Crossroads Dispatches

Two Years Ago, A Tsunami, A Heart Breakinga

Late last evening, before I lay to sleep I realized that it was very close to the 10:15 a.m. local time that a freight train of water struck Phi Phi Island, Thailand and rolled through thousands of other coastlines and islands throughout the Indian Ocean.

People ask me about the tsunami to this day. It's not as if I think about the tsunami any more today. That experience and all the people I met in Thailand and Sri Lanka are always part of me.

It wasn't my own near-death experience that got to me, I've had close calls scaling canyons and hurtling through whitewater rapids too.

"How to be open without taking on all the suffering of other people?" was not a philosophical question any longer. The tsunami broke my heart open in a way nothing had ever cracked through the fortress I'd erected.

I got this in my Nondual Highlights newsletter on Dec 16th, and I think it speaks volumes about what remains with me in the living moment to moment:

"Just be here. Sort of like sitting ducks. The mind can feel that way when one enters this unprotected place, like a sitting duck, at the mercy of the moment, fully surrendered, fully offered, without a strategy or a protection or any idea why, just a complete dropping everything, the stuff you're carrying, to the floor, and just here.

This being is more than enough. Then if we stay here, there's a song that starts to sing, a devotional song to Being that starts to sing between us - it is this song about, Ah! You are! I am! You are! I am! How lovely. How everything.

J: The essence of separation is I'm not part of this, I'm not at one with this, I am apart from this.
T: It's really difficult to get close.
J: It's too late, because we already are, like this, we were born this way. I'm already so close to you it's excruciating if you let yourself notice.
T: When I look into your eyes, I feel like I'm looking into Love itself, it's very sweet.
J: Me too, in yours... Why let a little horrific trauma get in the way of walking around the world as love, hmmm?

If we meet this world unprotected, our heart gets broken over and over and over. This is actually a gift. You let the world touch you, it shatters you open, and it shatters you open, and it shatters you open. And here you are, shining. After our heart is broken open a thousand times and all of the contents emptied out, there's just this shining left."

- Jeannie Zandi, speaking in satsang in Portland, Oregon

images from BBC's collection of children's art therapy post-tsunami

Ground Zero

I am indebted to the lessons of 9/11, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and Katrina to having me take an intimate engagement in my own local neighborhoods. The people right smack in front of me matter more to me than virtual ties. Geography, like Shel and Hugh say, did not use to matter to me either.

But the slogan 'Think globally, act locally' gradually took on new meaning for me over that last 20 months post-tsunami.

I was overwhelmed by its sheer size when I first moved to the Bay Area on October 30, 2002. A shimmmering sea of endless headlights and brakelights lit up I-280 as cars crawled their way from San Jose to Palo Alto on my first evening drive and I wondered silently to myself, "Omigod, what have I done?" It may have not helped to be swallowed up in the crowds the next evening at the Castro Street Halloween street party in San Francisco.

The intricate, extensive familial, friendship and community ties in tsunami-torn countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand on my return one-year anniversary trip left an indelible impression on me that I still can't articulate in any blog post. One day perhaps a book would be a large enough canvas to set the context and I might begin to scratch the surface of the person to person threads in that fabric that nurtured and unified the neighborhoods and families I visited.

I saw my Mom last week in Las Vegas (it's the anti-thesis of human-scale in my book). She was reminiscing about the strolls, parks, festivals and house porches of her hometown Guines, Cuba. "When I was a kid growing up, we'd play ball in the street. We didn't buy a ball. We'd tear cigarette packs and newspapers into strips."

"Weave them into tight balls. No Nintendo. No tv. We had so much fun."

"Around here, we have walls, not neighborhoods."

I don't think she was merely referring to gated communities.

Every day of my two-month pilgrimage back one year after the tsunami, I learned everything I ever needed to know about social capital or 'social networking'. For instance, watching the friends gather that sultry evening by the pool at a Moratuwa, Sri Lanka hotel frequented by locals from soap opera stars to honeymooners. They were all successful business owners. They talked of country clubs, the tea country, safaris, their families, their favorite churches, God, travelling up and down the tsunami-hit coast to distribute dahl and rice and other supplies they'd bought. They'd seen each other grow, their children grow for the last twenty years. They don't really need LinkedIn.

I'll be meditating, praying, talking one-on-one, and being present with folks at Ground Zero in Manhattan on the five-year-anniversary of 9/11. Doubt I'll necessarily be blogging however. This is one-on-one, quiet, private, intimate. Call 408 513 7324 cell or email me (yes I can check email from my cell too) if you're also at Ground Zero or simply inclined to reach out Monday.

Straight to the Art

Pictured right is an entry from one of Janice Lowry's journals. The artist has kept journals for her entire adult life. "It's the cheapest therapy a person can do," she says. - from Somerset Studio's Signatures: The Art Journal Collection

Talk therapy and trauma counseling aren't nearly as fasionable in Thailand as in LA, says Doc (his Thai name), a Thai national who returned to Thailand from LA to work at the Tsunami Children's Foundation. I'll share more about TCF some other time, but what's really fascinating is the myriad of ways people adapt to culture and navigate to what works.

Since psychotherapy was out, the arts stepped in to fill the healing gap.

Prabda Yoon, a Bangkok-based writer and screenwriter (most recently the 2006 Invisible Waves - and no it's not about the tsunami) was commissioned by the government's cultural ministry to write a post-tsunami book.

Drawing workshops ("art therapy") proliferated as a way to express the inexpressible, and Yoon himself led two: one in the ravaged fishing village of Ban Nam Khem and another at a school in touristy Kamala Beach. He writes with great empathy for the people before this critical, but honest, passage:

"It would be difficult to find an ugly artwork by a child. That is probably because when a children make art, they don't begin with an idea in their heads that what they are doing is "making art." Perhaps ugliness springs from ambition. It is that aimless, childlike spontaneity that Picasso tried so hard to recover and explore during the final years of creative life. The quality of children's art is that it defies all the annoying artistic ambitions held by most adults; the sorts of ambitions that turn art into making a career, or a self-serving, egotistical expression far removed from acts of creation inspired entirely by nature.

Even the children's depiction of the Tsunami's intimidating waves seemed somehow warm and optimistic. The drawings were about loss and in some cases fear, but no sense of hatred ever seemed evident in them. By comparison, the work of adults all seemed to try too hard to locate some kind of logic in the tragedy... Earthquakes and tidal wave, even the weather, are still mysteries to us. We know so much less than we ever want to admit. Only children, in their most spontaneous and instinctive moments, seem able to express this fact clearly." - Where We Feel: A Tsunami Memoir By An Outsider, by Prabda Yoon

Yoon's book was distributed free up and down the Andaman coast. It's a simple short book in both Thai and English that explores themes such as how people labor to make meaning out of the meaningless, Nature, ghosts, death, art.

At first I thought the small book was exceedingly simple. Yet I found myself digging up passages weeks later. Its simple language allowed it to be accessible to fishermen, laborers, juice vendors, divemasters and resort owners all alike.

I realized reading Thich Nhat Hanh's small 96-page book that clarity does not ring any truer in threading tributaries of words or in the sandbags of tomes.

The haiku ethic is striking a chord with me. I have this grandiose idea - grandiose as in one more project where the biz model isn't clear - of creating a small handmade art book/tsunami memoir. I'd incorporate punctuated fragments of blog posts and private journal entries, and a poem - maybe turned to prose - that's been marinating for a bit.

Maybe a fold book to echo an A-to-B saga dovetailing with a universal metaphor of 'path' and walking. Plumb the symbology of oceans and waves? Maybe sound is my metaphor: "Enlightenment hums in the heart as the pulsation of the universe itself" and Jack's "diamond sound of rich shh." Mix my metaphors and toss it all in? Translate to Thai, Tamil, Sinhala and Indonesian?

Ultimately I'm getting the urge to do sometime with my hands besides tapping a keyboard. I guess maybe it was something a cartoonist said at SXSW; he enjoys hand-packaging the books and T-shirts sent out to his fans. It's not a chore to be outsourced. It's that little extra personal connection. The human touch.

The brain may say go with a real publisher - but that's not the point - there's something about the handmade-ness, high touch and the art of DIY book-making that gut-instinct-sits-right-with-the-world.

Bonus resources:

• Arts and Healing Network's list of classes and workshops.
• This book, Cover to Cover: Creative Techniques For Making Beautiful Books, Journals & Albums, seems to be the definitive source on art-book-making. It's on The List.
• Bay Area Book Artists, The San Francisco Center for the Book, The Center for Book Arts (NYC)
• Creativity and Calamity, just missed this March 27th panel of artists that "incorporate political, personal, historical and global perspectives on natural and manmade disasters in their creative processes." (This panel is timed with the 1906 SF earthquake centennial coming up on April 18th.)

credits Artist journal page from Somerset Studio's Signatures: The Art Journal Collection; Japanese artist Hokusai's famous "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", a small woodcut; fold book by bookmaker Kavra L.C. Jones'

Ten-Minute Poem, Really

I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by validation

& paying rent
the galleries spit 'this won't sell' can you make it blacker please

i nearly disengage from the software salesman
the voice (isaiah 30:21) cocks my head
why i ask (i'll never know) what is your passion?
pilgrimage, journeys in swahili = safari

lsd can be ego-shattering, please don't try this at home

and I drove no radio sf through reno through the $5 buffets of Wendover
through the searing white washed luna-scape of the salt flats
a meditation on lust twisting through my mind
2 months before the divorce 2002
this isn't about him haunting my mind
god spoke

the Word is not printed
'over one million people a day do a search on the Internet for a spiritual term'

(according to Global Media Outreach)

not there either

lust, possession, I WANT you ripens melts into forgetting yourself
forget yourself, forget yourself, forget
your
self
merging
tao

sex, skiing, sado (tea ceremony): pale orgasms without shattering forgetting self

watch the waves from Pacifica 10 months after the tsunami
dead kelp artichoke, calamata colors, italian salad
roar slams the chain link fence rusting the trailer home
tell me where does one wave start? and next begin

where do You begin? and I end

ocean: no boundary - no shore -> no tsunami

p.s. thanks, Jack. isaiah 30:21 "Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it."

Passport to Understanding: Seeing Through Muwa's Eyes

 

Muwa, top right, took these photos. I noticed she was more interested in being on the other side of the camera: The creator.

At the last session at NewCommForum with Robert and Shel, a woman in the audience comments: "I thought I was up on this [blogging]. I'm starting to see this underlying sense of empowerment. That people want to have a voice. Customers are empowered."

Yeah, and engagement is more fun than passivity.

Best decision I ever made was to take a simple point-and-shoot digital camera that I could hand over to locals. I gave it to the most curious 'kid' in a crowd. It made me a lot of friends along the two-month journey to Thailand and Sri Lanka when language was a seeming barrier.

Muwa's first day shots were formal, posed. The subjects were stiff. I think they're all accustomed to posing for photographs for foreigners - the strangers that swooped in after the tsunami and gave international exposure to the plight of the indigenous Thai sea gypsy community. 

Wherever you go the world over, "cheese" smiles are contrived.

Yet something started to change.

Muwa began experimenting the second day I came over. In the cafe as the volunteers and I got bored with posing, she started to capture shots whether or not we stayed still. I didn't even notice she was still snapping photos of us.

Then she started to use the television set's reflective screen to create special effects: in one haunting photo (above, click to full res) our real-life cafe scene seamlessly blends in with a Bollywood-inspired virtual world.

Later she discovers that it's okay to turn the camera 90 degrees. And then she asks for my permission to take the camera into Tung Wa village proper.

Into areas I wouldn't necessarily have access to.

Villagers on siestas, joyously naked youngsters asleep and astride bikes, artful still-lifes illustrating her and her friend's fascination with motorbike and bicycle, pregnant moms giggling, kids shampooing their younger siblings...

As Muwa eased behind the lenses, and because she was already part of the community and culture even the posed shots took on a natural grace.

I only wish I'd thought of handing my camera to the three black-cloaked women sitting astride on a bench along the old fort wall in Galle, Sri Lanka watching the sun dip down into the waves.

Behind them a meadow fell away among cacti and palms and thirteen snowy egrets. Alas, the Muslim world is the one subculture I didn't get to deeply hang out in on my two-month journey.

In Thai, the word jai or chai means heart-mind (fused for Thais and Buddhists) and kao jai means deep understanding. There are times you enter the jai of another culture through the eyes of an insider - their selection, their framing, their angle, their interpretation, their poetry, their music, their essence. Thank you Muwa.

Bonus: The producers of Voices of Iraq distributed over 150 DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS across the entire country to enable everyday people - mothers, children, teachers, sheiks and even insurgents - to document their lives and their hopes amidst the upheaval of a nation being born.

In CHAIN CAMERA, director Kirby Dick relinquishes the video camera to let the students of this multicultural East Hollywood high school tell their own stories. Taking a new approach to the documentary genre, Dick decided to hand out video cameras in August of 1999 to ten teenagers in order for them to document their own lives for a week, at which point the cameras were passed on to ten more students, and so on.

p.s. These are only a fraction of the shots. You can see how this applies to what keynoter Rebecca Blood termed at NewCommForum "The Age of Participatory Culture", or the ProAm revolution; ethnography and 'deep hanging out'; artisan journalism; consumer-generated media; and learning about the world period.

tags social media consumer generated content citizen journalism blogging ethnography storytelling tsunami NewCommForum

 

Burnt Sienna Memories of Aid

I think it really - I mean I don't know how it took so long - really hit me that my experience as a fellow tsunami survivor was not so relevant to the situation any longer.

The discontinuity in our lives was a connecting bond, but the trajectories are far too different. I didn't need rice sacks and dahl and clean water delivered to the community shelter where I was housed with sixty families for months.

It might have happened in Hambantota, Sri Lanka that I realized quite another life experience bonded me more to survivors of natural disasters.

The west and south coast is fairly urban and one sees Army tent shelters alongside luxury gated resorts, but from Matara on, the scene changes to lush green rice paddies, stark white egrets and cocoa-dusted water buffalo. My contact lensed eyes felt refreshed after weeks of city dirt. I sunk into my seat and enjoyed a bus ride to Hambantota. (It was the bus ride from Hambantota I remarked on yesterday; that was altogether a different experience.)

Maybe the fact that 35% of the people are employed in agriculture comes alive here. This is the heartland.

There was a funeral that day. A fisherman in the neighborhood ran out of oxygen while part of a dive training program.

Death isn't foreign here. So many of the men died at market - too close to the sea - that Boxing Day, that it's mostly women in attendance today.

The monthly 'psycho-spiritual healing programme' at the temple school was running about a half-hour behind as mourners trickled in.

While the counselors and lecturer prepared, I entertained myself by glancing at posters - reminders for the teacher - such as: "A child is not a vessel to be filled - but a lamp to be lit."

As they settle, I count 28 although the numbers are in flux as kids arrive and elders depart throughout. One woman peels back her red blouse to nurse her baby as she listens attentively. Two hours glide by. Some other day I'll tell you more about those hours.

The program erases from my mind. At the end of the day, I'm introduced to a woman. Her hair is long and tucked back like most Sri Lankan woman and she wears what resembles a house-dress. She could have just walked out her bathroom. My mother snaps into focus with her signature house-dress and slippers. She is listless and numb too.

She stands there shifting slowly while the counselor speaks to me in English. The three girls are maybe eleven. Maybe twelve. They wear matching polyester blouse, skirt, black ponytails. When I was a child I would have sketched in the barefoot triplets with scrawls of burnt sienna Crayolas.

Crayola Inc adds a romantic dash to burnt sienna: The Japanese do not have a specific word named brown. Rather they use more descriptive names such as “tea-color," "fox-color," and "fallen-leaf.”

In Sri Lankan brown would be husked-coconut-color, bed-tea-color, water-buffalo-color, cinnamon-bark-color.

The three girls eyes aren't cloudy like their mother's. They mostly follow your gaze rather than look at the temple floor.

Christy was 14, Yvette was nine. I was just shy a few weeks before high school prom night when Papi died.

I'm close to that age when Mom was buying a casket for her husband at 42.

Mom's English was mangled but we understood her just fine. Her last job was teaching before she fled Cuba as a political refugee. She had a two-year teaching certificate. She didn't drive although we lived in suburban labyrinth of Miami.

And.

There was no life insurance.

Now this life experience is much more relevant to the people I meet post-tsunami.

How to pay for my college education paled in comparison to how are we paying the mortgage and eating dinner and keeping the lights on. I feel blessed that no one was surveying us forlornly as the three of us stood to the left of our mother. But maybe it's too easy to be invisible at times like this.

One of the best things that happened to us wasn't a donation or a handout. Papi was no longer around to boom: "No, you can't have a job. Get good grades. Go to college." A man with a junior high education quickly surmises that you can't scrape by in the U.S.A. without an education.

"Can you type?" my aunt Nina asked in her chirpy Brazilian accent.

No Sound Bytes I'm Afraid: Blogs as the Perfect Vehicle for Microstories

On the day after the tsunami anniversary, I ran into Ed, a Reuters foreign correspondent whom interviewed me and I had first met at an all-day meditation tsunami memorial event on Christmas.

We sat down for a couple of Singhas at an outdoor bar before he had to catch the island ferry and start the trek back to Bangkok, his home.  We were directly across the tsunami memorial park started by a couple who lost their little girl Sacha. I had just departed there and lost in my own world when I bumped into Ed.

We talked about the beauty of the paper latterns the night before. Dozens, maybe hundreds, were released by families along the beach to commemorate the one year memorial. Their burning flames trailing into a stream of lights across the night sky. Watching the twinkling fires fade and grow distant and vanish from view into the starry night. They continued onward beyond the limits of my perception. "When I die," he said, "I'd like to have those latterns in my funeral."

He asked me how things were going with my writing and the blog.

"This story [tsunami recovery and rehab] is like trying to photograph the Grand Canyon," I told him. "It's more nuanced and complex than the aftermath." I lamented no photograph can possibly do the Grand Canyon justice. No telephoto lens, no panoramic lens, no IMAX film. It all falls short of the 360 degree experience in the flesh.

"If it's like the Grand Canyon, then every shot will be a great one," Ed rejoined.

And bingo! there he had it. The closest "strategy" I've come up with for sharing the avalanche (or dare I call it a tsunami) of material I have is to simply write keep writing vignettes. Dozens, hundreds if need be.

Yes, there are overarching themes and patterns and big picture stuff, and I fret those will be missed if one reads a standalone post only. I thought of using tagging to tie related themes and patterns. And I always keep pitching for essays in print media where there is space and attention for long-form journalism.

Ed's optimism reminds me of an exchange I had with Bala Pitchandi (SEA-EAT blog and wiki) and Brian Oberkirch (Slidell Hurricane blog) today. We're preparing for next week's panel at the NewCommForum confererence (see speakers page for bios) in Palo Alto, CA.

We're on for the "A New Voice: Citizen Journalism and Disasters" panel on Friday, March 3, 11:30 a.m. (I'm hoping as a citizen journalist and marketing consultant to tie-in the citj lessons learned to the PR, communications, and business audience in attendance.)

I called them vignettes in my head and in my journal, Brian called them microstories in our chat. Brian said one of the points he'd like to cover is blogs as ideal vehicles for microstories.

I don't normally blog private exchanges, but this small excerpt from our chat I thought needed to be shared.

[11:50:51 AM] Bala Pitchandi says: but from your perspective, how do you think the rehab is going?
[11:56:17 AM] evelynrodr says: the rehab is a huge issue - no sound byte I'm afraid - physically Thailand is doing good - emotional and economic not so good (they calll it economic tsunami); Sri Lanka - lots of folks still in tents and the one-room wooden temp shelters still - but I am trying to also focus on soln's & what IS working in my writing

LATER BRIAN JOINS IN:

[12:30:58 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: I was talking with a group of tech non profit folks last week
[12:31:23 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: and I told them that I was at a loss when people ask me how things are in NOLA now
[12:31:27 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: I can't tell you one big story
[12:31:33 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: but I can tell you a zillion small ones
[12:31:53 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: That's what blogs can do well, I think.  Help you make a composite image, made up of lots of story fractals.
[12:31:55 PM] Bala Pitchandi says: just browse the NOLA metblogs for all of them --
[12:32:01 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: right
[12:32:05 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: lots of data points
[12:32:22 PM] evelynrodr says: wow - bala asked me earlier about rehab  - how's it going  over there - I said I didn't have a sound byte - i tooo have zillion stories & vignettes
[12:32:34 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: which, as a whole, are much truer than whatever 2:30 min. standup they'll do on the NBC news tonight
[12:32:49 PM] Brian Oberkirch says: perfect, see....your experience is the same

Perfect, hmm, yes perfect indeed.

tags social media journalism citizen journalism blogging disaster relief storytelling tsunami katrina

Fluff Pieces and the American "Entertainment" Press

While I was on Phi Phi island, a British tourist living in Hong Kong tells me he sees the American press as "entertainment." He doesn't read it for any insight. That's a pity...

That it's true. Thank god then there are NGOs including UN-Habitat that have noted the human rights issues related to the tsunami.

I hadn't written anything hard hitting yet because I'm looking for the appropriate venue (I'm not sure this blog is it) and I needed distance and perspective to remain fair and balanced. (BTW, I'm available for podcast interviews, etc. now that I'm home. Plus thinking of guest contributing to more appropriate and wider venues like Global Voices, WorldChanging - any other media suggestions?)

Within the first hour of my arrival in Bangkok in mid-December, the evening is winding down at Noreiga's Bar which is the meeting place I've arranged with Graeme, whom did work with UN-Habitat post-tsunami.

Stefan just happens to be there that evening when I arrrive from umpteen hours in the air from San Jose via Tokyo. He's just met Graeme himself - he came for the music and drinks. I briefly introduce myself as a writer and survivor.

"So you're here to write about the tsunami."

"Yeah."

"The land grab, heh?"

"What land grab?"

We don't get far in our conversation before Stefan grows weary: "Ughh, can we talk about something else." Fair enough - it's not exactly light bar conversation anyhow. And it's way past two in the morning.

Turns out Stefan worked non-stop for days after the tsunami getting German tourists safely back home through his job at a major tour operator. I sense that never ever talking about the tsunami again would suit him fine.

It didn't take me long to find out land grab Stefan was talking about.

When I left Phi Phi island on January 1st, folks whose homes, bungalow resorts, restaurants, and shops were completely destroyed (repairs were allowed) still hadn't obtained permission to rebuild as the government "considers" the new zoning plan.

After the entire evacuation of the island in the days after the tsunami, many islanders have been yet to return and still live in camps in Krabi (on the mainland).

The common refrain up and down the coast especially among business owners: "The government is colluding with wealthy investors about turning it all into a millionaire's paradise."

That's just the tip of iceberg.

Prime real estate is at stake. Much of the Thailand was the King's dominion. Over generations, families lived on the land and passed it on, but didn't own it. Private property titles are a newer phenomenon - and like anything else in Asia they can be bought for a price.

As a human rights worker told me, "Those families have been 'in the way' [of developers obtaining title] for a long time. Once the tsunami came, their problems conveniently were wiped away. The developers even cite karma as the reason they deserve the land."

When there's not a building left standing and the occupants have fled for a night or two in the hills, new titles for new owners suddenly appear overnight.

Slow recovery? Considering the government's friction, the physical infrastructure recovery in Phi Phi and Khao Lak had far exceeded my expectations.

I'm no investigative journalist, but I heard too much from varied sources to dismiss. Even basic media literacy teaches us to peer closer and know what's at stake and who's invested where and what their interests are.

Anyone that spends time on the ground like this six-month volunteer notes the same: "The goverment corruption is rampant with officials and developers conspiring to move people off their land."

There is a lot of money at stake on the postcard-perfect Andaman coast, you hardly have to read between the lines. You just have to talk to people outside of government authorities and chambers of commerce.

Besides NGO reports, thank god for international press like The Economist.

Lest you think that could only happen in Asia, The Economist in the January 21, 2006 issue reported that the government may apply imminent domain in New Orleans.

"[R]esidents in the harder hit areas, such as the Lower Ninth Ward (which was also hammered by Hurricane Betsy in 1965), would have until May 20th to show that they would return in sufficient numbers to keep their neighborhoods alive. If they fail to do so, homeowners could be "bought out" in some way and the areas in question could revert to swampland or be turned into parks...

[But] in general, plans to shrink the city's size could mean the end of a lot of poor black neighborhoods." - "The Big not-quite-so-Easy", The Economist, January 21-26, 2006

"Here people at least call a spade a spade," says one Asian-American volunteer in Khao Lak, "In the U.S., they'll surreptiously take a section of New Orleans and find a way to give it to Disney for a new park." He says that's exactly the rumor he hears in African-American neighborhoods back home: Disney is eyeing distressed property in New Orleans.

I've seen too many tsunami recovery and anniversary fluff pieces with loads of inaccuracies from American newspapers notably from those whom sent a reporter overseas for a few days. My suggestions to local newspapers as your profits keep sinking:

• Do a better job at covering your own locale and region and syndicate that to other papers. That's your core competency.
• With foreign correspondents you're more likely to get insight, rather than entertainment, pieces like this popular land rights story. If you can't afford to hire foreign correspondents like the two wonderful Reuters correspondents I met in Phi Phi, Ed and Bazuki, whom live in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur respectively, consider syndicating citizen journalists already on the ground and already residing in the field that already have first-hand insider knowledge of the culture, politics, religions, values, history and current events.
• Editorially guide citizen journalists that aren't familiar with foreign audience's interests on what is of interest to an outsider reader who isn't enmeshed in the same way. What they may dismiss because it's common knowledge locally might be newsworthy and compelling to a foreign audience.
• Oh, and don't expect all your citizen journalists to work solely for glory either. Consider incentives, payment, for instance, at least cover expenses. Think creatively if you are strapped for cash.

p.s. I'll be using new funds (it's tapped out now) coming in to the artisan journalism microfund to give Mon, a woman that I quickly trained to blog and lives in Khao Lak, Thailand a small stipend. I'd love to have her supply me with ground information for a while. For instance, Mon personally knows Ratree, the woman who is in the infamous land dispute in Laem Pom. (Ratree's story was originally published in Bangkok Post last April. And has been covered internationally. The BBC's early presence in Laem Pom is to be applauded; it helped kept the guns and mafia at bay and kindled the international interest which resulted in the Chicago Tribune's recent follow-up.) There's plenty more stories though. BTW, Mon is thinking about having her own public blog too (she likes to live simply in nature and in the background, so it's a bit of a sell).

p.p.s. I spent five weeks in Phi Phi, Phuket and Khao Lak through January 26, 2006.

tags social media journalism citizen journalism journalism blogging media literacy human rights tsunami katrina

Living Buddhism in Sri Lanka

"My son doesn't like that I work here because we are so close to the sea," the man pours me tea from a porcelain pot. The pounding surf just beyond the curled up dog and the makeshift fence. His son lurks behind him shyly the first time we meet.

"We were living with my sister in Hikkaduwa," recalling the day of the tsunami. They managed run "to the hills" before the deadly second wave after witnessing the wrath of the first wave.

"She's received over 4 lakhs [over $4000 USD] for her damages," he continues. "Since we weren't homeowners, we did not get anything from the government."

They sleep on a donated double bed in one room adjoining the guesthouse. "The Methodists gave us this mattress, two pillows, a radio."

Fourteen months later, the boy wears a donated Tommy Hilfinger polo shirt from a German tourist. He shows me the adult-sized backpack and two Mead spiral notebooks that an American gave him. He carefully opens the pages of the notebook. Not a word mars the pristine lined page.

This past Sunday was a poya day. The full moons are sacred holidays here. It was a poya day on December 26, 2004 too. Each full moon marks an important date in the history of Buddhism. In fact, a Sri Lankan tells me until the sixties that all weekends fell on half-moon, full-moons, quarter-moons until they realized it was too difficult to be out of step with the rest of the racing world.

I asked them if they can take me to the temple with them. The boy gives me two of his joss sticks and shows me how to insert them. The man has me touch the clay pot before he lights the oil lamps. On our way back, they insist as hosts on treating us all to ice cream and Sprite. They insist on paying for my share of the bus fare too. We easily could have spent at least a week's wages today.

Strangely on this trip I am as apt to meet widowers and motherless children who died of childbirth complications as I am tsunami orphans and widows. He was two years old when his mother died. She was forty.

Later that evening, the boy and I are flicking a marble across the rivulets and creases of the clingy blue plastic tablecloth at the convenience shop across the road. The father buys the eight-year-old three pieces of lemon-flavored candy from one of the store's jars.

The boy smiles and without a thought keeps one piece for himself. He presents the other two to me in the palm of his hand.

After the boy has "retired" (the English is a bit formal here), his father comes to thank me for my companionship. "He is like a little flower," says the father. "He doesn't need money as much as he needs love."

If beings knew as I know the results of sharing gifts, they would not enjoy their use without sharing them with others, nor would the taint of stinginess obsess the heart and stay there. Even if it were the last and final nib of food, they would not enjoy its use without sharing it, if there were anyone to receive it. - The Buddha, Itivuttaka (from "Switching Off", by Deepal Sooriyaarachchi - btw, this is the wonderful book I refer to in my last post)

And they say that Buddhism is ritualistic here.

Beyond Relief: We Must Not Rebuild Poverty

That's item number 7 in Sarvodaya's published position on tsunami rebuilding.

I've been visiting the headquarters of Sri Lanka's longest-standing NGO, Sarvodaya, which was founded on and rooted in grassroots principles since its inception in 1958. They kicked into high gear deploying their island-wide district offices and village-based volunteer force immediately after the tsunami.

I'm sipping my Ceylon tea with Bandala Senadeeva who heads the international unit that coordinated international groups and foreign invididuals that poured into their offices post-tsunami. We've dipped into the canteen next door for tea time which is "taken" from between 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. (You "take" lunch, here.) It's a tradition I can get happily accustomed to as I'm a big tea lover. Although the bed tea concept is a little harder to acquire a taste for as I'm not an early-riser.

Bandala explains that we will clean our own tea cups at the sink. "Each of us brooms our own office. We have titles such as executive director, but there really isn't a sense of heirarchy in that one person is better or less than another. Here, you can drop in and see anyone anytime."

It would seem natural for an organization inspired by the Buddha and Gandhi to spill over their peace efforts in a conflict-ridden country to disaster relief. Virtually every bit of coastline suffered losses in the tsunami, including the sparring Sinhalese and Tamils.

"After the tsunami, people just wanted to help. It didn't matter if they were Tamil [ancestral origins in south Indian and Hindu], Sinhalese [mostly Buddhist, but Christian in and around Colombo], or Muslim," Bandala says. So teams from interior and unaffected Tamil villages whom don't even speak the same language (English is a 'linking' language) were paired with their Sinhala-speaking tsunami-affected brethen, and Sinhalese unaffected village teams where paired with Tamil tsunami survivors.

"This is our Motherland. Then why should we be divided into groups? All human beings are the same and they have only one heritage. That is human heritage (manava urumaya) and not hela urumaya or damila urumaya." - Lyrics from award-winning Sri Lanka musician Dr. W.D. Amaradera in his song Sonduru Wu Minisa, from "Geneva Talks a Positive Development", Daily News, January 28, 2006

The "Heart to Heart Village to Village" strategy is quite extensive and encompassed the immediate emergency response all the way out to short-term and long-term plans completed with the participation of each affected village. (BTW, Sarvodaya's always been essentially about village development: both bottom-up and social empowerment.

Here are just two of the guidelines for the "Heart to Heart Village to Village" program:

• Teams will camp in the village and will provide for themselves without in any way burdening the community.
• [My fav:]The team will essentially play the role of a set of "friends" who have come to live and work in the community.

Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life even so let one cultivate a boundless love towards all beings. - sign at Vishva Niketan, the Sarvodaya peace center

tags: disaster relief, grassroots organizing, bottom up, community development, tsunami, katrina peace, buddhism