My Aim Is True

It's been a hard year for me and sports.

Not only because I've been away from a regular east coast sports schedule (and am no longer working a food service job where literally the greatest feeling in the entire world is biking home after closing, in the dark, shadow catapulting over you as you sail under the street lights, night air cool on your skin, coming quietly through the back door, opening an ice cold beer, sitting on the floor because you smell of ice cream, bleach and sweat and are wet from the bus, turning on sportscenter and letting the statistics wash over you) but because relatively recently I've been dealt two major blows:

Ray Allen left the Boston Celtics to play for the soul-less, gut-luss, remorse-less Miami Heat that stomped on my heart during the post season.

Lance Armstrong...I can't even write it.

My relationship with sports tends to be emotional/visceral/obsessive. In case you didn't get that yet. 

Professional cycling is the best example, but I'll start with Ray Ray because it's a little easier to deal with: 

As I said here, Ray Allen was my way into basketball. Growing up in Massachusetts, my allegiance lay with the Celtics, but it wasn't until I met a praise singer that I decided to sit up and pay attention. My senior year of college I took basketball seriously. I would go have a beer at the bar around the corner from my dorm and watch anyone play. The bartender started recognizing me and would put a game on when I walked in. I canceled plans when there was a Celtics game. I watched "He Got Game" three times in a row. I read everything I could find about #20. I was able to pick his Mom out of the crowd. My knowledge of the nuances of the game remains tenuous, but I watched the hell out of the 2009-2010 Celtics. I became a fanatic. Those Finals were devastating. 2010-2011 was even worse. Living at home, I was in control of the tv. I bought a Ray Allen jersey and wore it every time I went running. When he was on track to break Reggie Miller's three point record, I watched every game and when he finally did it, my whole family was wearing three-corner newspaper hats, eating a three-bean  dip I had made and waving flags that said THREEEEEE on them. The lead up to those Finals was out of control. I cared about the title, but more than that, I just wanted them to keep playing. They had become my companions and I wasn't ready to say goodbye. When I moved to Kenya, I hung a Ray Allen banner up on my wall. I checked Celtics blogs religiously. I worried about his ankle. I worried about the bone spurs. I woke up at 3am to watch games. I wrung my hands at trade rumors. I cried when they lost. And then "He Got Game" became real, Shuttlesworth weighed his options and went with the worst possible option. To go, willingly, to the Evil Empire, was more than I could bear. As the beginning of the season approaches, the spectre looms. How will it feel to see him in that uniform? Why can't I let it go? I've read about the uneasy chemistry, the desire for more playing time, the discomfort of being offered for trades...I've even tried to stomach the idea that he might just want to win...but it still stings. I can't bring myself to stop wearing that jersey. 

My history with professional cycling is even more intense.  It was only a few years after learning that my Dad was a cancer survivor (I was two or three when he was diagnosed and so have no memory of it) that I first read about Lance Armstrong. I paid attention to the Tour de France the next year, 2000, when I was turning 14. I started spending a lot of time at my local bicycle shop, sitting on a wooden stool in the corner, out of everyone's way, listening to Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen, watching in awe as these slight men hauled themselves up mountain after mountain, blood sometimes seeping from open leg wounds that were stitched up while moving. I was hooked. In the years following, I would eagerly buy all the Tour de France preview magazines, recording the race schedule in my journal, tearing out pictures of Lance Armstrong, his tragic hero nemesis Jan Ullrich, golden boy Ivan Basso, scrappy Thomas "TiBlanc" Voeckler and plastering them on the walls of my room. Lance Armstrong was my entry point; my love for the sport, the knowledge of team names, coaches and vocabulary grew from there. I read all the books on cycling and Armstrong I could find. I eagerly awaited the Alps and Pyrennes stages, getting to the bike shop early to watch the long days. I made t-shirts, cupcakes with yellow icing and let the Tour consume my Julys. In 2004, while on a family vacation in Italy, my Dad and I drove to France to see the Alp d'Huez time trial. Our trip was a marathon, we were in France for only 30 hours, but it was incredible: staying in a shitty hotel outside of Grenoble, winding up alpine roads in a bus, taking two separate gondolas to the top of Alp d'Huez and walking down the switchbacks, finding a spot where I could run along with the men I'd been watching for years. I took only one photo as Lance Armstrong finally flew by. He is tiny, barely distinguishable in the frame. I remember wanting to run with him as long as I could, to bask in whatever it was that drew me to him. 

My obsession maintained its fever pitch until Armstrong won his seventh tour. I went to college and had jobs during the summer that were less accommodating of seven hour mountain stage viewings. I still kept tabs on the race, reading updates in the newspaper, watching the evening recap on tv (Outdoor Living Network, which covered the Tour during my early years gave way to Versus, which still televises the Tour. I always used to scorn the evening recaps, not only because it cut out the HOURS of footage where nothing really happens, but it was narrated by Bob Roll and some other American who PALE in comparison to the British/Zimbabwean wit and insight of Liggett and Sherwen, even in their twilight years). Even last year, when I was living and working in Kenya, I kept the livestream from the official Tour de France website open on my computer while at work. Years had passed but I still remembered most of the names.

So you can imagine how I've been feeling the past few weeks as the Armstrong legend has come crashing down. I honestly can't believe it. And by that I mean, I can believe it, but it isn't registering. For so long, he has been a fixture in my life, staring down at me from the walls of my room, a way to understand my Dad's sickness, a way to imagine dedication, perseverance, suffering and insanity. He was the doorway to a world I've loved inhabiting. I had a cyclist pendant on a necklace my grandmother gave me that I used to wear everyday and when Lance won his sixth Tour, the one I had seen, my Mom bought me a "6" to put on next to it. I always jumped to his defense, always believed that his incredible performance was real. And I'm not some idealistic and naive fool. I know how doping works, the intricate systems, the secrets, the lies, the enormous pressure the riders and their staff are under. But somehow I just can't reconcile that Lance did that. After he railed against it for so long. After making me believe so fervently.

And now his titles have been stripped, his name removed from the record books, like he was never there.

But he was. And so was I, running right along side.

Everything In Its Right Place

this is what insanity feels like:

how can I get sorted out? (or follow your bliss part 2)

Cause = Time

For a while, I forgot where we were.

The northern Kenya we experienced on our most recent trip to the field was so vastly different from the one we had visited not more than a month ago. There was seemingly endless grass where before it had been cracked and dry. Cows were fat with milk where they had been drawn and bony. My recollections of the drought faded and I began to think: this is how it has always been here.

"We expect change quickly," said Rosemary, one of our business mentors who has been a teacher in northern Kenya for almost twenty years. "That is why we have such a hard time thinking about long-term things like education." Rosemary went on to say that the time it takes a student to learn and grow feels like a while to wait for change, "change that you maybe cannot even see." Relative to the rapid and obvious transformation in the landscape over the course of a month, the impact of education on a child is much less tangible, and I could, for the first time, understand the difficulty of that timescale shift.

It was amazing how quickly I had forgotten the hard times when surrounded by such abundance. Our memories dim just when we need them to be the most clear: the juxtaposition of the vastly different past and present only amplifies the importance of sustainable, long-range solutions. How can we appreciate change and enjoy relief while still maintaining our awareness of the past?

This corn plant was growing on the side of the road. It sprouted from relief maize that had spilled on the road in the months prior. Tons and tons of maize are transported to northern Kenya every month, even more so during periods of drought. With the abundance of rain the area received in November, those seeds sprouted and began to grow. Pretty nicely illustrates the contradictions and complexities of life up there, no?

Nothing Is Simple

The more time I spend doing this work, the more I find myself thinking about issues of content and form. How you say something is often more important (or is at least equally important) to what you are saying. Or rather, how you think about/quantify something is equal to what you are quantifying. Maybe an example will clarify:

The other day, we were discussing a survey. The survey essentially measures the poverty level of the individuals we work with. One of the questions on the survey asks "Do you have a bath shelter?" It seems like a simple question. You would presumably either have one, or not. But then we got to talking about bath shelters. Some people make bath shelters out of sticks, others make them out of sacks and cardboard. Others use concrete, or metal sheets. It turns out we were not just looking for any old bath shelter. We wanted to count only concrete or iron sheet bath shelters as bath shelters, those that demonstrated the individual had made a concerted, conscious purchase: this money will be used to build a serious bath shelter. I started thinking; how then, were we to interpret the other bath shelters? A bath shelter made of "cast offs," (in our survey) implies the absence of conscious monetary investment. But what if that "cast off" bath shelter represented the use of money on another investment? What if the individual valued, say, a latrine or a mosquito net, more than a bath shelter? (And the fact that not everyone has a "cast off" shelter implies that it still costs something to build one...) A lack of investment in a permanent bath shelter could mean other investments (in money or time) elsewhere...

and then my head exploded, and I was left holding a spent stick of dynamite like Wile E. Coyote, singed beyond recognition: Every statistic EVER became multi-dimensional: a lack of something could be interpreted to mean an alternative investment/valuing of something else. You could tell a multitude of stories by purposefully interpreting a single measurement. How, then, is there ever any certainty? Or objectivity? Or truth? How can you hope to convey a remotely complete picture of anything when even absence can speak volumes?

Which brings me to the photo. Whose significance I hadn't understood until now:

Prostitution Strictly Not Allowed is one thing. Strictly Prostitution Not Allowed is totally different. Prostitution and Eating? Fine. Prostitution and Dancing? No problem. Strictly Prostitution and nothing else? Absolutely not.

It was sort of the same as the bath shelters. Context/wording/emphasis completely altered meaning, presenting (at minimum) two very different realities: We count all bath shelters as bath shelters, which provides us with one set of data, or we count only some bath shelters as bath shelters, possibly ignoring an important choice that people make regarding which kind of bath shelter they want, which ultimately results in less bath shelters in among our participants...which makes them poorer, which then influences how we work with them...

Wile E. Coyote, man.

Research vs. Action...how soon is now?

This drought/famine and first-hand 'development' experience has really made me aware of the (perceived?) dissonance between research and "doing," as my colleague put it the other day. We were talking about an organization that has been 'working' in northern Kenya, researching ways to make arid and semi-arid lands more productive. My colleague thought the organization was useless because it hadn't "done anything" for northern Kenya; nothing was different. Another of my colleagues suggested that perhaps the organization's function was simply to do research and not necessarily implement any changes. "We want to see people changing northern Kenya," my colleague replied, what good was it if they just collected data?

I have experienced this tension before. When I studied abroad in southern Kenya, we finished our semester with what was essentially a research project. We collected data on how land use systems impacted vegetation (how expanding agriculture and growing livestock populations depleted the amount of land covered by nutrient-rich, native plants) and then asked local community members for their insight into why vegetation composition was changing. We did vegetation sampling and conducted interviews. My time in southern Kenya coincided with an intense drought, stressing an already stressed landscape and pushing local human, wildlife and livestock populations to the edges of survival. Our survey asked questions like "Have you noticed a change in vegetation in the area?," answerable by a quick look around at barren, dusty pasture (see above) and thin, worn cows. After politely answering our often-redundant questions, interviewees were given a chance to question us. Almost always, they wanted to know 'What will you do with this research? Will it be used to help us?' I struggled to find an answer, saying we were writing reports and making recommendations, that we would present our research at an open forum, which they were welcome to attend...but the real answer was that we were researching for research's sake. My paper would not lead to any tangible, direct, immediate change.

I think what it comes down to is different metrics for progress...different concepts of work and of time. Ideally, research and theory inform action on the ground, but it takes awhile. For some people, that time is necessary. For others, it is gratuitous. And it gets in the way.

After being up to my eyes in theory at school, I thought coming here would be a breath of fresh air. I would be affecting clear and immediate change, I would be working on the ground. Instead, I find myself in research's corner, advocating for more time, more reading, more theory...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Drought

We have been spending a lot of time talking about drought. And thinking about drought. And reading about drought. The difference between thinking and talking about drought is context...and specificity. It is no longer just drought, but the drought. It is no longer an affected population but our affected population.

With distance comes an ability to think abstractly, to bring up scholarly articles and talk about diction-- things that are not possible (or are at least more difficult), when your neighbors are calling you from back home, asking how you will help, asking when you are coming and what you will bring, which is the case for our Kenyan Director of Operations. The ways he and I conceptualize drought are very different. I think it is best explained by our different comfort levels with TIME. My other American colleague and I are able to hang back, talk about the long-term impacts immediate drought relief will have on our organization, while he keeps getting phone calls...and thinking about home. Who is more reasoned in their response?

For more on the relationships between drought and famine, a key distinction not made nearly enough, check out the following knowledge from people far more educated than I. It is critically important to understand the relationship between the two terms, both for a better sense of the current situation in the Horn, and for an idea of how important long-term vision is in addressing these issues. When it is possible. Or useful. Which might be never.

1. drought does not equal famine

2. famine and drought

thanks, Texas in Africa. and Murakami.