Let's talk some shit

I would like to warn my readers that this post might come off as a little... crass. I want to talk about one of the most basic human commonalities...something that most of us in America are pretty uncomfortable talking about... I want to talk about shit. If this potty talk sounds too much like... potty talk... then maybe this post isn't for you.

-------------------------------------------------------Anyways-------------------------------------------------------

The other day, I was doing my thing                                           as I often do during my study breaks. As I finished and turned around, I heard the firing of the automatic flush, and not surprisingly, found an empty toiled bowl. Now, for most, this probably isn't a very big deal. In fact, this is exactly what we've come to expect from a toilet... that we can eat whatever we want, have our body turn it into a nice heap of digestive waste, and then let our porcelain parcel-master dispose of it immediately. I might not have ever thought anything of that seemingly flawless system, had i not gone to Africa where a lot of people's toilets look more like this.

 

These are called squatting toilets. There's not really any plumbing, just a hole in the ground where your fecal matter lands, ever so gracefully, after a short-lived descent. Not only can you often look down the hole and see (with enough light) where your last meal has gotten to, but you get to experience the aromas that never made you question what was there in the first place. 

Now, I bring this up for a couple of reasons. 

1.) Poop is a natural thing.

2.) Everyone does it. Just ask Taro Gomi --------------->

3.) It feels like Americans are scared of poop.

Now, on the case of #3, I'll give us the credit of acknowledging that yes, poop is unsanitary. It's not just smelly, but it's loaded with bacteria when it leaves your body and can cause infections and illness if accidentally ingested*. However, it's a natural part of all life and is actually one of the most important natural sources of growth. It's literally the fertilizer of life.

So why does it make us so uncomfortable? 

I'll admit a bias here, because this topic is something I'm relatively passionate about (as pooping is one of my top ten most-enjoyable pass-times), but I really bring this topic up for another reason. I feel like this whole scenario is highly metaphorical, and unfortunately representative of our culture.

Let's talk about metaphorical poop for a minute. What are the things in our lives that we try to hide from the world? Things we're afraid to associate to closely with? 

Here are some of mine, past and present:
       A struggle for self-worth
       'Flaws' in my character
       A tainted self-image
       Parts of my identity that just don't fit in to the standards of my society... 

        Maybe you have some more of your own.



However, recently I've been undergoing a lot of growth... I've been learning to better appreciate myself, to show self-love and embrace all parts of my self and my identity. It's been a long journey and the hardest part has been digging deep enough to discover the things I had buried... I had to re-discover all of the shit I have spent years hiding from.

Though I'm still in the process, I've had a lot of success, and have had some pretty great moments... the greatest of which was realizing all these things I feel are natural. Like poop, if I let insecurity manifest and infect my life, there could be dire consequences. But similarly, if I recognize the nature of insecurity and grow through it, breaking down the lies into truth in my life, my journey could lead to massive growth... it could fertilize the ground beneath my feet, leaving me stronger, more joyful, and self-aware than I've ever been... and it has.

I blog about this here, because it relates to my experiences in Kenya in a strong way. The people I met in Kenya were some of the most comfortable people I've ever met. They had needs, but for the most part, they were open about them. They could see where their shit was and they were honest about it. It was present. It was out in the open. Almost every day, we met new boys from the streets and every time, they willingly told us their stories, their struggles, and their hardships. They were so honest.. so open and raw.. and they were comfortable in a way I've rarely seen people be, here in the United States.

I think there's a lesson here- and it's not as shitty as it sounds.

If we want to grow, we need to first acknowledge where we're at. 

It seems simple, but is actually quite the daunting task. We live in an age of important perceptions and the need for perfection, and we're not encouraged to show our insecurities. But those insecurities are part of us, whether we acknowledge them or not, and the truth is, they are totally natural. They even help us grow...

I think each of us could benefit from talking a little shit. We might even see what we are capable of. Mapquest can't give you directions to your final destination if you refuse to tell it where you're starting from.

Have a great week, everybody. Remember: "All living things eat, so everyone poops" ~ Taro Gomi

Jake

P.s. for more about the science of squatting check out this link. It changed my life. literally.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYcv6odWfTM


     

 

 

Violence

Violence.

It's a concept I actually have a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around. Why are we violent to one another? Why do we feel that others deserve a pain that we wouldn't wish on someone we loved? Why does whether or not we know, like, or love them change "what they deserve"? Who are we to say?

This afternoon, I heard about the Boston Marathon bombings, and my heart sank. I watched the videos on the link below, and felt a lot of things: fear, sorrow, hurt... and I can't help but wonder what would bring someone to cause such pain in another. My heart goes out to Boston and the hearts, people, and families that have been wounded there.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-boston-marathon-explosion-20130415,0,641755.story

It seems to me that, in America, we often feel immune. We see the problems of outcry and violence swirling in the world around us, and we feel like it's safe to shut the window... pull down the blinds... because we feel immune. I feel immune. Until it hits us at home, as it does, every once and a while.

If we took a look out the window, I imagine we'd see many things- primarily, people much like ourselves. People that are different... but the same. Humans. People with pain and joy and hardship and life... different bodies, different customs, different weaknesses, different strengths, but the same soul.

As I said in an earlier post, when I used to think about the third world, I used to jump quickly to the violence it was associated with. I used to be afraid, because I was taught that people out there are 'different' then Americans. Well, that's true, they are different. Physical violence may be much more accepted and common, on behalf of religion and politics and death often comes in greater numbers. But if we look at theses people, I think we'd likely see something we know very well. Anger. Frustration. Pain. The families of these 30 people killed in Somalia Monday aren't grieving any less than our the families of our two dead in Boston. Prayers for them, too.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/04/2013414101235148177.html

The truth is, we are all connected.

This truth has become increasingly apparent: thorough our global economy,  the effects of our use (and abuse) of our environment on the global weather, etc. It has been taught in philosophy and religion for thousands of years. The children of the 1990's learned it from a lion named Mufasa, with his circle of life. I learned it first from the amazing peice of s basics from Christianity, but then learned it better from physics. Take a moment and read this quote I found recently from one of America's most popular physicists:

"Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically... We are in the universe and the universe is in us." ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

When I reflect on the fact that we are each made of atoms and molecules, recycled through the ages in the bodies of hundreds of others and that those same atoms and molecules poured forward from the depths of the universe with the raw, primordial makings of life, destined (whether by fate or accident) to bring each of us into existence... I can't help but stop and take a deep breath. I can't help but take a moment and look around at all the wonderful things and all the wonderful people, feeling closer to all of it. Recognizing that at the base of it, we are part of the same energy. We are part of the same soul. Maybe if we all realized that, then love, over violence, would be a more common thing.

Have a blessed day, everybody. You better- you share atoms with Gandhi, Kind David, and the Buddha. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhtgINeaJWg @ 3:00]

Jake

Exceeding our Expectations

While In Kenya, I met a very inspiring boy named Allan Niongira Minani (below, red shirt).

He told about how he once heard a traveling professor talking about solar panels. Afterwords, he went on the internet and researched how to build a solar battery. And then he immediately started to build one.... as senior in high school, without any additional instruction or support.

I don't know how this strikes you, but as a junior physics major in college, this stunned me. I've never done anything like that before... especially not on my own.... and until I met Allan, it wasn't something I had even considered as being within my realm of skill or ability.





Let me share another story with you.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/tech/richard-turere-lion-lights/index.html

This one's about an 11-year-old boy (also from Kenya) who, realizing that lions stay away from his cows when someone walks around with a flash light, built a flickering LED device with a solar panel, LED lightbulbs, and a car battery. The boy, Richard Turere, designed, built, and installed the entire apparatus on his own, "without ever receiving any training in electronics or engineering" (CNN). Since he installed his "lion lights", his family hasn't lost any livestock to lion attacks.


As access to the internet has spread and technology has continued to advance, there has been a lot of talk about alternative means of education (anyone heard of MOOCs, lately? If not, Google it. Right now). My professor, Mark Orrs, has been emphasizing that one of the best things we could do with our resource center is to provide online educational opportunities for the youth, as an alternative to the struggling (and often ineffective) educational system that currently exists in Kenya.

Leading up to the trip, I was skeptical that technology could replace a physical teacher or that a student who had never seen a computer could make an online education work. I'm skeptical no longer. The youth we met in Kenya constantly impressed us with their affinity for technology and their powerfully desire to learn.

Every time we encountered a group of children (which happened a lot), they would rush at us, eager to figure out how to use our cell phones. These two boys I met ----->  (Dennis [9] and Joseph [6]) had never used an iPad before, but were using ours and taking pictures of themselves within minutes. They have the drive and they've got the skills. Imagine what they could do with the resources.    



This is a TED talk I watched a long time ago, about a "hole in the wall" experiment where a researcher, Sugata Mitra, put computers in rural villages (where children had never seen computers) and watches as they  teach themselves how to use them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks8D3WE-PbM. The list of impressive children doing impressive things with little to no guidance goes on and on.

It seems to me that children of the third-world aren't "uneducated" because they are less capable. In fact, it's likely the opposite. At least in my experiences, these kids are some of the most driven, capable people I've met, and it looks like one of the best things we could do for already driven kids is to give them the resources and learning opportunities they need, so that they can go ahead and exceed everyone's expectations.

I mean... unless you think a 13-year-old bad-ass lion-fighting engineer with no resources has a lack of potential...

"The Best Life is in Africa"

Hello all.

I apologize for taking so long to make another blog post, but to be fair, I was in Africa.

As can be assumed, the internet was wonderfully scarce over there and I was able to appreciate the world while being "off the grid", a little bit. The general lack of wi-fi is one of those things that we as Americans find disastrous or terrifying, but is something that I personally found to be one of the many blessings Africa had to offer me.

... And thus, we have the theme of this blog post: the prominent first-world viewpoint of the third-world, and how it's wrong. 

Three days into the trip I had the opportunity to have a really powerful conversation with my (our) awesome 

safari driver, Dennis. ---------------------------------------------------------->

We were talking about the differences in our cultures, about the people, about the children, and he told me a story:

Once, he had a Swedish family reserve his services for the week. The party consisted of a mom, a dad, a daughter, and their two body guards. Dennis took them on Safari, and afterwords brought them back into the city. As they got out of the van, a small mob of children crowded around them, doing what small Kenyan children often do when "mzungus" [white people] show up. They crowded around with curious eyes full of laughter, looking at these strange visitors and playfully asking for sweets. But they were met with a very different tone: the body guards got out of the van, waving their guns at the kids, yelling at these children as the Swedish family looked on, unfazed.

Dennis told me this story with a deep sadness, talking about how he couldn't imagine why someone would treat children like that... or would treat anyone like that... he said he had watched 30 minutes earlier as our class of 'mzungus' had been mobbed by a similar crowd of children and how we had instead made wonderful friends and playmates...  becoming human jungle gyms as the kids climbed all over us, playing with our hair and pinching our skin to see if it would come off. :) "Could you imagine waving a gun at those children, Jake?" I couldn't.

He then addressed the root of it, asking me what I thought of when I thought of Africa. 
The thought process went a little bit like this:

Dennis: "Jake, what do you think of when you think of 'Africa'?"

                                                                           Me:

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This is a problem. Everything I've ever learned about Africa has been very skewed- not entirely wrong... but definitely skewed. It's true, there are plenty of animals in Kenya... but (embarrassingly, to my surprise) there are also big cities... with plenty roads and vehicles to top it off. It's true, there are violent conflicts and mobs in Kenya, but when our van got surrounded by a mob on the second day, the people were smiling and laughing, holding "Peace for Kenya" signs, not machetes. And Finally, there are definitely starving and/or hungry children in Kenya (we met a lot of them), but contrary to what I've been told for most of my life, most of the kids look a lot more like this:

(Niomi with nine of her new closest friends)

The point of this blog post isn't to dismiss the suffering of many people living in Kenya; we spent a lot of time with a lot of people who have a real need for resources. We wouldn't have a project if that need didn't exist. Rather, this post is meant to address the gross, stigma-stained glasses through which the first world views those sitting two levels down. The truth is, these people have something amazing that we here in America are often without: each other.

The people I met in Kenya were some of the absolute most kind, wonderful, and generous individuals I've ever met. People with 'nothing' welcomed us into their homes and shared the little that they had with beaming faces. I saw boys sharing mattresses in one room apartments, friends sharing a patch of grass under the shade and lunch when the other would have gone without. I met amazing people who had 'escaped' from the streets, getting a college education in the US, but who then came back to the slums of Nairobi to help pull up the boys who hadn't made it, yet.

They may have had "nothing", but as far as I can tell, these people have what is most important. They have love and they have each other, because they need each other.

Coming back to America, I was struck by how many THINGS we had: supermarkets overflowing with food from all over the world, large quantities of immediately available medicines and first aid....toothbrushes for our dogs...... but when I look around in all of our wealth, I also see a lot of lonely people. I'm not saying that we don't have friends or family, but we (the general we) definitely don't have the sense of community that I witnessed in Kenya. We're taught from a young age that you have to beat others and get ahead, you know: "survival of the fittest"? In our capitalist society, our peers are our competitors, our future employers, our target market, but they're not our life-partners. When we succeed, we're not supposed to look too far back.. it could hurt our careers, hurt our reputations... I can't imagine escaping a slum, where all of my friends are addicted to glue and living on the streets, and then feeling like it was socially accepted for me to go back there. People would wish "something better" for me.

 
In my experience in the USA, I've noticed that we feel awkward depending too deeply on others... like it's a sign of weakness to let other people see our needs, like we're constantly trying to convince the world and ourselves that we're just fine on our own. As an RA on campus, here at Lehigh, I see this all the time. It's literally my job to help people connect with others, to get past superficiality and to overcome the fears they have of being vulnerable, so that they can form real relationships... It's something I love doing, but its unfortunate that so many people need help doing that. It's unfortunate that we're so deprived of that connection to other people... that we suffer from a poverty of the heart.


Dennis doesn't feel like Africa needs to be saved. He told me, "Jake, the people here have nothing... but they have everything. That's why the best life is in Africa". Is that true? I'm not sure. But I know there is definitely a great life in Africa, and that there's a great life here, too. We just need to learn to appreciate the most valuable resource that we have: one another. 

 

"Education"

Education- it's a word I've heard a lot over the course of my life. Specifically, it's been huge part of the past 3 years, as I've pursued my formal education here at school, and begun my Masters in Ed. classes through Lehigh's 5-year program. It's funny, though, for all the time that I've believed in the power of education, seeing it as one of the few things that enables individuals and gives them power over their lives, I haven't spent very much time thinking about what it means to be "educated".

Last night, I watched the film Schooling The World by Carol Black. It brought ideas to the surface that I had considered, but never really processed: that "education" doesn't have to happen in a school. And what's more, the Western-Mainstream mode of education isn't the only one.

The film makes a lot of good points about the domination of the Western culture in the "undeveloped" parts of the world, about the poverty that is created in the wake... but I think the greatest point it makes is found in this question: "What is the purpose of Education"?

This thought first occurred to me, 6 years ago, in high school. I was born in rural PA, and I knew a lot of kids who were planning on going into blue-collar jobs. They were going to work as mechanics; they wanted to drive truck or keep up the family farm. They were hard working kids who knew a lot more about how to work in their world than most of the rest of us did. And yet, as far as the rest of us were concerned, they were doomed to amount to nothing. They were the failures, the dropouts, the CPI kids (Central Pennsylvania Institute for technology: a place where students could go to develop skills as beauticians or machine workers). These kids were seen as the lowest link on the latter. They were going to do the jobs that we didn't want to, so that we (unlike them) could be successful.

I realize now, that while I didn't feel like that mindset was right, to some degree, I still bought into it. I "knew" that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life working with my hands in dirt, and thus I assumed that, deep down, no one else really wanted to either. While I didn't know exactly what I equated "success" to, I knew that it wasn't that.
                                                         Because that would be horrible.

So, I guess the real question is, "What is Success"? If there's one thing this class is teaching me, it's that there really isn't a uniform, simple answer to anything. Rather, the answer is almost always It Depends. For a question like this, you have to look back, literally to the meaning of life... what is it that would make your life worthwhile? Money? Love? Fame? Family? Compassion? I think the answer is different for all of us. And if education is supposed to be a means by which we learn how to be successful, then our educations must, in turn, be unique. If someone wants to be spend their life in business  to live and die as the CEO of a multi-million dollar company, it doesn't help them if you send them to beauty school. By the same token, if an Indian child would be happy spending their time on earth close to their family, tending their fields and living off the land, they just don't need to learn English. The ideals OUR society has created aren't the only ones.
Thank God for that.

As I learn more about what our project entails: creating opportunities in Kenya for boys to get off the streets and to get an education, one question is now very obvious. What is it, exactly, that these boys would benefit from learning? What are the needs of their society, and what resources/ ideas can we provide to really help them along their way? I'm sure that, right now, I definitely don't know the answer to that question. However, I'm excited to learn- from my research, but also from these boys. I know there's a lot of "education" to go around, and really I can't wait.

Saving Kenya?

I must admit, I've spent a lot of my life believing that I was going to grow up and save the world. I saw myself saving it first as a super hero, then a school teacher of the impoverished youth, the biologist/ecologist that was finally going to wake the slumbering populous, and even in my role as an RA, teaching the "young and helpless" freshman of Lehigh University to take on the vast and dangerous collegiate world.

It's probably a safe bet to say that, at one point or another, most people with a general sense of activism find themselves propagating that sort of mentality- that this world of ours is a lost and broken place, filled with gaps and broken bones that we, the passionate ones (maybe even 'the few enlightened'?), are meant to rebuild and make perfect. For me, I think it came originally from a good place- a genuine care and compassion for the human race, as well as a love for life as a whole. But then, somewhere along the way, insecurity crept in, and what was a love of life turned into a cause to clasp onto. Compassion turned to pride and my life's direction started to become a resume, not to mention a desperate plea for self-worth and the admiration of others.

Well...that sucks. lol. But, thankfully, that was not the end. Cut Scene. Enter- growth.

This semester, I get to start a project for my Sustainable Development Solutions class, here at Lehigh. All I know about the project so far is that I'm going to be working with a NGO (Non-Government Organization) in Kenya, to help get boys off the streets and help them get an education. I think the thing I'm most excited about for this project is the opportunity to enter into the world with a different mentality than I've had before. There are many people in the world with real and extreme hurt- they suffer from poverty, oppression, discrimination, and much much more that I can't even really wrap my mind around. But I think, in order to really be a helping hand in the world, we have to first look inward and recognize our hurt and weaknesses, too. Maybe then, we can actually see our strengths instead of talking about them, and finally see ourselves as a people, level with the world- no longer saviors, but a connected family- helping those who could use our help and accepting the healing they have for us in return.

I joined this course, "Sustainable Development Solutions", intending to learn about what really helps, and what doesn't. I don't really know too much about the specifics: I'm going to spend a long time learning about a people I don't know anything about, and I may or may not be going to visit their world over spring break. I guess my hope for this semester is that through it all, I'll be able to remember that I'm probably going to learn more from 'Kenya' then Kenya is going to learn from me. Or maybe we'll all just end up learning a lot from one-another  I'll keep you 'post'ed. :)