, as ill as the planet we are healing.
Now, but now, but NOW, must remain sick, bedridden.
Venezuela, USA, The Indian Res
And all the old Colonies hovering below remark for it.
Darkness, falsely lit, in phantom shallows. A putritude.
Holding good which was evil disguised as good without evil.

A lost time. Dead monks littering roads between Buddhist countries.
Greeds, Pollutions, Degraded, Degrading.
Falsity, lacklusterness, undefined ruination with no common purpose.
Results of organized religion - Capital wealth.
King's of Ancient Nations trading arms and lands and death.
Kunckledusters who let ruin the golden gates.
What would fix our world? By example from Thailand...
"Kill the Buddha!"

....

To our lovely friends and all her kind people, forgive a wit in wrath.

This blog is going to be followed by a short series of positive inspirations about eco tourism, public environmental art, service projects that are self-starters (and work), green development lessons, new friendships and the like. But, I have to get this out there to get started on the rest.

We have two days until Calcutta, India. What can await us there?

Wrapping up Thailand, we have been enjoying the long New Year's celebrations, visiting craft, music, and food bazaars and festivals and wishing we had many of our good friends and family along to enjoy this place and make sense of what is happening here so that we should all become better stewards of the world our children's children and their children's children might one day inherit.

Thailand is Booming with Tourism. What can we learn from their losses and their fate? (A sad and deadly sickness of selfishness and mad advantages)

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We finished Service Project #1 - The Tokyo "Sumiyoshi" Neighborhood Garden

Part 1:

Our first project is completed. Today we planted a Japanese sized (read: small) planter bed garden in front of Come On Up shared house in the Sumiyoshi neighborhood of Tokyo. This involved selecting, buying, and carrying everything needed to grow our small plot on foot. We got soil, fertilizer, and plants from a market 10 blocks away. We pulled the loose grasses and roots and used them as a base fluff for building up space at the bottom of the pots for drainage and mulch. We mixed new soils and mulch with old, and planted our garden. Then we commandeered two flower pots that were left aside on the roof and planted extra cabbages in these. We used perennial plants which we had noticed in the neighborhood, purple flowers, a tiny white flowering shrub with blossoms scented with a spicy almost cinnamon aroma, and red and white ornamental cabbages. None of these plants will live long enough to offset a carbon footprint from the non-stop JAL flight from New York to Tokyo. However, you never can succeed if at first you don't begin somewhere. So, try, try again! The final step to our project was sweeping the street of all trash and spilled soil with an appropriately stooped small broom and dustpan. Japan is such a tidy and clean place we could have just as easily lost all the good will of our enterprising community service project by leaving a mess behind.

We are beginning a learning curve in terms of documenting our projects properly. We only have the 'after' to our 'before and after' images, therefore losing the power of transformation. Small project; but, with lots of lessons learned for the next one.

Part 2:

It could easily be said that another way we are always in service is our cultural ambassadorship for the United States, New Orleans, and our folks back home. As a chef from New Orleans, my whole adult life has benefited from being able to cook Creole, Cajun, Country French, Tex-Mex, BBQ, and, best of all, New Orleans food for people all over the world. Today at Tsukiji Fish Market we had a grand time admiring the fish, seafood, and crustacean of the freshest varieties from around the world. There was a beautiful grouper that I thought would make a fine cooked gift for our hosts New Year's party; but we settled on a kilo of oysters and some beautiful very large clams, (thinking the shells would make a nice addition to our tiny streetscape).

What else would make the perfect authentic New Orleans offering to a New Year's  party when you are trained in creole cuisine than our own holiday favorite, oyster artichoke soup? We bought our oysters and set off to the adjacent markets to find artichokes. Using our Point It book, we visited all the vegetable stalls we could locate and finally came to the conclusion that artichokes are rare in Japan in general and out of season, (or, out of stock?), during December. We found the rest of our ingredients at the Life supermarket in Sumiyoshi, but artichokes still unavailable, I am inventing a new oyster stew on the fly. The clams are steaming to be breaded and stuffed with an oily mayonnaise and pork fat base...

In the midst of our planning the greening of our small corner of the Sumiyoshi neighborhood in Tokyo, we started planning ahead to the subcontinent of India. Our friend Sara's family is from there and she offered to let us camp on her ancestral lands. We were looking on a Lonely Planet map for Amendnagar (where my great-great-great grandfather began the Maharashti Missions almost 200 years ago. Since we fly to Delhi, I looked for where these roads would meet and found a calling to go volunteer at Sevagram where Ghandi started his ashram dedicated to universal service in 1936. Here are the eleven vows that visitors are asked to live by there.

The Eleven vows of Ashram life at Sevagram

1. Truth (Satya)
2. Non-violence (Ahimsa)
3. Chastity (Brahmacharya)
4. Non-possession
5. Non-stealing
6. Bread labor
7. Control of palate
8. Fearlessness
9. Equality of all religions
10. Swadesi (the law of the neighborhood)
11. Removal of untouchability

When I visited Mumbai in 2007, I learned that my ancestors mission had brought a challenge to the courts that would remove the laws of untouchability whereby their religion, Christianity, would allow them to break bread and drink from the same vessel as the people they served. They also started women's colleges, medical teaching universities, and print press in Marathi.

The more we internalize and practice our collective benefits from service the better off we are.

When our family took Summer camping trips in my childhood my mother always had us search the woods around our site and pick up garbage, 'Always leave the campsite cleaner than you found it,' she says. This may be a mantra for our service. The first service project complete, we are off to Shanghai and seven weeks in China.

Do you know that Japan consumes most of the Tuna in the world year in and year out?

Want to see more pictures?

We have photos of Tuna auction, a tiny new green space, as well as many other travel photos at:

http://honeyserviceyear.shutterfly.com

(password is "travel")

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