Cajamarca, Peru

Foundation for Education and Development, previously Grassroots HRE in Phang Nga, Thailand, is a Burmese-run human rights org I’ve volunteered for and visited twice. They primarily serve migrant workers on construction sites and rubber plantations by providing schools for migrants’ children and offering legal, educational and health services for adults.

If you’ve never seen a rubber plantation, it’s pretty amazing and beautiful. Thousands of rows of skinny trees all in a line. Little cups on all the trees. Crazy bugs. A stillness throughout the jungle. But the Burmese workers there are often attacked, murdered and raped as they tap the trees overnight, and are not usually paid well. This Irrawaddy report on life on the rubber plantation noticeably lacks mention of the extremely repressive and genocidal dictatorship in Burma which is the REAL reason people flee to work in Thailand, but nevertheless, it gives you a good sense of life there (story starts around 00:42). I was on this particular plantation twice:

Have started listening to opera.
It was there all along, like God,
but I chose to be busy with other things.

Catharsis comes sometimes the same way
seasons die: without our being able to control
the eventual or sudden transition. One day
it’s just cold.

I cut my hair because I could feel the leaves
disengaging. One must prepare.
And in the street, a rallying heat
waves its scarf in an early goodbye.

You might as well let everything go;
it’s best to be unfettered when the new winds blow.

I haven’t written in a while. Things have been a little nuts. Nuts in both good ways and bad ways.

I’ll skip the bad ways. They’ve involved unforeseen apartment crises necessitating the destruction of all our belongings and immediate vacancy of said apartment + acquisition of new apartment + spontaneous bout of quasi-homelessness/nomadic transience which will be remedied shortly. This has been both unexpected, very expensive and highly, highly annoying. Don’t know why I’m writing in my professional voice. I will stop.

The good ways include MIT being awesome, my intergenerational mobile video media project with a Kenyan community kicking off this week, proposal moving full steam ahead with the German fellowship I am applying for, and summer being, well, sunny and pretty and pleasant and full of oceans and bluejays and french fries.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my office. DD and I have done a lot of driving to and from Rhode Island. I finally swam in the ocean for the first time this year and it was great, just great. My 11-year-old stepbrother-in-law stood next to me in the water this entire time and, as his transition lenses faded from light purple to blue, he explained how one can hack one’s PS2 to allow one’s anime characters to have superpowers. And how one time he beat this game in like 11 minutes. And how one time his friend came over and they did this thing. And how he likes reading and he wants to go to Japan real bad.

That is all for now.

DD set up the camera and we let our friends take photos of themselves with a handheld timer. These are a few I liked.

Some things happened recently:

I graduated from MIT! It was fun, and surreal, and now it’s over. Except not really, because now I’ll be working there. Here’s me and M., looking relieved:

I also recently got to see some old & good friends, several of whom live far away, many of whom have had kids or are in the process of having kids. That was rad.

And I’m still working on the Peru film. Chugging away, etc. Will update more later. It’s past 2 a.m.

This is a cartoon my friend G. made about some friends of his who are getting married soon. It uses their own narration. I thought it was pretty cute. Also because it involves ice cream.

When I last traveled to Southern Thailand, I set up some multimedia accounts for the Burmese human rights org I volunteered for, Foundation for Education and Development (FED) — formerly named GHRE. Now they’ve got some American volunteers who are working with staff to create videos. Woohoo! Here’s the latest one about some of the Burmese migrant children going through the traditional process of becoming monks (all the Buddhist boys do this at some point as a rite of passage):

< technifiling > So I made a ridiculous investment (hello consumer debt, my old friend) in a new 500GB, 8GB memory MacBook Pro + lots of multimedia software. The first MBP had a 7200rpm hard drive that vibrated so consistently it made my hands go numb. After 24 hours I had it shipped back to Shanghai, and a week later got a replacement. I want to say technology is stupid, that machines are objects and they don’t matter and spending so much credit card unmoney on a computer instead of a vehicle, horse or intercontinental plane ticket is totally not worth it, but no! This computer is amazing and super fast with great battery life, and owning it and Final Cut 7 means I can do all my editing at home now. And do freelancing/consulting. Which, in about a year, might earn me enough to recoup the initial cost. Also I can write it all off on my taxes. Tra la! < /technifiling > < / justification >

Meanwhile, exactly a year ago I was in Cajamarca, Peru, washing my socks in a hotel sink and listening to great guitar singalongs led by a man named Jaime at a bar called Usha Usha. And taking taxis through the Andes every day and hiking to villages to interview rural entrepreneurs who mostly had broken internet connections for a film I am just now finishing. And eating fish & pizza & candy & Inka Cola and watching bad American TV shows. All of this with Mau (God bless you Mau, even though I felt like arm wrestling you 80% of the time) who is still in Lima, teaching attractive young women how to take digital photographs. {“con pasión y coraje haré este viaje contiiiiiiiiigo. y juro que secretos y recuerdos no los venderé, no no no.”}

Meanwhile, summer has arrived. Swooping in like a stealthy thief. The same fruit fly circles around my sofa every night, and birthdays come and go — of several friends, and soon my own. Instead of crying on the phone to FedEx employees from someone else’s living room, this year I will spend my birthday getting my master’s degree in an endless outdoor ceremony. How things change…