Life Gets in the Way

Sometimes life gets in the way. MikeyZ and I were supposed to hop a U-haul and make a cross-country cash-grab, stopping at every ex hippy’s paradise along the way, visiting old friends and greasy spoons too. CMcC was supposed to maybe join us.

Life got in the way. There were babies to feed and jobs to secure and begin, and most of all U-haul screwed us in the form of a 250 percent price increase. It’s seasonal. This is busy season.

I have this memory of barrelling across eastern Canada, my dad at the wheel, me on the navigation tip, belting out Blondie as we rode. There was a flat tire, three days travel, half the time now allotted by U-Haul’s insurance sharks. It may or may not have happened like that, but it’s a fine memory.

I wanted that journey as an adult. I just wanted that self-sufficiency, and to bond and cement relationships that need not end, play my music loud and watch the road unfold, no hurry or worry.

Life got in the way. Turns out it’s cheaper to hire a moving company. They make life easy, load up your junk, haul it over, unload it too, all for a third the price, and that includes coffee runs, gas and insurance.

Saves us a trip back to the people trap. Saves us a bundle, and time too, and a lot of labour.

Except I was looking forward to that labour because it would have been communal, with those old-fashioned friends of a fading era. And I was looking forward to that last trip back to make some visits with folks who I saw too little of this summer, and I'll see even less of them now.

But you gotta move forward, backward never as Kwame Nkrumah said. Life moves forward fast, and it still gets in the way.


[Post-script: the moving company screwed us too. They underestimated the weight of our stuff based on our description of it. Bottom line, the price tripled, so it's about the same as U-haul would have cost.

I may still be back in the Toronto area at Thanksgiving. Our good friend Kerty is getting married. Miia can't take the time off work but I may yet be able to make it.]

-CB

Novel News

Hi folks,

I finished the second draft of my novel a while ago and now have several readers scouring and improving. In the meantime, the Ghanaian paper I worked at has published the first bit of it, which is fun and adds some credibility for publishers I hope. See the excerpt here.

-CB

Good News

I've just been offered (and accepted) the position of Director of Programs atPhoenix Youth Programs in downtown Halifax. You can read up more on the agency here. I'm excited to be working at such a great organization with such a fantastic reputation.

So, here's keeping my fingers crossed that I can transition into the organization well, do good work, and find a real place in my life and work there. My job starts September4th.

Thanks to all of you who, over these last months especially, have been so supportive of us and of ourlives and work. Thanks also to Lorraine, Chantal and Maureen for the references you've provided (Maureen even sent an emailfrom an internet cafe from Yellowknife while on her vacation!). Thanks to our families for always being ready with good advice and constant support. And thanks to the rest of you for all your kindness and generosity, in an infinite number of ways.

Much love,
Miia

Follow-up Title Poll

So, we have two runaway favourites from the suggested titles, which also happen to be my favourites to date. I have altered one slightly to strengthen the language and image. So, just to see if it makes a difference, please tell me 1) which of the two you prefer, 2) why you prefer it, and 3) what you think the novel would be about based on these titles. Here are the two:


God and Other Dirty Sceptics

Living in the Dirt


-CB

Fear the Monoculture

I have published my latest poem over at Potluck, it's called Fear the Monoculture.

-CB

Audience Poll

I did this poll at my own blog and got some feedback from 'virtual friend' types, but also, if anyone is still reading this thing, would love some of your input.

I have several working titles for my novel [until now called only 'the subway novel' because that's where I wrote a good chunk of it], and I want to get your impressions of them. Knowing that few of you have read anything more than an occasional excerpt, I just want your impressions of the titles on their own, as if you had never heard of me or the novel and were browsing your local bookstore for something new:

Would any of these arouse your curiosity? Make you want to pick up the book and read the back flap? Which is most likely/least likely to do so? What would you think the story was about based on the title? What do they bring to your mind? Do they all suck? Should I scrap them all and start fresh in the morning?

Any comments would be appreciated. Here are the titles:

Control Freaks and Other Skeptics
The Underestimated
Living in the Dirt
Broken Social Contract
The Skeptical Nomads


Thanks for your help,

CB

United States of Africa

A story came out in The Statesman last week that I didn't see in any westernized media, although I hear that CNN did cover it. See Accra Declaration for details about a major development that could have a huge impact on our world:

The African Union has decided to move toward a single Union Government, which could mean a single set of laws governing a massive and diverse continent of nearly a billion people and, currently, 53 diverse nations. Some of them are dictatorships, some democracies; some are fairly wealthy, some extremely poor; some are agrarian, some have oil. I don't know how it will work, but it will definitely change Africa and thus, the world.

Recommended Reading

Of all the books we've read this year, Soil and Soul by Alistair McIntosh has probably been one of the most impactful and inspirational. We found it in the Skara Brae giftshop on the Orkney Isles. It provides what might be called an alternative theological and ecological history of Scotland, and details two major activist victories of recent decades: the purchase of the Isle of Eigg by its residents from their Laird, and the saving of a mountain from total destruction by a megaquarry project, thanks to the help of a Mi'kmaq Warrior Chief and Peace Pipe Carrier.

This is recommended reading for anyone who cares about the planet or its inhabitants.

Alan Paton on our return

"We could go back knowing better the things that one fought against, knowing better the kind of thing that one must build."
-Alan Paton in 'Cry, the Beloved Country', written in 1948

African Social Evolution

As promised, here is the article I wrote that sums up my thinking on African 'development' or renewal (click on African Social Evolution). It has been published on Potluck, a website I cofounded in 2001 dedicated to systems perspectives, ideas, and community-building.

African Social Evolution

-Chris

HCBS Diversity

Security


















Insecurity


[according to one British bank's ads, diversity is all about perspective.]

Some Closing Thoughts on the Year That Was

Miia's last post did a nice job of summing up not only some of our reverse culture shock frustrations upon re-entry, but also of some of the things we learned from Ghana.

Travel, while fun and exciting, can really mess with your mind, make it hard to fit in anywhere. You lose a sense of your own culture without ever really fitting in anywhere else, because you're not there long enough. I mean it takes many years to adapt to a new culture, and some never do fully adapt.

But you do learn to like and appreciate certain things as being better than at home. You miss home, because it's home, but there are certain things you really like. Like how Ghanaians act like they know each other even if they don't. They talk to strangers, and interact with them openly and freely. Hold each other's babies, no matter if you're a stranger. There's no fear in that.

But as a white outsider, you become too much an object of fascination, or desire, or ridicule, too easily, quickly, and often. So I found myself afraid of society, hiding from it. Here in Toronto, I find myself longing for that interaction, desperate for it, because everybody seems to have their heads down all the time. Or they look ahead but can't see but two feet in front of them. They are hypnotized. Maybe by all the advertising. Or maybe they are just living in their own heads, like I often do, but in so doing they fail to see the world going on around them, fail to participate with each other in this social experiment, or contract.

That's been the hardest thing about being back. Here are a few other random observations from the trip:

-I've always been sympathetic to First Nations land claims, but never done anything about it really other than argue with my non-aboriginal friends about it. Being in Mongolia, where people live off the land, where land is so important to their survival and to their souls, where there is so much vast openness, really hit the point home to me. The Europeans who settled Canada stole a way of life, and we perpetuate that sin to this day. It's unresolved. I don't know what the resolution should be, but it's a national shame.

-I've always been sympathric to the plight of newcomers to Canada, how hard it is to integrate into society, the economy, education system, et cetera here, how they often face racial and cultual prejudice and struggle with it daily. Ghana is a major source country of immigrants to Canada. It often broke my heart how hard Ghanaians were on their own country: women asking us to take their babies back with us, taxi drivers and friends of friends begging us for Canadian visas, a neighbour who couldn't understand why I'd leave Canada to come live in Kotobabi. But, on the level of economics, I get it. For the poor, Ghana is a very hard go. The better off know that their skills may never get fully developed there, or fully used, while they are having to kowtow to the Big Men who control society. If they don't get a foreign eduction, they may very well stagnate. And, about 20 percent of the country's GDP is remittance payments from Ghanaians abroad, sending money back home. So, of course people want to leave. I think though that Ghana has a serious brain drain problem, particularly in the areas of healthcare and teaching. A lot of good could be done by filling these holes, stopping the bleeding, and at the same channelling those remittance payments somehow toward renewal initiatives, i.e. infrastructure like hospitals, schools, etc. On the Canadian side, one of the best things we can do to help poorer countries reach their own goals is to ensure that people who come here from abroad find adequate employment. They want to contribute their skills to Canada, why aren't we letting that happen?!

-On the whole, development work is a crock. There is precious little of use being offered from rich nations to Ghana, and my experiences in other financially poor countries were much the same in that regard. Most development projects are more about controlling Ghana than facilitating its renewal. I don't quite advocate for a hundred percent withdrawal, but at the very least all tied (conditional) aid money should be untied, the conditions just don't help. Since when have rich countries had a monopoly on knowledge about how to live or how to govern?

-On a personal level, I still love travel, and I'm so grateful to have had this time. I highly recommend, to everyone who can possibly afford it, to take a gap year. It doesn't have to involve travel, the main thing is to de-enslave yourself from work for a while, explore, grow, blah blah, whatever, have fun, make a bunch of puppets, write a book. For us, it was cheaper than you'd think. In fact, it was much cheaper than if we just spent a year in Toronto not working, by a long shot. Try 20 bucks a day each, that's what we spent, total, in the last year, including airfare, accomodations, food, souvenirs, everything. It could be done cheaper even.

-There are still many places I want to visit in this world, but if I don't visit them, that's okay. The main thing, at this point, is I want to enjoy my life, do the work I love, worry as little as possible about the money. In this capitalist society you need some money, but not as much as most people around me seem to want. I want to write, do community work, have children, and be near family friends and true community. That will be my focus for the next long while.

-Hugh Brody wrote a great book called The Other Side of Eden where he said it's a myth that hunter-gatherers are the most nomadic people. They may move around but it's always in a small area, and they always come back to the same places year after year. Agriculturalists have big families (lots of workers), run out of land for the kids, send a bunch off to work in factories or colonise new lands, build cities, etc. Those who make enough money go travelling. This is something I have to think about, because it is very resource consumptive, and the world has precious little in the way of resources, and carbon emissions may sink us all. This isn't an argument against travel, just something to think about for now.

I guess that's it for now. I have drafted a big long piece that hopefully will get published somewhere I can link to. It is a discussion about Ghana, Africa, colonialism, and civilisation that further sums a lot of what I learned in the past year, so watch for that one.

Thanks to all who have been following this blog. It will be winding down now, but I'll continue posting travel stories over at my Benjibopper blog, which also has a bunch of creative and sometimes silly writing of mine, just for fun. I also imagine we'll keep this one up for posterity, and perhaps continue to use it as a family blog, putting occasional photos and updates on here, so feel free to continue visiting.

Thanks again and much love,
Chris Benjamin

Still Crazy After All These Years

It's strange to return to Toronto, feeling like a decade, rather than a year, has passed. Some small changes, some new development projects, new haircuts on friends but, otherwise, much the same. Part of me is confused - how on earth did the old neighbourhood keep going even after I left? How does life keep on keeping on even in our absence?

Culture shock is not really an adequate word. Less than the shock of plunging your hand in freezing cold water, this movement between place and space has that dreadful nausea like you've been on an amusement park ride too long. I want off and I want things to feel normal, though I don't even know what that is. I keep thinking that in some months, when I hopefully have a job and my own place to live and I wake up with Chris at my side and shuffle to the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee and greet the day, that is when I'll feel normal again.

Somehow too I think there are different kinds of cultural nausea. My head spins when I go from Canada to Finland but the South-North business is so much harsher, so much more extreme. On CBC this afternoon was a program trying to allow people in new subdivisions the right, contrary to the developer's rules, to have a clothes line and hang their laundry out to dry. "It doesn't make sense," comes the voice of the interviewee, "that on a day like today that is sweltering and where we want to conserve energy, that people can't put their clothes on the line to dry." What's news to me isn't the efforts to fight for the right to hang our clothes, rather it's that I never knew that it could be banned in the first place! Whatever makes more sense than being able to take your wet clothes and throw them on a piece of string, use a couple of clips and let the sun and the wind do precisely what they do best? Since when does a machine that sucks energy and resources to manufacture, ship, maintain and dispose of make more sense? It's these types of crazy anachronisms that make coming 'home' so much more difficult. I just don't understand when we lost ourselves like this.

I keep starting thoughts with, "In Ghana..." which is a bad sign. I want to be able to keep the lessons I learned, remember and honour the people and experiences. In many ways, my time in El Salvador and Nicaragua hasn't so much faded as been woven into the fabric of who I am. But Ghana is still centre stage and I find myself constantly comparing, constantly throwing out so much of what goes on in Canada because in Ghana, in Ghana, in Ghana... In Ghana, most people eat food that is grown locally. In Ghana, food isn't so processed, packaged and marketed. In Ghana, people are more freely generous without strings attached. In Ghana, spaces are more open and you can access people more easily without the oceans of bureaucracy to wade through first. In Ghana, parenting isn't an exercise in anxiety (no offense to all my friends who are new parents - this is more of a broader observation than an individual one). In Ghana, family is basically anyone who shares any relation to you in any way. In Ghana, people buy locally produced fabrics that are sewn by local tailors and brandnames have no dominion. In Ghana, big women are beautiful and are news anchors, movie stars, models. In Ghana, in Ghana... The list goes on. And then keeps going.

So I find myself back in the land of plenty where it's not uncommon to pat ourselves on the back to say, "We should be happy we weren't born there," or where you eat the last morcel because, "There are children starving in Africa," or where pictures of emaciated black children are on a cardboard box at the local West Indian roti shop with a few pennies lie at the bottom. I don't know what to make of any of this, of any of the changes or the differences. Most of all, I don't quite know how to live myself, to let it go while at the same time never letting up.

Ideas?

Miia

Spain

1. Gaudi building in Barcelona, 2. central Spain, 3. M at Picasso Museum (Barcelona), 4. Barcelona Buskers, 5. this is where they slaughter bulls for sport, 6. Dali toys, 7. Barcelona building

Paris

Here's Miia's good friend Benoit giving us a fascinating lecture on New Caledonian history.

Edinburgh

The first three are funky old architectural gems, then you have Edinburgh Castle, and lastly, dusk dancers preparing for fire festival.

Orkney canyon

Highlands

1. Orkney cliffs, 2. reflected hills, 3. blue skies, 4. sheepy campground, 5. black rock walk, 6. orkey standing rock monolith

Glasgow

1. Miia on the open mic, 2. glasgow cityscape, 3. a framed photo at the legion of my great-auntie ella, who is still held in great esteem there, 4. daldowie: my grandmother's resting place

England

1. dandy field near Oxford, 2. London friends Andrei and Gemma, 3. Cheddar (in Summerset) and its gorge, 4. bloggers unite, 5. Megan at work, 6. Jonothan and Andrew Steed in Warwick (they used to be part of Miia's youth group at Agricola Church in Trana)