Burness Global: Stories

Fresh water tanker (credit: Preeti Singh)

On a stiflingly hot day at the end of May, the tour company’s blissfully air-conditioned Suzuki SUV slowed down to a stop along a dirt road leading to our destination, a water-side resort on the coast of Kerala, near the southern tip of India.  What could be the trouble?  Broken down car, livestock lingering in the road, plain old traffic?

It was a traffic jam, but one that consisted of a shiny TATA tanker truck parked in the narrow lane, dozens and dozens of plastic buckets and curved steel pots of all sizes, and people who seemed to be racing against time to make sure every one of those containers in the road was filled with fresh water.

I’d spent the previous few days marveling at the amount of water everywhere I looked in Kerala, from the extensive backwaters on which the tourist houseboats motored toward evening thunderstorms that wet the landscape but provided no escape from the humidity.

I had seen a pair of women doing laundry on the stone steps that occasionally cut the canal wall down to the water’s edge, the stones convenient for rubbing the soap deeply into the clothes and the water for rinsing afterward.

I’d seen an elderly man bathing on another set of canal steps once the sun started to set and it no longer seemed so pointless to take a chance on cleanliness.

I myself had found huge bottles of chilled, filtered water ubiquitous in roadside shops and restaurants.

But to see people scrambling for water? [Read more →]

Goat Skinning (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

Their hands acted almost independently, knowing just where to insert the knife and just how to break the joints, so the whole process was smooth, clean, and calm.

Lo and I were walking through the medina in Tangier, at the mouth of the Mediterranean on Morocco’s northern coast, when I saw a ring in one of the jeweler’s stores that was nearly big enough around for two of my fingers. What woman, I wondered, could possibly wear a ring that big? Haven’t you noticed the women’s hands here? Lo replied. It wasn’t until several days later, in Ain Chaib, that I understood.

The trip from Tangier to Ain Chaib, a village with just over 1,000 people in southern Morocco, consisted of an overnight train ride to Marrakech–a frantic city of stifling heat on the high plains–a five-hour bus ride farther southwest, up over the High Atlas Mountains to the coastal city of Agadir, and, finally, an hour riding in the back of a worn-out Mercedes Benz taxi, shoulder to shoulder with five other passengers headed home to villages and towns sprinkled along the highway.

We stayed with the same extended family, nearly 40 members across three generations, that Lo lived with during her service in the Peace Corps two years earlier. Family members cycled through the main house throughout the day, but for lunch and dinner everyone gathered.

Beyond taste and smell, every meal the family prepared was a tactile experience. [Read more →]

Kerala Houseboat (credit: Preeti Singh)

Wangari Maathai talks about a hummingbird helping put out a forest fire.  I tried to be a hummingbird on another issue once and had my beak taped shut.

I took a special trip to India earlier this year – special because it involved relatives who almost never see each other to be together for a week.  Three of us headed from dry, dusty, blazing-hot New Delhi to the lushly green, humid, blazing-hot Kerala. This southern state is famous for its calm “backwaters” that are plied by deliberately rustic, thatched-roof, wooden tourist houseboats once designed to transport rice harvests.

On the first of the seven-day trip, one of my relatives began having dreadful intestinal issues, including pain and cramping that almost immobilized him. All he wanted in life then was a constantly-refilled bottle of filtered water and long naps on the padded benches on the houseboat’s covered deck.  “This will go away on its own,” he said, not realizing how troubling it was for me to see him in pain.

It took me one day to convince him—or for him to convince himself—that my cache of the antibiotic Cipro, left over from a recent trip to Gabon where it hadn’t been needed, might be the fastest way to not spend the rest of precious vacation time in a fog of misery. [Read more →]

Wangari Maathai, Ellen Wilson, media in Kenya (credit: Jeff Haskins)

The Dr. Maathai-inspired Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign planted 4 billion trees as of yesterday. It started in 2007.

At a conference in Nairobi that focused on how more trees on farms could help reverse climate change, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai had a story to tell.

It was about a fire that broke out in a huge forest.

“All of the animals are coming out of the forest very disheartened,” she said. “They were saying, ‘Let me leave, as there is nothing we can do.’ They came to the edge of the forest—all except the hummingbird.

“The hummingbird said, ‘I’m not going anywhere. I want to do something about this fire.’ The hummingbird went to a spring and brought back a drop of water and put it on the fire. The bird kept going back and forth putting a drop of water on the fire. All of the other animals stayed on the edge of the forest—even those with larger beaks which could bring more water. They said, ‘What are you doing? You are too little. Come and join us.’ The hummingbird kept going.”

Maathai said that when it comes to growing trees on farms and reforesting in Kenya, every citizen has a role to play. For example, she said, farmers should “not wait for the government” to dig trenches to allow water to sink into the ground rather than run off and strip away the top soil. They should harvest rain water on their land, she said. People should plant trees from large canopied trees to small shrubs.

“Every one of us can be a hummingbird,” she said.

Graves (credit: Jeff Haskins)

Land is a complicated issue in Africa. It is one of the areas of African society where the colonial legacy still lives on. Rights claims to “ancestral homelands” often shift with the tides of political power. There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to who owns land, but the vagueness seems to clear up immediately when there is money to be made.

When you have land, you hold on to it.  This lesson was reinforced to me just a few weeks ago, while I was traveling with a few companions in Cameroon for a community site visit. Our vehicle had broken down about an hour outside of Yaoundé. It was just before 9:00 a.m. and since the weather was still cool, we decided to walk out of the forest and meet our pick-up vehicle along the way to our destination.

At the end of one road, we turned left.  The village center was hopping. Women walked to work or to fetch water. Older men sat under storefronts arguing, seemingly unaware of the three foreigners–an American, a French woman, and an Italian, covered in mud and sweat–walking out of the forest. Some teenagers hooted and hollered at us, perhaps trying to scare us. [Read more →]

Ostrich in Kenya (credit: Julian Mason, cc license)

At the start of the story-telling festival at L’Alliance Française, a cultural center in the heart of Nairobi, the host imposed a condition on the audience: we must promise to share the stories we hear.  “Deal?” he asked.  “Deal” we answered. “Sawa sawa,” he said, and the storytelling began, the first from Kenya.

The storyteller was a tall anglo woman, her British accent rounded with African inflections.  She had a neck like a Maasai, long and regal, and cropped white hair.  She began, and she was the hunter.  Three drummers and a flautist seated on the stage articulated the story with beats, rattles, and high flowing notes:

This hunter held a spear as he searched the savannah for an ostrich.  The ostrich he found did not run, but rose, leaving him a single egg, which he wrapped in a blanket and took home.  He placed it in a pot, whose bottom was lined with a thin layer of fat.  The egg grew in size, the fat disappeared, the man added more fat, the egg grew larger.  The hunter transferred it to another pot, and the egg grew until one day it cracked, and from it emerged a baby girl. [Read more →]

Poznan Town Square (credit: Megan Dold)

As the sun began to set around 3 p.m. in Poznan, Poland, where I was attending the 2008 UNFCCC Climate Change Conference, I couldn’t help but wonder why this city was picked to host the huge event. I knew from an earlier Wikipedia search that it was the fifth largest city in Poland and one of the oldest; photographs showed off a beautiful old town square. But I had seen none of that while walking back and forth between my hotel and the enormous conference center. My experience was a place of gray skies and streets lined by gray, boxy buildings.

The conference organizers had prepared for the bleak weather, cheerfully handing out blue hats, scarves, and gloves, as well as jars of local honey, to the 9,000 attendees. Throngs of foreigners stood out around Poznan, all dressed alike with the same scarves and hats. Inside or out, they debated everything from emissions targets to deforestation terms to adaptation and mitigation schemes. All wanted their say, and as the conference continued, prospects for a global deal on emissions targets looked increasingly dismal.

That afternoon, while delegates were deep into their discussions, I decided to walk away from the conference center, in pursuit of the town square shown in the photographs. For a couple of blocks, the buildings looked the same, and I felt disoriented and lost.

But suddenly, [Read more →]

Wangari Maathai, 20 years ago (credit: Ellen Wilson)

“The earth was naked. For me, the mission was to try to cover it with green.”– Wangari Maathai

It is a day like any other, running around Washington, D.C., in a Honda Odyssey, taking children through their errands. This is the suburban life in the US: there’s a birthday party and a gift that needs to be bought. We drive to the toy store to get a Batman action figure for Tristram, and I hope my 6-year-old will not scream and cry about not having any of his own money left to get a toy. In the window, I glimpse a book that immediately takes me back years, to my days of trekking in the uplands north of Nairobi and down into the Rift Valley with four Green Belt Movement members. We went village to village to speak to women about planting trees across their treeless lands.

In Wangari’s Trees of Peace, this woman of inspiration and the movement she created has been memorialized in the form of a children’s book. It is a strange vision, and I wonder how an oversimplified story about Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai has been crafted to be sold to children who are also being sold plastic Legos and Playmobil sets and computer games and books on Star Wars and race cars and Barbie and Groovy Girls and Calico Critters.
[Read more →]

Margaret Musambi (credit: Dominic Chavez)

MUMIAS, Kenya — Margaret Musambi is one of those rare people who likes to expand her job responsibilities to have a greater impact on people’s lives. She is an extension agent for Kenya’s Ministry of Agriculture, based here in the western part of the country.

Musambi’s passion in the last few years has been to teach farmers the multiple uses of soybeans, emphasizing their nutritional benefits. She has shown farmers how to make soy milk, soy yogurt, soy cakes, soy sausages, even soy meatballs.

“Soy is wonderful,” she said one day recently, sitting with a group of farmers.

But one of her more creative projects has been to introduce soy to a group of people infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In Mumias, a town of about 30,000 people, she has begun to work with 50 members belonging to an HIV/AIDS support group.

Helped by a small grant from the US Agency for International Development, the group purchased 50-kilogram bags of soybeans. She told the group members, most of whom are taking anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS, that they should incorporate more soy into their diets. She also taught them how to make soy products, which the members now sell in local markets.

“These people are becoming so healthy,” Musambi said. “Their drugs are helping them, and the soybeans are as well. It’s true. You eat soy and it will cheer you up.”

Me hice la prueba de VIH (credit: Coimbra Sirica)

For me, the AIDS2008 conference in Mexico City this August opened in the lobby of a hotel in the Zona Rosa, where a French human rights activist — a young woman with short spiky hair — was trying unsuccessfully to communicate with a trans-gender sex worker from Mexico, a woman with shoulder-length dark hair and very big hands. I helped out for a bit, translating for them until the two had figured out where they might meet later that day to discuss how the French group could help advocate on behalf of the trans-gender group’s rights to HIV treatment and prevention services.

Chance encounters at the biannual international conference can be very funny — and immensely sad — and they often speak to the great difficulties surrounding AIDS. There is no scientific meeting that matches it for embracing the most marginalized of people.  Their representatives are in evidence, often in flamboyant glory. Yet most everyone has in common that they’ve lost people they love at some point in their lives. None of my gay friends from the 1980s is alive. (Except a dear cousin, who describes himself as uptight and Catholic, and says he thanks his parents regularly for repressing him so thoroughly they may have saved his life.)

The conference plays out in other venues as well — sometimes far from the big halls and hotel lobbies. One morning I accompanied a group of reporters to one of Mexico’s largest prisons, the Reclusório del Oriente, which holds 11,000 inmates. [Read more →]