So I guess this goes with the whole third world education thing. Calvin and I intern for a nonprofi organization called Hamomi Children's Centre, which is an elementary/middle school near Nairobi, Kenya. It started about 15 years ago with a Kenyan guy who realized how many kids there were sleeping on the streets and looking through garbage cans for food, so he found 7 street orphans and started to teach them. They started without a building and he was earning next to nothing, but he figured educated street children are better than uneducated ones so he continued to teach them. Here it becomes a cliche-but-still-quite-inspiring story about how he got together with some other teachers and they got more and more orphans and started fundraising until eventually they were able to buy land and build a school and then somhow they got connected with people in the USA who started a nonprofit to support them. Now we feed over 100 students 3 meals a day, 7 days a week, and pay for textbooks. We pay to feed the teachers too, and have a support-a-teacher program where you and your coworkers (or whoever) can pay $100 per month to pay the salary for a teacher. That isn't very much to live off of in Kenya, but it's something.
It's been interesting to see the American side of the whole thing--the wealthy Caucasian donors or buyers at auctions, buying signed movie posters or dinners at nice restaurant, and it's hard to connect that side with the Hamomi that is a school for the poorest of the poor on the other side of world, but I can only hope our work is valuable enough that it really does affect boh sides.
Another post on women's rights. Sorry. I'm finding my soapboxes. So there are two major solutions that I know of to lack of women's rights in third world countries, and not solutions like raiding brothels or handing out condoms. Two lastig solutions so make women more self sufficient and help them to advocate for themselves. Not surprisingly, these also help poverty in general in those areas.
Education: As young people we are always told "you don't understand the value of your education" or "imagine if you were not allowed to go to school" and many people roll their eyes or make some snarky comment about how they wish they were poor people in Sri Lanka so they didn't have to go to school, but the truth is that education is huge. Also if you think about it for at least three seconds, you'll realize you do not want to be an impoverished person in rural Sri Lanka for so many reasons. Especially in the microcommunity of Prism, we stress about school so much. We worry about etting into the right schools, about what kind of a career we want to go into and how much it will pay, we worry about recs and what our parents will say if we get a B in calculus, but really school is so integrated into our lives that we don't realize how crucial it is. Even an elementary education does so much for a person, and illiteracy in women is huge--you can manipulate a person very easily if they cannot read the rules to tell them how much of what you're doing is illegal. Women cannot be business women if they never learn math, and they cannot become respected members of the community if they have not learned the basic skills that even America's poorest immigrant children learn for free.
Business: Study after study has shown that if you let women handle business in third world countries, they are much more effective at it. This is because the women are not used to handling money, that there is this social stigma against giving women any power so husbands and fathers take care of money and women take care of children. This means that when women do get loans, they are very cautious with money and do not overspend so they don't encounter the debt problems that plague so many first world businessmen and women. The other thing about putting women in buiness is that it takes off that dea that women cannot have any power, either because of the thought that they are unintelligent or irresponsible (refuted when they are seen to be successful in microfinancing) or just because a culture says that women should not lead. It's funny how when power is given to powerless races within a society, the result is vastly different, highly ineffective, and almost always violent. HMM.
So I just started this book called Half the Sky. It had been on my reading list for a while and then Shanyi approached me recently and told me she was reading this awesome book and it seemed like the perfect book for me and that bumped it up on the list significantly, and then it came in and I was quite excited. The title is based off of a Chinese proverb that "Women hold up half the sky," and it's sort of a compilation of stories about women's rights in third world countries. I'm only a little bit in, but I've heard plenty of stories of sexual trafiking before and the first few stories in the book are about that, and it's always odd to me the kinds of justifications that people make for any sort of slavery. We live in a country that is so focused on diversity and equality that I can't comprehend what it is to see someone as deserving less than you. I certainly judge people in other ways-- I say "that person is lazy, but it'll come back to ruin his life later," or "she's dumb, so she had that coming" but it's so incredibly incorrect to say that any person is different from you just because of their race or gender that I have no understanding of what it is to live in a country where even the government works that way.
As far as I can tell, the book has two major issues that it deals with: sexual traffiking and maternal mortality. SO.
Sexual traffiking. I don't know when I first heard of this concept because when I was younger my parents kind of pretended that sex didn't exist. I probably first learned of it in church, though, from some missionary returning from Thailand or Cambodia, and I must have been appalled because I am still terrified of the concept. What is surprising and also concerning is that so many women who end up in brothel are sold by their family to do something like working in corn fields to deceitful employers who then take them far away to live and work in brothels. But it's the culture that really gets to me. I understand what it is to be in a culture that values abstinence until marriage, but in my experience that has always meant that the woman has kept herself pure and not given into temptation until she met the love of her life/had it sanctioned under God/insert-your-own-reason-for-waiting-until-marriage. How odd, how dreadful it must be to be forced into sexual slavery and then to go through the incredible difficulty of escaping only to find that there is no job, no family, no future available to you because you have lost your virginity.
Maternal mortality. This one makes sense because it is slightly closer to home, partially because maternal mortality is not a crime in the US, and partly because the Catholic faith was against any kind of birth control for so long, and that is a faith much closer to me than the Hindu or Islamic cultures that run the aforementioned brothels. The side of me that wrote the last paragraph says "what kind of a culture is against birth control, or just condoms? How can you forbid something that prevents so many children who will just end up with worse lives? Can't you see reason, that the women who have the most sex are often the women least fit to be mothers, even just financially?" but then another side of me remembers that my father's side of the family is pretty strongly against birth control. "Birth control interferes with God's will. If God didn't want those women to have kids, he wouldn't have let the women be on that part of their cycle." Which might make sense as an argument except when you realize that it is a monthly cycle and people have quite a bit of sex in this world, especially if they are sold into prostitution. The other aspect of maternal mortality, beyond women who are not yet old enough for childbearing being sold into prostitution, is the issue of women's health. So that bothers me too, that a culture would pay more attention to the health of one gender than the other, but it's also something that I cannot even start to understand because our culture is so strongly focused in diversity.
So we're reading a book in Spanish called Por Estas Calles Bravas by Piri Thomas. That translates roughly into "Down These Wild Streets," and it's the story of a Puerto Rican boy who grows up in Spanish Harlem around World War II. The book is a sort of autobiography of Piri Thomas, up to the time he is maybe twenty years old, and the culture clashes between Piri and those around him are strong and often violent. It's a pretty difficult read for someone who's not a Spanish speaker, mostly because there's a lot of Puerto Rican slang that we don't learn in a regular classroom. Piri sleeps with a lot of prostitutes, uses a lot of drugs whose names I probably wouldn't even recognize in English, and (spoiler alert) ends up in jail for a significant portion of the novel. But the novel also has a huge motif of racism.
Piri's whole family is Puerto Rican, but his mother and younger siblings are lighter colored whereas he and his father have darker skin and are often mistaken for African Americans. Piri finds it significantly easier to get along with African Americans than with Caucasians, but he is also resentful of black people. He is well aware of his cultures, of the stories his mother has always told about "Portorico," of the Spanish slang that is so incorporated into his lifestyle, and he sees it as offensive that he is treated as an African American, a race that the Caucasians on this side of the world held captive for centuries. He sees how easy it is for his white friends to get a job and how he is blown of at a job interview with the same credentials for the same job. He resents the whites for thinking they are better, and he resents the blacks for receiving poor treatment and thereby getting him bad treatment as well. But Piri has never lived in Puerto Rico and he is resentful of his own race too, asking his mother near the beginning how, if she was so happy in good old Puerto Rico, she could stand to move to the US where his father could never keep a job and there was no strong community, and never go back to the land she loved so much. He sees himself as a victim of circumstance, and even when he lets his emotions take control and knocks people out or gets arrested for robbery, Piri does not come to the realization that he has any control of his own fate. This is a trait he gets from his father, who cannot keep a job even during the war when jobs are easier to come by, but blames his circumstances on the depression, the WPA, his appearance, his crammed apartment, the expenses of running his family, and never takes responsibility for this.
Por Estas Calles Bravas brings up the point of reverse racism, something that it can do without being offensive, firstly because it is an autobiography and secondly because any reader who is easily offended would stop after a page, noting the frequent incidences of swearing, abuse, prostitution, gangs, drugs, violence, alcohol, theft, vulgar imagery, or... I don't know, can you think of anything else that is bound to offend people? Thomas as the author brings up reverse racism, though, because he is looking back at his past self and realizing how much of his circumstance was his fault and how much really was the fault of those around him. Piri is to a certain extent a victim of circumstances--his father is abusive and he grows up in a part of town where gangs are commonplace, and he does not really have anywhere to turn to solve his problems. White people really do hire other white people much more frequently in the places he goes to live, and the racism that the whole country has against African Americans at that time is huge in his quality of life. On the other hand, Piri does have the opportunity to take some control of his life, but by the time he comes to this realization he has such strong racial biases against everyone around him that the fight is made exponentially more difficult for him. White and black people treat him poorly throughout his childhood, and the racism he experiences at such a young age affects him tremendously in his youth, and every event just increases his disgust with one race or another.
Reverse racism is a touchy subject because if a white person accuses someone of another color of being racist, it just makes the white person seem worse, but Piri's hate for all races including his own in the book has really brought me to another level of understanding about the culture of many immigrant families or of gang members throughout the US and how our subtle racism can have such a strong effect on their lives.
I considered doing this for my co-cultures assignment, but it's a specific enough co-culture that I wasn't able to find resources on the topic. So I'm in this church youth choir called Bel Canto. It's pretty well known in circles of church youth choirs in the area because most churches can't afford to put together such a strong choral program for such a specific group of people. This is the choir I went to Costa Rica and San Francisco with and a group that I have grown to know about as well as I know the prism cohort or the cross country team, which is to say very very well. I should make this multimedia but all of our videos are on facebook so I have to include links instead of actual videos. But this is our most recent performance.
And this next one is my favorite. Because there are candles and the song is beautiful even if it's not that difficult.
I remember when I was deciding on my co-cultures assignment (which I eventually wrote about being a caucasian american) how I didn't think Bel Canto worked because it doesn't have that much of a culture--that it's open to new people and people could never feel uncomfortable in such a close community. Well I had my last performance ever yesterday and our banquet was tonight, and we definitely have our own culture.
Take this, for example. It's a skit that the guys did on our last night in Costa Rica. To us, it was hilarious. There were six guys in a choir of almost fifty, and they distinguished themselves very well. They'd spent the whole week making jokes about their voices cracking, or eating oreos to improve their falsetto. We saw Jeffrey and Mike drop the keyboard multiple times while our director wasn't looking, and we'd spent two weeks on tour together so we were all plenty comfortable making fun of the touring process, but sometimes I get really excited about that video and show it to people outside of Bel Canto and they... don't get it at all. "What was that clapping about? Someone passed out on stage?" I guess that goes into ethnocentrism--I'm so used to being a part of the choir, a part of the church and of the community that we've built that I fail to realized what a priveledge it is to have this opportunity, or how unique the whole situation is.
This is a choir that demands attendance to the same extent that school demands attendance and accepts few excuses, but it is also a choir that will go into the memorial gardens of our church or a random cathedral in Costa Rica and start singing just because our director thought it would be a cool idea on a whim. It is a choir that leads worship but also performs at retirement parties, weddings, choir competitions, and across the country and the world at cathedrals, universities, or other inredible venues. It is one that sings large multi-part works such as Benjamin Britten's Ceremony of Carols or Mendolssohn's Elijah, but also gospel pieces, foreign language pieces, modern acapella choral music, or elaborate version of Christmas carols accompanied by harp. Sometimes we have clapping, sometimes we have organ, sometimes we are acapella in a small village in Costa Rica with no plugs for our keyboard. We spend weeks preparing songs in six part harmony, or we hear the morning's hymn set five minutes before we walk on stage. It's this versatility that led me to think that we didn't really have a culture as a choir, but that's clearly inaccurate.
Nobody who spends that much time together can go without creating its own unique culture and we are no exception. We are a group of people who incorporates each freshman class easily and bids farewell to each senior class... with much less ease. We all deal with cheesy talks from our director and attempts at metaphors to make religion or the music make more sense, and we all secretly enjoy them. We all laugh as the director stops and says "second sopranos" or Katie runs in fifteen minutes late for the third week in a row. We get it when someone says "this song isn't exciting enough--let's add motions like we did for Adiemus!" or "this is too short, we could always insert a two minute clapping section on page six." We get used to the scavenger hunts that seniors always put on for retreat or the pretzel dance and the bedtime stories we read to incoming freshmen to make them feel welcome... or very confused. To us, it's all normal, and it's all tradition that feels comfortable. So now as I leave for college and I leave all of my Bel Canto traditions behind, I worry just a little bit. I worry about being the new kid in crew or in an acapella group, about no knowing the traditions, about the culture shock of going into a womens college and not knowing their traditions and culture. And then I realize that four years from now, that culture and those traditions will be my ethnocentric world view and I'll be just as unprepared to leave them behind as I was tonight, saying good bye to Bel Canto for the last time.
When I was twelve, our family decided to host an exchange student. It was a group decision--we went through a big list of them and picked a girl with a good understanding of English. It was so exciting the first time. My mom wanted a girl so that my sister and I wouldn't fall in love with him, a notion my sister and I both found ridiculous. She wanted someone who had at least one younger sibling so that she could deal with our family, and someone whose first language was neither French nor Spanish so that there was no bias towards one of us--Allison was taking French at the time and I'm fluent in Spanish. So we got Andrea. Andrea was a Swiss fifteen-year-old who had been to Florida a couple times with her mom but never spent significant time in the USA. She had one older sister and one younger sister, and all of us were younger than her. She went to school in another district because ours didn't have room for any more exchange students, but she got by.
Everyone loved Andrea. She brought us Swiss chocolate and still sends it to us every Christmas, which is a fantastic side effect of getting a student from the land of Toblerone. She got along very well with my sister, which is an incredible feat in itself--my sister saw her as the older sister she'd never had, which is a little odd to me as the oldest child in the family, but Allison and I are close enough in age that she doesn't see me as a big sister. Swiss people are very clean and Andrea loved doing the dishes, so my parents used her as an example for us. "See how nice Andrea keeps her room?" "See how Andrea does her homework right when she gets home?" Andrea really was like a sister to us, and her experience went exactly the way a year long exchange program should go. She learned a lot about our culture and we learned about her culture too. We learned that fondue pots must be thick, and that swatches are superior to all kinds of watches, we learned not to eat Hersheys because it is offensive to Swiss people (just like how Lindt is offensive to americans? wait...) and that Mount Rainier is nothing compared to the Alps. We learned a little about diplomacy and French and German cultures, and what it's like to live in a neutral country, and that Swiss people despise Turks. And we ate lots of chocolate.
Two years later, we got Michele. Michele was Andrea's little sister, and she wasn't too good at English but Andrea convinced her to come stay with us because we were a good family and would teach her about other cutlures. The thing about Michele is that she didn't want to be here. This is huge. The most important part of learning to assimilate with another culture is wanting to assimilate, and Michi was this little sister whose family had seen the merits of an exchange program and convinced her to come. She had a very possesive boyfriend back in Switzerland who we later learned sometimes threatened to kill himself from time to time if she did not come back soon. Funny, we'd thought only American guys were that angsty. Michi played volleyball here and she went to my school, but when she was at home she stayed in her room the whole time. She didn't eat much and she didn't do much with our family, and my parents didn't know how to react to that. Michele was supposed to stay for a year but she left after a semester.
So the moral of that story is that you can't judge a culture by one person because people are different everywhere. Just how they tell you on tour that you have to be on your best behavior because you're representing America to whoever you visit, as a host person you have to understand that not all people from the same culture act the same and that while society affects some aspects of people, individualism exists in all societies to some extent.
This is Brooke Fraser, a singer from New Zealand. Have you heard of her? No? Here, I'll try another.
This is Adele. She's a chart topper in the UK, and she's becoming more and more popular here. I bet you've heard that song before.
I'm sure you've heard of Enrique Iglesias before. Sorry this song's in Spanish, his Spanish songs are significantly better than his English ones. Maybe that's just me. His English songs tend to be about sex and about having an incredible physical passion for some attractive woman, whereas his Spanish ones are about having a deep love for a woman, or sometimes a lot of angst about a misunderstanding. But it's ok, angst sounds better in Spanish. Is this a statement about our culture, that the English chart toppers are more sexual whereas Spanish ones are more romantic?
This is Calle Paris. They are a pair of siblings who are half Spanish, half French, and they sing in Spanish. Before I went to Spain, I looked up a ton of Spanish songs like the one above so that I would be used to listening to Spanish music, and so that maybe I would have an understanding of the pop music common in Spain when I went there. So I got there with a pretty good knowledge of Mexican and Spanish artists, some common like Ricky Martin or David Bisbal, some less common like Calle Paris or Chenoa. Then I got there and listened to the music. English! My host sister loved Katie Perry's "Hot 'n' Cold" and she played a lot of Linkin Park and Green Day. Maybe it was just her, I thought, maybe it was because she was so interested in international studies and because she wanted to make me feel comfortable, but then I would listen to the radio or go to the mall and there it was! Shakira's "Waka Waka" song played a ton while I was there because of the world cup, but I heard it first in Spanish and I didn't realize it had an English version until a couple months later when I heard it in English and--what? "When you fall get up, oh oh/ If you fall get up, eh eh/ Tsamina mina zangalewa/ Cuz this is Africa." What was that? The boys soccer team played it a ton this spring while we had track practice, and every time I hear it I still say in my head "esto es Africa."
But I wonder why American music is so popular. Is our culture really something people want to take part in that much? Our music certainly isn't superior just as our clothing, our movies, and our language aren't superior. The sandals and sun dresses sold on the southern coast of Spain are adorable, but once you get even ten miles out from the coast, any mall has more shirts with English writing on them than with Spanish. White Americans are always looking for some interesting culture to associate themselves with, some intriguing place to travel, but we bring so much of our culture with us when we go places.
But it's funny because in the US, nobody wants to be mainstream. Our mainstream music is for the rest of the world, we associate ourselves with either unknown American singers or international groups. I'm sure Vicki and Claire have mentioned kpop, Korean pop music with groups like the one below:
And yes, that's adorable, though it's a little odd to see a korean group dressed as cheerleaders and football players. Even other countries' pop music that is so alien to people in the US has our influence. More examples? When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was obsessed with Filipino pop. Songs like this:
Wait a minute... that's a Celine Dion song...
Wait... that's a cover of Melissa Manchester...
I think you get the point. Even the music that we think is so alien to us is hugely impacted by American music and American culture. It makes you think. Ethnocentrism factors into some of our world view, but a lot of the world really is that based on American music and culture.
