22
September
2006
I’ve arrived safely and managed to get online far quicker than I anticipated. Everything about my staging and travel went smoothly and tomorrow I leave for my training site in Morogoro.Â
Cleared up misconceptions: It turns out I will not be teaching biology, chemistry and physics. Presumably and hopefully I will be sticking to biology.Â
First impressions: Dar es Salaam reminds me of Montego Bay, Jamaica – e.g., tourist billboards, small shack businesses, vegetation that reminds me quite a bit of Florida, palm trees & etc. Â
Notes from the Staging Event: We shared the hotel in Philadelphia with three other African groups: Senegal, Ghana and Kenya. The event itself was a bit too hippie love fest for my taste: e.g., get-to-know-you-games, drawing pictures, talking about feelings, performing skits. Of course, that’s coming from a cold unfeeling stone 
 That all being said, the Peace Corps staff was informative, helpful and shared our sense of excitement.
It was also great that I got to meet up with former Hopkins colleague Dave Munns (bound for London) and old friend Brian Hart (high school buddy, former roommate and webmaster of this site). Thanks to them, I left the States with lobster in my belly.
While there’s plenty more to say about the people I’ve been meeting, the staff and the 40 other volunteers, I’ll have to save that for later. I should be getting online about once a week.
Tutaonana baadaye (See ‘ya later),
Josh
Posted: Training Diary
18
September
2006
This will be my last post before I arrive in Tanzania. I’m feeling a bit scattered, but I want to put a few more thoughts down before I leave, some political, some personal.
I know I’m a bit late for commemorating the 5-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, but as I think about the task of representing our government’s Peace Corps under the command of our “wartime president,” I cannot help but think about the day that seemed (on the surface) to change the way our country views foreign policy.
For me, as I’m sure for many, September 11, 2001 was frightening, ominous, yet surreal and somehow detached. For me, it was difficult to square these horrific events from the beautiful Baltimore morning outside of my high-rise apartment. Celeste had called from work, woken me up and told me to turn on the TV. I barely understood the significance of what I was watching. I remember shaking my head and saying that somewhere in the world, brown people would be getting bombed for this atrocity. I felt as certain of this fact as I was fearful that those who paid the price for this would have as little connection to this terrorist act as the murdered civilians in New York City had to this falling symbol of American imperial hegemony. As America embraced the extremist dictatorial General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan as an ally while cynically turning on their dependent client-state in Afghanistan, my worst fears seemed to be confirmed. This was another example of the West playing a calculated game of political chess with 3rd World pawns. Their civilian dead would be classified as calculated losses while ours would be a rallying cry for perpetual warfare.
While September 11, 2001 pushed me deeper into the study of U.S. foreign policy, it was March 11, 2004 that made this disconnected, surreal war a personal matter. Again, it was Celeste that woke me up; the phone was for me. My mom’s voice on the other line was somewhat stiff and controlled, emotionally precise. She remained clear and careful in her tone without losing any empathetic inflection. It was the well-practiced voice of a professional therapist far too accustomed to sharing in her clients’ pain and suffering. She started with the facts. Did I know that Scottie had been working in Iraq? I did. Although now, in retrospect, with a mind crammed full of information about his work with Blackwater, about his expectations for acting as a bodyguard for Paul Bremer, about how he was betrayed and ultimately murdered, I cannot now reconstruct what I really knew at the time. Nor can I remember exactly what my mother told me next. Did she tell me to turn on the television? Did she tell me to call Katy and Jason? Or did she just tell me to get on a plane and come back to Florida? I’m not sure what all she asked me to do at this point, only what I soon learned.
Stephen Scotten Helvenston, age 38, was killed in the city of Fallujah along with fellow Blackwater employees: Wesley Batalona, Jerry Zovko and Michael Teague. Their bodies were burned and mutiliated and two of them were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
I had only ever thought of the Euphrates River before as the boundary line of the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilization, the waters outside the Garden of Eden.
One of the the last times I saw Scott, we were sharing a trundle bed in my old room at my parent’s house. I felt self-consciously out-of-shape laying next to him; he was certainly the most impressive physical specimen I have ever known. In fact, he was staying with us while promoting a series of exercise videos for the Home Shopping Network; they promised to teach slobs like me to “train like a Navy SEAL,” although I couldn’t imagine that 30-minutes a day, three days a week could ever put me in the same league as him. Not that I was trying all that hard at the time. I had taken Scott out drinking. I was smoking like a chimney and although he hated the stuff, he didn’t say a word about it. We drank local brews at the Tampa Bay Brewing Company, watched South Park (a new show at the time – that appealed to Scott’s dark sense of humor) and talked about war. Despite his deserved family reputation for being something of a hothead, he was calm, thoughtful and seemed to confirm my cynical assumptions about U.S. foreign policy in Central America during the 1980s. Once we were back at home and getting ready to sleep, our conversation transitioned from the professional to the personal.
He talked with me about his kids, Kyle and Kelsey, how proud he was of them, his fears about being the best parent he could. Although, as a SEAL, Scott faced combat challenges the likes of which I’m sure I could never imagine, when I think about him, I think about how he overcame his peacetime challenges, as a father, a brother and a son.
At a time when our military is overextended in an illegal, immoral war in Iraq and an ill-prepared, ill-conceived war in Afghanistan, as we continue to support immoral military actions in Haiti (having facilitated the coup against Jean Bertrand Aristide) as well as in occupied Palestine and Lebanon (failing to hold Israel accountable for tageting civilian populations), I will be representing the United States at a secondary school in Tanzania, teaching biology, chemistry and physics. It feels both inadequate and overwhelming.
I was asked to write an aspiration statement for my impending service to be sent ahead to the training team in Morogoro. I won’t restate here, but to summarize: I just want my work to be relevant.
P.S. As I write this, my good friend Kevin Ashbaugh is in critical care at St. Joseph’s. For those of you that do, send him your prayers.
See y’all in Africa, Josh
Posted: Personal
14
September
2006
When I first began my Peace Corps application (almost two years ago at this point!) I was instructed to write an essay about my previous experiences with other cultures – positive and negative. Knowing that any material I submitted would be held as confidential, I wrote without much in the way of self-censorship. What follows is essentially the essay I submitted with a few emendations and updates. As a big fan of David Sedaris, I know that open discussion of private family moments can be something of a double-edged sword. I hope, however, that my search for honesty and clarity about the cross-cultural events that have shaped my outlook on Peace Corps service has not overwhlemed my sense of proper discretion in this instance.
Cross-Cultural Experiences
When Granddaddy remarried in the Summer of 1998, my family’s reaction had been mixed, bittersweet to put it charitably. When he called from Jamaica to announce his intentions, he instructed his children on the other line to: “Say hello to your mother.” It had only been two years since Grandmere had passed away, after a protracted series of tests, therapies and remissions from her third and final cancer. My grandfather’s new love, a Jamaican woman roughly thirty-five years his junior failed to arouse any wellsprings of maternal affection in her soon-to-be adopted family back in Florida. It is hard to say whether or not she would have been better received under different circumstances; first impressions, after all, still matter.
At least for my mother, sister and I, my grandfather’s newfound love was immediately seen as a welcome development, a sure sign of progress. We could all still remember the Easter before last, when my sister and I raged against our grandfather’s depictions of the untrustworthy “Japs” and incompetent “Negroes” that he had encountered during the Second World War in the Pacific theater. In his own inimitable style, Granddaddy defended these racist stereotypes with the same unflappable, cocksure disposition that had made him both a great salesman and an overbearing father. Growing up I had rarely seen my grandfather contradicted, whether he was predicting the impending Rapture, explaining that God answered his prayers by sending him checks in the mail (from “Nowhere,” he insisted), or buying Gator football tickets (he never paid more than face-value!). Needless to say, it was quite something when my Dad interrupted our debate by telling his father to just shut up about the whole thing. None of us had ever seen anything like that before. Apparently Granddaddy was as stunned as the rest of us, and he did shut up. Anyway, now that he was living in Jamaica and engaged to be married, it seemed as though love had broken down his long held attitudes about race. At least it seemed to be a great thing to the three of us.
My father and his three younger siblings, however, had somthing of a longer road to travel. The hardest part about watching your parent re-remarry, I have to think, must be the internalized fear that your parent is somehow being “replaced.” Granddaddy’s less-than-tactful, “Say hello to your mother,” hardly worked to dispell this fear. In addition, a lifetime’s worth of relaively benign xenophobia and subtly circumspect racism at their father’s feet could not have been without consequence for my dad and his siblings. For some, I think the marriage catalyzed already destructive tendencies into full-blown moral and emotional breakdowns. For my dad, I believe, it became a time of reckoning and self-awareness. He was one of two siblings to attend the wedding in Jamaica. “Just don’t have kids!” he warned his father.
The four of us, Mom, Dad, Beth and I flew into Montego Bay where we took a taxicab along the coast and through the mountains to Mandeville, Jamaica. My third visit to the country, this was the first time I felt that maybe I was supposed to be there. Back in the summer of 1992, I still considered myself a Christian. Along with some thirty other 16 and 17 year-old predominantly white kids from the affluent Hyde Park and Palma Ceia Presbyterian churches, we had come to Ocho Rios to build a basketball court at a local church and to distribute used clothes in the nearby mountains. We stayed in the homes of local parishioners, ate communally with the whole congregation, worked by day and played by night.
There are at least three episodes I cannot forget about this trip (my first ever outside the United States). When we delivered used clothes to the people in the mountains, I was struck by the condition of their homes, free-standing shacks really. Children came running up to us when they saw what we were doing; they tried on our clothes, flirted and played with us. Soon, raised voices behind me caught my attention. A man was yelling at us, angered and insulted by our handouts of used wares, our carefree decadence, our ignorant hubris. Poverty was not a game and his home was not a playground. The minister of the local church confronted the man; he dismissed the man’s resentment and protected our sense of benevolence. We went back to enjoying the sunshine and thought no more about it. Later on, I found myself griping about the home in which we were staying, the cold showers and generally meager accommodations by south Tampa standards. I had unintentionally done this in the presence of our hosts. Finally, I acutely remember how we spent our free time in Ocho Rios. A group of us began to trespass at the local hotel, where we swam in the pool and drank complementary Rum Runners and Yellow Birds. Our whiteness was the perfect cover. A British boy of about 10 that I met in the pool told me how he had been offered marijuana on the beach. “It’s called the black market,” he told me, “because everyone who sells it is black.”
My second trip to the island was devoid of any of the previous pretenses to altruism. At this point, Granddaddy had been living in Mandeville for almost a year where he worked at Jamaica Bible College. A man who finished his undergraduate degree from a Bible College in Clearwater, FL at the age of 63, he was known in Jamaica as Dr. Levens. At my grandfather’s urging, our family stayed at an all-inclusive resort on the coast in Runaway Bay. We basked and gorged for nearly a week. While the hotel owned and closed-off the stretch of beach on its face, locals congregated all over the beach adjoining the hotel property. I spent a few long afternoons talking with a local named Winston (his friends called him “Blackah”) who told me all about his life on the island, his own business of selling t-shirts and drugs to tourists, about Jamaican history and politics, local crime, corruption in the police force as well as in the hotel industry. He was well-informed as well as ambitious. “I bought this pair of Nike shoes,” he proudly showed me, “they cost me about a week’s pay.” Winston said he had never left the island and assured me he would probably be on the same stretch of beach if I ever returned.
One year later, at the wedding in Mandeville, my family moved from place to place as if in a daze. The people we had just met talked to us as if we were old friends; they laughed with us as if we all knew the same inside jokes. We were honored guests; at the same time, we were expected to pull our fair share of the work that needed to be done. It was both comforting and disconcerting.
As I get ready to leave for Tanzania, where I will live with a family I’ve never met, learn to speak Kiswahili, learn to cook/clean/live without electricity or plumbing, I have to imagine that I will encounter similar feelings, a kind of shotgun approach to familiarity and intimacy.
Posted: Personal
