Summer 2011 Blog

by Micah Hendler:

Last Friday, I saw a performance at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.   The Concertgebouw is renowned as one of the world’s foremost concert halls, particularly for orchestras. It has the names of all the famous composers of the Western tradition emblazoned on the balcony, as well as many I’d never heard of, whom I assume to be Dutch composers.  The audience, whose skin and hair was mostly of whiter shades, was seated in red velvet chairs after having sipped wine in the foyer, ready for a performance of Mozart piano sonatas.  But the performer of the evening was Hugh Masakela — a black South African jazz trumpeter known for his social activism and his 1968 hit, “Grazin’ in the Grass” (arranged by the Duke’s Men my freshman year, actually).  He was backed by a band of South Africans who played keyboard, bass, guitar, and drum set, as well as a Senegalese multi-percussionist who played, among other instruments, the most amazing talking drum I’ve ever heard.  Masakela led the show with his trumpet, vocals both spoken and sung about his life and experience growing up in South Africa and performing all over the world, and a guiro and cowbell which he played during other members’ solos. Listen below to a version of “Grazin’ in the Grass”:

01 Grazin’ in the Grass

But no African musical performance would be complete without its twin sister, dance.  Even in his seventies, Hugh Masakela could get low and expected us to do the same.  The audience, conditioned by the hall and the classical etiquette of simply appreciating a musical monument in reverent silence, was a bit hesitant, though he eventually got us on our feet.  It was interesting to watch Hugh Masakela’s set, with its African-derived modes of discourse, fit into the very Western space we were in.  His set would have fit better either in a more intimate jazz club, where there could be more give-and-take between the performers and the audience, or in a large outdoor concert venue for a huge crowd of people who were on their feet and ready to dance and shout unconstrained by the watching eyes of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.  Yet here he was at the Concertgebouw, and after his first number he paid homage to the great composers whose names graced the balcony. (He attended the Manhattan School of Music for a few years for advanced classical study in trumpet, after all.

The Concergebouw is one of the world's foremost concert halls. (Topping/Creative Commons)

Masakela gave a great performance, playing everything from standards to original numbers to South African freedom songs, and everyone loved it.  But halfway through the concert, I realized one simple fact: it was Dutch colonists in South Africa who were responsible for apartheid, and here was Hugh Masakela, an artist known for his activism against the regime, performing for a Dutch audience.  I’ll let that sink in for a moment.  Now I’m sure that this isn’t the first time a black South African has performed in Amsterdam; for all I know, Hugh Masakela has performed at the Concertgebouw before.  But the symbolism was still powerful.  And beyond that, it was clear that Masakela came as an ambassador of goodwill, holding strikingly little against the Dutch as a people, or the specific members of the audience (at least as he showed in the concert).  He demonstrated this astoundingly in the jokes he would tell in between songs.  He told us that he tried to propose to a Dutch girl here in Amsterdam in Afrikaans and she said he sounded like a small child (Afrikaans is a vastly simplified form of Dutch).  He also regaled us with the story of his birth in a small town outside of Amsterdam, with blond hair and white skin. One day, he said, he fell into a canal and was washed all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope, where the sea lions and the oil and mud in the water turned his hair and skin black, so that when an African couple was walking down the street, they saw him in the rushes and adopted him as their own.  “But really,” he added, “my name is [insert exorbitantly long Dutch name].  The third.”  Obviously jokes like this are part of his shtick, which he has honed to a science over decades of performing internationally. Still, it struck me that he was able to separate what I’m sure must have been many years of resentment against the Dutch from his performance that night, and that he could connect with the audience through his humor and his music.

Perhaps Masakela’s main goal in the concert was not only to entertain, but truly to build bridges and educate.  He ended the concert with the song “Kauleza,” a song I had actually learned from a recording made by his late ex-wife, Miriam Makeba.  “Kauleza” is a song that children would sing in the townships to warn their mothers that the police were coming to raid their homes.  Masakela told us the story of the song in an intimate way and had us sing with him the refrain of “Kauleza.”  In doing so, he succeeded in transforming conflict by including us (a mostly Dutch audience) in the struggle of black South Africans for justice and equality.  It was an impressive and powerful evening and I doubt anyone in the audience left unchanged.

by Micah Hendler:

The Whiffenpoofs reunited in Athens last week after a much-needed break.  After a day of sight-seeing, I decided to explore the city by myself. I set off toward the Acropolis and ran across a man who was selling buzukis in his crafts shop (a buzuki is a Greek traditional long-necked lute of sorts). Naturally, I stopped to ask him about the buzukis, which he had made in his own workshop, and after about ten minutes of conversation, he told me, “You know, there is a museum for traditional Greek music right down the street – you should take a look at it.” I was thankful for his advice and directions (it was hidden quite well around several corners – there’s no way I would have run across it in the course of my own wanderings) to the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments: The Fivos Anoyanakis Collection and Centre of Ethnomusicology.

The city of Athens sprawls out beneath a heat haze. (Bruner/TYG)

The Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments was small but very well laid-out and packed with useful information. Its organization alone belied its deep academic grounding in the discipline of ethnomusicology, as the rooms were assigned on the basis of German musicologist E.M. Hornbostel’s foundational classification of musical instruments into idiophones (instruments whose bodies you hit to produce sound – bells, spoons, jangle-coated headdresses, etc.), membranophones (instruments with a membrane that vibrates to produce sound (drums, mainly), aerophones (instruments that create sound through the movement of air – clarinets, flutes, shawms, etc.), and chordophones (instruments that have vibrating strings that create sound (lyres, violins, buzukis, etc.). Each room had cases filled with old instruments used in Greek traditional music, and alongside each case was a field recording featuring that case’s instrument in the context of a song. In addition, each case had a well-translated explanation of how each instrument worked, and where it originated from. This last part was the most interesting to me, as the instruments in the traditional Greek zikiya ensemble — the shawm and the daouli drum — go back as far as ancient Greece, but some instruments like the clarinet, which are now seen as integral to a traditional Greek sound in the kombania ensemble, actually originated elsewhere and were imported to Greece as late as the mid-19^th century. Greek music shares much with the melodic Arab and Turkish musical traditions from the Eastern Mediterranean, yet also much with the harmonic traditions of Balkan and other European folk musics (some Greek folk music even sounds Irish!), and it was fascinating to see which instruments originated where and whether I, with relatively untrained ears, could detect any of the original region in the resulting sound of each sample recording. The track I selected, from a collection of folk music from all over Greece, is a particularly interesting example, I think, of a combination of Eastern melodicism and Western harmonic structure. Listen here:

09 Track 09

Almost as interesting as the museum itself was the story of its founder, Fivos Anoyanakis. According to the educator who was working at the museum during my visit, Anoyanakis was a man who felt that Greek folk music was an important tradition that needed to be preserved against the forces of modernism and popular culture that were overtaking the world in the first half of the 20th century. So for 50 years between 1940-1990, he and several of his companions traveled all over the country collecting traditional instruments and songs from the Greek countryside and cities. The Museum was his lifelong dream, and even though he was exiled from Greece at one point for being an accused communist (“people’s music” can be a dangerous tool…), Anoyanakis bequeathed much of his collection to the Greek Ministry of Culture to create the museum before he died. His one stipulation was that the museum be free of charge, as the music inside was Greek national patrimony which belonged to everyone. So I got to experience the whole thing for free!

According to the educators who worked in the museum shop, the Museum of Greek Folk Musical Instruments is the only museum of its kind (of a national folk music tradition and its instruments) in Europe, and is a hub for European ethnomusicological conferences, a concert venue for traditional performances (with over 50 well-attended performances a year), and a school for traditional Greek music with hundreds of students and an ever-increasing enrollment. I would call Fivos Anoyanakis’ mission to preserve Greek folk music a resounding success.

by Eric Gresham:

For my last blog post this summer, I’ve posted an article I wrote for my newspaper back home in Alexandria, Virginia summarizing my journey to and through Chile.  If you’ve been keeping up with my posts, you might find some stories familiar, but I hope my attempt to reason why I’ve ended up here entertains.

Growing up, non-fiction bored me. I would rather inhabit the worlds passed down to me by my older brother, created by writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.  I wanted to possess the strength of Tarzan, the spirit of John Carter of Mars, and the mien of Conan the Barbarian.

At St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia, such motivation led me to the football and lacrosse fields, and eventually to the football and lacrosse teams of Yale University.  I viewed my time in school as mental and physical preparation for the future, whatever mine would be.

Following my junior year at Yale, for the first time I confronted that future, choosing an internship to prepare me for a career.  Not having any true passion, I settled on investment banking.  Since I didn’t know my purpose, for now I would make as much money as possible.

However, such reasoning could not even last me the two months of my internship.  I was incapable of faking the desire to succeed in a world I felt was alien.  I finished the summer sure of one thing: I would not return to New York.  It was then I began to search the pages of non-fiction for a life plan my fantastical heroes could not provide.

I came across a book written by Sam Sheridan, titled A Fighter’s Heart.  Sheridan quenched his need for adventure by embarking on a worldwide journey learning how to fight, funding his travels through writing.  Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, provided me with another example of the avenues of escape from corporate life.

Hungry for adventures of my own, in January of my senior year I accepted a journalism internship at the Patagon Journal, an upcoming magazine about the nature, culture, travel, and sports of Patagonia, based in Puerto Varas, Chile.  Since my arrival in late June, I have experienced what I once sought in the pages of books.

In preparation for an article on the appeal of Puerto Varas in winter, I snowboarded a volcano and trekked through Patagonian draws in which a machete would have been more appropriate than a hiking stick.

The slopes of the Volcán Osorno, an hour north of Puerto Varas, Chile. (Gresham/TYG)

The article also led me to interview a head manager for Andina del Sud, a Patagonian travel firm, which in turn bought me a ticket on the “Cruce Andino.”  The trip took me across southern Patagonia’s lake regions and the Andes Mountains to Bariloche, Argentina.

The frozen forests of the Andes. (Gresham/TYG)

Unfortunately, on account of a previous lack of snow and the recent eruption of Chile’s Volcán Puyehue, the gondolas and ski lifts of one of South America’s premier resorts were closed upon my arrival.  But Bariloche had just received three feet of fresh powder, and I was determined to take advantage.  After solo hiking up a mountain for two hours, I found a group of locals doing the same, and four hours later we were skiing down the Andes, enjoying the day as that mountain’s creator must have intended.

Taking a well-deserved break on our Andean hike. (Gresham/TYG)

While visiting the country’s capital of Santiago I have had to chase down pickpockets and struggle through salsa lessons with a patient Colombian friend in a packed late-night bar.  In the midst of these experiences, I have met many whose lives of adventure are on a scale far above my own.

Natalia Serna, an American-Colombian currently recording an album in Santiago, has boxcar hopped her way with a group of Mexican teenagers up through Central America to the US border.  I was fortunate to see her perform while in Santiago, hearing the translation of her many experiences to verse and guitar.

A friend of Natalia’s, Christian, is a political refugee from the Congo, who arrived in Chile to escape the violence that has cost him a family.  In Puerto Varas, my editor introduced me to a renegade American, Derek Way, who has been selling home-brewed beer in Chile for the past four years, recently opening a brewery.

However, my time in Patagonia is nearing its end; I will leave the friends I’ve made and the experiences I’ve had in August for Buenos Aires, Argentina.  I will work at minimum a year for an Argentinian consulting firm to earn a salary, hopefully continuing to write on the side.  I am still searching for my life’s purpose, and my restlessness will not end until I find it.  The preparation is over; the journey has just begun.

Eric Gresham is a 2007 graduate from St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Alexandria, VA and graduated last year from Yale University. Contact Eric at: egresh2@gmail.com.

by Sanjena Sathian:

When Heinrich Harrer wrote his now famous travel memoir Seven Days in Tibet, he boasted often of being one of only a handful of Europeans to have penetrated the country so deeply. Half a century later, Harrier is certainly not the only European to make it into Tibet, but he may still be one of only a few foreigners to have gotten a glimpse of the real Tibet.

I spent seven days last week accompanied by a guide on an overland trek to Everest base camp from Tibet’s capital, Lhasa. I found myself a tourist again – a shock after being one of five foreigners in eastern Nepal a few short weeks ago. Italian trekkers, Spanish mountaineers, British expats living in Hong Kong; there were no shortage of foreigners to traipse through the country. Tibet had seemed closed-off and inaccessible to me in the preceding months, as I went through all the hurdles set up by the Chinese government to make getting a permit and a visa incredibly difficult. And yet there I was, amidst a cohort of travelers, and I couldn’t imagine the country as I had before, as the quiet, isolated kingdom, pining for its exiled leader. It seemed, instead, positively pristine. As I drove in from the airport along perfectly paved roads and beautiful bridges (both of which I’d also marveled at in Darjeeling), I thought I could be in Japan or Singapore. My initial sentiments were corroborated by my fellow travel companions, most of whom had been making their way around China before Tibet: they described Lhasa as a regular little Chinese city, though maybe a bit cleaner.

Lhasa bears the telltale signs of its Chinese occupiers, including monuments and flags celebrating a 60 year anniversary of the 'peaceful liberation'. (Sathian/TYG)

But Tibet, today so easily accessed with a little money for a permit and a guide (travelers must be with a guide at all times; solo tourists or trekkers are regarded with suspicion by the Chinese government and kept out), still remains paradoxically out of reach. I can’t, of course, rightly compare two months in Nepal to a week in Tibet – but I found myself seeing Tibet only through a Nepal-colored film, through my experiences from the past two months. Despite the trouble of getting anywhere in Nepal, if you’re willing to suffer a bumpy jeep ride or a vomit-stenched bus, you can find your way to a Nepal out of Kathmandu, away from the gaze of foreigners. As you gaze onto a quiet corner of the country, absorbing, it slowly seems to become yours, the way Harrer’s careful gaze made Tibet his own – and made his voice an important one to carry Tibet into the international arena (Brad Pitt helped with that a little, by playing Harrer in the film version of the memoir). And your gaze is returned with gentle curiosity and warm hospitality. Reading Harrer’s memoir as I followed the conveyor belt of tourists through Tibet, I felt his stories ring with familiarity: tales of finding shelter in villages, of kind, wrinkled faces of old women welcoming him into their homes with a cup of steaming tea. But they were singing to me of Nepal, of what seems now, absurdly and arrogantly, my corner of Nepal. His Tibet seemed so different from what I encountered: hotels serving yak pizza, their attempt at making westerners comfortable in their land, rather than the village homes who welcomed Harrer on their own terms; wrinkled, sun washed villagers grabbing my elbow to demand I take a photo of them, and then impishly putting their hand out for 5 yuan afterward – the same people who, fifty years ago, might have been Harrer’s hosts and friends.

Harrer lived illegally in Tibet for seven years (even in the 1940s and ‘50s, gaining a resident permit or even a short travel permit to Tibet was difficult; it’s not a new feature of the Chinese presence). But today seems an exaggerated parody of that. And Harrer knows it. He writes in his epilogue that “perhaps only 2% of the Lhasa I knew still stands. It has become a Chinese city.” And it has: Mandarin script looms large on billboards and shop signs, dwarfing the tiny Tibetan script; all along the way to Shigatse and to Everest Base Camp, I stopped at army post after army post, showing my passport to Chinese army officials, and the distinctive red of the Chinese flag waves high amidst colorful Buddhist prayer flags.

The now empty Potala Palace was once a grand home to the Dalai Lama. (Sathian/TYG)

Harrer was a foreigner welcomed into a mysterious, closed kingdom. I was a tourist in a Chinese land. And I had no more access to the truth of the land around me than most foreigners of Harrer’s day. I saw an empty Potala Palace; Harrer spent hours in conversation with a 14-year old Dalai Lama in those rooms. I saw the Tashilumpo monastery, the home of Pachen Lama, and joined throngs of Chinese tourists, whose guide would tell them plenty about this monk, but not the one whose face is banned throughout the country – the current, 14th Dalai Lama. I made my way through a haunted landscape.

All through the Tibetan countryside, where villages once were, there are now impeccably paved roads, built by the Chinese to carry visitors through the once-mysterious land and to their choice destination: a holy lake, Mt. Everest, Mt. Kailash, or anywhere else money can take you. (Sathian/TYG)

I pondered questions of access plenty in Nepal, but those musings took on a new form in the case of Tibet. It is a strange paradox of a land – which makes it all the more important to se it sooner rather than later, when 0% of Harrer’s Lhasa may remain. Despite my frustrations about finding the “real” Tibet, I couldn’t help but enjoy the comfort that China had brought to the country. Infrastructure, roads, some amount of wealth. The talk of the town is the bullet train China is spending millions of yuan on building through the country in the next 4 years. China has tamed the greatest mountains in the world, building a road to Everest Base Camp through the towering Himalayas, while Nepal struggles to build a road through even its gentlest rolling green hills.

This is a story we all know well from the outside; the 14th Dalai Lama has made Tibet a global issue on the world stage, and today the world’s understanding of the country is the highest it’s ever been. It may be closed-off and inaccessible from the inside, but somehow it is found on many tongues in many corners of the world, and globally, it is anything but unknown. Nepal and Tibet strike me as mirrors of one another’s accessibility woes. What wouldn’t Nepal give for its national plight to be as well known and bumper-stickered as Tibet’s, for the simple infrastructure and roads that Tibet enjoys. And yet, I cannot do today in Tibet what Harrer did, or what I have tried to do in small scale in Nepal – no foreigner has that ability any longer, to come to know this land so intimately that it seems their own. I’m not sure which is better. But both Nepal and Tibet are in trouble – and I can only hope that both places can have enough voices fighting for them, and telling the truest story possible to the rest of the world.

by Aliyya Swaby:

I had wanted to WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) since I had decided early sophomore year that I was not going to go for a traditional internship or job this summer. With its network of free or cheap hosting options on different farms, WWOOFing seemed like the best way to travel for an urbanite looking for something a little different.

I had a week of unscheduled time during my travels through Ecuador, so I signed up on WWOOF Ecuador’s site and contacted as many host farms as possible. Options ranged from rainforest oases in the east to coastal eco-lodges and reserves, each including gorgeous descriptions that made my heart race in excitement.

The view down the road with lush mountain range in the background. (Swaby/TYG)

But the only farm that gave me a definite response was Finca Vrindavan, a small Vedic orchid farm just outside Baños, a few hours southeast of Quito. “You are very welcome to us whenever you are around,” wrote someone named Madhu mangala das “(or Patrick)” in a cheery e-mail. The farm’s website showed photos of smiling people in the midst of a variety of actions: sitting in hammocks, doing pottery, holding paintbrushes, standing amongst plants, climbing wooden structures, even doing yoga.

I wanted to be one of those smiling people—I was sold. So I hopped on a bus on July 30^th and arrived at the farm the next day, catching a camioneta or truck from the nearest town. The premises looked even more beautiful than on the website, with lush mountains visible in the background and a river audible from anywhere on the property. In the building up the road, there were people practicing yoga and two puppies chased each other and yipped happily. Picture perfect.

“Hare Krishna,” a young man greeted me happily at the entrance as I walked up with my giant hiking pack.

“Ummm…hola,” I replied in awe.

“Chocolate?” he asked, still smiling. I nodded speechlessly and he handed me a cup filled with brown liquid. The hot chocolate tasted different, almost earthy, and I could already feel my spirituality increasing.

This bright statue of Krishna greeted visitors near the entrance. (Swaby/TYG)

There was a large tour group from Quito staying for the day and I mingled with them, even going on a relaxing two-hour hike on a trail on the property.

“Sweet!” I thought. “Yoga breaks, hikes along a babbling river, puppies? What more could a gal need?” But then everything went downhill.

The tour group left for Quito on Sunday and I was left with four volunteers — a couple and two men, a younger one named Vida and an older one named Krishna. The first sign of trouble was the fact that the older man kept leering at me. I would take a bite of food or finish petting the puppies and look up to see his eyes fixated on my chest, his tiny mouth grinning behind unruly gray stubble. But it was OK—the others were there, nothing would happen and I was determined to learn how to plant orchids.

My only friends: the puppies and cats belonging to the farm. (Swaby/TYG)

But then the couple announced on Monday that they, too, were heading to Quito. Something to do with getting visas sorted out. I was a bit more worried at this point and decided to shorten my trip—to leave on Wednesday instead of Friday as I’d planned. Before leaving, the man in the couple, named Yajña, gave me and Vida an enormous list of tasks, including cutting down some banana trees in the back of the property and weeding the bed of aloe vera.

Soon after they left it started to rain and Vida gave up the idea of working for the day. Instead he told me stories about past volunteers who had come to the farm and hated it, told me that no one in charge really cared about taking care of the farm, and told me that he wouldn’t blame me for leaving early either. And just as I was starting to feel comfortable with this querulous companion, he, too, made a pass at me. (“You’re young and you’re nice. You should have expected us to be attracted to you,” he explained simply when I protested.) I knew my time at the farm was over.

This hut was used for temazcal, a type of massage with hot rocks. I thought it would be best if I didn't ask for one. (Swaby/TYG)

That night, I asked if I could change rooms, to sleep in a different building from the two men. And on Tuesday morning, I packed quickly and announced that I was leaving for Quito within the hour.

Throughout my travels this summer, I’ve prided myself on rarely taking the easy way out. I’ve taken 10-hour bus rides in the dead of night, hiked through the rainforest till my feet burned, stayed in questionable residences when necessary. But I realized that more important than pushing through difficult situations is knowing when to leave a potentially dangerous or even just uncomfortable one. It’s always important to weigh one’s options: in this case, I decided that my desire to not be violated completely overpowered my desire to plant flowers. For me, the choice was easy.

The sign at the main desk translated says, "Simple life, elevated thoughts." (Swaby/TYG)

by Micah Hendler:

So I’ve been more Jewish than usual in the last few weeks.  When I was in Fez on my birthday, I decided to find the Ibn Danan Synagogue, a 17th-century synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the city (outside the walled Medina).  When I arrived, I was shown around by a young Muslim woman about my age who explained the history of the building to me in Moroccan Arabic, which I understood well enough to ascertain the functions of various architectural elements—but not well enough to understand why, as a Muslim woman, she was giving tours of the synagogue.  Fez once had one of the largest Jewish communities in the diaspora, as it was a logical relocation for Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492, but now there are only a few hundred Jews living in Fez; most of them emigrated to Israel in the 1950s after the anti-Semitic riots in Morocco that followed the creation of the Jewish state.  However, the King of Morocco still retains Jewish advisors as has been the tradition for hundreds of years, and has pled, with little success, for Moroccan Jewish emigrés to return.

The ark of the Torah in the Ibn Danan Synagogue in Fez, Morocco. (Hendler/TYG)

At the synagogue, I ran across an Argentinean couple who were having trouble understanding the young woman’s English information. I offered, boldly (perhaps too boldly) to translate for them from the Arabic (which I had only half understood in the first place) to Spanish.  But between hearing it the second time around to making some interpretations of my own based on my understanding of Jewish practice which I assumed to hold for the Jews of Fez, I was able to give them a pretty decent understanding of the place.  What was perhaps most interesting about them, though, was that they were not Jews!  However, they had many Jewish friends, they told me (in Spanish).  They described at length their impressions of the Jewish community of Buenos Aires: hardworking, well-educated, and integrated into the Argentinean community.  They told me how many synagogues there were in the city, and how there were entire streets where all the shops were owned by Jews.  The chief rabbi of Buenos Aires has a great public presence as well, according to the couple, appearing alongside his Christian counterparts to advocate interfaith cooperation and tolerance.  This was in marked contrast to the burgeoning Muslim community in the city, they explained to me, which was not interested in assimilation or cooperation and had violent tendencies—so they said.

Just a few days later, I found myself at the Grand Synagogue in Rome. The synagogue is located in the old Jewish ghetto in Rome, the second-oldest ghetto in Europe (second only to Venice).  As I learned during our tour of the synagogue, the Jewish community in Rome goes back over 2,000 years: the emperor Titus was personally responsible for one of the largest influxes of immigration when he brought 40,000 Jews to Rome as slaves during the destruction of the second temple in the year 72.  The Jews have lived there since, and have developed their own traditions and customs in accordance with Italian Orthodoxy, marking a third independent stream of halakhah (rabbinic tradition) which is neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi.  Who knew?  Roman Jewish cuisine also has a long and storied tradition, notably involving artichokes.  In 1492, as the Jews expelled from Spain travelled to Fez, they also came to Rome and established a smaller Sephardic community there; their synagogue was laid out similarly to the synagogue in Fez.  The Grand Synagogue in Rome, though, was built in 1904 (before the unification of Italy in the late 19^th century, Jews weren’t allowed to build large buildings in the ghetto), and it is indeed grand.  Its architecture was heavily influenced by the Catholic church (St. Peter’s is about 20 minutes away), and it feels almost like a cathedral.  Almost 2,000 years later, Pope John Paul II was the first Pope to ever officially visit the Grand Synagogue in Rome, and Pope Benedict has been several times to pay his respects to this vibrant and ancient community.

Last Wednesday, I found myself back in Bethesda, Maryland for the funeral of my grandmother, Ruth, who passed away while we were in Florence.  She and my grandfather, Eli, have always valued Jewish community as one of the most important elements of a meaningful life, and I have been blessed to have grown up in an amazing one myself.  Thus, it was particularly important for me to fly home, and I was welcomed by a Jewish family at its strongest, as three generations of friends and relatives came together to show their support.  I particularly appreciated the ritual of sitting shiva, or opening one’s home for seven days after the funeral for guests to visit and offer their condolences and love.  In the mitzvah of saying kaddish for the dead, an affirmation of one’s belief in God specifically in times of trial, it is essential to have a community to support such a difficult assertion as God’s fairness and wisdom.  I can’t imagine what that process could have been like without such a strong network of support.

There are many things to think about and discuss in comparing my experience with these four Jewish communities.  During my stay in Bethesda, my uncle and I lamented the loss of diversity in Jewish expression as so many diasporic communities have picked up and moved to Israel, as well as the beauty, and difficulties, incumbent in such a family reunion.  We also discussed the tension faced by diasporic Jews in the modern age, blessed by the boon of interfaith tolerance but threatened by the spectre of anti-Semitic violence as we have been in every age (there was a shooting at the Grand Synagogue in Rome in 1982).  But perhaps one of the most interesting pieces of the puzzle is the system of concentric circles within the Jewish family.  Judaism has developed differently and manifested itself in unique ways all over the world, and the traditions that are specific to each place are what make a Jewish community truly feel like home to those who have grown up in it, particularly food and music.  For Roman Jews, carciofi alla giudia and other recipes are probably as essential as  harmonizing with my mother throughout a service is for me.  Yet I still was drawn to the synagogues in Fez and Rome (and to the synagogue in Buenos Aires back in March, though they denied me entrance two days in a row for security reasons) because, though distant, we are family too.

by Aliyya Swaby:

“Aren’t you, well, afraid of going to visit the Waorani?” asked James, one of about 15 scientists and visitors at the Estación Científica Yasuni. The station is in Yasuni National Park, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and I have been staying here for about a week to do firsthand research for my journalism project.

“Afraid?” I responded. Truthfully, I hadn’t thought it through well enough to be scared. I had come to the station primarily with the purpose of speaking with scientists — contact with the indigenous tribes in the area was a recent development.

“Talking with the Waorani is … difficult,” my roommate Andrea said simply, when I later asked her what exactly I would be up against. She told me stories of the Waorani attacking outsiders with little provocation, especially after they had been drinking. “But you should be fine with a guide in these communities nearby,” she added cheerily. Still, I was at least a little nervous about my upcoming excursions.

Agua practices using the blowgun, shooting one arrow many feet into the air. (Swaby/TYG)

I had done some research about the Waorani tribe before coming: I read accounts of how the building of a major road through their territory changed their way of life, scientific articles about the future of sustainable hunting with the introduction of firearms into their society, and most of Joe Kane’s firsthand non-fiction account “Savages” (a bible for many Americans traveling to Yasuni for the first time).  I got a picture of the Waorani as a people figuring out how to deal with forced cultural modifications. Generally, it didn’t seem like they were doing so well.

On Thursday I woke up at 6 a.m. to go hunting with two Waos from a community named Guiyero about a half hour drive from the station down the Pompeya Sur-Iro road. Bolivar and Agua met me at the side of the road and we took a bus a few kilometers down before plunging into the forest. The two were dressed casually in long sleeved shirts and long pants which contrasted with the weapon of choice for the morning: a 10-foot-tall blowgun made of natural tree fibers and paired with poison-tipped arrows.

Bolivar stands holding the tall blowgun used to hunt. (Swaby/TYG)

As we hiked through the forest, Agua carried the long, narrow weapon with one end resting against his shoulder and Bolivar followed behind us clearing the dense vegetation with a red-handled machete. Also a last minute addition to our trio: a stray hunting dog named Venado (deer, in Spanish). I tripped over roots, slipped down muddy slopes, and tried to avoid getting stung by the notorious conga ants, while the three of them sauntered through the forest.

Bolivar is an experienced eco-tourism guide and only lives in the village part-time, also spending some time with his family on the coast. Like many Waorani below a certain age, he speaks fluent Spanish (along with 5 other languages, most of them tribal) and pointed out animal footprints and giant lianas to me throughout the trek. When I wasn’t too out of breath, I asked him questions about his life in Yasuni and he, too, was curious about life in the United States.

Our hunt was a success — Agua used the blowgun to net a small bird and the dog Venado killed a small pig. (Bolivar told me later that he and his family ate the pig for dinner along with yucca and plantain.)

The dog killed a small wild pig ("puerco"), which was also bagged and brought home. (Swaby/TYG)

Bolivar seems like an example of a Wao who appears to have adapted perfectly to the changing times in a way that benefits both him and the environment. When he hunts in Yasuni, he makes a conscious decision never to use guns, partly because they’re too loud (he said while cringing and clutching his ears). Though his family used to commercially hunt and sell the extra meat at the market in Pompeya, they stopped a few months ago and now only subsistence hunt. He works as a guide in frequent contact with the outside world, teaching people about the ecology of the forest.

Unfortunately he is in the minority of Waorani right now — most haven’t yet figured out how to balance cultural tradition and success in a Westernizing society. It will take a lot of work, but the local governmental bodies and related organizations working in Yasuni should be — and in many cases, are — attempting to reach Bolivar’s golden standard by offering education and sustainable alternatives to commercial hunting.

Here are more images from the hunt:

by Conrad Lee:

After teaching a few weeks of classes, I’ve gotten to know my students and their level of English a little better. I teach the most advanced group of 8^thgraders at SEP, which means that I have the privilege of interacting with some of the brightest young students in Jordan. Although most of them come from lower and middle class backgrounds, they are just as socially-adjusted and fun-loving as any other students their age. They love poetry, games, and—as I discovered discussing their Arab identity.

My class. The SEP advanced 8th graders. (Lee/TYG)

I had my students read  and memorize the poem “Identity Card” by Mahmoud Darwish. After I told them what it was about, they were all eager to share what they thought of Palestine, even though most of what they knew came from hearing their parents talk at home. One girl had recited the poem in its original Arabic for a poetry competition before. Later, when we wrote thank you notes, one boy brought up his for me to read; I was pleasantly surprised to find that it began, “Dear Mum, Thanks for raising me as a Muslim Arabian child.” It is encouraging to see that even with the steady influence of American culture and modernization, young Jordanians still take great pride in their own identity.

On other days, we learned the lyrics to “Hey Jude” by the Beatles, worked through a section from a practice SAT test, and played our own version of the caption contest from the New Yorker. Most of the time, we write sentences and paragraphs—lots of them—and take them apart for spelling and grammar. Yesterday, we started reading one of Tolstoy’s short stories. My work basically consists of culling selected stories, poems, and writings that I think are challenging but manageable enough to share with the class. Sometimes the kids get bored, especially if the material gets too dense, but for the most part they manage to keep up.

Playing catch with a rugby ball. (Lee/TYG)

One of the things I’ve noticed is that there are some writing mistakes that seem particular to students whose native language is Arabic. For example, they don’t know when to use periods. Instead of writing complete sentences, they will simply put a comma at the end of each clause, and sentences will run on and on, in a stream of clauses punctuated by a slew of commas and the occasional “and” or “so.” Also, they hardly ever use capital letters correctly. Capital letters will appear in odd places, like in the middle of a word, or completely randomly, but almost never at the beginning of a sentence. Knowing some Arabic has helped me understand why these errors are so common. There are no capital letters in Arabic, so students tend to disregard the distinction between capitalized and uncapitalized letters as unimportant. Punctuation is also quite a loose concept and used rather freely; it didn’t even exist until the language was modernized. All in all, it’s quite fascinating to see how elements of grammar in a native language directly translate into habitual errors in a foreign language.

by Eric Gresham:

A view of the Andes from the slopes of Bariloche, Argentina. (Gresham/TYG)

Normally by July, Bariloche, Argentina is a month into ski season.  However, this winter has been marred by the potent combination of Chile’s Volcán Petrohue’s eruption, whose ashes have disrupted flights all over Argentina, and a rare lack of snow.  Consequently, many have shied away from Bariloche this season, paralyzing the local economy.

But I would not.  After an interview with the regional manager of Andina del Sud, a Patagionian travel firm, I was offered a space on the “Cruce Andino.”  The trip transports tourists from Puerto Varas, Chile, to Bariloche, Argentina.  Via boats and buses, travelers cross several lakes and wind their way through the Andes Mountains.

The cruise across the Lago Frias, one leg of the "Cruce Andino." (Gresham/TYG)

So on Thursday night I arrived in Bariloche, snowboard in hand.  Whether it was luck or my stubborn belief that Bariloche in July would equal snow, I was rewarded: my taxi could hardly enter the parking lot of my hotel due to the meter of powder blocking our path.  After such a welcome, I was shocked when the receptionist told me, smiling, “Oh, no — the only people who have skied so far have walked. The lifts are opening tomorrow!”

Only here for two days, I refused to waste one inside.  After asking around town, I found a trail leading up the mountain, and commenced a two-hour hike up to a lift’s base camp.  Unsure of where to go from there, I prepared to make my one descent of the day, first seeking shelter under a nearby wooden lodge to warm up. But as I walked under the porch, I realized I was not alone.

A scent of smoke wafted my way, and I heard the laughing and jabbering of eight skiers and snowboarders huddled together passing around a cigarette.  They paused a moment at my appearance, and I asked in broken Spanish if they were going higher up the mountain.  One chuckled. “Much, much higher,” he replied.  Seeing that they were leaving, and following a second of self-deliberation, I asked if I could join.

Meanwhile, their German shepherd “Daisy,” came over and sniffed me out; she approved.  Ten minutes later, we were making our ascent up a trail I never would have found by myself.

Three hours into the hike, my legs were burning.  I guess squats and lunges hadn’t prepared me for trekking through waist deep powder.  The surging fear of cramping combined with the fact I had no idea where we were going started to wear on my original optimism for the adventure.  But the camaraderie and awesome views were more than enough to push me through.

We had an entire Andean Mountain Range all to ourselves. (Gresham/TYG)

Another hour later, we arrived at our destination.  Taking off soaked gloves and jackets, we shared what food and water we had left.

An abandoned lift lodge provided shelter for a snack and a chance to relax before our descent. (Gresham/TYG)

The toil of the hike was well worth the reward.  Even with lifts open the ensuing day and the entire resort to explore, no run would compare to that day’s half-hour ride through untouched powder.  I will remember Bariloche for its otherworldly views and the ability to ski eight hours straight without repeating the same trail. But most of all, I will remember it for a brutal six-hour hike with eight strangers and their dog, enjoying the day as that mountain’s creator must have intended.

If you are interested in reading the article I wrote for the Patagon Journal about my time in Bariloche, you can find it here: http://www.patagonjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2070%3Abariloche-argentina-todavia-paraiso-invernal&catid=100%3Aexcursiones&Itemid=249&lang=en

by Micah Hendler

(Micah Hendler ’11 was in Calhoun College and majored in music and international studies.  He is spending the summer globe-trotting with the Whiffenpoofs and documenting their musical-diplomatic exploits for the Globalist. This post describes their time in Jerusalem.)

Sunday, July 10

After a five-hour tour of the Old City of Jerusalem, we head to the Jerusalem YMCA for the Whiffenpoofs Concert for Peace, our one public concert in Israel. In the past, the Whiffenpoofs had collaborated with the Rotary Club in Jerusalem to set up the concert (I myself attended the 2010 Whiffenpoofs’ performance at the YMCA in Jerusalem last summer, a benefit for Rotary, and it was lovely), but I really wanted our concert to benefit peace work, specifically the work I had seen Seeds of Peace do so well over my four summers working with the organization. I figured I had a lot of experience in Israel and many connections in diverse communities in Jerusalem, so I tried, as respectfully as I could, to decline the Rotary Club’s offer, and decided to put together the event myself, relying on the copious logistical aid I had been promised by various Seeds of Peace staff members, from regional staff members to the executive director herself, as well as all the other networks I knew I would be able to tap into to generate an audience. But, like everything else with this tour, things did not go as planned. I got some great help from certain Seeds of Peace staff members early on in the process, but once the pedal had to hit the metal promotion-wise a couple weeks ago, Seeds of Peace was completely absent, despite several desperate emails from me. In addition, there were certain key avenues of publicity that I learned, too late, were crucial for generating an audience to any concert in Jerusalem. Presumably, local Seeds of Peace staff, or other local Jerusalemites that I asked for advice, would have had such expertise, but no one told me about them.

Organizing the concert in Jerusalem showed me the difficulties of combining music and peace efforts. (Hendler/TYG)

Because of my last-ditch efforts to save the concert, we end up with an audience of about 300 people. Particularly, one of the audience members remarked, “you would never find such a mix of people all in the same place at the same event in this city – this is pretty amazing.” And she was right – I was able to assemble a mix of Israelis and Palestinians, Seeds and soldiers, Jews, Christians and Muslims, young and old, and they all loved the concert. So that was a victory for sure. We also collaborated with Heartbeat Jerusalem, an amazing program started by one of my former Seeds of Peace music counselors, Aaron Shneyer. They are a band composed of Israeli and Palestinian youth from Jerusalem, who engage in coexistence work through collaborative song-writing and performance about all the issues that confront them in their lives, including the conflict. Hearbeat opened for us, and we closed the concert with a joint encore of the Israeli pop hit from the ’90s, “Salaam.”

In many ways, the concert was a success. Many of my family and friends from the US, Israel, and Palestine were at the concert, and I was happy to make them proud. But it was also a seriously lost opportunity. As far as social efficacy, only half as many people were able to experience the concert as I had hoped, and as traditionally come to Whiffenpoof concerts in Jerusalem (under the Rotary Club’s aegis, they usually sell out the YMCA). Financially-speaking, we barely broke even (the hall seats 600 people, and even with 300 people, we could barely cover our costs), so we will have little, if any, money to donate to Seeds of Peace.

But I learned some valuable lessons about making musical change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – notably, how hard it is. In particular, as our guide, Oodee, noted about Jerusalem’s architectural structure, it is impossible to build anything from scratch here – it must be built on the foundations of existing structures. I was able to assemble a rag-tag coalition of people to come to the concert, but by trying to simply create my own way without even being in the city in person to solidify my efforts with personal presence, my event did not have the solid structure that the Rotary Club had built for the Whiffenpoofs over the last several years. I thought that I needed to go against the grain and forge out on my own in order to make a difference, but such daring is rarely rewarded in a place as complicated as Jerusalem. If I want to start my choir in a year or two, or five, it will need to be firmly entrenched in the city of Jerusalem itself first, so that it can then stand firmly on its own.