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?

Containers for water (credit: Preeti Singh)

Although I had a million questions—Why wasn’t there infrastructure for tap water? How often did the truck come? How much did this cost them? What did they do if they ran out?—I waited, silently watching until the road cleared, to keep forging ahead to the resort that didn’t lack for a single amenity from a swimming pool to hot showers.

But this nagged at me. Later that night, I Googled safe drinking water in Kerala and learned that although this state gets three times more rainfall than the rest of India, topography allows 40 percent of it to flow into the sea. Growing population pressure means the remaining amount of water is insufficient to meet people’s needs.

But through World Bank funding to the state government over the last many years, communities were to devise and manage their own water supply schemes. More than 3,000 of these projects were reported as of 2008.

I can now hope that the seemingly desperate scene I encountered was actually a home-grown solution to provide safe drinking water in the community. And I hope it wasn’t the symptom of a terrible natural resource and infrastructure crisis driving the poor to suffer unimaginable illness and thirst.

The only certainty I do have is that staying in my air-conditioned cocoon didn’t, and of course couldn’t, yield the answers to my lingering questions.

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. Once one of the aunts or nieces placed the tagine, a conical clay dish used to cook many meals, in the middle of the table, another family member would take several rounds of hubz, a type of flat bread made by hand that morning by one of the women in the family, and tear them in half, and then in half again, giving everyone several rough quarters with which to scoop food. Tearing the hubz into perfect, bite-sized pieces with just my right hand, as even the youngest cousins were able to manage, required more dexterity than I was able to muster at first. Trying to gather tiny grains of couscous into a single, edible ball–again, with just one hand–proved even more difficult.

One morning, Elgada, the 70-year-old grandmother of the family, cracked Argan nuts to begin the process of making oil, which they use to add a smooth, nutty flavor to many dishes. Nearly blind from diabetes, Elgada sat on the ground, and with one stone balanced on her lap and a smaller one held in her right hand, she split open a nut she held pinched between her left index finger and thumb. Her calloused fingers then deftly separated the nut from the shell. As I sat in the shaded courtyard to avoid the heat, I watched her do this dozens of times without missing once. Years of doing this had given her the precision required to avoid smashing her fingers between two rocks.

Cracking Nuts (credit: Flickr user mgilbir)

The Sunday we were in the village, two of the brothers slaughtered and butchered a goat to make lunch and dinner for the family. Slaughtering a goat usually happens at the end of Ramadan, or for a birth or wedding, but I wanted to see it, to experience the ritual, so we helped the brothers pay for one. As they worked together to corral the goat, cut its neck, peel the skin back and remove the innards, there was little hesitation in any of their motions. 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. In fact, the hands often seemed to lead the body, making quick work of a particularly odorous process and belying the grimaces on their faces.

Hands here made bread every morning, poured tea, slaughtered goats, peeled pricklypear fruits, all with an ease that could not come naturally to me. Some women in the village make jewelry, and those in other villages in the region weave carpets, or silversmith, all requiring dexterity and flexibility I can only admire.

In the two years since Lo had been in the village, the Internet has made its way to Ain Chaib. The family can now email a sister in Memphis without traveling to the nearby town, Ouled Teima, a 45-minute walk across an open, dry, dusty field. But the distance between the two communities won’t last. Ouled Teima is creeping toward Ain Chaib, extending a skeleton of development across the fields. A grid of roads, with a forest of solitary lamp posts at each corner, populates the otherwise barren landscape. In two more years, houses, families, markets, and taxi stands may fill the space.

Though the ring I marveled at in Tangier might fit the women in Ain Chaib, their fingers and palms large and muscled from years of  work, none of the women I met were wearing anything like it. Most will never go to Tangier. But Tangier is coming to them. And when it does, I wonder how their work, and their hands, will change.

Camels in Field (credit: Matt Gruenburg)

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.

Years of reading about the rapid evolution of drug-resistant disease organisms—ranging from the parasite that causes malaria to the bacteria that causes staph infections—had me handing him the bottle of white tablets with a warning: take a week’s worth even if you start to feel better.  I figure it’s every person’s individual responsibility not to abuse antibiotics and, if they must use them, to take an entire course of medication as indicated. Otherwise, we’re told, when you stop early you’ve killed most of the bacteria but left behind the sturdiest, which will then be the ones that flourish and become harder to kill the next time around in a vicious cycle that will be eventually leave us without effective drugs.  It is happening every day.

But this prodigy of worldly sophistication handed me back the remaining pills after two days.  “Thank you,” he said, “but I feel well now and the side effects of these pills are now what’s making me feel bad.”  How bad could it be?  Unfortunately, India is advanced enough in communications that we could use a USB-stick-modem to connect our laptop to the internet in the middle of a relaxing houseboat cruise.  So, nausea, vomiting, dizziness or drowsiness.  But think selflessly, I urged. You’re helping keep Cipro viable against stomach bugs well into the future for other people, ones who might be too poor to afford anything better once the cheap, once-reliable standbys stop working, I pleaded.

But it didn’t work. I felt helpless—I cannot imagine what doctors and nurses go through with TB patients who, for example, have to show up at clinics over the course of 6 to 10 months to take really unpleasant combinations of pills in order to beat the disease, when I can’t get a sophisticated person like my relative to adhere to a simple treatment regimen.  I guess now I understand a little better why there isn’t just drug-resistant tuberculosis, or even multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, but extensively multi-drug resistant TB ravaging various corners of the world today.

I lost on this one, but won’t mean I won’t try again given the opportunity.

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.

The main street, though, had only a few storefronts.  One side featured a sign for a high-society-sounding “Americain Coiffure” barbershop nailed to a pole, but no barbershop was in sight.  On the other side, young men and women argued with motorbike taxis over fares to destinations farther down the road or maybe Yaoundé.

Americain Coiffure (credit: Jeff Haskins)

We walked farther. The road turned dusty. Many of the brick houses had large mounds in front, some covered by dirt, some by tile. It took me a few seconds to understand that these were graves. Some yards had two graves in front and one on the side. A large one designated adults who died, small ones were for children. We asked one of the scientists leading our group why people in the area buried the dead in front of their houses. “It’s a local custom,” he said. “So they can watch over the family.”

I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.

We approached a man carrying a machete and what looked like the trunk of an oil palm tree. In French, one of us asked, “Why do you bury dead here, in front of your house?”

He smiled. “So that they can watch over me and my family,” he said. “My father knows that he will be buried here, and he knows that he will watch over us and we will watch over him.”

But why hadn’t the village or a church set aside a plot of land for a cemetery?

“I’m not giving up my land for someone else’s family,” he said.

Perhaps that solved the mystery. Land was precious, and I thought to myself, it takes a village to raise a child, but you’re on your own when it comes to burying them.

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.

The man and his wife were childless and they raised the girl.  She became the hunter’s pride and joy.  The girl could run almost as fast as a cheetah, and dance graceful intricate dances, and leap like a leopard.  So enamored was the father of his daughter that he ordered his wife to let the girl do as she liked.  Left to her own devices, the hunter believed his daughter would find a path to greatness.  The wife could get no help from their daughter -no help to gather firewood or water, to plant and weed and harvest the crops, or cook the food.  And the woman realized that her husband loved their daughter, more than he loved her.

The storyteller addressed the audience: “What does a woman feel like,” she asked, “when she thinks her husband loves someone else more than he loves her?” The man sitting next to me answered “She feels smashed.”  “She feels like smacking herself,” someone else in the audience offered.  The storyteller continued:

Year after year, jealousy grew in the wife’s chest.  It grew from a small dark seed, until it consumed her being.  Then, one day as she was cooking porridge, the wife found that the porridge was hardening in the pot.  She needed water.  She could not leave the pot for the porridge would spoil.  And so she called her daughter to go and fetch some water:

Now, the storyteller became the daughter and the lead drummer became the mother.  They spoke in the local language. The mother/drummer called for help.  The daughter/storyteller turned her back and admired her fingernails.  The mother demanded help. The daughter scoffed.

“You are nothing but an egg,” the drummer/mother yelled. (The man sitting next to me translated.) “What, me, an egg?”  “You are an egg, an ostrich egg, deserted in the grass!” The mother/drummer bellowed.

The girl could not stand to hear those words, she tore out of the house.  The hunter saw her run, and at once knew what had happened.  He pursued his daughter, across the savannah, past the trees dotting the grassland, toward the river.  He had almost reached her, when she jumped into the river and began to swim, stroke after stroke, across the river.  He wanted to pursue her, but something stayed him.  He froze there on the river bank.  As she emerged on the other side, her legs, her strong and beautiful legs, were changing, the thighs thickening.  Her neck, her long and elegant neck, grew longer still, her head grew smaller, and feathers sprouted from her chest and back, until, she stood there, an ostrich.  The ostrich turned and looked at the hunter.  For one moment, their eyes locked.  And then she turned and galloped across the savannah, almost as fleet as a cheetah, never to be seen again.

The audience was silent.  The school girls in their green sweaters and black skirts, the ex-pats and their children, the orphans from a nearby home, and the story-tellers in queue, preparing to speak.

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, at the end of a narrow street, I saw a dazzling light in the distance. As I approached closer, the street opened up and revealed Poznan’s old town square—a magnificent, light-infused place, surrounded by Baroque and Renaissance style buildings. People were everywhere. Christmas music poured out of hidden speakers. Shoppers gathered around outdoor booths around the square, buying everything from toys, souvenirs and candy, to mulled wine and giant loaves of freshly baked bread. The aroma of cooked meat filled the air.

And then I discovered the source of the magnificent light: ice sculptures, placed prominently in the middle of the town square. They were rapidly melting in the afternoon sun. The sculptures had surely once been magnificent creations—reindeer, or a sleigh filled with gifts, perhaps. Now they were so badly disfigured it was impossible to tell their original shapes. They were just globs of ice, their once grandeur lost, now hulks ludicrously illuminated by colorful pink and purple spotlights.

At that moment, Poznan, for me, became the perfect venue for the conference. Across town, thousands of people were working to resolve the complicated issues surrounding global warming, while here, in the old town square, overlooked and out of sight, large blocks of ice melted away.

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.

Book Cover

I buy the book to read it to my children. I buy it for myself as well. Its last lines say,

“And if you were to climb to the very top of Mount Kenya today, you would see the millions of trees growing below you, and the green Wangari brought back to Africa.”

I saw those green trees. We traveled by public taxi minibuses called matatus and walked for miles and miles on foot, probably stopping in many villages. In every village, we were greeted by women singing and dancing. In every village, Lilian Njehu, an early leader of the movement, spoke to the women for hours and hours about their trees. Sitting on bare benches in the sun under scarce trees for shade, she helped them tend to their trees, speaking in Kikuyu. We saw thousands of seedlings grown in rows in each place and others that had grown to be mature trees—trees for firewood, windbreaks, food, and medicine.

I read the book to my sons that night. They listened intently. When we were through, they asked why Wangari was arrested for trying to protect a park in the middle of Nairobi, for stirring up conflict by training women all across the land to plant trees. “Was she really in jail?” they asked. A few days later, I helped my youngest son plant a bean seedling he had nourished from a seed to life in our kitchen window.  He felt the dirt around the roots, the coolness of the soil in his hands, the feeling of laying to bed a green thing that will grow tall out of dirt—something that will produce the nurturing sustenance of life. It brought me back years again, and I understood anew how millions of nurturing women’s hands in Kenya, and in other countries, brought life out of the land and how their joy and their singing could bring life and peace back to the land.

Bean Seedling (credit: Ellen Wilson)

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. Several inmates were taking part in an AIDS prevention workshop, which was run in part by HIV “peer educators” — fellow prisoners.

Reclusório del Oriente (credit: Coimbra Sirica)

Prisoners told us that drug use and unprotected sex between men are common in the prison. One HIV peer educator, Guillermo, 32, said he regularly had sex with men and was HIV positive. He said that it was “normal” in prison for men to have sex with each other, regardless of whether they thought of themselves as gay.

Carlos Ortiz Perez, another of the peer educators, said he was thinking of his two young daughters when he volunteered for the prevention program. “One of them has got pregnant since I’ve been in here,” said Ortiz, 45, who said he too had grown up without a father. “She’s the one who made me want to try to help the young people in this prison.”

Guillermo said his job is to make sure his fellow inmates know how to protect themselves from infection. The warden acknowledged the use of drugs in the prison, but said he doubted there was much sex between prisoners.

“That’s a lie,” retorted Guillermo, who is serving five years on the assault charges. And if they don’t use condoms, he added, “their wives visit and take the virus home with them.”

As we walked down the cement stairs toward the exit, I saw to my left a three-story building. On its plain cement façade were engraved the words, “VISITA INTIMA.” The warden said that inmates on good behavior could stay the night with their wives in one of the rooms.

It made me think about Ortiz and Guillermo and the importance of their efforts to protect inmates and their families from HIV. They said changing their colleagues’ behaviors would never be easy.  “I talk about it only when the men are ready,” said Ortiz, who was convicted of stealing a car. “Differences in here are resolved with blows, so you want to pick the right moment.”