Stormy weather

For the third day today, it’s raining men (I wish!) cats and dogs here in Ubud. I put a glass out yesterday to measure the rainfall, and I got a centimetre in about ten minutes(!).

On the way home, I lifted my scooter onto a deserted sidewalk to get around a road that had a foot of water on it. The flooding flushed the gutters out, leaving trash in the street, and making everything smell really terrible. Many roads had an inch deep stream of (brown) water sweeping across them. It had a certain charm to it.

Here are some brave souls fording the river directly.

Best investment I’ve ever made is a super waterproof messenger backpack, also known to be used by deep sea divers. Fortunately (and unfortunately), it’s much more waterproof than my rain jacket and pants.

When I got back to the glass this morning to measure the total yesterday’s rainfall, I found it overflowed (over seven centimetres of rain). I didn’t get so wet riding home today. Like they say, yesterday was dramatic, today is okay.

Drawn onward to new era

This is (part of) the view from my office, and it doesn’t really do justice to how amazing the view is. It’s stunningly green, and the volcanoes are, in reality, huge.

After working for and talking to Ewa and Toshi at Kopernik here in Ubud, I’m getting a clearer picture of what exactly they’re trying to do. There isn’t really a simple explanation for what it is.

Kopernik works to address a couple of issues. In the first domain that they work in, they connect communities in developing countries in need certain types of technologies with companies or organisations which develop and produce innovative technologies, and finally with corporate donors and crowd-funding opportunities (where many donors each contribute a little to a specific project).

This gives poor people access to progressive, innovative and necessary technologies and products (which are often inaccessible because of cost) such as solar electric systems and water purification devices. Kopernik also provides support and advice to communities implementing projects. This spreads knowledge about technologies through the developing world and also connects companies to potential markets.

A key aspect of this is documenting the projects, and gathering comprehensive information on the outcomes and effects of introducing technology and projects. This allows experience to advise the design of future projects. Comprehensively reporting the impact of the projects that donors and supporters made possible is very important, and it helps to inform and engage people outside the field to support projects and learn about the impact of technology on the lives of the poor.

Kopernik not only connects companies to markets and communities with solutions, but also fosters communication between the organisations, businesses and people working on development challenges in low income countries. A big problem, I hear, is that “development” (a word and name I’m not terribly comfortable with), is a very closed industry, where there is little participation from people or other industries outside it, and where even some organisations within it don’t talk to each other.

Kopernik wants to change this by being a marketplace and a hub for technology as well as for people, and by involving and engaging people outside the field to learn about and support initiatives in developing countries. Ewa and Toshi are both veterans of the UN, and another reason they are going this route of connections-en-masse and decentralised operation is because it is much faster and more responsive than the bureaucratic and sluggish UN.

We’re making plans now for me to spend a couple of months, maybe? in East Timor, working directly with projects and communities Kopernik already works with, and introducing a whole bunch of new technology and programs. Yikes!

I wake up early everyday and ride a scooter (unfortunately, it’s too far and the roads are too dangerous for bicycles) to Ewa and Toshi’s house (aka Kopernik head office), where we type furiously at computers, sitting on a deck that hangs off the side of a hill facing a river and a countryside dotted with loads of coconut trees, hills (volcanoes?) in the distance. Simply amazing.

I’ve never owned or rented any kind of motor vehicle before, so it’s here in Ubud that I’m buying gas for the first time in my life, a surreal experience. Gas must be really really well subsidised by the government here or something, it’s about half the price of gas in the US. Probably in no small part because my scooter gets something like a hundred miles to the gallon, I pay about a dollar (no joke), a week right now for gas.

Yo soy del barrio

I often feel at home and confident in places before I’m actually familiar with them.

I have working maps in my head of so many little cities and places around the world…

Fried rice paradise

Ubud is amazing and a stunningly beautiful place. Perhaps I say this because I do my best to stay away from the main road where all the bars and restaurants and swanky hotels, where all the sunglassed, sweaty tourists hang, which I guess is still gorgeous, by tourist trap standards.

Still, I’m thinking of the Ubud where the road is narrow, houses, shops and warungs (roadside eats) creep onto the sidewalk (that’s barely there at all) and vines, bushes and trees and vegetation of all kinds grows over the buildings, trying to take over the street and block out the sky. Behind the buildings, it’s thick jungle, or swaths of rice fields. Everyone here is brown (I need to work on being browner).

The architecture here is amazing. Houses have these awesome pitched roofs that slope on all sides but end in a flat top — sometimes in tile and sometimes with straw, and sit on a flat concrete or raised earth slab, with very square, compact designs. Multi-storey houses keep their awesome roofs, and are stepped, a little bit like Japanese houses or Chinese temples. Families live in these awesome little compounds where houses sit next to each other on their platforms, with little prayer altar arranged all around them. Any space that isn’t a house or an altar is groomed as a garden, with stone slabs to walk on, grass, and flowers and decorative bushes. Chickens, cats and sometimes rabbits run around the garden, children play, and brightly coloured birds sit in cages. The whole compound is walled in, sometimes with intricate patterns on the walls, and ornately carved entryways. It’s charming and intensely beautiful I’m really not doing its beauty justice with words.

people live here! real people live here. Isn’t it beautiful? I don’t think any of the people around these parts are particularly rich, but their family compounds are all just really nice, a lot of carved wood and nice artwork. My theory is that so many people live in the same compound that the combined amount of money they can spend on it is quite substantial, and that they’ve lived in it for so many generations that they’ve had plenty of time to put some shine on it.

People are really friendly and smile a lot, people I’ve had extended conversations with are also extremely nice and really interesting. It’s funny how in Cambridge, it was rare for me to meet someone who was local, whilst in Ubud, it’s rare for me to meet someone who isn’t. People also ride scooters around town with crazy abandon, weaving and overtaking all over the road, riding in the wrong direction on two-way and one-way streets. The food is very goreng (fried), but tasty, well portioned and nicely arranged, and the weather is a few degrees cooler, because Ubud is a little higher up in the hills, than the rest of Bali.

The first evening, I walked to a little hole in the wall warung, the kind of place the local boy at my homestay tells me he would go to eat at, and I walked by a small terraced paddy field tucked away in someone’s back yard next to a plot of bananas and a little pen with hundreds of little ducklings in it, coconut trees shading everything. How’s that for an urban garden?

Ubud is in grave danger! Already there’s a Starbucks on the main road, with word that a McDonalds is on the way. Most of the shops in town are very shiny and polished, may selling upmarket clothes and perfumes and things that you could find anywhere else, really. There’s even a fish spa, a nutty Chinese or Japanese idea where the customer puts his or her feet into a tank and fish nibble on them. In pandering to western tastes, Ubud is losing its architecture, its local food and all its charm and culture, fast.

I blame it on the tourists. I think tourism is a great way to bring money into a country and create business, but it’s sad what lousy tourists can do to a place.

keeps things curious

After a little internet hunting, I found one person in Ubud who dances tango. Two days after landing in Bali, I found myself in a strange room dancing tango with a complete stranger I had never met before, and it felt strangely comfortable and even habitual, I almost took it for granted.

It’s pretty amazing to find something so familiar and delightful in such a strange place, to discover this kind of common language that exists between two people who understand the same thing (be it music and movement, or art, or food)

I’m just a little partial to tango because it is such an wonderfully tangible and immediate experience.

Unforeseen protractedness

A blog in four parts, that is much longer than I had initially intended
Cake will be awarded for guessing the title theme

The End
My last days in Cambridge were a storm of good times and good people: playing ultimate frisbee for the last time, going out to Gwyn Jones’s in Carlisle again (this time by train), seeing all of my favourite people in town, going to a couple of great milongas (tango dances), Bikes Not Bombs, and Daf and Laura conspiring to bake me a birthday cake (it was a really sweet surprise– it’s never happened to me before).

Life was so grand I almost didn’t get on that aeroplane.

Carry That Weight
Singapore is as weird as ever. Aside from the excellent food (which I keep hearing is stolen from Malaysia, and is better there anyway), there’s not a lot to like about it here. I’ve always found it a socially/culturally trying place, and have a hard time doing all the things I want to do, that I can do in a place like Cambridge (for example, get around by bike. Singapore is a TERRIBLE biking city).

Leaving my personal life out of the equation, I compiled a short list of reasons to hate Singapore. Whilst these don’t (or rather, have not yet) affected me, I have an intense philosophical and principled problem with them.

One party system: If you’ve ever looked at (for example) the democrat/republican squabbling in the US and thought to yourself, “hey, what a bunch of fools,” get this: Singapore has had ONE party in pretty much absolute and dominant power, since its independence. It’s called the PAP and its priorities are, in no particular order, control, stability, and image (trading for it the human rights enjoyed in most high-GDP highly educated countries). Hence, all the counter-critic action, all the population control laws (see below) and all the gerrymandering (the government routinely changes voting district boundaries in order to ensure its MPs are elected) and regulations on smaller opposition parties to ensure that they will never be able to compete with the PAP.

Freedom of assembly: Singapore used to limit-nay-deny the freedom of assembly by requiring a police permit for gatherings of more than five people. In 2009-ish, it changed to require a permit for any outdoor gathering that was related to any cause. In January, 2009 they arrested a two-man protest of the unfair treatment of and earlier protest of the Myanmar government during their whole constitutional referendum debacle.
Get this: the new bill also allows police to stop people from filming law enforcement “if it could put officers in danger.” This is the worse confusion of reason I’ve ever heard used to create an unconstitutional policy.

Freedom of speech: Singapore has severely restricted freedoms of speech. It’s got a speaker’s corner, modeled on the famous one at Hyde Park in London, but be damned if you think you can speak your mind there. Here‘s a fun little article that demonstrates how absurd things can be.

Freedom of press: Follows freedom of speech as abysmal. Examples are pretty easy to find on the internet

Black Bagging: Singapore’s Internal Security Act allows the government to arrest and detain individuals indefinitely without warrant or trial. This piece of legislation is a relic of 1960, where it was written to control communists (which is unconstitutional in and of itself, might I point out). It was used more liberally in the 1960s through 80s to control social activists and opposition parties (which is grossly inethical, might I point out). It has even been used as recently as June 2010. Whilst the details of the recent case are unclear, I must point out that there is absolutely no reason to detain anyone at all without trial. It is against any constitution and every human right.

Here’s the icing on the cake:
Charismatic churches (pastor disaster, ha ha!): In recent times, Singapore has experienced a bloom of swanky churches, where mass / service is attended by a highly unrepresentative population of, on average, extremely wealthy people. They donate (as is recommended by the bible, and I hear, quite well enforced by the church) a tenth of not just their salary –Chinese businessmen are too savvy for that– their net income, from assets and from paycheck. Their pastors drive Mercedeses and BMWs, live in big houses and often own a number of others. I don’t know how they can go along with churches that are basically donation clubs for rich Singaporeans, let alone trust their BMW driving pastor’s guidance.
A recent investigation uncovered extremely sneaky means by which church leaders are able to circumvent laws and regulations to benefit from these donations. It involves the church making large donations to other churches, outside the jurisdiction of Singapore law, such as in the Philippines (as an example, and not to pick on them in any way), with the catch that they must invite the pastor to speak at their church, for which the fee is, say, half of what that large donation was (Singapore can’t force the church in the Philippines to hand over information on the transaction). And for the church in the Philippines of a million dollars is a lot of money, and half is better than nothing, eh?

and, I almost forgot– put this in your pipe: Singapore has one of the highest income disparities in the world, on par with many African (politically corrupt, might I add) countries. Its neighbours on the big list? Burundi, Kenya, Iran and Nicaragua. I guess this is not so far off from the USA, where taxes and other policies that have favoured the rich for generations. From recent Singapore newspaper articles I’ve read, the poorest people here are starting to find that they make less than a living wage.

It’s clear that my ideologies differ from the leadership’s in some pretty fundamental ways, but is this the kind of place anyone would want to live in? If they had a choice? If they were well informed? All the information I used to write this (besides floating in my head) is easily available in open channels, and on the internet. I think that people are on the whole well suppressed and well misled, coddled with a bit of comfort and had the wool pulled over their eyes.
Singapore’s really well developed economically, but really needs to wake up and grow socially, culturally, intellectually, and all the other -allys they’ve missed.

Through the Bathroom Window
Singapore’s got a great little theatre scene, in which they make fun and jest of and generally celebrate the precious little culture of and little big news and happenings around Singapore, sometimes even poking fun at the government. And it’s surprisingly good, with loads of original music and lots of Singapore in-jokes. It usually makes me smile and laugh.

Living inside Singapore’s great little theatre scene is Singapore great little gay theatre scene.

In a country where not only is same sex marriage not lawful, but where there is still an “unnatural sex” law that prohibits homosexual sex explicitly and homosexual relationships implicitly, there is a thriving gay club scene, as well as a gay theatre scene where some very gay plays (featuring some very prominent local celebrities) take on the issues of being gay in Singapore in really big ways. Often funny, sometimes very poignant and sad.

I’m super proud and appreciative that they dare do this in Singapore, and that they pulled it off so well. Every show I’ve been to has been packed.

Majesty
What really earns Singapore a special place in my heart (at this moment, as much as I hate to admit it) is the tango. Tango in Singapore has been so much fun: people have been really friendly and welcoming, and dance very well. Singapore is also one of those rare places that (I know from personal experience) men will dance with men (it’s quite common for women to dance with women, it seems/I hear). Why is this important to me? I started to write but it got long, I’ll explain this another time.

When I dance in Boston, I usually never stay til the end of a milonga, but the first night I went out dancing in Singapore, I stayed out til two in the morning (way way past my bedtime). It was just great– I couldn’t leave.

Why is this important? It’s a hint that I can find something I like doing, and something that makes me happy, anywhere, even in Singapore.

pots and kettles

I was at Chicago O’Hare airport on my way to Singapore when I saw a political ad on the telly accuse Obama’s administration of policies that destroyed jobs and favoured large corporations over small businesses (what I thought was a classically republican move).

Every other word I hear in democrat AND republican propaganda alike is “jobs”, and the other word(s) is(are) “small businesses.” So, does this mean that both republicans and democrats are trying to create jobs and to spur the growth of small businesses? Whilst they accuse the other party of destroying jobs and small businesses?

Are either of them doing anything other than slinging charged words at each other? Will we ever get to the bottom of this?

This might be worth reading.